'Why, sure,' Karen said. 'The creek is running. Wade to your heart's content. Lunch will be here for you and I'll be back by supper. We'll go to the school together for Peter's installment.' Lea came upon the pool, her bare feet bruised, her skirt hem dabbled with creek water, and her stomach empty of the lunch she had forgotten. The pool was wide and quiet. Water murmured into it at one end and chuckled out at the other. In between the surface was like a mirror. A yellow leaf fell slowly from a cottonwood tree and touched so gently down on the water that the resultant rings ran as fine as wire out to the sandy edge. Lea sighed, gathered up her skirts and stepped cautiously into the pool. The clean cold bite of the water caught her breath, but she waded deeper. The water crept up to her knees and over them. She stood under the cottonwood tree, waiting, waiting so quietly that the water closed smoothly around her legs and she could feel its flow only in the tiny crumblings of sand under her feet. She stood there until another leaf fell, brushed her cheek, slipped down her shoulder and curved over her crumpled blouse, catching briefly in the gathered-up folds of her skirt before it turned a leisurely circle on the surface of the shining water. Lea stared down at the leaf and the silver shadow behind it that was herself, then lifted her face to the towering canyon walls around her. She hugged her elbows tightly to her sides and thought, 'I am becoming an entity again. I have form and proportion. I have boundaries and limits. I should be able to learn how to manage a finite being. The burden of being a nothing in infinite nothingness was too much-too much-' A restless stirring that could turn to panic swung Lea around and she started for shore. As she clambered up the bank, hands encumbered by her skirt, she slipped and, flailing wildly for balance, fell backward into the pool with a resounding splat. Dripping and gasping she scrambled wetly to a sitting position, her shoulders barely out of the water. She blinked the water out of her eyes and saw the man. He had one foot in the water, poised in the act of starting toward her. He was laughing. She spluttered indignantly, and the water sloshed up almost to her chin. 'I might have drowned!' she cried, feeling very silly and very wet. 'If you go on sitting there you can drown yet!' he called. ''High water comes in October.'' 'At the rate you're helping me out,' she answered. 'I'll make it! I can't get up without getting my head all wet.' 'But you're already wet all over,' he laughed, wading toward her. 'That was accidental,' she sputtered. 'It's different, doing it on purpose!' 'Female logic!' He grabbed her hands and hoisted her to her feet, pushed her to shore and shoved her up the bank. Lea looked up into his smiling face and, smiling back, started to thank him. Suddenly his face twisted all out of focus-and retreated a thousand miles away. Faintly, faintly from afar, she heard his voice and her own gasping breath. Woodenly she turned away and started to grope away from him. She felt him catch her hand, and as she tugged away from him she felt all her being waver and dissolve and nothingness roll in, darker and darker. 'Karen!' she cried. 'Karen! Karen!' And she lost herself. 'I won't go.' She turned fretfully away from Karen's proffered hand. The bed was soft. 'Oh, yes, you will,' Karen said. 'You'll love Peter's installment. And Bethie! You must hear about Bethie.' 'Oh, Karen, please don't make me try any more,' Lea pleaded. 'I can't bear the slipping back after-after-' She shook her head' mutely. 'You haven't even started to try yet,' Karen said, coolly. 'You've got to go tonight. It's lesson two for you, so you'll be ready to go on.' 'My clothes,' Lea groped for an excuse. 'They must be a mess.' 'They are,' Karen said, undisturbed. 'You're about Lizbeth's size. I brought you plenty. Choose.' 'No.' Lea turned away. 'Get up.' Karen's voice was still cool but Lea got up. She fumbled wordlessly into the proffered clothes. 'Hmm!' Karen said. 'You're taller than I thought. You slump around so since you gave up.' Lea felt a stir of indignation but stood still as Karen knelt and tugged at the hem of the dress. The material stretched and stayed stretched, making the skirt a more seemly length for Lea. 'There,' Karen said, standing and settling the dress smoothly around Lea's waist by pinching a fullness into a pleat. Then, with a stroke of her hand, she deepened the color of the material. 'Not bad. It's your color. Come on now or we'll be late.' Lea stubbornly refused to be interested in anything. She sat in her corner and concentrated on her clasped hands, letting the ebb and flow of talk and movement lap around her, not even looking. Suddenly, after the quiet invocation, she felt a pang of pure homesickness-homesickness for strong hands holding hers with the coolness of water moving between them. She threw back her head, startled, just as Jemmy said, 'I yield the desk to you, Peter. It's yours, every decrepit splinter of it.' 'Thanks,' Peter said. 'I hope the chair's comfortable. This'll take a while. I've decided to follow Karen's lead and have a theme, too. It could well have been my question at almost any time in those long years. ''Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?' ' In the brief pause Lea snatched at a thought that streaked through her mind. 'I forgot all about the pond! Who was it? Who was it?' But she found no answer as Peter began …. GILEAD I DON'T know when it was that I found out that our family was different from other families. There was nothing to point it out. We lived in a house very like the other houses in Socorro. Our pasture lot sloped down just like the rest through arrowweed and mesquite trees to the sometime Rio Gordo that looped around town. And on occasion our cow bawled just as loudly across the river at the Jacobses' bull as all the other cows in all the other pasture lots. And I spent as many lazy days as any other boy in Socorro lying on my back in the thin shade of the mesquites, chewing on the beans when work was waiting somewhere. It never occurred to me to wonder if we were different. I suppose my first realization came soon after I started to school and fell in love-with the girl with the longest pigtails and the widest gap in her front teeth of all the girls in my room. I think she was seven to my six. My girl and I had wandered down behind the school woodshed, under the cottonwoods, to eat our lunch together, ignoring the chanted 'Peter's got a gir-ul! Peter's got a gir-ul!' and the whittling fingers that shamed me for showing my love. We ate our sandwiches and pickles and then lay back, arms doubled under our heads, and blinked at the bright sky while we tried to keep the crumbs from our cupcakes from falling into our ears. I was so full of lunch, contentment and love that I suddenly felt I just had to do something spectacular for my lady-love. I sat up, electrified by a great idea and by the knowledge that I could carry it out. 'Hey! Did you know that I can fly?' I scrambled to my feet, leaving my love sitting gape-mouthed in the grass. 'You can't neither fly! Don't be crazy!' 'I can too fly!' ''You can not neither!' 'I can so! You just watch!' And lifting my arms I swooped up to the roof of the shed. I leaned over the edge and said, 'See there? I can, too!' 'I'll tell teacher on you!' she gasped, wide-eyed, staring up at me. 'You ain't supposed to climb up on the shed.' 'Oh, poof,' I said, 'I didn't climb. Come on, you fly up, too. Here, I'll help you.' And I slid down the air to the ground. I put my arms around my love and lifted. She screamed and wrenched away from me and fled shrieking back to the schoolhouse. Somewhat taken aback by her desertion, I gathered up the remains of my cake and hers and was perched comfortably on the ridgepole of the shed, enjoying the last crumbs, when teacher arrived with half the school trailing behind her. 'Peter Merrill! How many times have you been told not to climb things at school?' I peered down at her, noting with interest that the spit curls on her cheeks had been jarred loose by her hurry and agitation and one of them was straightening out, contrasting oddly with the rest of her shingled bob. 'Hang on tight until Stanley gets the ladder!'
