“She does so!” Tessie stamped her foot. “She tells you just as much as she tells me! And you don’t do it.”
I was saved from having to arbitrate between the warring two by Mrs. Wardlow’s calling them in to supper. Relieved, I sank down on the southwest corner of the parlor-a sizable moss-grown rock. Marnie sat down on the ground beside me.
“Marnie,” I said. “How did Tessie know what flowers to bring you?”
“I told her,” said Marnie, surprised. “They said I was boss today. Merwin just wouldn’t play.”
“Did you tell him things to do?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Marnie. “But he didn’t do nothing.”
“Did nothing,” I corrected.
“Did nothing,” she echoed.
“The last flower Tessie brought,” I went on. “Did you ask for that special one?”
“Yes,” said Marnie. “She started to pick the one with bad petals on one side.”
“Marnie,” I said patiently, “I was here and I didn’t hear a word. Did you talk to Tessie?”
“Oh, yes,” said Marnie.
“With words? Out loud?” I pursued.
“I think-” Marnie started, then she sighed and sagged against my knees, tracing a curve in the dirt with her forefinger. “I guess not. It is so much more easy (“Easier,” I corrected.) easier to catch her thoughts before they are words. I can tell Tessie without words. But Merwin-I guess he needs words.”
“Marnie,” I said, taking reluctant steps into the wilderness of my ignorance of what to do with a child who found “no words more easy,” “you must always use words. It might seem easier to you-the other way, but you must speak. You see, most people don’t understand not using words. When people don’t understand, they get frightened. When they are frightened, they get angry. And when they get angry, they-they have to hurt.”
I sat quietly watching Marnie manipulate my words, frame a reply, and make it into words for her stricken, unhappy lips.
“Then it was because they didn’t understand, that they killed us,” she said. “They made the fire.”
“Yes,” I said, “exactly.
“Marnie,” I went on, feeling that I was prying, but needing to know. “You have never cried for the people who died in the fire. You were sad, but-weren’t they your own people?”
“Yes,” said Marnie, after an interval. “My father, my mother, and my brother-” She firmed her lips and swallowed. “And a neighbor of ours. One brother was Called in the skies when our ship broke and my little sister’s life-slip didn’t come with ours.”
And I saw them! Vividly, I saw them all as she named them. The father, I noticed before his living, smiling image faded from my mind, had thick dark curls like Marnie’s. The neighbor was a plump little woman.
“But,” I blinked, “don’t you grieve for them? Aren’t you sad because they are dead?”
“I am sad because they aren’t with me,” said Marnie slowly. “But I do not grieve that the Power Called them back to the Presence. Their bodies were so hurt and broken.” She swallowed again. “My days are not finished yet, but no matter how long until I am Called, my people will come to meet me. They will laugh and run to me when I arrive and I-” She leaned against my skirt, averting her face. After a moment she lifted her chin and said, “I am sad to be here without them, but my biggest sorrow is not knowing where my little sister is, or whether Timmy has been Called. We were two-ing, Timmy and I.” Her hand closed over the hem of my skirt. “But, praise the Presence, I have you and Uncle Nils, who do not hurt just because you don’t understand.”
“But where on Earth-” I began.
“Is this called Earth?” Marnie looked about her. “Is Earth the place we came to?”
“The whole world is Earth,” I said. “Everything-as far as you can see-as far as you can go. You came to this Territory-“
“Earth-” Marnie was musing. “So this refuge in the sky is called Earth!” She scrambled to her feet. “I’m sorry I troubled you, Aunt Gail,” she said. “Here, this is to promise not to be unEarth-” She snatched up the last flower she had put in the playhouse vase and pushed it into my hands. “I will set the table for supper,” she called back to me as she hurried to the house. “This time forks at each place-not in a row down the middle.”
I sighed and twirled the flower in my fingers. Then I laughed helplessly. The flower that had so prosaically grown on, and had been plucked from our hillside, was glowing with a deep radiance, its burning gold center flicking the shadows of the petals across my lingers, and all the petals tinkled softly from the dewdrop-clear bits of light that were finely pendant along the edges of them. Not unEarth! But when I showed Nils the flower that evening as I retold our day, the flower was just a flower again, limp and withering.
“Either you or Marnie have a wonderful imagination,” Nils said.
“Then it’s Marnie,” I replied. “I would never in a million years think up anything like the things she said. Only, Nils, how can we be sure it isn’t true?”
“That what isn’t true?” he asked. “What do you think she has told you?”
“Why-why-” I groped, “that she can read minds, Tessie’s anyway. And that this is a strange world to her. And- and-“
“If this is the way she wants to make the loss of her family bearable, let her. It’s better than hysterics or melancholia. Besides, it’s more exciting, isn’t it?” Nils laughed.
That reaction wasn’t much help in soothing my imagination! But he didn’t have to spend his days wrestling hand to hand with Marnie and her ways. He hadn’t had to insist that Marnie learn to make the beds by hand instead of floating the covers into place-nor insist that young ladies wear shoes in preference to drifting a few inches above
