Just then Kiah and Derek rolled across the picnic table fighting over a cupcake. By the time we salvaged our lunch from under them and they had scraped the last of the chocolate frosting off their T-shirts, the koomatka incident seemed closed. And yet as we lay back resting a little to settle our stomachs, staring up at the smothery low-hanging clouds that had grown from the milky morning sky, I suddenly found myself trying to decide about Valancy’s look when she had seen the fruit. Surely it couldn’t have been recognition!
At the end of our brief siesta we carefully buried the remains of our lunch-the hill was much too dry to think of burning it-and started on again. After a while the slope got steeper and the stubborn tangle of manzanita tore at our clothes and scratched our legs and grabbed at the rolled-up tarp until we all looked longingly at the free air above it. If Valancy hadn’t been with us we could have lifted over the worst and saved all this trouble. But we blew and panted for a while and then struggled on.
After an hour or so we worked out onto a rocky knoll that leaned against the slope of Baldy and made a tiny island in the sea of manzanita. We all stretched out gratefully on the crumbling granite outcropping, listening to our heart beats slowing.
Then Jethro sat up and sniffed. Valancy and I alerted. A sudden puff of wind from the little side canyon brought the acrid pungency of burning brush to us. Jethro scrambled along the narrow ridge to the slope of Baldy and worked his way around out of sight into the canyon. He came scrambling back, half lifting, half running.
“Awful!” he panted. “It’s awful! The whole canyon ahead is on fire and it’s coming this way fast!”
Valancy gathered us together with a glance.
“Why didn’t we see the smoke?” she asked tensely. “There wasn’t any smoke when we left the schoolhouse.”
“Can’t see this slope from school,” he said. “Fire could burn over a dozen slopes and we’d hardly see the smoke. This side of Baldy is a rim fencing in an awful mess of canyons.”
“What’ll we do?” Lizbeth quavered, hugging Susie to her.
Another gust of wind and smoke set us all to coughing, and through my streaming tears I saw a long lapping tongue of fire reach around the canyon wall.
Valancy and I looked at each other. I couldn’t sort her mind, but mine was a panic, beating itself against the fire and then against the terrible tangle of manzanita all around us. Bruising against the possibility of lifting out of danger, then against the fact that none of the kids was capable of sustained progressive self-lifting for more than a minute or so, and how could we leave Valancy? I hid my face in my hands to shut out the acres and acres of tinder-dry manzanita that would blaze like a torch at the first touch of fire. If only it would rain! You can’t set fire to wet manzanita, but after these long months of drought-!
I heard the younger children scream and looked up to see Valancy staring at me with an intensity that frightened me even as I saw fire standing bright and terrible behind her at the mouth of the canyon.
Jake, yelling hoarsely, broke from the group and lifted a yard or two over the manzanita before he tangled his feet and fell helpless into the ugly angled branches.
“Get under the tarp!” Valancy’s voice was a whiplash. “All of you get under the tarp!”
“It won’t do any good,” Kiah bellowed. “It’ll burn like paper!”
“Get-under-the-tarp!” Valancy’s spaced icy words drove us to unfolding the tarp and spreading it to creep under. Hoping even at this awful moment that Valancy wouldn’t see me, I lifted over to Jake and yanked him back to his feet. I couldn’t lift with him, so I pushed and prodded and half carried him back through the heavy surge of black smoke to the tarp and shoved him under. Valancy was standing, back to the fire, so changed and alien that I shut my eyes against her and started to crawl in with the other kids.
And then she began to speak. The rolling terrible thunder of her voice shook my bones and I swallowed a scream. A surge of fear swept through our huddled group and shoved me back out from under the tarp.
Till I die I’ll never forget Valancy standing there tense and taller than life against the rolling convulsive clouds of smoke, both her hands outstretched, fingers wide apart as the measured terror of her voice went on and on in words that plagued me because I should have known them and didn’t. As I watched I felt an icy cold gather, a paralyzing unearthly cold that froze the tears on my tensely upturned face.
And then lightning leaped from finger to finger of her lifted hands. And lightning answered in the clouds above her. With a toss of her hands she threw the cold, the lightning, the sullen shifting smoke upward, and the roar of the racing fire was drowned in a hissing roar of down-drenching rain.
I knelt there in the deluge, looking for an eternal second into her drained despairing hopeless eyes before I caught her just in time to keep her head from banging on the granite as she pitched forward, inert.
Then as I sat there cradling her head in my lap, shaking with cold and fear, with the terrified wailing of the kids behind me, I heard Father shout and saw him and Jemmy and Darcy Clarinade in the old pickup, lifting over the steaming streaming manzanita, over the trackless mountainside through the rain to us. Father lowered the truck until one of the wheels brushed a branch and spun lazily; then the three of them lifted all of us up to the dear familiarity of that beat-up old jalopy.
Jemmy received Valancy’s limp body into his arms and crouched in back, huddling her in his arms, for the moment hostile to the whole world that had brought his love to such a pass.
We kids clung to Father in an ecstasy of relief. He hugged us all tight to him; then he raised my face.
“Why did it rain?” he asked sternly, every inch an Old One while the cold downpour dripped off the ends of my hair and he stood dry inside his shield.
“I don’t know,” I sobbed, blinking my streaming eyes against his sternness. “Valancy did it-with lightning-it was cold-she talked-” Then I broke down completely, plumping down on the rough floor boards and, in spite of my age, howling right along with the other kids.
It was a silent solemn group that gathered in the schoolhouse that evening. I sat at my desk with my hands folded stiffly in front of me, half scared of my own People. This was the first official meeting of the Old Ones I’d ever attended. They all sat in desks, too, except the Oldest who sat in Valancy’s chair. Valancy sat stony-faced in the twins’ desk, but her nervous fingers shredded one Kleenex after another as she waited.
The Oldest rapped the side of the desk with his cane and turned his sightless eyes from one to another of us.
“We’re all here,” he said, “to inquire-’”
