“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!”
“I can get down,” I said, scrambling off the ridgepole. “It’s easy.”
“Peter!” teacher shrieked. “Stay where you are!”
So I did, wondering at all the fuss.
By the time they got me down and teacher yanked me by one arm back up to the schoolhouse I was bawling at the top of my voice, outraged and indignant because no one would believe me, even my girl denying obstinately the evidence of her own eyes. Teacher, annoyed at my persistence, said over and over, “Don’t be silly, Peter. You can’t fly. Nobody can fly. Where are your wings?”
“I don’t need wings,” I bellowed. “People don’t need wings. I ain’t a bird!”
“Then you can’t fly. Only things with wings can fly.”
So I alternately cried and kicked the schoolhouse steps for the rest of the noon hour, and then I began to worry for fear teacher would tattle to Dad. After all I had been on forbidden territory, no matter how I got there.
As it turned out she didn’t tell Dad, but that night after I was put to bed I suddenly felt an all-gone feeling inside me.
