“The lady came along the road when I was riding my bicycle. She told me thank you and let me keep the rest of the money.”
“I thought it ran off,” grunted Til.
“You gave it enough reason to,” muttered Jeff.
After the dishes were done and the chickens shooed in, Glory walked back up the hill with me. We sat down on the porch, and I said what I’d been thinking about for days, “Glory, I’ve cultivated blindness as long as I can. I’ve always congratulated myself on being a realist, but it’s getting so I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and half real and mostly supposition. I want you to tell me everything, whether you think I’ll believe it or not.”
Glory gave me a look.
“I won’t doubt you,” I said firmly. “Whatever you say.”
She took a deep breath and started in. The cat-people. The money bag. I have never believed in telepathy, not really, even though one of my childhood imaginary people was supposed to be a telepath, and the only alternative to having seen it myself was to think I had read it from Glory’s mind. Believing I had seen it was easier. It had not been a dream, it had been real, but I had suppressed the reality of it.
Surprisingly, to me at least, when I finally took it in, things made more sense than they had up until then. Falija was not just an anomaly. She really was a treasured creature of some other race, and we really had to keep her safe.
Glory said, “I never fed Falija cat food any more than the barn cats get cat food. They eat what they catch. Falija eats what I eat. There’s no cat-food trail anybody can follow, and Falija doesn’t even associate with other cats. She won’t go into the barn at all. Whenever she sees a barn cat, she gets all strange.”
“How do you mean, strange.”
“All sad, upset, silent. So I don’t take her in there.”
“What about the money bag?” I asked her. “The one the people gave to you to pay for Falija’s needs.” Glory had given me the money so Sue Elaine couldn’t borrow it without asking, which was one of Sue Elaine’s many unattractive habits.
“It’s in my boot,” Glory said. “With some dirty socks shoved down on top of it.”
I mused, “It has to have a power source. People use detectors to find metal and things like radioactivity.”
We went down the hill together and up the back stairs to her room. She shook the bag out of her boot, and something else fell out with it: the little book Falija’s mother had given Glory, which Glory had told me about. We had both forgotten what the person had told Glory to do with it. Glory stared at it with her face all knotted up. I felt absolutely idiotic. Here between the two of us we’d forgotten the one thing we were supposed to do for Falija, even though I hadn’t really believed it until tonight!
We talked about a safe place for the little bag, and we eventually decided to bury it next to metal, not as easy as you’d think on Tercis, where metal was rare and expensive. We finally thought of the cemetery fence. Glory got a trowel out of Maybelle’s gardening basket, and we hiked over to the cemetery to bury the bag next to a fence post. If anyone used a metal detector, they’d think it was reacting to the post, though I thought it likely that the bag was of a technology far, far beyond metal detectors. Chances were, whoever might look for it would be equally sophisticated. Nonetheless, we scattered the place with rocks, weathered side up, then we went up to the thimble-apple rock to be sure we hadn’t left any sign of being there.
When we looked down the meadow, there they were, all Lou Ellen’s friends with Lou Ellen among them, moving out into the moonlight on the meadow, dancing like leaves dance on the wind, almost weightless, floating up and down, free and glorious, as though they had forever to dance in. They sang, too, with Lou Ellen’s voice among them, joyful and blithe.
I looked down at Glory. She was gazing down the hill with such longing that it almost broke my heart. She wanted to go down there with Lou Ellen. I started to say something, then stopped. Some things couldn’t be fixed with words. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, then stared, way across the meadow. I followed her gaze. There was the woman in red, looking straight at us from the edge of the trees. I could feel the woman’s eyes on me, almost stroking. I lifted my hand; the woman smiled and waved and disappeared into the forest.
“Who is she?” Glory asked.
“A dream from my past,” I said. “A woman who flies a dragonfly ship. Everything down there in the valley is a dream.”
Falija wasn’t around when we got back, but the next morning, Glory came up to apologize for forgetting about the book.
“I forgot what your mama told me to do, Falija. I was supposed to read it to you when you began to talk.”
“I’ve been talking for a long time,” Falija said, with a little frown between her eyes.
Glory flushed. “I know, Falija. It’s my fault. I’d forgotten it until last night. Now listen.” She opened the book. On each page there were only a few words. The first page started out: ‘Our word for insight is ghoss.’ Ghoss was spelled out as guh-HOSS, so the reader would know how to pronounce it. The next page had another few words, and so on, a few hundred of them altogether.
Then I took the book to look at it, and Falija stared at me in a funny way and said, “Please, read it to me again, Grandma.” I did. When I’d finished, Falija went off in a corner by herself after putting the book on one of my bookshelves, hidden
