Psyche (13 page)

Free to wander pretty much as she pleased, to come to careful conclusions unbiased by ready-made social strictures, she developed an independence of mind and spirit rarely achieved by a
child as young as she was. But, denied the tests that not only give proof of special ability but also provide stimulus, her physical growth was far in advance of any possible intellectual maturity. Having absorbed all that Butch and Mag could teach her, their limited fund of knowledge dredged to its shallow depths, her naturally active intelligence was stirred only occasionally, and only by something seen, felt, or observed outside the shack itself.

Butch and Mag might waste no love on the slag, but Psyche was fascinated by the elemental emptiness of a land that owed its changing moods to the slow rotation of the earth itself. It was exciting to her to discover that, even here, no day was quite the same as any other, that the pewter-coloured hills reflected nuances of colour as perceptible as the differing hues of the great, unobstructed span of sky above it.

Exploring the four points of the compass, she found that the wastelands seemed to continue to the north indefinitely; certainly beyond her courage or desire to go. To the west were the mines, the core and source of the blight that devastated the countryside. From a vantage point higher than most, she would stare at tall derricks rising out of haze that thickened here to the density of a dark cloud, its heart pierced by the unholy glow of huge smelters. Feather Duster clutched tightly to her, she would listen to the rattle of winch and chain, the harsh gears of heavy trucks, and the hoarse scream of whistles implementing spoken commands beyond her hearing. She came often to the miniature mountain top from which she had first surveyed this scene, but she never lingered long, and never approached any closer to a sound and fury that repelled her as much as it interested her. Although she knew that Butch went there every day, she rarely thought of him in connection with this patternless turmoil. She preferred to pretend that it was the home of dragons, a witches' cauldron stirred deep in the earth, a threat from which—when she was ready— she must flee as fast as her long legs would take her.

Eastward she discovered the outer fringes of the slag, and a stunted, leafless tree-line; a foreign country that genuinely frightened her by its dissimilarity from anything she knew or had imagined.

“Is them woods, yonder to the east?” she asked Mag. “They don't look like you said woods did.”

Mag glanced up from knitting one of the shapeless woollen bags that Butch must accept as socks, and sniffed audibly. “Them's not proper trees. Why, kid, like I told you, a proper woods has leaves, an' grass, an' little flowers growin' everywheres, just wild like.”

“You mean with nobody havin' planted them?”

“Sure.”

Psyche's voice was no more than a whisper. “You mean free— for anyone to pick what wanted to?”

“Ain't I told you that a hundred times?”

“Yeah, but I can't never believe it. Is some of them blue, perhaps?”

“Most like. You're sure crazy over blue, ain't you, kid?”

“I always was,” Psyche said, and it was almost as if she were telling the big woman something she might not otherwise have known.

Leaving his car in front oí the house, Dwight walked around to the gardens at the back where Sharon was nearly always to be found at the end of a summer's day
.

She was there, and, rising from her chair, came to meet him, graceful and unhurried
.

He is back, she told herself. Another day has gone, and he is home again. I must not run. I will not run. He is there. I can see him, and in a moment I will be able to touch him. There is no need to run, and I will not do it
.

Watching her, seeing the blue of her dress reflected in the blue of the delphiniums behind her, Dwight thought, what would I do if ever she were not here? Then, his quick stride slowing, his eyes swept the wall of blue which extended across the entire back of the garden, and he realized with shocking suddenness the significance of something that he had not even noticed before. How long had it been going on, this steady, purposeful planting?
When had the pink and white of phlox and carnations first begun to be submerged in this sea of delphiniums?

A hurt that he steadfastly refused to dwell upon, a hurt now eight years old, became mingled with fresh pain caused by the knowledge that whereas he had once shared Sharon's every thought, now there was a corner of her mind she kept locked against him, and which he dared not try to explore. If she had done this, what else might she not have done to fortify memories for a child whom he did not believe they would ever see again; a child whom he did not believe was necessarily alive
.

His arms, when they closed around her, held her almost too forcefully, but all he said was, “Sharon—my darling.”

Sharon, her face pressed hard against his shoulder, said nothing beyond his name. “Dwight.”

The direction in which Psyche most often set out when she left the shack was south. This was not only because she now fetched most of the deliveries left at the mail-box—sometimes making three or four trips in a single day for this reason alone—but because the highway was a magnet that she neither tried nor wished to resist. It was her road to Damascus, her way to Mecca, the actual, tangible starting point of the long journey to the ‘Outside' on which she had become more and more certain that she herself would some day set out.

Lying on the further side of the first of the two uneven ridges which, with intervening depressions, separated the highway from the shack, she would wait with infinite patience for the appearance of a car, any car, going south. Those going north she paid no attention to, scarcely even saw. Old cars, chugging past with difficulty, worried her, for she doubted if they had the strength and stamina to reach a goal too nebulous and visionary to be other than worlds away. The real rewards of her vigils were the swift, bright chariots, flashing with chrome, which only a heretic would have believed incapable of reaching their enchanted destination.

She came to know the truckers well, and they watched for the fair head usually to be seen peeping over a slate-grey rise a hundred feet back from the mail-box. They took to bringing her little presents of candy and gum, and, when the summer sun beat down on the unprotected slag, bottles of pop chilled against fast-melting blocks of ice, chips of which she would still be sucking when they had gone. At another season of the year, when bitter winds blew across wastes of arctic white, she would be invited into the warm cabs of the trucks to drink scalding tea or coffee from thermoses which always seemed to contain enough to allow their contents to be shared with her.

These rough and ready men were, without exception, kind to her. They were her friends. And she saw nothing odd in the fact that they were her only friends; her only continuing association with anyone, other than Butch and Mag, until the day when the truant officer for the district discovered both her presence at the shack and her absence from school.

It was on a warm September morning that Psyche came into the shack to announce that there was a “funny lookin' man outside.”

Mag pushed a loose strand of hair from one side of her moist forehead to the other, gave a wriggling hitch to her crumpled calico dress, and advanced impressively to challenge the uninvited intruder. He proved to be a slight, bald man of fifty-odd in a neat, dark suit. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and carried a leather dispatch-case. Dormant memories of travelling salesmen, whom it had once been her duty to dispense with while in service, satisfied Mag that this was a situation which she was more than competent to handle.

“We don't want nothin' we ain't got, bo,” she said with hauteur, and wheeled about in order to re-enter her residence. She was arrested, however, in mid-manoeuvre, by a voice which was, considering its apparently mild source, surprising in its forcefulness.

“You have a child here, madam, of school age. Either you will make immediate arrangements to send her to school, or you and your husband will appear in court on Thursday of next week.”

4

P
SYCHE
was twelve when her formal education began. She was nearly fifteen when she herself assumed the responsibility for an abrupt and final departure from an odorous, overcrowded classroom that she hated from the first moment she stepped into it.

Her preparations that first morning were of the simplest nature. Her one skirt was pressed. A faded blue shirt was patched. And Mag provided her with a yellowed block of writing paper and a carefully sharpened pencil.

Butch, who had been deputed to take her on her first morning, asked, “Who do I say the kid is?”

Mag had thought of this. “You better say she's Moran, like us. Make out she's a relative like. We don't want no nasty little kids askin' no questions of her.”

Butch began to scratch. “What about t'other name?”

Mag was nonplussed. “I ain't thought of that.”

Psyche, who had been silent up to this time, astonished them by saying quite fiercely, “I got a first name. It's writ plain on that there little dress I come in.”

“We ain't sure that that's——” Mag began.

“I'm sure!”

“Now, look, kid, there's no call to go gettin' excited.”

“I ain't excited. I'm just sayin' I got a name, that's all.”

Mag wavered, moved by the desperate insistence she saw in Psyche's thin, brown face. “Well, you may be right, kid, but it ain't no name nobody round here's goin' to recognize like.”

“That don't matter. I can spell it. I've learned it good.”

“I ain't goin' spellin' no names,” Butch said.

Mag looked at him doubtfully. “You could, mebbe.”

But Butch was for once not to be moved. “I ain't goin' up to no fancy-pants teacher an' say I can't say the kid's name right. I'll be buggered if I will.”

Psyche pleaded and coaxed to no avail.

“I ain't agoin' to make no more of a fool of myself than what God done a'ready,” he said stubbornly.

Mag, eventually settling the problem, said, “Margaret's a good name, kid, even if it's my own. It ain't goin' to hurt you none to answer to Maggie.”

“But I ain't Maggie!”

“You'll get used to it,” Mag told her firmly. “See if you don't.”

Psyche had often seen the school, a one-storey, flat-roofed, brick building on the edge of the town, encircled by a bare expanse of sun-baked mud. A long plank walk led from the road to the front door and a blackened stone portico that failed to lend dignity to architecture depressing in its squat, four-square lack of imagination. Following Butch up the walk, concentrating on boards that lifted and fell under her reluctant feet, she tried unsuccessfully to overcome nervousness that made the palms of her hands sticky and the roof of her mouth dry and sore. It was early, and the barren playground was still deserted, but even so she could not raise her eyes from boards that rose and fell until, too soon, she found herself climbing four worn stone steps.

It was dim in the entrance hall, and it smelled.

Butch, if possible even more uneasy than Psyche, stood still and looked uncertainly around him. On his left, through an open door, he could see a large class-room; opposite him were two doors, side by side, labelled respectively, “Boys” and “Girls”; on his right was another class-room. Mag, coaching him carefully, had told him to go to the office. That there should be no office was a blow that left him floundering, incapable either of going on or of going back. He would have continued to stand there indefinitely if the heavy silence had not been broken by a short, dry cough from the class-room on the left.

Clearing his throat loudly, he said, “Come on, kid. That'll be Teacher.”

Propelled by the shocking echoes of his own hoarse voice, as much as by his failing courage, he lumbered through the classroom doorway with Psyche close behind him.

The next hour, culminating in a humiliation she would never forget, was one of the worst Psyche ever had to live through. Tongue-tied, she heard herself introduced.

“This here's Maggie Moran.”

Dumbly she shook hands with the tall, spare woman who was to be her teacher. Agonized, she watched Butch leave, and then went to the desk assigned to her, at the back of the room. Haltingly she answered the questions that the tall woman asked her, knowing that each time she opened her mouth she was being further condemned by cold grey eyes that found her wanting in every possible way.

But if this had been bad, how much worse it was to sit, biting her nails, while the room filled up with noisy, laughing children who, while seeming to ignore her, yet studied her with sly, curious glances, followed by spoken asides which, although she could not hear them, she knew instinctively were uncomplimentary. Only one of them spoke to her, a big black-haired girl of fourteen or fifteen.

“Hello, who let you in?”

The words were not unfriendly, but Psyche, although she wanted desperately to reply, was quite unable to utter a sound.

“Snooty, huh?” said the girl. And the remark, falling across a momentary lull, was a brand Psyche was destined to carry for as long as she went to the school.

“I gotta get outa here,” she thought incoherently. “I gotta get out. I can't not bear it!” She had actually half risen from her seat when the sharp, peremptory period of a hand bell reduced the tumult of the previous moment to a stillness in which any sound or movement would have been so conspicuous she could not contemplate making one. Sinking back, her hands clenched beneath her desk, she sat rigidly staring at her pencil and writing block.

“We will now repeat the Lord's Prayer.”

The prayer was repeated, exactly that and nothing more, by over sixty voices intoning the required phrases with an automatic, monotonous precision which robbed them not only of beauty but of meaning.