"Zenna Henderson - Pilgrimage2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Henderson Zenna)

Pilgrimage
The First Book of the People

Zenna Henderson

1961
I

THE WINDOW of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let
her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized,
faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior.
"Look,' the thought, "I still have a face." She tilted her head and watched
the wan light slide along the clean soft line of her cheek. There was no color
except darkness for the wide eyes, the crisp turn of short cuffs above her
ears and the curve of her brows-all were an out-of-focus print against the
outside darkness. "That's what I look like to people," she thought
impersonally. "My outside is intact-an eggshell sucked of life."
The figure in the seat next to her stirred.
"Awake, deary?" The plump face beamed in the dusk. "Must have had a good nap,
"You've been so quiet ever since I got on. Here, let me turn on the reading
light." She fumbled above her. "I think these lights are cunning. How'd they
get them to point just in the right place?" The light came on and Lea winced
away from it. "Bright, isn't it?" The elderly face creased into mirth.
"Reminds me of when I was a youngster and we came in out of the dark and
lighted a coal-oil lamp. It always made me squint like that. By the time I was
your age, though, we had electricity. But I got my first two before we got
electricity. I married at seventeen and the two of them came along about as
quick as they could. You can't be much more than twenty-two or three. Lordee!
I had four by then and buried another. Here, I've got pictures of my
grandbabies. I'm just coming back from seeing the newest one. That's Jennie's
latest. A little girl after three boys. You remind me of her a little, your
eyes being dark and the color your hair is. She wears hers longer but it has
that same kinda red tinge to it." She fumbled in her bag. Lea felt as though
words were washing over her like a warm frothy flood. She automatically took
the bulging billfold the woman tendered her and watched unseeingly as the
glassine windows flipped. "... and this is Arthur and Jane. Ah, there's
Jennie. Here, take a good look and see if she doesn't look like you."
Lea took a deep breath and came back from a long painful distance. She stared
down at the billfold.
"Well?" The face beamed at her expectantly.
"She's-" Lea's voice didn't work. She swallowed dryly
"She's pretty."
"Yes, she is," the woman smiled. "Don't you think she looks a little like
you, though?"
"A little-" Her repetition of the sentence died, but the woman took it for an
answer.
"Go on, look through the others and see which one of her kids you think's the
cutest."
Lea mechanically flipped the other windows, then sat staring down into her
lap.