Parable of the Talents (27 page)
************************************
We were marched out of the school and lashed as we were made to kneel and pray, to scream out our sins, to beg for forgiveness, and quote Bible verses on command. I kept thinking they would make a mistake and kill some of us. This was an orgy of abuse and humiliation. It went on and on for hours with our "teachers" taking turns, trading off, screaming their hate at us, and calling it love. I had no voice at all left by the time it was over. I was sore all over. An ac-tual beating couldn't have left me feeling any worse. And if anyone had been paying attention to me in particular, they would have seen that I was a sharer. I lost control. I couldn't have concealed anything.
I remember wishing I could die. I remember wondering if in the end they would force us all to go the way Emery did, each of us taking a few of them with us.
************************************
The new women were stuffed in with us or put into the empty third room of the school—the room that was once our clinic. The men were housed in the big room with our men.
************************************
I need to write about Bankole.
I meant to do that when I began. I need to but I don't want to. It just plain hurts too much.
The Crusaders are making us enlarge our prison and en-large our cabins, which are now their homes. And we work in the fields as before. We're feeding livestock and cleaning their pens. We're turning compost, we're planting herbs, we're harvesting winter fruits, vegetables and herbs, clear-ing brush from the hills. We're expected to feed ourselves and our captors. They eat better than we do, of course. After all, we owe them more than we can ever pay, you see, be-cause they're teaching us to forsake our sinful ways. They keep talking about teaching us the meaning of hard work. They tell us that we're no longer squatters, parasites, and thieves. I've earned myself more than one lashing by saying that my husband and I own this land, that we've always paid our taxes on it, and that we've never stolen from anyone.
They've burned our books and our papers.
They've burned all that they could find of our past It's all ungodly trash, they say. They made us do most of the fetch-ing and carrying, the stacking and piling of so much that we loved. They watched us, their hands on their belts. All the books on paper and on disk. All the collections that our younger kids had assembled of minerals, seeds, leaves, pic-tures . . . All the reports, models, sculptures and paintings that our older kids have done. All the music that Travis and Gray wrote. All the plays that Emery wrote. All the bite of my journal that they could find All the legal papers, includ-ing marriage licenses, tax receipts, and Bankole's deed to the land. All these things, our teachers threw lamp oil on and burned, then raked and stirred and burned again.
In fact they've only burned copies of the legal papers. I'm not sure that matters, but it's true. Since we got our first truck, we've kept the originals in a safe-deposit box in Eureka—Bankole's idea. And we keep other copies in our var-ious caches, along with a few books, other records, and the usual weapons, food, money, and clothing. I had been scan-ning Bankole's writing and my journal notebooks and hid-ing disk copies of them in the caches too. I don't know why I did this. In the case of my journals, it's an indulgence that I've always been a little ashamed of—wasting money copy-ing my own stuff. But I remember I felt much better when I began to do it. Now I only wish I had scanned Emery's plays and Travis's and Gray's music. At least, as far as I know, the caches are still safe.
I've hidden my writing paper, pens, and pencils away in our prison room. Allie and Natividad have helped me loosen a couple of floorboards near the window. With only sharp stones and a couple of old nails as tools, we made a small compartment by scraping a hollow in one of the big lumber girders that supports the floor joists. The joists themselves were too slender and too obvious if anyone noticed a loose board. We hoped no "teacher" would peer down into the darkness to see whether anything might be in the girder.
Na-tividad put her wedding ring there too, and Allie put in some drawings that Justin had done. Noriko put in a smooth, oval green stone. She and Michael had found it back when they had gone out salvaging together—back when they could be together.
Interesting that we could scrape into the girder without pain from our collars. Allie thought it meant we might be able to escape by loosening more floorboards and crawling out under the school. But when we got Tori Mora, the slen-derest of us, to try to go down, she began to writhe in pain the moment her feet reached the ground. She convulsed and we had to pull her out. So we know one more thing. It's a negative thing, but we needed to know it.
So much is gone. So much has been taken from us and de-stroyed. If we haven't found a way out, at least we've found a way to keep a few small things. I find myself thinking sometimes that I could bear all this better if I still had Larkin and Bankole, or if I could see Larkin and know that she was alive and all right. If I could only just see her....
************************************
So how could a vigilante group have the nerve to set up a
"reeducation" camp and run it with illegally collared people?
We've been here for over a month and no one has noticed.
Even our friends and customers don't seem to have noticed.
The Gamas and the Sullivans aren't rich or power-ful, but they've been in these hills for a couple of genera-tions. Hasn't anyone come asking questions about them?
Maybe they have. And who has answered the questions?
Crusaders in their other identities as ordinary, law-abiding patriots? I don't think it's too much to assume they have such identities. What lies have they told? Any group wealthy enough to have seven maggots, to support at least several dozen men, and to have what seems to be an endless num-ber of expensive collars must be able to spread any lies it chooses to spread. Perhaps our friends outside have been told believable lies. Or perhaps they've just been frightened into silence, given to know that they shouldn't ask too many questions lest they get into trouble themselves. Or maybe it's just that none of us has powerful enough friends. We were nobodies, and our anonymity, far from protecting us, had made us vulnerable.
We at Acorn were told that we were attacked and enslaved because we were a heathen cult. But the Gamas and the Sul-livans aren't cultists. I've asked women from both families why they were attacked, but they don't know either.
The Gamas and the Sullivans owned their land just as we did, and unlike the Dovetrees, the Gamas and the Sullivans had never raised marijuana or sold alcoholic beverages. They worked their land and they took jobs in the towns whenever they could find them. They worked hard and behaved themselves. And in the end, what did it matter? All their hard work and ours, all Bankole's attention to dead-and-gone laws, and all my hopes for my Larkin and for Earthseed……..I don't know what's going to happen. We will get out of this!
We'll do that somehow! But what then? From what I've been able to hear, some of our "teachers" come from important families in the Churches of Christian America in Eureka, Arcata, and the surrounding smaller towns. This land is mine now. Bankole, with his trust in law and order, made a will, I've read it. The copy we kept here has been destroyed, of course, but the original and other copies still exist. The land is mine, but how can I take it back? How can we ever rebuild what we had?
When we break free of our "teachers," we will kill at least some of them. I see no way to avoid this. If they have to, and if they can, they'll kill us to stop our escape. The way they rape us, the way they lash us, the way they let some of us die—all that tells me they don't value our lives. Do their families know what they're doing? Do the police know? Are some of these "teachers" cops themselves or relatives of cops?
A great many people must know that
something
is going on. Each shift of our "teachers" stays with us for at least a week, then goes away for a week. Where do they tell people they've been? The area must be full of people who know, at least, that something unusual is happening. That's why once we've freed ourselves, I don't see how we can stay here. Too many people here will hate us either because we've killed their men in our escape or because they won't be able to for-give us for the wrongs that they, their families, or their friends have done us.
Earthseed lives. Enough of us know it and believe it for it to live on in us. Earthseed Lives and will live. But Jarret's Crusaders have strangled Acorn. Acorn is dead.
************************************
I saw him alive on the day the Crusaders invaded. I know I did. What happened? He was a healthy man, and no fool. He would not have provoked armed men to kill him. We're not allowed to talk to our men, but I had to find out what happened. I kept trying until I found a moment to talk to Harry Balter. I wanted it to be Harry so I could tell him about Zahra.
We managed to meet in the field as we worked with only our own community members nearby. We were
harvest-ing—often in the rain—salad greens, onions, potatoes, car-rots, and squashes, all planted and tended by Acorn, of course. We should also have been harvesting acorns— should already have harvested them—but we weren't per-mitted to do that. Some of us were being made to cut down both the mature live oak and pine trees and the saplings that we had planted. These trees not only commemorated our dead and provided us with much protein, but also they helped hold the hillside near our cabins in place.
Somehow, our "teachers" have gotten the idea that we worshipped trees, thus we must have no trees nearby except those that produce the fruit and nuts that our "teachers" like to eat. Funny how that worked out. The orange, lemon, grapefruit, persimmon, pear, walnut, and avocado trees were good. All others were wicked temptations.
This is what Harry told me, bit by bit, during the times we managed to be near one another in our work.
"They used the collars, you know?" he said. "On that first day, they waited until we were all conscious. Then they came in and one of them said, 'We don't want you to make any mistakes. We want you to understand how this is going to work.' Then they started with Jorge Cho, and he screamed and writhed like a worm on a hook. Then they got Alan Fair-cloth, then Michael, then Bankole.
"Bankole was awake, but not really alert. He was just sitting on the floor, holding his head between his hands, star-ing down. They had taken all the furniture out by then, and piled it in a heap out where the trucks were. So none of us fell on anything but the floor. When they used the collar on him, he didn't make a sound. He just toppled over onto his side and twitched, sort of convulsed. He never screamed, never said a word. But he went into worse con-vulsions than any of the others had. Then he was dead. That was all.
Michael said the collar had triggered a massive heart attack."
Harry didn't say more for a long time—or maybe he did, and I just didn't hear it. I was crying in spite of myself. I could be quiet, but I couldn't stop the tears. Then I heard him whisper, as we passed one another again, "I'm sorry, Lauren.
God, I'm sorry. He was a good guy."
Bankole had delivered both of Harry's children. Bankole had delivered everyone's children, including his own daugh-ter. Without believing in Earthseed, or even in Acorn, he had stayed and worked hard to make it all work. He had done more than anyone to make it work. How stupid and point-less that he should die at the hands of men who didn't know him or care about him or even intend to kill him. They just didn't know how to use the powerful weapons they pos-sessed. They gassed Zahra to death by mistake because they didn't take her size into consideration. They shocked Bankole into a heart attack by mistake because they didn't take his age into consideration. It must have been his age.
He'd had no heart trouble before. He was a strong, healthy man who should have lived to see his daughter grow up and maybe later father a son or another daughter.
It was all I could do not to fold up among the rows of plants and just lie there and moan and cry. But I stayed upright, somehow managed not to attract our "teachers'"
attentions.
After a time, I told him about Zahra. "I really believe it was her size," I finished. "Maybe these people don't know much about their weapons. Or maybe they just don't care. Maybe both. None of them lifted a finger to help Teresa."
There was another long, long silence. We worked and Harry got himself under control. When he spoke again, his voice was steady.
"Olamina, we've got to kill these bastards!"
He almost never called me Olamina. We'd known each other since we were both in diapers. He called me Lauren except during the more important Gathering Day ceremonies.
He had called me Olamina for the first time when I Welcomed his first child into the Acorn community, and into Earthseed. It was as though for him the name were a title.