Parable of the Talents (47 page)

Len blushed, then looked at her hands. "I've never done that kind of thing before. I liked it, but it was hard work."

I smiled. "She's game, if nothing else. I've been doing work like that all my life."

"You were a gardener?" Nia asked.

"No, it was just a matter of eating or not eating. I've done a number of things, including teach—although I'm not aca-demically qualified to teach. But I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.''

As she smiled her delight at hearing such agreement with her own thoughts, I handed her the drawing. On the lower right side of it I had written the first verse of Earthseed, "All that you touch, /You Change "On the other I had written the

"To shape God" verse that she liked.

She read the verses and looked at the picture for a long, long time. It was a detailed drawing, not just a sketch, and I felt almost pleased with it. Then she looked at me and said in a voice almost too soft to hear, "Thank you."

She asked us to stay the night, offered to let us sleep in her barn, proving that she hadn't altogether lost her fear of us.

We stayed, and the next day I did a few odd repair jobs around the house for her. I could have stolen her blind if I'd wanted to, but what I had decided that I wanted from her, I couldn't steal. She had to give it.

I told her that evening that I was a woman. First, though, I told her about Larkin. We were in her kitchen. She was cooking. She'd told me to sit down and talk to her. I'd worked hard, she said. I'd earned a rest.

I never took my eyes off her as I told her. It was impor-tant that she not feel foolish, frightened, or angry when she understood. A little confusion and mild embarrassment was inevitable, but that should be all.

She looked as though she might cry when she heard about my Larkin. That was all right. Len was in the living room, delighting in reading real books made of paper. She would not see any tears Nia shed—in case Nia was sensi-tive about that kind of thing. You could never be altogether sure what another person might feel as a humiliation or an invasion of privacy.

"What happened to . . . to the child's mother?" Nia asked.

I didn't answer until she turned to look at me. "It's dan-gerous on the road," I said. "You know that People vanish out there. I walked from the Los Angeles area to Humboldt County in '27, so I know it. Know it too well."

"She vanished on the road? She was killed?"

"She vanished on the road to avoid being killed." I paused.

"She's me, Nia."

Silence. Confusion. "But. . ."

"You've trusted us. Now I'm trusting you. I'm a man on the road. I have to be. Two women out there would be everyone's target." There. I was not correcting her, not smiling at the joke I'd played on her. I was making myself vulnerable to her, and asking her to understand and keep my secret. Just right, I hoped. It felt right.

She blinked and then stared at me. She left her pots and came over to take a good look. "I can hardly believe you,"

she whispered.

And I smiled. "You can, though. I wanted you to know." I drew a deep breath. "Not that it's safe for a man out there either. The people who took my child also killed my husband and wiped out my community—all in the name of God, of course."

She sat down at the table with me. "Crusaders. I've heard of them, of course—that they rescue homeless orphans and

. . . burn witches, for heaven's sake. But I've never heard that they . . . just killed people and. . . stole their children." But it seemed that what the Crusaders had done could not quite get her mind off what I had done. "But you . . . , " she said. "I can't get over it. I still feel. . . I still feel as though you were a man. I mean . . . "

"It's all right."

She sighed, put her head back and looked at me with a sad smile. "No, it isn't."

No, it wasn't. But I went to her and hugged her and held her. Like Len, she needed to be hugged and held, needed to cry in someone's arms. She'd been alone far too long. To my own surprise, I realized that under other circumstances, I might have taken her to bed. I had gone through 17 months at Camp Christian without wanting to be with any-one. I missed Bankole—missed him so much sometimes that it was an almost physical pain. And I had never been tempted to want to make love with a woman. Now, I found myself almost wanting to. And she almost wanted me to. But that wasn't the relationship that I needed between us.

I mean to see her again, this kind, lonely woman in her large, empty, shabby house. I need people like her. Until I met her, I had not realized how much I needed such people.

Len had been right about what I should be doing, although she had known no more than I about how it must be done. I still don't know enough. But there's no manual for this kind of thing. I suppose that I'll be learning what to do and how to do it until the day I die.

************************************

Most often we talked of it from the point of view of educa-tion. By the time we parted for the night, I could speak of it as Earthseed without worrying that Nia would feel harassed or proselytized. We stayed one more day and I told her more about Acorn, and about the children of Acorn. I held her once more when she cried. I kissed her lonely mouth, then put her away from me.

I did two more sketches, each accompanied by verses, and I let her offer to look after any of the children of Acorn that I could find until their parents could be contacted. I never suggested it, but I did all I could to open ways for her to suggest it. She was afraid of the children of the road, light-fingered and often violent. But she was not, in theory at least, afraid of the children of Acorn. They were con-nected with me, and after three days, she had no fear at all of me.

That was very compelling, somehow, that complete acceptance and trust. It was hard for me to leave her.

By the time we did leave, she was as much with me as Len was. The verses and the sketches and memories will keep her with me for a while. I'll have to visit her again soon—say within the year—to hold on to her, and I intend to do that. I hope I'll soon be bringing her a child or two to protect and teach—one of Acorn's or not. She needs purpose as much as I need to give it to her.

"That was fascinating," Len said to me this morning as we got under way again, "I enjoyed watching you work."

I glanced at her. "Thank you for working with me."

She smiled, then stopped smiling. "You seduce people. My God, you're always at it, aren't you?"

"People fascinate me," I said. "I care about mem. If I didn't, Earthseed wouldn't mean anything at all to me."

"Are you really going to bring that poor woman children to look after?"

"I hope to."

"She can barely look after herself. That house looks as though the next storm will knock it over."

"Yes. I'll have to see what I can do about that, too."

"Do you have that kind of money?"

"No, of course not. But someone does. I don't know how I'm going to do it, Len, but the world is full of needy peo-ple.

They don't all need the same things, but they all need purpose. Even some of the ones with plenty of money need purpose."

"What about Larkin?"

"I'll find her. If she's alive, I'll find her. I've sworn that."

We walked in silence for a while. There were a few other walkers in clusters, passing us or walking far ahead or behind us. The broad highway was broken and old and stretched long in front of us, but it wasn't threatening, somehow. Not now.

After a while, Len caught my arm and I turned to look at her. It was good to be walking with someone. Good to have another pair of eyes, another pair of hands. Good to hear another voice say my name, another brain questioning, de-manding, even sneering.

"What do you want of me?" she asked. "What is it that you want me to do? You have to tell me that."

"Help me reach people," I said. "Go on working with me, and helping me. There's so much to be done."

THURSDAY, JUNE
21, 2035

As my father used to quote from his old King James Bible,

"Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall." He liked to be accurate about his quotes.

I'm bruised and wounded about the pride, but not de-stroyed, at least.

I decided yesterday that things had worked out so well with Nia that I could go on recruiting people as we walked toward Portland. Walking through a roadside town that seemed big enough for people not to be alarmed at the sight of a stranger, I stopped to ask a woman who was sweeping her front porch whether we could do some yard work for a meal. With no warning, she opened her front door, called her two big dogs, and told them to get us. We barely got out of her yard in time to avoid being bitten. Interesting that neither of us drew a gun or uttered a sound. It turns out that Len's fear of dogs is as strong as mine. Last night, she showed me some scars given her by a dog that her former owners had allowed to get too close.

Anyway, the woman with the two dogs cursed us, called us

"thieves, killers, heathens, and witches." She promised to call the cops on us.

"All that just because you asked for work," Len said.

"Thank heavens you didn't try to tell her about Earthseed!"

She was cleaning a long, deep scratch on her arm. It came from a nail that stuck out from the woman's wooden gate. I had spotted the dogs in time to shove her back through the gate, dive through myself, then slam the gate by grabbing a bottom slat and yanking. I only just let go in time to avoid a lot of long, sharp teeth, and damned if the dog didn't bite one of the wooden slats of the fence in frustration at not being able to get at me. I had skinned hands and a bruised hip. Len had her long scratch, which hurt and bled enough to scare me. Later, I treated us both to tetanus skin tabs. They cost more than they should, but neither of us is up-to-date on our immunizations anymore. Best not to take un-necessary chances.

"I wonder what happened to that woman to make her willing to do a thing like that," I said as we walked this morning.

"She was out of her mind," Len said. "That's all."

"That's rarely all," I said.

Then early today, a farm woman drove us off with a rifle and I decided to quit trying for a day or two. A storekeeper told us that Jarret's Crusaders have been active in the area.

They've been rounding up vagrants, singling out witches and heathens, and generally scaring the hell out of house-holders by warning them about the dangers and evils of strangers from the road.

It was interesting to see how angry the storekeeper was.

The Crusaders, he said, are bad for business. They collar his highway customers or frighten them away, and they intim-idate his local customers so that he's lost a lot of his regu-lars—the ones who live a long way from his store.

They've learned to shop as close to home as they can with little re-gard for quality or price.

"Jarret says he can't control his own Crusaders," the man said. "Next time out, I'll vote for someone who'll put the bastards in jail where they belong!"

? ? ?

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

To survive,

Let the past

Teach you—

Past customs,

Struggles,

Leaders and thinkers.

Let

These

Help you.

Let them inspire you,

Warn you,

Give you strength.

But beware:

God is Change.

Past is past.

What was

Cannot

Come again.

To survive,

Know the past.

Let it touch you.

Then let

The past

Go.

I DON'T KNOW that Uncle Marc would ever have told me the truth about my mother. I don't believe he intended to. He never wavered from his story that she was dead, and I never suspected that he was lying. I loved him, believed in him, trusted him completely. When he found out how 1 was living, he invited me to live with him and continue my education.

"You're a bright girl," he said, "and you're family—the only family I have, I couldn't help your mother. Let me help you."

I said yes. i didn't even have to think about it. I quit my job and went to live in one of his houses in New York. He hired a housekeeper and tutors and bought computer courses to see to it that 1 had the college education that Kayce and Madison wouldn't have provided for me if they could have. Kayce used to say, "You're a girl! If you know how to keep a clean, decent house and how to worship God, you know enough!"

I even went back to church because of Uncle Marc. I went back to the Church of Christian America, physically, at least.

I lived at his second home in upstate New York, and I at-tended church on Sundays because he wanted me to, and because I was so used to doing it. I was comfortable doing it.

I sang in the choir again and did regular charity work, helping to care for old people in one of the church nursing homes.

Doing those things again was like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.

But the truth was, I had lost whatever faith I once had. The church I grew up in had turned its back on me just because I moved out of the home of people who, somehow, never learned even to like me. Forget love. Fine behavior for good Christian Americans, trying to build a strong, united country.

Better, I decided after much thought and much reading of history, to live a decent life and behave well toward other people. Better not to worry about the Christian Americans, the Catholics, the Lutherans, or whatever. Each denomination seemed to think that it had the truth and the only truth and its people were going to bliss in heaven while everyone else went to eternal torment in hell.

But the Church wasn't only a religion. It was a commu-nity—my community. I didn't want to be free of it.

That would have been—had been—impossibly lonely.

Everyone needs to be part of something.

By the time I got my Master's in history, I found that 1

couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway.