Parable of the Talents (7 page)
We don't know who did it. I've heard that in some of the more religious towns, repression of women has become more and more extreme. A woman who expresses her opin-ions,
"nags," disobeys her husband, or otherwise "tramples her womanhood" and "acts like a man," might have her head shaved, her forehead branded, her tongue cut out, or, worst case, she might be stoned to death or burned. I've only heard about these things. May is the first example of it that I've ever seen—if she is an example. I'm glad to say her terrible wound had healed by the time she came to us. We don't even know whether May is her real name. But she can say, "May," and she's let us know we're to call her that. It's al-ways been clear that she loves kids and gets along well with them. Now, with the little Noyer girls, it seems that she has a family. She's been sharing a cabin with Allie Gilchrist and Allie's adopted son Justin for the better part of a year. Now I suppose we'll have to either expand Allie's cabin or begin work on a new one. In fact, we need to begin work on two or three new ones. The Scolari family will be getting the next one. They've been cooped up with the Figueroas long enough. Then the Dovetrees, then the Noyers and May.
Dan Noyer is staying with Harry and Zahra Balter and their kids now that he's well enough to get around on his own a little. It seemed best to get him out of the clinic as soon as possible once his mother died. May is already sharing her one room with the two little girls, so Bankole looked for space for Dan elsewhere. The Balters volunteered. Also, May's a sharer, and Dan still has bouts of pain. He doesn't complain, but May would notice. I do when I'm around him. There's no hyperempathy in the Balter family, so they can care for injured people without suffering themselves.
It's been a busy few weeks. We've done several salvage runs with the truck and gathered things we've never been able to gather in quantity before: lumber, stone, bricks, mor-tar, cement, plumbing fixtures, furniture, and pipe from dis-tant abandoned ruins and from the Dovetree place. We'll need it all. We're 67 people now with the Noyer children. We're growing too fast.
And yet in another way, we're only creeping along. We're not only Acorn, we're Earthseed, and we're still only a sin-gle tiny hill community squeezed into too few cabins, and sharing an almost nineteenth-century existence. The truck will improve our comfort, but. . . it's not enough. I mean, it may be enough for Acorn, but it's not enough for Earthseed.
Not that I claim to know what would be enough. The thing that I want to build is so damned new and so
vast!
I not only don't know how to build it, but I'm not even sure what it will look like when I have built it. I'm just feeling my way, using whatever I can do, whatever I can learn to take one more step forward.
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The Noyers had driven up from Phoenix, Arizona, where food and water are even more expensive man they are in the Los Angeles area. They sold their houses—they owned two—some vacant land, their furniture, Krista Noyer's jew-elry, sold everything they could to get the money to buy and equip an armed and armored housetruck big enough to sleep seven people. The truck was intended to take the fam-ily to Alaska and serve as their home there until the parents could get work and rent or buy something better.
Alaska is a more popular destination than ever these days.
When I left southern California, Alaska was a popular dream— almost heaven. People struggled toward it, hoping for a still-civilized place of jobs, peace, room to raise their chil-dren in safety, and a return to the mythical golden-age world of the mid-twentieth century. They expected to find no gangs, no slavery, no free poor squatter settlements growing like cancers on the land, no chaos. There was to be plenty of land for everyone, a warming climate, cheap water, and many towns new and old, privatized and free, eager for hardworking newcomers. As I said, heaven.
If what I've heard from travelers is true, the few who've managed to get there—to buy passage on ships or planes or walk or drive hundreds, even thousands, of miles, then somehow sneak across the closed border with Canada to the also-closed Canadian-Alaskan border—have found some-thing far less welcoming. And last year, Alaska, weary of regulations and restrictions from far away Washington, D.C., and even more weary of the hoard of hopeful paupers flooding in, declared itself an independent country. It se-ceded from the United States. First time since the Civil War that a state's done that. I thought there might be another civil war over the matter, the way President Donner and Alaskan Governor—or rather, Alaskan
President
—Leontyev are snarling at one another. But Donner has more than enough down here to keep him busy, and neither Canada nor Russia, who have been sending us food and money, much liked the idea of a war right next door to them. The only real danger of civil war is from Andrew Steele Jarret if he wins the elec-tion next month.
Anyway, in spite of the risks, people like the Noyers, hopeful and desperate, still head for Alaska.
There were seven people in the Noyer family just a few days before we found the truck. There was Krista and Dan-ton, Senior; Kassia and Mercy, our seven- and eight-year-old orphans; Paula and Nina, who were 12 and 13; and Dan, the oldest child. Dan is 15, as I guessed when I first saw him. He's a big, baby-faced, blond kid. His father was small and dark-haired. He inherited his looks and his size from his big, blond mother, while the little girls are small and dark like Danton, Senior. The boy is already almost two meters tall—a young giant with an oldest-child's enhanced sense of responsibility for his sisters. Yet he, like his father, had been unable to prevent Nina and Paula from being raped and ab-ducted three days before we found the truck.
The Noyers had gotten into the habit of parking their truck in some isolated, sunny place like the south side of that burned-out farmhouse. There they could let the kids spend some time outside while they cleaned and aired the truck.
They could unroll the truck's solar wings and spread them wide so that the sun could recharge their batteries. To save money, they used as much solar energy as possible. This meant driving at night and recharging during the day— which worked all right because people walked on the high-ways during the day. It's illegal to walk on highways in California, but everyone does it. By custom now, most pedestrians walk during the day, and most cars and trucks run at night. The vehicles don't stop for anything that won't wreck them. I've seen would-be high-jackers run down. No one stops.
But during the day, they park to rest and refuel.
Danton and Krista Noyer kept their children near them, but didn't post a regular guard. They thought their isolation and general watchfulness would protect them. They were wrong.
While they were busy with housekeeping, several men approached from their blind side—from the north—so that the chimney that had not quite hidden them had blocked their view. It was possible that these men had spotted the truck from one of the ridges, then circled around to attack them.
Dan thought they had.
The intruders had rounded the wall and, an instant later, opened fire on the family. They caught all seven Noyers out-side the truck. They shot Danton, Senior; Krista, and Dan. Mercy, who was nearest to the truck, jumped inside and hid behind a box of books and disks. The intruders grabbed the three other girls, but Nina, the oldest, created such a diver-sion with her determined kicking, biting, gouging, and struggling, breaking free, then being caught again, that Kas-sia, free for an instant, was able to slither away from her captor and scramble into the truck. Kassia did what Mercy had not. She slammed the truck door and locked it, locked all doors.
Once she had done that, she was safer than she knew.
In-truders fired their guns into the truck's armor and tires.
Both were marked, but not punctured, not much damaged at all. The intruders even built a fire against the side of the truck, but the fire went out without doing damage.
After what seemed hours, the men went away.
The two little girls say they turned on the truck's monitors and looked around. They couldn't find the intruders, but they were still afraid. They waited longer. But it was terrible to wait alone in the truck, not knowing what might be hap-pening just beyond the range of the monitors—on the other side of the chimney wall, perhaps. And there was no one to take care of them, no one for them to turn to. At last, stay-ing in the truck alone was too much for them. They opened the door nearest to the sprawled bodies of their parents and big brother.
The intruders were gone. They had taken the two older girls away with them. Outside, Kassia and Mercy found only Dan and their parents. Dan had come to, and was sitting on the ground, holding his mother's head on his lap, stroking her face, and crying.
Dan had played dead while the intruders were there. He had given no sign of life, even when one of the intruders kicked him. Stoic, indeed. He heard them trying to get into the truck. He heard them cursing, laughing, shouting, heard two of his sisters screaming as he had never heard anyone scream. He heard his own heart beating. He thought he was dying, bleeding to death in the dirt while his family was murdered.
Yet he did not die. He lost consciousness and regained it more than once. He lost track of time. The intruders were there, then they were gone. He could hear them, then he couldn't. His sisters were screaming, crying, moaning, then they were silent.
He moved. Then gasping and groaning with pain, he man-aged to sit up. His legs hurt so as he tried to stand that he screamed aloud and fell down again. His mind, blurred by pain, blood loss, and horror, he looked around for his fam-ily.
There, near his legs, wet with his blood and her own was his mother.
He dragged himself to her, then sat holding her head on his lap. How long he sat here, all but mindless, he did not know.
Then his little sisters were shaking him, talking to him.
He stared at them. It took him a long time to realize that they were really there, alive, and that behind them, the truck was open again. Then he knew he had to get his parents in-side it. He had to drive them back down to the highway and into a town where there was a hospital, or at least a doctor. He was afraid his father might be dead, but he couldn't be sure. He knew his mother was alive. He could hear her breathing. He had felt the pulse in her neck. He had to get help for her.
Somehow, he did get them both into the truck. This was a long, slow, terrible business. His legs hurt so. He felt so weak.
He had grown fast, and been proud of being man-sized and man-strong. Now he felt as weak as a baby, and once he had dragged his parents into the truck, he was too exhausted to climb into one of the driver's seats and drive. He couldn't get help for his parents or look for his two lost sisters. He had to, but he couldn't. He collapsed and lay on the floor, unable to move. His consciousness faded. There was nothing.
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Al-most everyone in Acorn has a horrible, ordinary story to tell.
Today we gave the Noyer children oak seedlings to plant in earth that has been mixed with the ashes of their parents. We do this in memory of our own dead, present and absent. None of the ashes of my family are here, but five years ago when we decided to stay here, I planted trees in their mem-ory.
Others have done the same for their dead. Nina and Paula Noyer's ashes aren't here of course. Nina and Paula may not even be dead. But they will be remembered here along with their parents. Once Dan understood the cere-mony, he asked for trees for Nina and Paula as well as for his parents.
He said, "Some nights I wake up still hearing them screaming, hearing those bastards laughing. Oh, god……..They must be dead. But maybe they're not. I don't know. Sometimes I wish I were dead. Oh god."
We've phoned our neighbors and friends in nearby towns about Nina and Paula Noyer. We've left their names, their descriptions (garnered from what Dan told me), and the offer of a reward in hard currency—Canadian money. I doubt that anything will come of it, but we have to try. It isn't as though we have an abundance of hard currency to spread around, but because we're so careful, we do have some. Because of the truck, we'll soon have more. To tell the truth, I'd try to buy the girls back even if there were no truck. It's one thing to know that there are children on the roads and in the towns being made to suffer for someone else's pleasure. It's another to know that the two sisters of children you know and like are being made to suffer. But there is the truck. All the more reason for us to do what we can for the Noyer children.
We brought Dan to the funeral services on a cot that we used as a stretcher. He can stand and walk. Bankole makes him do a little of that every day. But he's still not up to standing or sitting for long periods of time. We put him next to the slender young trees that Bankole planted five years ago in memory of his sister and her family, who had lived on this property before us. They were murdered before we ar-rived.
Their bodies were burned with their home. All we found of them were their charred bones and a couple of rings. These are buried beneath the trees just at the spot where Dan lay for the funeral.
The little girls planted their seedlings under our guidance, but not with our help. The work was done by their hands.
Perhaps the planting of tiny trees in earth mixed with ashes doesn't mean much now, but they'll grow up knowing that their parents' remains are here, that living trees grow from those remains, and that today this community began to be their home.