“We walk our boards.”
“And what do you talk about? While you walk, you must talk.”
“Some days she talks a lot. Other days, not so much.”
A tired-looking woman with sweat stains under her arms stepped out of her Living Space, glanced over at us, then went back inside and closed her door. How strange it must have seemed to her, seeing Father home early and us outside talking.
“Well, when she feels like talking, what does she talk about?”
“The farm, mostly.”
“Oh, yes, the farm. We both loved the farm. It was a good place.” He bent down, reached through the fence, and pulled up a little bit of grass. I hoped the Gatekeeper didn’t see him do that. “She can’t let go of the farm.”
He rubbed the grass between his thumb and forefinger. “Smell that,” he said. “The smell of green, the smell of growing. How I miss the smell of a green, living thing!” He held the grass near my nose and I could smell it and the salty sweat of his hand. His thumb had swirly green circles on the skin. “I can still see you, little Emmie, learning to walk. Toddling back and forth on the grass. And when you fell, you would laugh and pull up handfuls of grass and try to put it in your mouth.”
Then he brushed his hands together and bits of grass fell onto the dirt.
“Did your mother tell you about the Relocations?”
“Yes, yes, she did. About Agenda 21, the new laws, and the Authority. It sounded complicated.”
“It was.”
“And Mother didn’t like it.”
The Gatekeeper started making his rounds. He walked slowly past each Living Space, carrying his clipboard. He walked past Father and me, glancing at us with curiosity, and making a notation on his clipboard. Father stood silently until the Gatekeeper was back at the gate.
“Guess he’s not used to me being home so soon.”
“Guess he’s not used to me being outside.”
We smiled at each other like we were sharing a secret. A warm little secret between us, out here near a tree.
“What else did your mother tell you about the Relocations?”
I thought for a moment before I answered. “She never told me why. Why it happened.”
He rubbed his hand across his forehead and sighed. “Oh, there’s so much, too much, to teach you in one day. Too much history.”
“Mother was a history teacher, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, and a good one at that. Except when it counted the most. With her own child.” He rubbed his shoulders again. “Look, Emmie, learning all of this is going to take time. Let me just go over it with, I don’t know, a kind of a big-picture overview. That’ll be a start.”
“Why didn’t she teach me?”
“Well, I guess it upsets her to even think about.” He frowned, making deep up-and-down lines between his eyebrows. “Do you want my big picture overview?”
I nodded.
“People didn’t trust the government, not the way things were going. The economy was bad. There were wars with other nations. Of course, people were worried. So they elected new officials. Officials who made big promises.”
I tucked the unfamiliar words into my memory and vowed to learn to understand them as soon as possible. Elected. Officials. Not knowing the meaning of the words was like being thirsty and not having water.
“And these new officials got right to work. Started passing new laws. Little laws at first.” He shrugged his shoulders. “None of them seemed important enough to worry about.”
He paused, looked up at the sky, then turned back to me.
“Then the laws got more strict. More broad. Almost impossible to comply with.”
He pulled a leaf off a tree branch close to the fence. He crushed it in his fingers and smelled it. He kept rubbing the leaf between his thumb and his finger.
“Can I touch it?”
“Touch what?”
“The leaf. Can I touch it?”
“I’ll do better than that.” He pulled off another leaf and handed it to me. “Your very own leaf,” he said. It was cool and smooth in my fingers. I tucked it into my pocket. My very own leaf.
“What kind of laws? Laws about what?”
“Emmeline, I can’t explain all of it, not in one day. There’s just too much! Let me do the big picture, please.” He sounded impatient, but I was impatient, too. Impatient for more. I saw the tree, the fence, the Gatekeeper clearly, as though they were outlined against a blank page and I made up my mind that from that moment forward I would learn and learn and learn. I had so much to learn. Somebody, somewhere could answer my questions.
“Your mother was limited on what she could teach. Absolutely no history. At least no accurate history. History was being changed, rewritten by the officials. That was very difficult for her. I think that’s why she spends so much time telling you how things used to be. That’s her history, the real version, and she wants to share it with you.” He smiled at me. “Does that make sense to you?”
I nodded. The headscarf felt smooth and silky on my cheek.
“Okay then. I’ll tell you some of the good history I remember. Just for a change of pace.”
He told me about the wonderful soup Mother used to make at harvest time. Fresh vegetables. Vegetable soup. Chicken. Applesauce. He said the kitchen smelled like Paradise and Mother cooked like an angel. Then he stopped abruptly.
“I guess I’m doing what she does, aren’t I? Talking about what was. And now we eat nourishment cubes.” He paused and stared out past the fence for a few moments before continuing.
“It’s hard, looking back, to know what started all the changes,” Father said. “I wish I had been more vigilant, more aware. But I wasn’t. Your mother was.”
“Aware of what?” I asked.
“Policies. Politics. What was happening.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Once everyone became aware, it was too late.” I waited for him to continue. Dusk would soon be approaching.
He said the laws kept changing and got harder and harder to obey. Soon there were no more elections because the officials felt that people kept making the wrong decisions. That word again, elections. “Those in power stayed in power. They sucked the power and will out of the people. Money became worthless. Churches were converted to community centers and then eventually torn down.” His voice was low and sad. More new words. Money. Church.
“Mother never told me about churches. What are churches?”
“Churches were special buildings for the people.” His voice dropped down to a whisper. “Places where people could worship God.” I strained to hear him so he bent down, his mouth now right next to my ear. “But the Authority made all worship punishable unless it was worship of them or of the Republic. I shouldn’t be talking about it now, it’s forbidden. Mother didn’t tell you because she wanted to protect you from accidentally talking about something that could get you in a lot of trouble. Everything she did was to protect you.”
I thought back to my ride on the bus-box. I wished I had told Marina that having a mother was having somebody who did everything they could to protect you.
Father started to talk again as if to himself, staring off into the distance, as though I weren’t there. As if he were reciting a strange tale, something he had read about in disbelief. His voice was flat, a straight line of words, not one word more important than another, until they all sounded meaningless.
“And the people were taken from their homes, their farms, their towns and put on trains. Relocated to Planned Communities like ours and assigned work. They had to produce energy. They had to attend Social Reorientation Sessions. There are probably a lot of communities like ours, but they’re all far away from each other. There’s no way to know, no way to communicate.”
A tear slid down his cheek. I reached out and touched his hand, then tugged on it, to reconnect, to make him look at me. Finally, he took my hand in both of his and held it. He didn’t wipe the tear away. We stood connected like that, quiet, touching each other.
Our hands together. He looked down at me for a moment, solemn. One shiny tear curving down his cheek.
“She hated those sessions. Hated them. She changed. Became bitter. Bitter and angry and clinging to the past.” He put a hand on my shoulder and it felt warm. “She clung to you. She wanted to keep you in that past, in the happy times. That’s when she started scratching at her skin. Like she was trying to shred herself.”
I saw the deep lines on his face. The back-and-forth wrinkles on his forehead, dark with dirt and sweat. A couple of stiff gray hairs in his eyebrows, like mistakes or afterthoughts. Curved creases descended on both sides of his face from his nose to his mouth, and his mouth was pinched, surrounded with feathery lines. With clarity, I now knew he had worked as hard as Mother to protect me from knowing exactly what happened. Even now, he was withholding things from me, things he didn’t want me to know.
Birds were beginning to roost in the trees, twittering, shifting from branch to branch as they sought the safest one. I wanted to learn more but I knew that it would take time. More time than we had right now. And, with a chill, I realized that, by protecting me from knowing what had happened, Mother and Father had actually put me in danger. I felt vulnerable and solitary because if they didn’t teach me, no one else would. Nobody at all.
“One more thing before we go in,” he said. He dropped the squashed leaf. It fluttered, spinning to the ground. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Some folks say there are people out there. People who slipped away in time. People who are free.” He motioned beyond the road, beyond the fence, beyond the trees. When he moved his arm, there was a smell—something musty and afraid, like a dark bit of breeze. He ground his foot over the leaf, shredding it.
I felt the smell of fear move to me, wrap around and encase me. That one more thing, that bit of whispered information, coming from Father, made me so cold I shivered.
“Almost dusk,” he said. “Time to go in.”
And so it began. Learning things to be afraid of.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Later that evening Mother told me about George. He worked on the Transport Team with Father, but before the relocation he had lived on a nearby farm. They had all worked together at harvest time.
“The only good thing,” Mother said, “is that he was my student once and I remember how much I liked him. Back then, before the changes. He was a good boy. If you have to be paired, he is a good choice. Not that you really have a choice,” she added.
She told me other things, too. Like what being paired meant. It wasn’t what I thought. It wasn’t like paring the skin off an apple. It wasn’t like anything I had ever heard of.
“Do you have any questions?” she asked.
I shook my head no.
“Good. Now take your fingers out of your mouth.” I didn’t even realize they were there.
And so we were paired. The bus-box brought the man named George to our Living Space. Two Enforcers in dark uniforms walked beside him to our door. He was taller than either of them, and stronger-looking. But the Enforcers had mustaches, like all the men in power. He had on the same orange uniform as Father. Father was at work. Mother stood beside me right outside of our door. At first I kept my head down; I didn’t know where to look. One of the Enforcers said some words about the Republic, Praise be to the Republic, and some words about Reproduction, Praise be to reproduction. Then he made the circle with his fingers on his forehead. George did the same. So I did, too. My white headscarf, still dirty, was exchanged for a white scarf trimmed in black. That meant I was officially paired.
Color marked boundaries. Color marked occupation. Color marked Compounds.
Flags and headscarves and uniforms.
The language of the colors of the Republic.
Living with George was like moving from being a child to being an adult. They assigned us a Living Space next to Mother and Father, and while Mother said that was just a lucky accident, I thought it was a wonderful accident. Our window slits faced each other so Mother and I could talk while we walked our energy boards. We could still be connected.
George didn’t try to touch me for over a year, which I didn’t mind. He said he still missed his wife and that made him sad. Instead of pairing with me, he sat and talked with me after he came home from work. He had the same strong back and leg muscles as Father from pulling the bus-box. He was older than me but younger than Mother and Father. He was like a bridge between what they knew and what I needed to know. Those were comfortable, peaceful years with Mother right next door and George by my side.
He told me what it was like pulling the bus-box. Hard, hard work. No wonder Father always seemed so tired in the evening. The bus-boxes were used to take people to Human Health Services for testing or to drive the Authorities and Enforcers around.
“You’d think going uphill would be the hardest,” George said. “Those things are heavy enough even when they’re not loaded with anything. But downhill is even worse.”
“Why? I’d think downhill would be easier.”
“Oh, would you now! We have to use our backs and legs and feet to slow it down or it will run over us. If an Enforcer is riding, he’ll sometimes help using a wide wooden beam against a wheel as a kind of brake. But if we’re just hauling supplies from the farm co-op to the train depot, well, our bodies are the only brakes.”
“Train depot?” I had seen pictures of trains in one of the books we used to have. “Where are the train depots?”
“The depot is far enough away from the Compounds that nobody can see or hear the train. Not many people know about the depot. We’re not allowed to talk about it.”
“You’re telling me about it.”
“Guess that means I trust you.” He touched my cheek with his finger. “I hate it when the train isn’t running. Then we have to go all the way to the co-op. I don’t much like going out there,” he said.
“Why not?” It was so easy asking him questions.
“I feel sorry for the people that work there. They’re not real bright. And they aren’t near their families and don’t have their own Living Spaces.”
“Where do they sleep?”
“In tents. Tents are cheaper than Living Spaces.”
“What’s a tent?”
He walked to the doorway and drew something in the dirt. I liked seeing him standing in the sunlight, strong and tall. I liked knowing he trusted me enough to tell me about the train depot and tents and bus-boxes. He never turned away from me when I asked questions.
“Oh, it looks like a triangle,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Mother taught me the names of shapes. Circle, triangle, square. Back when we still were allowed to have paper.”
“Did you know I was a student of your mother in school?” he asked.
“She told me.”
“She was a brilliant teacher, you know. Just brilliant.”
“How so?” I asked.
“She taught us so much. Starting with the history of our nation. The Founding Fathers. All of that. I’m ashamed to admit sometimes I doodled and daydreamed while she talked. I wish now that I’d paid more attention.” He smiled when he said that. “She liked bright colors and wore long dresses and she would make cookies and bring them to share with the students. We all loved her for that. Did you know that she wrote poetry?”
“No.”
He looked at me and went on. “I know she changed after all the upheaval. After the Social Reorientation Sessions. That was a difficult time for everyone. Bad things happened. It was especially hard for your mother.”
“Why?”
For the first time he looked away from me before answering.
“Imagine, Emmeline, living on your own land, free to go wherever you want, whenever you want, and then having to move here. A big circle of land, divided into work Compounds. A fence all around the outside right up against the back wall of the Living Spaces. Not an ordinary fence, but a great tall fence of heavy metal mesh embedded in thick concrete at
its base.”
He took my hand and we went back into the Living Space. It was dim compared to the bright sun outside and my eyes took a minute to adjust.
George went on. “Not only is there an outer fence, but there are also fences between each Compound. And, of course, a Gatekeeper for each Compound.”
He let go of my hand and rubbed his forehead. “I think it made your mother feel like a bird in a cage. She couldn’t fly.”
I had a sense that, for the first time, he wasn’t telling me everything.
* * *
When George finally touched me, it wasn’t like when the reproduction specialist touched me. It was different somehow, gentle and kind. And then he paired with me.
We pulled our sleeping mats together each night, and it was good to feel the warmth of another person in the darkness. It was good to feel his breath on my neck. It was good to be paired with George. Another year passed before I missed my monthly.
* * *
“I missed my monthly,” I told Mother through the window slit. I could see her scratching. “Quit scratching your face. Did you hear what I said?”
“I heard you. And I’ll quit scratching my face when you quit putting your fingers in your mouth.”
Our energy boards creaked and hummed as we walked, creating energy.
“What does that mean? Why did I miss my monthly?”
Walk, walk, walk. The red needle crept around the dial as the day warmed. I was hot and sweaty. I ran my finger across my forehead and put my finger in my mouth, tasting the salt. I wondered if it was ever this hot back on the farm.
“It means,” Mother said in a flat voice, “that I am going to have a grandchild I will never see and you are going to have a child that you will never see. That’s what it means. Praise be to the Republic? No! Republic be damned.”
She turned off her energy board and went to her sleeping mat. I kept on walking, afraid to stop.
There were rules to follow.
CHAPTER NINE
George was sympathetic when I told him I missed my monthly. He rubbed my feet in the evening and tried to remember some poetry that Mother had told him about.