Parable of the Talents

  And yet the Halstead trip was a good experience for me. I don’t get to travel as much as I did before I got pregnant—no salvaging and not as much trading. Bankole nags me to stay home and “behave myself,” and most of the time, I give in.

  I had forgotten what living in a big modern house was like. Even the cold and the wind weren’t that bad. I kind of liked them. The house rattled and creaked, but it was warmed both by electric heaters and by fires in the fireplaces, and it was set far enough back from the coastal bluffs to be in no danger for many years, if ever.

  During the first day, I walked out to the bluffs and stood looking at the Pacific Ocean. We can see the ocean every time we travel up the highway to the Eureka-Arcata area and farther north. Up there, it has washed away long stretches of sand dunes and done real damage along the Humboldt and Arcata Bay coastlines. This is all the fault of the steadily rising level of the sea and of occasional, severe storms.

  But still, the sea is beautiful. I stood there in the buffeting wind, staring out at the whitecaps and enjoying the sheer vastness of the water. I didn’t hear Bankole come up behind me until he was almost beside me. That says something about how safe I felt. I’m more watchful at home in Acorn.

  Bankole put his arm around me, and the wind whipped his beard. He smiled. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “I wonder how people used to living here are going to like living on the vast Siberian plains, even if the plains are warmer than they once were.”

  He laughed. “When I was a boy, Siberia was a place where the Russians—the Soviets, we called them then—sent people they thought of as criminals and political troublemakers. If anyone then had said that Americans would be giving up their homes and their citizenship and going to make new lives in Siberia, the rest of us would have looked around for a straitjacket for him.”

  “I suspect it’s a human characteristic not to know when you’re well off,” I said.

  He glanced at me sidewise. “Oh, it is,” he said. “I see it every day.”

  I laughed, wrapped an arm around him, and we went back to the Cannon house to a meal of broiled fish, boiled potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and baked apples. The Cannon house sits on a large lot, and, like Bankole and I, the Cannons raise much of their own food. What they can’t raise, they buy from local farmers or fishermen. They’re also part of a cooperative that evaporates salt for their own use and for sale. But unlike us, they use few wild foods or seasonings—no acorns, cactus fruit, mint, manzanita, not even pine nuts. Surely there will be new foods in Siberia. Would they learn to eat them or would they cling to whatever they could grow or buy of their bland familiar foods?

  “Sometimes I can’t stand the thought of leaving this house,” Thea Cannon said as we sat eating. “But there’ll be more opportunity for the children when we leave. What is there for them here?”

  I’m not so pregnant that most people notice, and I do wear loose clothing now. But I did think that Thea Cannon, who has seven kids of her own, would have noticed. Maybe she’s just too wrapped up in her own worries. She’s a plump, pretty, tired-looking blond woman in her forties, and she always seems a little distracted—as though she has a lot on her mind.

  That night, I lay awake beside Bankole, listening to the sounds of the sea and the wind. They’re good sounds as long as you don’t have to be outside. Back at Acorn, being on watch during rough weather is no joke.

  “The mayor tells me the town is willing to hire you to replace one of their teachers,” Bankole said, his mouth near my ear and his hand on my stomach where he likes to rest it. “They’ve got one teacher who’s in her late fifties and one who’s 79. The older one has been wanting to retire for years. When I told them that you had pretty much set up the school at Acorn and that you taught there, they almost cheered.”

  “Did you tell them that all I’ve got is a high school education, a lot of reading, and the courses I audited on my father’s computer?”

  “I told them. They don’t care. If you can help their kids learn enough to pass the high school equivalency tests, they’ll figure you’ve earned your pay. And by the way, they can’t actually pay you much in hard currency, but they’re willing to let you go on living in the house and raising food in the garden even after I’m dead.”

  I moved against him, but managed not to say anything. I hate to hear him always talking about dying.

  “Aside from the older teacher,” he continued, “no one around here has a teaching credential. The older people who do have college degrees do not want second or third careers teaching school. Just install some reading, writing, math, history, and science in these kids’ heads, and everyone will be happy. You should be able to do it in your sleep after what you’ve had to put up with in Acorn.”

  “In my sleep,” I said. “That sounds like one definition of life in hell.”

  He took his hand off my stomach.

  “This place is wonderful,” I said. “And I love you for trying to provide it for the baby and me. But there’s nothing here but existence. I can’t give up Acorn and Earthseed to come here and install a dab of education into kids who don’t really need me.”

  “Your child will need you.”

  “I know.”

  He said nothing more. He turned over and lay with his back to me. After a while I slept. I don’t know whether he did.

  Later, back at home, we didn’t talk much. Bankole was angry and unforgiving. He has not yet said a firm “No” to the people of Halstead. That troubles me. I love him and I believed he loves me, but I can’t help knowing that he could settle in Halstead without me. He’s a self-sufficient man, and he truly believes he’s right. He says I’m being childish and stubborn.

  Marc agrees with him, by the way, not that either of us has asked Marc what he thinks. But he’s still staying with us, and he can’t help hearing at least some of our disagreement. He could have avoided mixing in, but I don’t think that ever occurred to him.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded of me this morning just before Gathering. “Why do you want to have a baby in this dump? Just think, you could live in a real house in a real town.”

  And I got so angry so fast that my only choices were either to be very quiet or to scream at him. He, of all people should have known better than to say such a thing. We had reached out from our dump with money made at our dump. We had found him and freed him. But for us and our dump, he would still be a slave and a whore!

  “Come to Gathering,” I said in almost a whisper. And I walked out of the house away from him.

  He followed me to Gathering, but he never apologized. I don’t think he ever realized that he had said something vile.

  After Gathering, Gray Mora came up to me and said, “I hear you’re leaving.”

  I was surprised. I don’t suppose I should have been. Bankole and I don’t scream at one another and broadcast our troubles the way the Figueroas and the Faircloths do, but no doubt it’s clear to everyone that there’s something wrong between us. And then there was Marc. He might tell people—just out of a need to be important. He does have a consuming need to be important, to reassert his manhood.

  “I’m not leaving,” I told Gray.

  He frowned. “You sure? I heard you were moving to Halstead.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  He drew in a long breath and let it out. “Good. This place would probably go to hell without you.” And he turned and walked away. That was Gray. I thought back when he joined us that he might be trouble, or that he wouldn’t stay. Instead, he turned out to be dependability itself—as long as you didn’t want a lot of conversation or demonstrative friendliness. If you were loyal to Gray and his family, he was loyal to you.

  Later, after dinner, Zahra Balter pulled me out of a set of dramatic readings that three of the older kids were giving of their own work or of published work that they liked. I was enjoying Gray’s stepdaughter Tori Mora’s reading of some comic poetry that she had written. The more laugh
ter in Acorn, the better. And I was drawing Tori, tall and lean and angular, a handsome girl rather than a pretty one. I had discovered that drawing was so different from everything else I did that it relaxed me, and at the same time, it roused me to a new alertness—a new kind of alertness. I’ve begun to perceive color and texture, line and shape, light and shadow with new intensity. I go into these focused, trancelike states and draw really terrible stuff. My friends laugh at the drawings, but they tell me they’re getting better, getting recognizable. Zahra told me a couple of weeks ago that a drawing I’d done of Harry looked almost human.

  But this time Zahra hadn’t come to talk about my drawing.

  “So you’re going to leave!” she hissed at me as soon as we were alone. She looked angry and bitter. Here and there around us, people found their own Gathering Day amusements. May was teaching Mercy Noyer how to weave a small basket from tree bark. A few adults and older kids had gotten a soccer game going in spite of the cold. Marc and Jorge were out there on opposite sides, having a great time running up and down the field, getting filthy, and collecting more than their share of bruises. Travis, who also loves soccer, has said, “I think those two would kill each other for a chance to score.”

  If only Marc would confine himself to scoring in soccer.

  Of course, I wasn’t as surprised at Zahra’s question as I had been at Gray’s. “Zee, I’m not leaving,” I said.

  Like Gray, she didn’t believe me at first. “I heard you were. Your brother said… Lauren, tell me the truth!”

  “Bankole wants me to move to Halstead,” I said. “You know that. I don’t want to go. I think we’ve got something worthwhile going here, and it’s ours.”

  “I heard they offered you a house by the ocean?”

  “Within sight of the ocean, but not that close. You don’t want to be too close to the ocean in Halstead.”

  “But a real house, I mean. A house like back in Robledo.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you turned them down?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re crazy as hell.”

  That did startle me. “You mean you want me to go, Zee?”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re the closest thing I got to a sister. You know damned well I don’t want you to go. But…you should go.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I would.”

  I stared at her.

  “I’d go to a better place if I could. I got two kids. Where do they go from here? Where’s your little baby going from here?”

  “Where would they go from Halstead? Halstead is like Robledo with a better wall. Why do you think there are people there who are planning to emigrate to Russia or Alaska and others who are just trying to hang on to their little piece of the twentieth century until they die? None of them is trying to build anything to replace what we’ve lost or to boost us to something better.”

  “You mean like Earthseed? The Destiny?”

  “Yes.”

  “It ain’t enough.”

  “It’s a beginning. It’s a way of trying to build tomorrow instead of cycling back into some form of yesterday.”

  “Do you ever stop preaching?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  She shrugged. “You know I’m not religious the way you are. Besides, even if you go to Halstead, we’ll still be here. And Earthseed will still be Earthseed.”

  Would it? Maybe. But Earthseed is a young movement. I couldn’t walk away and leave it to a “maybe.” I wouldn’t walk away from it any more than I’d walk away from the baby I would soon be having.

  Someday, I want people to go from here and teach Earthseed. And I want what they teach to still be recognizable as Earthseed.

  “I’m not going,” I said. “And, Zee, I think you’re a liar. I don’t think you’d go either. You know that here at Acorn we’re with you if you get into trouble. And you know we would take care of your kids if anything happened to you and Harry. Who else would do that?” She had been raised in some of the nastier streets of Los Angeles, and she knew about loyalty, about depending on her friends and having them depend on her.

  She looked at me, then looked away. “It’s good here,” she said, staring out toward the hills to the west of us. “It’s better than I thought it could be when we got here. But you know it’s nothing like as good as we had back in Robledo. For your baby’s sake, you ought to go.”

  “For my baby’s sake, I’m staying.”

  And she met my eyes again. “You sure? Think about the future.”

  “I’m sure. And you know damned well I am thinking about the future.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she sighed. “Good.” Another silence. “You’re right. I wouldn’t want to go, and I wouldn’t want you to go either. Maybe that’s because I’m as big a fool as you are. I don’t know. But…we do have something good here. Acorn and Earthseed—they’re both too good to let go of.” She grinned. “How’s Bankole dealing with things?”

  “Not well.”

  “No. He tries to give you what any sane woman would want and you don’t want it. Poor guy.”

  She went away, smiling. I was heading back to the reading and my sketch pad when Jorge Cho came up to me, sweaty and filthy from the game. He was with his girlfriend Diamond Scott, tiny and black and every hair in place as usual. I saw the question on their faces before Jorge spoke.

  “Is it true that you’re leaving?”

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2033

  Jarret was inaugurated today.

  We listened to his speech—short and rousing. Plenty of “America, America, God shed his grace on thee,” and “God bless America,” and “One nation, indivisible, under God,” and patriotism, law, order, sacred honor, flags everywhere, Bibles everywhere, people waving one of each. His sermon—because that’s what it was—was from Isaiah, Chapter One. “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers.”

  And then, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they will be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

  Then, he spoke of peace, rebuilding and healing. “A strong Christian America,” he said, “needs strong Christian American soldiers to reunite, rebuild, and defend it.” In almost the same breath, he spoke of both “the generosity and the love that we must show to one another, to all of our fellow Christian Americans,” and “the destruction we must visit upon traitors and sinners, those destroyers in our midst.”

  I’d call it a fire-and-brimstone speech, but what happens now?

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2033

  Yesterday Marc told Bankole that he intended to hold services of his own on Gathering Day. He would, he said, speak just before our regular gathering. It seemed that he was remembering his time with the Durans in Robledo, remembering his carport church, and wanting to recapture that image of himself.

  Bankole sent him to me. “Don’t go out of your way to make trouble,” Bankole told him. “Your sister has been good to you. Tell her what you intend to do.”

  “She can’t stop me!” my brother said.

  “Do what’s right,” Bankole told him. “You have a conscience. Don’t go behind your sister’s back.”

  So later in the day, Marc found me sitting with Channa Ryan, sorting and cataloging books. We’re always behind in that, and it needs to be done. All of our kids work on projects as part of their education. Each kid does at least one group project and one individual project per year. Most kids find the two unrelated projects influencing one another in unexpected ways. This helps the kids begin to learn how the world works, how all sorts of things interact and influence one another. The kids begin to teach themselves and one another. They begin to learn how to learn. With their mento
rs’ help, they each choose some aspect of history, science, math, art, or whatever and learns it well enough to teach it. Then they do just that. They teach it. To do a good job, they need to be able to find out what information we have available here and what they’re going to have to go to the nets for. Since we aren’t rich yet, the more we can offer them from our own library, the better.

  Still, cataloging is tedious. I was almost glad when Marc came and interrupted my work. He and I went outside to talk.

  “I want to get back to what I really care about,” he said as we sat together on a handsome bench that Allie Gilchrist had made. Allie’s discovered a real liking for building furniture, and she’s worked as hard to learn to do it well as she has to learn to assist Bankole well.

  “What?” I asked Marc, hoping that what he wanted was something that we could accommodate. No one wanted more than I did for him to find his own interests and get into work that he cared about.

  “I want to start my church again,” he said. “I want to preach. I’m not asking your permission. I’m just letting you know. With Jarret in office, you need someone like me anyway so that you’ll be able to say you’re not a Satanist cult.”

  I sighed. All of a sudden I could feel myself all but sagging with weariness and dread. But I only said, “If Jarret noticed us and wanted to call us a Satanic cult, your preaching wouldn’t stop him. Would you be willing to speak at Gathering?”

  That surprised him. “You mean while you’re having your services?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t talk about Earthseed. I want to preach.”

  “Preach, then.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “You should know. You’ve been to our services. You choose the topic. You say what you want. But afterward there will be questions and discussion.”

  “I’m not out to teach a class. I want to preach a sermon.”

  “That’s not our way, Marc. If you speak, you have to face questions and discussion. You need to be ready for that. Besides, no matter what you call it, a good sermon is just a lesson that you’re trying to teach.”