Parable of the Talents

  Justin! Justin beaten and cut, but alive. I held him, ignoring the people around us who stared or muttered. Justin is small and wiry. I suspect he still has quite a bit of growing to do. He’s White, red-haired, and freckled. In short, he doesn’t look like someone who should be hugging me. But in Georgetown although people might stare, they don’t interfere. They mind their own business. They don’t need anyone else’s trouble.

  I held him away from me and looked him over. He was filthy and bloody, and he didn’t look as though he had had much to eat recently. The cuts on his face and mouth and his bruised head weren’t his only injuries. He moved as though he hurt elsewhere.

  “Is Mama here, too?” he asked.

  “She’s here,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “I’m taking you to her.” We had begun to walk together up toward the George complex.

  “Is the Doctor there too?”

  I stopped, staring up toward the complex, and looked down, waiting until I could keep my voice steady. “No, Jus. He’s not here.”

  The Justin I had known back before Camp Christian would have accepted these words at face value. He might have asked where Bankole was, but he wouldn’t have said what this much older, wounded, wiser child said.

  “Shaper?”

  I hadn’t heard that title for a while. In fact, I hadn’t heard my name for a while. In Georgetown, I called myself Cory Duran. It was my stepmother’s maiden name, and I used it in the hope of attracting my brother’s attention if he happened to be around. The false name is accepted here because even though I’d been to Georgetown several times before the destruction of Acorn, among the permanent residents, only Dolores George and her husband knew my name. And the Georges don’t gossip.

  As for the title, in Acorn, all the children called me “Shaper.” It was the title that seemed right for one teaching Earthseed. Travis, too, was called Shaper. So was Natividad.

  “Shaper?”

  “Yes, Jus.”

  “Is the Doctor dead?”

  “Yes. He’s dead.”

  “Oh.” He had begun to cry. He had not been crying over his own injuries, but he cried for my Bankole. I took his hand and we walked up the hill to George’s.

  Like the rest of us, Allie has been working for Dolores George. I never worried about my own ability to earn my way. I worried about Harry’s depression, but not about his resourcefulness. He would have little trouble. Nina Noyer didn’t give me time to worry about her. She arrived at Georgetown and almost immediately fell in love with one of the younger George sons. In spite of her two lost sisters, in spite of Dolores George’s disapproval, Nina and the boy are so intense, so wrapped up in one another that Dolores knows she could only alienate her son by objecting. She hopes the sudden passion will burn itself out. I’m not so sure.

  But I worried about Allie. She is healing. She talks now as much as she ever did—which is to say, not a lot. She can think and reason. But not all of her memory has come back. For that reason, I told Dolores some of her story and hoped aloud that some permanent job could be found for her. Dolores first gave her small jobs to do, cleaning floors, repairing steps, painting railings… When she saw that Allie worked well and made no trouble, she said Allie could stay as long as she wanted to. No salary, just room and board.

  I stopped at a tree stump about halfway up the hill and sat down and took both of Justin’s hands between mine. His face looked bad, and it was hard to look at him, but I made myself do it. “Jus, they hurt your mother.”

  He began to look afraid. “Hurt her how?”

  “They put a collar on her. They put collars on all of us. They hurt her with the collar. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen—”

  “I have. I saw collar gangs working on the highway and in Eureka, fixing potholes, pulling weeds, stuff like that. I saw how a collar can hurt you and make you fall down and twitch and scream.”

  I nodded. “Collars can do more than that. Someone got really mad at your mother and used the collar to hurt her badly. She’s almost okay now, but she’s still having some trouble with her memory.”

  “Amnesia?”

  “Yes. Most of what she’s lost is what happened in the weeks and months just before she was hurt. That was a bad time for us all, and it may be a mercy that she’s lost it. But don’t be surprised if you ask her about something and she doesn’t remember. She can’t help it.”

  He thought about that for a while, then asked in almost a whisper, “Will she remember me?”

  “Absolutely. We’ve been in contact with all sorts of people trying to find out where you and the others were.” Then I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask a few questions for myself. “Justin, were you with any of the other kids? Were you with Larkin?”

  He shook his head. “They took us all to Arcata to the church there. Then they made us all separate. They said we were going to have new Christian American families. They said…they said you were all dead. I believed them at first, and I didn’t know what to do. But then I saw how they would lie whenever they felt like it. They would say things about us and about Acorn that were nothing but lies. Then I didn’t know what to believe.”

  “Do you know where they sent Larkin—or any of the others?”

  He shook his head again. “They made me go with some people who had a girl and a boy of their own. I was almost the first one to go. I didn’t get to see who got the other kids. I guess they went with other families. The people who got me, the man was a deacon. He said it was his duty to take me. I guess it was his duty to beat me up, too!”

  “Did he do this to your face?”

  Justin nodded. “He did and his son—Carl. Carl said my mother was a devil worshiper and a witch. He was always saying that. He’s 12, and he thinks he knows everything. Then a few days ago, he said she was a…a whore. And I hit him. We got into a big fight and his father came out and called me an ungrateful little devil-worshiping bastard. Then they both beat the hell out of me. They locked up me in my room and I went out the window. Then I didn’t know where to go, so I just went south, out of town, down toward Acorn. The deacon had said it wasn’t there anymore, but I had to see for myself. Then a woman saw me on the road and she brought me here. She gave me some food and put some medicine on my face. She had a lot of kids, but she let me stay with her for a couple of days. I guess she would have let me live there. But I wanted to go home.”

  I listened to all this, then sighed. “Acorn really is gone,” I said. “When we finally broke free, we burned what was left of it.”

  “You burned it?”

  “Yes. We couldn’t stay there. We would have been caught and collared again or killed. So we took what we could carry, and we burned the rest. Why should they be able to steal it and use it? We burned it!”

  He drew back from me a little, and I was afraid I was scaring him. He’s a tough little kid, but he had been through a lot. I felt ashamed of letting my feelings show more than I should have.

  Then he came close and whispered, “Did you kill them?” So I hadn’t been scaring him. The look on his thin, battered face was intense and angry and far more full of hate than a child’s face should have been.

  I just nodded.

  “The ones who hurt my mother—did you kill them, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good!”

  We got up, and I took him to Allie. I watched them meet, saw Allie’s joyous tears, heard her cries. I could hardly stand it, but I watched.

  Then Harry got an idea about where his kids might be. He had gotten a job driving one of the George trucks or riding shotgun—something he had had plenty of experience doing back at Acorn. He was even able to make friends with the clannish George men. He would never be one of them, but they liked him, and once he’d proved himself by spotting and helping to prevent an attempted hijacking, they trusted him. This enabled him to see more of the state than he could have by just wandering on foot. But it also kept him on the job, with the trucks most of the time. He
couldn’t look for his children himself—couldn’t walk through the little towns, looking at the children as they worked or played. Doing that would probably get him into trouble, anyway.

  Justin had given us two sad, useful bits of information. First, all the kids’ names were changed. Justin had been called Matthew Landis, just another of Deacon Landis’s sons. The older kids like Justin would remember their real names and who their parents were, but the younger ones, the babies, my Larkin…

  The second bit of information was that sibling groups were always broken up. This seemed an unnecessary bit of sadism, even for the Church of Christian America. Justin didn’t know why it was done, hadn’t seen it done, but he had heard Deacon Landis mention it to another man. So children who had already lost their homes and their parents or guardians had also had their sisters or brothers and their own names taken from them.

  With all that, how will I find Larkin?

  How will I ever find my child? I’ve asked all the day laborers I know to look for a Black girlchild, dark-skinned, not yet two years old, but probably big for her age, who has suddenly appeared in a household where there had been no pregnancy, in a household that might not be Black, or in a foster home. I’ve pretended to be a day laborer myself and substituted for two of the cleaning women so that I could look at two children who had been reported to me as possible candidates. Neither was anything like Larkin.

  But is Larkin anything like the Larkin I remember anymore? How can she be? Babies grow and change so fast. She was only two months old when they took her. I’m afraid I won’t know her now. But I still have the hand and foot prints. I’ve made copies of them so that I can always carry one. I’ve even gone to the police—the Humboldt County Sheriff—with my false name and told them a false story of how my daughter had been stolen from me as I walked along the highway. I left them a copy of the hand and foot prints and paid the “fee for police services” that you have to pay for anything other than an immediate emergency. I don’t know whether that was wise or useful, but I did it. I’m doing everything I can think of.

  That’s why I don’t blame Harry for what he’s done. I wish like hell he hadn’t done it, but I don’t blame him. When you’re desperate, you do desperate things.

  Harry came to see me two days ago.

  He’d just returned from a three-day trip up into Oregon and then over to Tahoe and back. The usual thing for him to do after a trip like that should have been to eat something and go to bed.

  Instead, he came to my room to see me. I was working at a small, rickety table I had bought. I had sketched a mother and her three children and made the table the price of the sketch. My tiny, closetlike room itself came with a window, a block of wood to wedge it open or bar it shut, a narrow shelfbed, a lot of dirt, and a few bugs. I had bought a pitcher and basin for quick washing, some soap, a chair and table for working, and a jug with the best available water purifier for drinking water. And bug spray.

  “Fancy,” Dolores had said when she came to look at it. “Why the hell don’t you spring for a decent room? You can afford it.”

  “When I find my daughter, maybe I’ll be able to think about things like that,” I said. “I don’t know what it will cost me to find her, then maybe buy her. I don’t know what I might have to do.” And maybe, I did not say, maybe I’ll have to kidnap her and run. Maybe I’ll have to pay the Georges for a fast trip across one or two state lines. Maybe anything. I couldn’t waste money.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I haven’t heard anything more, but my people are listening.”

  They’re still listening. So are the freelancers to whom I had paid a little and promised a lot—people like Cougar, I’m sorry to say—except that they deal in even younger children. I feel filthy every time I have to talk to one of them. If anyone deserves to be collared and put to work, they do, and yet there hasn’t been any particular Christian American crackdown on them.

  Apparently we represent the greater danger to Jarret’s America. What was done to us was illegal, by the way. We’ve learned that much. No new laws have been made to okay any of it. But, as Day Turner said long ago, a lot of people are convinced that cracking down on the poor and the different is a good idea. There are now a number of legal cases—Hindus, Jews, Moslems, and others who have managed to avoid being caught when Crusaders came for them. But even among these people, young children who are taken away are not often returned. Charge after charge of neglect and abuse is made against the parents or guardians. In fact, the parents or guardians might wind up collared legally for the horrible things they were supposed to have done to their children. Sometimes brainwashed or terrorized children are produced to give testimony against biological parents they haven’t seen for months or years. I wasn’t sure what to make of that last. Justin had not turned against Allie, no matter what he had been told about her. What kind of brainwashing would make a child turn against its own parents?

  So the legal road seems not to lead to a return of abducted children—or it hasn’t so far. It hasn’t even led to an end of the camps. Camps are mentioned on the nets and disks as being strictly for the rehabilitation and reeducation of minor criminals—vagrants, thieves, addicts, and prostitutes. That’s all. No problem.

  We are, as we have always been, on our own.

  “I quit my job today,” Harry said to me. He sat on my bed and leaned forward on my table, looking across at me with disturbing intensity. “I’m leaving.”

  I put aside the lessons I had been writing for one of my students—a woman who wanted to learn to read so that she could teach her children. My students can’t or won’t afford books of any kind. I write lessons for them on sheets of paper that they buy from George’s and bring to me. I’ve taught them to practice first letters, then words on the ground in a smooth patch of dirt. They write with their forefingers to learn to feel the shapes of letters and words. Then I make them write with sharp, slender sticks so they can get used to the feel of using a pencil or pen.

  It seems I’ve always taught. With four younger brothers, I feel as though I were born teaching. I like doing it. I’m just not sure how much good it does. How much good does anything do now?

  “What have you heard?” I asked Harry.

  He stared off to one side, out my window.

  I reached across the table to take his hand. “Tell me, Harry.”

  He looked at me and tried, I think, to smile a little. “I’ve heard that there’s a big children’s home run by Christian America down in Marin County,” he said, “and there’s another in Ventura County. I don’t have addresses, but I’ll find them. Truth is, I’ve heard there are a lot of children’s homes run by CA. But those are the only two I know of in California.” He paused, looked out the window again. “I don’t know whether they would send our kids to one of those places. Justin says he didn’t hear anything about children’s homes or orphanages. He says all he heard was that he and the other kids were going to new families to be raised the right way as patriotic Christian Americans.”

  “But you’re going down to Ventura and Marin to find out for sure?”

  “I have to.”

  I thought about this, then shook my head. “I don’t believe they’d send kids as young as yours and mine down there. They have them adopted or fostered around here somewhere. At worst they’d be here in small group homes. The Ventura home would have kids pouring into it from all of southern California. The Marin home would be full of kids from the Bay Area and Sacramento.”

  “So you go on looking here,” he said. “I want you to. If you find our kids, it will be as good as if I found them. They won’t be in the hands of crazy people—of their own mother’s murderers.”

  “Here is where it makes sense to look!” I said. “If CA is doing any moving of kids, chances are, it’s from south to north. It’s still crowded down there—with all the immigration from Latin America plus the people from Arizona and Nevada and those who were already there.”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.
“I know you’re right, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t know where to look up here. Adoptions, foster homes, even small group homes don’t call enough attention to themselves. We’ve been checking them, one by one, and we could go on doing that for years. But if the kids are down south, I might be able to get a job at first one, then the other of the big homes and get a look at them.”

  I sat back, thinking. “I believe you’re wrong,” I said. “But if you insist on going—”

  “I’m going.”

  “You shouldn’t go alone. You need someone to watch your back.”

  “I don’t want you with me. I want you here, searching.” He took two palm-sized debit phones from his jacket pocket and pushed one toward me. They were a cheap version of the prepaid renewable kind of satellite phone that we used to use at Acorn. “I bought these yesterday,” he said. “I paid for five hours of in-country use. They’re cheap, simple, and anonymous. All you can do with them is call and receive, voice only. No screen, no net access, no message storage. But at least we’ll be able to talk to one another.”

  “But your chances of surviving alone on the road—”

  He got up and walked toward the door.

  “Harry!” I said, standing myself.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m half dead.”

  I let him go. His depression was bad enough. Depression and exhaustion together were too much to fight against. He hadn’t been himself since Zahra’s death. I would let him rest, then try to make him see reason. I wouldn’t try to make him stay, but going alone was suicide. He knew it. Once he had rested, he would be able to admit it.