Parable of the Sower

  He looked a little surprised. “I was, yes. Family practice. It seems a long time ago.”

  “People will always need doctors,” I said. “You’ll do all right.”

  “My mother used to say that.” He gave me a wry smile. “But here I am.”

  I smiled back because, looking at him now, I couldn’t help myself, but as he spoke, I decided he had told me at least one lie. He might be as displaced and in distress as he appeared to be, but he wasn’t just wandering north. He wasn’t looking for just anywhere he could be paid for his services and not robbed or murdered. He wasn’t the kind of man who wandered. He knew where he was going. He had a haven somewhere—a relative’s home, another home of his own, a friend’s home, something—some definite destination.

  Or perhaps he just had enough money to buy a place for himself in Washington or Canada or Alaska. He had had to choose between fast, safe, expensive air travel and having settling-in money when he got where he was going. He had chosen settling-in money. If so, I agreed with him. He was taking the kind of risk that would enable him to make a new beginning as soon as possible—if he survived.

  On the other hand, if I were right about any of this, he might disappear on me some night. Or perhaps he would be more open about it—just walk away from me some day, turn down a side road and wave good-bye. I didn’t want that. After I’d slept with him I would want it even less.

  Even now, I wanted to keep him with me. I hated that he was lying to me already—or I believed he was. But why should he tell me everything? He didn’t know me very well yet, and like me, he meant to survive. Perhaps I could convince him that he and I could survive well together. Meanwhile, best to enjoy him without quite trusting him. I may be wrong about all this, but I don’t believe I am. Pity.

  We finished the guns, loaded them, and went down to the water to wash. You could go right down to the water, scoop some up in a pot, and take it away. It was free. I kept looking around, thinking someone would come to stop us or charge us or something. I suppose we could have been robbed, but no one paid any attention to us. We saw other people getting water in bottles, canteens, pots, and bags, but the place seemed peaceful. No one bothered anyone. No one paid any attention to us.

  “A place like this can’t last,” I told Bankole. “It’s a shame. Life could be good here.”

  “I suspect that it’s against the law to live here,” he said. “This is a State Recreation Area. There should be some kind of limit on how long you can stay. I’m certain that there should be—used to be—some group policing the place. I wonder if officials of some kind come around to collect bribes now and then.”

  “Not while we’re here, I hope.” I dried my hands and arms and waited for him to dry his. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. He looked at me for a while, then reached for me. He took me by both arms, drew me to him, kissed me, and spoke into my ear. “Aren’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything. After a while I took his hand and we went back to camp to pick up one of his blankets. Then we went to an isolated little spot that we’d both noticed earlier.

  It felt natural and easy to lie down with him, and explore the smooth, hard, broad feel of his body. He’d kept himself fit. No doubt walking hundreds of miles in the past few weeks had burned off whatever fat he’d been carrying. He was still big—barrel-chested and tall. Best of all, he took a lot of uncomplicated pleasure in my body, and I got to share it with him. It isn’t often that I can enjoy the good side of my hyperempathy. I let the sensation take over, intense and wild. I might be more in danger of having a heart attack than he is. How had I done without this for so long?

  There was an odd, unromantic moment when we both reached into crumpled clothing and produced condoms. It was funny because of the way it hit us both at once, and we laughed, then went on to the serious business of loving and pleasuring one another. That combed and trimmed beard that he’s so vain about tickles like mad.

  “I knew I should have let you alone,” he said to me when we had made love twice and were still not willing to get up and go back to the others. “You’re going to kill me. I’m too old for this stuff.”

  I laughed and made a pillow of his shoulder.

  After a while, he said, “I need to be serious for a minute, girl.”

  “Okay.”

  He drew a long breath, sighed, swallowed, hesitated. “I don’t want to give you up,” he said.

  I smiled.

  “You’re a kid,” he said. “I ought to know better. How old are you, anyway?”

  I told him.

  He jumped, then pushed me off his shoulder. “Eighteen?” He flinched away from me as though my skin burned him. “My god,” he said. “You’re a baby! I’m a child molester!”

  I didn’t laugh, though I wanted to. I just looked at him.

  After a while he frowned and shook his head. In a little more time, he moved back against me, touching my face, my shoulders, my breasts.

  “You’re not just eighteen,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “When were you born? What year?”

  “Twenty oh nine.”

  “No.” He drew the word out: “Nooo.”

  I kissed him and said in the same tone, “Yesss. Now stop your nonsense. You want to be with me and I want to be with you. We’re not going to split up because of my age, are we?”

  After a while he shook his head. “You should have a nice youngster like Travis,” he said. “I should have the sense and the strength to send you off to find one.”

  That made me think of Curtis, and I cringed away from thinking of him. I’ve thought as little as possible about Curtis Talcott. He isn’t like my brothers. He may be dead, but none of us ever saw his body. I saw his brother Michael. I was terrified of seeing Curtis himself, but I never did. He may not be dead. He’s lost to me, but I hope he’s not dead. He should be here with me on the road. I hope he’s alive and all right.

  “Who have I reminded you of?” Bankole asked me, his voice soft and deep.

  I shook my head. “A boy I knew at home. We were going to get married this year. I don’t even know whether he’s still alive.”

  “You loved him?”

  “Yes! We were going to marry and leave home, walk north. We had decided to go this fall.”

  “That’s crazy! You intended to walk this road even though you didn’t have to?”

  “Yes. And if we had left earlier, he’d be with me. I wish I knew he was all right.”

  He lay down on his back and drew me down beside him. “We’ve all lost someone,” he said. “You and I seem to have lost everyone. That’s a bond, I suppose.”

  “A terrible one,” I said. “But not our only one.”

  He shook his head. “You’re really eighteen?”

  “Yes. As of last month.”

  “You look and act years older.”

  “This is who I am,” I said.

  “You were the oldest kid in your family, weren’t you?”

  I nodded. “I had four brothers. They’re all dead.”

  “Yes,” he sighed. “Yes.”

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2027

  I’ve spent all of today talking, writing, reading, and making love to Bankole. It seems such a luxury not to have to get up, pack, and walk all day. We all lay sprawled around the campsite resting aching muscles, eating, and doing nothing. More people flowed into the area from the highway and made their camps, but none of them bothered us.

  I began Zahra’s reading lesson and Jill and Allie looked interested. I included them as though I had intended to from the first. It turned out that they could read a little, but hadn’t learned to write. Toward the end of the lesson, I read a few Earthseed verses to them in spite of Harry’s groans. Yet when Allie proclaimed that she would never pray to any god of change, Harry was the one who corrected her. Zahra and Travis both smiled at that, and Bankole watched us all with apparent interest.

  After that, Allie began to ask questions
instead of making scornful proclamations, and for the most part, the others answered her—Travis and Natividad, Harry and Zahra. Once Bankole answered, expanding on something I told him yesterday. Then he caught himself and looked a little embarrassed.

  “I still think it’s too simple,” he said to me. “A lot of it is logical, but it will never work without a sprinkling of mystical confusion.”

  “I’ll leave that to my descendants,” I said, and he busied himself, digging a bag of almonds out of his pack, pouring some into his hand, and passing the rest around.

  Just before nightfall a gun battle began over toward the highway. We couldn’t see any of it from where we were, but we stopped talking and lay down. With bullets flying, it seemed best to keep low.

  The shooting started and stopped, moved away, then came back. I was on watch, so I had to stay alert, but in this storm of noise, nothing moved near us except the trees in the evening breeze. It looked so peaceful, and yet people out there were trying to kill each other, and no doubt succeeding. Strange how normal it’s become for us to lie on the ground and listen while nearby, people try to kill each other.

  22

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  As wind,

  As water,

  As fire,

  As life,

  God

  Is both creative and destructive,

  Demanding and yielding,

  Sculptor and clay.

  God is Infinite Potential:

  God is Change.

  EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2027

  WE’VE HAD OVER A week of weary, frightening, nerve-wracking walking. We’ve reached and passed through the city of Sacramento without real trouble. We’ve been able to buy enough food and water, been able to find plenty of empty places in the hills where we could make camp. Yet none of us have had any feelings of comfort or well-being along the stretch of Interstate-5 that we’ve just traveled.

  I-5 is much less traveled than U.S. 101, in spite of the earthquake chaos. There were times when the only people we could see were each other. Those times never lasted long, but they did happen.

  On the other hand, there were more trucks on I-5. We had to be careful because trucks traveled during the day as well as at night. Also, there were more human bones on I-5. It was nothing to run across skulls, lower jaws, or bones of the pelvis and torso. Arm and leg bones were rarer, but now and then, we spotted them, too.

  “I think it’s the trucks,” Bankole told us. “If they hit someone along here, they wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t dare. And the junkies and alcoholics wouldn’t be that careful where they walked.”

  I suppose he’s right, although along that whole empty stretch of road, we saw only four people whom I believed were either not sober or not sane.

  But we saw other things. On Tuesday we camped in a little hollow back in the hills to the west of the road, and a big black and white dog came wandering down toward our camp with the fresh-looking, bloody hand and forearm of a child in its mouth.

  The dog spotted us, froze, turned, and ran back the way it had come. But we all got a good look before it went, and we all saw the same thing. That night, we posted a double watch. Two watchers, two guns, no unnecessary conversation, no sex.

  The next day we decided not to take another rest day until we had passed through Sacramento. There was no guarantee that anything would be better on the other side of Sacramento, but we wanted to get away from this grim land.

  That night, looking for a place to camp, we stumbled across four ragged, filthy kids huddled around a campfire. The picture of them is still clear in my mind. Kids the age of my brothers—twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old, three boys and a girl. The girl was pregnant, and so huge it was obvious she would be giving birth any day. We rounded a bend in a dry stream bed, and there these kids were, roasting a severed human leg, maneuvering it where it lay in the middle of their fire atop the burning wood by twisting its foot. As we watched, the girl pulled a sliver of charred flesh from the thigh and stuffed it into her mouth.

  They never saw us. I was in the lead, and I stopped the others before they all rounded the bend. Harry and Zahra, who were just behind me, saw all that I saw. We turned the others back and away, not telling them why until we were far from those kids and their cannibal feast.

  No one attacked us. No one bothered us at all. The country we walked through was even beautiful in some places—green trees and rolling hills; golden dried grasses and tiny communities; farms, many overgrown and abandoned, and abandoned houses. Nice country, and compared to Southern California, rich country. More water, more food, more room…

  So why were the people eating one another?

  There were several burned out buildings. It was obvious that there had been trouble here, too, but much less than on the coast. Yet we couldn’t wait to get back to the coast.

  Sacramento was all right to resupply in and hurry through. Water and food were cheap there compared to what you could buy along the roadside, of course. Cities were always a relief as far as prices went. But cities were also dangerous. More gangs, more cops, more suspicious, nervous people with guns. You tiptoe through cities. You keep up a steady pace, keep your eyes open, and try to look both too intimidating to bother and invisible. Neat trick. Bankole says cities have been like that for a long time.

  Speaking of Bankole, I haven’t let him get much rest on this rest day. He doesn’t seem to mind. He did say something that I should make note of, though. He said he wanted me to leave the group with him. He has, as I suspected, a safe haven—or as safe as any haven can be that isn’t surrounded by high-tech security devices and armed guards. It’s in the hills on the coast near Cape Mendocino maybe two weeks from here.

  “My sister and her family have been living there,” he said. “But the property belongs to me. There’s room on it for you.”

  I could imagine how delighted his sister would be to see me. Would she try to be polite, or would she stare at me, then at him, then demand to know whether he was in his right mind?

  “Did you hear what I said?” he demanded.

  I looked at him, interested in the anger I heard in his voice. Why anger?

  “What am I doing? Boring you?” he demanded.

  I took his hand and kissed it. “You introduce me to your sister and she’ll measure you for a straitjacket.”

  After a while, he laughed. “Yes.” And then, “I don’t care.”

  “You might, sooner or later.”

  “You’ll come with me, then.”

  “No. I’d like to, but no.”

  He smiled. “Yes. You’ll come.”

  I watched him. I tried to read the smile, but it’s hard to read a bearded face. It’s easier to say what I didn’t see—or didn’t recognize. I didn’t see condescension or that particular kind of disregard that some men reserve for women. He wasn’t deciding that my “no” was a secret “yes.” Something else was going on.

  “I own three hundred acres,” he said. “I bought the property years ago as an investment. There was going to be a big housing development up there, and speculators like me were going to make tons of money, selling our land to the developers. The project fell through for some reason, and I was stuck with land that I could either sell at a loss or keep. I kept it. Most of it is good for farming. It’s got some trees on it, and some big tree stumps. My sister and her husband have built a house and a few outbuildings.”

  “You might have dozens or hundreds of squatters on that land now,” I said.

  “I don’t think so. Access is a problem. It’s not convenient to any real road, and it’s well away from the big highways. It’s a great place to hide.”

  “Water?”

  “There are wells. My sister says the area is getting dryer, warmer. That’s no surprise. But the ground water seems dependable so far.”

  I thought I could see where he was headed now, but he was going to have to get there all by himself. His land; his cho
ice.

  “There aren’t many black people up that way, are there?” I asked.

  “Not many,” he agreed. “My sister hasn’t had much trouble, though.”

  “What does she do for a living? Farm the land?”

  “Yes, and her husband does odd jobs for cash—which is dangerous because it leaves her and the children alone for days, weeks, even months at a time. If we can manage to support ourselves without becoming a drain on her few resources, we might be useful to her. We might give her more security.”

  “How many kids?”

  “Three. Let’s see…eleven, thirteen, and fifteen years old by now. She’s only forty herself.” His mouth twitched. Only. Yeah. Even his little sister was old enough to be my mother. “Her name’s Alex. Alexandra. Married to Don Casey. They both hate cities. They thought my land was a godsend. They could raise children who might live to grow up.” He nodded. “And their children have done all right.”

  “How have you kept in touch?” I asked. “Phone?”

  “That was part of our agreement,” he said. “They don’t have a phone, but when Don goes to one of the towns to get work, he phones me and lets me know how everyone is. He won’t know what’s happened to me. He won’t be expecting me. If he’s tried to phone, both he and Alex will be worried.”

  “You should have flown up,” I said. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “Are you? So am I. Listen, you are coming with me. I can’t think of anything I want as much as I want you. I haven’t wanted anything at all for a long time. Too long.”

  I leaned back against a tree. Our campsite wasn’t as completely private as the one at San Luis had been, but there were trees, and the couples could get away from each other. Each couple had one gun, and the Gilchrist sisters were babysitting Dominic as well as Justin. We had put them in the middle of a rough triangle and given them my gun. On I-5 they and Travis had had a chance to do a little target practice. It was all of our duty to look around now and then and make sure no strangers wandered into the area. I looked around.

  Sitting up I could see Justin running around, chasing pigeons. Jill was keeping an eye on him, but not trying to keep up with him.