Others followed my example and drank and ate a little dried fruit, meat, and bread. Bankole and I shared with Emery and Tori. Mora seemed to want to leave in spite of us, but his daughter Doe was sitting half asleep on the ground against Zahra. He stooped next to her and made her drink a little water and eat some fruit.
“We might have to keep moving all night,” Allie said, her voice almost too soft to hear. “This might be the only rest we get.” And to Travis, “You’d better put Dominic into the carriage with Justin when he’s finished eating.”
Travis nodded. He’d carried Dominic this far. Now he tucked him in with Justin. “I’ll push the carriage for a while,” he said.
Bankole looked at my wound, rebandaged it, and this time gave me something for the pain. He buried the bloody bandages he had removed, digging a shallow hole with a flat rock.
Emery, with Tori gone to sleep against her, looked to see what Bankole was doing with me, then jumped and looked away, her hand going to her own side.
“I didn’t know you were hurt so much,” she whispered.
“I’m not,” I said, and made myself smile. “It looks nastier than it is with all the blood, but it isn’t bad. I’m damned lucky compared to Jill. And it doesn’t stop me from walking.”
“You didn’t give me any pain when we were walking,” she said.
I nodded, glad to know I could fake her out. “It’s ugly,” I said, “but not too painful.”
She settled down as though she felt better. No doubt she did. If I moaned and groaned, I’d have all four of them moaning and groaning. The kids might even bleed along with me. I would have to be careful and keep lying at least as long as the fire was a threat—or as long as I could.
The truth was, those blood-saturated bandages scared the hell out of me, and the wound hurt worse than ever. But I knew I had to keep going or burn. After a few minutes, Bankole’s pills began to take the edge off my pain, and that made the whole world easier to endure.
We had about an hour’s rest before the fire made us too nervous to stay where we were. Then we got up and walked. By then, at some point behind us, the fire had already jumped the road. Now, neither the north nor the south side looked safe. Until it was dark, all we could see in the hills behind us was smoke. It was a terrifying, looming, moving wall.
Later, after dark, we could see the fire eating its way toward us. There were dogs running along the road with us, but they paid no attention to us. Cats and deer ran past us, and a skunk scuttled by. It was live and let live. Neither humans nor animals were foolish enough to waste time attacking one another. Behind us and to the north, the fire began to roar.
We put Tori in the carriage and Justin and Dominic between her legs. The babies never even woke up while we were moving them. Tori herself was more than half asleep. I worried that the carriage might break down with the extra weight, but it held. Travis, Harry, and Allie traded off pushing it.
Doe, we put atop the load on Bankole’s cart. She couldn’t have been comfortable there, but she didn’t complain. She was more awake than Tori, and she had been walking on her own most of the time since our encounter with the would-be kidnappers. She was a strong little kid—her father’s daughter.
Grayson Mora helped push Bankole’s cart. In fact, once Doe was loaded aboard, Mora pushed the cart most of the time. The man wasn’t likeable, but in his love for his daughter, he was admirable.
At some point in the endless night, more smoke and ash than ever began to swirl around us, and I caught myself thinking that we might not make it. Without stopping, we wet shirts, scarves, whatever we had, and tied them around our noses and mouths.
The fire roared and thundered its way past us on the north, singeing our hair and clothing, making breathing a terrible effort. The babies woke up and screamed in fear and pain, then choked and almost brought me down. Tori, crying herself with their pain and her own, held on to them and would not let them struggle out of the carriage.
I thought we would die. I believed there was no way for us to survive this sea of fire, hot wind, smoke, and ash. I saw people—strangers—fall, and we left them lying on the highway, waiting to burn. I stopped looking back. In the roar of the fire, I could not hear whether they screamed. I could see the babies before Natividad threw wet rags over them. I knew they were screaming. Then I couldn’t see them, and it was a blessing.
We began to run out of water.
There was nothing to do except keep going or burn. The terrible, deafening noise of the fire increased, then lessened, and again, increased, then lessened. It seemed that the fire went north away from the road, then whipped back down toward us.
It teased like a living, malevolent thing, intent on causing pain and terror. It drove us before it like dogs chasing a rabbit. Yet it didn’t eat us. It could have, but it didn’t.
In the end, the worst of it roared off to the northwest. Firestorm, Bankole called it later. Yes. Like a tornado of fire, roaring around, just missing us, playing with us, then letting us live.
We could not rest. There was still fire. Little fires that could grow into big ones, smoke, blinding and choking smoke… No rest.
But we could slow down. We could emerge from the worst of the smoke and ash, and escape the lash of hot winds. We could pause by the side of the road for a moment, and gag in peace. There was a lot of gagging. Coughing and gagging and crying muddy tracks onto our faces. It was incredible. We were going to survive. We were still alive and together—scorched and miserable, in great need of water, but alive. We were going to make it.
Later, when we dared, we went off the road, unloaded my pack from Bankole’s cart, and dug out his extra water bottle. He dug it out. He’d told us he had it when he could have kept it for himself.
“We’ll reach Clear Lake sometime tomorrow,” I said. “Early tomorrow, I think. I don’t know how far we’ve come or where we are now, so I can only guess that we’ll get there early. But it is there waiting for us tomorrow.”
People grunted or coughed and downed swallows from Bankole’s extra bottle. The kids had to be prevented from guzzling too much water. As it was, Dominic choked and began to cry again.
We camped where we were, within sight of the road. Two of us had to stay awake on watch. I volunteered for first watch because I was in too much pain to sleep. I got my gun back from Natividad, checked to see that she had reloaded it—she had—and looked around for a partner.
“I’ll watch with you,” Grayson Mora said.
That surprised me. I would have preferred someone who knew how to use a gun—someone I would trust with a gun.
“I’m not going to be able to sleep until you do,” he said. “It’s that simple. So let’s both put our pain to good use.”
I looked at Emery and the two girls to see whether they’d heard, but they seemed to be already asleep. “All right,” I said. “We’ve got to watch for strangers and fire. Give me a yell if you see anything unusual.”
“Give me a gun,” he said. “If anybody comes close, I can at least use it to scare them.”
In the dark, sure. “No gun,” I said. “Not yet. You don’t know enough yet.”
He stared at me for several seconds, then went over to Bankole. He turned his back to me as he spoke to Bankole. “Look, you know I need a gun to do any guarding in a place like this. She doesn’t know how it is. She thinks she does, but she doesn’t.”
Bankole shrugged. “If you can’t do it, man, go to sleep. One of us will take the watch with her.”
“Shit.” Mora made the word long and nasty. “Shiiit. First time I saw her, I knew she was a man. Just didn’t know she was the only man here.”
Absolute silence.
Doe Mora saved the situation to the degree that it could be saved. At that moment she stepped up behind her father and tapped him on the back. He spun around, more than ready to fight, spun with such speed and fury that the little girl squealed and jumped back.
“What the hell are you doing up!” he shouted. “W
hat do you want!”
Frightened, the little girl just stared at him. After a moment, she extended her hand, offering a pomegranate. “Zahra said we could have this,” she whispered. “Would you cut it?”
Good thinking, Zahra! I didn’t turn to look at her, but I was aware of her watching. By now, everyone still awake was watching.
“Everyone’s tired and everyone’s hurting,” I told him. “Everyone, not just you. But we’ve managed to keep ourselves alive by working together and by not doing or saying stupid things.”
“And if that’s not good enough for you,” Bankole added, in a voice low and ugly with anger, “tomorrow you can go out and find yourself a different kind of group to travel with—a group too goddamn macho to waste its time saving your child’s life twice in one day.”
There must be something worthwhile in Mora. He didn’t say anything. He took out his knife and cut the pomegranate into quarters for Doe, then kept half of it because she insisted that he was supposed to have half. They sat together and ate the juicy, seedy, red fruit, then Mora tucked Doe in again and found himself a perch where, gunless, he began his first watch.
He said nothing more about guns, and he never apologized. Of course he didn’t leave us. Where would he go? He was a runaway slave. We were the best thing he’d found so far—the best he was going to find as long as he had Doe with him.
We didn’t reach Clear Lake the next morning. To tell the truth it was already the next morning when we went to sleep. We were too tired and sore to get up at dawn—which came early in the second watch. Only the need for water made us move out when we did—at a hot, smoky 11 A.M.
We found the corpse of a young woman when we got back to the road. There wasn’t a mark on her, but she was dead.
“I want her clothes,” Emery whispered. She was near me or I wouldn’t have heard her. The dead woman was about her size, and dressed in a cotton shirt and pants that looked almost new. They were dirty, but far less so than Emery’s clothes.
“Strip her, then,” I said. “I’d help you, but I’m not bending too well this morning.”
“I’ll give her a hand,” Allie whispered. Justin was asleep in his carriage with Dominic, so she was free to help with the ordinary, unspeakable things that we did now to live.
The dead woman had not even soiled herself in her dying. That made the job less disgusting than it could have been. Rigor mortis had set in, however, and stripping her was a job for two.
There was no one but us on this stretch of road, so Emery and Allie had all the time they needed. We had seen no other walkers yet this morning.
Emery and Allie took every scrap of clothing, including underwear, socks, and boots, though Emery thought the boots would be too big for her. No matter. If no one could wear them, she could sell them.
In fact, it was the boots that yielded Emery the first cash she had ever owned. On the farm where she had been a slave, she had been paid only in company scrip, worthless except on the farm, and almost worthless there.
Stitched into the tongue of each of the dead woman’s boots were five, folded one hundred-dollar bills—a thousand dollars in all. We had to tell her how little that was. If she were careful, and shopped only at the cheapest stores, and ate no meat, wheat, or dairy products, it might feed her for two weeks. It might feed both her and Tori for a week and a half. Still, it seemed riches to Emery.
Late that day, when we reached Clear Lake—much smaller than I had expected—we came across a tiny, expensive store, being run from the back of an old truck near a cluster of half-burned, collapsed cabins. It sold fruit, vegetables, nuts, and smoked fish. We all had to buy a few things, but Emery squandered too much money on pears and walnuts for everyone. She delighted in passing these around, in being able to give us something for a change. She’s all right. We’ll have to teach her about shopping and the value of money, but she’s worth something, Emery is. And she’s decided she’s one of us.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2027
Somehow, we’ve reached our new home—Bankole’s land in the coastal hills of Humboldt County. The highway—U.S. 101—is to the east and north of us, and Cape Mendocino and the sea are to the west. A few miles south are state parks filled with huge redwood trees and hoards of squatters. The land surrounding us, however, is as empty and wild as any I’ve seen. It’s covered with dry brush, trees, and tree stumps, all far removed from any city, and a long, hilly walk from the little towns that line the highway. There’s farming around here, and logging, and just plain isolated living. According to Bankole, it’s best to mind your own business and not pay too much attention to how people on neighboring plots of land earn a living. If they hijack trucks on 101, grow marijuana, distill whisky, or brew up more complicated illegal substances… Well, live and let live.
Bankole guided us along a narrow blacktopped road that soon became a narrow dirt road. We saw a few cultivated fields, some scars left by past fires or logging, and a lot of land that seemed unused. The road all but vanished before we came to the end of it. Good for isolation. Bad for getting things in or out. Bad for traveling back and forth to get work. Bankole had said his brother-in-law had to spend a lot of time in various towns, away from his family. That was easier to understand now. There’s no possibility here of coming home every day or two. So what did you have to do to save cash? Sleep in doorways or parks in town? Maybe it was worth the inconvenience to do just that if you could keep your family together and safe—far from the desperate, the crazy, and the vicious.
Or that’s what I thought until we reached the hillside where Bankole’s sister’s house and outbuildings were supposed to be.
There was no house. There were no buildings. There was almost nothing: A broad black smear on the hillside; a few charred planks sticking up from the rubble, some leaning against others; and a tall brick chimney, standing black and solitary like a tombstone in a picture of an old-style graveyard. A tombstone amid the bones and ashes.
25
❏ ❏ ❏
Create no images of God.
Accept the images
that God has provided.
They are everywhere,
in everything.
God is Change—
Seed to tree,
tree to forest;
Rain to river,
river to sea;
Grubs to bees,
bees to swarm.
From one, many;
from many, one;
Forever uniting, growing, dissolving—
forever Changing.
The universe
is God’s self-portrait.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2027
WE’VE BEEN ARGUING ALL week about whether or not we should stay here with the bones and ashes.
We’ve found five skulls—three in what was left of the house and two outside. There were other scattered bones, but not one complete skeleton. Dogs have been at the bones—dogs and cannibals, perhaps. The fire happened long enough ago for weeds to begin to grow in the rubble. Two months ago? Three? Some of the far-flung neighbors might know. Some of the far-flung neighbors might have set the fire.
There was no way to be certain, but I assumed that the bones belonged to Bankole’s sister and her family. I think Bankole assumed that, too, but he couldn’t bring himself to just bury the bones and write off his sister. The day after we got here, he and Harry hiked back to Glory, the nearest small town that we had passed through, to talk to the local cops. They were, or they professed to be, sheriff’s deputies. I wonder what you have to do to become a cop. I wonder what a badge is, other than a license to steal. What did it used to be to make people Bankole’s age want to trust it. I know what the old books say, but still, I wonder.
The deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing. They treated Bankole as though they doubted that he even had a sister, or that he was who he said he was. So many stolen IDs these
days. They searched him and took the cash he was carrying. Fees for police services, they said. He had been careful to carry only what he thought would be enough to keep them sweet-tempered, but not enough to make them suspicious or more greedy than they already were. The rest—a sizeable packet—he left with me. He trusted me enough to do that. His gun he left with Harry who had gone shopping.
Jail for Bankole could have meant being sold into a period of hard, unpaid labor—slavery. Perhaps if he had been younger, the deputies might have taken his money and arrested him anyway on some trumped-up charge. I had begged him not to go, not to trust any police or government official. It seemed to me such people were no better than gangs with their robbing and slaving.
Bankole agreed with me, yet he insisted on going.
“She was my little sister,” he said. “I have to try, at least, to find out what happened to her. I need to know who did this. Most of all, I need to know whether any of her children could have survived. One or more of those five skulls could have belonged to the arsonists.” He stared at the collection of bones. “I have to risk going to the sheriff’s office,” he continued. “But you don’t. I don’t want you with me. I don’t want them getting any ideas about you, maybe finding out by accident that you’re a sharer. I don’t want my sister’s death to cost you your life or your freedom.”
We fought about it. I was afraid for him; he was afraid for me, and we were both angrier than we had ever been at each other. I was terrified that he would be killed or arrested, and we’d never find out what happened to him. No one should travel alone in this world.
“Look,” he said at last, “you can do some good here with the group. You’ll have one of the four guns left here, and you know how to survive. You’re needed here. If the cops decide they want me, you won’t be able to do a thing. Worse, if they decide they want you, there’ll be nothing I can do except take revenge, and be killed for it.”