Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

We could hear people shooting, screaming, cursing, running… . Same old stuff— tiresome, dangerous, and stupid. The shooting went on for over an hour, waxing and waning. There was a final barrage that seemed to involve more guns than ever. Then the noise stopped.

I managed to sleep through some of it. I got over being afraid, even got over being angry. In the end, I was only tired. I thought, if the bastards are going to kill me, I can’t stop them by staying awake. If that wasn’t altogether true, I didn’t care. I slept.

And somehow, during or after the battle, in spite of the watch, two people slipped into our camp and bedded down among us. They slept too.

We awoke early as usual so that we could start walking while the heat wasn’t too terrible. We’ve learned to wake up without prompting at the first light of dawn. Today, four of us sat up in our bags at almost the same time. I was crawling out of my bag to go off and urinate when I spotted the extra people— two gray lumps in the dawn light, one large and one small, lying against each other, asleep on the bare ground. Thin arms and legs extended like sticks from rags and mounds of clothing.

I glanced around at the others and saw that they were staring where I was staring— all of them except Jill, who was supposed to be on watch. We began trusting her to stand night watch last week with a partner. This was only her second solitary watch.

And where was she looking? Away into the trees.

She and I would have to talk.

Harry and Travis were already reacting to the figures on the ground. In silence, each man was peeling out of his bag in his underwear, and standing up. More fully clothed, I matched them, move for move, and the three of us closed in around the two intruders.

The larger of the two awoke all at once, jumped up, darted two or three steps toward Harry, then stopped. It was a woman. We could see her better now. She was brown-skinned with a lot of long, straight, unkept black hair. Her coloring was as dark as mine, but she was all plains and angles— a wiry, hawk-faced woman who could have used a few decent meals and a good scrubbing. She looked like a lot of people we’ve seen on the road.

The second intruder awoke, saw Travis standing nearby in his underwear, and screamed. That got everyone’s attention. It was the high, piercing shriek of a child— a little girl who looked about seven. She was a tiny, pinched image of the woman— her mother, or her sister perhaps.

I could see that. “Just take what we give you and nothing more than we give you,” I said. “That will be pay enough.”

“We won’t steal. We aren’t thieves.”

Of course they were thieves. How else could they live. Some stealing and scavenging, maybe some whoring… . They weren’t very good at it or they’d look better. But for the little kid’s sake, I wanted to help them at least with a meal.

“Wait, then.” I said. “We’ll put a meal together.”

They sat where they were and watched us with hungry, hungry eyes. There was more hunger in those eyes than we could fill with all our food. I thought I had probably made a mistake. These people were so desperate, they were dangerous. It didn’t matter at all that they looked harmless. They were still alive and strong enough to run. They were not harmless.

It was Justin who eased some of the tension in those bottomless, hungry eyes. Stark naked, he toddled over to the woman and the girl and looked them over. The little girl only stared back, but after a moment, the woman began to smile. She said something to Justin, and he smiled. Then he ran back to Allie who held on to him long enough to dress him. But he had done his work. The woman was seeing us with different eyes. She watched Natividad nursing Dominic, then watched Bankole combing his beard. This seemed funny to her and to the child, and they both giggled.

“You’re a hit,” I told Bankole.

“I don’t see what’s so funny about a man combing his beard,” he muttered, and put away his comb.

I dug sweet pears out of my pack, and took one each to the woman and girl. I had just bought them two days before, and I had only three left. Other people got the idea and began sharing what they could spare. Shelled walnuts, apples, a pomegranate, Valencia oranges, figs… . Little things.

“Save what you can,” Natividad told the woman as she gave her almonds wrapped in a piece of red cloth. “Wrap things in here and tie the ends together.”

We all shared corn bread made with a little honey and the hard-boiled eggs we bought and cooked yesterday. We baked the corn bread in the coals of last night’s fire so that we could get away early this morning. The woman and the girl ate as though the plain, cold food were the best they had ever tasted, as though they couldn’t believe someone had given it to them. They crouched over it as though they were afraid we might snatch it back.

“We’ve got to go,” I said at last. “The sun’s getting hotter.”

The woman looked at me, her strange, sharp face hungry again, but now not hungry for food.

“Let us go with you,” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “We’ll work. We’ll get wood, make fire, clean dishes, anything. Take us with you.”

Bankole looked at me. “I assume you saw that coming.”

I nodded. The woman was looking from one of us to the other.

“Anything,” she whispered— or whimpered. Her eyes were dry and starved, but tears streamed from the little girl’s eyes.

“Give us a moment to decide,” I said. I meant, Go away so my friends can yell at me in private, but the woman didn’t seem to understand. She didn’t move.

“Wait over there,” I said, pointing toward the trees nearest to the road. “Let us talk. Then we’ll tell you.”

She didn’t want to do it. She hesitated, then stood up, pulled her even more reluctant daughter up, and trudged off to the trees I had indicated.

“Oh God,” Zahra muttered. “We’re going to take them, aren’t we?”

“That’s what we have to decide,” I said.

“What, we feed her, and then we get to tell her to go away and finish starving?” Zahra made a noise of disgust.

“If she isn’t a thief,” Bankole said, “And if she doesn’t have any other dangerous habits, we may be able to carry them. That little kid… .”

“Yes,” I said. “Bankole, is there room for them at your place?”

“His place?” three others asked. I hadn’t had a chance to tell them about it. And I hadn’t had the nerve.

“He has a lot of land up north and over by the coast,”

I said. “There’s a family house that we can’t live in because his sister and her family are there. But there’s room and trees and water. He says… .” I swallowed, looked at Bankole who was smiling a little. “He says we can start Earthseed there— build what we can.”

“Are there jobs?” Harry asked Bankole.

“My brother-in-law manages with year-round gardens and temporary jobs. He’s raising three kids that way.”

“But the jobs do pay money?”

“Yes, they pay. Not well, but they pay. We’d better hold off talking about this for a while. We’re torturing that young woman over there.”

“She’ll steal,” Natividad said. “She says she won’t, but she will. You can look at her and tell.”

“She’s been beaten,” Jill said. “The way they rolled up when we first spotted them. They’re used to being beaten, kicked, knocked around.”

“Yeah.” Allie looked haunted. “You try to keep from getting hit in the head, try to protect your eyes and. .

.your front. She thought we would beat her. She and the kid both.”

Interesting that Allie and Jill should understand so well. What a terrible father they had. And what had happened to their mother? They had never talked about her. It was amazing that they had escaped alive and sane enough to function.