“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.
“Should we let her stay?” I asked them.
Both girls nodded. “I think she’ll be a pain in the ass for a while, though,” Allie said. “Like Natividad says, she’ll steal. She won’t be able to stop herself. We’ll have to watch her real good. That little kid will steal too. Steal and run like hell.”
Zahra grinned. “Reminds me of me at that age.
They’ll both be pains in the ass. I vote we try them. If they have manners or if they can learn manners, we keep them. If they’re too stupid to learn, we throw them out.”
I looked at Travis and Harry, standing together.
“What do you guys say?”
“The next one might.” I leaned toward her. “The world is full of crazy, dangerous people. We see signs of that every day. If we don’t watch out for ourselves, they will rob us, kill us, and maybe eat us.
It’s a world gone to hell, Jill, and we’ve only got each other to keep it off us.”
Sullen silence.
I reached out and took her hand. “Jill.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” she said. “You can’t prove I— ”
“Jill!”
She shut up and stared at me.
“Listen, no one is going to beat you up, for heaven sake, but you did something wrong, something dangerous. You know you did.”
“So what do you want her to do?” Allie demanded.
“Get on her knees and say she’s sorry?”
“I want her to love her own life and yours enough not to be careless. That’s what I want. That’s what you should want, now more than ever. Jill?”
Jill closed her eyes. “Oh shit!” she said. And then, “All right, all right! I didn’t see them. I really didn’t. I’ll watch better. No one else will get by me.”
I clasped her hand for a moment longer, then let it go. “Okay. Let’s get out of here. Let’s collect that scared woman and her scared little kid and get out of here.”
The two scared people turned out to be the most racially mixed that I had ever met. Here’s their story, put together from the fragments they told us during the day and tonight. The woman had a Japanese father, a black mother, and a Mexican husband, all dead. Only she and her daughter are left. Her name is Emery Tanaka Solis. Her daughter is Tori Solis.
Tori is nine years old, not seven as I had guessed. I suspect she has rarely had enough to eat in her life.
She’s tiny, quick, quiet, and hungry-eyed. She hid bits of food in her filthy rags until we made her a new dress from one of Bankole’s shirts. Then she hid food in that. Although Tori is nine, her mother is only 23. At 13, Emery married a much older man who promised to take care of her. Her father was already dead, killed in someone else’s gunfight. Her mother was sick, and dying of tuberculosis. The mother pushed Emery into marriage to save her from victimization and starvation in the streets.
Up to that point, the situation was dreary, but normal. Emery had three children over the next three years— a daughter and two sons. She and her husband did farm work in trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for the workers’
shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing-new or used— for everything they needed, and, of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages— surprise!— were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts.