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 ChangeŃ
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, dissolvingŃ
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 sizable 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.”
That slowed me down— the thought that I might cause his death instead of backing him up. I didn’t quite believe it, but it slowed me down. Harry stepped in then and said he would go. He wanted to anyway. He could buy some things for the group, and he wanted to look for a job. He wanted to earn some money.
“I’ll do what I can,” he told me just before they left.
“He’s not a bad old guy. I’ll bring him back to you.”
They brought each other back, Bankole a few thousand dollars poorer, and Harry still jobless-though they did bring back supplies and a few hand tools. Bankole knew no more than he had when he left about his sister and her family, but the cops had said they would come out to investigate the fire and the bones.
We worried that sooner or later, they might show up.
We’re still keeping a lookout for them, and we’ve hidden— buried— most of our valuables. We want to bury the bones, but we don’t dare. It’s bothering Bankole. Bothering him a lot. I’ve suggested we hold a funeral and go ahead and bury the bones. The hell with the cops. But he says no. Best to give them as little provocation as possible. If they came, they would do enough harm with their stealing. Best not to give them reason to do more.
There’s a well with an old-fashioned hand pump under the rubble of an outbuilding. It still works. The solar-powered electric pump near the house does not. We couldn’t stay here long without a dependable water source. With the well, though, it’s hard to leave— hard to walk away from possible sanctuary— in spite of arsonists and cops.
Bankole owns this land, free and clear. There’s a huge, half ruined garden plus citrus trees full of unripe fruit. We’ve already been pulling carrots and digging potatoes here. There are plenty of other fruit and nut trees plus wild pines, redwoods, and Douglas firs. None of these last were very big. This area was logged sometime before Bankole bought it.
Bankole says it was clear-cut back in the 1980s or l990s, but we can make use of the trees that have grown since then, and we can plant more. We can build a shelter, put in a winter garden from the seed I’ve been carrying and collecting since we left home.
Granted, a lot of it is old seed. I hadn’t renewed it as often as I should have while I was at home. Strange that I hadn’t. Things kept getting worse and worse at home, yet I had paid less and less attention to the pack that was supposed to save my life when the mob came. There was so much else to worry about-and I think I was into my own brand of denial, as bad in its way as Cory’s or Joanne’s mother’s. But all that feels like ancient history. Now was what we had to worry about. What were we going to do now?
“I don’t think we can make it here,” Harry said earlier this evening as we sat around the campfire. There should be something cheerful about sitting around a campfire with friends and a full stomach. We even had meat tonight fresh meat. Bankole took the rifle and went off by himself for a while. When he came back, he brought three rabbits which Zahra and I skinned, cleaned, and roasted. We also roasted sweet potatoes that we had dug out of the garden.