Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

  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 1990s, 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. We should have been content. Yet all we were doing was rehashing what had become an old argument over the past few days. Perhaps it was the bones and ashes just over the rise that were bothering us. We had camped out of sight of the burned area in the hope of recovering a little peace of mind, but it hadn’t helped. I was thinking that we should figure out a way to capture a few wild rabbits alive and breed them for a sure meat supply. Was that possible? Why not, if we stay here? And we should stay.

  “Nothing we find farther north will be any better or any safer than this,” I said. “It will be hard to live here, but if we work together, and if we’re careful, it should be possible. We can build a community here.”

  “Oh, god, there she goes with her Earthseed shit again,” Allie said. But she smiled a little as she said it. That was good. She hadn’t smiled much lately.

  “We can build a community here,” I repeated. “It’s dangerous, sure, but, hell, it’s dangerous everywhere, and the more people there are packed together in cities, the more danger there is. This is a ridiculous place to build a community. It’s isolated, miles from everywhere with no decent road leading here, but for us, for now, it’s perfect.”

  “Except that someone burned this place down last time,” Grayson Mora said. “Anything we build out here by itself is a target.”

  “Anything we build anywhere is a target,” Zahra argued. “But the people out here before… I’m sorry, Bankole, I gotta say this: They couldn’t have kept a good watch—a man and a woman and three kids. They would have worked hard all day, then slept all night. It would have been too hard on just two grown people to try to sit up and watch for half the night each.”

  “They didn’t keep a night watch,” Bankole said. “We’ll have to keep one, though. And we could use a couple of dogs. If we could get them as puppies and train them to guard—”

  “Give meat to dogs?” Mora demanded, outraged.

  “Not soon.” Bankole shrugged. “Not until we have enough for ourselves. But if we can get dogs, they’ll help us keep the rest of our goods.”

  “I wouldn’t give a dog nothing but a bullet or a rock,” Mora said. “I saw dogs eat a woman once.”

  “There are no jobs in that town Bankole and I went to,” Harry said. “There was nothing. Not even work for room and board. I asked all over town. No one even knew of anything.”

  I frowned. “The towns around here are all close to the highway,” I said. “They must get a lot of people passing through, looking for a place to settle—or maybe a place to rob, rape, kill. The locals wouldn’t welcome new people. They wouldn’t trust anyone they didn’t know.”

  Harry looked from me to Bankole.

  “She’s right,” Bankole said. “My brother-in-law had a hard time before people began to get used to him, and he moved up here before things got so bad. He knew plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, and motor vehicle mechanics. Of course, it didn’t help that he was black. Being white might help you win people over faster than he did. I think, though, that any serious money we make here will come from the land. Food is gold these days, and we can grow food here. We have guns to protect ourselves, so we can sell our crops in nearby towns or on the highway.”

  “If we survive long enough to grow anything to sell,” Mora muttered. “If there’s enough water, if the bugs don’t eat our crops, if no one burns us out the way they did those people over the hill, if, if, if!”

  Allie sighed. “Shit, it’s if, if, if anywhere you go. This place isn’t so bad.” She was sitting on her sleepsack, holding the sleeping Justin’s head in her lap. As she spoke, she stroked the boy’s hair. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that no matter how tough Allie tried to seem, that little boy was the key to her. Children were the keys to most of the adults present.

  “There are no guarantees anywhere,” I agreed. “But if we’re willing to work, our chances are good here. I’ve got some seed in my pack. We can buy more. What we have to do at this point is more like gardening than farming. Everything will have to be done by hand—composting, watering, weeding, picking worms or slugs or whatever off the crops and killing them one by one if that’s what it takes. As for water, if our well still has water in it now, in October, I don’t think we have to worry about it going dry on us. Not this year, anyway.

  “And if people threaten us or our crop, we kill them. That’s all. We kill them, or they kill us. If we work together, we can defend ourselves, and we can protect the kids. A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children—the ones we have now and the ones we will have.”

  There was silence for a while, people digesting, perhaps measuring it against what they had to look forward to if they left this place and continued north.

  “We should decide,” I said. “We have building and planting to do here. We have to buy more food, more seed and tools.” It was time for directness: “Allie, will you stay?”

  She looked across the dead fire at me, stared hard at me as though she hoped to see something on my face that would give her an answ
er.

  “What seed do you have?” she asked.

  I drew a deep breath. “Most of it is summer stuff—corn, peppers, sunflowers, eggplant, melons, tomatoes, beans, squash. But I have some winter things; peas, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, winter squash, onions, asparagus, herbs, several kinds of greens… We can buy more, and we’ve got the stuff left in this garden plus what we can harvest from the local oak, pine, and citrus trees. I brought tree seeds too: more oak, citrus, peach, pear, nectarine, almond, walnut, a few others. They won’t do us any good for a few years, but they’re a hell of an investment in the future.”

  “So is a kid,” Allie said. “I didn’t think I would be dumb enough to say this, but yeah, I’ll stay. I want to build something, too. I never had a chance to build anything before.”

  Allie and Justin were a yes, then.

  “Harry? Zahra?”

  “Of course we’re staying,” Zahra said.

  Harry frowned. “Wait a minute. We don’t have to.”

  “I know. But we are. If we can make a community like Lauren says and not have to hire out to strangers and trust them when they shouldn’t be trusted, then we should do it. If you grew up where I did, you’d know we should.”

  “Harry,” I said, “I’ve known you all my life. You’re the closest thing to a brother that I have left. You aren’t really thinking about leaving, are you?” It wasn’t the world’s best argument. He had been both cousin and lover to Joanne, and he’d let her go when he could have gone with her.

  “I want something of my own,” he said. “Land, a home, maybe a store or a small farm. Something that’s mine. This land is Bankole’s.”

  “Yes,” Bankole said. “And you’ll be getting the use of it rent free—and all the water you need. What are those things going to cost you farther north—if you can get them at all farther north—if you can get yourself out of California.”

  “But there’s no work here!”

  “There’s nothing but work here, boy. Work, and a lot of cheap land. How cheap do you think land will be up where you and all the rest of the world are heading?”

  Harry thought about that, then spread his hands. “What I’m worried about is spending all our money here, then discovering we can’t make it here.”

  I nodded. “I’ve thought about that, too, and it bothers me. But it’s a possibility anywhere, you know. You could settle in Oregon or Washington, not be able to get a job, and run out of money. Or you could be forced to work under the conditions that Emery and Grayson found. After all, with rivers of people flowing north, looking for work, employers can take their pick, and pay what they feel like paying.”

  Emery put her arm around Tori, who sat drowsing next to her. “You might be able to get a job as a driver,” she said. “They like white men to be drivers. If you can read and write, and if you’d do the work, you might get hired.”

  “I don’t know how to drive, but I could learn,” Harry said. “You mean driving those big armored trucks, don’t you?”

  Emery looked confused. “Trucks? No, I mean driving people. Making them work. Pushing them to work faster. Making them do…whatever the owners says.”

  Harry’s expression had dissolved from hopeful to horrified to outraged. “Jesus God, do you think I’d do that! How could you think I’d do anything like that?”

  Emery shrugged. It startled me that she could be indifferent about such a thing, but she seemed to be. “Some people think it’s a good job,” she said. “Last driver we had, he used to do something with computers. I don’t know what. His company went out of business and he got a job driving us. I think he liked it.”

  “Em,” Harry said. He pitched his voice low and waited until she looked at him. “Are you telling me you believe I’d like a job pushing slaves around and taking away their children?”

  She stared back, searching his face. “I hope not,” she said. And then, “Sometimes jobs like that are the only jobs—slave or slave driver. I heard that just on this side of the Canada border there are a lot of factories with jobs like that.”

  I frowned. “Factories that use slave labor?”

  “Yeah. Workers make things for companies in Canada or Asia. They don’t get paid much, so they get into debt. They get hurt or sick, too. Their drinking water’s not clean and the factories are dangerous—full of poisons and machines that crush or cut you. But people think they can make some cash and then quit. I worked with some women who had gone up there, taken a look, and come back.”

  “And you were going up there?” Harry demanded.

  “Not to work in those places. The women warned me.”

  “I’ve heard of places like that,” Bankole said. “They were supposed to provide jobs for that northward-flowing river of people. President Donner’s all for them. The workers are more throw-aways than slaves. They breathe toxic fumes or drink contaminated water or get caught in unshielded machinery… It doesn’t matter. They’re easy to replace—thousands of jobless for every job.”

  “Borderworks,” Mora said. “Not all of them are that bad. I heard some pay cash wages, not company scrip.”

  “Is that where you want to go?” I asked. “Or do you want to stay here?”

  He looked down at Doe who was still nibbling at a piece of sweet potato. “I want to stay here,” he said, surprising me. “I’m not sure you have a hope in hell of building anything here, but you’re just crazy enough to make it work.” And if it didn’t work, he’d be no worse off than he was when he escaped slavery. He could rob someone and continue his journey north. Or maybe not. I’d been thinking about Mora. He did a lot to keep people away from him—keep them from knowing too much about him, keep them from seeing what he was feeling, or that he was feeling anything—a male sharer, desperate to hide his terrible vulnerability? Sharing would be harder on a man. What would my brothers have been like as sharers? Odd that I hadn’t thought of that before.

  “I’m glad you’re staying,” I said. “We need you.” I looked at Travis and Natividad. “We need you guys, too. You’re staying, aren’t you?”

  “You know we are,” Travis said. “Although I think I agree more than I want to with Mora. I’m not sure we have a prayer of succeeding here.”

  “We’ll have whatever we can shape,” I said. And I turned to face Harry. He and Zahra had been whispering together. Now he looked at me.

  “Mora’s right,” he said. “You’re nuts.”

  I sighed.

  “But this is a crazy time,” he continued. “Maybe you’re what the time needs—or what we need. I’ll stay. I may be sorry for it, but I’ll stay.”

  Now the decision is acknowledged, and we can stop arguing about it. Tomorrow we’ll begin to prepare a winter garden. Next week, several of us will go into town to buy tools, more seed, supplies. Also, it’s time we began to build a shelter. There are trees enough in the area, and we can dig into the ground and into the hills. Mora says he’s built slave cabins before. Says he’s eager to build something better, something fit for human beings. Besides, this far north and this near the coast, we might get some rain.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2027

  Today we had a funeral for Bankole’s dead—the five people who died in the fire. The cops never came. At last Bankole has decided that they aren’t going to come, and that it’s time his sister and her family had a decent burial. We collected all the bones that we could find, and yesterday, Natividad wrapped them in a shawl that she had knitted years ago. It was the most beautiful thing she owned.

  “A thing like that should serve the living,” Bankole said when she offered it.

  “You are living,” Natividad said. “I like you. I wish I could have met your sister.”

  He looked at her for a while. Then he took the shawl and hugged her. Then, beginning to cry, he went off by himself into the trees, out of our sight. I let him alone for an hour or so, then went after him.

  I found him, sitting on a fallen log, wiping his face. I sat with him for some time, saying nothing. A
fter a while, he got up, waited for me to stand, then headed back toward our camp.

  “I would like to give them a grove of oak trees,” I said. “Trees are better than stone—life commemorating life.”

  He glanced back at me. “All right.”

  “Bankole?”

  He stopped, looked at me with an expression I could not read.

  “None of us knew her,” I said. “I wish we had. I wish I had, no matter how much I would have surprised her.”

  He managed a smile. “She would have looked at you, then looked at me, then, right in front of you, I think she would have said, ‘Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.’ Once she got that out of her system, I think she would have gotten to like you.”

  “Do you think she could stand…or forgive company now?”

  “What?”

  I drew a deep breath and wondered about what I meant to say. It could go wrong. He could misunderstand. It still needed to be said.

  “We’ll bury your dead tomorrow. I think you’re right to want to do it. And I think we should bury our dead as well. Most of us have had to walk away—or run—away from our unburned, un-buried dead. Tomorrow, we should remember them all, and lay them to rest if we can.”

  “Your family?”

  I nodded. “Mine, Zahra’s, Harry’s, Allie’s—both her son and her sister—maybe Emery’s sons, maybe others that I don’t know about. Mora doesn’t talk about himself much, but he must have losses. Doe’s mother, perhaps.”

  “How do you want to do it?” he asked.

  “Each of us will have to bury our own dead. We knew them. We can find the words.”

  Words from the Bible, perhaps?

  “Any words, memories, quotations, thoughts, songs… My father had a funeral, even though we never found his body. But my three youngest brothers and my stepmother had nothing. Zahra saw them die, or I wouldn’t have any idea what happened to them.” I thought for a moment. “I have acorns enough for each of us to plant live oak trees to our dead—enough to plant one for Justin’s mother, too. I’m thinking about a very simple ceremony. But everyone should have a chance to speak. Even the two little girls.”