Seed to Harvest

by Octavia E. Butler

  Doro’s woman Susan had her child a month after Iye bore Stephen’s child. Both were boys, sturdy and healthy, promising to grow into handsome children. Iye accepted her son with love and gratitude that amazed Anyanwu. Anyanwu had delivered the child and all Iye could think of through her pain was that Stephen’s child must live and be well. It had not been an easy birth, but the woman clearly did not care. The child was all right.

  But Iye could not feed it. She had no milk. Anyanwu produced milk easily and during the day visited Iye’s cabin regularly to nurse the child. At night, she kept the child with her.

  “I’m glad you could do this,” Iye told her. “I think it would be too hard for me to share him with anyone else.” Anyanwu’s prejudices against the woman were fast dissolving.

  As were her prejudices against Doro—though this frightened and disturbed her. She could not look at him now with the loathing she had once felt, yet he continued to do loathsome things. He simply no longer did them to her. As she had predicted, she was at war with herself. But she showed him no signs of that war. For the time he wore the beautiful little body that had been his gift to her, it pleased her to please him. For that short time, she could refuse to think about what he did when he left her. She could treat him as the very special lover he appeared to be.

  “What are you going to do now?” Doro asked her when he came home from a short trip to find her nursing the baby. “Push me away?”

  They were alone in her upstairs sitting room so she gave him a look of mock annoyance. “Shall I do that? Yes, I think so. Go away.”

  He smiled, not believing her any more than she wished to be believed. He watched the nursing child.

  “You will be father to one like this in seven months more,” she said.

  “You’re pregnant now?”

  “Yes. I wanted a child by this body of yours. I was afraid you would be getting rid of it soon.”

  “I will be,” he admitted. “I’ll have to. But eventually you’ll have two children to nurse. Won’t that be hard on you?”

  “I can do it. Do you think I can’t?”

  “No.” He smiled again. “If only I had more like you and Iye. That Susan …”

  “I’ve found a home for her child,” Anyanwu said. “It won’t be fostered with the older ones, but it will have loving parents. And Susan is big and strong. She’s a fine field hand.”

  “I didn’t bring her here to be a field hand. I thought living with your people might help her—calm her and make her a little more useful.”

  “It has.” She reached over and took his hand. “Here, if people fit in, I let them do whatever work they prefer. That helps to calm them. Susan prefers field work to anything indoors. She is willing to have as many more children as you want, but caring for them is beyond her. She seems especially sensitive to their thoughts. Their thoughts hurt her somehow. She is a good woman otherwise, Doro.”

  Doro shook his head as though dismissing Susan from his thoughts. He stared at the nursing child for a few seconds more, then met Anyanwu’s eyes. “Give me some of the milk,” he said softly.

  She drew back in surprise. He had never asked such a thing, and this was certainly not the first child he had seen her nursing. But there were many new things between them now. “I had a man who used to do that,” she said.

  “Did you mind?”

  “No.”

  He looked at her, waiting.

  “Come here,” she said softly.

  The day after Anyanwu gave him milk, Doro awoke trembling, and he knew the comfortable time in the compact little body he had taken as a gift to her was over. It had not been a particularly powerful body. It had little of the inborn strangeness he valued. Anyanwu’s child by it might be beautiful, but chances were, it would be very ordinary.

  Now the body was used up. If he held onto it for much longer, he would become dangerous to those around him. Some simple excitement or pain that he would hardly notice normally might force transmigration. Someone whose life was important to him might die.

  He looked over at Anyanwu, still asleep beside him and sighed. What had she said that night months before? That nothing had really changed. They had finally accepted each other. They would keep each other from loneliness now. But beyond that, she was right. Nothing had changed. She would not want him near her for a while after he had changed. She would still refuse to understand that whether he killed out of need, accident, or choice, he had to kill. There was no way for him to avoid it. An ordinary human might be able to starve himself to death, but Doro could not. Better, then, to make a controlled kill than to just let himself go until he did not know who he would take. How many lifetimes would pass before Anyanwu understood that?

  She awoke beside him. “Are you getting up?” she asked.

  “Yes. But there is no reason for you to. It’s not even dawn.”

  “Are you going away? You’ve just come back.”

  He kissed her. “Perhaps I’ll come back again in a few days.” To see how she reacted. To be certain that nothing had changed—or perhaps in the hope that they were both wrong, that she had grown a little.

  “Stay a little longer,” she whispered.

  She knew.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  She was silent for a moment, then she sighed. “You were asleep when I fed the child,” she said. “But there is still milk for you if you want it.”

  At once, he lowered his head to her breast. Probably, there would not be any more of this either. Not for a long while. Her milk was rich and good and as sweet as this time with her had been. Now, for a while, they would begin the old tug of war again. She stroked his head and he sighed.

  Afterward, he went out and took Susan. She was the kind of kill he needed now—very sensitive. As sweet and good to his mind as Anyanwu’s milk had been to his former body.

  He woke Frank and together they hauled his former body to the old slave graveyard. He did not want one of Anyanwu’s people to find it and go running to Anyanwu. She would know what had happened without that. If it were possible, he wanted to make this time easy for her.

  By the time he and Frank left, a hoe gang of field hands was trooping out toward the cotton fields.

  “Are you going to be wearing that body long?” Frank asked him, looking at Susan’s tall, stocky profile.

  “No, I’ve already got what I need from it,” Doro said. “It’s a good body through. It could last a year, maybe two.”

  “But it wouldn’t do Anyanwu much good.”

  “It might if it were anyone but Susan. Anyanwu’s had wives, after all. But she knew Susan, liked her. Except in emergencies, I don’t ask people to overcome feelings like that.”

  “You and Anyanwu,” Frank muttered. “Changing sex, changing color, breeding like—”

  “Shut your mouth,” Doro said in annoyance, “or I’ll tell you a few things you don’t want to hear about your own family.”

  Startled, Frank fell silent. He was sensitive about his ancestry, his old Virginia family. For some foolish reason, it was important to him. Doro caught himself as he was about to destroy completely any illusions the man still had about his blue blood—or for that matter, his pure white skin. But there was no reason for Doro to do such a thing. No reason except that one of the best times he could remember was ending and he was not certain what would come next.

  Two weeks later, when he went back to Anyanwu, home to Anyanwu, he was alone. He had sent Frank home to his family and put on the more convenient body of a lean, brown-haired white man. It was a good, strong body, but Doro knew better than to expect Anyanwu to appreciate it.

  She said nothing when she saw him. She did not accuse him or curse him—did not seem hostile to him at all. On the other hand, she was hardly welcoming.

  “You did take Susan, didn’t you?” was all she said. When he said yes, she turned and walked away. He thought that if she had not been pregnant, she would have gone to sea and left him to deal with her not-quite-respectful childr
en. She knew he would not harm them now.

  Pregnancy kept her in human form, however. She was carrying a human child. She would almost certainly kill it by taking a nonhuman form. She had told him that during one of her early pregnancies by Isaac, and he had counted it a weakness. He had no doubt that she could abort any pregnancy without help or danger to herself. She could do anything with that body of hers that she wished. But she would not abort. Once a child was inside her, it would be born. During all the years he had known her, she had been as careful with her children before they were born as afterward. Doro decided to stay with her during this period of weakness. Once she accepted his two most recent changes, he did not think he would have trouble with her again.

  It took him many long, uncommunicative days to find out how wrong he was. Finally, it was Anyanwu’s young daughter Helen who made him understand. The girl sometimes seemed very much younger than her twelve years. She played with other children and fought with them and cried over trivial hurts. At other times, she was a woman wearing the body of a child. And she was very much her mother’s daughter.

  “She won’t talk to me,” the child told Doro. “She knows I know what she’s going to do.” She had come to sit beside him in the cool shade of a giant oak tree. For a time, they had watched in silence as Anyanwu weeded her herb garden. This garden was off limits to other gardeners and to helpful children, both of whom considered a great many of Anyanwu’s plants nothing but weeds themselves. Now, though, Doro looked away from the garden and at Helen.

  “What do you mean?” he asked her. “What is she going to do?”

  She looked up at him, and he had no doubt that a woman looked out of those eyes. “She says Kane and Leah are going to come and live here. She says after the baby comes, she’s going away.”

  “To sea?”

  “No, Doro. Not to sea. Someday, she would have to come out of the sea. Then you would find her again, and she would have to watch you kill her friends, kill your own friends.”

  “What are you talking about?” He caught her by the arms, barely stopped himself from shaking her.

  She glared at him, furious, clearly loathing him. Suddenly she lowered her head and bit his hand as hard as she could with her sharp little teeth.

  Pain made Doro release her. She could not know how dangerous it was for her to cause him sudden unexpected pain. Had she done it just before he killed Susan, he would have taken her helplessly. But now, having fed recently, he had more control. He held his bloody hand and watched her run away.

  Then, slowly, he got up and went over to Anyanwu. She had dug up several purple-stemmed, yellow-rooted weeds. He expected her to throw them away, but instead she cut the plants from their root-stocks, brushed the dirt from the stocks, and put the stocks in her gathering basket.

  “What are those things?” he asked.

  “A medicine,” she said, “or a poison if people don’t know what to do with it.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Powder it, mix it with some other things, steep it in boiling water and give it to children who have worms.”

  Doro shook his head. “I’d think you could help them more easily by making the medicine within your own body.”

  “This will work just as well. I’m going to teach some of the women to make it.”

  “Why?”

  “So that they can heal themselves and their families without depending on what they see as my magic.”

  He reached down and tipped her head up so that she faced him. “And why shouldn’t they depend on your magic? Your medicines are more efficient than any ground weed.”

  She shrugged. “They should learn to help themselves.”

  He picked up her basket and drew her to her feet. “Come into the house and talk with me.”

  “There is nothing to say.”

  “Come in anyway. Humor me.” He put his arm around her and walked her back to the house.

  He started to take her into the library, but a group of the younger children were being taught to read there. They sat scattered in a half circle on the rug looking up at one of Anyanwu’s daughters. As Doro guided Anyanwu away from them, he could hear the voice of one of his sons by Susan reading a verse from the Bible: “Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.”

  Doro glanced back. “That sounds as though it would be an unpopular scripture in this part of the country,” he said.

  “I see to it that they learn some of the less popular ones,” Anyanwu answered. “There is another: Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.’ They live in a world that does not want them to hear such things.”

  “You’re raising them as Christians, then?”

  She shrugged. “Most of their parents are Christian. They want their children to read so they can read the Bible. Besides”—she glanced at him, the corners of her mouth turned down—“besides, this is a Christian country.”

  He ignored her sarcasm, took her into the back parlor. “Christians consider it a great sin to take one’s own life,” he said.

  “They consider it a sin to take any life, yet they kill and kill.”

  “Anyanwu, why have you decided to die?” He would not have thought he could say the words so calmly. What would she think? That he did not care? Could she think that?

  “It’s the only way I can leave you,” she said simply.

  He digested that for a moment. “I thought staying with you now would help you get used to … to the things I have to do,” he said.

  “Do you think I’m not used to them?”

  “You haven’t accepted them. Why else should you want to die?”

  “Because of what we have already said. Everything is temporary but you and me. You are all I have, perhaps all I would ever have.” She shook her head slowly. “And you are an obscenity.”

  He frowned, staring at her. She had not said such things since their night together in the library. She had never said them this way, matter-of-factly, as though she were saying “You are tall.” He found that he could not even manufacture anger against her.

  “Shall I go away?” he asked.

  “No. Stay with me. I need you here.”

  “Even though I’m an obscenity.”

  “Even so.”

  She was as she had been after Luisa’s death—uncharacteristically passive, ready to die. Then it was loneliness and grief pressing on her, weighing her down then. Now … what was it now, really?

  “Is it Susan?” he asked. “I didn’t think you had gotten that close to her.”

  “I hadn’t. But you had. She gave you three children.”

  “But …”

  “You did not need her life.”

  “There was no other way she could be of use to me. She had had enough children, and she could not care for them. What did you expect me to do with her?”

  Anyanwu got up and walked out of the room.

  Later, he tried to talk to her again. She would not listen. She would not argue with him or curse him. When he offered again to go, she asked him to stay. When he came to her room at night, she was strangely, quietly welcoming. And she was still planning to die. There was an obscenity. An immortal, a woman who could live through the millennia with him, yet she was intent on suicide—and he was not even certain why.

  He became more desperate as her pregnancy advanced, because he could not reach her, he could not touch her. She admitted she needed him, said she loved him, but some part of her was closed away from him and nothing he said could reach it.

  Finally, he did go away for a few weeks. He did not like what she was doing to him. He could not remember a time when his thoughts had been so confused, when he had wanted so badly, so painfully, something he could not have. He had done what Anyanwu had apparently had done. He had allowed her to touch him as though he were an ordinary man. He had allowed her to awaken feelings in him t
hat had been dormant for several times as long as even she had been alive. He had all but stripped himself before her. It amazed him that he could do such a thing—or that she could see him do it, and not care. She, of all people!

  He went down to Baton Rouge to a woman he had once known. She was married now, but, as it happened, her husband was in Boston and she welcomed Doro. He stayed with her for a few days, always on the verge of telling her about Anyanwu, but never quite getting around to it.

  He took a new body—that of a free black who owned several slaves and treated them brutally. Afterward, he wondered why he had killed the man. It was no concern of his how a slaveholder treated his chattels.

  He shed the slaveholder body and took that of another free black—one who could have been a lighter-skinned brother to the one Anyanwu had liked, compact, handsome, red-brown. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too like the other one without being the other one. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too unlike the other one. Who knew which way her mind would turn. But perhaps she would accept it and talk to him and close the distance between them before she shut herself off like used machinery.

  He went home to her.

  Her belly got in the way when he hugged her in greeting. On any other occasion, he would have laughed and stroked it, thinking of his child inside. Now, he only looked at it, realized that she could give birth any time. How stupid he had been to go away and leave her, to give up any part of what might be their last days together.

  She took his hand and led him into the house while her son Julien took his horse. Julien gave Doro a long, frightened, pleading look that Doro did not acknowledge. Clearly, the man knew.