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.
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
