Parable of the Talents

it?'

'Yes. We couldn't stay there. We would have been caught and collared again or killed. So we took what we could carry, and we burned the rest. Why should they be able to steal it and use it? We burned it!'

He drew back from me a little, and I was afraid I was scar­ing him. He's a tough little kid, but he had been through a lot. I felt ashamed of letting my feelings show more than I should have.

Then he came close and whispered, 'Did you kill them?' So I hadn't been scaring him. The look on his thin, battered face was intense and angry and far more full of hate than a child's face should have been.

I just nodded.

'The ones who hurt my mother—did you kill them, too?'

'Yes.'

'Good!'

We got up, and I took him to Allie. I watched them meet, saw Allie's joyous tears, heard her cries. I could hardly stand it, but I watched.

************************************

Then Harry got an idea about where his kids might be. He had gotten a job driving one of the George trucks or riding shotgun—something he had had plenty of experience doing back at Acorn. He was even able to make friends with the clannish George men. He would never be one of them, but they liked him, and once he'd proved himself by spotting and helping to prevent an attempted hijacking, they trusted him. This enabled him to see more of the state than he could have by just wandering on foot. But it also kept him on the job, with the trucks most of the time. He couldn't look for his children himself—couldn't walk through the little towns, looking at the children as they worked or played. Doing that would probably get him into trouble, anyway.

Justin had given us two sad, useful bits of information. First, all the kids' names were changed. Justin had been called Matthew Landis, just another of Deacon Landis's sons. The older kids like Justin would remember their real names and who their parents were, but the younger ones, the babies, my Larkin....

The second bit of information was that sibling groups were always broken up. This seemed an unnecessary bit of sadism, even for the Church of Christian America. Justin didn't know why it was done, hadn't seen it done, but he had heard Deacon Landis mention it to another man. So children who had already lost their homes and their parents or guardians had also had their sisters or brothers and their own names taken from them.

With all that, how will I find Larkin?

How will I ever find my child? I've asked all the day la­borers I know to look for a Black girlchild, dark-skinned, not yet two years old, but probably big for her age, who has suddenly appeared in a household where there had been no pregnancy, in a household that might not be Black, or in a foster home. I've pretended to be a day laborer myself and substituted for two of the cleaning women so that I could look at two children who had been reported to me as possi­ble candidates. Neither was anything like Larkin.

But is Larkin anything like the Larkin I remember any­more? How can she be? Babies grow and change so fast. She was only two months old when they took her. I'm afraid I won't know her now. But I still have the hand and foot prints. I've made copies of them so that I can always carry one. I've even gone to the police—the Humboldt County Sheriff—with my false name and told them a false story of how my daughter had been stolen from me as I walked along the highway. I left them a copy of the hand and foot prints and paid the 'fee for police services' that you have to pay for anything other than an immediate emergency. I don't know whether that was wise or useful, but I did it. I'm doing everything I can think of.

That's why I don't blame Harry for what he's done. I wish like hell he hadn't done it, but I don't blame him. When you're desperate, you do desperate things.

Harry came to see me two days ago.

He'd just returned from a three-day trip up into Oregon and then over to Tahoe and back. The usual thing for him to do after a trip like that should have been to eat something and go to bed. Instead, he came to my room to see me. I was working at a small rickety table I had bought I had sketched a mother and her three children and made the table the price of the sketch. My tiny, closetlike room itself came with a window, a block of wood to wedge it open or bar it shut, a narrow shelfbed, a lot of dirt, and a few bugs. I had bought a pitcher and basin for quick washing, some soap, a chair and table for working, and a jug with the best available water purifier for drinking water. And bug spray.

'Fancy,' Dolores had said when she came to look at it 'Why the hell don't you spring for a decent room? You can afford it'

'When I find my daughter, maybe I'll be able to think about things like that,' I said. 'I don't know what it will