'It's not worth anyone's life!'
'It didn't cost any of our lives!' I sat up and looked down at him. I needed to have him see me as well as he could in the dim light from the window. I wanted to have him know that I meant what I was saying. 'If I had to die,' I said, 'if I had to get shot by strangers, shouldn't it be while I was trying to help the community, and not just while I was trying to run away?'
He raised his hands and gave me an ironic round of applause. 'I knew you would say something like that, Well, I never thought you were stupid. Obsessed, perhaps, but not stupid. That being the case, I have a proposition for you.'
He sat up and I moved close to him and pulled the blankets up around us. I leaned against him and sat, waiting. Whatever he had to say, I felt that I'd gotten my point across. If he wanted to call my thinking obsessive, I didn't care.
“I’ve been looking at some of the towns in the area,' he said. 'Saylorville, Halstead, Coy—towns that are a few miles off the highway. None of them need a doctor now, but one probably will someday soon. How would you feel about living in one of those towns?'
I sat still, surprised. He meant it. Saylorville? Halstead? Coy? These are communities so small that I'm not sure they qualify as towns. Each has no more than a few families and businesses huddled together between the highway—U.S. 101—and the sea. We trade at their street markets, but they're closed societies, these towns. They tolerate 'foreign' visitors, but they don't like us. They've been burned too many times by strangers passing through—people who turned out to be thieves or worse. They trust only their own and long-established neighboring farmers. Did Bankole think that they would welcome us? Except for a larger town called Prata, the nearest towns are almost all White. Prata is White and Latino with a sprinkling of Asians. We're you name it: Black, White, Latino, Asian, and any mixture at all—the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a city. The kids we've adopted and the ones who have been born to us think of all the mixing and matching as normal. Imagine that.
Bankole and I both Black, have managed to mix things up agewise. He's always being mistaken for my father. When he corrects people, they wink at him or frown or grin. Here in Acorn, if people don't understand us, at least they accept us.
'I'm content here,' I said. 'The land is yours. The community is ours. With our work, and with Earthseed to guide us, we're building something good here. It will grow and spread. We'll see that it does. But for now, nothing in any of those towns is ours.'
'It can be,' he said. 'You don't realize how valuable a physician is to an isolated community.'
'Oh, don't I? I know how valuable you are to us.'
He turned his head toward me. 'More valuable than a truck?'
'Idiot,' I said. 'You want to hear praise? Fine. Consider yourself praised. You know how many of our lives you've saved—including mine.'
He seemed to think about that for a moment. 'This is a healthy young group of people,' he said. 'Except for the Dovetree woman, even your most recent adoptees are healthy people who've been injured, not sick people. We have no old people.' He grinned. 'Except me. No chronic problems except for Katrina Dovetree's heart. Not even a problem pregnancy or a child with worms. Almost any town in the area needs a doctor more than Acorn does.'
'They need any doctor. We need you. Besides, they have what they need.'
'As I've said, they won't always.'
'I don't care.' I moved against him. 'You belong here. Don't even think about going away.'
“Thinking is all I can do about it right now. I'm thinking about a safe place for us, a safe place for you when I'm dead.'
I winced.
'I'm an old man, girl. I don't kid myself about that.'
'Bankole—'
'I have to think about it. I want you to think about it too. Do that for me. Just think about it.'
Chapter 3
? ? ?
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
God is Change,
