fibers into mats, baskets, and bags.
Four years ago, after Bankole delivered Gray's first son, Gray paid Allie to build a fine rocking chair for 'the doctor.' Gray and Bankole hadn't gotten along very well at first—Gray's fault, and he knew it. He pretended to be contemptuous of Bankole—'a pussy-whipped old man!'— when, in fact, Bankole's age, education, and personal dignity intimidated him. Until Gray's wife had become pregnant with their first son, the two men barely spoke. Then Bankole took care of Emery during her pregnancy and during Joseph's difficult birth—he was breech. After that, the handsome, oaken chair, given in stolid silence, had served as Gray's peace offering. Now Bankole sits in it rocking, looking into his daughter's sleeping face, touching it as though he can't quite believe it's real, and yet, as though it's more real, more important than anything else in his world.
He seems to have taken his cue from Adela Ortiz. He says Larkin looks just like his younger sister did when she was a baby. That's the sister whose bones we found when we arrived here. Her bones, her husband's, her children's. After their deaths, Bankole must have felt cut off from the future, from any immortality of the flesh, the genes. He had no other relatives. Now he has a daughter. I'm not sure he even realizes how much of the time over the past couple of days that he's been smiling.
sunday, july 24, 2033
Today we Welcomed Larkin into the community—into Acorn and into Earthseed.
So far, I've been the one to Welcome each new child or adult adoptee. I don't conduct every Sunday Gathering, but I have Welcomed every newcomer. By now, it's expected— something I'm
It makes us more truly a community, somehow, now that so many of us have had children here ... now that I've had a child here.
saturday, july 30, 2033
'I don't think you can truly understand how I feel,' Bankole said to me last night as he sat down to eat the dinner I had kept warm for him. He had been on evening watch, sitting with binoculars at a mountain overlook where he could see whether some new gang of thugs was approaching to destroy his family. He's more serious than ever about maintaining our 24-hour watch, but for each of us, standing watch is still a tiresome duty. I didn't expect him to come home in a good mood, but he was still on enough of a new-daddy high not to be too bad-tempered.
'You just wait until Larkin starts waking him up more,' Zahra has warned me.
No doubt she's right
Bankole sat down at the table and sighed. 'Before I met you,' he said, 'there were times when I felt as though I were already dead.' He looked at me, then at Larkin's crib where she slept, full of milk and, so far, dry. 'I think you've saved me,' he said. 'I wish you'd let me save you.'
That again. The people of Halstead had found themselves another doctor, but they didn't like him. There was some doubt as to whether he really was a doctor. Bankole thought he might have some medical training, but that he was something less than or other than an M.D. He was only about 35, and these days, almost all young physicians—those under 50—were working in privatized or foreign-owned cities, towns, or huge farms. There, they could earn enough to give their families good lives and the company police would keep them safe from marauding thugs or desperate poor people. There had to be something wrong with a 35-year-old doctor who was still looking for a place to hang out his shingle.
Bankole said he thought a sick or injured person would be safer in the hands of Natividad or Michael than with Hal-stead's new 'Doctor' Babcock. He had warned several of his Halstead friends, and they had let him know that he was still welcome. They didn't doubt his medical knowledge, and they preferred to have him. And he still wanted to save me by taking me to live among them.
