Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,119

us and about Acorn that were nothing but lies. Then I didn’t know what to believe.”

“Do you know where they sent Larkin—or any of the others?”

He shook his head again. “They made me go with some people who had a girl and a boy of their own. I was almost the first one to go. I didn’t get to see who got the other kids. I guess they went with other families. The people who got me, the man was a deacon. He said it was his duty to take me. I guess it was his duty to beat me up, too!”

“Did he do this to your face?”

Justin nodded. “He did and his son—Carl. Carl said my mother was a devil worshiper and a witch. He was always saying that. He’s 12, and he thinks he knows everything. Then a few days ago, he said she was a…a whore. And I hit him. We got into a big fight and his father came out and called me an ungrateful little devil-worshiping bastard. Then they both beat the hell out of me. They locked up me in my room and I went out the window. Then I didn’t know where to go, so I just went south, out of town, down toward Acorn. The deacon had said it wasn’t there anymore, but I had to see for myself. Then a woman saw me on the road and she brought me here. She gave me some food and put some medicine on my face. She had a lot of kids, but she let me stay with her for a couple of days. I guess she would have let me live there. But I wanted to go home.”

I listened to all this, then sighed. “Acorn really is gone,” I said. “When we finally broke free, we burned what was left of it.”

“You burned 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