Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,120

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 cost me to find her, then maybe buy her. I don’t know what I might have to do.” And maybe, I did not say, maybe I’ll have to kidnap her and run. Maybe I’ll have to pay the Georges for a fast trip across one or two state lines. Maybe anything. I couldn’t waste money.

“Yeah,” she said. “I haven’t heard anything more, but my people are listening.”

They’re still listening. So are the freelancers to whom I had paid a little and promised a lot—people like Cougar, I’m sorry to say—except that they deal in even younger children. I feel filthy every time I have to talk to one of them. If anyone deserves to be collared and put to work, they do, and yet there hasn’t been any particular Christian American crackdown on them.

Apparently we represent the greater danger to Jarret’s America. What was done to us was illegal, by the way. We’ve learned that much. No new laws have been made to okay any of it. But, as Day Turner said long ago, a lot of people are convinced that cracking down on the poor and the different is a good idea. There are now a number of legal cases—Hindus, Jews, Moslems, and others who have managed to avoid being caught when Crusaders came for them. But even among these people, young children who are taken away are not often returned. Charge after charge of neglect and abuse is made against the parents or guardians. In fact, the parents or guardians might wind up collared legally for the horrible things they were supposed to have done to their children. Sometimes brainwashed or terrorized children are produced to give testimony against biological parents they haven’t seen for months or years. I wasn’t sure what to make of that last. Justin had not turned against Allie,