Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,22

could hear her breathing. He had felt the pulse in her neck. He had to get help for her.

Somehow, he did get them both into the truck. This was a long, slow, terrible business. His legs hurt so. He felt so weak. He had grown fast, and been proud of being man-sized and man-strong. Now he felt as weak as a baby, and once he had dragged his parents into the truck, he was too exhausted to climb into one of the driver’s seats and drive. He couldn’t get help for his parents or look for his two lost sisters. He had to, but he couldn’t. He collapsed and lay on the floor, unable to move. His consciousness faded. There was nothing.

It was a familiar sort of story—horrible and ordinary. Almost everyone in Acorn has a horrible, ordinary story to tell.

Today we gave the Noyer children oak seedlings to plant in earth that has been mixed with the ashes of their parents. We do this in memory of our own dead, present and absent. None of the ashes of my family are here, but five years ago when we decided to stay here, I planted trees in their memory. Others have done the same for their dead. Nina and Paula Noyer’s ashes aren’t here of course. Nina and Paula may not even be dead. But they will be remembered here along with their parents. Once Dan understood the ceremony, he asked for trees for Nina and Paula as well as for his parents.

He said, “Some nights I wake up still hearing them screaming, hearing those bastards laughing. Oh, god… They must be dead. But maybe they’re not. I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I were dead. Oh god.”

We’ve phoned our neighbors and friends in nearby towns about Nina and Paula Noyer. We’ve left their names, their descriptions (garnered from what Dan told me), and the offer of a reward in hard currency—Canadian money. I doubt that anything will come of it, but we have to try. It isn’t as though we have an abundance of hard currency to spread around, but because we’re so careful, we do have some. Because of the truck, we’ll soon have more. To tell the truth, I’d try to buy the girls back even if there were no truck. It’s one thing to know that there are children on the roads and in the towns being made to suffer for someone else’s pleasure. It’s another to know that the two sisters of children you know and like are being made to suffer. But there is the truck. All the more reason for us to do what we can for the Noyer children.

We brought Dan to the funeral services on a cot that we used as a stretcher. He can stand and walk. Bankole makes him do a little of that every day. But he’s still not up to standing or sitting for long periods of time. We put him next to the slender young trees that Bankole planted five years ago in memory of his sister and her family, who had lived on this property before us. They were murdered before we arrived. Their bodies were burned with their home. All we found of them were their charred bones and a couple of rings. These are buried beneath the trees just at the spot where Dan lay for the funeral.

The little girls planted their seedlings under our guidance, but not with our help. The work was done by their hands. Perhaps the planting of tiny trees in earth mixed with ashes doesn’t mean much now, but they’ll grow up knowing that their parents’ remains are here, that living trees grow from those remains, and that today this community began to be their home.

We moved Dan’s cot so that he could use the garden trowel and watering can, and we let him plant his own seedlings. He, too, did what he had to do without help. The ritual was already important to him. It was something he could do for his sisters and his parents. It was all he could do for them.

When he had finished, he said the Lord’s Prayer. It was the only formal prayer he knew. The Noyers were nominal Christians—a Catholic mother, an Episcopalian father, and kids who had never seen the inside of a church.

Dan talked his sisters into singing songs in Polish—songs their mother had taught them. They don’t speak Polish, which is a pity. I’m always glad when we