Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,56
electric heaters and by fires in the fireplaces, and it was set far enough back from the coastal bluffs to be in no danger for many years, if ever.
During the first day, I walked out to the bluffs and stood looking at the Pacific Ocean. We can see the ocean every time we travel up the highway to the Eureka-Arcata area and farther north. Up there, it has washed away long stretches of sand dunes and done real damage along the Humboldt and Arcata Bay coastlines. This is all the fault of the steadily rising level of the sea and of occasional, severe storms.
But still, the sea is beautiful. I stood there in the buffeting wind, staring out at the whitecaps and enjoying the sheer vastness of the water. I didn’t hear Bankole come up behind me until he was almost beside me. That says something about how safe I felt. I’m more watchful at home in Acorn.
Bankole put his arm around me, and the wind whipped his beard. He smiled. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “I wonder how people used to living here are going to like living on the vast Siberian plains, even if the plains are warmer than they once were.”
He laughed. “When I was a boy, Siberia was a place where the Russians—the Soviets, we called them then—sent people they thought of as criminals and political troublemakers. If anyone then had said that Americans would be giving up their homes and their citizenship and going to make new lives in Siberia, the rest of us would have looked around for a straitjacket for him.”
“I suspect it’s a human characteristic not to know when you’re well off,” I said.
He glanced at me sidewise. “Oh, it is,” he said. “I see it every day.”
I laughed, wrapped an arm around him, and we went back to the Cannon house to a meal of broiled fish, boiled potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and baked apples. The Cannon house sits on a large lot, and, like Bankole and I, the Cannons raise much of their own food. What they can’t raise, they buy from local farmers or fishermen. They’re also part of a cooperative that evaporates salt for their own use and for sale. But unlike us, they use few wild foods or seasonings—no acorns, cactus fruit, mint, manzanita, not even pine nuts. Surely there will be new foods in Siberia. Would they learn to eat them or would they cling to whatever they could grow or buy of their bland familiar foods?
“Sometimes I can’t stand the thought of leaving this house,” Thea Cannon said as we sat eating. “But there’ll be more opportunity for the children when we leave. What is there for them here?”
I’m not so pregnant that most people notice, and I do wear loose clothing now. But I did think that Thea Cannon, who has seven kids of her own, would have noticed. Maybe she’s just too wrapped up in her own worries. She’s a plump, pretty, tired-looking blond woman in her forties, and she always seems a little distracted—as though she has a lot on her mind.
That night, I lay awake beside Bankole, listening to the sounds of the sea and the wind. They’re good sounds as long as you don’t have to be outside. Back at Acorn, being on watch during rough weather is no joke.
“The mayor tells me the town is willing to hire you to replace one of their teachers,” Bankole said, his mouth near my ear and his hand on my stomach where he likes to rest it. “They’ve got one teacher who’s in her late fifties and one who’s 79. The older one has been wanting to retire for years. When I told them that you had pretty much set up the school at Acorn and that you taught there, they almost cheered.”
“Did you tell them that all I’ve got is a high school education, a lot of reading, and the courses I audited on my father’s computer?”
“I told them. They don’t care. If you can help their kids learn enough to pass the high school equivalency tests, they’ll figure you’ve earned your pay. And by the way, they can’t actually pay you much in hard currency, but they’re willing to let you go on living in the house and raising food in the garden even after I’m dead.”
I moved against him, but managed not to say anything. I hate to hear him always talking about dying.