The One We Feed (26 page)

Chapter
19

The
Sword-Maker

I wanted to give them their
peace, so I avoided eavesdropping on Ananda and Devlin, no matter how curious I
was. Jinx divided his time between shouting at Skype calls and computer programs;
hackers were all nocturnal, it seemed. Arthur sat quietly in his corner reading
a book about string theory, occasionally frowning or blinking over the edge of
it at me.

“You seem
bored,” he remarked when I refused to stop staring. “Yes?”

“I know I
should be spending time in Reesa’s head, trying to figure out what I’m meant to
know about her or do with her.”

“It is good
that you know this.” He turned a page.

“But when I do
look into her memories, I feel….” I sighed heavily and pulled my hair back behind
my ears.

“Furious?”  

I sat up and
eyed him. “Exactly.”

He put his
bookmark in place and set the book down, turning his full attention to me in a
single intense glance. He had the kind of mouth that always looked as if it was
about to smile, but I was sure that at that moment he was really giving it
serious thought.

“Should I feel
that?” I asked finally. “I mean, you’re like, the philosopher and moral
so-and-so. What do you think? Is anger an okay emotion?”

The smile
appeared as if it had always been there. “There is no point in debating what
you should feel. Who has given you the expectation? No one can tell you what is
appropriate, because no matter how similar, no one can provide a comparison.”

“Right.” I
checked Jinx’s earphones. Still in place, “but aren’t you the one always saying
that we should accept everything?”

“Did I ever
say that acceptance was the end?”

I thought
about that for a bit, leafing through mental documents of Buddhist lore. “Well,
you did say that it was the means of enlightenment.”

He shifted in
his chair and leaned toward me. It was silly, but I inched toward him on the
bed like a little girl, keen to hear whatever he had to say.

“Suffering
exists, everywhere, and with varying values of horrific consequences and
perpetuation. I lived in dark times. Motivation was all that mattered. My
efforts were the only way to pull people out of misery long enough to question
how their brain interpreted their circumstances negatively. Once they realized
that their suffering was a function of their natural state, they were able to
change their natural state. That was the beginning, but the process must
continue.”

“Okay,” I
whispered, a bit shocked to hear him own his revolution. He very seldom did
that. It was more than a bit humbling. “But what is next?”

“Acceptance
does not mean docility. It does not mean complacency.” He receded into his
shadowed corner and left me on the edge of my seat. “It means a foundation, a
bedrock. From that position, one can see clearly enough to discern what must be
done to negate a
need
for acceptance.”

“So I should
accept that her story makes me angry, that her story is one of misery and pain
that could have been avoided, prevented. I should accept that I want to tear
Mara’s heart out and shove it up his….”

“And once you
have, you may see past your feelings, determine what it is that makes you
angry, and how to change it forevermore, so that no one need ever accept such
things again.”

“Grace,” I
murmured.

Arthur watched
me as I positioned myself comfortably on the bed in preparation for a psychic
sojourn.

“What if the
problem is so systemic,” I wondered aloud, for the first time giving voice to
the glowing red eyes, “that the only solution is something sweeping, something
that changes everything, like when democracy was invented and all those
revolutions began?”

“Then so be
it,” he replied, and, though he betrayed no emotion, something in me felt a
chill.

I turned my
head and found his eyes. “You’re fine with that?”

Was he
smiling? I couldn’t tell.

“I can accept
anything.”

“Cryptic.”

I sank into
the
jhana
with that peculiar smile in my mind’s eye and lay myself over
Reesa’s mind, withdrawn though it was. She could choose to disregard what she
was feeling, retreat from reality; but the neurons were still firing, and as
long as they were I could invade her memory. I told myself it was to soothe
her, but really I was just another trespasser. There were, however, times when
you had to be cruel to be kind.

She was
remembering an older woman close to death. Tiny and sunken against the
billowing white of hospital sheets, the elderly patient was wracked by
occasional shivers of pain. With a start, I realized it was her Gran, almost
unrecognizable in her flannel shroud.

Reesa was
curled into a ball on the bed, her head resting on a pillow near the woman’s
stomach. She was watching the old woman breathe, careful to mark each tortured
intake and each grateful release as if they were the most important things she
had ever seen.

The memory was
sharp, scraping through my mind and demanding I pay attention to the sorrow
that gave it its edge. This
was
a pivotal moment, a turning point for
her character, and in the darkest times, she could not help but recall it. It
could have been a Crossroads, if indeed her people were born in such a way.

Suddenly the
woman’s thin eyelids fluttered open. For a moment, the expression in them was
dazed and uncertain, until they found Reesa and smiled. The calloused hand
moved and patted Reesa’s tightly woven corn-rows.

“You s’posed
to be sittin’ there, child?” she said in a broken whisper.

I felt Reesa
shrug. She may have been small, but she knew what was heavier than the weight
of rules. The girl chose her words carefully. “Gran, you scared?”

There had been
no mention of death, no repetition of a serious diagnosis, but Reesa knew, and
her wise Gran could not keep it from her. I saw the weathered face give in and
watched her eyes perform a slow, watery blink. “What I gotta be scared of, hmm?”

“Dyin’,” Reesa
murmured. “Momma says you goin’ to heaven. Are you?”

“I don’t know,
child. Ain’t for me to say.” The heavy hand patted again.

“But what if
there’s no place like heaven?” Reesa sat up, perfectly content to confront the
issues no one dared contradict when they had forever. “What if Jesus was just a
man that people made up things about? People make up things about me all the
time! What if...what if there’s nothin’ after this?”

I thought the
older woman would be upset. She still had a crucifix around her neck, a
well-loved Bible at her bedside, but to my surprise she just gave a soft
chuckle that made me feel utterly composed. “Well then, child, nothin’ I say or
think is gonna matter, is it? In that case, I might as well just keep on
believin’.”

Reesa’s
well-muscled brow wrinkled in consternation. “How can you say that? You’re
gonna believe a lie, just cause it makes you feel better?”

“If nothin’ I
say or think matters, then fear is my only enemy.” She sighed and nodded with
surprising resolve. “We choose our battles, child, and our weapons.”

“Theresa, get
down from there now!” another female voice cut in. I knew at once that it was
Reesa’s mother’s. I could see the concern in the woman’s eyes when she, too,
saw the matron who had raised her looking tiny and pressed flat. I couldn’t
read her thoughts, but I didn’t have to. They were there in Reesa’s head in
remembrances of frustration and discord. Little eyes had seen a great deal:
bills piling up, her mother’s longer absences, the stretches of time alone in
her own thoughts.

The woman in
the bed, Reesa’s great-grandmother, was the glue that held everything together,
and in a few precious hours, she would be gone forever.

“Oh, let her
stay, Esther,” the old woman whispered. “She ain’t hurtin’ nothin’ and I don’t
mind.”

Reesa’s mother
said nothing. I saw then that she didn’t know how to speak to this woman. Evidently,
her own mother had passed away from something when she’d been a child, and she’d
been raised by Gran; but Gran was a generation apart, a woman whose mind she
thought was failing.

Reesa’s heart
ached with resentment for her mother, because she was certain her
great-grandmother’s mind wasn’t failing, that her mother just didn’t understand
anything that had been communicated. To Reesa, the lessons were obvious and
deep; she hated her mother the way I had hated Eva. She blamed Esther for this
moment, for what to her mind was the undignified demise of a hero.

As the memory
faded, with Reesa’s anger flickering in the foreground, I realized how young
she had been. Eight. Still lacking the words to give her emotions form but able
to feel them none the less.

It was so
tempting to think of children as unfinished, as lacking; but really their eyes
saw more than ours because they didn’t know yet what was impossible, what to
ignore, what things made life just that much easier. It was one reason I never
entertained the thought of having children. I wasn’t sure I could handle eyes
like those staring me down, demanding answers, picking lies from truth with
brutal efficiency.

Impressed and
saddened, I let her guide me backward, through her physical suffering and into
her even more distant past. We landed in a scene she could barely recall. She
must have been about four, her eyes filled with the image of brightly colored Legos
stacked and restacked by her unpracticed fingers. But as frustrated words rang
out, I realized it was not the images that were important.

“Gran, how can
you say that?” Reesa’s mother was demanding. “After all you did? You marched
with Dr. King! How can you say it?”

Reesa glanced
up. Her mother was seated at an old dining room table, a backpack on the floor
beside her and an open book in one hand. Gran was standing at the stove,
pulling sprigs of rosemary from a larger branch.

“I earned the
right to say it, that’s how.”

“But Gran!”

“No!” she
interrupted, one dark finger raised at her granddaughter’s fury.

It was the
beginning of her end, I could tell. It was in how she stood, the tiny veil of
pain in her gaze that divided her soul from the outside world.

She shook her
neatly curled head with that same stern decisiveness. “You don’ know nothin’
about it! You go to a good school, you have a beautiful daughter. You walk into
a room and sit where you like, do what you like, marry who you like. You have a
voice!”

“But prejudice
and racism still exist, Gran!”

The older
woman turned away and took a steadying breath. “I know they do,” she said
quietly.

“Then how can
you stand there and tell me that it’s time to move on and….”

Gran planted
her hands on the edges of the stove and set her shoulders. Reesa froze, every
tiny movement stilled. This was how Gran looked just before she got upset, and
even Reesa knew not to make a sound.

“I didn’t say
to move on. Everybody got their problems,” she said so quietly that Reesa
almost couldn’t hear her. “Was a time when women couldn’t vote. Was a time when
a black man had to ask permission to sing. Was a time when thousands of Indians
got their homes stolen. A time when Jews were cast out. Every race, creed,
gender, and culture had the force of ignorance leveled against ’em.”

“Exactly!” her
granddaughter shouted, throwing her hands in the air. “Our struggle is still….”

“And today we
got people tryin’ to tell others who they can love, what god they have to
believe in, what country they gotta fight for. While you go to your good school
and raise your pretty girl, people die every day. They die, Esther. They die!”

Taken aback by
the strange tension in her grandmother’s face, Esther fell silent.

“If a white
man tells you you can’t have a job because you’re black, what do you do?”

“Well….”
Esther turned and glanced out the window. “I could report him to the NAACP,
file a discrimination lawsuit, or….”

“Exactly! You
got laws to protect you now. They ain’t perfect, but you got ’em. You got
rights and the best part is, you
know
you got ’em! Anytime a white
person looks down on you, all you got to do is work a little harder. It ain’t
right, but it also don’ hurt you. It don’ make you a worse person, it makes you
a better person! So while you sittin’ here, bein’ a better person every day,
people elsewhere ain’t able to marry, ain’t able to worship, ain’t even able to
live. Their struggle is greater.

“Slowly the fools
will die out and take their stupidity with ’em. The harder we work, the less
their ideas make sense. The less their ideas make sense, the fewer children
pick ’em up. We already won our tiny battle. But there’s a bigger war goin’ on,
and we’re obliged to help. You can’t focus so small, Esther, not if you mean to
really end this fight. You can’t pick what opinions you agree with, or what
people you like. You gotta fight for everyone, for every single person that
disagrees with you, that hates you, that fights against you. A fight for civil
rights is not a fight where you get to pick your allies. Your ally is the
world.”