Most Revolutionary - Chapter Six
When The Border Crossed The Family Of Sabia Perez
Previously: Sabia confronts Secret Service Director William Kingsley and fends off investigations of her role in the bombing of Ground Force One and the fate of the President. Billy “The Moto Kid" Yonkin records and uploads to his online channel, sending it viral, the frantic state rescue and recovery efforts at the Perez farmhouse and bomb site. Billy survives security agent gunfire. President Silver, Lin, and Roca attempt to acclimatize to the trap of the bunker. Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez struggles to know and control the new post-coup situation while attempting to maintain and regain her health.
MOST REVOLUTIONARY - A SERIALIZED NOVEL
Marine One lands on the grassy pad of the South Lawn of the White House, several days after the bombing and coup attempt against President Silver. Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez steps out beneath the slowing rotors.
Two Secret Service agents flank and rush her off the pad toward the White House, past two ceremonial Marines, saluting, unusually heavily armed.
Not exactly how Alecta anticipated her political life going, literally running from the danger of the white supremacist thug mentality that continues to pervade the nation. It shouldn't be easy to forget that the United States of America was founded as empire, a white supremacist Empire born of European violence emigrated to an ancient world, brown inhabited. Still, Alecta never thought she would be forced to literally run for her life in her first days as President.
A long series of white supremacist male Presidents and Congresses – Native killing, African slave owning – and their ongoing racist acts and policies cannot be entirely reversed in a progressive Presidency or two. Alecta knows that. The culture remains too ingrained, the policies too invested in centuries of white violence and white smears and white propaganda against people of color at home and all around the globe. Meanwhile, mainly white men grow increasingly super rich at the top of the money pyramid in the world's most violent and most wealthy Empire. How do they get away with it? How do they maintain and worsen the Evil of the financial disparity?
Evil Empires coup and lie – lie and coup. They have a monopoly on violence – military, police. They keep control of vital resources in their lethal grip, all the better for capitalist mechanics to eviscerate body, mind, and planet at a nice profit. The inhuman profiteering of the system, and the person. Fraud, that's fine. Lies, excellent. Earth homicide, the price you pay – to profiteer. They even coup their own government at times, or attempt to, in their savage outrage at the public's gaining a bit of human rights.
And so Alecta runs through the endless fight for liberty, equality, and health. She runs for her life as a brown person in a white Empire, even as the top representative of the People. Or maybe especially because she is the most prominent and powerful and genuine representative of the people, she runs. She knows the stakes, and she is all about the best possible future outcomes. The question is: How to get there? How to move forward in a backwards world?
What Alecta doesn't know, can't know, is that she's about to get a big assist from the middle of nowhere Iowa and a young woman named Sabia Perez – due to a plausible impossible event as shocking as it is scandalous, a twist of circumstances combined with a revolutionary ardor seldom seen in this time or any time.
Never – for real – has there been a time as desperate at this one. The Doomsday Clock ticks down to nothing, as terminal atomic threats proliferate like fruit flies, and the planet cooks and bakes like a thermonuclear device itself blinking red and beginning to blow.
What is anyone, what is Alecta to do?
Apparently the first thing you do is run. At least, for Alecta, for whatever reason, running and running hard fits her, like a bee to a blossom, a hand to a sword, like language to a brain. You run for office. You run for your life. You get elected or you get democratically appointed or you get beat. You run your heart out for your constituents, your country, your world. When necessary, as necessary, you run for everyone's life, including your own. You run for very life itself.
And so-
You run like a band full of drummers pouring and pounding out the greatest fills of their life.
Alecta runs. Eyes up. Feet fast, knees quick and light. Shoes slamming the ground. Mind set. As powerful as possible, quick as can be. Intentions, actions, results fast and ever forward. There's no time to wait, no space for failure, no reason not to run, and run hard. As a brown girl in a white world, you run, Alecta thinks, as someone who values life as life deserves, implores, exudes to be valued. You need to live like a runner in full flight for life itself. And so Alecta runs.
Then for the first time, and after literally and figuratively and all but insanely running for it, Alecta stands in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk by herself alone, her staff before her. She touches her hands to the shiny smooth surface and takes in the finish with her fingers as if to convince herself of the reality of her new position.
Alecta has been in the Oval often enough of course as Vice President and congressional representative, but it's different now, it should be different as Alecta for the first time is in full command of the room. And it feels it too. It feels like she could really do something here and now. More than that. It feels like she must. More than a little. Do a lot. So very much is needed. However much is needed. Everything is needed.
President Silver is gone.
Acting President Alecta is in charge.
Chief of Staff Shakeeta Glazier and Press Secretary Tisha Noori stand before and to the side of President Alecta O'Roura-Chavez near the Resolute Desk.
“We’re ready to do this,” says Shakeeta.
“First order of business?” says Tisha.
Alecta holds out both hands, palms up, fingers wide. “The election continues as scheduled,” she says. “Our ticket stays the same. President Silver is presumed dead though technically still missing until they find the remains.”
“If they do,” says Tisha. “Those missiles incinerated almost everything and everyone on the bus.”
“Alecta's exactly right,” says Shakeeta. “Fuck the DNC. We adjust the ticket when and if we need to. You're the President, Alecta, now and going forward.”
“My President,” says Tisha.
“We need a new Vice President,” says Alecta.
“I don't see how,” says Shakeeta.
“Someone more radical than me. Someone to make me assassination-proof.”
“God forbid,” says Tisha.
“God, gods, or no goddesses, we'll do what needs to be done,” says Alecta. “We need a VP. A VP-in-waiting, at least.”
“Impossible,” says Shakeeta. “The House will never confirm anyone you pick. You know that. Neither will the Senate. You'll need to go without a VP. It's happened a lot in the past.”
“Not under these circumstances,” says Alecta.
“Have there ever been these circumstances?” says Tisha.
“Unfortunately. I would say so. President Kennedy's own family assumed it was CIA or ex-CIA who had him assassinated after he began to clean house at the CIA.”
“That wasn't during an election,” says Shakeeta.
“And you're no Lyndon Baines Johnson,” says Tisha. “Thank God.”
Alecta nods. “Okay, but, Johnson passed major civil rights and social services legislation after Kennedy's assassination. The record is clear. He wasn't all bad.”
“Band aids for badly abused peoples and their devastated communities,” says Tisha. “It didn't stop the riots against police brutality, that constant menace, and the riots against imposed poverty, racism, and the killer lack of social services. I mean, come on. If you don't fix the problems that can readily be fixed, you get what's coming. I mean, what can you expect?”
“Johnson not all that bad?” says Shakeeta, pointing at Alecta. “Tell that to the millions of people killed in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. He amped up to the sky the slaughtering of all those civilians and resistance fighters. So if the countless dead could talk, I think they would say that Johnson was all bad for them and nothing but.”
“That's right,” says Tisha. “Empire red in tooth and claw. Bloody guns and bombs, bombs and guns. Violence and lies are the bread and butter of the Big Boys' constant hunger for money.”
Alecta holds up her hands. “Okay, okay, I know, I know.”
“Johnson was a killer money farmer. A money farmer killer.”
“Okay, okay.”
“It's so gruesome. So depraved.”
“Dressed disgustingly in patriotism.”
“We need to end it,” says Alecta. “As best we can. Get me a short list for a new Vice President. Let's see what we can do. In fact, I want Rashida. She may be more principled and disciplined than all the rest of us put together.”
“Will do,” says Shakeeta.
“Love it,” says Tisha.
“Too bad she's a dead nominee walking,” says Shakeeta.
In the bunker, cleaning up after dinner with Lin and Roca, President Silver dries a few dishes, then clatters and bangs them into a cabinet.
Silver turns on Roca: “It’s been days now. Still no Sabia. This is outrageous. Your nieta is a fucking lousy hostage-taker.”
“Your agents are everywhere above us,” says Roca. “It's all over the news. Sabia can't do anything. She can't reach us. Even if she wanted to.”
“Please. So sorry that Sabia might be inconvenienced. It's a fucking kidnapping, Roca. Who does that? You? Your nieta? Both?” Silver turns to Lin. “What in Hell happened to my Secret Service?”
Lin shrugs. “We haven't exactly had a security briefing. But unless they're in on it, they missed everything. Them and the FBI. The coup. The bombing. The assassination.”
“The would-be assassination. And now my kidnapping.”
“All of it. I was only here for the speeches, really, the strategic moves, the co-ordination of the message-”
“You fucking hate speeches, Ellen.”
“They're such a grimy means to an end. Necessarily, I know. Anyway, I love them now. I wish we could have a few more. Even just one.”
President Silver powers on the cable TV news, the cable recently restored.
“I told you they would fix it,” says Roca.
“At least somebody somewhere is getting something done right,” says Silver. “No surprise if a cable crew discovers us before my Secret Service.”
“They'd have to get through Sabia first, and the cable guys love Sabia,” says Roca. “She's the main attraction when we need our line adjusted, I can tell you that. She can handle the cable men.”
“Sabia's a user of men, of course she is,” says Silver. “And she's using me. So she thinks. Fucking lunatic.”
“Maybe you're your own problem here,” says Roca.
Silver scoffs. “It's you and your nieta. Guilty conscience much, Roca? And if not, why not?”
“Check your own conscience, Ms. President. I know that's what Sabia would say.”
President Silver sniffs and turns her shoulder to Roca. She looks to the TV.
Her gaze is unfocused. “My conscience gets shit done,” the President says quietly.
On TV, a news moderator details multiple polls showing President Silver’s electability ratings and comparative rankings soaring even as she is presumed dead. “A tragic, ironic consequence of the apparent assassination,” says the moderator.
“Look at this!” says Silver. “We're coming back!”
“They like you more dead than alive,” says Roca.
“Shut up, Roca.”
“Isn’t that always the case,” says Lin. “People don't appreciate a good thing when they have it. And, it's true, you practically need to kill yourself to get much traction these days.”
“And look, you did,” says Roca.
“Hey, whatever works,” says Silver. “Everyone knows bombings improve polls. Usually you don't bomb yourself. Except when you do. But everyone knows. You need to attack strategically, for the reason of the bump in the ratings. Every President does. The media loves it too. That's where the bump comes from, the way they cover it. Like it's Christmas.”
“Not that you would admit to any of this publicly, of course,” say Lin. “Or even privately here to Roca.”
“So really everything Sabia says is accurate, is it?” says Roca. “You would even bomb yourself, if you could pull it off, to improve your polls. Wouldn't you? Maybe you did.”
Lin points her finger at Roca. “That's a horrible thing to say.”
“Some truths are horrible,” says Roca.
“So you're just another Sabia, are you, Roca?” says Silver. “Our colleagues are dead, Roca. And you enable your Sabia. You created a monster.”
Roca points at Silver. “It's not me who's in the Frankenstein business, Madame President. Remember, Sabia threw me in here too. With you. Because of you. It's about you. Not me. You.”
President Silver, Roca, and Lin watch Alecta speak live on TV. It's five days after the bombing. Acting President O'Roura-Chavz seems weary and determined standing behind a table top lectern set on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office:
“The decision has been made to continue the Presidential primary voting as scheduled,” says Alecta. “President Silver will remain on top of the ticket in the primary election and, upon winning, in the general election as well. Currently, by law, I serve as Acting President. Our nation will grow stronger from these terrible times. We will look deeply inward at what causes strife in our great land. We will reflect, and we will grow from this catastrophic moment. We will never forget those who are no longer with us. We will carry their memories and come together, as we must.”
“She’s talking like a politician finally,” says Lin.
“She would never do that for me,” says Silver.
“It’s an art: saying nothing and sounding good,” says Lin.
“A con art,” says Roca.
“In politics that’s how you survive,” says Lin.
“That’s great. People love it.”
“I knew the little Princess would use me to become President. She hasn’t earned it. Look at her standing there behind my desk. As if she owns it. She hasn't earned a goddamned thing.”
“She thinks she has,” says Lin.
“I put her there. Now she’ll run to the left, making promises that can’t be kept. She’s so fucking irresponsible. My donors are pissed right now, I know they are. If anyone will find me, if anyone can find me, it will be them.”
“They think you're dead,” says Roca. “And anyway, maybe such promises actually can be delivered by President O'Roura-Chavez. Whatever she might push for. Might as well try.”
“I'm the President,” says Silver. “She has no right. This is my administration, my office, my time to rule.”
“She’s all left then,” says Roca. “Like Manny Pacquiao, greatest southpaw ever. All the great rights come from the left, Sabia says. She says, 'The political right is tyranny. The political left is full democracy.' That's the 'real political spectrum,' Sabia says, and that both the Democrats and the Republicans are far to the right, with the Republicans to the right even of the Democrats. Sabia says, democracy is real socialism. Real democracy is real socialism. And the big money donors are a 'death cult'. That's what she says.”
“Kristen,” says Lin to Silver, “who put this guy in here with us?”
“Fucking Sabia.”
When the Perez family migrated north from the silver mines of Chihuahua, Mexico to the mixed forest and prairie of Iowa, they found upon arrival that much of the woodlands and open space had been cut and plowed to fields of corn, wheat, oats, barley, and hay, or run as pasture for cattle and increasing numbers of sheep. And coal mines. This ecological collapse was made possible by the prior expulsion of the Native tribes from Iowa who had been thrown out by a series of treaties at the point of a gun, in the form of the US Army, culminating in the final expulsion by the Second Treaty of Washington in 1842. Four years later, one year after the treaty deadline for the indigenous to get out, Iowa became the 29th state in the USA. Only white males could vote. Women would not gain the vote until 1920.
Iowa's entry upheld the deal cut in the US Senate – one of the most undemocratic and anti-democracy institutions in the history of the world, continuing to the present – the deal that for every “free” state in the nation there must be a “slave” state to ensure slavery's balance of power in the US Senate and the US empire. With the slave state of Florida's entry into the nation the previous year, Iowa took advantage of the opportunity and gained admittance.
Meanwhile white Empire had wholly dispensed with the indigenous in Iowa.
Gone were the Ioway tribe.
And the Sauk.
The Dakota.
Omaha.
Missouria.
Otoe.
And the Meskwaki, though the Meskwaki – the Sac and Fox – were able to buy a bit of land on their former territory within a couple decades of expulsion and begin to gradually return to become the only federally recognized tribe in Iowa. In fact some Meskwaki hid out during the expulsion, maintaining a continual presence in the state.
The US Army would continue to conquer, eliminate, and control the indigenous peoples for decades to come across the United States, not to mention the globe. This despite the fact that the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878 following the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 outlawed use of the Army to enforce state and local laws. In reality, the Posse Comitatus Act was white Empire tightening its grip on people of color, as the federal Army was now barred from protecting former slaves in the South during Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the Army was therefore increasingly free to continue attacking and slaughtering indigenous peoples all across the continent. By some strange coincidence, the worst laws of white Empire tend to benefit the white and the wealthy at the expense of people of color and those otherwise impoverished or disapproved of by the masters of violence and money. Passage of the Posse Comitatus Act also caused state governments to construct armories in cities all across the nation to house and train National Guard forces – not covered by the Act. This allowed state governors, elected by the mechanisms of wealth, to break strikes in attacks on impoverished and abused working people on behalf of industrial capitalism and white privilege, often and at will.
Seldom does the world reveal to us day by day as we walk through it, even though we may think we get it. We don't, too often, even if we feel we imbibe the fullness of life through every sense and pore and faculty. So often we don't know the real and whole history of our own lives, let alone the lives of those around us, let alone those who came before. And seldom does everyday life begin in a grand garden, or become one, but that's what the Perez family was determined to make of their flight from persecution in Mexico, albeit to a new persecution in the warring and not so united states to the north.
A not uncommon combination of personal trouble and social disorder caused the Perez family to hurriedly cross a border that had first crossed them, a tale as old as time that would grow only ever more common in the coming centuries of nonstop indefensible regional and global wars, and the equally and increasingly supreme human crimes of climate and economic collapse, along with the all-too-preventable pandemics.
After a year in Iowa, when Sylvia Perez was asked by her husband Jaime if she thought they could make a go of it there in the cutting chill of the prairie, Sylvia offered a single word in reply: “Nueces.”
“Does that mean yes or no?”
“Nueces.”
The word spoke to every side of any possible answer. To Sylvia, it held more hope than reality, more joy than sorrow and despair, more “yes” than “no” – a reluctant “yes” that reserved the possibility of a potential “No, not at all.”
Then Sylvia placed in her husband's hands a few of the shagbark hickory nuts she had been harvesting from the ground beneath ever-giving trees, magical towering fountains of food. She knew he wanted to stay. That's why he asked while she was busy with her favorite task, the local wild nut harvest from the forest patches and stands – more likely cultivated than not and otherwise engendered for millennia by Native tribes. Sylvia too, in the years to come and for the rest of her long life, would carefully and lovingly propagate, select, and grow her own nut trees and groves as her main connection to the natural world and to the land of their former home.
Nueces – a fitting word for rugged trees in a cold wet country with limited but sufficient sun near the little coal mine where Sylvia's husband had gotten hired on.
Gone were the bushy fragrant pinyon pines, and the little southern walnuts and evergreen oaks and acorns, and the lovely curly and bumpy mesquite pods harvested by their now distant families and ancestors. Gone was the boundless sun and the dry sandstone. Here in cold, moist Iowa on and along deep rich prairie soils grew the northern walnuts and oaks, the hickories and hazelnuts, and the great seed pods of the honey locust. The new nuts would help support and nourish the family alongside the work of her husband hired on to a single family coal mine punched into the side of a hill – a mine they would one day, when it was worthless, come to own. The coal would give out but the big burr oak acorns and the even bigger black walnuts and the shrubby fast-growing hazelnuts would not. And so Sylvia foraged, propagated, and processed nuts and seeds for their health, their survival, and the future ever-expanding orchards of themselves and their ancestors. Sabia's earthy great inheritance.
Average minimum temperatures during winter in Iowa dropped below freezing for five months each year, as compared to no months at their former home in Chihuahua. So the atmosphere both physical and social was literally chilling to comprehend and to live within to Sylvia and Jaime Perez. Fortunately, Iowa received more than twice as much rain as the rugged high desert from which they'd ventured, creating great opportunities for plants of all kinds, especially for the most useful and most valuable of all the perennials – la nueces.
Here in Iowa there was water, always water. The bushes and trees along the banks of the steady Iowa creeks and rivers produced plenty of berries and larger fruits like plums, persimmons, and the mighty pawpaw. These fruit and nut trees and shrubs in turn attracted countless insects – bees, caterpillars, flies, bugs – reptiles, mammals, and birds. Sylvia saw what was what, that life gave life to life, in Iowa as in Mexico. So they worked to buy land of their own and make it their own to make it give life to life. Sylvia planted and grew orchards, where she could, as she could, and out of it she made a home of homes.
While her husband dug into the dirt and stone for a livelihood, Sylvia raised as many nut trees as it was possible to bear in one place. When the coal seams unexpectedly ran out and the field crops failed, it would be nuts and other perennial crops and the household crops that would sustain. They would eat nut meat, nut gravy, nut oils, nut flour, also potatoes, all the long brutal winter and little else not homegrown, or wild grown, there in this new and strange cold land called Iowa. For the newly migrated Perez couple and soon to be larger family, one of the few Mexican families in the entire state at the time, it wasn't paradise and it wasn't Hell, but you didn't need to look too hard to see the spilled blood and tears of the recently vanquished indigenous for whom the land had become a form of both, paradise and Hell, their ever-living prairie and woodlands, their home, lost by way of their banishment, at the end of the white man's gun, from what became the newest proud US state called Iowa.
Let's take a quick moment to note that while it is commonly said that “pride goeth before the fall,” and while the original source actually reads “pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” both lines of thought and admonishment speak too little in the explicit of pride in and of itself, as it is so often in a proclaimed a haughty, proud land, or community, or family, or person – pride is the fall. Steep and far.
Pride is the fall.
And redeemable?
So goes white Empire against the indigenous and the Perez family in southeastern Iowa, thrown by and through violence in torn societies. Jaime and Sylvia determine to sustain through new tears and blood and by the nuts and other plantings, many first put to root by the local indigenous, newly by Sylvia.
Past and present, for Sabia and Roca, during long days and longer nights, big winter storms mean time for rocking, cracking and picking the fine kernels of the hickories – las nueces de nogal americano – shagbark, pignut, mockernut, shellbark, and their hybrids, many planted by Roca's abuela Sylvia, beginning more than a century ago. Though the women are all dead now in the direct family descent to Sabia, they live, they continue to dwell in and among the carefully tended trees and shrubs and in the fruits and nuts and seeds of those trees and shrubs. These fallen women and men of Sabia's family, and of the indigenous preceding, she thinks of them every time in the planting, caring, observing, and harvesting, in the selling, processing, consuming, and otherwise enjoying the trees for their endless bounty.
Sabia was raised and has lived always in the past, present, and future of her family, in their stories, lessons, and details of life, and in nature, walking the groves through the sun and shade of the orchard and among the many specimen trees that fill the farm and surrounding lands where Sabia and her family both sold and guerrilla planted enough trees and bushes of nuts, fruits, and seeds to satisfy the needs of their creek bio-region and beyond, creating ever anew.
If Sabia might need to set and freeze any point in time, day or night, she would place herself very near to eternity in summer in a rocker on the porch in the evening shelling nuts with family and friends, and she would remember to think of young Sylvia placing a small handful of foraged hickories into Jaime's hand as her way of explaining without saying “yes” and showing what it meant.
Were she ever to become a novelist, Sabia might find that the miraculous propagation of life in creating orchards is very much like the emergence of new worlds in making novels. At a certain point you step back and say "Wow" to the new life, then continue on, come what may. It can get dicey though, given the oft chaotic climate, what it can do to growing plants, blossoms, and crops, a lot like what glacial yet unpredictable times can give or fail to provide to the unconscious of novel creation. Growing, writing, it's a challenge, for sure, in orchards as in novels. It's a science where not an art, and an art where not a science. Take the plant genus prunus, for example – cherry, plum, apricot, peach – you may or may not like prunus trees, recalcitrant in yielding fruit and explosive in shooting limbs as they are, but you must love them – full of themselves as they may be. The maddening amazing thing is that prunus growth like novel creation can hardly be contained. And therein lies the etymology and slang of prunus: "to cut back" – "to lop off as superfluous or injurious" as "disagreeable and disliked." You may not always like prunus and pruning, you may not always like the novel you attempt to make whole, but that doesn't mean you don't love it for what wild thing, what gutty new life, it ultimately becomes or might be.
The orchard makers and novelists are themselves both prunus, lively growing and self-lopping, feral and highly literate in their own domains. You may not like it, but you gotta love it. If to err is human, then maybe to novelize is divine. Or to divine. And if to make an orchard is to survive in a harsh world, then to harvest that orchard is to thrive in a moment of paradise on a planet that may yet still suckle this kind of life.
Orchard maker though she certainly is, Sabia is no novelist but another kind of creator, in conscious and unconscious. She's a revolutionary, and she knows she is. She wills it so. Opportunity allows it. Her medium encompasses everything – plants, words, people, cities, continents, the planet, even the cosmos beyond. She is ready and willing to make and harvest a revolution against the deadly status quo.
So far from orchard, and porch, and any literary work today, in the early long aftermath of the most recent calamity to occur in southeastern Iowa, Sabia sits on the edge of the great room in her families' secret underground home in front of a flat screen monitor. The re-purposed old LED TV screen is connected to a closed-circuit system, linked cameras, speakers, screens, microphones in the Perez family survivalist bunker. Sabia sits there as intent as ever and considers the blank screen. This was the system her family used to keep an eye on her as a little girl when she played in the bunker as playhouse, occasionally preparing snacks and meals for everyone from the emergency provisions stored in the coal mine fifty feet below and beside the farmhouse.
Sabia activates speakers and the camera mounted near the bunker ceiling that casts her live image onto the broadcast TV.
Silver, Lin, and Roca all look toward the TV as Sabia’s face appears onscreen in the bunker, as if by supernatural miracle, unimaginable in times gone by and arrived again today, so remote in time and space does being trapped in the bunker feel from the world and society that spawned the dungeon and redoubt.
“Hello, my darlings,” says Sabia.
“Sabia! Bueno,” says Roca.
Roca turns off the cable TV news.
“You!” shouts President Silver. She rushes toward the screen. “You need to release me, right now. Young Lady.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“And me,” says Lin.
No one, especially not Roca, takes their eyes off the image of Sabia.
“Abuelo, it’s good to see you.”
“Mija.”
Tears cross Sabia's cheeks.
“Our new President Alecta O'Roura-Chavez means business,” says Sabia. “And so do I. Suck it, Silver.”
President Silver shouts at the screen: “You! I will get you, Sabia. My people will get you. And you will be sorry like never before.”
“I doubt it,” says Sabia.
“You're impossible,” says Silver. “You have no idea what you're doing.”
“Let's find out,” says Sabia. “I know I'm impossible. Yet here I am. So I must be plausible at least. That's good enough for me. And you, Silver-Toes, you must do as I say, if you wish to walk the surface of the Earth ever again.”
“That's a threat,” says Silver. “That won't take you any place you want to go, Sabia.”
“Whatever,” says Sabia. “Take it how you like. It's your reality. Make of it what you will. Not much else you can do now, is there? Fortunately for all of us.”
“You're a criminal,” say Lin. “This makes you, you know, an outlaw in every way, shape, and form.”
“I'm a facilitator,” says Sabia. “Of the future. The work of a water protector is never done.”
“You're delusional,” says Silver.
“What do you think, dear Roca,” says Sabia. “Am I delusional?”
Roca squeezes the side and back of his head with his hands. It feels better that way. He closes his eyes and angles forth his neck and glances down and shakes his head in his hands.
Then Roca drops his hands and looks back up at the screen at Sabia.
“Sabia,” he says. “You do you. I know you will. You do what you need to do.”
Roca can hardly believe the words out of his mouth. Sabia will never walk free in the orchard again, he thinks. And for what? A failed, desperate attempt at progress? At revolution?
“Oh, for Christ's sake, Roca,” says Silver.
“Roca, come on,” says Lin.
“I know you understand, Abuelo.”
Roca's not so sure he does. He tries to think back through family history but struggles to find much guidance there. He thinks of the continent-traversing life of his abuela Sylvia. He thinks of Sabia. Are they the same?
No.
But Sabia may be an acorn fallen not far from a tree, a mighty oak, that Sabia's great-great-grandmother Sylvia planted from an indigenous acorn gathered from and put again into this land called Iowa so very many years ago. Roca holds to the image of Sabia as acorn. He hopes she has been planted well. He knows she cannot help but grow in her own way. Come what may. As it fiercely, most certainly will.
