She nodded to Josh as she headed for the kitchen. Dawn was ignored.
“Isn’t she the most beautiful thing you ever saw in your whole life?” Uncle Ryan said again. He was not talking about the daughter at his side. He stared raptly after Stacy until she was out of sight.
“I’ve never seen anyone with hair like that,” Josh said. “It’s like gold.” That at least was true enough. He cleared his throat. “Uncle Ryan, didn’t my mother call and discuss my coming here to stay with you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Ryan’s eyes strayed now and again after the vanished Stacy, but he actually seemed a little more relaxed when she was gone. “Lucy sent an electronic message to the farm’s facsimile and recording center. She just said you would be arriving sometime in the next week or two.”
“You didn’t talk to each other about it—to plan for my being here?”
“We couldn’t. There was no return address. No way to know how to reach you.” Uncle Ryan smiled, ruefully, trying to set up a bond between the two of them. “Just like your mom, eh?”
It was, all too like her. Fly by night, and vanish, as they had vanished from the people they owed money to; and now she had flown from him. Suddenly Josh had a new worry. He remembered Burnt Willow Farm as a place of infinite food, food that appeared at every hour of the day or night whether you wanted it or not, more than you could ever eat—soups and roasts and stews, pies and puddings and sorbets, fruitcake and brandied plums, cheese and biscuits and candied fruit. Aunt Maria said a body could never have too much food, provided it was nourishing and well cooked.
“What did Aunt Stacy”—he forced himself to say the hard word—“mean, that it won’t be easy to feed another person? Am I going to be a problem for you?”
“No, no, no.” But Uncle Ryan’s tone said, yes, yes, yes. “Look, dinner won’t be ready for another hour. Let’s me and you go on up the hill. And you’ll see for yourself.” And, as an afterthought, “Don’t put your shoes on ’til we’re at the door.”
When they came to the farmhouse entrance Josh had new proof that Dawn understood more than Aunt Stacy gave her credit for. His cousin was putting on her own shoes, before he and Uncle Ryan started to put on theirs.
“Will Dawn come with us?”
“Sure she will.” Uncle Ryan sounded uncomfortable as he fastened his boots, still liberally coated with yellow powdery dust from the farm’s dry soil. “Better if we all go. Stacy doesn’t like Dawn around the kitchen. She says she spooks her and gets in the way.”
He led them up the hill, along the same path that Josh had followed to reach the farm. Dawn stayed at Joshua’s side, always looking at and through him but hardly saying a word. It made him feel really uncomfortable. Whenever he glanced across at her, she smiled and said, “Joshua.”
“She remembers you,” Uncle Ryan said. “And it’s been eight years. I’ve tried to explain to Stacy, there’s some things that Dawn remembers perfectly. Don’t you, love? For some things she’s a perfect walking recorder, better at exact remembering than anyone.
But for most things…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Autistic, that’s what the doctors say.”
“Artistic?”
“No. Autistic. Dawn is autistic. It’s not the same as being retarded. I don’t think people know quite what it is. Seems like it’s one of them words they use for something they don’t really understand. They say they understand, but they can’t do anything about it. Maybe that will change. You know how scientists are. They tell you something is impossible, like space travel. Then they discover the node network, and suddenly it’s not impossible at all. I just wish they’d do something like that here on Earth. I wish they’d find a way to help Dawn.” Uncle Ryan peered up at the cloudless sky. “At the very least, I wish they’d find a way to make it rain where it’s needed.”
On his earlier walk downhill, Josh had been too interested in the farmhouse and farmyard below to take much notice of the land on either side of the path. Now, walking back the same way, the parched, water-starved quality of the slope jumped out at him more strongly. The wheat was stunted, no more than half a meter tall, with yellow-brown and brittle stems. The leaves of the root crops were wan and wilted, all the way up the hill. Only off to the right and left, in the irrigated fields beyond Burnt Willow Farm, could he see healthy green plants. They extended as far as the horizon.
“Why don’t you irrigate your fields, the way that the others do?” he said, as they came to the brow of the hill.
“The wells ran dry.” Uncle Ryan halted, breathing heavily. “You say, ‘others,’ but there are no ‘others.’ There’s just one other, singular. Every independent farm in this area, except for Burnt Willow, went out of business. What you see is all Foodlines. One big conglomerate farm all the way from here to the Pacific. FoodLines owns everything—including the rights to tap into the aquifers around Burnt Willow.”
“But weren’t you here before them?” Josh remembered his mother saying that Uncle Ryan’s family had farmed in eastern Oregon “forever.”
“We were here first, true enough. But that turns out to mean nothing. What matters is who you know, and the arrangements you’ve made in the state capitol. It’s all politics, every bit of it.” Uncle Ryan pointed to the west. “Take a big enough wad of cash with you to Salem, and water rights are for sale along with everything else. I learned that, but I learned it too late. The past couple of years, with Maria sick and all, I guess I wasn’t watching things close enough. By the time I woke up, the water supply was all locked up. Did you notice, coming in, that Burnt Willow Creek is dry? That never happened when I was young. I’ve done what I can, with drought-resistant and salt-tolerant plants. They help some. But when all’s said and done, you still need water.”
“What about rain?” Josh remembered many rainy days, too many, when he had been confined to the farmhouse and chafed to get out into the yard. “If you have rain, you don’t need irrigation.”
“Quite right.” Uncle Ryan pointed to the well-worn track that they had come up. “See that? Dawn and I made it, walking up and down. I’ve stood here ’bout every day this whole season, looking north for rain clouds.”
Josh’s formal education had been spotty and random, with all the jumping around from town to town wherever Mother’s jobs took them. But he had always had a terminal, and he had learned early to tap the public databases. Eight years had produced a big change in him and in Uncle Ryan, but he knew that it wasn’t nearly long enough to make the climate change around Burnt Willow Farm.
“True enough,” Uncle Ryan said when Josh made that point. “But Dawn and I haven’t seen a rain cloud in two months. See, the moisture is carried this way mostly from the north. Foodlines finagled the rights to seed the southbound clouds north of here, and make the rain fall twenty or thirty miles away. By the time the air reaches us it’s pretty well dried out. All we need is one good soaking from a southerly wind and we’d be fine. But we haven’t managed that.”
While they were talking Dawn had taken off her shoes. She was carrying them under her arm, wandering barefoot along the brow of the hill toward a patch of wild filbert bushes that seemed to thrive on the dry yellow clay. An hour ago, Josh would have sworn that he didn’t know those bushes existed. Seeing them now, he realized that they had gathered nuts in that very place on his previous visit to Burnt Willow Farm.
The bushes looked the same, but most other things had changed. The long ridge of the hill was quite bare of even the drought-ridden crops. With no one else around, Josh had a chance to say what had been on his mind since they left the farmhouse. He turned to face Uncle Ryan. “If I’d known things were so bad for you here, with Dawn and the farm and everything, I never would have come. I can leave tomorrow. I can go back east, and find Mother.”