Joshua’s shop was off to one side, with a cellar partly under it and partly under Rillibee’s room. Joshua used the cellar to store the wood he would turn into tables and chairs and cabinets after it had seasoned. There were power tools in the shop and Miriam’s potter’s wheel and a big door along the creek side that stood open all summer long.
The low, earthen bulk of the house and shop stretched along Red Creek beside monstrous old cottonwoods that dangled their leafy branches over it, green in summer, heartbreak gold in the fall. Miriam called it that. Heartbreak gold. So beautiful it made you catch your breath when the sun came through, like the touch of the hand of God. Miriam said a lot of things like that, old-fashioned kinds of things. Even her name was old-fashioned. A really antique name, from a long, long time before.
His father, too. Joshua. That was an antique name for you. Even the things Joshua and Miriam did were old-fashioned things, things nobody else did—woodworking, pottery, gardening, making things with their hands, growing things in the soil.
In between making stuff or growing stuff they were always taking Rillibee and Songbird out to show them something or other, a flower or a crawdad or a fish. There were lots of fish in the creek. There were deer in the canyon. There were sage chickens and wild turkey on the rimrock, way up there. “This is one of the few places on earth that man hasn’t made garbage out of,” Joshua said sometimes, pointing up the canyon. “Live in it. Watch out for it. Take care of it. Every springtime move out to the front edge of it and plant something that will live longer than you do.”
Joshua and Miriam had been doing that for twenty years, ever since Joshua came back from Repentence, planting things every spring. Up the canyon along Red Creek the trees were old and big. Joshua’s grandfather had planted those. Orchards stood below the house, apple and cherry and plum, trees four times as tall as Joshua, clouds of blossoms in the spring, Joshua’s father had planted the fruit trees. Then came the groves Joshua had planted, young conifers, shorter and shorter ones as they reached the edge of the green belt Joshua and Miriam had made. Beyond the green was the gray, flat land: dry soil specked with knapweed and thistle and thorny brush, cut by the dusty knife edge of the road. Down that road was the town and the school, a Sanctity town and a Sanctity school. Rillibee’s folks weren’t Sanctified, but they sent Rillibee to school there anyhow. It was closest, and besides the things Joshua and Miriam taught him, he needed to learn the things a school could teach. School was only a mile away, easy to get to most of the year. Once in a while they’d be snowed in for a week or so, but that was rare. Sometimes Rillibee brought kids home from school with him, but that was rare, too. Mostly they thought he was strange.
Their parents all worked in comnet cubicles at their apartments, or they worked in one of the technical centers along the surface route! They went back and forth on covered walkways. If they needed to go very far, they had hovers. Joshua and Miriam had donkeys, for cries sake. Donkeys. It was enough to make Rillibee’s schoolmates chop themselves into pieces laughing about the earthfreaks who ate food they grew themselves and wouldn’t use dirty words and wore funny-looking clothes. Rillibee never heard the word earthfreak until he was in fourth category. Then he thought he’d never hear the end of it.
Rillibee minded more than Song did. She had a boyfriend who belonged to another earthfreak family over in Rattlesnake, and the two of them got along fine. Jason was his name. Another old-time name. Jason used some bad words, but never in front of Joshua. That’s one thing Joshua was death on, bad words, and when he was around, Rillibee was careful not to say any.
“Why’d you call me Rillibee?” he complained to his mother after one particularly bad day at school when everyone was busy making fun of him for his name and his clothes and his folks. “Why Rillibee?”