“Six years,” Leader told him. “You arrived six years ago. So you’ve been fishing for all that time.”
Matty nodded. But he stiffened. He was wary. It was too soon for his true name to be bestowed, he thought. Surely it was not going to be Fisherman! Was that why Leader had called him here?
Leader looked at him and began to laugh. “Relax, Matty! When you look like that, I can almost read your mind! Don’t worry. It was only a question.”
“A question about fishing. Fishing’s a thing I do just to get food or to fool around. I don’t want it to turn into something more.” Matty liked that about Leader, that you could say what you wanted to him, that you could tell him what you felt.
“I understand. You needn’t worry about that. I was asking because I need to assess the food supply. Some are saying there are fewer fish than there once were. Look here, what I’ve been writing.” He passed a paper over to Matty. There were columns of numbers, lists headed “Salmon” and “Trout.”
Matty read the numbers and frowned. “It might be true,” he said. “I remember at first I would pull fish after fish from the river. But you know what, Leader?”
“What?” Leader took the paper back from Matty and laid it with others on his desk.
“I was little then. And maybe you don’t remember this, because you’re older than I am . . .”
Leader smiled. “I’m still a young man, Matty. I remember being a boy.” Matty thought he noticed a brief flicker of sadness in Leader’s eyes, despite the warm smile. So many people in Village—including Matty—had sad memories of their childhoods.
“What I meant was, I remember all the fish, the feeling that they would never end. I felt that I could drop my line in again and again and again and there would always be fish. Now there aren’t. But, Leader . . .”
Leader looked at him and waited.
“Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther. The first time I came here through Forest? The journey seemed forever.”
“It does take days, Matty, from where you started.”
“Yes, I know. It still takes days. But now it doesn’t seem as far or as long. Because I’m older, and bigger, and I’ve gone back and forth again and again, and I know the way, and I’m not scared. So it seems shorter.”
Leader chuckled. “And the fish?”
“Well,” Matty acknowledged, “there don’t seem to be as many. But maybe it’s just that I was a little boy back then, when the fish seemed endless.”
Leader tapped the tip of his pen on the desk as he thought. “Maybe so,” he said after a moment. He stood. From a table in the corner of the room he took a stack of folded papers.
“Messages?” Matty asked.
“Messages. I’m calling a meeting.”
“About fish?”
“No. I wish it were just about fish. Fish would be easy.”
Matty took the stack of message papers he would be delivering. Before he turned to the staircase to leave, he felt compelled to say, “Fish aren’t ever easy. You have to use just the right bait, and know the right place to go, and then you have to pull the line up at just the right moment, because if you don’t, the fish can wiggle right off your hook, and not everybody is good at it, and . . .”
He could hear Leader laughing, still, when he left.
It took Matty most of the day to deliver all of the messages. It wasn’t a hard task. He liked the harder ones better, actually, when he was outfitted with food and a carrying pack and sent on long journeys through Forest. Although he hadn’t been sent to it in almost two years, Matty especially liked trips that took him back to his former home, where he could greet his boyhood pals with a somewhat superior smile, and snub those who had been cruel to him in the past. His mother was dead, he had been told. His brother was still there, and looked at Matty with more respect than he ever had in the past, but they were strangers to each other now. The community where he had lived was greatly changed and seemed foreign, though less harsh than he remembered.
Today he simply made his way around Village, delivering notice of the meeting that would be held the following week. Reading the message himself, he could understand Leader’s questioning about the supply of fish, and the concern and worry that Matty had felt from him.
There had been a petition—signed by a substantial number of people—to close Village to outsiders. There would have to be a debate, and a vote.
It had happened before, such a petition.
“We voted it down just a year ago,” the blind man reminded Matty when the message had been read to him. “There must be a stronger movement now.”
“There are still plenty of fish,” Matty pointed out, “and the fields are full of crops.”
The blind man crumpled the message and dropped it into the fire. “It’s not the fish or crops,” he said. “They’ll use that, of course. They argued dwindling food supply last time. It’s . . .”
“Not enough housing?”
“More than that. I can’t think of the word for it. Selfishness, I guess. It’s creeping in.”
Matty was startled. Village had been created out of the opposite: selflessness. He knew that from his studies and from hearing the history. Everyone did.
“But in the message—I could have read it to you again if you hadn’t burned it—it says that the group who wants to close the border is headed by Mentor! The schoolteacher!”
The blind man sighed. “Give the soup a stir, would you, Matty?”
Obediently Matty moved the wooden ladle around in the pot and watched beans and chopped tomatoes churn in the thick mixture as it simmered. Thinking still of his teacher, he added, “He’s not selfish!”
“I know he isn’t. That’s why it’s puzzling.”
“He welcomes everyone to the school, even new ones who have no learning, who can’t even speak properly.”
“Like you, when you came,” the blind man said with a smile. “It couldn’t have been easy, but he taught you.”
“He had to tame me first,” Matty acknowledged, grinning. “I was wild, wasn’t I?”
Seer nodded. “Wild. But Mentor loves teaching those who need it.”
“Why would he want to close the border?”
“Matty?”
“What?”
“Has Mentor traded, do you know?”
Matty thought about it. “It’s school vacation now, so I don’t see him as often. But I stop by his homeplace now and then . . .” He didn’t mention Jean, the widowed schoolteacher’s daughter. “I haven’t noticed anything different in his household.
“No Gaming Machine,” he added, laughing a little.
But the blind man didn’t chuckle in reply. He sat thinking for a moment. Then he said, in a worried voice, “It’s much more than just a Gaming Machine.”
Five
The schoolteacher’s daughter told me that her dog has three puppies. I can have one when it’s big enough, if I like.”
“Isn’t she the one who promised you a kiss? Now a dog as well? I’d settle for the kiss if I were you, Matty.” The blind man smiled, loosened a beet from the earth, and placed it in the basket of vegetables. They were in the garden together.