This is a longer version of that earlier excerpt from THE KIND. Its mostly NOT a repeat. When we pulled into the campground parking lot about twenty minutes later, a man and a woman who each looked to be in their late forties were waiting for us. They introduced themselves as Digger and Lark Jones. Digger was a stocky man with a round, jowly face, bright, piercing blue eyes, big arms and legs, and a long shock of white hair that hung loose. If he’d had a beard, he might have looked like a character from a Tolkien novel—perhaps a cross between Gandalf the wizard and one of the dwarves. Lark was darker-skinned; as one might guess from her name, she looked to be of Native American ancestry. That isn’t unusual among the Kind, but it’s also certainly not universal. She was a tall woman, a couple of inches taller than Digger himself, who was around my height of 5 foot 9. Her eyes were dark brown, and in the shadows thrown by the electric lights in the parking lot, they looked practically black, like two twinkling stones of obsidian. She had black hair that she’d pushed into a thick bun. She carried what looked to be a carved wooden staff or walking stick; whether she needed it or it was mere affectation wasn’t clear to me right away. “Light-bringer!” the two exclaimed as Luci jumped down out of the bus and practically ran to hug them. It wouldn’t have surprised me, then, if Luci knew everyone in the world, both Kind and humankind. Luci smiled. “How you guys doin’?” “Pretty good,” Digger said. “Pretty good. Got the ol’ RV tuned up and ready for tour again.” “You guys gonna do the whole thing?” “Think so, yeah. This one’s gonna be short; just a month. The band’s going in the studio afterward to make a new record. It’ll be good to shake the dust off the bones and put some joy in the world again.” “That’s what being Kind’s for, right?” Luci grinned. Beside Digger, Lark grinned. “That’s what we’ve always thought,” she said. Lark and Digger, it turned out, hadn’t been born Kind, like Luci or Dhania. They’d been awakened, like Avery and myself, and most of the rest of the Oxford tribe. They’d been part of it all, though, since the earliest days of Coventina’s Well. But it seemed the Long Road got too long for some of our people, sometimes—which I guess I understand. We live a long time—the upper limit of our lifespan hasn’t been determined, but then, no one really knows the actual limit of a normal human’s lifespan, either. They just know what the average is. Our average is much longer. And because of that, and because the work we do in the world can be taxing and draining in many ways—just as a long life itself can—we sometimes pull away from working on the world and go to work on ourselves. But we always return—well, as long as life will let us. As I’ve said before, we’re not immortal. Lark and Digger had been off the road the last few months, because the band had been. But for the past few years, they’d spent less and less time on the road. “Sit down by the campfire with us for a bit,” Digger told us. It was already nearly midnight, but we didn’t have class the next day—nothing in our plans but the second show, which was in everyone’s plan. “Before we sit down, though—I believe there’s someone you wanted us to meet, Lightbringer?” Luci nudged Ethan from where he’d been trying to hide between her, Kurt, me and Avery, and he came out into the open. “This is Ethan. We ran into him in the lot tonight after the show.” “Yeah,” Ethan said, looking sheepish. “I guess I was kinda sitting on the back fender of their bus. I needed a ride.” “He needs a family,” I said, the words jumping out of my throat before I’d really thought them through. “He needs a bath,” Lark said, and everyone laughed—including Ethan, I was glad to see. “Digger, go show this young man where he can wash up, and where he can sleep while he’s bunkin’ with us the next couple of nights. Then come back to the fire. Luci and her tribe need to know what we’ve seen.” --from THE KIND: A NOVEL OF MEMORYS CHILDREN
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 15:50:21 +0000
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