Page 20 of Freak
Bo’s aura—his energy—was of a great talent and a deep thinker. His mother’s aura, bright yellow with occasional threads of orange and russet, was of a pragmatic, powerful achiever. Lilli Lunden got things done.
“Y’all here for your jams, I expect. I got everything boxed up and ready to go,” Abigail said as Lilli and Bo reached her. She turned and waved them forward with her. “C’mon in. I got fresh coffee and cookies. Tried a new recipe for chai cookies. They’re real nice.”
“Coffee and cookies sound great,” Lilli said as they reached the porch steps, “but sadly, we can’t stay. Bo and I are driving into St. Louis today to make a delivery.”
“I had a special order for an epoxy river table,” Bo added.
“I never heard of any such thing,” Abigail said and opened the screen door. “Epoxy river table?”
“I can show you some photos.” Bo drew his phone from his pocket and tapped on the screen. He turned it to Abigail.
She saw a table that seemed to be about six feet long and four feet wide—a smallish dining table, or possibly a desk. Both long sides were wood, but the outside edges were the only straight lines. The inside edges of the wood were wildly uneven, like the banks of a meandering stream—and between those pieces of wood was the epoxy, tinted teal and swirled to look like moving water. Absolutely stunning. As she peered more closely at the photos, she saw that under the epoxy seemed to be river rocks. The work was so well done, Abigail could hardly believe it wasn’t a real segment of river.
Abigail had seen such things at art fairs; now she knew what they were called.
“This is art, Bo. It’s brilliant.”
“Thank you.” He put his phone away. “I’ve been told by other artisans that this kind of woodwork is a cliché, but I don’t care about that. I like to make things that are practical and also beautiful.”
Abigail smiled. No hobgoblins in Bo’s vast mind.
“Is this ours?” Lilli asked, her hands on one of the boxes Abigail had put on her island.
She looked on the side and saw she’d writtenLLthere, with a shorthand list of its contents: a dozen lavender soaps, two large bottles of honey lotion, and two dozen pint jars of assorted canned fruits and vegetables. “Yep, that’s yours!”
“Excellent, thanks.” Hefting the box, Lilli stepped away from the island, toward the door. “As we talked about, I’ll cover your booth fee for the Harvest Festival, and that—she patted the box with her fingers—gets us square for this, yeah?”
Even as the twenty-first century approached its middle age, there were ways to minimize how much actual money one needed to live, despite living in a society founded on currency. One could, for instance, provide a box of soaps, jams, and canned vegetables that was a similar value as the booth fee for a community festival and have the recipient handle the cash transaction.
Barter was more difficult at the festival itself, but it wasn’t impossible. Abigail bartered with regulars and neighbors even there; she generally took legal tender payments from out-of-towners—and she used that money to cover big expenses with big companies, like her insurance providers.
In the way her grandmother had taught her, Abigail sought to limit her direct contact with conventional currency as much as possible. The reasons for this were many and various, but at the core, it wasn’t about superstition or an aversion to modernity. It was that dollars and cents had no intrinsic value. They were strips of paper and chunks of cheap metals—or more insidiously, invisible bits of ‘code’ transmitted through the air. Their supposed value was tied to the caprices of billionaires playing the ‘stock market’—another thing with no intrinsic value, and whose only purpose was to generate more imaginary dollars and cents for those selfsame billionaires.
Traditional bartering meant exchanging one physical needful, useful, or wishful thing or service for another service or physical needful, useful, or wishful thing. The value of a bartered thing was tied directly to its purpose.
There were other, more spiritual reasons to avoid contact with money—physical money picked up traces of energy from anyone who touched it, just as it picked up germs, and money changed hands so often it could be literally toxic. But those were the kinds of reasons most people scoffed at, and they weren’t the most important to Abigail. She simply appreciated inherent value over imaginary.
“I like that you use the barter system,” Bo said as he took the box from his mother. “It’s not a perfectly egalitarian system of exchange, but it’s the closest humans have ever come. But systems of power in the world don’t value egalitarianism, so they don’t value barter.”
Abigail smiled at him and almost reached out to touch his arm, until she remembered that, unlike herself, Bo didn’t like to be touched. “I like the way you used the word ‘value’ there, as a verb and not a noun. I think that’s an important distinction to make.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes.” Then he set the box on the corner of the counter nearest the door, held it in place with his hip, and dug into his pocket. He pulled out a small carboard box, one you might gift inexpensive earrings in, and handed it to her. “Our topic reminded me that I have this, but I don’t mean to barter with it. I found this near our stream one day when I was rockhounding, and I thought you might find it useful.”
Abigail lifted the lid and found, on a bed of cotton batting, the complete and perfect skeleton of a tiny frog. From nose to tail, it was less than two inches long and almost as wide. Bo had arranged the bones as if the frog were resting on a stone, its legs drawn up snugly to its body.
“Oh, Bo! This is a lovely specimen! Thank you so much for thinking of me!”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I think it’s a Boreal Chorus Frog.”
“It’s wonderful. Are you sure I can’t offer you anything in exchange?”
“I would like it to be a gift,” he answered. At their side, his mother shifted, as though she wanted to say something and was trying not to interfere.
Abigail could discern what Lilli was thinking—that it would hurt Bo to have his gift made a transaction. It was a similar thought to Mel’s challenge last night.
Though she’d always struggled with accepting gifts and feeling therefore unbalanced with the giver, she understood that as a weakness in her spirit. The balance to a gift was gratitude, and she certainly felt that.
“Thank you again, Bo.” She closed the box and held it to her chest. “This is special to me.”
