Son (The Giver, #4)

by Lois Lowry

Handfasting.

Alys frowned. “It’s music, child. Have you never heard music? Have you forgotten it?” “No, never,” Claire whispered. “I’m quite sure.”

Nothing was wasted.

“I must find him,” Claire whispered, finally. “Aye. You must.” “How?”

“It was different, where I lived. There weren’t weddings. And yes, I gave birth.” She found herself speaking tersely to him. She was angered. “You can’t understand. I was selected to give birth. It was an honor. I was called Birthmother.” He raised his chin and looked at her with a kind of contempt. “You live here, now. And you’re stained.” “Stained? What are you talking about?” “Women who couple in the field, like animals. They have a stain to them. No one wants them, after.”

So, she thought, there’s one young man who doesn’t think me stained. Or is it that I’m now ruined, as he is?

“I worry about what he’ll find, if he goes searching,” Jonas went on. “He wants a family, and there won’t be one. He was a—” Frowning, he searched for the right description. “He was a manufactured product,” he said at last. “We all were.”

they still talked in the village about the hand-woven cloth adorned with intricately patterned birds of all kinds in which she had wrapped the body of her father before his burial.

It was a very small village that had had its beginnings years before in a gathering of outcasts. Fleeing battles or chaos of all kinds, often wounded or driven out by their own clans or villages, each of the original settlers had made his way to this place. They had found strength in one another, had formed a community. They had welcomed others.

It had been Jonas, during his time as Leader, who had gently but firmly reminded the villagers that they had all been outsiders once. They had all come here for a new life. Eventually they had voted to remain what they had become: a sanctuary, a place of welcome.

He was buried beside his adopted son, Matty.

That day had changed him. It had changed the entire village. Shaken by the death of a boy they had loved, each person had found ways to be more worthy of the sacrifice he had made. They had become kinder, more careful, more attentive to one another. They had worked hard to eradicate customs that had begun to corrupt their society, banning even seemingly benign diversions such as a gaming machine, a simple gambling device that spit out candy to its winners.

Trademaster

Like Needful Things

But it’s another reason why you must study. You must make yourself ready. Someday you’ll be called upon for something special. Maybe something dangerous. So you have to prepare yourself, Gabe. You’ll need knowledge.”

In the end she decided that it was enough that she had found him. She would let him be. But she realized then the magnitude of the cruel exchange Trademaster had offered her.

Claire was very frightened of swift-moving water. She had reason to be. She had once lived beside a river, once beside a sea. Both had brought her heartbreak and loss. She did not want her son to be lost to water.

She knew it was a trade she would make again, given the chance.

She did not regret the trade she had made in order to find him. But she was desperately sad to realize that her time was short now.

seven years

Although Jonas had no awareness of who she had once been, that once she and he had been contemporaries in the same community, Claire remembered Jonas as a boy. He was too young for fatherhood then; nonetheless, it had been he who had saved a baby sentenced to die because the little one was eager, and curious, and lively. Because he didn’t sleep. He was—what was the word?—disruptive. Didn’t fit in. Jonas had risked his own life, sacrificed his future, to bring him here. She wondered if he worried about Gabe now, about the frailty of the little boat he was striving to build and the dangers he would face if somehow he launched it into the river.

She decided she would tell her story, her own history that she had kept so secret until now, to Jonas. Someday, after she was gone, if the time was ever right, when the boy was old enough and ready, he could pass it on to her son.

“I loved Einar,” she told him. “Do you wish you had stayed?” Jonas asked her after a moment. “No,” she said firmly. “But I wish it had not been Evil that brought me here.”

“That means a trade can be reversed,” Gabe said. Jonas nodded.