Messenger - Lois Lowry [7]
Outside, it was twilight. Matty adjusted the wick on an oil lamp and lighted it. "You know," he remarked, "when you win a candy, a bell rings and colored lights blink. Of course that wouldn't matter to you," he added, "but some of us would really appreciate—"
"Matty, Matty, Matty," the blind man said. "Keep an eye on that fish. It cooks quickly. No bell rings when it's done.
"And don't forget," he added, "that they traded for that Gaming Machine. It probably came at a high cost."
Matty frowned. "Sometimes you get licorice," he said as a last attempt.
"Do you know what they traded? Has Ramon told you?"
"No. Nobody ever tells."
"Maybe he doesn't even know. Maybe his parents didn't tell him. That's probably good."
Matty took the pan from the stove and slid the browned fish onto two plates, one after the other. He placed them on the table and brought the salad bowl from the sink. "It's ready," he said.
The blind man went to the bread container and found two thick pieces of bread that smelled fresh-baked. "I got this at the marketplace this morning," he said, "from Mentor's daughter. She'll make someone a good wife. Is she as pretty as her voice makes her sound?"
But Matty was not going to be diverted by reminders of the schoolteacher's pretty daughter. "When's the next Trade Mart?" he asked, when they were both seated.
"You're too young."
"I heard that there was one coming soon."
"Pay no attention to what you hear. You're too young."
"I won't be always. I ought to watch."
The blind man shook his head. "It would be painful," he said. "Eat your fish now, Matty, while it's warm."
Matty poked at the salmon with his fork. He could tell that there was to be no more discussion of trading. The blind man had never traded, not one single time, and was proud of it. But Matty thought that someday he himself would. Maybe not for a Gaming Machine. But there were other things that Matty wanted. He ought to be allowed to know how the trading worked.
He decided he would find out. But first he had the other thing to worry about, and the troubling awareness that he had not dared to tell the blind man of it.
***
There were no secrets in Village. It was one of the rules that Leader had proposed, and all of the people had voted in favor of it. Everyone who had come to Village from elsewhere, all of those who had not been born here, had come from places with secrets. Sometimes—not very often, for inevitably it caused sadness—people described their places of origin: places with cruel governments, harsh punishments, desperate poverty, or false comforts.
There were so many such places. Sometimes, hearing the stories, remembering his own childhood, Matty was astounded. At first, having found his way to Village, he had thought his own brutal beginnings—a fatherless hovel for a home; a grim, defeated mother who beat him and his brother bloody—were unusual. But now he knew that there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge.
He believed in Leader, and in Leader's insistence that all of Village's citizens, even the children, read, learn, participate, and care for one another. So Matty studied and did his best.
But sometimes he slipped back into the habits of his earlier life, when he had been a sly and deceitful boy in order to survive.
"I can't help it," he had argued glumly to the blind man, in the beginning of their life together, when he had been caught in some small transgression. "It's what I learnt."
"Learned." The correction was gentle.
"Learned," Matty had repeated.
"Now you are relearning. You are learning honesty. I'm sorry to punish you, Matty, but Village is a population of honest and decent people, and I want you to be one of us."
Matty had hung his head. "So you'll beat me?"
"No, your punishment will be no