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When the heat buds in the first sunrise it will bloom at midday, and that means your feet are going to burn even through the cloth, but you can’t get relief until night falls and cools the harvest again, so if you go out you have to bear it. You’ve been eaten up by the dunes before. Wine-drunk salesmen chanting Beru, Beru, take me with you, Beru, Beru, and your sister, too look kinder in the spaceport than when they make good on their promise and take you out into the night. The moons’ light kissed your skin more gently then, it was almost a solace, even when morning crowned over the sand and you had to trek back alone with your sister while fire licked the back of your necks. The old shopkeeper took one look at Paaivi that day and said she wasn’t right in the head no more, and that’s why girls like you shouldn’t run around with them lot that pass through Mos Espa, because don’t you see the way they pass through. Though you’re still right enough in the head for him, and he gives you a dash more milk than he rings you up for and lends you a pair of cowls for you girls’ necks. And he was right, Paaivi wasn’t right in the head no more after that, but you never knew if it was the men or the wine or the shopkeeper, just that the dunes tried to eat you both but it was only you who climbed out of them.
These dunes surround you now, far enough, because a moisture farmer starves in company. They sing, some nights, and then one night they bring the boy to you out of the depths, and that traveller turns and leaves again and you wonder if he knows the coolness of the night out there enough to brave it, if Paaivi could’ve known better either. And your husband looks at you and the babe and you know that this boy must be a nobody.
The baby is a shock to them all, a witchy shock, like that witchy boy who won the Boonta Eve Classic those years ago, do you remember him? The slave boy? So you stutter your excuses while you have Owen let slip that the boy is Paaivi’s, a bastard child surrendered to you before she walked into the dunes forever. Awful enough to believe, a better story than her quiet withering away, and so you have it that your sister died for this boy to live.
And Luke hates the trap of it all, looks to the sky like Paaivi looked to the yellow sea in the later years, and you wonder if you can give something to him, like you couldn’t give to her.
You want to put him in school. Owen refuses. It’s not about the money, and you tell him as much, tell him that you know the little that his father left will get the farm through the dry season without interest this once, so you know you can afford it, the dinky one in town. You say that it’s no life to live, never leaving the farm. He says Luke won’t have a life to live if you aren’t careful. You sleep in Luke’s room that night. In the morning, in the kitchen, you find him cooking Shmi Skywalker’s root stew and he finds the night’s harvest already collected downstairs.
Luke learns he is Luke Lars outside of the homestead, in the classroom. He has friends he knocks about with and they call him Wormie and you try not to frown at it. Lars is not a slave name like Skywalker or Whitesun or Darklighter. Luke learns this, too. He learns is the first freeborn of the Skywalkers, but he mustn’t say it. Luke Lars has hair bleached blond by the binary suns, the shades of the dune sea in his mouth and skin and crown. You look at him and squint to see his father if he’d never left Mos Espa, but you only knew the man once, so the contours of that face blur with his mother’s. You look at Luke and squint to see your sister if she’d never left the port. With wide eyes, you see him beg to leave.
There’s no thrill in farm work, he says, watching his friends leave him in the dust for the academy. But the boys that go first are the ones with some family stake in the Hutts’ trade, debts of flesh and blood money. Sometimes they come back to talk deals with Jabba. The next ones that go, the ones that Luke longs after, are the Darklighters and Banais and Fardreamers and Sandskimmers and then the ones with no names begin to run there the moment their bodies are rid of explosives, sometimes before. The academy is the way out, he murmurs to you, so his Uncle can’t hear, when he lugs in the harvest. You almost begin to believe him. Shmi Skywalker used to talk of a little boy who got away, got to fly away on a spaceship to places where things would be better. Shmi Skywalker used to swallow the phlegm in her mouth because she could not recall a time when moisture was not worth more than the every pure mineral in the galaxy. Shmi Skywalker is dead, and so is the son whose thirst was quenched for every dry cough she endured. So you almost begin to believe that there really is nothing for Luke on Tatooine but sucking condensation from cloth and ill-advised joyrides in the desert, teasing death just because it’s one of the few friends still left back home.
Shmi seemed to know, as the years got on, that her ‘something better’ was going to end. You never said it, but there’d been a recollection, an echo, of the woman, fever-mad, who murmured to you in the night about dying in the cold and the dark. You still bought your milk from Old Man Thiff, and he may’ve been halfway right again, because he saw Shmi and told you it’s the dead babes, it gets to them. Paaivi had already been half gone when she’d delivered a corpse, but sometimes you think maybe she already knew there was a dead thing inside her, like how Shmi seemed to have known her little boy might well be a dead-thing if he stayed on this dead-planet. You seldom left her side for those four days as she sweat out half the harvest, growing mad when she saw her body’s betrayal, coming to life only in fits and starts. Ani, you will not die here with me. Ani, baby, we can’t afford tears. He mustn’t die in this place, Master Jedi. And over and over: I must see Ani before I die. Ani, please, it is my hour. Her stilted words took on a sharper accent until they were interrupted by a dialect of Huttese no-one around you could parse. Your sister and your lover’s stepmother both believed they would die, and you were there, and you could not change it— until one day Shmi returned to consciousness with her wry dry smile, and you only ever heard her speak Basic, until one day, she vanished.
When her son came you thought you were seeing a dead man. You believed the Mad were mad because they straddled this life and its end, but here you were, face to face with a living dead man, from Tatooine and Coruscant both, almost sane as he touched the life-planet and death-planet. But when he left he may well have been dead, anyway. You bury your sister two years or so after you do your mother-in-law, and you don’t tell anyone, as though you are keeping her alive, in limbo, like you are Mad, too. Thiff gets older and the dead things were gonna come for him too, he said. You hoped he died quick. Cleigg died quick. You told Owen I think I’ve watched too many people die slow, but then you watch Cleigg die slow anyways when the boy comes and you decide to let the sands bury the gravestones for good. You watch Ben Kenobi live only for the hope of teaching the boy, your nephew, your son, and think you are going to watch this strange old wizard die slow. You hope Anakin knew nothing when he went, and, in the dark, you hope he’s still straddling life and death just for the sake of sweet Luke.
Luke will not die slow. You feel the Empire grasping for Tatooine and you do not think we will all die slow. You know Luke must get out of this warm death. You burn, and maybe you were always going to burn, and your second to last thought is of Luke lost out there, but your very last one is this:
Give him this quick death.
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