Chapter Three--The Past is Another Country
Owen's childhood had been overshadowed by the central event in his parent's lives; the loss of his older brother Ben at the age of six months. Not that Ben had died, of course. Sometimes, Owen wondered if it wouldn't have been easier on the family if he had. Instead, two Jedi had appeared on the farm one morning and instructed the Kenobis that Ben was a Jedi candidate, and as such was forfeit to the Order by galactic law. Owen heard the story from his mother many times, but the telling of it did little assuage her bitterness. The Jedi had been scrupulous, as was their wont. The Kenobis were given a written list of exemptions, none of which applied to Ben, and the Jedi made off with their prize before the stunned parents had time to react.
It had been a very long time before his parents had another child.
Eventually, they saved enough money for a legal opinion of their chances of losing a second child to the Jedi. They were assured that the second child exemption would protect them, and Owen had been born.
Yet, like a bad dream, the Jedi reappeared when Owen turned six months old.
His mother had exploded. "Why are you here?" she cried. Accordingly to what Owen heard later, the two Knights on her doorstep coolly explained that Ben had proved a gifted candidate. Therefore, they wanted to check on Owen's abilities. "But you can't take him anyway!" his mother exclaimed. "We have the second child exemption!" That's when the Jedi informed her, uneasily, that they could apply for an override the exemption should the prospective candidate prove gifted enough. It did not occur to Owen's mother to question this assertion; she did not answer them at all. She had slammed the door of the homestead and locked it. Owen's father had returned home from servicing the vaporators to discover the Jedi on his doorstep, vainly trying to open the barricaded door and persuade his hysterical wife not to kill herself and their son.
The Jedi backed off, nervously telling the Kenobis that they obviously had a 'medical' exemption. Owen's father suggested to them that their immediate absence would be appreciated. They took the hint.
But they left chaos behind them. Owen's mother refused to have any further children. Owen was raised alone, unusual on Tatooine, where very large families were the norm. It enforced the Kenobi's poverty: their farm suffered from a shortage of labor. It made Owen's parents anxious, over-protective and suspicious.
If Owen chaffed at the isolated and lonely life he led, the problem resolved itself in a tragic way. The year he turned fifteen, macule fever ravaged the Rim Worlds. By reason of its scattered population, Tatooine felt reasonably secure against this plague. But it proved adaptable and had spread by means of Tatooine's abundant rodent population.
First his father sickened and died. His mother had followed within a few days. Owen caught the fever but didn't die of it. The med-droids had congratulated him on his survival, but he scarcely felt like celebrating the event.
The question of what to do with him then came up. The farm was just workable with two adults and one adolescent. But one person alone could not keep everything running. The homestead that his parents had laboured so hard over was then abandoned to the dunes and the Tatooinian authorities had contacted Ben.
And so the fabled brother of his mother's stories came to fetch the sibling he had never even met. Owen's first real sight of his much-talked-of elder brother was in the quarantine hospital in Tatooine. He was still recovering from the fever that had killed his parents; and even he knew that he was a miserable-looking object-a tall, clumsy, gauche adolescent, half-sick and wholly wretched. Ben had appeared to him to be a god-like being from another planet. This handsome, urbane young man had looked at the only surviving member of his family, and his face had fallen. Another minute, and he recovered himself, and he comforted the desolate Owen; but Owen ever after remembered the flash of what he had taken to be disappointment that had crossed his face that day. He had been mortified, but he felt the justice of Ben's reaction. It was not for many years that he learned the true reason for Ben's recoil from him that day.