Parable of the Sower (6 page)

“The same one,” I said, managing to straighten up. “It wasn’t dead. We saw it moving.”

“I put three bullets into it,” he said.

“It was moving, Reverend Olamina,” Joanne insisted. “It was suffering. If Lauren hadn’t shot it, someone else would have had to.”

Dad sighed. “Well, it isn’t suffering now. Let’s get out of here.” Then he seemed to realize what Joanne had said. He looked at me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. I don’t know how I looked. No one was reacting to me as though I looked odd, so I must not have shown much of what I had gone through. I think only Harry Baiter, Curtis Talcott, and Joanne had seen me shoot the dog. I looked at them and Curtis grinned at me. He leaned against his bike and in a slow, lazy motion, he drew an imaginary gun, took careful aim at the dead dog, and fired an imaginary shot.

“Pow,” he said. “Just like she does stuff like that every day Pow!”

“Let’s go.” My father said.

We began walking up the path again. We left the canyon and made our way down to the street. There were no more dogs.

I walked, then rode in a daze, still not quite free of the dog I had killed. I had felt it die, and yet I had not died. I had felt its pain as though it were a human being. I had felt its life flare and go out, and I was still alive.

Pow.

❏ ❏ ❏

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

S
UNDAY
, M
ARCH
2, 2025

I
T
’
S RAINING
.

We heard last night on the radio that there was a storm sweeping in from the Pacific, but most people didn’t believe it. “We’ll have wind,” Cory said. “Wind and maybe a few drops of rain, or maybe just a little cool weather. That would be welcome. It’s all we’ll get.”

That’s all there has been for six years. I can remember the rain six years ago, water swirling around the back porch, not high enough to come into the house, but high enough to attract my brothers who wanted to play in it. Cory, forever worried about infection, wouldn’t let them. She said they’d be splashing around in a soup of all the waste-water germs we’d been watering our gardens with for years. Maybe she was right, but kids all over the neighborhood covered themselves with mud and earthworms that day, and nothing terrible happened to them.

But that storm was almost tropical—a quick, hard, warm, September rain, the edge of a hurricane that hit Mexico’s Pacific coast. This is a colder, winter storm. It began this morning as people were coming to church.

In the choir we sang rousing old hymns accompanied by Cory’s piano playing and lightning and thunder from outside. It was wonderful. Some people missed part of the sermon, though, because they went home to put out all the barrels, buckets, tubs, and pots they could find to catch the free water. Other went home to put pots and buckets inside where there were leaks in the roof.

I can’t remember when any of us have had a roof repaired by a professional. We all have Spanish tile roofs, and that’s good. A tile roof is, I suspect, more secure and lasting than wood or asphalt shingles. But time, wind, and earthquakes have taken a toll. Tree limbs have done some damage, too. Yet no one has extra money for anything as nonessential as roof repair. At best, some of the neighborhood men go up with whatever materials they can scavenge and create makeshift patches. No one’s even done that for a while. If it only rains once every six or seven years, why bother?

Our roof is all right so far, and the barrels and things we put out after services this morning are full or filling. Good, clean, free water from the sky. If only it came more often.

M
ONDAY
, M
ARCH
3, 2025

Still raining.

No thunder today, though there was some last night. Steady drizzle, and occasional, heavy showers all day. All day. So different and beautiful. I’ve never felt so overwhelmed by water. I went out and walked in the rain until I was soaked. Cory didn’t want me to, but I did it anyway. It was so wonderful. How can she not understand that? It was so incredible and wonderful.

T
UESDAY
, M
ARCH
4, 2025

Amy Dunn is dead.

Three years old, unloved, and dead. That doesn’t seem reasonable or even possible. She could read simple words and count to thirty. I taught her. She so much loved getting attention that she stuck to me during school hours and drove me crazy. Didn’t want me to go to the bathroom without her.

Dead.

I had gotten to like her, even though she was a pest.

Today I walked her home after class. I had gotten into the habit of walking her home because the Dunns wouldn’t send anyone for her.

“She knows the way,” Christmas said. “Just send her over. She’ll get here all right.”

I didn’t doubt that she could have. She could look across the street, and across the center island, and see her house from ours, but Amy had a tendency to wander. Sent home alone, she might get there or she might wind up in the Montoya garden, grazing, or in the Moss rabbit house, trying to let the rabbits out. So I walked her across, glad for an excuse to get out in the rain again. Amy loved it, too, and we lingered for a moment under the big avocado tree on the island. There was a navel orange tree at the back end of the island, and I picked a pair of ripe oranges—one for Amy and one for me. I peeled both of them, and we ate them while the rain plastered Amy’s scant colorless hair against her head and made her look bald.

I took her to her door and left her in the care of her mother.

“You didn’t have to get her so wet,” Tracy complained.

“Might as well enjoy the rain while it lasts,” I said, and I left them.

I saw Tracy take Amy into the house and shut the door. Yet somehow Amy wound up outside again, wound up near the front gate, just opposite the Garfield/Balter/Dory house. Jay Garfield found her there when he came out to investigate what he thought was another bundle that someone had thrown over the gate. People toss us things sometimes—gifts of envy and hate: A maggoty, dead animal, a bag of shit, even an occasional severed human limb or a dead child. Dead adults have been left lying just beyond our wall. But these were all outsiders. Amy was one of us.

Someone shot Amy right through the metal gate. It had to be an accidental hit because you can’t see through our gate from the outside. The shooter either fired at someone who was in front of the gate or fired at the gate itself, at the neighborhood, at us and our supposed wealth and privilege. Most bullets wouldn’t have gotten through the gate. It’s supposed to be bulletproof. But it’s been penetrated a couple of times before, high up, near the top. Now we have six new bullet holes in the lower portion—six holes and a seventh dent, a long, smooth gauge where a bullet had glanced off without breaking through.

We hear so much gunfire, day and night, single shots and odd bursts of automatic weapons fire, even occasional blasts from heavy artillery or explosions from grenades or bigger bombs. We worry most about those last things, but they’re rare. It’s harder to steal big weapons, and not many people around here can afford to buy the illegal ones—or that’s what Dad says. The thing is, we hear gunfire so much that we don’t hear it. A couple of the Baiter kids said they heard shooting, but as usual, they paid no attention to it. It was outside, beyond the wall, after all. Most of us heard nothing except the rain.

Amy was going to turn four in a couple of weeks. I had planned to give her a little party with my kindergartners.

God, I hate this place.

I mean, I love it. It’s home. These are my people. But I hate it. It’s like an island surrounded by sharks—except that sharks don’t bother you unless you go in the water. But our land sharks are on their way in. It’s just a matter of how long it takes for them to get hungry enough.

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
5, 2025

I walked in the rain again this morning. It was cold, but good. Amy has already been cremated. I wonder if her mother is relieved. She doesn’t look relieved. She never liked Amy, but now she cries. I don’t think she’s faking. The family has spent money it could not afford to get the police involved to try to find the killer. I suspect that the only good this will do will be to chase away the people who live on the sidewalks and streets nearest to our wall. Is that good? The street poor will be back, and they won’t love us for sicking the cops on them. It’s illegal to camp out on the street the way they do—the way they must—so the cops knock them around, rob them if they have anything worth stealing, then order them away or jail them. The miserable will be made even more miserable. None of that can help Amy. I suppose, though, that it will make the Dunns feel better about the way they treated her.

On Saturday, Dad will preach Amy’s funeral. I wish I didn’t have to be there. Funerals have never bothered me before, but this one does.

“You cared about Amy,” Joanne Garfield said to me when I complained to her. We had lunch together today. We ate in my bedroom because it’s still raining off and on, and the rest of the house was full of all the kids who hadn’t gone home to eat lunch. But my room is still mine. It’s the one place in the world where I can go and not be followed by anyone I don’t invite in. I’m the only person I know who has a bedroom to herself. These days, even Dad and Cory knock before they open my door. That’s one of the best things about being the only daughter in the family. I have to kick my brothers out of here all the time, but at least I can kick them out. Joanne is an only child, but she shares a room with three younger girl cousins—whiny Lisa, always demanding and complaining; smart, giggly Robin with her near-genius I.Q.; and invisible Jessica who whispers and stares at her feet and cries if you give her a dirty look. All three are Baiters—Harry’s sisters and the children of Joanne’s mother’s sister. The two adult sisters, their husbands, their eight children, and their parents Mr. and Mrs. Dory are all squeezed into one five-bedroom house. It isn’t the most crowded house in the neighborhood, but I’m glad I don’t have to live like that.

“Almost no one cared about Amy,” Joanne said. “But you did.”

“After the fire, I did,” I said. “I got scared for her then. Before that, I ignored her like everyone else.”

“So now you’re feeling guilty?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are.”

I looked at her, surprised. “I mean it. No. I hate that she’s dead, and I miss her, but I didn’t cause her death. I just can’t deny what all this says about us.”

“What?”

I felt on the verge of talking to her about things I hadn’t talked about before. I’d written about them. Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about.

But Joanne is a friend. She knows me better than most people, and she has a brain. Why not talk to her? Sooner or later, I have to talk to someone.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. She had opened a plastic container of bean salad. Now she put it down on my night table.

“Don’t you ever wonder if maybe Amy and Mrs. Sims are the lucky ones?” I asked. “I mean, don’t you ever wonder what’s going to happen to the rest of us?”

There was a clap of dull, muffled thunder, and a sudden heavy shower. Radio weather reports say today’s rain will be the last of the four-day series of storms. I hope not.

“Sure I think about it,” Joanne said. “With people shooting little kids, how can I not think about it?”

“People have been killing little kids since there’ve been people,” I said.

“Not in here, they haven’t. Not until now.”

“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it. We got a wake-up call. Another one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Amy was the first of us to be killed like that. She won’t be the last.”

Joanne sighed, and there was a little shudder in the sigh. “So you think so, too.”

“I do. But I didn’t know you thought about it at all.”

“Rape, robbery, and now murder. Of course I think about it. Everyone thinks about it. Everyone worries. I wish I could get out of here.”

“Where would you go?”

“That’s it, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to go.”

“There might be.”

“Not if you don’t have money. Not if all you know how to do is take care of babies and cook.”

I shook my head. “You know much more than that.”

“Maybe, but none of it matters. I won’t be able to afford college. I won’t be able to get a job or move out of my parents’ house because no job I could get would support me and there are no safe places to move. Hell, my parents are still living with their parents.”

“I know,” I said. “And as bad as that is, there’s more.”

“Who needs more? That’s enough!” She began to eat the bean salad. It looked good, but I thought I might be about to ruin it for her.

“There’s cholera spreading in southern Mississippi and Louisiana,” I said. “I heard about it on the radio yesterday. There are too many poor people—illiterate, jobless, homeless, without decent sanitation or clean water. They have plenty of water down there, but a lot of it is polluted. And you know that drug that makes people want to set fires?”

She nodded, chewing.

“It’s spreading again. It was on the east coast. Now it’s in Chicago. The reports say that it makes watching a fire better than sex. I don’t know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it.” I drew a deep breath. “Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people. Measles!”

“I heard about the measles,” Joanne said. “Strange. Even if people can’t afford immunizations, measles shouldn’t kill.”

“Those people are half dead already,” I told her. “They’ve come through the winter cold, hungry, already sick with other diseases. And, no, of course they can’t afford immunizations. We’re lucky our parents found the money to pay for all our immunizations. If we have kids, I don’t see how we’ll be able to do even that for them.”