Parable of the Sower (12 page)

He still had the BB gun until Dad took it away from him and smashed it.

Keith wouldn’t say where he’d been or how he’d gotten the new things, so Dad beat him bloody.

I’ve only seen Dad like that once before—when I was 12. Cory tried to stop him, tried to pull him off Keith, screamed at him in English, then in Spanish, then without words.

Gregory threw up on the floor, and Bennett started to cry. Marcus backed away from the whole scene, and slipped out of the house.

Then it was over.

Keith was crying like a two-year-old and Cory was holding him. Dad stood over both of them, looking dazed.

I followed Marcus out the back door and stumbled and almost fell down the back steps. I didn’t know what I was doing. Marcus wasn’t around. I sat on the steps in the warm darkness and let my body shake and hurt and vomit in helpless empathy with Keith. Then I guess I passed out.

I came to sometime later with Marcus shaking me and whispering my name.

I got up with Marcus hanging on to my arm, trying to steady me, and I got to my bedroom.

“Let me sleep in here,” he whispered once I was sitting on my bed, dazed and still in pain. “I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t care.”

“All right,” I said, not caring where he slept. I lay down on the bed without taking off even my shoes, and drew my body into a fetal ball on top of the bedclothes. I either fell asleep that way or I passed out again.

S
ATURDAY
, O
CTOBER
25, 2025

Keith has gone outside again. He went yesterday afternoon. Cory didn’t admit until tonight that he took not only her key this time, but her gun. He took the Smith & Wesson.

Dad refused to go out and look for him. Dad slept in his office last night. He’s sleeping there again tonight.

I never liked my brother much. I hate him now for what he’s doing to the family—for what he’s doing to my father. I hate him. Damn, I hate him.

M
ONDAY
, N
OVEMBER
3, 2025

Keith came home tonight while Dad was visiting over at the Talcott house. I suspect that Keith hung around and watched the house and waited until Dad left. He had come to see Cory. He brought her a lot of money done up in a fat roll.

She stared at it, then took it, dazed. “So much, Keith,” she whispered. “Where did you get it?”

“It’s for you,” he said. “All for you, not him.”

He took her hand and closed it around the money—and she let him do it, though she had to know it must be stolen money or drug money or worse.

Keith gave Bennett and Gregory big, expensive bars of milk chocolate with peanuts. He just smiled at Marcus and me—an obvious “fuck you” smile. Then, before Dad could come home and find him here, he left again. Cory hadn’t realized that he was leaving again, and she all but screamed and clung to him.

“No! You’ll be killed out there! What’s the matter with you? Stay home!”

“Mama, I won’t let him beat me again,” he said. “I don’t need him hitting me and telling me what to do. Pretty soon, I’ll be able to make more money in a day than he can in a week—maybe in a month.”

“You’ll be killed!”

“No I won’t. I know what I’m doing.” He kissed her, then, with surprising ease, took her arms from around him. “I’ll come back and see you,” he said. “I’ll bring you presents.”

And he vanished out the back door, and was gone.

❏ ❏ ❏

C
IVILIZATION IS TO GROUPS
what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

❏ ❏ ❏

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

T
HURSDAY
, J
UNE
25, 2026

K
EITH CAME HOME YESTERDAY
, bigger than ever, as tall and lean as Dad is tall and broad. He’s not quite 14, but he already looks like the man he wants so much to be. We’re like that, we Olaminas—tall, sturdy, fast growing people. Except for Gregory who is only nine, we all tower over Cory. I’m still the tallest, but my height seems to annoy her these days. She loves Keith’s size, though—her big son. She just hates the fact that he doesn’t live with us anymore.

“I got a room,” he said to me yesterday. We talked, he and I. Cory was with Dorotea Cruz who is one of her best friends and who had just had another baby. The other boys were playing in the street and on the island. Dad had gone to the college, and would be gone overnight. Now, more than ever, it’s safest to go out just at dawn, and not to try coming home until just at dawn the next morning. That’s if you have to go outside at all, which Dad does about once a week. The worst parasites still prowl at night and sleep late into the morning. Yet Keith lives outside.

“I got a room in a building with some other people,” he said. Translation: He and his friends were squatting in an abandoned building. Who were his friends? A gang? A flock of prostitutes? A bunch of
astronauts,
flying high on drugs? A den of thieves? All of the above? Whenever he came to see us he brought money to Cory and little gifts to Bennett and Gregory.

How could he get money? There’s no honest way.

“Do your friends know how old you are?” I asked.

He grinned. “Hell, no. Why should I tell them that?”

I nodded. “It does help to look older sometimes.”

“You want something to eat?”

“You going to cook for me?”

“I’ve cooked for you hundreds of times. Thousands.”

“I know. But you always had to before.”

“Don’t be stupid. You think I couldn’t act the way you did: Skip out on my responsibilities if I felt like it? I don’t feel like it. You want to eat or not?”

“Sure.”

I made rabbit stew and acorn bread—enough for Cory and all the boys when they came in. He hung around and watched me work for a while, then began to talk to me. He’s never done that before. We’ve never, never liked each other, he and I. But he had information I wanted, and he seemed to want to talk. I must have been the safest person he could talk to. He wasn’t afraid of shocking me. He didn’t much care what I thought. And he wasn’t afraid I’d tell Dad or Cory anything he said. Of course, I wouldn’t. Why cause them pain? I’ve never been much for tattling on people, anyway.

“It’s just a nasty old building on the outside,” he was saying of his new home. “You wouldn’t believe how great it looks once you go in, though.”

“Whorehouse or spaceship?” I asked.

“It’s got stuff like you never saw,” he evaded. “TV windows you go through instead of just sitting and looking at. Headsets, belts, and touchrings…you see and feel everything, do anything. Anything! There’s places and things you can get into with that equipment that are insane! You don’t ever have to go into the street except to get food.”

“And whoever owns this stuff took you in?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

He looked at me for a long time, then started to laugh. “Because I can read and write,” he said at last. “And none of them can. They’re all older than me, but not one of them can read or write anything. They stole all this great stuff and they couldn’t even use it. Before I got there they even broke some of it because they couldn’t read the instructions.”

Cory and I had had a hell of a struggle, teaching him to read and write. He had been bored, impatient, anything but eager.

“So you read for a living—help your new friends learn to use their stolen equipment,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“And what else?”

“Nothin’ else.”

What a piss-poor liar he is. Always was. He’s got no conscience. He just isn’t smart enough to tell convincing lies. “Drugs, Keith?” I asked. “Prostitution? Robbery?”

“I said nothing else! You always think you know everything.”

I sighed. “You’re not done causing Dad and Cory pain are you? Not by a long shot.”

He looked as though he wanted to shout back at me or hit me. He might have done one or the other if I hadn’t mentioned Cory.

“I don’t give a shit about him,” he said, his voice low and ugly. He had a man’s voice already. He had everything but a man’s brain. “I do more for her than he does. I bring her money and nice things. And my friends…my friends know she lives here, and they let this place alone. He’s nothing!”

I turned and looked at him and saw my father’s face, lighter-skinned, younger, thinner, but my father’s face, unmistakable. “He’s you,” I whispered. “Every time I look at you, I see him. Every time you look at him, you see yourself.”

“Dogshit!”

I shrugged.

It was a long time before he spoke again. At last he said, “Did he ever hit you?”

“Not for about five years.”

“Why’d he hit you—back then?”

I thought about that, and decided to tell him. He was old enough. “He caught me and Rubin Quintanilla in the bushes together.”

Keith shouted with abrupt laughter. “You and Rubin? Really? You were doing it with him? You’re kidding.”

“We were twelve. What the hell.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get pregnant.”

“I know. Twelve can be a dumb age.”

He looked away. “Bet he didn’t beat you as bad as he beat me!”

“He sent you boys over to play with the Talcotts.” I gave him a glass of cold orange juice and poured one for myself.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“You were nine,” I said. “Nobody was going to tell you what was going on. As I remember, I told you I fell down the back steps.”

He frowned, perhaps remembering. My face had been memorable. Dad hadn’t beaten me as badly as he beat Keith, but I looked worse. He should remember that.

“He ever beat up Mama?”

I shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen any sign of it. I don’t think he would. He loves her, you know. He really does.”

“Bastard!”

“He’s our father, and he’s the best man I know.”

“Did you think that when he beat you?”

“No. But later when I figured out how stupid I’d been, I was just glad he was so strict. And back when it happened, I was just glad he didn’t quite kill me.”

He laughed again—twice in just a few minutes, and both times at things I’d said. Maybe he was ready to open up a little now.

“Tell me about the outside,” I said. “How do you live out there?”

He drained the last of his second glass of juice. “I told you. I live real good out there.”

“But how did you live when you first went out—when you went to stay.”

He looked at me and smiled. He smiled like that years ago when he used red ink to trick me into bleeding in empathy with a wound he didn’t have. I remember that particular nasty smile.

“You want to go out yourself, don’t you?” he demanded.

“Someday.”

“What, instead of marrying Curtis and having a bunch of babies?”

“Yeah. Instead of that.”

“I wondered why you were being so nice to me.”

The food smelled just about ready, so I got up and took the bread from the oven and bowls from the cupboard. I was tempted to tell him to dish up his own stew, but I knew he would spoon all the meat out of the stew and leave nothing but potatoes and vegetables for the rest of us. So I served him and myself, covered the pot, left it on the lowest possible fire, and put a towel over the bread.

I let him eat in peace for a while, though I thought the boys would be coming in any time now, starving.

Then I was afraid to wait any longer. “Talk to me, Keith,” I said. “I really want to know. How did you survive when you first went out there.”

His smile this time was less evil. Maybe the food had mellowed him. “Slept in a cardboard box for three days and stole food,” he said. “I don’t know why I kept going back to that box. Could have slept in any old corner. Some kids carry a piece of cardboard to sleep on—so they won’t be right down on the ground, you know.

“Then I got a sleepsack from an old man. It was new, like he never used it. Then I—”

“You stole it?”

He gave me a look of scorn. “What you think I was going to do? I didn’t have no money. Just had that gun—Mama’s .38.”

Yes. He had brought it back to her three visits ago, along with two boxes of ammunition. Of course he never said how he got the ammunition—or how he got his replacement gun—a Heckler & Koch nine millimeter just like Dad’s. He just showed up with things and claimed that if you had the money, you could buy anything outside. He had never admitted how he got the money.

“Okay,” I said. “So you stole a sleepsack. And you kept stealing food? It’s a wonder you didn’t get caught.”

“The old guy had some money. I used it to buy food. Then I started walking toward L.A.”

That old dream of his. For reasons that make sense to him alone, he’s always wanted to go to L.A. Any sane person would be thankful for the twenty miles that separate us from that oozing sore.

“There’s people all over the freeway coming away from LA.,” he said. “There’s even people walking up from way down in San Diego. They don’t know where they’re going. I talked to this guy, he said he was going to Alaska. Goddamn. Alaska!”