Butler, Octavia: Parable of the Sower

Mars is a rock— cold, empty, almost airless, dead.

Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who’ve made such a hell of life here on Earth.

MONDAY, AUGUST 12, 2024

Mrs. Sims shot herself today— or rather, she shot herself a few days ago, and Cory and Dad found her today. Cory went a little crazy for a while afterward.

Poor, sanctimonious, old Mrs. Sims. She used to sit in our front-room church every Sunday, large-print Bible in hand, and shout out her responses: “Yes, Lord!” “Hallelujah!” “Thank you, Jesus!” “Amen!”

During the rest of the week she sewed, made baskets, took care of her garden, sold what she could from it, took care of pre-school children, and talked about everyone who wasn’t as holy as she thought she was.

She was the only person I’ve ever known who lived alone. She had a whole big house to herself because she and the wife of her only son hated each other. Her son and his family were poor, but they wouldn’t live with her. Too bad.

Different people frightened her in some deep, hard, ugly way. She didn’t like the Hsu family because they were Chinese and Hispanic, and the older Chinese generation is still Buddhist. She’s lived a couple of doors up from them for longer than I’ve been alive, but they were still from Saturn as far as she was concerned.

“Idolaters,” she would call them if none of them were around. At least she cared enough about neighborly relations to do her talking about them behind their backs. They brought her peaches and figs and a length of good cotton cloth last month when she was robbed.

That robbery was Mrs. Sims’s first major tragedy.

Three men climbed over the neighborhood wall, cutting through the strands of barbed wire and Lazor wire on top. Lazor wire is terrible stuff. It’s so fine and sharp that it slices into the wings or feet of birds who either don’t see it or see it and try to settle on it.

People, though, can always find a way over, under, or through.

Everyone brought Mrs. Sims things after the robbery, in spite of the way she is. Was. Food, clothing, money… . We took up collections for her at church. The thieves had tied her up and left her-after one of them raped her. An old lady like that!

They grabbed all her food, her jewelry that had once belonged to her mother, her clothes, and worst of all, her supply of cash. It turns out she kept that— all of it— in a blue plastic mixing bowl high up in her kitchen cabinet. Poor, crazy old lady. She came to my father, crying and carrying on after the robbery because now she couldn’t buy the extra food she needed to supplement what she grew. She couldn’t pay her utility bills or her upcoming property taxes.

She would be thrown out of her house into the street! She would starve!

Dad told her over and over that the church would never let that happen, but she didn’t believe him.

She talked on and on about having to be a beggar now, while Dad and Cory tried to reassure her. The funny thing is, she didn’t like us either because Dad had gone and married “that Mexican woman Cory-ah-zan.” It just isn’t that hard to say “Corazon”

if that’s what you choose to call her. Most people just call her Cory or Mrs. Olamina.

Cory never let on that she was offended. She and Mrs. Sims were sugary sweet to one another. A little more hypocrisy to keep the peace.

Last week Mrs. Sims’s son, his five kids, his wife, her brother, and her brother’s three kids all died in a house fire— an arson fire. The son’s house had been in an unwalled area north and east of us, closer to the foothills. It wasn’t a bad area, but it was poor.

Naked. One night someone torched the house.

Maybe it was a vengeance fire set by some enemy of a family member or maybe some crazy just set it for fun. I’ve heard there’s a new illegal drug that makes people want to set fires.

Anyway, no one knows who did it to the Sims/Boyer families. No one saw anything, of course.

And no one got out of the house. Odd, that. Eleven people, and no one got out.

So about three days ago, Mrs. Sims shot herself.

Dad said he’d heard from the cops that it was about three days ago. That would have been just two days after she heard about her son’s death. Dad went to see her this morning because she missed church yesterday. Cory forced herself to go along because she thought she should. I wish she hadn’t. To me, dead bodies are disgusting. They stink, and if they’re old enough, there are maggots. But what the hell?

They’re dead. They aren’t suffering, and if you didn’t like them when they were alive, why get so upset about their being dead? Cory gets upset. She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.

I began writing this about Mrs. Sims because she killed herself. That’s what’s upset me. She believed, like Dad, that if you kill yourself, you go to hell and burn forever. She believed in a literal acceptance of everything in the Bible. Yet, when things got to be too much for her, she decided to trade pain now for eternal pain in the hereafter.

How could she do that?

Did she really believe in anything at all? Was it all hypocrisy?

Or maybe she just went crazy because her God was demanding too much of her. She was no Job. In real life, how many people are?

SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2024

I can’t get Mrs. Sims out of my mind. Somehow, she and her suicide have gotten tangled up with the astronaut and her death and her expulsion from heaven. I need to write about what I believe. I need to begin to put together the scattered verses that I’ve been writing about God since I was twelve. Most of them aren’t much good. They say what I need to say, but they don’t say it very well. A few are the way they should be. They press on me, too, like the two deaths. I try to hide in all the work there is to do here for the household, for my father’s church, and for the school Cory keeps to teach the neighborhood kids.

The truth is, I don’t care about any of those things, but they keep me busy and make me tired, and most of the time, I sleep without dreaming. And Dad beams when people tell him how smart and industrious I am.

I love him. He’s the best person I know, and I care what he thinks. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right-just the way it has to be. In the past year, it’s gone through twenty-five or thirty lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to:

God is Power—

Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

Indifferent.

And yet, God is Pliable—

Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is Change.

This is the literal truth.

God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to.

Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails.

But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.

That’s what I know. That’s some of it anyway. I’m not like Mrs. Sims. I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.