Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2025

Joanne told.

She told her mother who told her father who told my father who had one of those serious talks with me.

Damn her. Damn her!

I saw her today at the service we had for Amy and yesterday at school. She didn’t say a word about what she had done. It turns out she told her mother on Thursday. Maybe it was supposed to be a secret between them or something. But, oh, Phillida Garfield was so concerned for me, so worried. And she didn’t like my scaring Joanne. Was Joanne scared? Not scared enough to use her brain, it seems. Joanne always seemed so sensible. Did she think getting me into trouble would make the danger go away? No, that’s not it. This is just more denial: A dumb little game of “If we don’t talk about bad things, maybe they won’t happen.” Idiot! I’ll never be able to tell her anything important again.

What if I’d been more open. What if I’d talked religion with her? I’d

wanted to. How will I ever be able to talk to anyone about that?

What I did say worked its way back to me tonight. Mr. Garfield talked to Dad after the funeral. It was like the whispering game that little kids play. The message went all the way from, “We’re in danger here and we’re going to have to work hard to save ourselves,” to “Lauren is talking about running away because she’s afraid that outsiders are going to riot and tear down the walls and kill us all.”

Well, I had said some of that, and Joanne had made it clear that she didn’t

agree with me. But I hadn’t just let the bad predictions stand alone: “We’re going to die, boo-hoo.” What would be the point of that? Still, only the negative stuff came home to me.

“Lauren, what did you say to Joanne?” my father demanded. He came to my room after dinner when he should have been doing his final work on tomorrow’s sermon. He sat down on my one chair and stared at me in a way that meant, “Where is your mind, girl? What’s the matter with you?” That look plus Joanne’s name told me what had happened, what this was about. My friend Joanne. Damn her!

I sat on my bed and looked back at him. “I told her we were in for some bad, dangerous times,” I said. “I warned her we ought to learn what we could now so we could survive.”

That was when he told me how upset Joanne’s mother was, how upset Joanne was, and how they both thought I needed to “talk to someone,” because I thought our world was coming to an end.

“Do you think our world is coming to an end?” Dad asked, and with no warning at all, I almost started crying. I had all I could do to hold it back. What I thought was, “No, I think your world is coming to an end, and maybe you with it.” That was terrible. I hadn’t thought about it in such a personal way before. I turned and looked out a window until I felt calmer. When I faced him again, I said. “Yes. Don’t you?”

He frowned. I don’t think he expected me to say that. “You’re fifteen,” he said. “You don’t really understand what’s going on here. The problems we have now have been building since long before you were born.”

“I know.”

He was still frowning. I wondered what he wanted me to say. “What were you doing, then?” he asked. “Why did you say those things to Joanne?”

I decided to go on telling the truth for as long as I could. I hate to lie to him. “What I said was true,” I insisted.

“You don’t have to say everything you think you know,” he said. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Joanne and I were friends,” I said. “I thought I could talk to her.”

He shook his head. “These things frighten people. It’s best not to talk about them.”

“But, Dad, that’s like…like ignoring a fire in the living room because we’re all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.”

“Don’t warn Joanne or any of your other friends,” he said. “Not now. I know you think you’re right, but you’re not doing anyone any good. You’re just panicking people.”

I managed to suppress a surge of anger by shifting the subject a little.

Sometimes the way to move Dad is to go at him from several directions. “Did Mr. Garfield give you back your book?” I asked.

“What book?”

“I loaned Joanne a book about California plants and the ways Indians used them. It was one of your books. I’m sorry I loaned it to her. It’s so neutral, I didn’t think it could cause trouble. But I guess it has.”

He looked startled, then he almost smiled. “Yes, I will have to have that one back, all right. You wouldn’t have the acorn bread you like so much without that one—not to mention a few other things we take for granted.”

“Acorn bread…?”

He nodded. “Most of the people in this country don’t eat acorns, you know. They have no tradition of eating them, they don’t know how to prepare them, and for some reason, they find the idea of eating them disgusting. Some of our neighbors wanted to cut down all our big live oak trees and plant something useful. You wouldn’t believe the time I had changing their minds.”

“What did people eat before?”

“Bread made of wheat and other grains—corn, rye, oats…things like that.”

“Too expensive!”

“Didn’t use to be. You get that book back from Joanne.” He drew a deep breath. “Now, let’s get off the side track and back onto the main track. What were you planning? Did you try to talk Joanne into running away?”

Then I sighed. “Of course not.” “Her father says you did.”

“He’s wrong. This was about staying alive, learning to live outside so that we’d be able to if we ever had to.”

He watched me as though he could read the truth in my mind. When I was little, I used to think he could. “All right,” he said. “You may have meant well, but no more scare talk.”

“It wasn’t scare talk. We do need to learn what we can while there’s time.”

“That’s not up to you, Lauren. You don’t make decisions for this community.”

Oh hell. If I could just find a balance between holding back too much and pushing, poaching. “Yes, sir.”

He leaned back and looked at me. “Tell me exactly what you told Joanne.

All of it.”

I told him. I was careful to keep my voice flat and passionless, but I didn’t leave anything out. I wanted him to know, to understand what I believed. The nonreligious part of it, anyway. When I finished, I stopped and waited. He

seemed to expect me to say more. He just sat there for a while and stared at me. I couldn’t tell what he felt. Other people never could if he didn’t want them to, but I’ve been able to most of the time. Now I felt shut out, and there was nothing I could do about it. I waited.

At last he let his breath out as though he had been holding it. “Don’t talk about this any more,” he said in a voice that didn’t invite argument.

I looked back at him, not wanting to give a promise that would be a lie. “Lauren.”

“Dad.”

“I want your promise that you won’t talk about this any more.”

What to say? I wouldn’t promise. I couldn’t. “We could make earthquake packs,” I suggested. “Emergency kits that we can grab in case we have to get out of the house fast. If we call them earthquake packs, the idea might not bother people so much. People are used to worrying about earthquakes.” All this came out in a rush.

“I want your promise, Daughter.”

I slumped. “Why? You know I’m right. Even Mrs. Garfield must know it.

So why?”

I thought he would yell at me or punish me. His voice had had that warning edge to it that my brothers and I had come to call the rattle—as in a rattlesnake’s warning sound. If you pushed him past the rattle, you were in trouble. If he called you “son” or “daughter” you were close to trouble.

“Why?” I insisted.

“Because you don’t have any idea what you’re doing,” he said. He frowned and rubbed his forehead. When he spoke again, the edge went out of his voice. “It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.” His mouth crooked into a little smile. “It’s interesting that you chose to begin your efforts with the book you lent to Joanne. Did you ever think of teaching from that book?”

“Teaching…my kindergartners?”

“Why not. Get them started on the right foot. You could even put together a class for older kids and adults. Something like Mr. Ibarra’s wood carving class, Mrs. Baiter’s needlework classes, and young Robert Hsu’s astronomy lectures. People are bored. They wouldn’t mind another informal class now that they’ve lost the Yannis television. If you can think of ways to entertain them and teach them at the same time, you’ll get your information out. And all without making anyone look down.”

“Look down…?”

“Into the abyss, Daughter.” But I wasn’t in trouble any more. Not at the moment. “You’ve just noticed the abyss,” he continued. “The adults in this community have been balancing at the edge of it for more years than you’ve been alive.”

I got up, went over to him and took his hand. “It’s getting worse, Dad.” “I know.”

“Maybe it’s time to look down. Time to look for some hand and foot holds before we just get pushed in.”

“That’s why we have target practice every week and Lazor wire and our emergency bell. Your idea for emergency packs is a good one. Some people already have them. For earthquakes. Some will assemble them if I suggest it. And, of course, some won’t do anything at all. There are always people who won’t do anything.”

“Will you suggest it?”

“Yes. At the next neighborhood association meeting.” “What else can we do? None of this is fast enough.”

“It will have to be.” He stood up, a tall, broad wall of a man. “Why don’t you ask around, see if anyone in the neighborhood knows anything about martial arts. You need more than a book or two to learn good dependable unarmed combat.”

I blinked. “Okay.”

“Check with old Mr. Hsu and Mr. and Mrs. Montoya.” “Mr. and Mrs.?”

“I think so. Talk to them about classes, not about Armageddon.”

I looked up at him, and he looked more like a wall than ever, standing and waiting. And he had offered me a lot—all I would get, I suspected. I sighed. “Okay, Dad, I promise. I’ll try not to scare anyone else. I just hope things hold together long enough for us to do it your way.”

And he echoed my sigh. “At last. Good. Now come out back with me. There are some important things buried in the yard in sealed containers. It’s time for you to know where they are—just in case.”

SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2025

Today, Dad preached from Genesis six, Noah and the ark: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts and of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the

earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”

And then, of course, later God says to Noah, “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.”

Dad focused on the two-part nature of this situation. God decides to destroy everything except Noah, his family, and some animals. But if Noah is going to be saved, he has plenty of hard work to do.

Joanne came to me after church and said she was sorry for all the craziness.

“Okay,” I said.

“Still friends?” she asked.

And I hedged: “Not enemies, anyway. Get my fathers book back to me.

He wants it.”

“My mother took it. I didn’t know she’d get so upset.”

“It isn’t hers. Get it back to me. Or have your dad give it to mine. I don’t care. But he wants his book.”

“All right.”

I watched her leave the house. She looks so trustworthy—tall and straight and serious and intelligent—I still feel inclined to trust her. But I can’t. I don’t. She has no idea how much she could have hurt me if I had given her just a few more words to use against me. I don’t think I’ll ever trust her again, and I hate that. She was my best friend. Now she isn’t.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Garden thieves got in last night. They stripped citrus trees of fruit in the Hsu yard and the Talcott yard. In the process, they trampled what was left of winter gardens and much of the spring planting.

Dad says we have to set up a regular watch. He tried to call a neighborhood association meeting for tonight, but it’s a work night for some people, including Gary Hsu who sleeps over at his job whenever he has to report in person. We’re supposed to get together for a meeting on Saturday. Meanwhile, Dad got Jay Garfield, Wyatt and Kayla Talcott, Alex Montoya, and Edwin Dunn together to patrol the neighborhood in shifts in armed pairs. That meant that except for the Talcotts who are already a pair (and who are so angry about their garden that I pity any thief who gets in their way), the others have to find partners among the other adults of the neighborhood.

“Find someone you trust to protect your back,” I heard Dad tell the little group. Each pair was to patrol for two hours from just before dark to just after dawn. The first patrol, walking through or looking into all the back yards would get people used to the idea of watchers while they were still awake enough to understand.

“Make sure they see you if you get first watch,” Dad said. “The sight of you will remind them that there will be watchers all through the night. We don’t want any of them mistaking you for thieves.”

Sensible. People go to bed soon after dark to save electricity, but between dinner and darkness they spend time on their porches or in their yards where it isn’t so hot. Some listen to their radio on front or back porches. Now and then people get together to play music, sing, play board games, talk, or get out on the paved part of the street for volleyball, touch football, basketball, or tennis. People used to play baseball, but we just can’t afford what that costs in windows. A few people just find a corner and read a book while there’s still daylight. It’s a good, comfortable, recreational time. What a pity to spoil it with reminders of reality. But it can’t be helped.

“What will you do if you catch a thief?” Cory asked my father before he went out. He was on the second shift, and he and Cory were having a rare cup of coffee together in the kitchen while he waited. Coffee was for special occasions. I couldn’t miss the good smell of it in my room where I lay awake. I eavesdrop. I don’t put drinking glasses to walls or crouch with my ear against doors, but I do often lie awake long after dark when we kids are all supposed to be asleep. The kitchen is across the hall from my room, the dining room is nearby at the end of the hall, and my parents’ room is next door. The house is old and well insulated. If there’s a shut door between me and the conversation, I can’t hear much. But at night with all or most of the lights out, I can leave my door open a crack, and if other doors are also open,

I can hear a lot. I learn a lot.

“We’ll chase him off, I hope,” Dad said. “We’ve agreed to that. We’ll give him a good scare and let him know there are easier ways to get a dollar.”

“A dollar…?”

“Yes, indeed. Our thieves didn’t steal all that food because they were hungry. They stripped those trees—took everything they could.”

“I know,” Cory said. “I took some lemons and grapefruits to both the Hsus and the Wyatts today and told them they could pick from our trees when they needed more. I took them some seed, too. They both had a lot of young plants trampled, but this early in the season, they should be able to repair the damage.”

“Yes.” My father paused. “But you see my point. People steal that way for

money. They’re not desperate. Just greedy and dangerous. We might be able to scare them into looking for easier pickings.”

“But what if you can’t?” Cory asked, almost whispering. Her voice fell so low that I was afraid I would miss something.

“If you can’t, will you shoot them?” “Yes,” he said.

“…yes?” she repeated in that same small voice. “Just…‘yes?’” She was like Joanne all over again—denial personified. What planet do people like that live on?

“Yes,” my father said.

“Why!”

There was a long silence. When my father spoke again, his own voice had gone very soft. “Baby, if these people steal enough, they’ll force us to spend more than we can afford on food—or go hungry. We live on the edge as it is. You know how hard things are.

“But…couldn’t we just call the police?”

“For what? We can’t afford their fees, and anyway, they’re not interested until after a crime has been committed. Even then, if you call them, they won’t show up for hours—maybe not for two or three days.”

“I know.”

“What are you saying then? You want the kids to go hungry? You want thieves coming into the house once they’ve stripped the gardens?”

“But they haven’t done that.”

“Of course they have. Mrs. Sims was only their latest victim.” “She lived alone. We always said she shouldn’t do that.”

“You want to trust them not to hurt you or the kids just because there are seven of us? Baby, we can’t live by pretending this is still twenty or thirty years ago.”

“But you could go to jail!” She was crying—not sobbing, but speaking with that voice-full-of-tears that she can manage sometimes.

“No,” Dad said. “If we have to shoot someone, we’re together in it. After we’ve shot him we carry him into the nearest house. It’s still legal to shoot housebreakers. After that we do a little damage and get our stories straight.”

Long, long silence. “You could still get in trouble.” “I’ll risk it.”

Another long silence. “‘Thou shalt not kill,’” Cory whispered. “Nehemiah four,” Dad said. “Verse 14.”

There was nothing more. A few minutes later, I heard Dad leave. I waited until I heard Cory go to her room and shut the door. Then I got up, shut my door, moved my lamp so the light wouldn’t show under the door, then turned

it on and opened my grandmother’s Bible. She had had a lot of Bibles and Dad had let me keep this one.

Nehemiah, chapter four, Verse 14: “And I looked and rose up and said unto the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, be not afraid of them: remember the Lord which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives and your houses.”

Interesting. Interesting that Dad had that verse ready, and that Cory recognized it. Maybe they’ve had this conversation before.

Saturday, March 15, 2025

It’s official.

Now we have a regular neighborhood watch—a roster of people from every household who are over eighteen, good with guns—their own and others—and considered responsible by my father and by the people who have already been patrolling the neighborhood. Since none of the watchers have ever been cops or security guards, they’ll go on working in pairs, watching out for each other as well as for the neighborhood. They’ll use whistles to call for help if they need it. Also, they’ll meet once a week to read, discuss, and practice martial arts and shoot-out techniques. The Montoyas will give their martial arts classes, all right, but not at my suggestion. Old Mr. Hsu is having back problems, and he won’t be teaching anything for a while, but the Montoyas seem to be enough. I plan to sit in on the classes as often as I can stand to share everyone’s practice pains.

Dad has collected all his books from me this morning. All I have left are

my notes. I don’t mind. Thanks to the garden thieves, people are preparing themselves for the worst. I feel almost grateful to the thieves.

They haven’t come back, by the way—our thieves. When they do, we should be able to give them something they don’t expect.

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Our thieves paid us another visit last night.

Maybe they weren’t the same ones, but their intentions were the same: To take away what someone else has sweated to grow and very much needs.

This time they were after Richard Moss’s rabbits. Those rabbits are the neighborhood’s only livestock except for some chickens the Cruz and Montoya families tried to raise a few years ago. Those were stolen as soon as they were old enough to make noise and let outsiders know they were there. The Moss rabbits have been our secret until this year when Richard Moss insisted on selling meat and whatever his wives could make from raw or

tanned rabbit hides out beyond the wall. The Mosses had been selling to us all along, of course, meat, hides, fertilizer, everything except live rabbits. Those he hoarded as breeding stock. But now, stubborn, arrogant, and greedy, he had decided he could earn more if he peddled his merchandise outside. So, now the word is out on the street about the damned rabbits, and last night someone came to get them.

The Moss rabbit house is a converted three-car garage added to the property in the 1980s according to Dad. It’s hard to believe any household once had three cars, and gas fueled cars at that. But I remember the old garage before Richard Moss converted it. It was huge with three black oil spots on the floor where three cars had once been housed. Richard Moss repaired the walls and roof, put in windows for cross ventilation, and in general, made the place almost fit for people to live in. In fact, it’s much better than what a lot of people live in now on the outside. He built rows and tiers of cages— hutches—and put in more electric lights and ceiling fans. The fans can be made to work on kid power. He’s hooked them up to an old bicycle frame, and every Moss kid who’s old enough to manage the pedals sooner or later gets drafted into powering the fans. The Moss kids hate it, but they know what they’ll get if they don’t do it.

I don’t know how many rabbits the Mosses have now, but it seems they’re

always killing and skinning and doing disgusting things to pelts. Even a little monopoly is worth a lot of trouble.

The two thieves had managed to stuff 13 rabbits into canvas sacks by the time our watchers spotted them. The watchers were Alejandro Montoya and Julia Lincoln, one of Shani Yannis’s sisters. Mrs. Montoya has two kids sick with the flu so she’s off the watch roster for a while.

Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Montoya followed the plan that the group of watchers had put together at their meetings. Without a word of command or warning, they fired their guns into the air two or three times each, at the same time, blowing their whistles full blast. They kept to cover, but inside the Moss house, someone woke up and turned on the rabbit house lights. That could have been a lethal mistake for the watchers, but they were hidden behind pomegranate bushes.

The two thieves ran like rabbits.

Abandoning sacks, rabbits, pry bars, a long coil of rope, wire cutters, and even an excellent long aluminum ladder, they scrambled up that ladder and over the wall in seconds. Our wall is three meters high and topped off with pieces of broken glass as well as the usual barbed wire and the all but invisible Lazor wire. All the wire had been cut in spite of our efforts. What a pity we couldn’t afford to electrify it or set other traps. But at least the glass—

the oldest, simplest of our tricks—had gotten one of them. We found a broad stream of dried blood down the inside of the wall this morning.

We also found a Glock 19 pistol where one of the thieves had dropped it. Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Montoya could have been shot. If the thieves hadn’t been scared out of their minds, there could have been a gun battle. Someone in the Moss house or a neighboring house could have been hurt or killed.

Cory went after Dad about that once they were alone in the kitchen tonight.

“I know,” Dad said. He sounded tired and miserable. “Don’t think we haven’t thought about those things. That’s why we want to scare the thieves away. Even shooting into the air isn’t safe. Nothing’s safe.”

“They ran away this time, but they won’t always run.” “I know.”

“So what, then? You protect rabbits or oranges, and maybe get a child killed?”

Silence.

“We can’t live this way!” Cory shouted. I jumped. I’ve never heard her sound like that before.

“We do live this way,” Dad said. There was no anger in his voice, no emotional response at all to her shouting. There was nothing. Weariness. Sadness. I’ve never heard him sound so tired, so…almost beaten. And yet he had won. His idea had beaten off a pair of armed thieves without our having to hurt anyone. If the thieves had hurt themselves, that was their problem.

Of course they would come back, or others would come. That would happen no matter what. And Cory was right. The next thieves might not lose their guns and run away. So what? Should we lie in our beds and let them take all we had and hope they were content with stripping our gardens? How long does a thief stay content? And what’s it like to starve?

“We couldn’t make it without you,” Cory was saying. She wasn’t shouting now. “That could have been you out there, facing criminals. Next time it might be you. You could be shot, protecting the neighbors’ rabbits.”

“Did you notice,” Dad said, “that every off-duty watcher answered the whistles last night? They came out to defend their community.”

“I don’t care about them! It’s you I’m worried about!”

“No,” he said. “We can’t think that way any more. Cory, there’s nobody to help us but God and ourselves. I protect Moss’s place in spite of what I think of him, and he protects mine, no matter what he thinks of me. We all look out for one another.” He paused. “I’ve got plenty of insurance. You and the kids should be able to make it all right if—”

“No!” Cory said. “Do you think that’s all it is? Money? Do you think—?”

“No, Babe. No.” Pause. “I know what it is to be left alone. This is no world to be alone in.”

There was a long silence, and I didn’t think they would say any more. I lay on my bed, wondering if I should get up and shut my door so I could turn on my lamp and write. But there was a little more.

“What are we supposed to do if you die?” she demanded, and I think she was crying. “What do we do if they shoot you over some damn rabbits?”

“Live!” Dad said. “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

That was the end of their talk. I lay in the dark for a long time, thinking about what they had said. Cory was right again. Dad might get hurt. He might get killed. I don’t know how to think about that. I can write about it, but I don’t feel it. On some deep level, I don’t believe it. I guess I’m as good at denial as anyone.

So Cory is right, but it doesn’t matter. And Dad is right, but he doesn’t go far enough. God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped. It isn’t enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse. If that’s the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak—too poor, too hungry, too sick—to defend ourselves. Then we’ll be wiped out.

There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape.

Another place. Another way. Something!