The Indifferent Children of the Earth

  Chapter 7, Sunday 21 August

  I got the job at the garden shop, with its unintelligible name “Forest at Home.” Mr. Wood, tall and on the young side of middle-aged and kind of fat, the old-man version of an athlete. I was kind of surprised to find someone like him running a garden store, but he told me it was a family business. I also found out he didn’t like my grandfather, although he seemed slightly mollified when I told him that my grandfather had been dead for over a year.

  I didn’t really care what he thought. What I cared about was that he was going to pay me ten dollars an hour to haul bags of soil, arrange the potted plants, and keep the shelves stocked. As many afternoons a week as I wanted to work, but even as he said it, he reminded me that he wanted an employee who was dedicated to the store. Great—a free schedule that I wasn’t really free to determine. I didn’t have to start until Monday, though, so that left me time to go around town, give myself something of a tour.

  There was not much to see. The industrial zone wedged between the river and the edge of town. The railroad that ran along the southern edge. A park on the north side, and another, nicer park on the east side. And then, after an invisible marker that divided town from country, rows of corn sprang up, living walls that hedged in West Marshall, locking me into a box. Nothing that hinted at the presence of a quickener, although even I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. If I’d had access to electric bills, it probably would have been easier. Or if there had been a power plant close, that might have been a place to start. But in a tiny town where everyone knew everyone’s business, and I was an outsider, how did I start investigating? I finally gave up and went home.

  Sunday was long, quiet, and comfortable. I’d had no luck with the quickener, and I found that being curious made me open to painful memories that either left me curled up in agony on the bed, or riding my bike until I couldn’t breathe and then screaming into fields of empty corn. The way the stalks rippled made me feel better, as though the force of my voice, the weight of pain, were enough to bend the world before me. Sunday, I decided to retreat back into that anesthetized space behind my heart and let that weight on my chest slow my breath.

  Dad would have said something about, “a patient etherized upon a table.” Or perhaps, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws.” I hated poetry.

  Instead, I just lay there, the rise and fall of my chest almost in time with the click and vibrating hum of the air conditioning turning on and off, watching the ceiling, grateful that there was a place I could go that was calm and quiet and let me drift.

  I could hear Mom sometimes, out in the garden, just the thud of soil, or the ripping noise of roots torn free of earth. She was worse than Dad, in some ways. Dad at least would look at me, talk to me sometimes. It was like Mom couldn’t even stand me, couldn’t stand to be in the same house as me. Whatever tied us together was broken, and we were drifting away from each other like two engineless ships in dark, smooth waters.

  I couldn’t blame her; no matter how much she hated me, no matter how much they both hated me, it would never come close to how much I hated myself.