Dear Jesus, please help Sheba to be okay, please, please, Jesus, help her to live, I repeat over and over as I lay in my bed.
The next morning no one comes to wake me up, so I sleep late. I wander into the dining room, where everyone is finishing breakfast, the bright sun streaming in through the windows, just as my father walks in through the front door. “Boys, come here!” The solemn look on his face tells me before he speaks. “Sheba has gone to be with Jesus. She’s gone to dog heaven.”
Fourteen eyes fill with tears.
I stare at my hands. I failed. I tried so hard and she died anyway! Why didn’t Jesus answer our prayers? My chest is so tight I can barely breathe.
“We did all we could for her. The vet said she had fourteen puppies.”
Our jaws drop. I’d never heard of a litter of fourteen!
“Sheba just didn’t have the strength to birth that many.” If the vet had showed up yesterday, it might have saved her, I think resentfully. “Faithy helped us save some of the puppies last night. We got out five puppies; one was dead, but the other four are still alive. Praise the Lord!”
Uncle Michael puts the four surviving puppies in a box with a blanket. He bottle-feeds them every two hours, even through the night. I pray silently all day, Jesus, please help the puppies to live.
My father takes Sheba’s body and puts her in a gunnysack. We all pile into the van and drive up Eucalyptus Hill two miles away—the sharp, medicinal smell of the trees tickles my nose. We stand around while my father digs her a proper grave off the side of the road. It is my first funeral. We erect a small wooden cross over her grave, and each of us kids steps forward to say goodbye and give her a present—some ribbon, a ball, a tattered collection of cheap treasures from kids who have little to give. Tears wetting our cheeks, we try not to look at each other. I carefully place my offering on her grave—an empty glass perfume bottle that Mommy Esther had thrown away; I’d kept it so I could enjoy the lingering fragrance. It is the saddest day of my young childhood, losing our beloved Doberman. Whenever I smell eucalyptus, I think of her grave.
In a few days, the first puppy born is the only one still alive. She had been able to nurse from her mother for one full day and was stronger than the others. We name her Shebina—daughter of Sheba. Unlike the rest of the dogs, who are rarely allowed in the house anymore, Shebina is raised in the trailer Uncle Michael shares with his new wife, Auntie Crystal.
“She thinks she’s human.” Uncle Michael laughs as Shebina jumps up on the bench to sit with the family at the table.
She is the worst guard dog ever. She genuinely loves everybody—friends, strangers, neighbors. She bounds up to each passing person, tail wagging, expecting to be petted. We love her with a touch of melancholy. She can never take the place of our first love, Sheba, but she does her best to make up for it.
8
My Sister Is a Jesus Baby
As the Farm evolves, so do the Family’s witnessing practices. With the AIDS epidemic sweeping the world, Grandpa starts to rein in Flirty Fishing. “We can’t have this disease of Sodomites spread in the Family,” he says.
You can’t miss a single Mo Letter, as you never know what life-altering revelation might be on the horizon. Several years earlier, a Mo Letter insisted that women should be willing to suffer STDs to save souls as Jesus laid down His life. (The accompanying picture made me wince—a woman nailed to a cross with a stake through her pum. Yeek!) But the consensus among the adults was that most are okay with STDs that they can treat, but not herpes. That is the incurable disease, like leprosy. Once you had it, you were tainted forever. Some of the adults had herpes, but we knew which ones, and we asked that they wipe down the shared toilet seat with Lysol after they used it.
As Grandpa tells Homes to wind down FFing and find new ways to support themselves, women who had longtime Fish who supported the Family could continue the relationship, but everyone else needed to stop. After a few more years, the FFing ban became final—no one was allowed to sleep with Systemites, on pain of excommunication.
Grandpa’s call to curb FFing gives my mother the excuse she wanted. She spends one last night with Uncle Ashok to say goodbye. While she does not seem distraught that this will be their final time together, I’m worried. I love going to his apartment in the city. He gets me treats and lets me cut out shapes in the chapatti that he cooks me in his kitchen. But mostly I like that the attention he shows me makes me feel warm and safe. I’m worried all this will end if they break up.
But we have a bigger surprise coming.
Three weeks after their breakup, my mother discovers she is pregnant.
I’m going to be a big sister!
The question we are all wondering is who oh who is the baby’s father? My mother said it could be my father or Uncle Ashok or another uncle living with us at the Farm who has bright red hair. This is not uncommon in the Family; with all the “sharing,” it is not unusual for children to not know who their fathers are. We’re told there is no shame in it, not like in mainstream society, where such a mystery is taboo. All children belong to the Family and Jesus first. At least with these three options, the baby’s coloring will surely tell us.
My mother tells me that having a little brother or sister is like having a life-size doll to play with. I am excited. After so many years as the littlest one, I am excited for my new role as big sister. I must learn all I can about pregnancy and childbirth so I can help. I study the first volume of the Childcare Handbook, which is about babies, and watch the Miracle of Life documentary many times. It shows everything: the little tadpole sperms shooting out of the penis and into the woman’s vagina, the hard swim upstream in the fallopian tubes, the egg getting fertilized and growing into a fetus, and the birth at the end, which looks gross, so I usually turn it off by that point.
Natural home births are common in the Family, and my mother decides she wants to have her baby born at home with a midwife instead of in a hospital, where she had me. It will be a teaching moment for us kids.
When the big day arrives, we all cram into the Dodge van and head to our old apartment, which we still lease in Macau so we can host Family visitors. The Macanese midwife my mother hired is also the head nurse at the hospital. She insists we need to be in the city near the hospital just in case something goes wrong.