Read Leaving Before the Rains Come for Free Online

hair, for example.
    Losing faith is not the same as losing belief, but it can break the fragile tether between a person and her innocence just the same. On the afternoon of January 9, 1978, when I was home from school for the Christmas holidays, my world as I had known it fell to pieces, and out of the devastation that remained I could never, ever again make anything whole. On that day, my sister Olivia drowned in a neighbor’s pond. The sin of omission was mine; my eyes had turned from babysitting, my attention had been captured by the earthly wonders and temptations of a bright and alluring farm grocery store, my trustworthiness had been tested and found to be lacking. “It was one of those things, Bobo,” Dad told me, trying to make it better. But I knew it wasn’t a thing; it was a fault. Specifically, it was my fault.
    That night and for months afterward, my prayers were so urgent, so clear, so grief-soaked and guilt-ridden, I was a nine-year-old vessel of Old Testament awe and superstition. I did not know then that suffering and grief are universal and that there would be a time, when I was older (although not much older), that I would know my own anguish to be nothing special or personal. All I knew back then is that God was our Father and that he could bring the dead back to life, I just wasn’t sure exactly how to go about insisting that my miracle was worth his time. “Oh God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself.”
    So like any child testing out the miracle-dealing propensities of an all-powerful God offered to her in church or in school, I conducted experiments. I held myself under bathwater, willing myself to take the breath that might resemble Olivia’s last fatal inhalation of green duck water. Surely, if I had the faith and courage to drown myself on purpose, God might see my sacrifice and use his all-power to bring our sister back to life? And as penance for having allowed her death and to ensure that God knew of my serious commitment to him, I spent nights on the bare wooden floorboards of the dormitory, as I imagined monks and nuns must do. And I tried fasting, as Jesus had done for forty days in the wilderness, but by midmorning break on the first day, when we boarders were allowed a sandwich and the day scholars unpacked their tuck boxes of wondrous goodies, greed drove me to crimes of savagery and theft.
    Then guilt heaped on guilt since God was ever-present, omniscient, and all-seeing. “Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth?” In the black-and-white world of school, God was in all the rules about not talking after lights-out, not running the faucet for longer than a count of thirty, not taking more than one square of butter at supper. We were our surname, a number, accountable. “Be good. Our men and boys are out there dying for you,” Mrs. Martingale told us every evening, and their deaths felt immediate, as if they were happening just outside the dormitory windows.
    We, who were told to be good, were not like English or American children who were told to eat their spinach because of the remote specter of starving children in Africa. Unlike the vague benefits of vegetables, being good was a tangible imperative linked directly to the war and to all our dead whose number multiplied seemingly without end. At morning assembly, we were read the words of Cyprian of Carthage: “Let us on both sides of death always pray for one another.” Then we bowed our heads and beseeched God to protect our troops, and to send us peace and plentiful rain, and to grant us an ample harvest. But God remained pretty meager with his miracles: the dead stayed dead, the war went on, the rain either came too early and too strong or not at all, and the harvest depended on whether or not we’d had eelworm and blight.
    At last I concluded that if God existed, he was not my personal savior or a heavenly anything. He was, I thought, on the side