reading

The Miracle

The ride to the chapel took forever. There were Jason, the girls—Ellen and me—and Papa riding facing each other in the back of a car that was so big and so dark that it was like a cavern on wheels. Or at least that’s how it seemed that afternoon. Papa was nervous about letting another man drive, I could tell, though of course he never said anything. That was Papa’s way. He just sat there still as a fence post, staring out the window at the snow, which was coming down in thick wet flakes the size of walnuts.

That’s what I remember most about the drive: the snow, the dark car, the perfume-sweet smell of the funeral director. He was perfectly quiet—solemn, I guess the word is—though he’d never met Mama, and could never even guess how bad it felt losing her to cancer the day after Thanksgiving. But he was doing his job. There’s no shame in that.

At the chapel, it was just us family and a couple of the closer relatives. Ellen and Jason looked like angels with their round faces, their bright blue eyes, their hair—like mine was once—the color of late-August wheat. Papa wore his one suit. Mama never could make it so that it seemed to fit.

Father Mack, the same priest who’d married Mama and Papa and baptized each of us three kids, said a few words about passing from one life to a better one. Ellen cried. Jason, little as he was, didn’t fidget much, though I don’t guess he really understood what was happening. He was a good boy. As for me, I was pretty cried out by then, and that was all right, since being the oldest I figured I ought to set an example. Papa was himself all the way through. When Father Mack was finished, we went up one by one and said our last goodbyes. Papa lingered the longest.

It was already starting to get dark when we got home. I set about to heating up some of the leftover turkey, and Papa went off to the bedroom, saying he had to get some things straight. The kids sat at the table—pretty quiet at first, watching me slice away at the bird—but they were edgy. A lot of quiet is tough on kids. Soon enough they were at each other, poking and picking, saying this one did this and that one that, and I just got fed up. I didn’t think it would hurt, so I sent them off to the living room to watch television until supper.

It wasn’t a minute before Ellen started yelling—shrieking, really—and Papa came rushing through one door just as Jason toddled in through the other.

“Mama,” he said. “It’s Mama. It’s Mama.”

I followed Papa into the living room. Ellen was standing there, covering her mouth and trying not to scream anymore. She was shaking like a leaf and staring wide-eyed at the TV screen. Then Papa and I understood what Jason had said. There was Mama—or somebody that looked just like her—right there on TV.

“Papa?” I whispered.

He hushed me. I’ve never seen Papa scared—not when the shotgun went off and took a half his hand, not when the pack of wild dogs came at him down at the barn. He wasn’t the type to scare. But I don’t know what else you’d call the look in his eyes as he stared at the television set. He moved closer, squinting, putting his good hand close to the screen and then pulling it away suddenly, as if a spark was going to come leaping out and strike him dead.

Finally, he did touch the screen, and moved his fingers in a wide circle across the glass, feeling.

“Rita?”

Mama—or the likeness of Mama—didn’t answer. In fact, she wasn’t moving at all. It could have been a photograph there on the screen. Mama was lying down, it looked like, with her head on a pillow. Her hair was loose, the way she wore it when she slept. She looked like she was sleeping, too—her eyes were closed, and there was a smile on her lips. It wasn’t a big toothy grin or anything, just a kind of peaceful, pleasant-dream smile. It was kind of like the one she’d have when she rubbed Papa’s back with ointment after he’d been out milking all day.

“Rita?” Papa asked again.

Mama didn’t say a word.

Ellen was holding little Jason in front of her, and the shaking had pretty much stopped.

“Alison,” she whispered to me. “What is it, Alison? What’s happening?”

The first words came out of my mouth before I could even think about them:

“It’s a trick. Somebody’s playing a trick.”

“No,” Papa said, very soft, very low. “It ain’t a trick. It ain’t nothing like that. It’s —”

He ran his fingertips across the screen.

“It’s a miracle.”

Now I didn’t know much about miracles, but I was nearly willing to take Papa’s word for it that what was there on the TV was what he said it was. Papa wasn’t exactly the most religious man in the county. Still, the thing bothered me. What if it was a trick? What if somebody in the funeral home had taken Mama’s body and put a camera on it, and then was sending out a picture, just to be mean?

As soon as I could slip away, I got on the telephone and called my friend Dana, who lives just a half mile up the road, and asked her to go turn on channel twelve.

“There’s nothing on channel twelve,” she said.

“Just check, Dana. Please?”

“Nope,” she said when she got back. “There’s nothing on channel twelve.”

When I went back to the living room, Papa had already cleared the top of the set and covered it with a piece of green felt. There were two candles, the kind we save for the power blackouts, at either end, and in the middle a small bouquet of flowers that one of the neighbors had sent. Papa sat at the edge of the sofa, waiting for something to happen. Ellen and Jason had sneaked off to their room.

One thing I have to say about Papa: Throughout the months that followed, regardless of how much time he put in front of that television, never once did he shirk his duties. He was up at four, on the dot, and back from the barn at noon. He’d have his lunch, when he ate, sitting in front of the TV, and then he’d be off again to do the afternoon chores. That’s the way it went: seven days a week, never failing. Sometimes he wouldn’t get done until ten, eleven o’clock, and he’d come dragging in exhausted, shower up, and take his place in front of the set once more. From the bedroom I could see him sitting there, waiting in the little grotto the silver-blue light carved out of the darkness. That’s where he’d be at four the next morning when the alarm went off.

The candles went on burning, and the flowers were always fresh.

We had the understanding in the family—Papa never ordered us and never had to—that the television was to be kept on twenty four hours a day, and never switched from channel twelve. Neither were we to tell a soul about the miracle just in case some nosy reporter would come sniffing around and write up a story that would make Mama’s appearance sound cheap and phony, like something you read about in the checkout line at the market while you’re waiting to be rung up. In fact, we weren’t allowed to have anyone over to the house at all. It never had been any secret that Papa wasn’t too fond of company, maybe because he didn’t have any family but us, and after a couple of sharp words Mama’s people pretty much left us alone, as if we’d been quarantined for the fever or something.

For a long time, through Christmas—which wasn’t much of one—New Years, and on into February, even, nobody put up a fuss. Of course, the newness kind of wore off. Jason and Ellen would run through the living room after breakfast hurrying to catch the school bus and call over their shoulders:

“Bye, Mama!”

They always said hello, too, when they got home at five, though Mama never answered back. For a while I tried to make them spend some time in front of the set each night. I started with an hour, let it fall off to a half, then a quarter, and finally I let them go straight to their room to play games and draw with their crayons. Toward the end, I even had to remind them to say good night.

It was harder for me. After a time, I couldn’t look at the TV anymore. When I walked past it, I’d be sure to look away, toward anything. It seemed kind of said, and worse yet, kind of unnatural, keeping Mama’s picture there like that. It seemed to me then as it does today that the way things are set up, people when they die are supposed to go back to the earth. But Mama hadn’t changed a bit. She still looked exactly the same way she had when the miracle first started. Not that I wanted to watch her come undone right there on television, of course, but it sure didn’t seem right that she should sleep through Eternity looking like a figure in a wax museum, either.

Of all of us, though, Papa seemed to be taking the miracle the worst. It’s a strange thing, seeing a man age right before your eyes. It wasn’t overnight that Papa’s hair went silver, but it was pretty close to that. The lines, too, especially around his eyes, started deepening, and the creases in his forehead got thick as tractor tracks. The strain, I guess, was wearing on him. He started getting testy, too. The sound of the kids laughing in their room, the way kids do when they stay up late and try not to get caught, one time set Papa into a rage. He flew through the house like a big hawk, slamming the door open with his fist and shouting in a voice I didn’t know he had in him. It must have scared the kids white.

There were other things about Papa, too. It’s hard to describe. I’d watch him come walking back to the house at night, breathing steam like one of the animals, kicking up the snow, and there was something in the way he moved that made it seem as if he’d gained an awful lot of weight, when in fact he’d probably lost twenty pounds since the miracle started. It was like gravity was pulling on him more than on the rest of us, and it showed in his shoulders, especially. They strained toward the ground like a couple of tree limbs full of wet snow. He’d come trudging toward the house, trailing his shadow like an old-fashioned plow, or a ball and chain. It broke my heart to see him that way, but there was nothing I could do. There was never any talking to him.

The days, anyway, were getting lighter. Spring was coming. I could feel it in the air and see it in the slant of the sun. It was taking the kids hard—they were all itching to run out without their coats and mittens, though it wasn’t so warm yet that they wouldn’t catch something. There were other changes, too.

It was late March, a couple weeks before the first real thaw, when Ellen first asked me if she could put something else on the television.

“There’s a rule in this house,” I said.

“But Alison!”

“And a rule is a rule.”

“But, but.”

“And what if you did and something happened—what if Mama disappeared for good?”

I was about to get my answer to that. The sound of a cartoon came sailing across the air into the kitchen. I found Jason sprawled across the couch, watching Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner across the desert.

“Jason!”

I was more than a little afraid to switch channels, but I did, and there was Mama, silent and still as always, lying there smiling. Well, I thought, as long as Papa never finds out, there’s no harm in letting the kids have a little fun.

Things went along fine for a month. The kids would watch their shows, and I’d keep an eye out the window, just in case Papa came back early from the barn, which he never had and never did. There was a lot to look at out that window, and I never got bored. Spring was coming on full blast now. The trees were bursting green all over the place—a green so bright and new you nearly had to squint at it. And the clouds, those big ones the color of tarnished silver, had broken up and given way to cottony swirls and broad patches of blue. The birds were chirping and nesting. And, like a lot of girls, I guess, I was kind of caught up in the fever, too.

Johnny Eagleton was a year younger than me, fifteen, but he was tall and good-looking and very sweet. It didn’t bother him, or so he said, that the other boys gave him a ribbing for walking me up the road to the house after school. I’ll bet it did, but he wouldn’t admit it. He was sturdy as an oak, inside and out, and something about his quiet ways made me feel all warm inside. Maybe that’s what some people call love. I really never thought of it that way. We started off talking on the way home, and then after a time that wasn’t enough, so I told him it was all right to call on the telephone, as long as it wasn’t too late. We had a lot of talks, Johnny Eagleton and me. I got so I kind of expected his calls. I also got so I started forgetting to keep watch for Papa.

What had to happen finally did. I was on the phone, talking about something important, like the weather, or some silly music group, when the back door clicked and opened. I didn’t think much about it. Then I did. I screamed and dropped the phone and went running into the living room, but it was too late. Papa had got there first. He’d caught Ellen and Jason having a picnic, sort of, in front of the television. The Three Stooges were on—beating on each other in the way they did.

The kids had bolted to their feet and stood frozen. They looked terrified. Papa’s eyes blazed, and when he turned to glare at me, their fire scorched me down to the bone. He shook. He shuddered. He seemed big as a mountain. He looked down at the kids and bit his lip. Then he took two hard steps toward me a raised his hand over his head. He held it there, waiting, I guess, for his anger to build up enough for him to go ahead and hit me. It kept building. I felt the tears well up, but I didn’t turn away or try to cover my face. I was wrong, I knew it, and I was the oldest.

Papa never did hit me. After a time, the anger seeped out of him. He put down his fist and walked off into the bedroom. I sent the kids to bed.

“Papa?” I called through the door.

There was nothing.

“Papa?”

The door opened and Papa stepped out. He put his hand on my shoulder. I could feel his eyes again, but this time they weren’t burning with rage. He took a little of my hair in his hand and rolled it between his fingers as if he was testing soil, or gauging the corn by its silk.

“Daughter,” was all he said.

I followed him through the kitchen and out the door. We walked, me a few steps behind, straight to the shed, where Papa got a spade.

There was a place Mama had always liked. It was out back, a little hill that rose up right in the middle of the field and couldn’t be plowed. In the summer it would be covered with fine grass and shaded by a tall oak. I remember Mama spreading a checkered cloth and laying out the sandwiches and the apples and pouring us each cups of cold, sweet juice.

I guess I don’t have to tell you what Papa had chosen that place for. When he was done, I followed him back to the house. The kids had turned the channel back to twelve.

Papa didn’t look all that long at Mama, but he did bend down and kiss the screen just before he pulled out the plug and carried the set off.

When he got back he washed, and then he went off again, this time in the car. He came home a little after dark. There was a television set under his arm—not a brand-new one, but it was color. He set it on the stand and waited for it to warm up.

The kids came out of their room at the sound of the Evening News. Somebody was holding somebody hostage. Then there was the economy, bad for the working man, same as always.

Papa hesitated, pretending to be interested. Then he looked at each of us—first at Jason, then at Ellen and finally at me. I don’t think he was looking at us ourselves, though, so much as at the likeness and the memory.

We all held our breath as he turned the dial—station to station, click by click, the long way round to channel twelve.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, there it was: not nothing, but not a picture, either. The screen was filled with snow—all these wonder flakes, big as walnuts and white as could be.

Betrayed by Johnny Gomez

Most of the words in my life-long arsenal of obscenities I learned from Johnny Gomez. He and I were partners during the 4th grade. We drifted together through no natural inclination; rather, it was a matter of necessity. We were both fat, outcast, disrespectful of authority and a good way smarter than the Dominican nuns who taught us. As one of those loveless brides of Jesus once said, Johnny and I deserved each other.

To amuse ourselves during the long hours of being read at, over, under but never to, we developed a game. It involved no skill, no cleverness, but a great deal of honor. We would write a bad word backwards on a slip of paper. After that, we would pass it to the partner, who would unscramble the word and was duty-bound to speak it in a voice almost loud enough by be detected by the Nun. If the Nun happened to seek out the source of the commotion that generally followed, the speaking partner was on his honor to hide the mystery word. If caught with it, he was to take full responsibility, which invariably meant detention.

Now, most of the words were routine Saxonisms for body parts and functions. But, one day, I received from Johnny a word I did not recognize. He howled from across the room as I, wide-eyed, virtually bellowed the offending syllable not once but many times, amazed at the reaction it invoked.

Later that day, after detention, I met Ruth Ann Rudd behind the school. The late March wind shearing across the frozen river had graciously reddened both our faces even before I asked her whether or not the word was as dirty as the class’s response to it had indicated.

“To some people, it’s dirty,” she said, adding thoughtfully, “but to others, it isn’t.”

That was my first taste of ambiguity, and I wasn’t too sure I liked it.

I started at St. Elizabeth’s School midway during the 4th grade, my father having transplanted the family from Detroit to Shawnee, Michigan, with the idea that he would prosper in his own insurance agency there. St. Elizabeth’s was, I suppose, a typical small town Catholic elementary school. We had a modest red brick building which stood, one story, between the red brick convent and the red brick church. On the far side of the church stood the rectory, the mysterious retreat of the parish priest, a bourbon-belching Irishman who loudly smacked his lips when swilling Eucharistic wine and terrified us by numbering aloud our failing grades before the entire class when report cards were issued. Father Tom Collins—I swear that was his name—regularly approved of my grades, except for those in Conduct and Effort.

We also had a typical assortment of nuns, all Dominicans, from the young, innocent and pretty novice Sister Alice, who never took final vows, to careerists like Sister Victor, whom we called Sister Moldy because of the prominent mole on her chin, the sole hair sprouting from which she would regularly and absently tug. Ruling the convent with an iron rosary was Sister Ann, an ogre. My mother once said of her, cryptically, that she “liked the younger nuns.” It was rumored that her favorites were allowed to stay up late at night, drinking wine. All our nuns wore the ankle-length habits with the blocky headpieces and the long black veils of the Order. We called them Penguins. What I recall most clearly about them is that they always smelled very strongly of laundry starch.

Our school, as I’ve said, was typical. Typical, too, was my plight. I was a plump little stranger, transplanted from the Big City, an oddity not to be trusted. The majority of students had already formed social cliques from which I was excluded. By default, then, I wound up with the children of Mexican farmworkers who, through the absence of Jews, Blacks, Arabs, Asians or any other ethnic group, were our town’s put-upon minority. Our clique consisted of Angel Alaniz, Johnny Gomez and his two cousins, Mary Garcia and Nellie Villanueva, and me, the little gringo. Johnny was our general, and he quickly promoted me to his lieutenant because of my reckless sense of humor and bone-headed willingness to do anything to get attention. My dirty-word recitations were considered hysterical. My imitation of a bullfrog during choir rehearsals for a Christmas concert brought down the house and sent Sister Victor running from the gym in tears of rage. Spy movies were then in vogue, and I did a fairly accurate parody of macho swagger. I regularly referred to the prettiest of the older girls as agent 36-24-36. That never failed to get a belly laugh out of Johnny Gomez, and his was a considerable belly indeed.

Bound together by laughter and the code of the backwards word, Johnny and I became school pals, though we never saw each other after the school day ended. The boundaries of our friendship, though unspoken, were clear. We ate lunch together, tormented girls together and, when necessary, took our punishment together. Frequently seated at diagonal ends of the classroom for reasons of public order, we invented chain humor, usually beginning with a standard—a Helen Keller joke, say, or a leper story—and by the time it reached the far end of class a dozen retellings had mutilated it so wretchedly that it became all the more hilarious. In this way we were also able to disrupt many more desks than our own, a source of some pride.

Our punishment was generally mild. Only once do I recall physical violence coming into play, but the memory disturbs me still. In a strange reversal, Johnny was my lieutenant in the 4th grade crossing guard. I’d been chosen Captain, no doubt out of sympathy, the Sisters feeling that giving the new boy a position of responsibility would endear him to the other students—this representative of their understanding of human nature. Our mission, fortunately, was quite minor: We were to stand at the doorway beside two 8th graders to make sure that at the final bell the hordes of shrieking escapees would not go tearing madly across the front lawn and into traffic, but would instead be shepherded along the walk toward the parking lot, where their mothers awaited them in glistening Buicks and Fords.

Now, burdened by the responsibility, I reasoned—and to this day I think correctly—that Johnny and I should leave final period a few minutes before the bell so that we could assume our posts and be ready to manage the first graders, whose classroom was adjacent to the front doors while ours was at the far end of the hall. Mrs. Wilkens, a lay teacher and attendant during final period, accepted our reasoning. We had been leaving five minutes before the bell for about a month when we were captured by Sister Ann, dragged by our ears back to class, and presented to Mrs. Wilkens who, shuddering at Sister’s fury, denied ever giving us permission to leave class early. The liar! As a result, we were detained after school in the main office. We joked casually, nervous but in no way prepared for what was to come.

Sister Ann swooped in like a Valkyrie—you could feel the otherworldly chill all about her—and entaloned Johnny by the front of his shirt. She began then alternately shaking him and backhanding him across the mouth. I didn’t understand what she was trying to get him to confess to—whatever it was, it seemed to having little to do with the day’s infraction. But Johnny was unable to get anything coherent out. His throat was choked with sobs, and when he did manage to get a few strangled words past his lips, those words were in Spanish, which only fueled Sister’s rage.

“In English!” Sister Ann shrieked.

And the more he tried to stop it, the more his language—a language of warmth and comfort—came pouring out, the trickle become a torrent. This, of course, only caused Sister Ann to shake faster, strike harder.

Standing back to appraise her work, she glared down her long nose at the red-faced and quivering Johnny Gomez and said, sneering:

“Why don’t you take it like a man, like Robert, here?”

She dismissed Johnny Gomez, but ordered me to stay. My knees felt like sponges. I shuddered. What had this woman planned for me? Was I to be beaten? Worse? Was she going to make me stay up late and drink wine with her?

Sister Ann stood behind the huge wooden desk, beneath a photograph of the Pope, and looked down at me. As Johnny Gomez’s footsteps faded into the distance so, it seemed, did her rage. Her face now looked deeply saddened, even pained.

“This business, Robert. It was Gomez’s idea?”

“Yes, Sister.” The words were very close to my tongue, and the idea of regret a very long way away.

“Come here, Robert,” she said. “I want to show you something.” She sounded almost motherly. I remembered that some of the sisters—the younger ones—would often call her mother.

I stepped closer. I felt nauseous. The smell of starch was overwhelming. On the desk was a large book, bound in black and red leather. It was very impressive. Sister Ann thumbed through it, looking over the tops of her wire-rimmed glasses, running one white and gnarled finger from top to bottom of the page. She stopped. She rotated the book so that I could see its contents, lay it across the desk and, finger still resting where it had, demanded that I look. I closed my eyes.

I had expected to find beneath that finger a passage from the Bible, something detailing the punishment for boys who left class early. At the very least, I thought she was revealing to me some school rule which, bound by the thick leather, would have nearly as much moral weight.

“Look,” she demanded.

I opened my eyes. I had never seen such a book. There were many, many lines of several colors, breaking the page into neat, ordered columns both horizontally and vertically. I looked for a long while trying to make sense of the chaos of names and numbers. Then, directing my eyes along the white finger, I recognized my family’s name. Beside it was a silver star, the kind good students often had plastered to their foreheads for work well done. Also beside our name were a series of numbers and dollar signs. Then the finger moved, and my eyes with it, to the name Gomez. There was no star. Some of the columns had no numbers. Only some years later did I learn that in this book the sisters kept a record of the Sunday donations made by each family in the parish. It was the Order’s humble version of Heaven’s somewhat larger ledger.

“Do you understand, Robert?” Sister Ann asked.

I lied: “Yes, sister.”

“You’re a good boy, Robert.” She said in a hushed and serious tone. “Keep to your kind.”

I ran out of the office. I found Johnny Gomez in the boy’s room. His eyes were blood-red from crying, his face was flushed crimson, and his shirt hung out over his pants. The bottom buttons were missing, and part of his large, dark belly glistened in the florescent light.

“She hit you, too?” Johnny said. He looked me in the eye.

“Yeah,” I said. “A lot. She hit me a lot.”

“Where? Where’d she hit you? In the face? Where?”

“In the face,” I said, but then tried to cover myself: “But not so much. She used the stick, mostly.”

I rubbed my ass, feigning soreness.

“Yeah,” Johnny Gomez said. “Yeah. Right.”

That night I got out my bike and rode toward where I knew Johnny Gomez and his family lived. I had never been to that part of town before. No route my parents ever took had passed that way. I rode slowly—there were some icy patches along the streets—until I came to the edge of town. There the street lights stopped, and the road turned to dirt. I got off my bike and walked it, stumbling sometimes when a drifting cloud swallowed up the quarter-moon. Twenty minutes beyond the edge of town, the dirt road crested. Below, circled with a broken wood fence, stood the home of Johnny Gomez.

I will not describe the house. By the standards of poverty we have now come to accept as routine, I doubt the house would seem all that shocking. But I was shocked—a feeling reinforced by the memory of Sister Ann’s leather-bound book. The ruin of a home, the missing numbers, the beating all had some interconnection. I felt it, though I did not understand it. It was something obscene. It was something so horrible it could not be written, backwards or forwards. It was something even I would not say aloud.

Forgetfulness is any child’s most important resource, and I soon forgot the incident. So, I believed, did Johnny Gomez. In a matter of days our mischief was reborn, the chain of humor resurrected. But I was growing tired of the games. Even the few obscenities I had mastered in Spanish failed to excite me. I had, you see, fallen in love.

Irene Mudget, despite the dissonance of her name, was the most beautiful girl in the 4th grade, and she had money. Precisely the way wealth complements physical beauty I still do not understand, but Irene’s money seemed not so much the cause of her great looks, but rather a reward for them. I was dazzled. Irene had lustrous, wavy, shoulder-length blonde hair, and the fragrance she strewed like many small flowers as she passed was clean and pure. Her eyes were sapphires. Her smile was perfect—white, radiant, assured. Everything she did, she did well: Irene Mudget walked with grace, skipped rope elegantly. The other girls must have envied her to the sweet marrow, but they could hardly hate her, since never did her assurance surface as arrogance. Her betterness was always expressed with the un-condescending good will that characterizes real royalty in its dealings with the common.

I say I was in love. Can a 4th grader fall in love? I believe so. Poised between true childhood and the hormonal eruptions of adolescence, a long way from the lacerations that make adult relationships the wonder they are, a 4th grader is particularly qualified to fall in love. I saw, untainted, a physical beauty that must surely have been a product of some inner light, as if the human form were a sort of three-dimensional screen into which was projected the image of the soul.

I loved, perhaps for the only time in my life, with the sole right reason: I loved her because she was good.

And what was I? A fat cipher, at best; at worst, class clown. Knowing that never in a jillion years would a girl like Irene Mudget pay mind to me, I took desperate measures. Even at my young age I had seen some poetry. Most of it was passionate doggerel composed to the Virgin Mary, begging intercession. I was, I thought, ready to beg the divine intercession of Irene Mudget.

This is the text, complete, of my first literary production:

Your lips are like cherries,

Your teeth are like pearls.

Oh, Irene!

You’re such a girl!

Those lines, hastily scrawled on a half-sheet of three-hole binder paper, I folded into a tight mat. I remember anxiousness, a lump in the throat and its twin in my stomach. I probably sweat—I have always sweat. On the cover I wrote the name Irene as clearly as I could, in what I thought a formal script. I then tapped the shoulder of Ruth Ann Rudd, who sat in front of me. I whispered “pass it on,” and slipped the packet alongside the desk and into her hand.

Midway through its journey, my little poem found itself in the hands of Johnny Gomez. I felt relief. There were only two more students between him and Irene Mudget, and these were girls on our side: Nellie Villanueva and Mary Sanchez. Johnny eyed the note, the large script, the name. He turned, with difficulty, toward me, and I motioned with my hand for him to pass the note along. Instead, he grinned whitely, opened the note, read it, and began to laugh.

He laughed. He laughed wildly, hysterically, as if that note contained the filthiest of backwards obscenities. Sister Victor, scribbling figures on the blackboard, turned silently. The entire class seemed to inhale at the same moment. Johnny Gomez went on laughing, oblivious in rapture.

Within moments, Sister Victor was there: black and white, monolithic, redolent. She stood above Johnny Gomez, swaying, a tower of anger. She put out her hand. Johnny Gomez hesitated for only a moment before handing over the note. From that time, he would never again turn to face me.

As I waited for my vulgarity to be made known to the entire class, I did not hate Johnny Gomez, nor did he hate me. Though we had had many small things in common, a great space had always separated us. But now even that had been partly bridged by the sorrow of knowledge. We had stood together before the infinite pettiness of God. Together, we had come to know that no man can trust his brother.

I was not afraid. I watched Sister Victor’s eyes dilate, the veins rise in her neck, her flesh turn purple. But I saw much more than this. I saw a world unfold. I saw humiliation, certainly. I saw each word of my poem scissored by Sister Victor’s lips before a leering class. I saw the dozens of 4th grade faces, twisted with ugly laughter, follow me for weeks across the playground, down the dark halls: “Loverboy!” they shrieked. “Poet!” Among those faces, I saw my dream of Irene Mudget crumble.

And I saw—I believe I saw—the many years of silences, the future fit for the likes of me and Johnny Gomez, collapsed into one mass—black, white, monolithic. Had I then known, I would have raised my voice in praise of a kind: For there, in Sister Victor, I saw all the disparate shards of a life gone wrong cemented together with the bitter starch of disappointment.