“This place is a joke. Central is a joke. The teachers are intimidated by the kids, so they don’t teach anything. Kids be hollering, howling. I could just cry seeing them, pants hanging down by their butts. When they’re outside”—she gestured to the campus—“nobody keeps them or watches them, no teachers or nothing.”
Ms. Riley’s new tone of bleakness disoriented me. At Stars she had greeted me daily by saying, “God is good, God is good.” At Stars she had wielded real power. Incoming teachers like me looked up to her; students behaved for her. What she lacked in teaching certification, she’d made up for in moral authority. Now she’d been exiled along with the students. She was trying to build a fort on quicksand.
“I tell them, ‘Don’t come in here with no foolishness.’ You know me, Ms. Kuo. I got my gospel music, I got my Bible on my desk, I say to the kids, ‘Better shut up and hush.’ But that village is down; they killed it. Where is that village, where is that village? Ms. Kuo, I remember when I was growing up, you could sleep with your windows up all day long—I don’t care how low on the ground they were. You could leave food on our stove and say, Hey, neighbor, hey, Mary, hey, Joanne, I left my neck bone on the stove and got to run off to the store and get some potatoes. She’d say, Okay, I got you. And I tell you, Ms. Kuo—your food wouldn’t burn. Your food wouldn’t burn. That’s how close people were.”
I told her I’d gone to see Patrick.
“The devil got him, Ms. Kuo,” she said. “Once the devil gets you, he don’t let go.”
She threw away her cigarette. “The things that are happening with our people, the devil just seem to have all the control, all the control.”
—
THE TOBACCO STORE was a drive-in, my first. “Buglers?” I asked, unsure if I’d gotten the name right. The woman at the window grinned, showing a gold tooth; when she turned to get the tobacco, her dice earrings rattled. The package was baby blue, with a pretty logo of a man with a trumpet.
The next morning Patrick greeted me enthusiastically. “I did my homework.”
“Two days in a row!” I said. “That’s great.” On cue, I began to scrounge around my bag, signaling that I’d brought his tobacco and made good on my end of the deal. Patrick poked his head out into the hallway, checking for guards. He nodded.
I passed him the package and he deftly made it disappear. The stealth of our exchange and the way he stowed the package inside the folds of his jumpsuit made me distrust him for a second.
From my bag, I retrieved a book: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “I read this again over the weekend,” I said. “It’s so good that I almost started crying at the end.”
“You, Ms. Kuo?” he said. “Crying?” He shook his head, smiling at the idea.
I handed him the book.
It was a light paperback, but Patrick reached for it with both hands, as if I were handing him something heavy and fragile.
He bent down, examining the colorful illustration on the cover. I was nervous that he’d be offended it was a children’s book. Yet he seemed curious. Perhaps he was thinking about his daughter or his own childhood; I didn’t know. He traced the illustration’s outlines with his fingertips.
“What do you see?”
He stared for a long time. “I see two little girls. Look like they dancing with the lion.”
“What does the lion look like to you?”
Patrick hesitated.
“There’s no right answer, you know,” I said.
“Like a beast, but they having fun in a field. It look like a sunset.”
I nodded and then pointed to the page for him to start.
Patrick read:
“To Lucy Barfield”
“Who do you think Lucy might be?” I asked.
Patrick looked hard at the words, as if the answer would appear if he stared long enough. He got agitated. “I don’t know, Ms. Kuo. I don’t know about none of this.”
“Hey,” I said. “My bad, I didn’t explain. You’re not supposed to know. We’re just guessing.”
In his panic, he didn’t seem to hear me.
“My dear Lucy,” I began, ignoring him. “Now you read.”
My heart pounded. I was afraid he’d refuse to continue.
He cleared his throat.
“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books.” He continued until he reached the signature: “Your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.”
Patrick’s reading was awkward. His words rushed together in a flow barely impeded by punctuation.
I asked, “So who do you think Lucy is?”
Patrick leafed to the front cover, checking the name. “It be his goddaughter.”
“Yes.” I nodded emphatically. “That’s exactly right.”
“So he wrote this for her?” he asked. “Like a gift?”
“Yes. Like a gift.”
And then we began to read.
“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy,” I started. “This story is about…”
The room was just big enough for our purposes, with one table and two chairs. We sat facing each other, each with our own book, and took turns reading aloud. (“See here?” I said. “This is where the paragraph begins. And where the chunk of words ends—see that space?—that’s where the paragraph ends.”) When it was my turn to read, he relaxed, his finger following the words as I spoke, as if assuring himself that each word were properly tended. And as I approached the final sentence of my paragraph, his shoulders stiffened; his turn was coming.
“?‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room….But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold.”
“Have you seen snow?” I asked. He said he didn’t think so.
“Well, you’re about to,” I said cheerfully. At this Patrick looked perplexed but encouraged.
—