“It got some sun in it.”
I wasn’t sure what Patrick meant by this—whether he meant it was golden, like streaks or spots of sun, or whether he meant it had literally been shone on. So I said, “That’s very poetic,” and he smiled.
“Okay, last poem for the day,” I said again. “Why don’t you read it aloud?”
How admirable!
to see lightning and not think
life is fleeting.
“Lightning,” Patrick said, surprised by the word. “I forgot about lightning.”
“What other images,” I asked, “could Basho have used?”
Patrick was thinking. “The sunset,” he answered. I hadn’t heard him use the word since we looked at the cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “Because it happen so fast. You look, then it gone. But it be different than lightning. Because you never know when lightning be striking. But the sunset always come; you always know your day gonna end.”
“Which is sadder?”
“The sunset,” he said definitively.
Years later, I still associate the ginkgo leaf with sunset.
—
FOR THAT SUNDAY’S grocery shopping, I settled on Food Giant. Walmart was bigger, but I had just gone for a run and was sweating, in shorts and sneakers. I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, especially people coming back from church in their fancy hats and floral dresses.
As I picked through Food Giant’s yellowing spinach and molding blueberries, I sensed a man staring at me. He was white, middle-aged, well dressed—nobody I knew. Being Asian in the Delta meant getting stared at, so I ignored him.
Now the stranger approached. A woman and man accompanied him, forming a small circle around me that blocked my access to the tomatoes.
“Weren’t you in that movie about Helena?” the stranger asked, referring to Richard Wormser’s documentary. “I used that in a workshop,” he said, “and I got hell for it.
“But it was a striking movie,” he continued, “and you were the heart of it.” He nodded to himself, remembering. He had led a professional workshop for teachers, the man said, and he was a paid consultant. I could tell that he was not from Helena. If he had led a workshop of any kind, likely he was from Little Rock or Fayetteville, the more urban areas of Arkansas.
“You have a gift for children, a real gift. For speaking with them. And speaking about them.”
He paused, waiting for me to respond. I said thank you, inwardly hoping that the other teachers in Helena, especially those who knew that I left, had not seen it.
“I showed it to teachers in a workshop and used it as an example of the key of keys—care. The student in the movie, he used that word to talk about you, to explain why you made an impact on him. I told them a teacher’s care could change someone.”
At this, his friends nodded gravely, as if this were an original thought. I nervously guessed at what was to come next: What kind of consultant session involves showing some film and telling teachers to care? Few teachers like to be told that other teachers care more than they do. And I didn’t care more; I had left.
“So then one teacher got offended; she thought I was saying something about her.” Now the man grew agitated, the conflict surging in his memory. “She said that kid didn’t change at all. She said he murdered someone and is in jail now. Then she got up and left the room.”
Expectantly, the three faces turned to look at me. They were waiting, I realized, for me to confirm or deny that disgruntled teacher’s account. This is what it came down to—true or false. Patrick had either killed someone or he hadn’t. Caring could change a person or it couldn’t. I thought they were na?ve, yet maybe I was no different.
I had not intended to talk or even think about anything that mattered to me this morning. Now, in my gym shorts and silly sweatband, I’d been ambushed in a fluorescent aisle of Food Giant by a stranger who wanted to know what happened. What happened was just facts; it was nothing of the inner life, nothing of a person’s complex regrets or intentions. But for them, what happened was a shorthand for understanding who he was.
It is destabilizing to think of a person as X—incapable of killing someone—and then be told he is Y—a killer.
But it wasn’t about being right or wrong about a person. This wasn’t some final reveal in a story where the violence represents internal evil, a crux to a person’s character. This was just life. Anybody exposed to fighting knows it’s a matter of degrees. A knife instead of a belt; a fatal cut instead of a shallow one.
I looked straight at the man and said it was true. It was true that the student in the documentary had killed someone and was in jail now. The man’s face fell; the others’, as well. Now I knew: They weren’t from around here. Nobody from here, even the mild and kind elderly folks who fed me pie at the Presbyterian church, would be so shocked, so overtaken by pity.
“It was a fight late at night, you know,” I said. “The man who”—I paused, choosing my words carefully—“died, he was older, drunk on his porch, with Patrick’s sister. Patrick got scared.”
The three shared the same face: stricken and curious, as if they had never heard of a fight gone bad.
I wanted to tell them how Patrick was doing, that he was in pain, indeed agonized by what he had done. And I wanted to tell them Patrick had read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, tell them about his fondness for Lucy, his forgiveness of Edmund. These were ethereal, precious gains.
But it was clear that little of what I wanted to say mattered to them, for they wanted to hear that Patrick hadn’t killed anyone. I had nearly forgotten—in fact, I had been glad to forget. Hadn’t forgetting been the very point of reading together? Hadn’t it been a way of detaching us from the past?
I started to panic. No matter what he did for the rest of his life, Patrick would never escape that question: What happened? The question of his inner life would always be overshadowed by fact. I thought of the lines concentrated around Patrick’s jaw as he wrote, his eyes squinting as he searched for a word: the way you could see on his face the silence, the private labor, the proof of feeling, the evidence of thinking.
“It’s been a pleasure,” I said, and pushed my cart of dismal produce away from them.
—
“YOU PASS THAT test?” Patrick greeted me.
“The test?” I said. “Oh! The bar. Yes!”
He had remembered that my results had come out over the weekend.
“I was in Memphis with Danny and Lucy when I found out. They took me out to celebrate.”
He grinned, happy for me. “That’s great, Ms. Kuo. Really, I ain’t surprised, you real smart. Where you go to eat?” I said Mexican food.
He wanted to know about Mexican food, or he was trying to procrastinate. Obligingly, I explained the tortilla and the enchilada.