Patrick’s deep spiritual belief, his ability to recognize tonal joy and grief, his poetry and sense of sound—all of these led me back to Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s novel that I had first read at the end of my two years in Helena. An aging pastor writes a letter to his young son. For me the book had been about different ideals of love and how we strive and fall short. There was not enough time now to read all of it together, but I would treat the passages like poems, and Patrick could imitate them as he had done before.
When we reached the end of the page, I told Patrick, “You know what I’m going to ask.”
Patrick read his favorite line: “You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind.”
“How would you describe the tone?”
“Jubilant. Peaceful. Hopeful.”
He said the words in quick succession, as if the words themselves formed a poem he’d memorized.
I told him his assignment. “It’s just like your imitation of Merwin,” I said. “Same thing. Just sentences, not lines.”
An hour passed.
Again the motions repeated themselves.
He would frown.
He would crack his neck, rotate it.
He would leaf through his notes, then a book of pictures, hunting for images.
Then the process would start over.
Finally, Patrick passed me his letter.
Do you remember when me, you and your mother went fishing at Bear Creek? I know you do, you were so happy. And yes, I will take you back there again. Down by the bank where I was sitting you came running, calling, “Daddy, look.” There near some bamboo you showed me some bright pink flowers. They were pink peonies with many petals that you described as more beautiful than a rose. You pulled one and said, “Take this, Daddy,” and I put its stem in my mouth. That made the biggest smile on your face so I picked you up and kissed your nose with the peony still hanging from my mouth. After I let you down, you asked can we come back again one day and I said, of course, yes.
I held the thin, torn-out notebook paper. I could not believe he had written it. It was more than I had expected. It was better than what I had taught him.
I had been searching all along for a form in which Patrick could write. I had thought it was poetry, but now I had really found it: the letter. This was the medium that captivated him even more. And why wouldn’t it? In his life he had already done it a thousand times—for what was prayer but a letter to God? He had been writing letters all along: to Cherish, to Marcus’s mother. The letter injected writing with purpose, it was a plea to be heard, it was one person addressing another. The choice of Gilead clarified itself. It explored love between friends, between spouses, between whites and blacks, between God and his supplicants, between a professional and those to whom he is entrusted—but, above all, it dealt with a parent’s love for a child. How to express to a child what you know, what you wish for her? What could you say that is worth keeping?
“Cherry will read this someday and know that she’s the center of your life,” I said. “You’ve come so far. Do you remember what your letter was like back then?”
He waited for me to describe it.
“A repetition of I’m sorry—I’m sorry for not being here, for dropping out of school. Don’t be like me; don’t do what I did. This is the first time that you don’t seem afraid of her. Because before, what you wrote—that’s a weight on a child, don’t you think? How would she have felt if she’d read those letters from seven months ago?”
He paused. “Just as lost as I was. Like her daddy don’t know too much.”
—
BY MAY HE’D written dozens of letters to Cherish, one each day. Today’s letter was about canoeing. I’d shown Patrick pictures of my own canoeing trip down the Mississippi during high-water season: Rain flooded the area, trees stood in water, and, in certain channels, the river was transformed into an underwater forest that appeared to admit only animals that could swim or fly. “You canoe around the trees?” Patrick asked, studying a picture, surprised. I explained each picture, sharing the names I had learned. “These are Virginia creepers, and these are cottonwoods, and those are mulberries.” And I pointed to a small green clump and said, “That’s a turtle on a log. You can’t really see it, but it’s hanging out in the sun.”
He worked for an hour. Then he showed me what he’d written:
You and I are canoeing down the Mississippi River. There are so many trees, bunched together in the water like bushes. The river is shadowy in some places, but the light shines through cracks of the trees. Near the bank there is a great blue heron, standing still, searching for fish. And as we are passing, a silver carp surfaces as if it is jewelry in the water. You say, “Dad look a snake.” I say, “Where” and you say, “No it’s just a vine.” We hear splashes, the fish jumping or the frogs croaking. The white light glitters on the muddy water, which you say looks like coffee.
When we approach the thicket of cottonwoods and cypress, we can hear an inflection of birds. On some low branches hang plenty of mulberries. You stretch your arm straight out to grab some. They are white because they are not ripe yet, but the edible ones are bluish-black. You eat one and it stains your shirt. As we row away, I tell you that whenever we are at home and you take a nap, I think of you as a sleeping berry.
It’s amazing to see trees grow out of the water, in so many different shapes. Some have a Y-shape, and others are lying down. The willow trees are so tall that you can hear our necks cracking while we are looking for the top. To the left is a floating log and suddenly I see it has two turtles on it. We watch the turtles until they jump off. You want to feel the water, too, so you put your foot outside the canoe and into the river. I can see it dangling under the surface like a little fish.
I am sitting at the bow, with my hands behind my head, mesmerized. If the wind blows and the trees leaves shake, it sounds like rattling paper.
My chest pounded with astonishment. Where had he gotten these ideas? I could trace the mulberries and the turtles, the cottonwoods and the willows. But we never talked about the blue heron, the silver carp, or the nickname for his daughter (a sleeping berry!). Nor the frog croaking, the muddy water, the necks cracking below the trees.
I read the letter a second time. I was searching for myself, for deposits of our conversations, memories he’d shared or words I taught him. But I was barely there. Each word felt like a tiny impulsive root, proof of a mysterious force that exceeded me.
“Remember what you said about Lucy?”
Patrick looked at me blankly. He did not remember.
“How you said the book was like a gift to her from C. S. Lewis? Now your letter is your gift. Someday you’ll take Cherish on this trip, and you’ll tell her you’d planned it a long time ago.”
—
AND FINALLY WE read Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, printed in The Fire Next Time.
I’d sent him the book when I first learned he was in jail. But he hadn’t read it. “I tried,” he’d said to me simply when I asked about it. I didn’t inquire further.
As I looked at Baldwin’s letter again, the strangest thing happened: I heard Patrick’s voice as I read it.
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.