Reading with Patrick

by Michelle Kuo

  Patrick leaned his head toward the page. He was studying the illustration of the Faun, who laid his head in his hands and slumped back in his chair, with his tail in a loop on the floor.

  “That him crying, ain’t it?” Patrick said. “That the Faun.”

  I said it was.

  Then Patrick resumed reading.

  The Faun confessed to Lucy: He was a kidnapper for the White Witch. The Witch, he explained, was the reason it was always winter in Narnia.

  “ ‘Always winter and never Christmas,’ ” Patrick read, his tone as forlorn as that of a self-loathing faun.

  The Witch had threatened the Faun. If he didn’t obey her, she would cut off his tail, saw off his horns, and pluck out his beard.

  Patrick read, “ ‘And if she is extra and specially angry she’ll turn me into stone and I shall be only a statue of a Faun in her horrible house.’ ”

  He gave his head a baleful shake.

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?” I said. We grimaced in unison. “What do you think he’ll do with Lucy?”

  “I think…” His fingers touched his chin. “I think he be letting her go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he a good man. Or goat. Or whatever he is. And he crying. He want to do the right thing.”

  Patrick read on and saw that the Faun did indeed let Lucy go. “ ‘Then be off home as quick as you can,’ said the Faun, ‘and—c-can you ever forgive me for what I meant to do?’

  “ ‘Why, of course I can,’ said Lucy, shaking him heartily by the hand.”

  Patrick, now deeply absorbed, pressed on.

  The Faun asked Lucy whether he could keep the handkerchief that she had lent him. She told him yes. And there the chapter ended.

  “Your prediction came true,” I said.

  He glowed, then looked away.

  “Why do you think the Faun wanted the handkerchief?”

  “Because he know she special,” he said. “So he want to remember her.” His fingers tapped his chin in thought. “And I think…I think he know he did the right thing, letting her go like that. So the handkerchief”—he said the word slowly, so as to not stumble over it—“it be like a good memory.”

  —

  I WENT HOME ecstatic. I barely noticed the rain as I drove. A book: Of course this was what came first. Not just any book but a magical book, where the heroes were children, and children on the side of good. In the damp cold jail a book could be a fantasy, a refuge, a separate place.

  Patrick continued to gain momentum. For homework, I’d asked him to choose one child from the book whose feelings he related to. It had not occurred to me that Patrick would see himself in Edmund, who betrays his siblings and gets tricked by the Witch. I had imagined he was more like Lucy, who was on a journey, or Peter, who was the eldest and protected everyone.

  Lewis had written, Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Patrick wrote:

  Every since I had my terrible incedent. Some days I wake up hating to be in Jail. Hopeing it was really a dream to began with. Although it was’nt then, as soon as I try to forget or look around being here. Once I dreamed my mother was sick or had died. When I awaken the sense was so devastating. My mind wouldnt let me call home an check right off. Those are a couple of reasons I chose Edmund.

  Patrick had clearly labored over each letter. Each period was a circle that he’d carefully closed. Difficult words were correctly spelled: awaken, devastating, reasons. He must have taken the time to use the dictionary I gave him.

  Patrick watched me as I read his work. “It’s probably pretty lousy, because my head was hurting.”

  I said, “It’s not lousy. It’s good.”

  I would correct the apostrophes later.

  “I saw your sisters yesterday afternoon,” I said, changing the subject to a more pleasant topic.

  Patrick jolted up, excited.

  I had started, on a regular basis, to pick up cigarettes from his house rather than buying them. This time, all three of his sisters had been home, the picture of pleasing domesticity. The eldest sister, Willa—this was Jamaal’s mother—was attempting to read some kind of textbook as Jamaal grabbed her hair. She was taking a class at the community college. Patrick’s father and Pam both seized Jamaal, trying to hold him back, as they competed for his affection. The worn-down couch sank under the weight of their struggles. Kiera had just woken up, having napped after a long night shift at the retirement home, where she worked with her mother.

  “Pam be okay?” he said, asking about her first.

  “She seems really nice.”

  At this Patrick grunted. “She too nice. People always be trying to put their kids on her, but they don’t pay her. These grown people, they already got babies and they trying to put their babies on her. They take advantage ’cause they see she got a good heart. I try to tell her, ‘People will use you, they ain’t your real friends.’ I don’t know if she know or if she don’t care. That’s how she is.”

  “Pam is very trusting,” I agreed. “She and Kiera told me to tell you they’re hoping to see you soon.”

  This was the wrong thing to say. Patrick flinched and brusquely waved his hand in the air. Did he know they’d put off visiting him because coming was too hard? Or did his wave mean that he already understood and forgave them?

  Patrick fingered the cover of the book.

  “Narnia,” Patrick said. “That a real place?”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised. “I wish it were.”

  I shook my head to indicate I was sorry that Narnia wasn’t real.

  “But, Ms. Kuo,” he said. His brows, insistent, were ridged with concern. “It got a map right here.”

  Patrick opened the book, expertly creasing back the spine. He pushed into my view a map of Narnia, its borders designated by hand-drawn lines. “And that a compass,” he said, gesturing to the star in the corner. It was apparent that he had already studied the map in earnest.

  “I’m guessing the author drew the map, too.”

  He seemed less disappointed than baffled. “So he made this all up?” He was thinking aloud and didn’t appear to expect an answer. Then his face lit up. “Maybe Narnia be like that place he from—where you say he from?”

  “England.”

  “Yeah. Maybe Narnia be like that.”

  “That’s possible,” I said. “Though I don’t think there are half-men, half-goats there.”

  At this Patrick gave a little chuckle.

  “Ms. Kuo,” he said. Distracted, he held his fingers on his chin. “A man once told me you can do one thing that could change the rest of your life. Man locked up in cell next to me. He told me that right in front of my house.”

  The man’s duplicated proximity to Patrick startled him, as if converting the man’s words to prophecy.

  “Do you think that one day is going to change the rest of your life?”

  “It have already.”

  —

  “HOW IS IT?” I asked finally, hesitant to interrupt him.

  “Great.”

  I had started to carve out time where I just let him read. “Like silent reading,” I said, hoping he remembered. While he read, I corrected his homework, but usually I finished before him.

  “Which part are you on?”

  “Part where the stone table cracked.”

  “You like that part?”

  “Yeah, where they be battling, Edmund and Peter. First they fighting with the Witch, and Edmund’s the one that kept them going.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “Edmund,” he said, without hesitating. “He be real smart. He just a young boy, you know. The Witch started turning him into stone and he thought to knock the wand out of her hand when everybody was doing something else. And Edmund be on the Witch’s side at first.”

  “Why do you think he was on her side?”

  “He be fooled by the Witch. I believe he went along because he was alone. And because he took that Turkish Delight. And becau
se he wanted to be a king. He be mad at his siblings because they gave him the cold shoulder, wouldn’t listen to him.”

  “How do you think he changed?”

  “He became”—here Patrick struggled to find the words he wanted—“a lot stronger and wiser.”

  —

  I WAS THERE when he finished the book. From the corner of my eye I saw him reach the last paragraph, his pinkie finger tracing the words. Disbelieving, he turned the page: It was blank. He turned the book again to the back cover, as if the book were playing a trick on him, as if books did not truly have endings. Then he leafed backward, looking for a chapter he wanted to read again. He continued to read for a bit longer.

  Later, I would draw an upward-sloping line. “This is how a story is structured,” I would say. “What is the rising action?”

  He wrote, He abandoned his siblings with the beavers and betrayed them for the witch.

  “What goes at the peak?”

  He wrote, Edmund been forgiven and granted a sword.

  —

  I HAD THOUGHT I was choosing a fantasy into which Patrick could retreat. But Narnia was real to him. What made the story fantastical for Patrick was that Edmund was able to change.

  7

  * * *

  He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

  Deep autumn—

  My neighbor

  How does he live, I wonder.

  —BASHO

  New Year’s Day—

  everything is in blossom!

  I feel about average.

  —ISSA

  HAIKU: THIS WAS HOW MY college poetry professor, the poet Jorie Graham, had begun our semester. The essentials of poetry, she insisted, were contained in the three-line form. On the board she wrote one translation: Sick on a journey / my dreams wander / the withered fields. Then another: Sick on a journey / over parched fields / dreams wander on.

  She asked how they were different. I had no idea.

  Then she erased the second version—which, without explanation, she said she didn’t like—and kept writing, her back turned to us. Another year gone / hat in hand / sandals on our feet. And then another. A small eternity passed as the three-line poems proliferated on the board. Our homework, she said, was to choose a few—she was never too specific in her instructions—and rearrange each one ten times.

  Back at my dorm, I tried various permutations, each worse than the next. I tried: I wonder how he lives / My neighbor / In deep autumn. Then: In deep autumn / I do not know how / My neighbor lives. Was this any different? Better or worse? Probably worse. I was not a natural, but something did happen to me as I scratched through the assignment, hating my bad drafts. I had slowed down and focused on just a handful of words. The original text, which initially appeared like something I might have written myself, now seemed untouchable, invulnerable to correction.

  Did Patrick know that poems like this existed? We had just finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I didn’t know what to teach next. These little poems seemed just right. They were too short to intimidate. Periods and commas appeared optional. Just one or two images; just one or two senses; just one surprise. They could be rewritten in infinite ways. Or, as I learned, they resisted being rewritten. Reading these, there was less potential to feel that one’s response was wrong and more opportunity simply to respond.

  —

  READING HAIKUS SILENTLY the next day, Patrick laughed.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  Don’t worry, spiders,

  I keep house

  Casually.

  “Spider busy, not bothering anybody,” he said. “I can relate to that, you know.”

  I gave him the whole book of haikus and told him to take his time flipping through them on his own. “Mark the ones you like,” I said. “There are more than a hundred, so take your time.”

  Minutes passed. I waited. I occupied myself with an anthology of poetry, marking poems I wanted to read with him.

  “Which one’s your favorite?” I asked finally.

  He studied the poems, comparing them. Then he pointed at this haiku:

  Blossoms at night,

  and the faces of people

  moved by music.

  “Probably this one,” he said.

  That one body of words moved him more distinctly than another—this seemed vital. But why had he chosen it?

  “I like that one, too. What do you like about it?”

  “That it be real.” He shrugged to indicate he was done talking.

  “Okay,” I said. “What else do you like?”

  Patrick chose this:

  Napped half the day;

  No one

  punished me!

  “Why do you like this one?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause it be true. I sleep all day here and don’t nothing get said about it. Don’t nobody punish me for doing nothing.”

  I asked if he meant at home or in jail, and he said both.

  Then he pointed to another poem and said, “I like this one, too.”

  The world of dew

  Is the world of dew

  And yet—and yet

  I said, “That’s a good one. He wrote that after his son died.”

  He nodded—that appeared to make sense to him.

  “What kind of feeling do you get reading it?”

  Patrick gazed at the page intently. Then he said, “Feeling of accepting. It is what it is.”

  Now he leaned forward and asked suddenly, “Is it raining, Ms. Kuo?”

  I wondered if the dew in the poem had reminded him of rain.

  I said it had been raining when I came in. He nodded soberly, as if I’d said something serious about God or politics.

  “Man. I miss the rain. I can’t tell when it rain. I thought it be raining today. I was gonna ask you if it really raining or a shower from another cell.”

  “You’re never sure?”

  “Naw.”

  The rain now made me remember something I meant to show him. “Oh,” I began. “I met this nice old white dude named Douglas.”

  Patrick guffawed and covered his face. “Ms. Kuo say old white dude,” he said to himself.

  I laughed, too. “What’s so funny?”

  I had met Douglas a few weeks ago, I said. The man knew every tree in Helena. Patrick’s shoulders had loosened. “You like them trees, Ms. Kuo?”

  I didn’t know much about trees, but I did love the ginkgo. When I’d told Douglas that, he lit up. The ginkgo! He liked the ginkgo, too. It was an old tree, here since the day of Adam and Eve. Its bloom was very short, only a week. A few days after that conversation, I found a bag of tomatoes holding down a piece of paper on my windshield: It was a map of downtown Helena, with an X to mark the last blooming ginkgo tree.

  “When I saw the tree,” I said, “I wished you could see it, too.”

  I said that a poem has images, a fancy word for what he already knew all about: a picture of something that we could see or hear or feel or touch.

  He got the hang of it quickly. “What are the images here?” I’d ask, pointing.

  “Blossoms, because you can see them; music, because you can hear it.”

  “What about this one?”

  “Dew, because you can touch it and smell it,” he said, then added after a second, “And sometime see it.”

  We went through more. Words I normally took for granted were for Patrick a labor of imagination—some described things he had never encountered. “Mountain,” he read. “I ain’t never really seen a mountain, to be honest.”

  “What about an ocean?” I asked.

  He wrinkled his eyebrows, a great groove now bisecting his forehead. “Maybe,” he said finally, honestly.

  “Last poem for the day,” I said. “It uses a vocabulary word, fleeting. I’m going to tell you how fleeting is used and you guess what it means. Ready? Okay. Let’s say you hear the sound of a bird but only for a second. Or let’s say you have a dream about Cherish at night but it disap
pears as soon as you have it. We say that the sound is fleeting, the dream is fleeting. Now, what do you think fleeting means?”

  Patrick thought. “Brief?” he asked. “Passing by?”

  I nodded and then put my hand in my pocket. “Can you guess what’s in my hand? Just guess,” I urged.

  “Some candy?” he asked.

  I gave Patrick a golden ginkgo leaf. He ran his fingertip along its veins and then twirled the leaf in his hands, like a makeshift pinwheel.

  “This bright gold that you see doesn’t last long on the tree. After the leaves turn gold, they’ll fall within a week or two. Like, you could say the color blooms in a fleeting way, or fleetingly.” Patrick was still studying the leaf, not listening to me.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “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.