Brother Odd

the grace of his art.
        When I had given him time to proceed but had gotten not another word from him, I said, "Who wants you dead, Jacob?"
        "The Neverwas."
        "Help me understand."
        "The Neverwas came once to see, and Jacob was full of the black, and the Neverwas said, 'Let him die.'"
        "He came here to this room?"
        Jacob shook his head. "A long time ago the Neverwas came, before the ocean and the bell and the floating away."
        "Why do you call him the Neverwas?"
        "That's his name."
        "He must have another name."
        "No. He's the Neverwas, and we don't care."
        "I never heard anyone named the Neverwas before."
        Jacob said, "Never heard no one named the Odd Thomas before."
        "All right. Fair enough."
        Employing an X-Acto knife, Jacob shaved the point on the pencil.
        Watching him, I wished that I could whittle my dull brain to a sharper point. If only I could understand something about the scheme of simple metaphors in which he spoke, I might be able to crack the code of his conversation.
        I had made some progress, figuring out that when he said "the dark is gonna come with the dark," he meant that death was coming tonight or some night soon.
        Although his drawing ability made him a savant, that was the extent of his special talent. Jacob wasn't clairvoyant. His warning of oncoming death was not a presentiment.
        He had seen something, heard something, knew something that I had not seen, had not heard, did not know. His conviction that death loomed was based on hard evidence, not on supernatural perception.
        Now that the pencil wood had been cut away, he put down the X-Acto knife and used a sandpaper block to sharpen the point of the lead.
        Brooding about the riddle that was Jacob, I stared at the snow falling thicker and faster than ever past the window, so thick that maybe you could drown out there, trying to breathe but your lungs filling up with snow.
        "Jacob's dumb," he said, "but not stupid."
        When I shifted my attention from the window, I discovered he was looking at me for the first time.
        "That must be another Jacob," I said. "I don't see dumb here."
        At once he shifted his eyes to the pencil, and he put aside the sandpaper block. In a different, singsong voice, he said, "Dumb as a duck run down by a truck."
        "Dumb doesn't draw like Michelangelo."
        "Dumb as a cow knocked flat by a plow."
        "You're repeating something you heard, aren't you?"
        "Dumb as a mutt with his nose up his butt."
        "No more," I said softly. "Okay? No more."
        "There's lots more."
        "I don't want to hear. It hurts me to hear this."
        He seemed surprised. "Hurts why?"
        "Because I like you, Jake. I think you're special."
        He was silent. His hands trembled, and the pencil ticked against the table. He glanced at me, heartbreaking vulnerability in his eyes. He shyly looked away.
        "Who said those things to you?" I asked.
        "You know. Kids."
        "Kids here at Saint Bart's?"
        "No. Kids before the ocean and the bell and the floating away."
        In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness that is with us every day, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.
        "Before the ocean and the bell and the floating away," Jacob repeated.
        "Those kids were just jealous, fake, see, you could do something better than anything they could do."
        "Not Jacob."
        "Yes, you."
        He sounded dubious: "What could I do better?"
        "Draw. Of all the things they could do that you couldn't, there wasn't one thing they could do as well as you can draw. So they were jealous and called you names and made fun of you-to make themselves feel better."
        He stared at his hands until the tremors stopped, until the pencil was steady, and then he continued working on the portrait.
        His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot