Brother Odd

portrait of your mother came out very well. It's one of your best."
        I had hoped that he would be in a more garrulous mood than when I had last seen him. This proved to be a false hope.
        "She must have been very proud of your talent."
        Jacob finished sharpening the last of the pencils, kept it in his hand, and shifted his attention to the drawing tablet, studying the blank page.
        "Since I was last here," I told him, "I had a wonderful roast-beef sandwich and a crisp dill pickle that probably wasn't poisoned."
        His thick tongue appeared, and he bit gently on it, perhaps deciding what his first pencil strokes should be.
        "Then this nasty guy almost hanged me from the bell tower, and I got chased through a tunnel by a big bad scary thing, and I went on a snow adventure with Elvis Presley."
        He began lightly and fluidly to sketch the outline of something that I could not recognize at once from my upside-down point of view.
        At the doorway, Romanovich sighed impatiently.
        Without looking at him, I said, "Sorry. I know my interrogation techniques aren't as direct as those of a librarian."
        To Jacob, I said, "Sister Miriam says you lost your mother when you were thirteen, more than twelve years ago."
        He was sketching a boat from a high perspective.
        "I've never lost a mother because I never really had one. But I lost a girl I loved. She meant everything to me."
        With a few lines he suggested that the sea, when fully drawn, would be gently rolling.
        "She was beautiful, this girl, and beautiful in her heart. She was kind and tough, sweet and determined. Smart, she was smarter than me. And so funny"
        Jacob paused to study what he had thus far put on the paper.
        "Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army."
        His tongue retreated, and he bit instead on his lower lip.
        "We never made love. Because of a bad thing that happened to her when she was a little girl, she wanted to wait. Wait until we could afford to be married."
        With two styles of cross-hatching, he began to give substance to the hull of the boat.
        "Sometimes I thought I couldn't wait, but then I always could. Because she gave me so much else, and everything she gave me was more than a thousand other girls could ever give. All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that. I don't know what she saw in me, you know? But I could give her that much."
        The pencil whispered over the paper.
        "She took four bullets in the chest and abdomen. My sweet girl, who never hurt a soul."
        The moving pencil gave Jacob comfort. I could see how he took comfort from creation.
        "I killed the man who killed her, Jacob. If I had gotten there two minutes sooner, I might have killed him before he killed her."
        The pencil hesitated, but then moved on.
        "We were destined to be together forever, my girl and I. We had a fortune-teller's card that said so. And we will be… forever.
        This here, now-this is just an intermission between act one and act two."
        Perhaps Jacob trusts God to guide his hand and show him the very boat and the precise place on the ocean where the bell rang, so he will know it, after all, when his own time comes to float away.
        "They didn't scatter my girl's ashes at sea. They gave them to me in an urn. A friend in my hometown keeps it safe for me."
        As the pencil whispered, Jacob murmured, "She could sing."
        "If her voice was as lovely as her face, it must have been sweet. What did she sing?"
        "So pretty. Just for me. When the dark came."
        "She sang you to sleep."
        "When I woke up and the dark wasn't gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again."
        That is the best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small.
        "Jacob, earlier you told me about someone called the Neverwas."
        "He's the Neverwas, and we don't care."
        "You said he came to see you when you were 'full of the black.'"
        "Jacob was full of the black, and the Neverwas said, 'Let him die.'"
        "So 'full of the black' means you were ill. Very ill. Was the man who said they should let you die-was he a doctor?"
        "He was the Neverwas. That's all he was. And we