Brother Odd

the stairwell, through a bolt-reinforced door, at another level. Already the brothers were debating the merits of three security options.
        From the southeast stairs, Romanovich and I enlisted Brother Knuckles, and from the northwest stairs, Brother Maxwell, for the defense of Jacob Calvino. Each of them brought two baseball bats in case the first was cracked in battle.
        If the Mr. Hyde part of Brother John Heineman's personality had an animus against all mentally and physically disabled people, then no child in the school was safe. Every one of them might be slated for destruction.
        Common sense suggested, nonetheless, that Jacob-Let him die-remained the primary target. He would most likely either be the only victim or the first of many.
        When we returned to Jacob's room, he was for once not drawing. He sat in a straight-backed chair, and a pillow on his lap served as a hand rest when he needed it. Head bowed, intently focused, he was embroidering flowers with peach-colored thread on white fabric, perhaps a handkerchief.
        At first, embroidery seemed to be an unlikely pursuit for him, but his workmanship proved to be exquisite. As I watched him finesse intricate patterns from needle and thread, I realized that this was no more remarkable-and no less-than his ability to summon detailed drawings from pencil lead with these same short broad hands and stubby fingers.
        Leaving Jacob to his embroidery, I gathered with Romanovich, Knuckles, and Brother Maxwell at the only window.
        Brother Maxwell had graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. For seven years, he worked as a crime reporter in Los Angeles.
        The number of serious crimes was greater than the number of reporters available to cover them. Every week, scores of industrious thugs and motivated maniacs committed outrageous acts of mayhem, and discovered, to their disgruntlement, that they had been denied even so much as two inches of column space in the press.
        One morning, Maxwell found himself having to choose between covering a kinky-sex murder, an extremely violent murder committed with an ax and a pick and a shovel, a murder involving cannibalism, and the assault upon and ritual disfigurement of four elderly Jewish women in a group home.
        To his surprise as well as to the surprise of his colleagues, he barricaded himself in the coffee room and would not come out. He had vending machines stocked with candy bars and peanut-butter-filled cheese crackers, and he figured he could go at least a month before he might develop scurvy due to severe vitamin C deficiency.
        When his editor arrived to negotiate through the barricaded door, Maxwell demanded either to have fresh orange juice delivered weekly by ladder through the third-story coffee-room window-or to be fired. After considering those options for exactly the length of time that the newspaper's vice president of employee relations deemed necessary to avoid a wrongful-termination lawsuit, the editor fired Maxwell.
        Triumphant, Maxwell vacated the coffee room, and only later, at home, with a sudden gale of laughter, realized that he simply could have quit. Journalism had come to seem not like a career but like an incarceration.
        By the time he finished laughing, he decided that his petit madness had been a divine gift, a call to leave Los Angeles and to go where he could find a greater sense of community and less gang graffiti. He had become a postulant fifteen years ago, then a novice, and for a decade he had been a monk under full vows.
        Now he examined the window in Jacob's room and said, "When this building was converted from the old abbey, some of the windows on the ground floor were enlarged and replaced. They have wood muntins. But on this level, the old windows remain. They're smaller, and they're solid bronze-rails, muntins, everything bronze."
        "Nothin's gonna chop or chew through those too easy," Brother Knuckles declared.
        "And the panes," said Romanovich, "are ten-inch squares. That brute we encountered in the storm would not fit through one. Indeed, if it managed to tear out the entire window, it would still be too large to get into the room."
        I said, "The one in the cooling tower was smaller than the one that smacked down the SUV. It couldn't get through a ten-inch pane, but it'll fit through an open window this size."
        "Casement window,