History of Wolves(52)

Here’s what Leo wrote:


Let me start by acknowledging the goodness that is the Church of Christ, Scientist and the inspired teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. I’ve written here of my son before but, today I want to give thanks for the omniscient, omnipotent grace of God, who shows Himself to the childlike nature in us all. My son, who has recently struggled with the belief of a stomachache, surprised me one night by asking me to read the Scientific Statement of Being instead of his favorite bedtime story. He is four years old, but his wisdom has long been a model to his mother and me. I read him the statement we all know so well, “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter …” After I finished, he asked me, “What is matter?” I was taken aback because he’d never asked this before. As a scientist, I thought of all the definitions my colleagues argue about and discuss, but as a Scientist, I was led to tell him, “Your stomachache and everything else that lies to you and tries to pretend it is real.” “Out of the mouths of babes.” He said to me then: “I’m not matter. I don’t lie.” So I saw that he knew better than I his own spiritual nature. By the morning after our conversation, my son’s stomachache was entirely gone and he was able to prepare for a weekend trip we’d planned as a family. His demonstration was complete. As Mary Baker Eddy says, “Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will then utter no complaints.” I’m so continually grateful to this church, which has sustained me and my family with the true teachings of Christ all these years.



Here’s what Patra had added at the bottom:

Maybe start with a little more description of Paul?

Maybe add a little more about what he was struggling with?

Re: “Out of the mouths of babes”: Is that how he put it? Didn’t he say, “I don’t matter” instead of “I’m not matter”? Remember how he spooked me with that, and how you corrected him, and it was funny and sweet and everybody laughed? Remember how he was sitting with that old glove of yours pulled up to his elbow and he kept petting your chin as you talked to him? Details like those that will move people, I think. Don’t forget to put a few details like that in. Or, remember how he was trying to fit both hands in that glove at once, like a fin? That was funny, too. Remember how when he took his hands out, all those little rocks from the lake came out on your lap? I’m not sure how that fits, but otherwise, of course, this is very beautiful.





14


I WROTE MR. GRIERSON A LETTER ONCE. He was living in Florida when I tracked him down, in a little town outside Tallahassee called Crawfordville, which was named for a doctor who’d lived there long ago. That’s what the Internet said. I learned from online reports that Mr. Grierson kept a shop, a place that sold Star Wars lunchboxes and nineteenth-century rocking chairs and 1950s postcards of orange groves. The postcard oranges were a shiny balloon yellow, not really orange at all. Junk, people called it. The Treasure Chest the shop was called.

“Dear Mr. Grierson,” I wrote.

Then I stopped. I was living in Minneapolis by then. I was eating my dinners with the mechanic and working days as an office temp and, when I couldn’t sleep at night, I read biographies of explorers, stories about the sick drive to Everest where men with frost-bitten fingers dug in the ice with spoons. I read these books with a flashlight so as not to awaken Ann in her single bed across the room. I read for hours in a shadowy cave of blankets, leaning against the cold wall, growing impatient with the hopelessly boyish ploys for survival. When the climbers inevitably started up the mountain in a storm with just a pocketknife and a shovel, I tried writing Mr. Grierson instead. I started the same letter again and again. Dawn grayed and regrayed the room.

“Dear Mr. Grierson,” I wrote.

“Dear Adam.” “To Adam Grierson.” “To Mr. Adam Grierson.” “Dear You.” Then finally:

You may not remember me. I was your student in eighth grade American history in Loose River, Minnesota. I was the one by the window in the lumberjack shirt and the long braid and the hiking boots. You knew me as Mattie. You called me Miss Originality, for the prize I won in History Odyssey. I did wolves, remember? I did a history of wolves. I’m writing now because I’ve been thinking about something that has bothered me for a while. After you left Loose River and after Lily Holburn said the things she did, no one ever spoke one word about what you taught us in class. It was weird to me, like all those days never happened. But I guess you put a lot of energy into your lessons. I remember how you stood up and recited the whole Declaration of Independence by heart, which must have been a lot of work to memorize. I remember how you had us draw maps of the country as if we were Lewis and Clark, as if we only knew the shapes of the rivers by riding them. When you took me to History Odyssey, I admit, I thought you were laughing at my wolf idea, but later I thought about how you picked me to do it over everybody else. Maybe you saw me as less trouble for you than some other girl, but it seems to me now that the reasons you picked me matter less than the fact of it.

Did you know that when Lily Holburn came back to school the fall after you left, she had a surprise for us? People had been saying for a while she was sick. But no, she was pregnant, which sealed her fate and yours in town, though most people had heard by then that she’d taken back her testimony against you. The courtroom, people said, had spooked her. Can you imagine Lily pregnant? She was very beautiful, actually. She was even more beautiful than she was before. But then she got on a bus one day and went to Saint Paul, where there was a program for girls like her associated with the Catholic Church. She became a blood lab technician, I heard. The program gave her free career training, baby clothes and stuff, so it’s not hard now to guess why she lied about you. Lots of animals in a trap will play dead. That’s how I think of what she did. She found a sneaky way out of the little life she would have had if they’d made her stay and get married to the guy who knocked her up.