While he’s digging through his bag for pen and paper, I ask, “Robert, was there a particular reason you decided to take English Lit? It’s an elective, after all.”
“Sure there was. I can’t do advanced math, that’s certain. I hate Civics, and I’m not smart enough for French. I figured, y’know, I can read.” He shrugs. Obviously, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.
He sits back down next to me. “What did you write today? About Jesus?”
“The character sketch. I enjoyed that. I took the position that Jesus of Nazareth was a very gifted and spiritual person who was convinced by desperate people around him that he was the fulfillment of this biblical prophecy. And because he was convinced of it, he did everything he could think of to make it work, but there were too many people who had differing ideas of what that would mean. He wanted nothing more than for everyone to understand God the way he did. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to bend his image of God to fit what was expected of him, and that was his undoing.”
About ten seconds of silence later, Robert says, “You put all that into one paper?”
“I write fast.”
I’m tempted to ask him what he wrote. But now that I’ve told him about my paper, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. So we go back to the first paragraph of A Handful of Dust.
He makes some progress, but pretty soon that wears thin, so I decide we should start a character sketch he can finish on his own. At first he wants to do his favorite football player.
“You can do that if you think you know enough about him personally. Mr. Williams today made an assumption we all had enough information about Jesus to do the assignment.”
“What would I have to know?”
“What factors do you think went into his decision to play football? Did he have a father who was physically handicapped and this is like a gift for him, or a father who always made him feel like a loser and this is a way to prove himself? Did he have a sister who made him feel like he could do anything he really wanted to do? Or is he just some dumb lunk who can’t do anything else? Does he have an interest outside of football that inspires him or has taught him lessons he brings to the game? Does he—”
“Okay, okay. Maybe I don’t know enough. So who then?”
“Santa Claus.” I don’t know where this comes from. It isn’t even Christmas season, and I haven’t believed in Santa since I was four. An early skeptic, if you will. But I can smell cookies baking, and Aunt Audrey used to leave cookies out on Christmas Eve.
“Santa Claus?” he echoes.
“Sure. Why not? I mean, maybe you don’t know who his father is either, like you don’t with the football player’s family, but in this case you could make it up. In a way, this is a double exercise. First you have to construct the person, and then you have to put together the reasons why he ended up in that career.”
He’s still looking blankly at me.
“Tell you what. We’ll work together to get some background down, and then you can take that with you and work on it for a character sketch. If you get stumped, we’ll work on that part together as well. Okay?”
I can tell it isn’t, really, but he’s asked for help, and it seems he’s determined to take it.
Just before we’re done, Aunt Audrey knocks on the door and opens it.
“Boys, I have some chocolate chip cookies if you’d like some. Keep up your energy. In the kitchen, whenever you’re ready.”
She disappears again. I really could have done a lot worse than Aunt Audrey.
Robert gets this determined look on his face, like he’s trying really hard not to be distracted by the thought of those cookies. He leans over the notebook and scowls. While he’s scribbling away, my mind goes back to one of those times when I’d been practicing drawing and Aunt Audrey was playing one of these old classics. I was using my brand-new, gorgeous set of colored pencils. That set was huge; not a color in the world was missing from it. I loved the feel of the pencils, the way they moved over paper, the way you could use water to make the color intensity change. I was never much good at the drawing itself, but I really got into the colors.
We’d bought that set of pencils together. I was just starting second grade, and after a few sessions in Art it was obvious the pencils in class were lousy. So the teacher said we could bring in our own if we wanted to. I told my aunt and uncle this, and Uncle Steve asked if I wanted my own set.
“I dunno. There’s pencils there. I can use those.”
Aunt Audrey went next. “But are there enough to go around? And do you enjoy using them, or are they all chewed and broken?”
It was like she could see them herself, like she’d gone to the class and had seen how grungy they were. I just shrugged, but that weekend she took me to an art store. I’d never known places like that existed. Man, there was nothing they didn’t have! I was running around looking at everything, but especially the paints and pencils, anything with color.
If there was one thing Uncle Steve had made me understand, it was that we weren’t poor, but we didn’t have money to throw around. So when it came time to decide on some pencils, I picked up the smaller set. Aunt Audrey grinned at me, tousled my hair, and put it back. She handed me the larger set. The huge set. The one with more colors than I had names for.
“Now, young man, these are pencils, and you’ll be using them in water sometimes, and they’ll get dull very quickly. Let’s find you a good sharpener you can carry.”
And again, going for cheap, I picked up a black plastic one. But Aunt Audrey went to find a sales clerk.
“I’m considering pencil sharpeners, but I want to make sure of the quality. Is there a pencil I can test with?”
We stood there with our test pencil and tried every sharpener we could see. And the one that worked best was not the plastic one, and it was not the cheapest one. It was metal with a really cool gold matte finish.
“We’ll take this one, and these pencils. And while we’re at it, we’d like a tablet of your best drawing paper.”
I took them to school the very next day, really excited about all my new stuff. During Art, I was working away at a long wooden table with my beautiful new pencils, sharpening them from time to time with the gold matte sharpener, and really getting into the drawing. The pencils made it easy, and the paper was the best, and the sharpener was there whenever I needed it.
I was sitting beside a girl named Kristi. Everyone knew her parents were really rich. She was nice, didn’t lord it over anyone, but they had lots more money than my family. So there we were, working away, and Kristi kept clicking her tongue like she was disgusted about something. At one point she sat back hard and threw her dark green pencil onto the table. I watched it clatter across the wood.
She looked at me, I looked at her, and then she looked at my pencils. Then we both looked at hers. It wasn’t a very big set, and it looked like there were some colors missing. Most of the pencils that were there were broken and chewed, just like the ones Aunt Audrey hadn’t wanted me to have to use.
I offered her one of my two kinds of dark green, and she ran it across her paper. Then she said, “No wonder my mom said I could have these old pencils. The color part is all crumbly!”
You know, I don’t think I ever told Aunt Audrey about Kristi’s pencils. I think I’ll have to do that. I think I’ll have to let her know that I realize she’s always treated me more like a son than a nephew. And that if I’m like that son she and Uncle Steve couldn’t have, then she’s like the mother I can’t really remember.
Suddenly