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1

Trees. He had painted trees. The first week of classes, the first grade. Sister Veronica coming down the aisle, the folds of her habit brushing rows of the wood desks. Her long white fingers, their wrinkled blue veins, handing out sheets of paper. Waxy, smooth, the surface slick like the paper the butcher wrapped meat in. Only this paper was not yellow or cream but white, like eggshells. The nun walking the aisles a second time, telling the class to keep their hands on top of their desks as she handed out jars of paint. Each student could choose, he chose green. Because he sat at the last desk in the last row. And green was the only color left. The nun had smiled, placing the last jar in his small hands.

In the middle of the week it had been crayons. He'd raised the lid of his desk, seeing and with the seeing feeling the names and dates and images carved in the wood. The desk lid was blond, the carvings and letterings black. Black was the color of the hair of the girl who sat three rows up and two rows over. Franny. Franny Bernard. They were seated alphabetically, she was ahead of him. His name came at the end of the class, hers at the beginning. But that first week he already knew her name because her family lived across the alley in back of his house, where she spoke French sometimes with her parents, but never to him. Her parents spoke French all the time, even to him. But those first days of classes he did not speak to her. They were in the same grade. He would speak to her later. And he looked at her face and hair and saw the dark and white keys of the piano his mother played each evening after dinner. The flow of her fingers moving over the keys, blurring a little, like water.

The middle of the first week of school, his fingers touching the blond wood of the desk, his eyes watching the girl's hair fall across her face as she bowed to her box of crayons. Her bending head, the worn ivory keys rising and falling. A wave of slow water, the ripple that drew the long dark bands and ribbons on the shore. Water was no color at all. Water was clear. In his third year of college he would buy his first car, a '53 Chevrolet, and ask Franny to go for ride. He would buy the car for $125, money he had saved from working in a lumber yard, and where his feet were meant to go on the floor there would be only the road underneath. Franny would walk to the back steps of his house and stop without mounting the steps and say she was engaged. To an Air Force pilot. Water washing sand, sand going transparent. Asphalt a gray and black blur, moving under his feet. She would look up into his face as if he were to say something but he would be looking away, across the street to the empty yard, seeing the trunks of elm trees, their leaves already starting to turn. He would reach for her hand and her fingers would touch his. Her skin darker than his, the shade of the iris of a buckeye. Her touch cool, like the stones that pebbled the shore of Lake Michigan. The lake under storm clouds, the glint of gray and white and black.

2

Sister Veronica. Her voice sharp, the crackle of a bonfire. Burning leaves. He was to select a crayon. He watched Tommy Fisher, sitting along the aisle, leaning over his desk. Tommy had already chosen a crayon. Orange. Tommy was Flash . In the eighth grade, the last year at St. Martha's, he would race in the school games and come from behind and win the relay for his team. In the tenth grade, the second year of high school, Flash would be dead.

His hand opening the lid of the box, his fingers feeling the molded pointed tips of the eight crayons. Six colors, not counting blackandwhite. In the grocery store downtown he had seen boxes that held sixteen and thirty-two crayons, and in the back of the corner drugstore on Clay Street he found a box of sixty-four. Umber was in that box, and burnt sienna. Not just violet but vermilion and scarlet and saffron. He had not known there were so many colors, or so many names for colors; and he'd pointed to the big box, hoping his mother would notice; but his mother was reaching for a pack of ruled white writing paper. Then his mother was moving down the aisle toward the counter, the hard rubber heels of her shoes lifting and falling and not making a sound, not even where the linoleum tile was broken. He did not move and now she was calling to him from the checkout lane. On the shelf beside the crayons were jars of Elmer's white glue, squat and fat. She wanted him to bring her one of those.

In the seventh grade Tommy Fisher would play kickball and race faster than Jamie ever would run because Jamie had asthma and would wheeze and lose his breath whenever he tried to race. In the summer between the seventh and eighth grade Jamie would try to get a merit badge for running, and the only day he ran was the day he took the test. And failed. It was during that summer the bones in Tommy Fisher's back began to curl, his spine shriveling the way a matchstick or stick of dry kindling shriveled and warped when it caught flame. At the end of the eighth grade Flash would come to the dance in a wheelchair, its wheels like tricycle tires; and on the back of the wheelchair he would paint the cruel affection of his nickname. The newspaper would print a special article, alongside his photograph, describing the pilgrimage his family was making to Lourdes where they would light candles so that Flash would be healed. But the spine didn't heal, despite the pilgrimage, despite the trips to Cleveland and then the operation at a clinic in New York. Tommy Fisher had become the nautilus, the chambered shell the class studied in sixth-grade life science; and at lunch in the refectory, at the seminary his second year away from home, Jamie would receive the letter from his mother and know without opening or reading it that Tommy Fisher was dead.

Now Sister Veronica was standing in front of him, not speaking to the class but only to Jamie, asking why he had not chosen a crayon. He stared at the box, the thin cardboard. Bluegreenbrownred. Four colors poking from a green and yellow box. Blackandwhite not really colors. White no color. And orangeandyellow was not even true enough to draw corn stalks or carrots and besides they reminded him of the turtle. The shell warm from the sun, greenandyellow on top, yellowandorange underneath. Gold really, and lined with little pencil lines of black. An eastern painted turtle sunning on a rock at the edge of the river, the head and legs tucking themselves away as he slipped the turtle into his pocket and began the bike ride home. But when he showed the red eyes of the small amphibian to his brother, his brother told on him and his parents told him to go back to the river and set it free.

The tires of the bike, front and back, making their bumps as he went up and down over the curbs, then the scrape of paint and metal as he leaned the bike against the concrete ledge. His elbows and forearms beginning to bleed as he leaned over the concrete embankment, leaving long scratches where the skin rubbed over the raw concrete. The smooth glass of the river, then the roil of the water and the brightening where the turtle went under and left the river smooth. His fingers, not wanting to set the turtle free. His eyes, not wanting to look. Then the sight of the boulder, growing larger it seemed as the small eastern painted turtle slipped from his hands. The sound of the shell as it struck the stone and the sound of the water as it sucked the turtle under the waves. Orangeandyellow . His feet rushing him to the end of the bridge where he was sick.

3

The dark weave of the teacher's habit, the folds black against the desk. Standing over him, bending down and taking his ear, pushing his forehead toward the box of crayons. The strange, sweet smell of colored wax. The paper wrapping the crayons had a different smell, the odor of ink, and a different feel, not the slick and smooth polish of the cardboad box. The black folds of the habit pressing the wood lid where a single carved eye gave its sidelong and unblinking stare. The stiff, starched white linen cloth of the nun's plate that covered her chest, and the stiff band he couldn't see but he knew bound the nun's forehead. Then the heavy black habit began to move again, and he could see the folds of the cloth moving, and the long fingers with the flat fingernails and tiny boat moons were taking a crayon from the box, placing the crayon in the grip of his right hand. Green.

4

The voice. Sharp. Hard above the rustle of the class. The hush sweeping across the room. Jamie coming back to himself, looking across the room. The rows of seats. The other members of the class already on their feet, starting to file out of the room into the hall where a guard, an assistant was waiting.

- Boys and girls, the day is over. The first week of class has ended. Form your rows to go home.

Insistence in the voice, and something deeper, something else.

- Put the fingerpaint away.

An edge to the voice, a tone he had noticed earlier in the week, like the darker colder sounds that move under the wind when it is blowing in limbs and trees.

And then a second voice, smaller, something new and surprising. A voice he had never heard before.

- The picture. It isn't finished. It isn't done.

The nun not saying anything now, walking down the aisle, stopping at the back row. Taking his wrist, pulling his hands up from the waxy sheet. His fingers and palms wet and green and sticky, his eyes moving from his hands back to the smears, the swirls of green thick on the stiff paper. The paper also wet but beginning to dry, and his hands almost as if they meant to protect the paper moving out of the nun's grasp and spreading over the surface of the paper. The ripples and streaks and curves of green paint congealing, little circles and waves and curls of hardening green.

The whirlpools and funnels at the end of a dock, a wave washing the pilings. The rings and spirals along the hull of a boat when the oars are lifted from the water and begin to drop their strings of beads across the glass of the lake. Two strings of beads, right oar and left, the uneven rhythms in their falling. The whorls of weeds in the weedbeds when he held his breath and surface dived and went down deep to swim and hold his breath among the strands.

5

The first week of August his family drove from lower Michigan north to the Mackinac Bridge where they crossed to the Upper Peninsula and stayed at a small cottage. For two weeks every morning and evening Jamie would row the lake and fish. Noons and afternoons were for swims and sometimes he would hike back into the woods where there were no trails and he would wander alone. On the UP (that was what his parents called the Upper Peninsula) the doctors had said the air would be clear and free of pollen and ragweed. The lake had a special color too, as if brown and green and blue had always had a touch of gold.

The sheet of paper in his hands. The reeds and the bullfrogs, the skin and bones of their backs, their spines shining in the glare of his flashlight while their eyes went deep and red. At night before sleep he would walk the warped planks to the end of the pier and shine the light into the water, and sometimes a bass would hang just off the bottom, as if sleeping or dozing, the black line threading the length of its side almost unwavering. The body wavering as the gills moved water. Ripples of sand on the lake bottom, wavering. The clams drawing their maps, leaving their trails in the dark.

- It isn't done yet.

- Put the jar of paint away.

- It's a woods and the trees need apples.

- Put the lid on the jar and put the jar of paint away.

The dry, clipped voice. No longer the sound of leaves catching fire. The sound now of leaves when the leaves were being raked and the long tines of the rakes were making gouges in the ground. Bunching the leaves into a pile to be burned. He thought of the little puffs and twists of white smoke that rose from pine needles when they were just catching fire in the stone fireplace, after supper at the cottage among the red cedars. The cottage was made of stone. But it was called The Cedars.

The crackle of newspaper being crumpled and lit and held flaming to create a draft in the flue. The rush of the air as the paper burst into flame. The crackling of dry splinters, the white and yellow wood catching the flame and beginning to build into tongues and arms of fire. The chainlink of pine bark, the dissolve of bark and branch in night. On the water, across the lake, the floating moon. His boat, floating until at dawn, first light, the sun sent its own light floating, scattering the water.

- Classes are over, James Waters. It's time for you to go home.

The nun's hands, extending the paper towel. Her fingers, strong, reaching down and taking his fingers in their grasp, wiping the paint from his fingers and palms. And when he looked up and started to speak, her fingers going to her lips. Then her head bending and nodding to the jar of paint still open at the corner of the desk. Saying without saying anything that he should put the jar away. And something else. In the pause, as he twisted the lid on the jar and placed it at the back of the shelf that was his desk, almost a smile. Like a secret moving on her lips, like a secret being shared. Her voice, softer, like something overheard, something he wasn't meant to hear, something she hadn't meant to say. Sister Veronica, saying the drawing was beautiful.

6

He always played alone after school until it was time to wash his hands for dinner. He knew his parents would find the painting. He wanted to hide the picture until he could paint the apples, but the paint needed to dry and dry paint was more important than apples. So he left the picture lying on the buffet. He had asked the teacher for the jar of red paint to take home, but she had only the one thing to say and he was tired of hearing that the painting was done. After supper when the table was cleared and he was drying the dishes his mother leaned close and whispered that his father was going to have the picture framed.

Under his hands the dish towel swirled over the plate, making streaks of drying water; but what he saw was the way the waves and streams of color had flowed under his fingers and left their marks on the shiny ivory field of the paper. How could Sister not see the picture wasn't finished? Yet when he talked to his mother she did not understand and said he was to leave the painting alone.

He thought of his fishing pole in the basement, the way the red plastic bobber moved up and down on the lake, waiting for the bluegill or sunfish or perch. The leaves and limbs and trunks of that green forest sea needed the red of apples, the way the darker, blacker greens under the pier needed the red and green layers of cracked paint on the chipped hull of the rowboat. Apples. The trees needed apples.

At the bottom of the stairs on his way to bed he asked one last time and when he fell asleep he dreamed he was swimming underwater with bulging frog eyes that rose to the surface where they could not break through to breathe. And when he awoke he was out of breath and his hands were clenched and he was wheezing.

It was past midnight when he crept downstairs, keeping to one side of the steps and holding onto the railing. He wanted to make no sound. But the steps still creaked and after turning the landing halfway down the stairs he looked up and saw a figure in white at the bottom waiting for him and his breath caught and he felt his throat begin to tighten and he couldn't breathe. Then with a burst of air like the crushing of a paper bag his lungs emptied and began to fill again, and he approached and passed the mirror of the coat closet and slipped into the dining room.

7

At breakfast his parents and brother were silent. Then his mother picked up her husband's plate and went to the sink, his father rose to go for the car keys, and the two boys stared at each other from opposite sides of the table. When the water at the sink stopped running, Jamie was alone. In the dining room he ran his hand the length of the mahogany buffet, a second hand under his fingers, the two hands moving over the shining black space where he had left the painting the night before. He looked in the top drawer, the lower, the side cabinets. He heard the back door to the porch open and shut. His brother leaving the kitchen, going outside to play. The painting was gone.

That evening Jamie watched his father bring a package out of the basement. It was an easel that he set up against the side wall of the dining room, where the windows gave only indirect light. For a moment Jamie thought the easel might be for him, but when his father brought the stretched canvas from the basement and drew a chair from the table Jamie left him alone to work.

Through the rest of that fall and into the winter and through the slowly brightening evenings of spring his father would leave the dinner table and move to sit on the small stool in front of the easel. He had opened a large volume of reproductions on the table beside him, but each night when he had finished working he closed the book and no one intruded. Yet there was an image slowly emerging from the pencil lines he had sketched on the canvas, even though his father seemed to be working in all sections of the picture at once. Then one evening in late April Jamie asked where the row of arched columns and the narrowing aisle of stone tiles were located. His father, not looking up, pointed to the gold and yellow and brown tones that shone from the surface of the open book.

- Capistrano.

The swallows, Jamie said.

His brother, at the open door to the kitchen, making his eyes go huge. Out of their father's line of sight. Flapping his elbows, leaning his skinny frame right and left, mocking the wing motions of a swooping bird.

8

Seven years later, the summer Tommy Fisher would begin to notice the stitch in his back, Jamie's parents would move away from the alley that separated their house from Franny Bernard's. Helping pack, Jamie would find the easel wrapped in old cloth and stored away in a closet of the spare bedroom. On the shelf above the easel he would find and unroll the canvas. Unfinished. But that was seven years from now, the summer Jamie would be completing the eighth grade and deciding to enter the minor seminary and begin study for the priesthood. The summer Tommy Fisher would decide to write his name on the back of his wheelchair. And this was the old house, where the easel stood in the dining room, the columns of arches empty of swallows and quiet. Silent as the house that afternoon of Easter vacation when his mother walked the four blocks to school, to the library, to talk with the school librarian.

Jamie's father, leaving for the office that morning, said he saw no reason for the visit. And at lunch when his father finished listening to Mary Worth on the radio and walked to the door, he did not turn and smile; and Jamie watched his mother stand at the window and follow the car as it moved out of sight down the street toward the glass factory.

- It is only three afternoons a week, he heard his mother say to the empty room. Then she folded her purse under her arm, pressed the small button that would put on the night latch, told Jamie she would be back in an hour, and that he was to see his younger brother stayed out of trouble. The older brother standing there, unmoving. Then the room moving, as if the walls and floor were tilting; and almost before he had caught his balance, he was moving too, walking toward the kitchen.

Laundry detergent under the sink, the cardboard tongue of the orange box being pried open. White flakes, sprinkling like a first snow across the linoleum. The snow gathering force. The bucket sloshing hot water, snow melting to rain. Puddles becoming a pool. Jamie, pushing the bucket to one side of the room, sending water splashing under the kitchen table. Down on his hands and knees, dunking the sponge. Beginning to scrub.

Beads of sweat ran the length of his arms and soap suds soaked his shirt and pants, front and back, when the screen door from the back porch swung open. Suds at his elbows, suds on his chest, suds around his neck and in his hair. The froth of detergent a surf that crested around the table legs and covered the floor tile from one end of the room to the other.

9

That spring his parents replaced the coal-fired furnace with gas. The coal bin in the basement had been emptied and swept, and plans to make the forbidden room of concrete block and coal dust into a secret meeting place had come and gone, defeated by the same dark coating of grime and crushed coal that gave the place its allure. So although Jamie started to take the outside steps to the coal cellar, he ended up in the garage, his fingers spinning the front wheel of the English racer his grandfather had once used on his postal route.

His grandfather had died two years earlier, leaving Jamie's grandmother living alone in their two-story home a half-hour's drive away. Before taking on a rural mail route his grandfather had raised chickens and kept a cow; and when the house and barn were sold and his grandmother was moved into their house Jamie's father kept the old woodworking tools along with an old Ford roadster and the English racer. Jamie moved to the oblong wood carpenter's tray stored on a shelf under the workbench. Fitting a bit into the hand drill, he was sorting through scraps for a piece of lumber when his eyes saw what was wedged at the back of the shelf. Among old carpentry tools and glass jars of nails lay a small flat of wrapping paper, tied and knotted with brown string. He thought he would find the package of fireworks his parents had confiscated the summer before. But instead, under the knots and wrapped a second time in the heavy brown paper of a grocery bag, he uncovered his first-grade painting.

10

Weeds clotted and shawled the rapids, and wet rocks made for uncertain footing. His shoes were sopping, and strings of moss and a film of river scum coated his legs as he waded downstream. Starting the fire was not difficult; he had found matches in the garage, and burning leaves in the back yard had taught him to keep a fire under control. The dry twigs and small branches caught at once, giving off only the faintest odor of smoke. Then the tent of larger limbs began to burn; and the driftwood, cured by the sun and the seasons, gave a clear flame.

He had always been one for water; but now he studied the flames, watched the eyes that opened and closed as the small circle of fuel burned to coals. When the fire was a simmering bed of white ashes, he watched the stiff paper with the green limbs and trunks begin to soften and melt. The paper curled the way it had curled when he first applied the paint, dimpling and bulging and becoming liquid again as the edges and center of the forest took fire. Water beginning to boil. Rocks and stones and the rapids a river made moving over them. The wash of sun on wood oar blades. The trees, the limbs and leaves, the waves they make in wind. The waves of his fingers.

He withdrew his fingers from the water, looked back to the fire that had burned down and left only ashes. Walked across the random path of stones to where the river was shallow, following the rocks to the place where he had fallen when he first arrived. Carp were swimming the narrows, negotiating the shallows; what he took to be churning water was a school of fish, their fins and tails thrashing, the great-scaled bodies pushing and thrashing to force their way over and through the narrows. They glistened, the blunt snub-nosed heads and gray heavy-bellied bodies. They shone like polished rock, like wet stepping stones. Then they were through the shallows, this school of flashing carp; and the small, water-smoothed rocks that were swimming fish swam downriver and disappeared.

Where the banks sloped down to a bend a gang of older boys from the higher grades were stoning the fish when their dorsal fins broke the surface and their bellies became exposed, wedged and trapped among the rocks and fallen limbs. For a long time the only time was the movement of the fish, the school moving downriver, helpless in the current and in their own migration to save themselves from the older boys, the gauntlet that lay in waiting, only a stone's throw away. Then the boys tired of their sport and moved on, and Jamie felt his breathing slow and become easy again and he returned to the circle of coals on the shore.

The fire was cold, but he nudged loose gravel and small pebbles over the coals before climbing the dirt and clay banks to the path. There was blood on his hands. The spill he took when he first entered the water had slashed his right palm just below the thumb, and he had watched the blood drip on the gray shale. He could stop at a gas station to wash, but he knew the scar would form and remind him. By the time he reached the back porch the sun was down.

11

Jamie's father was gone that evening, fishing off Catawba Island on Lake Erie. Jamie went to bed without reprimand or supper. In the room after his bath he listened to his brother's breathing, and when it became quiet he listened to the silence. Sometime later he rose and made his way to the easel. Next to the canvas and the oils a small box held materials, and he found what he was looking for. Then, moving down the cellar steps to the basement, he went to the small square room where no one would look for him and no one would hear him working.

He considered his father's painting in the dining room, propped against the easel, the penciled outlines of the columned archway, the squares of the tiled walkway. If the painting were complete there would be trees outside the walkway, trees would bend over the roof of the monastery. In the eaves and among the pillars and around the roof tiles the swallows would dart and build the small round caves of their clay nests. The trees would send their green shadows walking like monks down the rows of the columns.

The gang of small boys, huddled like apostles beside the water. Throwing stones, stoning the carp. The scales breaking away from the bodies, the bodies flopping on the stones, shiny and wet. The way his father scaled black bass, prepared perch or pickerel or a northern pike for a meal. The wood of the fire, any fire, going up in flame. The cut, almost like an afterthought, when he pushed himself up, putting his weight on his right palm.

His fingers moving over the sheet of thick paper, the sheet of the paper wanting to move under the pressure of the charcoal. The single bare bulb overhead, the shadows like the shadows he was tracing on the tooth of the paper. The rough door to the coal cellar, the splinters in the coarse unfinished wood. At the bend in the river they were stoning the fish. Down the length of the walkway the swallows were darting and coming to nest. And the tails and fins of the carp, the darts and sweeps of the swallows, these were the waves, the strokes of the charcoal on the river pool of the paper.

When he returned to his room and fell asleep he was thinking of carp, golden koi, albino koi with gold and orange spots, bronze koi swimming in the clearest of waters. But what he dreamed was a blaze of dark water moving beside a concrete bridge, the arches of poured concrete like the columns of a monastery opening along a walk. There was the light green of the tree leaves and the darker green of the branches moving and swaying and falling on the sheet of the river. Breaking into fragments and shreds, patches of color no longer color, fractured prisms of light that now gave up their green, turned white and gray and shades of black, the porous and soft shades of the coals and ashes of a small fire when the fire was burning down but had not yet gone out.