A Little Life

  If Brother Luke wasn’t there, he instead passed the time playing with his things. The brother had shown him how if he moved aside a stack of plastic planters in the far corner of the room, there was a small grate, and if you removed the grate, there was a small hole beneath, big enough to hold a plastic garbage bag of his possessions. So he had unearthed his twigs and stones from under the tree and moved his haul to the greenhouse, where it was warm and humid, and where he could examine his objects without losing feeling in his hands. Over the months, Luke had added to his collection: he gave him a wafer of sea glass that the brother said was the color of his eyes, and a metal whistle that had a round little ball within it that jangled like a bell when you shook it, and a small cloth doll of a man wearing a woolen burgundy top and a belt trimmed with tiny turquoise-colored beads that the brother said had been made by a Navajo Indian, and had been his when he was a boy. Two months ago, he had opened his bag and discovered that Luke had left him a candy cane, and although it had been February, he had been thrilled: he had always wanted to taste a candy cane, and he broke it into sections, sucking each into a spear point before biting down on it, gnashing the sugar into his molars.

  The brother had told him that the next day he had to make sure to come right away, as soon as classes ended, because he had a surprise for him. All day he had been antsy and distracted, and although two of the brothers had hit him—Michael, across the face; Peter, across the backside—he had barely noticed. Only Brother David’s warning, that he would be made to do extra chores instead of having his free hours if he didn’t start concentrating, made him focus, and somehow, he finished the day.

  As soon as he was outside, out of view of the monastery building, he ran. It was spring, and he couldn’t help but feel happy: he loved the cherry trees, with their froth of pink blossoms, and the tulips, their glossed, improbable colors, and the new grass, soft and tender beneath him. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would take the Navajo doll and a twig he had found that was shaped like a person outside and sit on the grass and play with them. He made up voices for them both, whispering to himself, because Brother Michael had said that boys didn’t play with dolls, and that he was getting too old to play, anyway.

  He wondered if Brother Luke was watching him run. One Wednesday, Brother Luke had said, “I saw you running up here today,” and as he was opening his mouth to apologize, the brother had continued, “Boy, what a great runner you are! You’re so fast!” and he had been literally speechless, until the brother, laughing, told him he should close his mouth.

  When he stepped inside the greenhouse, there was no one there. “Hello?” he called out. “Brother Luke?”

  “In here,” he heard, and he turned toward the little room that was appended to the greenhouse, the one stocked with the supplies of fertilizer and bottles of ionized water and a hanging rack of clippers and shears and gardening scissors and the floor stacked with bags of mulch. He liked this room, with its woodsy, mossy smell, and he went toward it eagerly and knocked.

  When he walked in, he was at first disoriented. The room was dark and still, but for a small flame that Brother Luke was bent over on the floor. “Come closer,” said the brother, and he did.

  “Closer,” the brother said, and laughed. “Jude, it’s okay.”

  So he went closer, and the brother held something up and said “Surprise!” and he saw it was a muffin, a muffin with a lit wooden match thrust into its center.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s your birthday, right?” asked the brother. “And this is your birthday cake. Go on, make a wish; blow out the candle.”

  “It’s for me?” he asked, as the flame guttered.

  “Yes, it’s for you,” said the brother. “Hurry, make a wish.”

  He had never had a birthday cake before, but he had read about them and he knew what to do. He shut his eyes and wished, and then opened them and blew out the match, and the room went completely dark.

  “Congratulations,” Luke said, and turned on the light. He handed him the muffin, and when he tried to offer the brother some of it, Luke shook his head: “It’s yours.” He ate the muffin, which had little blueberries and which he thought was the best thing he had ever tasted, so sweet and cakey, and the brother watched him and smiled.

  “And I have something else for you,” said Luke, and reached behind him, and handed him a package, a large flat box wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. “Go on, open it,” Luke said, and he did, removing the newspaper carefully so it could be reused. The box was plain faded cardboard, and when he opened it, he found it contained an assortment of round pieces of wood. Each piece was notched on both ends, and Brother Luke showed him how the pieces could be slotted within one another to build boxes, and then how he could lay twigs across the top to make a sort of roof. Many years later, when he was in college, he would see a box of these logs in the window of a toy store, and would realize that his gift had been missing parts: a red-peaked triangular structure to build a roof, and the flat green planks that lay across it. But in the moment, it had left him mute with joy, until he had remembered his manners and thanked the brother again and again.

  “You’re welcome,” said Luke. “After all, you don’t turn eight every day, do you?”

  “No,” he admitted, smiling wildly at the gift, and for the rest of his free period, he had built houses and boxes with the pieces while Brother Luke watched him, sometimes reaching over to tuck his hair behind his ears.

  He spent every minute he could with the brother in the greenhouse. With Luke, he was a different person. To the other brothers, he was a burden, a collection of problems and deficiencies, and every day brought a new detailing of what was wrong with him: he was too dreamy, too emotional, too energetic, too fanciful, too curious, too impatient, too skinny, too playful. He should be more grateful, more graceful, more controlled, more respectful, more patient, more dexterous, more disciplined, more reverent. But to Brother Luke, he was smart, he was quick, he was clever, he was lively. Brother Luke never told him he asked too many questions, or told him that there were certain things he would have to wait to know until he grew up. The first time Brother Luke tickled him, he had gasped and then laughed, uncontrollably, and Brother Luke had laughed with him, the two of them tussling on the floor beneath the orchids. “You have such a lovely laugh,” Brother Luke said, and “What a great smile you have, Jude,” and “What a joyful person you are,” until it was as if the greenhouse was someplace bewitched, somewhere that transformed him into the boy Brother Luke saw, someone funny and bright, someone people wanted to be around, someone better and different than he actually was.

  When things were bad with the other brothers, he imagined himself in the greenhouse, playing with his things or talking to Brother Luke, and repeated back to himself the things Brother Luke said to him. Sometimes things were so bad he wasn’t able to go to dinner, but the next day, he would always find something in his room that Brother Luke had left him: a flower, or a red leaf, or a particularly bulbous acorn, which he had begun collecting and storing under the grate.

  The other brothers had noticed he was spending all his time with Brother Luke and, he sensed, disapproved. “Be careful around Luke,” warned Brother Pavel of all people, Brother Pavel who hit him and yelled at him. “He’s not who you think he is.” But he ignored him. They were none of them who they said they were.

  One day he went to the greenhouse late. It had been a very hard week; he had been beaten very badly; it hurt him to walk. He had been visited by both Father Gabriel and Brother Matthew the previous evening, and every muscle hurt. It was a Friday; Brother Michael had unexpectedly released him early that day, and he had thought he might go play with his logs. As he always did after those sessions, he wanted to be alone—he wanted to sit in that warm space with his toys and pretend he was far away.

  No one was in the greenhouse when he arrived, and he lifted the grate and took out his Indian doll and the box of logs, but even as he wa
s playing with them, he found himself crying. He was trying to cry less—it always made him feel worse, and the brothers hated it and punished him for it—but he couldn’t help himself. He had at least learned to cry silently, and so he did, although the problem with crying silently was that it hurt, and it took all your concentration, and eventually he had to put his toys down. He stayed until the first bell rang, and then put his things away and ran back downhill toward the kitchen, where he would peel carrots and potatoes and chop celery for the night’s meal.

  And then, for reasons he was never able to determine, not even when he was an adult, things suddenly became very bad. The beatings got worse, the sessions got worse, the lectures got worse. He wasn’t sure what he had done; to himself, he seemed the same as he always had. But it was as if the brothers’ collective patience with him were reaching some sort of end. Even Brothers David and Peter, who loaned him books, as many as he wanted, seemed less inclined to speak to him. “Go away, Jude,” said Brother David, when he came to talk to him about a book of Greek myths the brother had given him. “I don’t want to look at you now.”

  Increasingly he was becoming convinced that they were going to get rid of him, and he was terrified, because the monastery was the only home he had ever had. How would he survive, what would he do, in the outside world, which the brothers had told him was full of dangers and temptations? He could work, he knew that; he knew how to garden, and how to cook, and how to clean: maybe he could get a job doing one of those things. Maybe someone else might take him in. If that happened, he reassured himself, he would be better. He wouldn’t make any of the mistakes he had made with the brothers.

  “Do you know how much it costs to take care of you?” Brother Michael had asked him one day. “I don’t think we ever thought we’d have you around for this long.” He hadn’t known what to say to either of those statements, and so had sat staring dumbly at the desk. “You should apologize,” Brother Michael told him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Now he was so tired that he didn’t have strength even to go to the greenhouse. Now after his classes he went down to a corner of the cellar, where Brother Pavel had told him there were rats but Brother Matthew said there weren’t, and climbed onto one of the wire storage units where boxes of oil and pasta and sacks of flour were stored, and rested, waiting until the bell rang and he had to go back upstairs. At dinners, he avoided Brother Luke, and when the brother smiled at him, he turned away. He knew for certain now that he wasn’t the boy Brother Luke thought he was—joyful? funny?—and he was ashamed of himself, of how he had deceived Luke, somehow.

  He had been avoiding Luke for a little more than a week when one day he went down to his hiding place and saw the brother there, waiting for him. He looked for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere, and instead he began to cry, turning his face to the wall and apologizing as he did.

  “Jude, it’s all right,” said Brother Luke, and stood near him, patting him on the back. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” The brother sat on the cellar steps. “Come here, come sit next to me,” he said, but he shook his head, too embarrassed to do so. “Then at least sit down,” said Luke, and he did, leaning against the wall. Luke stood, then, and began looking through the boxes on one of the high shelves, until he retrieved something from one and held it out to him: a glass bottle of apple juice.

  “I can’t,” he said, instantly. He wasn’t supposed to be in the cellar at all: he entered it through the small window on the side and then climbed down the wire shelves. Brother Pavel was in charge of the stores and counted them every week; if something was missing, he’d be blamed. He always was.

  “Don’t worry, Jude,” said the brother. “I’ll replace it. Go on—take it,” and finally, after some coaxing, he did. The juice was sweet as syrup, and he was torn between sipping it, to make it last, and gulping it, in case the brother changed his mind and it was taken from him.

  After he had finished, they sat in silence, and then the brother said, in a low voice, “Jude—what they do to you: it’s not right. They shouldn’t be doing that to you; they shouldn’t be hurting you,” and he almost started crying again. “I would never hurt you, Jude, you know that, don’t you?” and he was able to look at Luke, at his long, kind, worried face, with his short gray beard and his glasses that made his eyes look even larger, and nod.

  “I know, Brother Luke,” he said.

  Brother Luke was quiet for a long time before he spoke next. “Do you know, Jude, that before I came here, to the monastery, I had a son? You remind me so much of him. I loved him so much. But he died, and then I came here.”

  He didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t have to say anything, it seemed, because Brother Luke kept talking.

  “I look at you sometimes, and I think: you don’t deserve to have these things happen to you. You deserve to be with someone else, someone—” And then Brother Luke stopped again, because he had begun to cry again. “Jude,” he said, surprised.

  “Don’t,” he sobbed, “please, Brother Luke—don’t let them send me away; I’ll be better, I promise, I promise. Don’t let them send me away.”

  “Jude,” said the brother, and sat down next to him, pulling him into his body. “No one’s sending you away. I promise; no one’s going to send you away.” Finally he was able to calm himself again, and the two of them sat silent for a long time. “All I meant to say was that you deserve to be with someone who loves you. Like me. If you were with me, I’d never hurt you. We’d have such a wonderful time.”

  “What would we do?” he asked, finally.

  “Well,” said Luke, slowly, “we could go camping. Have you ever been camping?”

  He hadn’t, of course, and Luke told him about it: the tent, the fire, the smell and snap of burning pine, the marshmallows impaled on sticks, the owls’ hoots.

  The next day he returned to the greenhouse, and over the following weeks and months, Luke would tell him about all the things they might do together, on their own: they would go to the beach, and to the city, and to a fair. He would have pizza, and hamburgers, and corn on the cob, and ice cream. He would learn how to play baseball, and how to fish, and they would live in a little cabin, just the two of them, like father and son, and all morning long they would read, and all afternoon they would play. They would have a garden where they would grow all their vegetables, and flowers, too, and yes, maybe they’d have a greenhouse someday as well. They would do everything together, go everywhere together, and they would be like best friends, only better.

  He was intoxicated by Luke’s stories, and when things were awful, he thought of them: the garden where they’d grow pumpkins and squash, the creek that ran behind the house where they’d catch perch, the cabin—a larger version of the ones he built with his logs—where Luke promised him he would have a real bed, and where even on the coldest of nights, they would always be warm, and where they could bake muffins every week.

  One afternoon—it was early January, and so cold that they had to wrap all the greenhouse plants in burlap despite the heaters—they had been working in silence. He could always tell when Luke wanted to talk about their house and when he didn’t, and he knew that today was one of his quiet days, when the brother seemed elsewhere. Brother Luke was never unkind when he was in these moods, only quiet, but the kind of quiet he knew to avoid. But he yearned for one of Luke’s stories; he needed it. It had been such an awful day, the kind of day in which he had wanted to die, and he wanted to hear Luke tell him about their cabin, and about all the things they would do there when they were alone. In their cabin, there would be no Brother Matthew or Father Gabriel or Brother Peter. No one would shout at him or hurt him. It would be like living all the time in the greenhouse, an enchantment without end.

  He was reminding himself not to speak when Brother Luke spoke to him. “Jude,” he said, “I’m very sad today.”

  “Why, Brother Luke?”

  “Well,” said Brother Luke, and paused. “You kn
ow how much I care for you, right? But lately I’ve been feeling that you don’t care for me.”

  This was terrible to hear, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. “That’s not true!” he told the brother.

  But Brother Luke shook his head. “I keep talking to you about our house in the forest,” he said, “but I don’t get the feeling that you really want to go there. To you, they’re just stories, like fairy tales.”

  He shook his head. “No, Brother Luke. They’re real to me, too.” He wished he could tell Brother Luke just how real they were, just how much he needed them, how much they had helped him. Brother Luke looked so upset, but finally he was able to convince him that he wanted that life, too, that he wanted to live with Brother Luke and no one else, that he would do whatever he needed to in order to have it. And finally, finally, the brother had smiled, and crouched and hugged him, moving his arms up and down his back. “Thank you, Jude, thank you,” he said, and he, so happy to have made Brother Luke so happy, thanked him back.

  And then Brother Luke looked at him, suddenly serious. He had been thinking about it a lot, he said, and he thought it was time for them to build their cabin; it was time that they go away together. But he, Luke, wouldn’t do it alone: Was Jude going to come with him? Did he give him his word? Did he want to be with Brother Luke the way Brother Luke wanted to be with him, just the two of them in their small and perfect world? And of course he did—of course he did.

  So there was a plan. They would leave in two months, before Easter; he would celebrate his ninth birthday in their cabin. Brother Luke would take care of everything—all he needed to do was be a good boy, and study hard, and not cause any problems. And, most important, say nothing. If they found out what they were doing, Brother Luke said, then he would be sent away, away from the monastery, to make his way on his own, and Brother Luke wouldn’t be able to help him then. He promised.