his parents are still waving, or if they’re even still there. A dream turned throat-clogging nightmare.
“It might help,” the woman called Eden had told him, “if you talked to them. You know, imagine your mom or dad is right there with you and you’re having a chat. A good time to do this might be at night, right before you go to sleep.”
And that night he had tried, but it had felt too strange. He couldn’t pretend like that—it was not his way. And then he dreamed that he was indeed trying to talk with his father. But his father was speaking the language of the dead. He kept getting madder and madder at Cole for not understanding him. Finally, he punched Cole in the face. In real life his father had never hit him, but the dream punch came as no surprise. To Cole it seemed woeful but natural, even inevitable. Deserved. He’d half woken up, and when he drifted off again he dreamed that his parents had shrunk to the size of gerbils. He carried them around with him in a Tupperware bowl. He fed them jelly beans and nuts.
At first glance anybody—not just the kids in Bible group—would have found the group leader scary. One of his eyes is dead and lies buried under a patch of purple scar tissue. He has some fierce tattoos—snakeheads, skulls—and his head is shaved like a skinhead’s. A silver stud through his right earlobe reminds Cole of a bullet.
Everyone knows Mason Boyle’s story because he has told it during the part of Sunday worship when members of the congregation are invited to testify. They know about the fight in the bar where he lost his eye to “this other punk” wielding a broken bottle, and how that was even worse luck than it sounded. As a child Mason had been afflicted with lazy eye, and the vision in that eye had always been blurred and weak. The eye he lost in the fight was his other eye, the one with 20/20 vision.
“I was cast down so low, I hoped to die. I was so mad at the world, if I could’ve seen ’em I’d have punched out everyone who dared cross my path.”
But then Mason started noticing something.
“My left eye—my bad, lazy eye—seemed to be getting stronger.”
It took about a year, Mason’s hardworking eye making a little more progress each day, until it was as good as his dead eye used to be.
“And then, man, it just kept going! I mean, my left eye actually got better. Doctor said she never saw anything like it, but today this here eye is twenty-ten!”
Even if they’d already heard the story, people would roar when Mason got to this part. And they would hoot and stomp and clap as he told the rest so that he had to raise his voice louder and louder.
“It was like God had taken pity on me, and not just a little-bitty pity but enough to forgive the fact that I had only myself to blame. Because, don’t you know, I picked the fight in the bar that night. And I started thinking it was a miracle, and that within that miracle was a message for me. A message about blindness and healing. A message about laziness and strength. A message about work—about doing double duty and being rewarded with brand-new vision.
“And I knew that God was calling on me to put aside all my lazy, shameful, devil-delighting habits and to receive what he was holding out: a chance to accept his love and forgiveness and make myself worthy of the vision with which he’d blessed me. Mason the sinner had a new life, and Mason had a mission. Mason was blind no more. Now he must help the blind.”
Mason earns his worldly living fixing cars. But as part of his selfless service, he helps make Braille Bibles.
Cole likes Mason—all the kids do—and he feels foolish for ever having found him scary. But secretly he wishes he did not have to study Bible with him.
Whenever Pastor Wyatt talks about the Bible, whether he’s preaching a sermon or talking on Heaven’s A-Poppin’! or studying at home alone with Cole, he always makes it sound as if it had all just happened yesterday and he himself had been there. When he tells the story of Jesus, it’s as if he’d seen it all with his own eyes—the miracles, the Crucifixion—and Cole is captivated by his big voice and the way he