moves his hands, floating them up and down like white birds.
“I’m too deaf to catch most of what he’s saying,” Cole has heard an old lady sitting behind him in church say. “But I feel blessed just watching him.”
“You want to teach folks, you got to hold their attention,” says PW. “Won’t do if they’re bored.”
But in Bible group Cole is often bored. In fact, Bible group reminds him a lot of school and of the kind of assignment he never liked. (Imagine that you, like the narrator, are drafted into the army to fight a war that you think is wrong. What would you do?) There is always a topic with a peppy title (“The Beatitudes vs. Bad Attitudes”), and though Mason picks the topic he has a rule about not doing much of the talking. He has another rule, about everyone having to write something about every topic.
“Okay, dudes, listen up. Say a Martian lands on Earth and this Martian comes up to you and he goes, ‘What’s this thing you Earthlings call Gospel?’ How would you define it for him? Say a secular kid tells you his mama told him Jesus’ story is nothing but a myth. How would you prove to this kid—without dissing his mama!—that she’s wrong? Cite verses but use your own words.”
But the worst assignments are the ones that are supposed to be fun. Rewrite the Beatitudes as hip-hop verses. The kind of thing that used to make Cole hate school.
But the other kids do have fun writing the hip-hop verses. And even when they might not like an assignment, they never get sullen or sarcastic or make a big show of how bored they are. And in this way Bible study is totally different from school. The other kids are happy to be there, and most of them throw themselves into the work. They want to please Mason, and they want to please God. Doesn’t Cole?
Mason sees all. Mason is not fooled. Mason teases Cole for not paying attention, for not really trying, and though he does it gently Cole is humiliated, he is ashamed, he knows it’s his same old problem. He has always been a bad student. Lazy, like Mason’s left eye. He will always be an underachiever. Everything has changed, but not this.
Mason sees all. “Never give up on yourself, little bruh. Moses was once a basket case.”
And in fact, it isn’t that Cole doesn’t want to learn. He loves the Bible stories. He thinks Daniel and Samson and David are superheroes. Every day he looks forward to the half-hour after supper that he spends with PW in the den. Cole has his own Bible, of course, but at these times they share an illustrated coffee-table-book-sized edition laid open on PW’s desk. They sit close together, and sometimes PW drapes his arm around Cole, and the weight and warmth of that thick arm on his narrow shoulders (like a friendly boa constrictor, Cole thinks) calm whatever jitters he might be having. When they are finished for the evening, PW kisses the side of Cole’s head. Once, he kept his lips pressed to Cole’s temple an extra beat and sniffed, saying, “You smell like a good boy to me,” and though Cole was embarrassed he was also pleased.
At first, when the inspiration comes to him, he puts off telling PW, afraid he might disapprove. But PW could not be more enthusiastic, and though Tracy’s response is not as important to him as PW’s, Cole is thrilled to hear her gush.
“Such a fine likeness of a lion! Nothing cowardly ’bout him, is there? And if that ain’t the darnedest scariest Goliath I’ve ever seen. Look, WyWy, he went and made Samson look like our Mason.”
Soon everyone in Salvation City knows about Cole’s gift, and besides his Bible-hero comics he is emboldened to try sketches—some cartoonish, some not—from life.
He is skillful beyond his years, and he knows it. The only good thing to come out of his days at Here Be Hope.
Two strokes of luck in that place where luck was essential to survive. First, he happened to be right there when a donation of art supplies arrived, and he’d managed to grab a supply of sketch pads and colored pens and pencils before they ran out (in that place where everything could be expected, almost instantly, to run out). Second, he had found a spot no one else seemed to know about (a cavity under some back stairs), where he could