I was twelve and my brother Daniel was nine when we began our lessons with Sister Marie. She’d somehow gotten word of the boys living motherless on a farm ten miles out in the Puyallup Valley, unable to read or write. She sent a letter to our father informing him that she was worried for our souls. She believed God meant what He said, that the Word was with Him and the Word was Him. An unlearned child couldn’t know God, she said, and offered to give us free literacy lessons on Sundays at the church.

My father had no objection to us being schooled. It simply hadn’t been feasible to that point. No bus lines ran past the farm, and my father only drove into town once a week, on Sundays, to buy gasoline and visit the VFW. So he wrote back to Sister Marie and said that for two hours each Sunday she could have as much of us as she could handle.

The church was St. Joseph’s, on the eastside of Tacoma, and my father left us there early that first Sunday with a box of eggs from the farm to give to Sister Marie. As we waited for her, my brother Daniel and I climbed up into the old dogwood in the courtyard. Leaves heavy and red with late summer. I asked my father once why leaves turn red — he said the sun burns them up over the course of the summer. I considered that as I looked straight up into the dogwood. I imagined that the tree was filled with a special kind of fire that burns slow and cold.

I could’ve climbed higher, but I didn’t want to leave Daniel. I had to lift him on my shoulders so that he could reach the lowest limbs, and even then he stayed low in the tree’s thickest boughs. He was small for nine, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t know other children. Our world was the only world.

We sat quiet in the dogwood’s sturdy embrace, rasping the bark with our fingernails until Sister Marie arrived. She came on foot carrying a black satchel, her forehead glistening with sweat beneath her habit. We descended from the tree and met her by the door to the little brick building behind the church. I introduced myself and my brother as I’d been taught.

You’re early, she said. Have you been waiting long?

No, I said. We brought you something.

Daniel handed Sister Marie the small cedar box of eggs and straw.

Our father said you can just bring the box back next week, Daniel said shyly.

Sister Marie smiled at us as she took the box from Daniel, and I saw to my surprise that she was quite young. I hadn’t seen many nuns in my life, and I definitely hadn’t seen any young ones. I thought nuns were a variety of widow. But Sister Marie didn’t look like a widow. She had eyes bright like thistle and a blush in her cheeks from walking.

A silver key dangled from around her neck, and she used it to open the schoolhouse. Dusty light trailed us through the door, and I looked about the room, but there wasn’t much to see. A collection of wooden tables and chairs had been pushed into the far corner. Nothing on the tables but a corroded brass bell. Nothing on the walls but a bare metal rod above the one window at the front of the room. The dogwood looming in the window.

I helped Sister Marie pull one of the tables from the corner into the center of the room while Daniel went and sat on the floor where the sun streamed through the glass onto the flaking tiles.

Get up_,_ Sister Marie told Daniel. Stern and without menace.You’ll sit with your brother at this table.

Daniel looked to me, and I nodded at him. I retrieved two chairs from the corner and Daniel and I took our places at the table. Silent and still, I could feel Daniel’s eyes on me. His restless energy. It wasn’t normal for us to sit around waiting for instruction. At home, the farm’s rhythm compelled activity at all times. Idleness wasn’t allowed. Even sleeping was a chore to be done efficiently — my father once flew into a rage when he found Daniel rustling about in the pantry for dried apples after bedtime.

But we weren’t at the farm now, and there was nothing for Daniel and me to do in that moment but sit and watch Sister Marie prepare our first lesson. She reached into her black satchel and removed a white linen curtain, sheer as a veil, and spread it out flat across the tile floor; then she lifted it by the corners and carried the curtain to the window. My brother and I watched in silence as she hung the curtain from the bare rod and let it fall down over the window. She drew the curtain across the glass, cloaking the red dogwood and the golden sun.

Next, Sister Marie returned to her satchel at the front of the room and procured a small jar of black paint and a thin brush. She removed the lid from the jar and stirred the paint in smooth, round strokes as she walked back over to the curtained window. There, on the stretch of sheer fabric that lay over the dogwood, she painted a series of thin black letters —

T       R       E       E

From the table, Daniel and I squinted at Sister Marie’s delicate strokes and the spindly lines that appeared behind them. We could recognize letters in general but not in particular. We saw only silent black streaks of paint on a white cloth glowing silver in the sunlight. We saw the veiled red form of the dogwood. We saw a bounty of silent things.

But letters are not silent. That’s what Sister Marie taught us.

She stood next to the curtain and explained carefully that each letter has its own demand. The letters have voices, she said, and we need only to listen to them, to let the letters speak through us. We need to drink the letters with our eyes and let their voices crawl from our mouths. Like prayers. That is, she said, what it is to read — to pray.

Listen, she said. And repeat.

She pointed at the thin black lines on the curtain, and we listened as they commanded her tongue. Her lips. Each one had its own sound, and Sister Marie incanted their demands. First, she prayed them individually. T-R-E-E. Then, she prayed them in sequence.

Tree, she said.

She prayed again and again until we began to pray along with her. We did not know enough to resist. We could not. T-R-E-E, we said. Tree. We prayed with Sister Marie until the letters carved records in our throats. Until the sounds coalesced with the black letters and our voices were no longer our voices but echoes of a different world.

That was our first Sunday with Sister Marie.

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Every Sunday thereafter Sister Marie arrived with more sheer white curtains to add to our classroom. Everything needed a curtain. She lay one over our wooden table and each of the wooden chairs. The face of the door. The brass bell. And on every white shroud she painted black letters. Things needed names. Even the eggs we brought Sister Marie each week — she took them up one by one and marked their brown shells with her thin brush.

At no point did she tell us how many letters there were, nor any of the rules that governed their arrangement. She simply affixed them to everything in our classroom, letting their shapes impress themselves upon us. In time, I came to see that the room was not so spare after all. Whenever I thought that Sister Marie had exhausted the objects at hand, she would find some detail — a door hinge, a crack along the wall — that had escaped my notice. It was a thrill, the search. As the weeks passed, I craved the moment when Sister Marie covered something in white. I longed to see the black shape of a thing’s name spilling from the tip of her brush and feel the letters take hold of my tongue.

Daniel, on the other hand — his enthusiasm for our lessons never grew. He mustered only a hollow echo of Sister Marie’s voice. And when she offered no guidance, he turned to me and soundlessly mirrored the movement of my lips. By the end of the two-hour lesson, he would retreat into silence, head down on the tabletop.

I wasn’t surprised then, one Sunday, when Daniel refused to come into the schoolhouse from the courtyard. Even as Sister Marie summoned him from the doorway, he stayed out by the dogwood, gathering the gray mushrooms that grew in the tree’s loamy skirt. I felt, for the first time in my life, embarrassed of my brother. I saw him through Sister Marie’s eyes — a strange and wayward little boy. A flush of anger drew me across the courtyard to the dogwood tree, where I took hold of the collar of Daniel’s cotton shirt and dragged him toward the schoolhouse, ignoring his pitiful whimpers.

When we were seated at the table, Sister Marie stood before us and stared down silently at Daniel, her face pinched. Stand up, she said. And empty your pockets.

Daniel shook his head.

Empty them.

At length, under Sister Marie’s unyielding eyes, Daniel turned his pockets out, and his small gray mushrooms scattered on the floor tiles. Sister Marie knelt down and gathered them into a pile. They were ugly, alien things. Soon enough, Sister Marie had covered them with a handkerchief. Then she procured her jar of paint and her thin brush, and she painted a string of letters on the handkerchief and pointed.

Mushrooms, I said.

I looked over at Daniel, but his head was down on the table. He was silent a moment, and then his shoulders started to heave.

Sister Marie sighed and put the lid back on the jar of paint. For a long time, nobody moved. No sound but that of Daniel crying. I watched Sister Marie’s eyes fill with sadness as she looked at my younger brother. She knelt down and placed her hand on his bare and mud-caked knee.

I sat at the table and listened. Listened to my brother’s sobs, and found that they sounded to me like letters. Like a chain of vowels. A song of worship.

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In October there came the Sunday when my father brought me alone to the church. That morning, Daniel had collected the eggs for Sister Marie from the coop and closed the gate behind him without realizing Rex the farm hound had snuck into the pen. Our father made Daniel pick every bloody feather off the chicken wire while over and over repeating the words, I was born stupid. Daniel started to cry, of course, which always made our father angry. He chased Daniel into the house. I stayed outside cleaning up the feathers.

That afternoon, as I handed Sister Marie the box of eggs, I told her that Daniel was ill. She frowned. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not.

Will he be joining us again next week?

I don’t know, I said.

I still sometimes wondered why Sister Marie wanted to help my brother and me, even though she’d explained it many times — that education lifts the mind toward God. That the written word proves the union of body and soul. I believed that she believed this, but I still didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand how my brother’s absence could cause Sister Marie’s eyes to darken and her small hand to rise to her creased brow.

We shouldn’t continue the lessons without him, she said. He will be left too far behind.

I’ll help him catch up, I said.

She shook her head. It won’t do.

We stood outside the schoolhouse door, Sister Marie absently fingering the key around her neck. I stared at her, the trouble on her soft face. The sanctimonious air that had drawn me to her for weeks now flared my resentment. She couldn’t care so much for my brother — I’d seen the hopeless way she’d looked at Daniel since that first Sunday when he’d thrown himself down onto the patch of sunlight on the classroom floor. She may have cared about the elevation of Daniel’s soul, but she didn’t care for him.

Daniel won’t be coming to any more lessons, I lied. He’s told my father he’d rather stay by himself at the farm on Sundays.

Sister Marie looked puzzled. And what will he do?

I shrugged. There’s always something, I said.

She studied me a moment, and I returned her gaze. We were nearly the same height, Sister Marie and me.

If I miss this week, I added, I will lose all of my progress.

She nodded slowly, and I saw some of the brightness return to her eyes. Of all the poor, illiterate, godless children in the world, I was the only one standing in front of her. She lifted the key to the schoolhouse door.

That afternoon was the only time Sister Marie didn’t bring out any new white cloth or black paint from her satchel. In fact, Sister Marie began our lesson by walking over to the window and pulling down the curtain that’d hung there since our first lesson.

Aren’t you going to help? she asked, dropping the curtain into a white heap on the floor.

Together we pulled the white sheets from the door and the wall and the bell and the table and the chairs. The thrill of seeing the classroom covered, it turned out, was surpassed by the exhilaration of revealing it. She started laughing, Sister Marie, and I found myself imagining her hair. I imagined it rich like fingers of honey. She’d absolved herself of Daniel, and now she was lighter, unsparing with her energy.

It wasn’t long until the classroom was entirely free of Sister Marie’s white sheets. All the sheer cloth and black painted letters were gone, and the room was once more a room of silent things. A bare, forgotten schoolhouse in a brick building behind the church.

That’s when Sister Marie directed me to the window. We stood side by side before the glass, looking out at the old dogwood. Spent with autumn, its limbs bare and gaunt. The sun was far away — the sky a shadow.

But Sister Marie turned and smiled at me, undiminished. She nodded at the dogwood and handed me her thin paint brush. I took it, and ran the stiff bristles over the pads of my fingers. Then she removed the lid from the jar of black paint and held it out to me. I lowered the tip of the brush into the jar and lifted it to the window glass. I painted as delicately as I could manage —

Then I stepped back and appraised the letters on the glass, written in my own hand over the dogwood. I looked at the tree together with the letters and felt no strangeness.

I spent the rest of the afternoon writing with Sister Marie. We sat on the floor tiles, pulling stretches of cloth from the heap. She pointed at the bell, the table, the chair, the door, and I painted the names, recalling the letters from my memory. With each stroke, I felt the room recede and the letters waxing in my mind. I felt weightless. When I made mistakes Sister Marie gently corrected them, assuring me of what I already knew: a new world had nested inside of me, a gathering of sounds and thin lines. I would never leave this place, not even at dusk, when I heard the sound of the horn on my father’s truck and I stood up from the floor to go home.

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