Long lost

"If I get the chance, Mrs. Garner, believe me, I will."

She gripped the sides of her wheelchair. "There was a time when I could walk. I was always the earliest to arrive for Sunday services."

The change in topic confused me.

"I made a point of getting to the church before everyone. Now I wonder if I wasn't too proud and that's why God punished me."

"Whatever happened, Mrs. Garner, it wasn't God's fault. It was Lester Dant's."

3

He'd sat at the top of the church steps with his back against the door.

"A teenager," Mrs. Garner said. "His head was drooped, but even without seeing his face, I could tell that I didn't know him. His clothes were torn, so the first thing I thought was that he'd been in some kind of accident. The next thing I thought was, the way his head hung down, he might be on drugs. But before I could make a decision whether to hurry to help him or run away, he raised his head and looked at me. His eyes were so direct, there was no way he could have been on drugs. They were filled with torment. I asked him if he was hurt. 'No, ma'am,' he said, 'but I'm awful tired and hungry.'

"By then, other members of the congregation had arrived. The reverend came. But neither he nor anybody else recognized the boy. We asked him his name, but he said that he couldn't remember. We asked where he came from, but he couldn't remember that, either. From the rips in his clothes and the freshly healed burn marks on his arms, we figured that he must have had something terrible happen to him, that he was in shock.

"The reverend offered to take him home and get him something to eat, but the boy said, 'No. These people are waiting for the service to begin.' That sounds too good to be true, I know. But you weren't there. Everybody who came to church that morning felt so concerned about the boy and so touched by his unselfish attitude that we had a sense of God's hand among us. We took him inside. I sat next to him and handed him a Bible, but he didn't open it. I wondered if he was too dazed to be able to read. Imagine my surprise when the congregation read out loud from the Scriptures and the boy recited every passage from memory. I remember that the reverend said something in his sermon about keeping compassion in our hearts and helping the unfortunate. He paused to look directly at the boy. Afterward, everybody said that it was one of the most moving services that we'd had in a long time. The reverend took the boy home. He asked me and a couple of other church members to help. We made a big meal. We got the boy fresh clothes. He did everything slowly, as if in a daze.

"Who was he? we wondered. What had happened to him? Where had he come from? A doctor examined him but couldn't get him to remember anything. The chief of police got the same results and asked the state police if they knew about anybody who matched the boy's description and had been reported missing. The state police didn't learn anything, either."

That made sense, I thought. Loganville was in Ohio, but the fire had happened in Indiana. The Ohio police had probably decided that the boy's arrival in Loganville wasn't important enough for out-of-state inquiries. Even if they had gone out of state, inquiries to the Indiana state police might have been pointless, the fire having been basically a local matter that the state police wouldn't have monitored.

"Various members of the congregation offered to take the boy in," Mrs. Garner said. "But the reverend decided that since I'd found him, I had the right to take care of him if I wanted. My husband was the most generous soul imaginable. Five years earlier, we'd lost a son to cancer." She paused, caught in her memories.

"Our only child. If Joshua had lived, he'd have been the same age as the teenager I'd found on the church steps seemed to be. I couldn't help thinking that God had sent him into our lives for a reason. As a…"

Mrs. Garner had trouble saying the next word.

"Substitute?" I asked.

She nodded, her pain lines deepening. "That's another reason I believe I was punished. For vain thoughts like that. For presuming that God would single me out and give me favorable treatment. But back then, I couldn't resist the idea that something miraculous was happening, that I was being given a second son. I told my husband what I hoped for, and he didn't take a moment to agree. If I wanted the boy to live with us while his problems got sorted out, it was fine. My husband loved me so much and…"

Her voice dropped. She turned her wheelchair slightly so that she looked even straighter at me. "The boy came to live with us while the authorities tried to figure out who he was. He was awfully ski

"I left books and magazines on his bedside table so he'd have something to amuse him while he was resting. After a while, I realized that none of them had been opened. When I asked him if they didn't suit him, if he'd like to read something else, he avoided the question, and it suddenly occurred to me that the boy couldn't read."

I'd taken a seat on a porch swing. Now I frowned. "But you said that he could recite passages from the Bible."

"Any passage I asked him."

"Then I don't understand."

"I asked him to read the back of a cereal box. I asked him to read the headline of a newspaper. He couldn't do it. I put a pencil and paper in front of him. He couldn't write the simplest words. He was illiterate. As for the Bible passages, there was only one explanation. Someone had taught him the Bible orally, had made him memorize passages that were read to him. It chilled me when I realized that. What on earth had happened to him?"

"That's one of the few questions I have an answer for."

Her gaze was intense. "You know?"

Wishing that I hadn't interrupted, I nodded. "His parents held him prisoner in an underground room."

"What?"

"As much as I've been able to figure out, they believed that the Devil was in him, that the only way to drive Satan out was by filling his head with the Bible."

Mrs. Garner looked horrified. "But why wouldn't they have let him learn how to read and write?"

"I'm still trying to piece it together. Maybe they believed that reading and writing were the Devil's tools. The wrong kind of books would lead to the wrong kind of ideas, and the next thing, sin would be all over the place. The Bible was the only safe book, and the surest way to guarantee that the Bible was the only book Lester knew was to teach it to him orally."

Mrs. Garner's eyes wavered as if she'd become dizzy. She lowered her head and massaged her temples.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"The things people do to one another."

"I've told you what Lester did to my family. What did he do to your Seconds passed. Gradually, she looked up at me, the pain in her eyes worse. "He was the politest boy I ever met. He was always asking to help around the house. At the same time, I'd never met anyone so troubled. Some afternoons, he'd lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, reliving God knew what. In the nights, he couldn't go to sleep unless his closet light was on. He often woke screaming from nightmares. They seemed to have something to do with the fire that had burned his arms. I'd go into his room and try to calm him. I'd sit holding him, stroking his head, whispering that he was safe, that nothing could hurt him where he was, that he didn't have to worry anymore."