Page 386 - A Little Life: A Novel

frightened, both. Brother Luke had done so much for him, and he had done
nothing in return. He not only wanted to help earn money; he had to.
At last he was able to convince the brother, who hugged him. “You really

are one in a million, you know that?” Luke asked him. “You really are
special.” And he smiled into the brother’s sweater.
The next day they had classes as usual, and then the brother left again,
this time, he said, to find him a good job: something he could do that would
help them earn money so they could buy the land and build the cabin. And
this time Luke returned smiling, excited even, and seeing this, he was
excited as well.

“Jude,” said the brother, “I met someone who wants to give you some
work; he’s waiting right outside and you can start now.”
He smiled back at the brother. “What am I going to do?” he asked. At the
monastery, he had been taught to sweep, and dust, and mop. He could wax a
floor so well that even Brother Matthew had been impressed. He knew how
to polish silver, and brass, and wood. He knew how to clean between tiles

and how to scrub a toilet. He knew how to clean leaves out of gutters and
clean and reset a mousetrap. He knew how to wash windows and do
laundry by hand. He knew how to iron, he knew how to sew on buttons, he
knew how to make stitches so even and fine that they looked as if they had
been done by machine.
He knew how to cook. He could only make a dozen or so dishes from
start to finish, but he knew how to clean and peel potatoes, carrots,

rutabaga. He could chop hills of onions and never cry. He could debone a
fish and knew how to pluck and clean a chicken. He knew how to make
dough, he knew how to make bread. He knew how to whip egg whites until
they transformed from liquid to solid to something better than solid:
something like air given form.
And he knew how to garden. He knew which plants craved sun and

which shied from it. He knew how to determine whether a plant was
parched or drowning in too much water. He knew when a tree or bush
needed to be repotted, and when it was hardy enough to be transferred into
the earth. He knew which plants needed to be protected from cold, and how
to protect them. He knew how to make a clipping and how to make the
clipping grow. He knew how to mix fertilizer, how to add eggshells into the
soil for extra protein, how to crush an aphid without destroying the leaf it

was perched on. He could do all of these things, although he was hoping he