The Tapes That Came Back To Me

The voice I never expected

There were a dozen tapes in that box, maybe more, and I did not get through them that first morning. I could only take so much.

But I reached in and felt along the edges of the labels, and there was one tape whose label was different from all the others.

The letters on it were not smooth. They were careful, pressed hard, a little crooked, the writing of a hand that had learned its letters late and did not trust them.

I put that tape in the machine.

For a moment there was only the hiss and a big man breathing, gathering himself. And then a voice I knew better than almost any in this county.

It was Virgil.

Virgil, the blind veteran. Virgil, who came to Thursday reading at sixty with his hat in his lap and told me he had never read a word in his life.

Virgil, whose thick drill press hands I had spent two years teaching to feel six little dots in a row.

And on that tape, Virgil read me the Scripture.

He read it in Braille. I could hear it, the little pause at the start of each line as his fingers found their place, the slow steady track of a man reading with his hands.

He read the whole of the fourth chapter of Second Corinthians, and when he got to the part that says we look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen, his voice went thick and he had to stop.

He started again. He finished the chapter. Then he spoke to me plain, not reading anymore.

He said, “Opal, you taught me to read when I was an old blind man who had given up. I could not give you your eyes back. But I could give you back the reading. So I am going to read to you now, every week, long as you want it, and you are going to let me.”

I sat at that table and I wept until the coffee went cold, and it was not the parking garage crying, not the empty house crying.

It was the crying you do when you find out that a thing you cast into the dark for nineteen years was being saved up all that while, and was coming back to you full.

I had taught Virgil to read so he would not be cut off from the world. And now Virgil, reading with his fingers in a dark deeper than my own, was reading the light back to me.

I found out later that Katie had done it. Katie, the little girl I taught at seven, grown and working at the hospital, the one who drove me to Kansas City.

She had heard the specialist say my word, blind, in the hall. And she went home and started calling people. She knew where every one of them was, because I had taught half the county to read and she had kept the list.