Dr Marcus Bell stood up at the First Baptist potluck, told the whole fellowship hall that thirty-eight years ago Miss Rose taught him to read, and then he turned to Jason and said, I think you and I need to talk about that eviction notice, because I called your landlord.
Jason had told my Aunt Rose he was about to be evicted, that he needed her five thousand five hundred dollars of cataract surgery savings to keep a roof over his head, that he would pay her back by Labor Day. It was October.
Dr Bell, now an eye surgeon at Mission Hospital, had heard the story from me and made one phone call. Jasons landlord said Jason had never been behind on rent, had never gotten an eviction notice, was in no danger of losing anything. The whole thing was invented to pry money out of a blind seventy-seven year old woman who had taught half of Asheville to read.
Jason said she just sits at home and listens to the radio, so what does she need to see. She reads her Bible every morning. She could not anymore. That was the whole point of the money.
Dr Bell did two things that day. He told Aunt Rose her surgery was Thursday, no charge, because a boy never forgets the teacher who opened the world to him. And he laid out, plainly, that Jasons eviction story was a lie, which made the money not a loan but something taken under false pretenses.
Faced with a doctor who had already called his landlord, Jason paid Aunt Rose back. The new Jordans did not look like such a good purchase next to five thousand five hundred dollars he suddenly had to produce.
Dr Bell did Aunt Roses surgery that Thursday. Both eyes. She reads her Bible again every morning now, in her own chair, in her own light.
She told me the first thing she wanted to see clearly was the faces of the children in the old class photos on her wall. Half of them learned to read from her. One of them gave her back her sight. She says that is the best arithmetic she ever heard of.