“Tell me everything,” Jack said. “I want to know everything.”
“The headmaster—” Warnie looked keenly at Jack, intense. “His name is Capron, but he’s called Oldie. He reads our letters before they are mailed so I can’t say everything I want to say. But I don’t want to talk about school right now. I want to talk about Boxen. Your letter said that King Bunny has been captured!” Warnie loosened the top button of his uniform and sat down.
“I rescued him!” Solemn words poured out of Jack. “I wrote so many stories for us: ‘The King’s Ring,’ ‘Manx Against Manx,’ ‘The Locked Door,’ ‘Living Races of Mouseland,’ and ‘The Relief of Murry.’”
“Oh, that’s so wonderful. I want to see them immediately.”
“I even wrote a play called The King’s Ring with Icthus-Oress, who is the son of a dead butcher and a singer. And these.” Jack pointed to new drawings where mice carried swords and donned top hats. Toads wore three-piece suits.
Warnie reached for the piles of drawings and notebooks and Jack watched him, aware that Warnie was slightly different. Not in any essential way, but something in his eyes had shifted, a hardness that softened with the talk of Boxen.
“Do you not like Wynyard?” Jack asked, wondering if this might be the cause of the change that made Jack feel as if there was something about his brother he didn’t know.
Warnie gave a sad type of smile. “I like cricket and being outdoors but—”
“Then I would hate it,” Jack said. “You know I can’t play those kinds of games.” Jack held up his thumbs. “I am too clumsy by far.”
“Father says it’s only because we’re missing a joint in our thumbs, not because we’re clumsy.” Warnie picked up a drawing of Puddiphat. “And because of that, you are so clever at all of this. Mother would agree that God gives us what we need.”
Jack stared at his brother spouting his parents’ words and for a moment, a terrifying moment, he believed he had lost his brother to Wynyard and adulthood.
But then Warnie smiled and crouched down. “How shall Pig Land fare in the next battle?”
Before Jack could answer, Annie’s voice rose up the stairs. “Dinner is ready, boys!”
The brothers jumped up, leaving Pig Land and Boxen and Puddiphat to await their return.
*
I stop. George opens one eye to verify that I have closed my notebook.
“Oh, Megs! Is that it? Is that all they said? What did the two brothers say or do with you after that? What did the professor say?”
“Well, firstly, George, he isn’t a professor—not like the professor in his book. Mr. Lewis is the tutor of English literature but not a professor, so I just call him Mr. Lewis. You could call him a don or tutor or fellow, but . . .”
George looks at me, bored with such facts, so I keep going. “Anyway, after they were done telling me that story, Warnie bolted from the common room as if his tail were on fire, and he returned with their drawings from that time.” I lean forward. “George, they were amazing! I saw a bunny riding a bike and a toad in a three-piece suit. Mr. Lewis had drawn them all as a child. Your age. He said he longed to make things.”
“Do you think that was the start of Narnia?” George asks quietly as if afraid to know the truth.
“Neither of them can say.” I shrug.
“And Mr. Lewis’s unusual thumbs,” George says. “Imagine if they hadn’t been created that way.” He pauses, and I imagine he thinks about his own heart being created differently from others. “What if Mr. Lewis’s thumbs had been perfect?”
“I don’t know,” I tell George. “What if he had been better built with a hardy constitution and had never been done in with colds? Would he have started to draw and make up stories in the sunlit hallways and dusty little end room while he was stuck inside? Maybe not. Maybe he would have been outside with the other boys playing and running, and he’d never have created Animal-Land and then Boxen. I’m not sure if a missing joint in a thumb can be said to have started something that turned into Narnia, but I find it interesting, and so does Mr. Lewis.”
“Did you get to read any of it? Of Boxen?”
I shake my head. “Mr. Lewis says he seldom rereads any of his work, but he did say he will sometimes pick up the old notebooks and drawings and glance at them, marvel at the land they created together when they were young. He told me that when their father died, he and Warnie returned to Little Lea and buried their attic toys in the garden. But they saved some of the drawings. Even later, when Jack was twenty-eight years old, he said he wrote an encyclopedia to explain all of Boxen.”
George grew solemn. He gazed out the window and asked, “Was that all they told you?”
“I have one more story, but I think we’ll save it for after dinner. Remember, they found me lurking like a proper crook on their property. It’s incredible they told me anything at all. But they invited me back on Monday. Remember, little brother,” I say, ruffling his curls, “it’s close to exams. I can’t just mooch about with Mr. Lewis all day. I have to study, and he has to teach and lecture and mark exams.”
“I know,” George says softly. “Out there, the world is a very busy place. But you have one more story?”
I kiss his cheek. “Right before the next story, Mr. Lewis told me this, so I’ll tell you: ‘And then everything changed.’”
“Well, isn’t that a brilliant way to keep you hanging on?” George laughs, and the sound brings Mum into the room with a tray carrying three teacups and one pot with yellow flowers sprinkled about the edges. Her hair is longer this season, graying at the edge by her ear and chestnut everywhere else. Mum is too young, only forty years old, to be showing the signs of age. The skin under her eyes casts a purplish shade, and I wonder when she last truly slept for more than a few hours. But her sweet smile belies all fatigue, and her musical voice fills George’s room with cheer. Dad is so very in love with her, and each time she walks into a room, I know why. She possesses a light that everyone can see.
“What is so funny?” she asks as she sets the tray beside the medicine bottles on George’s little desk. It should be covered in schoolbooks and notes, but that’s not George’s life.
“Mr. Lewis. He left Megs hanging on so she would come back to his house. I’m going to get more stories.”
Mum looks to me with a stern expression that tells me I best be careful not to lead my little brother down the trail of lies.
“They’re true stories,” I say as I pour the tea into my cup and think about the very strong tea at the Kilns. “I asked Mr. Lewis and his brother exactly what George told me to ask, and while he didn’t quite answer me in the way I want, he told me two stories to bring home and said there are more for us.”
Mum shakes her head. “Don’t waste the poor man’s time. Or yours. Narnia came from his imagination and that just must be that. It is a beautiful story to keep George occupied, but we mustn’t hound a busy man.”
George leans back and flattens against his pillow. “No, Mum. That is not just that. That is too simple an answer.”