…all my souls be Emparadised in you─in whom alone I understand, and grow, and see…

Most of the Mexican kids then, before any of us ever saw a television set or had much access to magazines or books─except what dribbled in through the public school system in a small town─were good at art; but Kelly was more. The rest of us drew representational forms, as close to the real objects as we could, and some of us were more than fair, but by the same token, we knew Kelly was better, although at the time we didn’t know why.

He would draw a tree, and it didn’t look like a tree the way the rest of us saw it, but you knew it was a tree─because you could see its soul.

In the fifth grade, when the teacher asked for volunteers to decorate the walls and windows of the classroom during the holidays, Kelly didn’t raise his hand, but the class, which was about a good third Hispanic, voted Kelly in anyway.

Christmas had a different look in the fifth grade that year. The reindeer, drawn on a large sheet of newsprint and cut to fit across the window panes, were wraith-like and pale blue. And because none of us had ever seen snow in southern Texas, Kelly parked the sleigh on a rooftop made of woven twigs on which doves nested. Santa Claus wore patch overalls and a panama hat and handed out peanut butter sandwiches to kids. As backdrop, the Spirit of the Season was a galactic event in silver both smokey and luminous at the same time: impending, growing, reaching out, and winged with gold and emerald tendrils like the flares from a Benevolent Sun.

Our sixth grade teacher wasn’t as progressive as her predecessor. The next year, the girls decorated the classroom.

Taking into consideration the traditional Mexican-Irish affinity, people would ask Kelly throughout his life how much Irish he had in him, to which he would just shrug his shoulders and say, “None.” He was born Candelário Acósta the youngest son in a family of four boys and one girl, Maureen, who was a year younger than him and who explained it often enough before she learned better that Kelly got that name from his brothers because they used to make fun of him when his father would pull a good sized specimen of quelíte and strap him with it for spending his time weaving garlands of flowers and grasses for his mother instead of picking cotton. They’d make fun of Maureen, too (whose real name was Mariána Luz), because she defended his dreamer ways) and they called her “moron” until their mother objected so they switched to the thinly disguised euphemism that was close enough phonetically to be unmistakable in its intent. The names followed Maureen and Kelly through their life.

Kelly didn’t make much of a splash in high school either in academics or in art, and in all those years, the only drawing of his that was ever exhibited in those halls was during Art Week in his senior year, of a girl done in every possible shade and hue and nuance of brown.

It didn’t look like any girl the way the rest of the world saw girls, nor like Maureen the way they saw Maureen who was in her junior year; but those who saw it and who knew Maureen, knew it was Maureen. Because you could see her soul.

Kelly joined the army right out of high school and went to war. He did two tours. Maureen used to have drawers full of his drawings: of street scenes in Asia, of vendors and snake handlers and prostitutes, soldiers on leave. But he’d do drawings of the front, too: of perplexed villagers living on rationed food and rationed land and rationed years, and soldiers, constrained by war and boyhood to show nerve and verve, yet visible to at least one witness as frail beings treading the fine line between unwavering defiance and total surrender to their fates.

Kelly and a buddy stayed back once to cover the retreat of their platoon, and showed up in camp half a day later, Kelly’s buddy on his back, both shot to hell. It took Kelly the rest of his hitch and a year of civilian life again to recover from the six bullet holes in his body. But he never recovered from the death of his mom and dad in a head-on crash with a drunk driver, a boy just mustered out of the army. There is no end to the casualties of war.

Maureen, who was married with children now, tried to take him up north to live with her and her husband, Cláudio (Claude), a childhood friend of both of them. But Kelly couldn’t tear himself away from his ancestral home.

And the thread to that faculty that had given him his vision into the depth of things was severed, maybe by one of the bullets, or maybe by the fatal grind of Detroit steel. He said his hands were useless. One day, Kelly disappeared and was never seen alive again. He was found two years later by a crew clearing out some woods not five miles from his parents’ house, dead of natural causes, they said. Maureen and her family and two childhood friends were the only ones at the burial. She paid for all of it.

Her kids grew up with as little opportunity for art or accessibility to it as she could manage. She couldn’t bear it. Cánde (short for Candelário), her youngest, had distant but finely etched memories of the gentle soul who had drawn his portrait in pencil a lifetime ago, a picture that Maureen kept under lock and key in a chest among a twelve inch stack of Kelly’s work that she’d collected through the years.

One day, Cánde, on a field trip to the art museum with the fifth grade, turned a corner and came to a halt in front of “The Wheatfield,” which held him transfixed for the remainder of the tour.

That night at home, Cánde took possession of the kitchen table right after supper, and drew picture after picture of anything and everything until sometime before midnight when he went to bed. And Maureen came in from the front porch─where she’d been sitting fighting back tears for hours─and sat at the kitchen table in front of Cánde’s last drawing while the rest of the family raided the refrigerator one by one, and who all (three boys, two girls and Claude their father) agreed that the picture in front of Maureen didn’t look like a man the way they saw men, nor like Kelly the way they remembered Kelly, but they knew it was Kelly. Because they could see Kelly’s soul.

Noe.