PATRICK’S HOUSE WAS on a corner and it had a porch. This was the sum of what I remembered from three years before. I peered out the window into the bright sun, searching for something that would trigger my memory. When I reached a stand of leafy poplars, I doubled back, with the strange feeling that this had all happened before.
Patrick had asked me to pick up cigarettes from his family. It would save me some money, he’d said. This also gave me a chance to talk to his parents. I thought they should know a teacher had started visiting their son in jail. Maybe I could offer them some help. And I was curious about how they made sense of the night of the killing. The only thing Patrick had really told me about his family on that night was that, from the police car, he had seen his mother crying on the porch.
The house I suspected to be Patrick’s was small, square, and one story tall. I looked for a doorbell. Finding none, I opened the screen and knocked lightly. I waited. Looking up, I saw that the porch ceiling was very low, a cobweb within arm’s reach. A baby magnolia had littered seedpods and leaves across the yard.
The door creaked open. At first, it was as if a ghost had opened the door. I saw only the dark inside. Then I lowered my head and saw a toddler with a head of bountiful curls. Our eyes met. Losing interest, he waddled soundlessly back into the shadows of the house.
Now the dark room lay in view. Yes, this was the right house.
I took a tentative step inside. I put my hand above my eyes so I could see more clearly. The boy had returned to the couch and was poking at something—a man, Patrick’s father, I thought. Though supine, he was awake.
His body and face were gaunt. His right leg was disfigured, twig-like.
I introduced myself, still standing. I said I used to be a teacher of Patrick’s and that I was reading with him in jail.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Pat tell me you been visiting him; that’s good, that’s good.”
“I’ve been giving him homework—helping him keep his mind active,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah.” His eyes flicked back to the program he was watching.
I cleared my throat. “Patrick—Pat—told me you had some cigarettes to give to me.”
Now he looked up, as if seeing me for the first time, and started to rummage behind the couch. Wordlessly, he passed me the same brand of Buglers that I usually picked up for Patrick.
“He likes this kind,” I said, trying to make conversation. Then: “I went to see Rob,” I continued, wondering whether it was rude to sit down when he hadn’t asked me to. Probably. I stayed standing.
“Who?”
“Patrick’s—Pat’s lawyer.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.” He nodded. “When his court date be?”
Mentioning Rob, I realized, was my way to justify being in his house—he didn’t seem to care that I was teaching Patrick, so I offered myself as an intermediary between Rob and the family instead. They had never contacted one another.
“It was supposed to be December,” I said. “But it’s been postponed until February.”
He did not sigh or grimace but seemed used to the vicissitudes of court dates.
I inched closer now and stuck out my hand.
“Ms. Kuo; you can call me Michelle,” I said.
“James,” he said. “And this be Jamaal, my grandboy.” James gestured to the little boy, the son of Patrick’s eldest sister. Now he finally motioned for me to sit.
“Were you born here?” I asked.
“Born and raised. Mary, too.” Mary must have been Patrick’s mother.
“Your mom and dad also from here?”
They were. Were they still around?
“Naw.”
“They died—they died here?”
“Yeah.”
He took out a cigarette.
After his mother died, he said, as he lit his cigarette, he was sent to his father’s place across town. But his dad didn’t want him, and he spent his time on the streets. He was kicked out of school in the eighth grade; he thought it was a miracle he’d lasted that long. “I think they tolerated me for as long as they did because of my handicap.” He pointed to his disfigured leg—polio. (At this I must have had a look of pity on my face, for he then said, “It never affected my trigger finger.” He hit his hand on his knee, laughing at his joke. “Just playing.”)
“Could you tell me…” I hesitated. “Could you tell me what happened the night of the…the killing?”
At this he sat up.
“Okay, I hear arguing,” he said. “I hear Pat say, ‘Get out of my yard, get out of my yard.’ I got up to go to the door. That boy Marcus reached in his pocket”—he mimed reaching for his pocket—“kept reaching for something. When I get out the door, Pat was coming in. He say, ‘Dad, I had to do it; dude be trying to jump on me.’ I said, ‘Do what, what you do?’ I looked out the door again. Guy had gone up and fell beside the hedge. He was walking out the yard and he done fell out and rolled.” A sister called the ambulance. “By the time they got here, boy was dead.”
I asked where Pam had been. “She went to a party the guy be at. They was having a get-together in an apartment building over there. We didn’t know then. But the woman there knew my daughter supposed to be at home.” It was a Tuesday night, he continued—a school night.
He lowered his voice, even though no one was home besides Jamaal. “My daughter, she a little slow. That’s her nature, she like kids. Her older sister—I mean, her twin—she been quit playing with them. But Pam still playing. She play with a lot of little kids. You know what I’m saying. You could leave your kids with her; she’d keep ’em all day. She’ll talk to anyone. She’s eighteen but she act childish.”
James lit another cigarette. “But after all that went down” with Patrick, “she just stopped doing it. After school she didn’t want to go nowhere. She didn’t want to play with no kids. It wasn’t like her.” He inhaled. “It was a lot going up to see her brother. He was telling her, It ain’t your fault, stay in school, stuff like that. He real protective of his sisters, especially her—he worry about Pam a lot more than he do the other sisters.”
He tapped his cigarette, ash falling. “On just a normal day ain’t no way in the world he would’ve done that. He didn’t go around fighting people. Never had no trouble like that out of him.” He inhaled again, thinking.
I had hoped Patrick’s father would help me make sense of the crime, but he seemed bewildered, as well.
“I think him and the guy got into it before. What I heard, Pat backed down from the fight then. Guy had hit him in the face with a shoe, guy tried to make him fight. So maybe Pam being his favorite sister, she the one he look out for the most…” His voice trailed off. “Maybe, to see that guy with her that night, maybe he thought the guy was trying to get over on him by getting with his sister in some kind of way.”
I didn’t know that Marcus and Patrick had known each other. If his dad’s speculation was true, maybe Patrick had snapped when he saw Marcus hanging out with his little sister and, blaming himself, overreacted. And maybe he’d also felt he needed to prove he could hold his own.
“How’s his mother doing?” I asked. “I know Patrick loves her a lot.”
“He crazy about his mama.”