After we hang up I reach under my bed and pull out my box of loose-leaf papers from Arkansas. A poem drifts out: A. R. Ammons’s “Easter Morning.” Maybe I had planned to share it with Patrick but ran out of time. After months immersed in affidavits, spreadsheets, briefs, and letterhead, my eye tries to adjust to the empty space on the page, as an eye adjusts to light.
The poem is in seven parts, a memory of a single experience: When the poet is four, his infant brother dies. I have a life that did not become, / that turned aside and stopped, it begins. It is to his grave I most / frequently return and return. He wants to ask what is wrong, what went wrong, what might finally put the child to rest. But the child will not rest. And the child, / stirring, must share my grave / with me, an old man…
I tape the poem to my wall. I start to write about Patrick.
—
THE NOT MATH Tutor turns out to be Taiwanese American like me. A graduate student at Berkeley, he studies religion and German history.
“You speak German?” I ask.
“Yes, but—”
“Say something in German,” I command.
He is shy and refuses.
“You probably don’t actually speak German,” I tell him.
I begin to date the Not Math Tutor, whose name is Albert.
—
PATRICK TAKES A bus from Arkansas to California, to visit a friend in San Francisco whom he met through Job Corps. He has just graduated from the program with a certificate in carpentry and plumbing.
Its huge and beautiful, he texts me about California, somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
My mother and father are in town. Albert and I have just gotten married.
Patrick comes to visit. Everyone shakes hands with him. Mortifying me, my dad reaches out to touch Patrick’s giant Afro; Patrick is good-natured about it.
We take a walk alone in Crissy Field, an unfolding sheet of green that overlooks the bay and, farther out, the ocean. We watch a dog gallop past us.
I tell Patrick I am still writing about him, about us, about reading in jail, about Arkansas. “Is this okay?” I ask. “I won’t use your name.”
“You can use my name,” he says. “I believe in testimony; I believe in God.”
I feel relieved. But I am thinking to myself, This is not his testimony; it is mine.
I ask Patrick what he wants to do with his life, if he could do anything he wanted. He says, “Truck driving.” He wants to handle big eighteen-wheelers and see the whole country.
Later, I will say to my parents, “I always imagined him being, I don’t know, an English teacher or something,” and they will snicker.
“Truck driving is good,” they will burst out. “Good benefits.”
My mom: “He’ll make more money than you did as a teacher.”
My dad, pointedly: “And lawyer.”
I tell Patrick I will look into truck driving for him.
He shakes his head. “I already know my felony gonna be a problem.”
We talk some more. I tell him I am sorry about his mother.
He says she was sick and under a lot of stress. She was having seizures every day. She had high blood sugar levels. “Water,” he says suddenly. “I don’t remember her drinking no water.” This strikes him, a new clue, and he turns it over in his mind.
I am thinking about how when we read together, he loved water, images and words relating to water. Rain, river, stream, brook, dew. For the vocabulary word assuage, he wrote: Rain assuage the earth.
I say, “You know she loved you very much.”
“I talk to her every night.”
“That’s good.”
“I talk to Marcus, too. Every night, too.”
“Do they respond?”
“They do, they do.” I remember his mother talking about God. Does he respond to you? He do, he do.
We are approaching the horizon, blue sky mixing with blue water. For a moment we don’t speak, lost in our own thoughts.
Once, I had asked Patrick, “Why do you think Marcus is in heaven?”
“I just think people who be…murdered or whatever, they go to heaven.”
“Do you think you’re going to heaven?”
“I don’t know. If there is a place in heaven for people like me.”
“People like you?”
“People who have made mistakes or whatever.”
The majestic, swooping red arc of the Golden Gate Bridge disappears into fog. I had once showed him a photograph of the bridge, and now we take a long look at it together. It is getting late, we realize, and we don’t have time to cross it.
—
THE IDEA THAT you can change somebody’s life for the better is powerful. It looms, in particular, over the debate about teachers. Are they good or bad, cheats or saints, unfairly demonized or blindly exalted? Underpinning these opposed portraits is the debate over the nature of the student. One side of the argument claims the student is an impressionable blank slate, a tabula rasa onto which teachers—if they’re good enough, smart enough, and they care enough—can effectively imprint their passions and knowledge. The other side argues that the student is already permanently formed by his conditions—by violence, by neglect, by poverty. No teacher can change his life. Neither side can be completely true.
I met Patrick when he was fifteen. He’d watched dope deals at age five, accidentally set himself on fire at eleven, and seen a lot that I can’t know. It may seem crazy to believe that I, or any educator, could have decisively reversed his fate. In the complex portrait of a person’s life, it’s possible that a teacher is just a speck.
And yet to know a person as a student is to know him always as a student: to sense deeply his striving and in his striving to sense your own. It is to watch, and then have difficulty forgetting, a student wrench himself into shape, like a character from Ovid, his body twisting and contorting, from one creature to another, submitting, finally, to the task of a full transformation. Why? Because he trusts you; because he prefers the feel of this newer self; because he hopes you will help make this change last.
—
NOW TWENTY-FIVE, PATRICK is the same age as Marcus was when he died.
Patrick’s daughter, Cherish, now six, attends KIPP, in Helena. Together, Patrick and I visit her classroom. Kids sit on a large colorful patchwork rug made of squares and animals. Cherish is happy to see her dad. He gives her a book about a panda who likes haiku. She hugs the book close to her chest, not wanting to part with it. “Your daddy got that for you?” another child asks, not without jealousy. Cherish nods.
Patrick wanted to stay in Little Rock because there were more jobs there. But he couldn’t find one. He applied to a warehouse, but the felony was a problem. He thought about trucking, but the felony was a problem. In Helena the options were even fewer. He applied to the casino. No, the felony. He applied to KFC and Dollar General. No, they didn’t have openings. He has no car, no computer.
I drive Patrick to Phillips Community College. I have been pushing Patrick to take a class there.
The lady at the desk says, “You have to take a placement test.”
“I took it already, ma’am,” he says.
I look at Patrick quizzically. He hadn’t told me this. Had he enrolled and then dropped out?
She checks the file. “Your English scores are very good,” she says, sounding surprised. “Very good.”