by Michelle Kuo
The task of correction gave me a peculiar but necessary distance from him and a semblance of control in a situation where I had little. He would write, for instance, a sentence for the word sunder. To sunder me and my family is like cutting my life short. I drew a smiley face next to the sentence and responded, with the emotional deafness of a robot, Perfect use of sunder. Yes, jail has sundered you and your family. For the word profane, he wrote, People in jail talk crazy and are profane to each other even elderly folks. Wanting to repeat the usage of the vocabulary word, I wrote idiotically: Yes, it’s unfortunate that they are profane. Or he wrote, It would be figurative if I say I’m dead in jail. I responded: Wonderful use of figurative.
Perhaps this is how all writerly beginnings work: with a focus on mechanics, with the enactment of distance. But there was also a merciless honesty in my corrections. Because Patrick worked quickly to stamp out old errors, I told myself that he craved my corrections in a way that certain people, seeking guidance, trust only that which is most savagely dispensed. For me and perhaps for him, the task of making a sentence perfect had the effect of containment: It kept unbearable emotions at bay.
And, in fact, Patrick was learning with a ferocity I did not remember from the first time around. To keep up with his pace, my visits went from once to twice a week. I instituted Friday quizzes on vocabulary and bought him a pack of index cards. Within a month he would exhaust the supply. He had no rubber band, so the cards were always tumbling out of his notebook or forming a thicket in his hand.
The cigarettes had given Patrick new cachet; he traded them, it appeared, for candy and chips. Often he had some kind of junk food for me. “Here,” he’d say casually. A jumbo-sized Snickers bar would appear suddenly from his jumpsuit, in his outstretched palm.
—
“HOW ARE YOU?” I asked one Monday morning.
“Ain’t nothing going on here,” he said. “Just drama. What’d you do this weekend, Ms. Kuo?”
“I cooked a bean soup with Danny and Lucy,” I said casually. “Then we saw a movie.”
He was silent, his hand on his chin, as if I’d said something very philosophical.
“How does that sound to you?” I asked brightly.
He said, “Lovely.”
Then he said, “They married?”
“Yes.”
“Ms. Kuo,” Patrick said, “you got a boyfriend?”
I felt an immediate discomfort. To receive male attention is a universal horror for young female teachers in secondary school. On the other hand, I thought, I asked him about his personal life; why couldn’t he ask me about mine?
“Yes,” I said.
This was a lie.
“What he do?”
I ignored him. “Hey, why don’t you start some silent reading while I check your homework.”
He returned to his book and I tried to hide my distress. I was just being paranoid, I thought.
I looked at his homework. I had written, What is the best part of your day?
In his handwriting: Thinking back when you ask me whats the best part of my day. I must admit it is when I see your face. Here in Jail theres nothing really going on outside of negativity. When you say yea, I feel you sound very sexy.
I felt queasy. Why did he have to go and ruin the exercise like this? I felt a rush of nostalgia for my female students. They’d written about boys, breakups, feeling ugly, unrequited love, single moms, hope, flowers, candles. With them I never had to engage in the fearful, self-inspecting review: Was my blouse modest, my skirt long enough? Instinctively now I glanced at my clothes: baggy pants, baggy sweater, muddy sneakers, hair pulled back—yes, I looked like my usual unkempt, androgynous self who caused my poor mother despair. No, I had not encouraged him.
But for the past three years, since dropping out, he had wandered around Helena without any institutional contact and forgotten all its rules. I looked young, I was a woman, and he was surrounded by men. I visited him; I showed compassion.
So why was I mad? Because of what I had to do now: make boundaries clear.
“Patrick.”
He looked up from his book.
“This is not okay. It’s inappropriate.” I pointed to the last line of his writing.
My tone surprised me—there it was, the teacher’s tone still intact, an affect of no-nonsense irritation.
Patrick looked down. My frankness had humiliated him. He didn’t want me to think that he was like creepy Mr. Cousins or shameless Shawn or his trashy jail mates. So much of jail seemed to involve convincing yourself that you were different from those around you.
“Sorry, Ms. Kuo. I ain’t mean no disrespect. Really, my mind ain’t be clear here, you know. Things be crazy here, jail mates be—” He stopped.
So this was why I was angry, too: Patrick had lowered himself, not knowing any better, and I had caused this lowering by showing up in his life.
“I’m your teacher,” I said.
Officiously, I pointed to his book, even though he had been reading it dutifully and I had been the one to interrupt.
He never crossed that boundary again.
—
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.”
“Patrick says he doesn’t like to call her, because it upsets her.”
“It do kind of upset her when he talk to her. I’m glad she work on the weekends, ’cause then she don’t have to go up there and see him. One weekend she didn’t have to work, we went up together. She cry a lot. She even go to crying when she talk to him on the phone.” He tapped his cigarette again. “Truth is, I think she feel bad because she told him to go and look for his sister. I think she hate she had said that. It do weigh on her.”
Meanwhile, Jamaal had wandered to the front door, ready to step out. “Stop it, J-ball!” James yelled. Jamaal turned to look at us, returned. His grandfather opened his arms to the boy, bounced him up on his lap.
“Me,” he continued, “I was going up there every weekend the first year, you know, when he first was locked up. Then he told me I didn’t need to. Matter of fact, I don’t think he wanted me to go up there too much.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he don’t want me to see him locked up. He call, I send him things when he need it. Soap, stuff like that. You know.”
Now he released Jamaal from his lap.
“I wasn’t good to be around, you know, when he was growing up. I don’t know what my son saw—’cause, you know, I kept him with me a lot. We went to a lot of places together. I don’t know if he really remember. He was like three or four years old. He might have saw me doing some stuff that I don’t want him to see. Kids remember things you think they don’t.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Now his father looked me squarely in the eye, as if he suspected I was playing stupid. But in truth, I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I don’t want to get into that,” he said decisively. He bent his head down to light the next cigarette, then stopped. “My younger days, I spent time locked up. Drugs. I wasn’t around for some years. When I went in, I went as a certain type of person. You know. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I went to jail or not. I didn’t want to go, but it wasn’t like it was a big deal for me.
“What went down…” He made a sound. “I wish I could take his place. I know this all new to him. It’s hard for people that feel for others the way he feel to be locked up like that, away from family. Me, I’m not a very emotional man. I think I lost my emotions a long time ago.”
Now James held his unlit cigarette, the lighter still burning. He was thinking. “I just want my son to be…to not think of me as wrong as I was. In a lot of ways I wish I could have been better. I don’t know. If I went to school, I could’ve gotten a job, even with my handicap. I don’t know.” Now he inhaled. “Like I said, he was a good kid. A lot better than me.” He repeated, “A lot better than me.”
—
I STARTED TO go to the jail everyday.
“Deplorable.”
“Is it wicked?”
“Yep. Example?”
“Jail be a deplorable place.”
“Perfect.” I nodded briskly. “Inquisitive.”
“Lucy,” he said immediately. “Because she be curious, looking inside the closet.”
“One more.”
“Cherish. How she be looking at everything, touching everything, like she want to know what it be.”
“Sarcastic.”
“If Ms. Kuo ask me how was my day yesterday, and I say, Great.” His tone suddenly became exaggerated, imitating bitterness.
“Awesome,” I replied. “And we’re done. Let’s see how you did. How do you think you did?”
“Probably missed a couple,” he said casually.
“Better than that,” I said. “That’s an A in
Ms. Kuo’s personalized school.”
Then we opened up The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and started to read.
—
IN THE SNOWY place Lucy had come upon, she met the Faun. The Faun was half-man, half-goat. The Faun was so surprised to see a little girl that he dropped the parcels he was carrying.
“ ‘Delighted, delighted,’ it went on. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Tumnus.’
“ ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Tumnus,’ said Lucy.”
At this Patrick laughed. “He a goat but she calling him Mister.” I laughed, too.
It was cold outside and Mr. Tumnus invited Lucy to tea. He told her she was in Narnia. “Lucy thought she had never been in a nicer place,” Patrick read. His voice adopted a strange, singsong tone, exaggerating certain words, as if he was imitating someone he had once heard reading aloud—perhaps me.
Patrick continued, reading about how they ate “buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake.”
He stopped at cake and I gave him a look; we were both hungry.
Then the Faun’s brown eyes filled with tears. They trickled down his cheeks and soon were dribbling off the end of his nose.
“ ‘Mr. Tumnus! Mr. Tumnus!’ said Lucy in great distress. ‘Don’t! Don’t! What is the matter? Aren’t you well? Dear Mr. Tumnus, do tell me what is wrong.’ But the Faun continued sobbing as if its heart would break. And even when Lucy went over and put her arms round him and lent him her handkerchief, he did not stop—”
“Sobbing mean crying, don’t it?” Patrick interrupted. I said that was exactly right.
