Reading with Patrick

by Michelle Kuo

  “I know I guilty.”

  He put his head in his hands.

  I wanted to tell him: It’s not your fault alone. It’s society’s fault. Bad schools, bad neighborhood, family, history, racism, a now-obsolete economy that had for a century depended on black labor and then discarded it.

  But how to explain this?

  Would that be saying, You are not the agent of your own actions?

  Would it be saying, You cannot change yourself; you cannot change your future?

  I remembered a January day, when I was working at the homeless shelter in Massachusetts. It was the coldest day of the year; there was snow up to my knees. A man outside the shelter was begging me to let him in, but I couldn’t, because all the beds were taken. He smelled like alcohol, and all his words were slurred. I kept saying, “I’m sorry, there just aren’t any beds left.” He kept begging. I kept thinking, Why should I, or anybody, have power over him?

  Patrick’s head was down; I couldn’t see his face.

  He said, “Ms. Kuo, I did what I did.”

  I felt an uprising in my throat; I felt water in my eyes.

  He looked up and saw.

  “It’s okay, Ms. Kuo. Don’t cry.”

  On a day like this, I didn’t know what I could teach him. But I knew I couldn’t leave.

  “I want you to do something,” I said. I told him to write a letter to Marcus’s mother.

  Now he seemed fearful.

  “Right now?”

  I said, yes, right now. I said I knew he wanted to do it. I said he’d already done it a thousand times in his head, when he prayed. I said if he wanted forgiveness he really had to ask for it. I said I knew he was thinking about her and avoiding thinking about her. Anything was better than what we were doing now. We hadn’t learned anything from the law, had we? It hadn’t helped him make sense of how he felt and what happened that night, had it?

  “You gonna give it to her?”

  “If I can find her.”

  “My handwriting ain’t good.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “I’ll write it, but you write it over again.”

  “No.”

  He wrote her. He wanted her to know that before he went to sleep every night he talked to Marcus and asked Marcus to let him into his heart. He wrote her that he asked God time and time again for mercy upon his and Marcus’s souls. He wrote that it was hard for him to talk to her and he had no way to explain away her pain and grief. He wrote he was sorry and that this was only the beginning; there was a heaven. Marcus was there and watched over all of them. It was a better place for them to join and be happy. And at the end of the letter he wrote: Forgive me Mama.

  Then he folded the letter into an envelope. Two creases.

  I asked, “Why do you call her mama?”

  “Because he’s my brother.”

  “Why is he your brother?”

  “He ain’t just another nigger.”

  He didn’t say, Because he’s black. He didn’t say, Because he’s my neighbor.

  Kinship was an assertion. Against the loneliness of feeling degraded, against the way the world sees you. Against its judgment that you must have done something wrong to end up where you are.

  10

  * * *

  To Paula in Late Spring

  HIS HANDWRITING HAD CHANGED. HIS letters were small, consistent, and delicate. I could draw a smooth horizontal line tracing their tops. There were no darkened blotches of ink, no trace of the ballpoint pressed too hard; he had gained control of his pen.

  Every day he wrote. Every day we recited poems.

  We read Anna Akhmatova, Walt Whitman, Yusef Komunyakaa. We read Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, Rita Dove, Czeslaw Milosz, Li-Young Lee. We read Du Fu’s songs of autumn rain and Richard Wright’s haikus. Patrick noticed things, made connections. Richard Wright’s line I am nobody recalled Emily Dickinson’s I’m Nobody! Who are you? He knew when the meter of a poem was manipulated and guessed why. I found myself working alongside him, reading poems as if for the first time, and trying to understand what made a line work. Every evening I searched for a poem to bring the next day. I’d never read so much poetry in my life.

  Each day I lugged the books into the prison in two large tote bags, one for each shoulder, and stacked them on top of one another so that the dimly lit interrogation room became a little library of picture books and guidebooks, anthologies and dictionaries. When I’d leave, Patrick would look sorrowfully at my bags, asking if they were heavy. It was April and my visits had started getting longer. In the previous fall I usually left the jail after an hour, in a rush to teach Spanish; now one visit might last a whole afternoon or morning. Conversations digressed. In one day we might have discussed the origins of comets, Hitler, and the atomic bomb.

  We looked at all kinds of pictures for reference. I’d bring a random pamphlet, like “Arkansas Backyard Birds”; examining the hummingbird, Patrick wrote, It wings beat a hundred times a second. He studied the solar system in Bill Bryson’s illustrated history of the earth and took notes: Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun. It rings maybe iridescent gold and blue and gray. It looks like a fishing hat or a sheriff’s hat.

  In one day, so much happened in Patrick’s notebooks.

  Each morning, he imitated a poem. The goal was to listen for the voice, meter, and sound and try to replicate each.

  Philip Larkin wrote, Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May.

  Patrick wrote, Some pity these leaves are gone in fall / Another season again it’s golden.

  Dylan Thomas wrote, Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Patrick wrote, Break down the hill and build a house to live.

  Pablo Neruda wrote, I do not want to go on being a root in the dark, / hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams / downwards, in the wet tripe of the earth, / soaking it up and thinking, eating every day.

  Patrick wrote, I do not wish to be a dream in a grave / A guitar untuned whining at night / Howling, with the inflection of a wolf, / Complaining, of things that won’t be heard.

  Every poem took a long time.

  He would count syllables using his thumb, tapping it once on each fingertip.

  First his left hand, then his right.

  He would frown, lean back down.

  He would crack his neck, rotate it.

  Then the process would start over.

  After, as I read his work, he massaged his hands as if they were sore.

  I had been taken aback by Patrick’s interest in some of these poems. He loved Whitman. He loved lines about the delight in the carpenter nailing a plank and the mother singing to her child. He loved: STRANGER! If you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you? Patrick didn’t deride any of it—he wanted to be a part of it. Whitman was fun and easy to imitate: exclamation points, bursts of feeling, clear line breaks. You, Patrick Browning! What widens within you? And: O take my hand Patrick Browning! As the world moves! So vivid and quaking! And another: I hear the amazing drippings of a waterfall from huge cliffs or mountains / I hear leaves shaking as the storm rattles the tree branches. When you wrote a line about waterfalls, cliffs, mountains, storms, leaves, you made that beauty a part of you. You built an inner world that moved and amazed you.

  But perhaps of all the poems we studied, he knew W. S. Merwin’s “To Paula in Late Spring” the best.

  Let me imagine that we will come again / when we want to and it will be spring, Merwin wrote to his wife.

  Patrick wrote a version for his daughter. Let me imagine that I am there with you / when you need me even if a little late

  Then he wrote one for his mother. Let me imagine that we are high in the mountains

  We recited the Merwin at the beginning of each session; we knew it so well that it nearly bored us.

  —

  I HAD RETURNED to poetry out of desperation, after a series o
f failed lessons with prose. We would get halfway through a novel or play and we would quit: a Walter Dean Myers story (he said it reminded him too much of his life), a Shakespeare play (it was taking too long), the Book of Job (he said God must have had a reason to punish Job, and I couldn’t persuade him otherwise), The Things They Carried (he said it was too violent and that he didn’t like not knowing what was made up). So poetry arose from a process of elimination.

  “I think you’ll like this poet.” It was George Herbert. “He was a pastor. And he writes in a simple, natural voice.”

  The poem was an old favorite: “Love (III),” in which Love exhorts the speaker to eat at his table.

  “What’s your favorite line?”

  Patrick thought. “But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack,” he decided.

  “Like me—maybe I got a little dust on me, maybe my ways be kinda crooked. But Love, because it eye be quick, it watch him fall away. People that don’t love you ain’t telling you that you falling away. But Love do. Love observe you, then Love tell you. What your favorite line, Ms. Kuo?”

  I told him I liked the last two lines. “ ‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’ / So I did sit and eat.”

  He agreed they were good ones. “It’s God,” he said. “It’s God inviting you to dinner. It’s God saying, We straight.”

  Then he asked, “Yesterday wasn’t Easter, was it, Ms. Kuo?”

  “It was.”

  “Only reason I knew ’cause yesterday morning time they had given us some eggs. They usually give us plain grits. Somebody was like, it’s the first Sunday of the month; it’s Easter.”

  “Do you usually celebrate Easter?”

  “My mama, she cook or whatever. But not really. What happen on Easter, anyway, Ms. Kuo?”

  He leaned forward.

  I began: “So you know how Jesus is killed the Friday before Easter?”

  He blinked, suggesting he didn’t know. Kids were religious here, but their knowledge of Bible stories was selective.

  “So on Sunday,” I continued, “Mary Magdalene goes with a friend to visit his tomb.”

  At the sudden sound of his mother’s name, Patrick beamed.

  “But on the way to the tomb, they keep worrying about it. Because it’s blocked by a big stone. They keep asking, Who’s going to roll the stone for us? How are we going to get in? But when they get to the tomb, the big stone isn’t there. And somebody says, The tomb is empty! Jesus isn’t there, because he’s been—”

  “Raised,” Patrick concluded. “An Easter—that the day he be born again?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Everybody is so excited but also terrified, because they can’t believe it.”

  I had not grown up with much religion, but in college I had accompanied friends to services and found myself at a small prayer group for the first time. People prayed about all sorts of things, opening themselves up (it seemed to me) to the criticism that their innermost cares were trivial. What could I say? To be honest, I was doing pretty well. My turn came. “Help me, God,” I began, tentatively, awkwardly, wanting to laugh at myself, not believing I was speaking to anybody. “Help me, God…” And when I repeated that weird phrase, the repetition softened its strangeness, and I thought it was not such a bad thing to have the structure of address decided for me, so I could focus on content. And indeed the supplicatory posture released the worries I had been holding in: About a friend suffering from the first episode of major depression in her life, a new territory for us both. About a guest at the homeless shelter, his life’s belongings, including a picture of his grandchild, in a garbage bag. His two weeks were up, and he wanted to store his bag in our locker, but he worried that the staff would get rid of it, and I locked the bag away. “Help me, God, help me sit still with my friend. Help me, God, to concentrate on things that matter.”

  I told Patrick all this. He was listening, concentrating. He wanted me to believe in God. And he was happy to hear me explain Easter. It meant something to him that I knew the story. And this in turn made the story mean something to me.

  —

  IT WAS ALMOST May, and in the mail I got keys to my place for the summer. It was an apartment in northern Oakland, where, my subletter promised, there was excellent Lebanese, Ethiopian, and Korean food all on one block. I was going to drive, and I decided on the route I’d take. A friend from law school would meet me in Albuquerque and help me drive from there to California. We would stop at the Grand Canyon, see cacti, take pictures. I toyed with the idea of staying longer in the Delta, but now I knew that it was time to leave.

  —

  “I’M WRITING THIS IN PART to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later,” Patrick read. He paused, curiosity seeping into his voice: Perhaps he was wondering about himself. “You have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.”

  Patrick paused at the word miracle, to think.

  Patrick’s deep spiritual belief, his ability to recognize tonal joy and grief, his poetry and sense of sound—all of these led me back to Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s novel that I had first read at the end of my two years in Helena. An aging pastor writes a letter to his young son. For me the book had been about different ideals of love and how we strive and fall short. There was not enough time now to read all of it together, but I would treat the passages like poems, and Patrick could imitate them as he had done before.

  When we reached the end of the page, I told Patrick, “You know what I’m going to ask.”

  Patrick read his favorite line: “You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind.”

  “How would you describe the tone?”

  “Jubilant. Peaceful. Hopeful.”

  He said the words in quick succession, as if the words themselves formed a poem he’d memorized.

  I told him his assignment. “It’s just like your imitation of Merwin,” I said. “Same thing. Just sentences, not lines.”

  An hour passed.

  Again the motions repeated themselves.

  He would frown.

  He would crack his neck, rotate it.

  He would leaf through his notes, then a book of pictures, hunting for images.

  Then the process would start over.

  Finally, Patrick passed me his letter.

  Do you remember when me, you and your mother went fishing at Bear Creek? I know you do, you were so happy. And yes, I will take you back there again. Down by the bank where I was sitting you came running, calling, “Daddy, look.” There near some bamboo you showed me some bright pink flowers. They were pink peonies with many petals that you described as more beautiful than a rose. You pulled one and said, “Take this, Daddy,” and I put its stem in my mouth. That made the biggest smile on your face so I picked you up and kissed your nose with the peony still hanging from my mouth. After I let you down, you asked can we come back again one day and I said, of course, yes.

  I held the thin, torn-out notebook paper. I could not believe he had written it. It was more than I had expected. It was better than what I had taught him.

  I had been searching all along for a form in which Patrick could write. I had thought it was poetry, but now I had really found it: the letter. This was the medium that captivated him even more. And why wouldn’t it? In his life he had already done it a thousand times—for what was prayer but a letter to God? He had been writing letters all along: to Cherish, to Marcus’s mother. The letter injected writing with purpose, it was a plea to be heard, it was one person addressing another. The choice of Gilead clarified itself. It explored love between friends, between spouses, between whites and blacks, between God and his supplicants, between a professional and those to whom he is entrusted—but, above all, it dealt with a parent’s love for a child. How to express to a child what you know, what you wish for her?
What could you say that is worth keeping?

  “Cherry will read this someday and know that she’s the center of your life,” I said. “You’ve come so far. Do you remember what your letter was like back then?”

  He waited for me to describe it.

  “A repetition of I’m sorry—I’m sorry for not being here, for dropping out of school. Don’t be like me; don’t do what I did. This is the first time that you don’t seem afraid of her. Because before, what you wrote—that’s a weight on a child, don’t you think? How would she have felt if she’d read those letters from seven months ago?”

  He paused. “Just as lost as I was. Like her daddy don’t know too much.”

  —

  BY MAY HE’D written dozens of letters to Cherish, one each day. Today’s letter was about canoeing. I’d shown Patrick pictures of my own canoeing trip down the Mississippi during high-water season: Rain flooded the area, trees stood in water, and, in certain channels, the river was transformed into an underwater forest that appeared to admit only animals that could swim or fly. “You canoe around the trees?” Patrick asked, studying a picture, surprised. I explained each picture, sharing the names I had learned. “These are Virginia creepers, and these are cottonwoods, and those are mulberries.” And I pointed to a small green clump and said, “That’s a turtle on a log. You can’t really see it, but it’s hanging out in the sun.”

  He worked for an hour. Then he showed me what he’d written:

  You and I are canoeing down the Mississippi River. There are so many trees, bunched together in the water like bushes. The river is shadowy in some places, but the light shines through cracks of the trees. Near the bank there is a great blue heron, standing still, searching for fish. And as we are passing, a silver carp surfaces as if it is jewelry in the water. You say, “Dad look a snake.” I say, “Where” and you say, “No it’s just a vine.” We hear splashes, the fish jumping or the frogs croaking. The white light glitters on the muddy water, which you say looks like coffee.

  When we approach the thicket of cottonwoods and cypress, we can hear an inflection of birds. On some low branches hang plenty of mulberries. You stretch your arm straight out to grab some. They are white because they are not ripe yet, but the edible ones are bluish-black. You eat one and it stains your shirt. As we row away, I tell you that whenever we are at home and you take a nap, I think of you as a sleeping berry.