Pat had not seen his little brother since. He missed not seeing the nanny Elesa more, he admitted.

Pat’s stories were often like Aunt Sweetie’s. Both were full of ghost-people. They were there but not really there. They were seen once or twice and then gone from sight but not from mind. They appeared again with little notice. Aunt Sweetie’s people were dead, which explained their actions. Pat’s were often still alive, and yet he never had a good reason for why they acted as they did.

When Pat was ten and six, the Old Lady informed him of his father’s passing. She began her letter Charles left you nothing. The Old Lady was his father’s aunt and Pat’s grandaunt and guardian. He always referred to her as the “Old Lady,” and she always called him “The Boy.” She must have had a heart because it stopped beating when she passed, but there was no proof of its existence when she was alive, Pat claimed. He didn’t shed a tear for his father or for her when she went to her God. Pat was in Cincinnati when he received this letter, and it began with a similar declaration, he said.

“Was the Old Lady meant to leave you something, Pat?” I asked.

Charlotte would have turned back at this point to hear more, I knew.

Pat answered my question with a question.

“Of course it matters, Pat!” I answered.

Charlotte may be right, I remembered thinking. Pat doesn’t know where he’s living. Money matters here. Clothes matter here. The color of his skin matters here. The color of mine matters. Each of these thoughts was a finger that I wanted to jab into his chest. I didn’t, but Pat must have seen on my face the will that it took for me not to do so.

Mattie, it was unlikely that the Old Lady had any money left when she died, Pat said. Or, perhaps, she had never intended to keep her word in the first place.

Pat then listed for me what the Old Lady did give him. Camphor, which he said was the smell of death waiting for you; the Catholic religion, which was not the faith of his father or of his mother; and boarding schools, which taught him the language of French and of violence.

“Violence isn’t a language, Pat,” I objected.

Mattie, a language requires only that you understand it and, in the case of violence, that you obey it. Which is easier to understand, Pat asked, the whip or a man’s voice?

“It depends on the man,” I replied.

Exactly, Mattie. But the whip is always a whip. To use it is to wound. Pain is its only purpose.

“How do you know this?” I asked. What I meant was Who whipped you, Patrick Hearn? Charlotte and I, we’ve seen white bodies holding whips but never on the blood-raising ends of them.