The Old Lady, Pat replied without a pause. She did not have the stomach or the strength for corporal punishment, but she sent me to a school where the teachers and the boys did it for her, all in the name of her God, all in the name of obeying His will. The whole of St. Cuthbert’s smelled of fear and on Fridays of fish, Pat said.

St. Cuthbert’s was where Pat lost his eye, Miss. It wasn’t an accident is what he wouldn’t want you to know. Someone took it from him is what I want you to know.

Pat’s vision was poorly from the time he was young. He could not recognize faces until they were near. He could not see a ball aimed at him. He could not see words on a page or a blackboard unless he was close enough to kiss them, he said. When he was ten and six, one morning before Mass, he heard a friendly voice calling to him from behind the college chapel, and he walked toward it. The voice punched him in the face until he could no longer see the gray wool of the English sky. Lying on his back in the grass, Pat heard the voice laughing in the dark. When he could see the wool again, it was only with his right eye.

I can hear Pat’s voice, as if he were here with us. Maybe he is. Even as a ghost-person, I know he would sound the same.

What would I say to him? That’s an easy question, Miss.

Pat, you weren’t alone in Cincinnati. You had Bill and me. You should have remembered us in the end.

I hadn’t mentioned Bill before? Is that so, Miss?

I cared for Bill from when he was a baby until he was grown. When I’d left Maysville for Cincinnati, Aunt Sweetie had asked me to do him the kindness of raising him as a mother would. I did.

You could say that Bill and Aunt Sweetie are kin, Miss. We’re all God’s children, like I said.

Pat met Bill at Mrs. Haslam’s. It must have been in the late fall or wintertime because Pat was seated by the kitchen’s work table and smoking his pipe, while I did the washing up. Before Pat left that evening, he bent down and asked for “the young gentleman’s name.”

Bill’s voice piped up from underneath the table, “I’m not a gentleman, and my name is Bill.”

Pat chuckled and said, “I stand corrected, Not a Gentleman Bill.”

“But you’re sitting!” Bill objected, his freckled face peeping out and up at Pat’s.

Pat got up from his chair and said again, “I stand corrected, Not a Gentleman Bill.”

“Now you sure are!” Bill agreed.

Pat shook Bill’s little hand, sticky with the fried apple pies that I’d made for him from that day’s scraps of dough.