He was someone’s kin but not mine, Mattie. He took one look at my face, read the letter that I had brought to him, looked me over once more, and then sent me on my way. He shooed me out of his house as if I were a cur. I stood outside his front door, my hat still in my hand, because I had nowhere else to go and no idea what to do next. In my travel case, I had books and no clean clothing left, and in my suit pocket a single coin.

Pat must have been a pitiful sight, because the man’s wife, probably defying her husband’s orders, opened their front door—Pat remembered the aroma of a meaty dinner wafting out—and handed him two crumpled bills from her apron pocket. He said her gesture of kindness woke him from his stupor, but it also made him understand that he was a mere beggar to this woman and man.

Pat, the beggar, slept on a park bench his first night in Cincinnati and many nights thereafter. When the air turned cold, he traded a day’s work at a stable for a night’s sleep with the horses and the hay. If the stablemen were Irish, they might share with Pat a corner of bread, a bit of cheese, an apple, and whatever else someone, who was their kin, had wrapped in a clean cloth for them that morning. When Pat couldn’t find work—he shoveled coal, he shoveled horse dung, he shoveled salt, he shoveled sand—he would walk the city’s streets with his travel case in hand, as if he were just arrived or headed elsewhere soon.

Bucktown and the Levee were the neighborhoods where it was easiest to be without, especially at nightfall, Pat said. Food was cheapest there, and so was drink. For the price of a glass, he could come out of the cold. Those whiskey-shops never closed, and if they did, few of them cared if you stayed. They would lock you in with the bottles and charge you in the morning for what you had drunk overnight.

I stared hard at Pat when he told me about his early days here, not because I didn’t believe him but because I did. You don’t live with the streets as your home and not leave a part of yourself there. The soft parts were what you left behind, or sold, or lost like a rotted-out tooth—in its place, a gap, a soreness, and the taste of blood.

The Patrick Hearn who came to Mrs. Haslam’s didn’t look to me as if he had parts of him missing except for the sight in one eye. He was a young white man of books, papers, and ink. His hands showed no sign of hard labor. His fingernails were trimmed and had no careless lines of grime. He was gentle of voice and of body. His hair was neatly cut, but the barber always missed a tuft above the right ear. Pat must have not noticed or, if he did, he kept returning to the barber out of habit or out of loyalty. I hoped that it was loyalty, which was a good trait in a man, but I couldn’t decide.