The news stories, Miss.

Yes, I said the news stories.

I heard about the doctors who kept stillborn babies like pickles in jars; the roustabouts who fought each other in Thurber Alley because it staved their boredom; the girls from the countryside who were maltreated by the men of the city; the unclaimed bodies of the poor that were bound for Potter’s Field but ended up at the city’s medical schools, butchered like hogs instead. Pat told them all to me first.

I made certain that Bill was in his bed and sleeping soundly before we would begin. Pat would light his pipe, and instead of Mrs. Haslam’s kitchen we were now in our own. Instead of washing up for eight, there were the wares for three. Instead of stories of Rosa, Charles, and the sea, Pat now told me stories of Cincinnati. I didn’t know that so many people in this city murdered and maimed, their floorboards dark with dried blood, their flocked wallpaper marred with bullets and bits of brain, their breath rotten with gin and sin—

No, I didn’t enjoy those stories, Miss. The readers of the Enquirer did.

I had to listen to them twice. The first telling was Pat’s way of hearing the whole story again, before he wrote it down. He would sometimes miss the heart of the story, which I could hear.

Pat, for instance, once told me about a mob that had surrounded a young loafer who had been arrested and was being hauled through Rat Row by three policemen. The mob, Pat said, was intent on teaching the wretch a lesson with their fists and their boots. Drunk and mean, that young wretch had hit an old man bloody for no good reason—not to rob him or settle a grudge—and mob justice decided that he should be ripped apart, like an alley cat onto a mouse.

“What were the policemen doing, Pat?” I asked.

The officers shielded that wretch with their own bodies, Pat said.

“Three policemen protecting a common criminal from blows? Had you ever seen such a sight, Pat?”

Pat hadn’t. His readers, I knew, hadn’t either.

“What was the criminal’s name, Pat?”

Pat lifted his notebook up to his right eye and answered with a name that sounded German to my ears. Cincinnati taught that to me. Who knew that the Promised Land was full of Germans, I’d thought when I first got here.

“Captain Eichelberger was one of the officers, Pat?”

No, it wasn’t a blind guess, Miss. It was a name that I’d often heard coming from Pat’s mouth.

The captain, I’d figured, was more of Pat’s eyes than any of the other policemen. If Captain Eichelberger was present, then Pat’s notebook would be chock-full. The young man that night was missing a side tooth, and the rest of them were tobacco-stained. His shirt, soaked with sweat and dirt and speckled with the other man’s blood, had been carefully mended, and someone had even embroidered the young man’s initials at a corner of the shirttail. Pat couldn’t have seen these details with his own eye, but when he was offered them, he included every last one because they made the readers feel as if they had lost the tooth or were wearing the shirt, he said.