His full name was Matthew Echota, a cripplingly shy, talented, smart, and handsome boy, although many poked fun at him for being short, the poor soul, trailing along like a rabbit trying to keep up—little Matthew dodging around, chasing squirrels and groundhogs, confirming everything we’d heard throughout those elementary-school years: that he and his family captured rabbits and birds and ate them with their bare hands. We heard lots of things: that his grandfather developed trachoma and became blind, which led to his suicide; that his (brief) girlfriend, Cassie Magdal, had so dazzled both an Episcopalian priest and a Baptist minister with her genius knowledge of theology, biblical passages and interpretations, as well as her talent for playing the piano like a prodigy since the age of six, that each one of them fell into an irrepressible obsession with trying to be as smart and talented as her, and that they scourged each other and gouged their eyes out and became blind, too. We also heard rumors that the house that Matthew lived in near the train tracks held the ghosts of diseased men with afflicted faces and animals deadened by the heat from the family’s bonfires; that fireflies batted violently against their windows and worms crawled along the windows’ corners so that even the slightest wisp of clean country air would not creep into the cracks, and the chickens pecked around in the yard, and the mangy dogs slept on the porch, and the ridiculous goats gnawed on the wire fence like the town’s sinful drunks; and that, for a few years, Matthew’s mother’s hair was so long that she wasn’t able to leave her house because her hair dragged along the floor and mice had built nests there. Call them rumors, inscrutabilities, whatever, but our Matthew’s lack of response to such stories only made him more irreproachable.
Some of us were artists, too, even though our teachers had a special affinity for his work ethic and gentle demeanor, I mean, of course they labeled him highly intelligent and creative as opposed to the way they viewed the rest of us, sinners that we were, 99.5 percent of the time showing Matthew favoritism by using his work as an example in class of how to draw a tree with crooked branches, or how to paint a sunset, or, most frustrating, how write a good, compound-complex sentence (we already knew how, of course). Because he kept to himself and avoided eye contact, whenever Matthew looked at you, he had the desolate eyes of a sleepwalker in the shadows deciding the fate of the world, with an aura of premonitory silence and antagonism and a stare, as if controlled by the cycles of the universe, that made the room feel darker; or maybe it was the way he hesitated in broad daylight whenever he contemplated your motives, listening as if startled by something you said, focused on some unmistakable act of vivacity that was unique to you. I mean, look at his drawings, mostly charcoal portraits of the less fortunate—beggars, addicts, the homeless, etc.—and his writing was composed with the intensity of an eclipse, as his younger sister, Nora, put it—breathing through his mouth, squinting in his glasses, writing under the fleeting stars at night, or scribbling poetry on his arm or on the palm of his hand, and we were so very jealous because of his inexplicable artistic talent and the favoritism he’d received in school from teachers who loved his poems and stories (despite their laconic, annoying, grotesque giddiness), because he loved Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Morrison as opposed to, say, James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway (some of us challenged one another as to who could write the longest, most complicated but clear sentence, full of beauty, risk, and vigor, or who could draw the best eagle or rabid dog, but Matthew was never interested in such competitions). He dressed less eccentrically than any of the Indians no matter what their tribe was, I mean, his style was neither anachronistic nor modern, adhering strictly to a dress code like the poor, unfortunate, because most of the time he wore black jeans and a T-shirt, nothing special whatsoever, I mean, he was never interested in things like fashion and especially general grooming because his habits were atrocious, of course, since his hair was long and unmoussed or gelled, often unkempt, and those who knew him best said he was disinterested in belt buckles or leather vests, turtleneck sweaters, designer sunglasses, cowboy boots, or listening to metal rock or goth New Wave that made the rest of us feel tormented and uneasy, even angry, serious as we were about our choice of music on the school bus or outside on the boom box during lunch. One could never notice the oxycephalic skull due to his roundish face, but rather the way his eyes squinted whenever he smiled as he talked with his friends at school was delightful, because he was beautiful, and we often wondered what he was laughing about, and the rest of us found ourselves made miserable by his abstruse demeanor around others at school; we rarely heard him speak. Many thought he was complicated and tricky because he would be in the hallway one minute and outside the next, interrupting a game of kickball or Red Rover, as if he’d walked right through the walls. He was indeed a handsome devil who told people he needed a legitimate meditation partner. He kept his jeans rolled up at a time when nobody else did. He was condemned, he said, to die of love.
Of course, boys and young ladies found him adorable. (Of course, Cassie Magdal did.)
Lots of boys wanted to be like him, to be accepted, given attention, admired and loved by teachers, but the rest of us were looked down upon. We lifted him up to icon status, a type of worship, wishing he was not among us in the classroom with his beauty and gifts, wishing he was somewhere else, invisible, because he was entirely himself with a confidence unlike anyone else, although we thought that this was a sign that he would burn out too early, that the teachers had imposed upon him a penance of success for Old Dublan that would lose all its appanage, his prowess had peaked and that he would be left as a struggling prodigy with nothing but bread to eat and tap water to drink, and some of us thought, Isn’t God incontrovertibly clever to allow the rest of us to thrive after Matthew floundered so that our own fame would come? O’ Father, fame would arrive so that smart readers and literary critics recognized our boy was not to be taken too seriously in his youth and that we would be read in the most intimate libraries and universities like true gifted mature novelists, that the inclemency of power remained in the consciousness of critics who took photographs of us reclined in easy chairs and beside swimming pools, while our texts were bound in human skin and enclosed in glass cases.
We knew early on that he possessed what we wanted, even if his mother put his glasses on him first thing in the morning, or read him Anacreontic verse while she trained him in adages written in modern English as they relaxed in the sultriness of low clouds on warm afternoons, or when she sat with him upstairs at the public library longer than any son had ever dreamed of on the face of the Earth, training him with the apodictic determination of a mother whose love for her son was inexhaustible, a fierce and immortal influence, an irresolvable love none of the rest of us had received or could even comprehend. It wasn’t fair. While he received this attention, we brought him mercilessly closer to us by looking at him as if he were like the Old Dublan hunters, ruthlessly shooting quail and hungry deer with frightened eyes, the instantaneous signs of someone whose expressions were ungraspable and filled with terror; our boy was facing the impassive horrors of listening to his girlfriend, who wore a promise bracelet and accused him of loving his art more than he loved her, an immature and immoderate romance, wasn’t it, our boy afraid of the beautiful Cassie Magdal, who brought him homemade beef jerky in his backyard despite the fact that we had dumped piles of mud and slime back there, and yet he told her (I spied on them whenever possible since I figured he might start lies, and I wanted to be there to defend myself) that he could hear the sparrows and cardinals and other birds singing on starry nights in that exact spot, that’s what he told her, and that he had written a poem in which a pretty girl brought a popsicle to a boy in a garden somewhere far away among the fragrance of lilies where souls wandered without rule or law, a beautiful spirit world, where everyone recovered the strength to live and where nobody urinated or bled or shat, where houses were made of glass, colors were as blue as the deepest sky, and windows opened to the endless sea. He knew he was needed, of course, he really understood that Cassie, his mother and family, and the teachers whose admiration for him was like the anxious barking of unneutered stray dogs—they all needed him. Insensitive to the attention of anyone else besides Matthew, they never gave equal attention to us or listened to the timid requests of those of us who had no opportunities or contact with the rest of the world, more solicitous than ever, we whose guardians and foster parents inculcated us with a criminal perceptiveness those dreadful teachers would never understand. The rest of us were the ones the Dublaners despised, of course, we were the sinners they hated, who never had a chance, who did whatever we wanted, and whose teachers and parents gave up on us a long time ago when the shouting and cursing and beatings all dissipated like smoke somewhere in the diaphanous sky. We were the ones who never had the privilege of choosing punishment and whose hope therefore grew as empty as forgotten rooms, whose ingratitude and insolence taught us that even the toughest people never wasted bullets on deer or birds but instead considered the austerity of death with a light of fire in our eyes and without the ignominy of fierce morality or religious orders; call it sadistic or obstreperous, whatever, but we lived in accordance with nothing, too wounded and angry, too weak and depressed to listen to any delusive truths our hearts needed to hear, resolved to mandatory counseling, grieved by our own injustices.
O’ Father: You knew Matthew possessed every bit of artistry we wanted, and we were jealous of him, disheartened, lonely and morbid and plagued by the deadly sin envy, shadows in nightmarish school hallways, irredeemable in our vast manipulations and appalling destructive behavior. We stole and cheated and stole more. We belied our identities as wild and filled our lungs and bellies with poison, yes sir, we smoked anything to try to see You, dear Father, as if we weren’t also skipping school, fighting barefisted, firing guns, dear Lord, but our crimes were necessary. We were bullied, after all, by the older teenagers who beat us on a regular basis, bloodied our mouths with one punch. Those who predicted a doomed future for all of humanity called us addicts and criminals, leeches and slime (and way worse things) because we were detested, shouted at, dragged by our arms across bedrooms and public sporting events. Timorous thieves and runaways, addicts and truants, twerps and punks leading an uproar of younger siblings and suburban middle-class gangster-wannabes to wear their clothes with primary colors the way we did, never even threatening anyone in our way, especially not the ones who never complained about our behavior or wallowed in our paths with a gloomy aura, too dismayed to try to talk to us and realize we didn’t commit any flagitious acts, no Lord, we were children envious of those other children whose gifts were greater than ours, whose parents made more money than ours, and whose lives felt more important than ours.
All we wanted was to create art, to paint and draw and write, and develop a strong and positive value of ourselves; while at school we watched a ton of films and television shows to learn because our teachers were Dublaners whose communication skills were below par, I mean, they were these really terrible, shlubby teachers who wheeled in the squeaking cart with a TV and VCR and then played programs like Electric Company, Sesame Street, and (my personal favorite) Let’s Draw! We watched Captain Kangaroo finger his sideburns and talk neighborly to Mr. Green Jeans about growing corn and cabbage and then, per instruction, we wrote our own stories about farms and vegetables, drew pictures of talking cornstalks and the pork-bellied cockeyed farmers who ate them, and afterward our teachers asked us to share. Indeed, art and writing were our favorite subjects, though Matthew was clearly the “most gifted” student, as the teachers referred to him, winning all the awards, earning the most praise.
Forgive us, Father. Forgive us, Matthew.
Forgive us for our vile and felonious behavior, for everything that we said about you, Matthew, in our fearful state and in all the manner of mortifications we imposed on our conscience, with nothing to show for ourselves but our envy and admiration and a realm of gloom; after all, we were as petrified as your own timid and indulgent eyes, boy, and later that night we awakened in our beds from short and unpleasant dreams with an increasing and torturous sense of guilt, trying to grasp why we allowed ourselves to do such a thing to you. Yes sir, the act of vandalism and holding you down and punching you in the face and ribs were fatal experiments, of course, because we understood that we were the real victims, as we realized in our insomnia, staring into the murk and holding our breath in horror, cringing with pain until one of us had the mercy to confess what we had done to you and how we had taken such pleasure in such a cruel, careless, and selfish act. We needed anyone’s empathy while we sat at the police station, oppressed by the heavy humidity and faded colorless walls the hands of inmates had touched after they had wiped themselves, while you, our dear and innocent boy, upon waking, recited the poignant and percipient verses of saints.
__________________________________
From The Devil Is a Southpaw by Brandon Hobson. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Used with permission of the publisher, Ecco. Copyright 2025 by Brandon Hobson.
