Defending Jacob (8 page)

at cold sprg pk now. yellow tape still up. nthng to see though. no cops.

The messages went on like this, unguarded, confessional. The Web created an illusion of intimacy, a byproduct of the kids’ dazed immersion in the “virtual” world. Alas, they were about to learn the Web belonged to grown-ups: I was already thinking of the subpoena
duces tecum
—the order to produce documents and records—that I would send to Facebook to preserve all these online conversations. In the meantime, avid as an eavesdropper, I went on reading.

Dylan Feldman
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 9:07pm on April 15th, 2007

Jacob
STFU
. if you dont want to read it, go someplace else. you of all people. f*ck off. he considered you a friend. dickhead

Mike Canin
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 9:01pm on April 15th, 2007

Have to call you out on that Jake. You’re not the FB police, esp the way things went down. you shd keep your head down & be quiet.

John Marolla
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 8:51pm on April 15th, 2007

WTF? JB what are you mouthing off here for? go die. the world would be a better place. go f*ck off & die.

Julie Kerschner
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 8:48pm on April 15th, 2007

Not cool, Jacob.

Jacob Barber
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 7:30pm on April 15th, 2007

Maybe you all haven’t heard—Ben is dead. Why are we still writing him messages? And why are some people acting like his best friend when you never were? Can we just be real here?

I stopped at Jacob’s name—at the realization that these last venomous messages were aimed at
my
Jacob. I was not prepared for the reality of Jacob’s life, the complexity of his relationships, the trials he went through, the brutality of the world he inhabited.
Go die. The world would be a better place
. How could my son have been told such a thing and never shared it with his family? Never even let on? I was disappointed not in Jacob but in myself. How could I have left my son with the impression I did not care about such things? Or was I being a wimp, overreacting to the exaggerated, hopped-up tone of the Internet?

I also felt like a fool, honestly. I ought to have known about all this. Laurie and I had talked with Jacob only in the most general way about what he did on the Internet. We knew that when he went off to his room at night, he was able to go online. But we had some software installed on his computer to prevent him from looking at certain websites, porn sites mostly, and we felt that was enough. Facebook never seemed particularly dangerous, certainly. Also, neither of us wanted to spy on him. As a couple, we believed that you raise a child with good values and then you give him space, you trust him to behave responsibly, at least until he gives you reason not to. Modern, enlightened parents, we had not wanted to be Jake’s adversaries, quizzing him about every move, hectoring him. It was a philosophy shared by most of the McCormick parents. What choice did we have? No parent can monitor his kid’s every moment, online or off. In the end, every child leads his own life, largely out of his parents’ sight. Still, when I saw the words
Go die
, I realized how naive and stupid we had been. Jacob did not need our trust or our respect as much as he needed our protection, and that we had not given him.

I scrolled through the messages more quickly. There were hundreds, each just a line or two. I could not possibly read them all, and I had no idea what Sarah Groehl wanted me to find. Jacob disappeared from the conversation for a long stretch as the messages got older. The kids consoled one another in maudlin messages (
we will never evr be the same
) and hard-boiled ones (
die young, stay pretty
). Over and over they expressed their shock. The girls protested their love and loyalty, the boys their anger. I scoured these endless repetitive messages for some worthwhile detail:
i cant believe this … we have to stick together … there are cops everywhere in school …

Finally, I clicked over to Jacob’s own Facebook page, where a hotter conversation was still simmering, this one from the immediate aftermath of the murder. Again, the messages were displayed in reverse chronological order.

Marlie Kunitz
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 3:29pm on April 15th, 2007

D.Y.: Do
NOT
say things like that here. That is
GOSSIP
and it could get people
HURT
. Even if it’s a joke, it’s stupid. Jake, just ignore him.

Joe O’Connor
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 3:16pm on April 15th, 2007

Everyone shd all just keep their mouths
SHUT
if we dont know what we’re talking abt. that means you derek, you tool. this is
SERIOUS
SHIT
here.
NFW
you shd be talking out of your ass like that.

Mark Spicer
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 3:07pm on April 15th, 2007

ANYbody could say ANYthing about ANYbody. maybe
YOU
have a knife derek? how does it feel when somebody starts a rumor about YOU?

Then this:

Derek Yoo
(McCormick Middle School) wrote at 2:25pm on April 15th, 2007

Jake, everyone knows you did it. You have a knife. I’ve seen it.

I could not move. Could not budge my eyes from the message. I stared at it until the letters broke down into pixels. Derek Yoo was a friend of Jacob’s, a good friend. He had been to our house a hundred times. The two boys had been in kindergarten together. Derek was a good kid.

I’ve seen it
.

The next morning I let Laurie and Jacob both leave before me. I told them I had a meeting at the Newton police station and did not want to drive back and forth to Cambridge. When they were safely gone, I went up to Jacob’s room and searched.

The search did not take long. In the top drawer of the bureau, I found something hard, lazily hidden in an old white T-shirt. I unrolled the T-shirt until it spilled onto the bureau a folding knife with a black rubberized handle. I picked it up daintily, tweezed the blade between my thumb and index finger, and pulled it open.

“Oh my God,” I murmured.

It might have been a military knife or a hunting knife, but then it seemed too small for that. Unfolded, it was about ten inches long. The handle was black, grippy, shaped to accept four fingers. The blade was hook-shaped, with an intricately serrated cutting edge—a ripping blade—and it came to a lethal gothic point. The flat sides of the blade had been drilled out, presumably to save weight. The knife was sinister and beautiful, the shape of the blade, its curve and taper. It was like one of those lovely deadly things in nature, a lick of flame or the claw of an enormous cat.

One year later
.

TRANSCRIPT
OF
GRAND
JURY
INVESTIGATION
.

Mr. Logiudice: When you discovered the knife, what did you do? I presume you reported it immediately.
Witness: No, I did not.
Mr. Logiudice: No? You discovered the murder weapon in an ongoing murder investigation and you did not tell anyone? Why not? You made such a pretty speech earlier this morning about how you believed in the system.
Witness: I did not report it because I did not believe that it was the murder weapon. I certainly did not know it for a fact.
Mr. Logiudice: You didn’t know it for a fact? Well, how could you? You kept it hidden! You didn’t submit the knife for forensic testing, for blood, fingerprints, comparison with the wound, and so forth. That would be the ordinary procedure, wouldn’t it?
Witness: It would be if you genuinely suspected it was the weapon.
Mr. Logiudice: Ah. So you didn’t even suspect it was the weapon?
Witness: No.
Mr. Logiudice: The thought never crossed your mind?
Witness: This was my son. A father does not think, can’t even imagine his child in those terms.
Mr. Logiudice: Really? Can’t even imagine it?
Witness: That’s right.
Mr. Logiudice: The boy had no history of violence? No juvenile criminal record?
Witness: No. None.
Mr. Logiudice: No behavioral problems? No psychological problems?
Witness: No.
Mr. Logiudice: He had never hurt a fly, is that fair to say?
Witness: Something like that.
Mr. Logiudice: And yet when you found the knife, you covered it up. You behaved exactly as if you thought he was guilty.
Witness: That is not accurate.
Mr. Logiudice: Well, you didn’t report it.
Witness: I was slow to realize—in hindsight, I admit—
Mr. Logiudice: Mr. Barber, how could you be slow to realize when, in fact, you’d been waiting for this moment for fourteen years, from the day your son was born?
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: You’d been waiting for this moment. Fearing it, dreading it. But expecting it.
Witness: That’s not true.
Mr. Logiudice: Isn’t it? Mr. Barber, isn’t it fair to say that violence runs in your family?
Witness: I object. That is a completely improper question.
Mr. Logiudice: Your objection is noted for the record.
Witness: You are trying to mislead this jury. You are suggesting that Jacob could inherit a tendency to violence, as if violence were the same as red hair or hairy ears. That’s wrong on the biology and wrong on the law. In a word, it’s bullshit. And you know it.
Mr. Logiudice: But I’m not talking about biology at all. I’m talking about your state of mind, what you believed at the moment you found that knife. Now, if you choose to believe in bullshit, that’s your business. But what you believed is perfectly relevant and perfectly admissible as evidence. And you know it. But, out of respect, I’ll withdraw the question. We’ll approach it another way. Have you ever heard the phrase “the murder gene”?
Witness: Yes.
Mr. Logiudice: You’ve heard it where?
Witness: Just in conversation. I’ve used it in conversation with my wife. It’s a figure of speech, nothing more.
Mr. Logiudice: A figure of speech.
Witness: It is not a scientific term. I’m not a scientist.
Mr. Logiudice: Of course. We’re all non-experts here. Now, when you used this, this figure of speech, “the murder gene,” what were you referring to?
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: Oh, come on, Andy, there’s no reason to be shy about it. It’s all a matter of public record now. You’ve felt a lot of anxiety, haven’t you, in your life?
Witness: A long time ago. When I was a kid. Not now.
Mr. Logiudice: A long time ago, okay. You were worried—a long time ago, when you were a kid—about your own history, your own family, weren’t you?
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: It’s fair to say you’re descended from a long line of violent men, aren’t you, Mr. Barber?
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: It’s fair to say that, isn’t it?
Witness: [Inaudible.]
Mr. Logiudice: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. You’re descended from a long line of violent men, aren’t you? Mr. Barber?

V
iolence did run in my family. You could follow it like a red thread back through three generations. Probably there were more. Probably the red thread ran right the way back to Cain, but I never had any desire to trace it. A few stories, lurid, mostly unverifiable, and a few photographs had come down to me; that was affliction enough. When I was a kid, I wanted to forget these stories entirely. I used to wonder what it would be like if a magical amnesia descended and erased my mind completely, leaving only a body and some sort of blank self, all potential, all soft clay. But of course, no matter how I tried to forget, the story of my ancestors was always stored in deep memory, always ready to poke up into awareness. I learned to manage with it. Later, for Jacob’s sake, I learned to drink it down entirely, leaving nothing for anyone to see, nothing to “share.” Laurie was a great believer in sharing, in the talking cure, but I never meant to cure myself. I never believed such a thing was possible. That is what Laurie never understood. She knew that my father’s ghost troubled me, but not why. She presumed the issue was that I never knew him and there would forever be a daddy-shaped hole in my life. I never told her anything else, though she tried to pry me open like an oyster. Laurie’s own dad was a shrink, and before Jacob was born she was a teacher at the Gavin Middle School in South Boston, fifth- and sixth-grade English. She believed, based on these experiences, that she had some understanding of under-fathered young boys. “You’ll never be able to deal with it,” she would tell me, “if you won’t talk about it.” Oh, Laurie, you never got it! I never intended to “deal with it.” I intended to stop it cold. I meant to stop the whole sordid criminal line of descent by absorbing it all inside me. I would stand there and stop it like a bullet. I would simply refuse to pass it along to Jake. So I chose not to learn much. Not to research my history or analyze it for causes and effects. I purposely orphaned myself from the whole brawling lot of them. As far as I knew—as far as I chose to know—the red thread went back to my great-grandfather, a slit-eyed thug named James Burkett, who came east from North Dakota carrying in his bones some feral, wicked instinct for violence that would manifest itself over and over, in Burkett himself, in his son, and most spectacularly in his grandson, my father.

James Burkett was born near Minot, North Dakota, sometime around 1890. The circumstances of his childhood, his parents, whether he had any education—I knew nothing about these things. Only that he grew up on the High Plains of Dakota in the years after Little Big Horn, at the closing of the frontier. The first real evidence I had of the man was a sepia photograph on thick card stock, taken in New York City at the H.W. Harrison Photographic Studio on Fulton Street on Wednesday, August 23, 1911. The day and date were carefully noted in pencil on the back of the photo along with his new name, “James Barber.” The story behind this journey was also murky. The way I heard it—from my mother, who got it from my father’s father—was that Burkett lit out of North Dakota to escape an armed robbery charge. He lay low awhile on the southern shore of Lake Superior, clamming and working on fishing boats, then made his way to New York under a new name. Why he changed his name—whether it was to avoid an arrest warrant or just to make a new start with a new identity out east, or for some other reason—no one knew for sure. Nor could anyone explain why my great-grandfather chose Barber as his new surname. The only solid evidence I had of this period was the photo itself. It was the only image of James Burkett-Barber I ever saw. He would have been about twenty or twenty-one when it was taken. He is shown full figure. Slim and taut, bandy-legged, in a borrowed coat, with a bowler held in the crook of his arm. He squints into the camera with a Bowery smirk, one corner of his mouth curling up like smoke.