But sitting here in his sweeping Greco-Roman style home with Corinthian columns, gold-gilded bedroom furniture and a poster of a grinning Garfield in his teenage daughter’s room, Khawaja and his family can be sure that there are many others in Pakistan who might not take the street in protest Monday but feel the same way. For if you think there is universal support for what appeared to the entire world as harmless-looking green flickers of light on CNN, then peek into the homes of this city. Walk through these streets where the sweet scent of a flower called rath ke rahni, queen of the night, seeps deep into you.

No matter what qualifications come from President Bush or the caveats put on the attacks by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. And no matter that, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair instructed us Sunday, “Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion, and the acts of these people are contrary to the teachings of the Koran.” The bombings will inevitably seen as an attack by the West against Muslims by many who feel deeply that the Quran teaches that all Muslims are brothers and sisters.

In Khawaja’s living room, they sit around the television tucked into a large wooden wall unit, growing quiet as the Al Jazeera videotape of a frail-looking Osama bin Laden is broadcast.

“Allah ap koh muhdath dho,” whispers Khawaja’s wife Shamama to the screen. May Allah give you help.

The Pakistan government is the first — and at this point, only — Muslim country to voice support for the attacks, and reportedly opened its airspace to allow fighter jets to storm overhead. But that’s the government. After two weeks of conversations with many from here and neighboring towns, from nokars (servants) washing dishes, to retired military officers, housewives and professionals, it’s clear the minority in the streets protesting against any U.S. operation against Afghanistan very much represents a larger constituency. Among them, there is great empathy for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, and anger and frustration over issues of Western foreign policy — Israel, Iraq, Palestinians, Kashmir and Bosnia. Most of them aren’t going to do anything about it except share their bitterness with their family and friends.

But inside Khawaja’s home, there is a sense of faith, anger and mourning, and a need for action. Though the Taliban says that Osama bin Laden is still alive, the sense is that many uncles may very well have died.

“Assalamalaikum,” the greetings come gently. Peace be upon you.

“Walaikumsalam,” comes my reply. And peace be upon you.

Khawaja’s wife glides forward to offer an embrace. Once an aspiring lawyer, she is tall, graceful and eloquent in Urdu and English, as is her husband. She is grim but optimistic about those that died in the first wave of attacks.

“They have become ‘shaheed,’” — martyrs, she says, pulling her dupatta over the gray hair that gently frames her face.

During another rebroadcast of Osama bin Laden’s statement, Khawaja slips to the ground in his chilwar kameez. He leans forward on a squat table, with a tissue box lined with red tulips resting on top. His 10-year-old son comes out from the kitchen with a plate of “dhal chawal,” lentils and rice, to eat with two spoons. He is a fan of Disney’s “The Lion King,” he says (the first one, he makes clear, not the sequel). Khawaja’s elderly mother, who once taught in a girls’ school, sits beside the TV, draped in a white cotton flowered dupatta, a necklace of brown prayer beads, a thuzbi, hanging from her right hand.

The wife reads the flash excerpt from bin Laden’s statement, referring to the hijackings of Sept. 11: GOD HAS GIVEN THEM BACK WHAT WE HAVE RECEIVED.

Khawaja is calm. He is mostly quiet.

His wife is calm, too. Muslims have to choose their side, too, she says. With Allah. Or not. Khawaja breaks his silence, echoing the message from bin Laden most sure to haunt Americans. “No American is safe now,” he says. “Americans are not safe. They have started this jihad.”

This is rhetoric that could be easily dismissed, painted onto a white sheet in a street march in Islamabad’s twin city of Rawalpindi. It will, in fact, likely show up on a placard on the streets Monday. The White House markets this as a war against terrorism. The people here know that — they watch CNN, too. Khawaja’s mother leans toward the TV to read the banner: WAR ON TERRORISM.

But this isn’t the way it’s seen over here. “They have killed our Muslim brothers,” Khawaja tells his wife. “Now, we will react. Tomorrow it will not happen. It will happen over time. This is a lifelong war.”

The anger isn’t just at the West. It’s against the Muslim governments that run their countries as dictatorships and monarchies. “We have to overthrow our Muslim states. There was only one Islamic government and now they have attacked it.”

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour comes on the air from here in Islamabad. She explains to viewers that most Muslims don’t agree with the Taliban “fundamentalists.”

“Ch!” comes the answer from Khawaja’s wife in this culture’s universal exclamation meaning utter disdain: What a shame. What a pity. How terrible. How horrible. “This woman has so much anger in her heart for this ‘fundamentalism.’”

They, too, study the tape of bin Laden, which appears to be taped during the day in sunlight, and wonder when it was taped. But it doesn’t matter much to them; they feel his message is clear.

On TV, Rumsfeld explains that food is also being dropped on Afghanistan, as relief aid. Giggles break out when someone compares it to a Quranic account, manwasalva, of God dropping food from the heavens for Moses when he and his people were hungry.

Ten-year-old Mohammad is curious about something else. He looks at the sign behind the defense secretary that says, “Pentagon.” He thought the Pentagon was destroyed.

Tony Blair, whose youthfulness is often remarked upon in the West in innocent terms, like that of a schoolboy, fills the screen and lauds the British military’s role in this war. “He looks like a terrorist,” comes the comment from this room.

Nobody can say what will happen for certain with this war. It looks by all accounts that this battle will be over, perhaps, in days, but those here are convinced a wider war has sprung from it.

“We will see, Inshallah,” says Khawaja.

His wife nods. “Allah will fight this war, Inshallah.”

I first learned about the bombings earlier that day at the home of relatives here in Islamabad, because of a call from America. “War start ho-guy-yah.” War has begun, my uncle says as he hangs up the phone.

CNN reports air strikes on the Afghan cities of Kabul and Kandahar. BREAKING NEWS flashes over the screen.

“Yah Allah!” comes the sigh from my aunt. Oh God.

This is a house much like other Pakistani houses with a divided family, partly in Pakistan, partly in the United States — the only reminders are wedding photos laminated onto blocks of wood hung on the wall.

CNN flashes the image that has become the poster sheik of terror, Osama bin Laden.

Razia Phuppi, an aunt, is something over 80 years old. Nobody knows exactly how much more than 80. They didn’t record births in her day. She is a subdued maternal version of my dadi, my father’s feisty mother. She drifts her lithe body out of the room, leaving the English CNN dispatches to listen to BBC Radio’s crackled transmissions in Urdu in the bedroom. America created Osama bin Laden, she says. Now, they want to destroy him. She laments the flip-flop.

She prays for little damage. “Jahldee hoe dho.” Let it be quick.

Another cousin bent closely toward the screen is a modern, global woman. A graduate of the University of Hawaii, she keeps Gap body cream by her bathroom sink and talks wistfully of her love for the New York subways. She watches the flashes of light across the screen like muted starbursts.

“Becharay Thah-lee-bahn,” she says. Poor Taliban.

The crickets have gone silent as the morning comes to Pakistan. An alarm clock goes off in the house next door. A car honks. The TV is back on with talk of Dick Cheney being moved to a secure location.

My father, in Morgantown, W.V., sends me an e-mail. His subject line: “STARTED!” He reports that my 8-year-old nephew Samir says, “War is bad.” My 10-year-old Safiyyah, “It is horrible.” They should now be tucked into bed, but refuse to go to sleep. “Pray Allahsubanathala,” a praiseworthy adulation of God, my father writes, “for Peace.” Then he signs off.

The call for morning prayer spills into the air here as light begins to break across the sky. The call for prayer, however, competes with the chatter rising from Islamabad living rooms, the voices of TV talking heads in America, where it is now night. What is black there, is very much white here.

The newspapers here are calling President Bush by the moniker “Sheriff Bush.”

Abid’s newspaper is writing about the “Bush mafia,” Bush administration officials like Vice President Cheney, whom they consider war hawks.

“They need an enemy,” he says.

I am the only woman in the small room, feeling increasingly odd as more and more men filter inside from the street. On the adjacent wall hangs a wall-size photo of millions of Muslims packed around the Kaa’ba sharif in Mecca for the holy pilgrimage Haaj. Outside, the muzzein had called the azan for magrib namaz, the prayer when the sun sets, but the men remain seated.

Yes, these men are conservative Muslims, but not of the strain of Islam practiced by the Taliban, who some here support, while others do not.

On my way to meet with the men, I pass the Bell & Tell Burger Corner, which offers “separate seating for ladies & families,” a timely reminder of how strongly many here feel about the appropriate separation of men and women, unless they are married. But something happens when I arrive at the house that surprises me: The men listen to me. They allow my challenges. They smile at me. They give me Coke in a glass.

A lawyer and economic thinker with a head of white hair talks to me about Israel, the Palestinians, U.S. foreign policy. His points go through me like the repeated mantra expressed by so many Muslims. And then he tells me how U.S. foreign policy hit home with him. When the U.S. bombed Iraq, killing thousands of civilians without any outrage from the world, he was about to host his son’s lavish wedding dinner to a lieutenant general’s daughter. His son was eager to throw the dinner. Maybe the prime minister would show up. Maybe other generals.

It didn’t matter. This man was so depressed by the killings of so many Muslims, he canceled the fete and had his son married in a simple nikkah ceremony.

He told his son, “Hum jushan nahee bah-nah suk thay.” I cannot host a celebration. He does not support Saddam Hussein. He does not support the Taliban. But it is the same grief he feels thinking about the people of Afghanistan, and the fate that may await them.

He has the sort of anonymous Muslim name, Mahmood Mirza, that is a blur of nothing to those of us in the West. He will always be known to me as the man who canceled his son’s wedding dawat, because of the death of Muslims thousands of miles away in a country whose policies he didn’t even support.

He pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Every Muslim may be liberal, but in his heart he has feeling for the suffering of Muslims. There, his intellect disappears. It’s deep in his emotions.” It is not much unlike, these men say, the sadness of Christians for the murders of Christians in Indonesia.

“Dil may musthakil dhuk raythah hay.” There is permanent grief in the heart.

He sent a letter to the Washington Post, which he doesn’t think has been published yet. He recites it now. “A world can afford injustice and discrimination. A global village will not.”

“Va! Va!” the editor exclaims, the two of them shaking hands.

Beside him sat a man in a salwar kameez from the Jamaat-i-Islami party. I’ll be honest. I thought he’d be an orthodox nut. I thought he wouldn’t make eye contact with me, because men and women aren’t supposed to look each other in the eye in conservative Islam, lest lust arise. But he did look me in the eye, and he called me “bah-hayn jee,” dear sister. And he was far from a nut. He was a father. He told me about the night his 23-year-old son took his mother into a room in their house in Mansoorah outside Lahore, locked the door and told her that he had been training in Afghanistan to fight the Indian Army in India-held Kashmir, as it is called here. She wept.

“Son,” she told him, “I have known you have been going to Afghanistan. I have not worried because so many come and go on that path. But this road upon which you are now going, no one returns.”

Her son explained to his mother, the man recounted, “Mother, I have read of the rape of Muslim women in Kashmir by Indian Army men. I must stop them before they come here to my house and rape my mother and sisters.”

She kissed him upon the neck and blessed his departure. They emerged from the room, the decision sealed and joyful. And when news of his death came not long after, neighbors visited to say “mubarak,” congratulations, for having a son that was a martyr.

He, too, has that generic Muslim name to the West, Safdhar Ali Choudry. To me, he shall always be the father who smiles with pride while talking about his own son’s death.

His political party is writing anti-American slogans in English so they can be read by the West on CNN broadcasts (and by Pakistan’s ruling military generals, he says). But it is not because they hate America, he says. It is a political campaign to keep American soldiers off Pakistani land, which they believe has succeeded for the moment. (That has been supported by Musharraf in interviews he has given.)

He laughs. “Amrika tho Pakistanis kuh jannath hay.” America is heaven to Pakistanis. He translates for himself, making the ironic, but true, point: “The most hated country of world is our heaven.” That is proven by the countless number of boys, students, who ask me when I think it will be easy to apply again for student visas to Amrika.

My friend Anaya in Chicago wrote after my first dispatch to ask if the country is going to erupt into a civil war. Well, Anaya, Jamaat-i-Islami only grabbed 15 percent of the vote in the last election. And many people here discount the blustering cries of their clerics, the mowlwis.

As she wipes the tiled floor with a rag, the nokrahni at the house of my dadi, my father’s mother, Medina Khatoon, asks: How are the people of Pakistan going to fight when people can barely afford to eat? Her family of 13 people earns about as much as the 9,000 rupees, about $143, they spend on rent, food and school fees every month. “If there are vegetables then we eat them. If there isn’t, then that’s OK.”

But to the men around the coffee table, they were prepared to protest in the streets against Musharaff, if U.S. troops were allowed in to fight against Afghanistan, their Muslim brothers. But for now, they were all quite sure such a thing would never happen.

Raised in Pakistan, my cousin came to my hometown of Morgantown, W. Va., seven years ago to earn his master’s degree in engineering before starting work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then moving not long ago to a new job on the East Coast.

This is the reality of the new war that looms over the world. It is no longer a day like the reconquista when Queen Isabella slaughtered anonymous Muslims and Jews in Spain if they refused to convert to Christianity. It is no longer Us versus Them. Or, in this case, U.S. versus Them. We are them. They are us.

My dadi (grandmother) comes into the room and sits in front of the Philips desktop computer, now encased in clear plastic slipcovers. She is my father’s mother, 88, born into the rural town of Hinganghat in India when the British were still colonialists. She was married at 14 to my grandfather, Mumtaz Ahmad Nomani, who became a successful defense attorney in the old city of Hyderabad. She traveled alone in 1942 from Wardha to Benares with her children at a time when few women dreamt of doing such a daring thing as traveling unaccompanied by a man. She even drove a car, learning on a racecourse, until she hit a rickshaw. There were no power brakes back then. They paid off the rickshaw driver for maybe 15 rupees, 20 rupees tops (between $3 and $5 then).

“He was happy,” she insists.

Three sons and five daughters settled in Pakistan, uprooting themselves from their lives in India in the years after India won independence from the British in 1947, dividing itself into a mostly Hindu India and a predominately Muslim nation of Pakistan. Dadi wept about leaving her homeland, but as she grew older, her sons called her to Pakistan in the 1980s. My father was her one child to settle in America in the 1960s, after earning his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, bringing my mother, brother and me over to a life where we couldn’t have imagined the Barbies, slumber parties and Disney World vacation in our future. Another daughter recently moved from Pakistan to Fremont, Calif., with her husband and family. Now, Dadi counts 12 grandchildren settled in America, including my brother and me, and dozens of other relations in an extended family that makes everybody her “bhai” (brother), “apa” (sister), “beyta” (son), or “beyti” (daughter).

I took her hand, softened with age, and told her yesterday, after my 39-hour journey beginning from West Virginia, that she looked strong.

She corrected me. She has dropped from 50 to 42 kilograms [110 to 92 pounds] in recent months. The back of her hair has the orange-red of the henna with which she dyed it. The hair around her face frames her in silver. Her face is creased with a lifetime that has seen imperialism, revolution, war, famine and the extension of her family to the far corners of the world. She is part of the older immigrants from India who still wraps yards of sari around her waist, throwing the “pallu” over her shoulder, rather than switching to the salwar kameezes; the tunic kurtas, harem pants and dupattas that make the more modest style of Pakistan. She is certainly daring compared to the chadors that shroud the women of Afghanistan in a sea of cloth, with only netting before their eyes. But she is an elderly lady and is allowed her fashion statement. I try to probe her for her thoughts about the World Trade Center bombings, the mujahedin, Osama bin Laden.

She pauses. “How old is Khalida’s son?” she asks about a cousin of mine, still single and available.

War? The war can wait. Dadi still has a granddaughter to see married. And she’s puzzled that this granddaughter has crossed the ocean with only Lonely Planet’s “Pakistan: A Travel Survival Kit,” a new padded laptop backpack from Office Depot and a JFK Airport shopping bag filled with World Trade Center key chains, New York Police Department pencils and two New York Fire Department stuffed bears (one red, one blue) to give away as gifts. War looms as a reality in this home in Lahore, where CNN’s “Larry King Live” is replaced with Pakistan Television, PTV, and its roundtable discussion between a man who looks like a skinny Santa Claus with a “topi” cap, a fiery woman commentator without a dupatta covering her head and Pakistan’s foreign minister explaining his government’s friendship with America. “Jung” is what war is called here.

Dadi doesn’t pretend to know who did what. But she knows about war.

“Jung nahee kuroh,” she says. Don’t do war.

“Nuhksahn hay subkoh,” she says. It will be ruinous for everyone.

Dadi has only a clue of what it took me to get here, to find out, among other things, what she thinks about the perilous position in which her adopted country now finds itself.

In America, we think that folks from this part of the world are all basically the same. But that’s not what I learned as I stood outside the Pakistani Consulate in New York, the rain pouring upon me as I tried to convince the press attachi I wasn’t a threat just because I was born in India. I already had a Pakistani visa stamped into my passport from my travels last year. My name comes from the 17th surah of the Quran, which tells the tale of a mystical journey the Prophet Mohammad made from Mecca to the seven heavens, his bed still warm and the door knob still shaking when he returned. How much more Muslim could you get than that?

I went to the Pakistani consulate in my friend Sumita’s kameez flowing over my black pants, with a black sweater on top so I wouldn’t offend any Muslims who consider it immodest for a woman to bare her arms. I wore my dadi’s dupatta, hand delivered to me by my father after his recent trip to Pakistan. What a goof. The press attachi’s assistant is a Filipino veteran of the Consulate since the 1960s by the name “Connie.” I should have just gone in the Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants that I usually wear.

I find out later from other officials that the Pakistani government has a red flag up for Indian-born visa applicants, even if they have foreign passports, like my U.S. passport. I end up having to travel to another embassy, in another city, to get my visa.

I talk to my mother amidst the delays. She tells me what we are taught as Muslims from our earliest days: “Everything happens for a reason.”

My reason, I think, is pause. With an obstacle that doesn’t allow adrenaline to make the decision, I must ponder whether I really want to go to Pakistan. It will be a psychic journey as much as physical one. I am a bit afraid. My brother tries to relax me: “Oh! Go have a vacation!” But my previous trips to Pakistan had certainly never qualified as vacations.

I first went to Pakistan for just that in 1983 as a rising WVU sophomore. My cousins thought my parents either wanted to find me a husband or get me out of the influence of Western culture. It was neither. I was curious about my culture, my religion. On that trip, I carried Smurf key chains. My notebooks from those days are jammed with the wonder of an 18-year-old’s first impressions, like the Afghan refugees flooding into Pakistan at the time from the war against the Soviets. Another uncle, a doctor who worked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, took me to the bedside with refugees so I could hear their arduous escapes from the war in their country. We went through the beautiful Khyber Pass, so rugged and magnificent a place it remained with me as one of the most serene of places I had seen on this earth. Now, this place is at the border of what could be the worst trouble in the history of the world.

At that time, Pakistan was boastful of the F-16 fighter jets America was selling it. I bought an F-16 sticker for three rupees, small change in America. What would I see now? When I returned to West Virginia at the end of the summer, I wrote, “Back to blue jeans and polo shirts, coke machines and granola bars, knapsacks and vibrant hellos.” In Pakistan, girls didn’t greet boys with any sort of animation on the street.

I went again to Pakistan with tears in my eyes before Christmas 1992. I thought I was doing the right thing, choosing to marry a Muslim man because it would fulfill my responsibilities to my culture and religion, even if it meant leaving a Lutheran man from Iowa who was as noble and gentle a soul as any that could exist in human form. I went ahead with this wedding, draped in a glittering golden brocade dupatta, having my makeup session at the Mee Lee Beauty Parlour, wed at the Margala Motel in Islamabad. Yes, a motel.

The father of the man that I married sat me down during my honeymoon in his house and quickly outlined my new identity. “First,” he said, “you are Muslim. Secondly, you are Pakistani. Thirdly, you are Urdu speaking.” It stung me like a cat being tied to a leash. And then I made the rounds like a good new bride, saying little and trying to look pretty in golden Stuart Weitzman pumps.

The marriage lasted barely three months.

To go back now, and report on a country — a faith, really — under extreme scrutiny from the entire world, I would have to journey again to Islamabad, this time without the silence I accepted as a new bride. This time, with a voice. I will eventually go again to where I spent my wedding night, the Islamabad Marriott, now the hub for foreign journalists covering the war. And in the process, I’ll hopefully not just report what is happening on the ground in a country that warily, but dutifully, is supporting its ally, the United States, but also try and figure out this emerging conflict between cultures, East vs. West, Muslim vs. the world, it seems, that has become a subtext of this entire battle.

My dadi pauses. What about prospects in Aligarh, India, she wonders, where intellectual Muslims stream across the well-paved roads of Aligarh Muslim University? She’s back to the question of my marital future.

I write all this feeling quite removed from the moment, seeing my grandmother again, back in Lahore for the first time since riding the Peace Bus here from Delhi last year, but only my fourth visit to Pakistan in my life. Yet knowing of U.S. military movements, the collective baited breath of the world, I am sitting with dadi in the living room near a picture of my two cousins embracing a life-size cutup of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

My mother called me with the news on Sept. 11. I was across town from her in my childhood home, beginning another day penning the book that caused me to take a leave from my job as a reporter in New York for the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t believe her. Yahoo told me the truth. I folded the news article and set off for my volunteer duty as Lunch Lady (without a hairnet) at my niece and nephew’s North Elementary School, where the children buzzed amongst themselves. “The kids know something is up,” one of the teachers said. I wanted to tell my nephew, 8-year-old Samir, myself. I whispered to him, as he sat next to a good friend, Youseph, whose parents are from Syria. I whispered the news to 10-year-old Safiyyah, my niece as mothers and fathers swept into the office to take their children home early.

I volunteered to help in the office, dividing the forms for school pictures into homerooms. My count for Mrs. DeVincent’s second grade class got interrupted when I heard the principal shout: “What are those men doing here?!”

I looked up. Two Arab men. I didn’t blame the principal. I don’t blame the principal. I, too, was suspicious. They were my Muslim brothers, but what were they doing here?

To notify the office that their child would be getting off at a different bus stop from now on. Oh. The principal politely recovered much faster than I would have. A little nappy hair. An accent. It was enough to raise my suspicions.

Then the reports started coming in from my mother, my personal High Street correspondent from her boutique in downtown Morgantown. Ali Baba, the restaurant with mosquito netting over a booth and hummus on the menu, shut down because of a bomb threat. It turned out to be a vulgar phone call. Two Muslim women wearing hijabs, the head scarves tightly wrapped around the hair, had them ripped off their heads at the West Virginia University student union, with the shouts, “We’re going to get you!”

I have never been motivated to cover my head in public in America. To me, it was an unnecessary symbol of modesty in a place where not wearing a halter top in the summertime seemed like an act of conservatism. The weekend before, as I stood near the Dorito chips at Wal-Mart, an Arab woman walked by me with a full covering that cloaked her body and face. All that was visible were eyes that could study price tags. Suddenly, I wanted to cover myself. Proclaim to the world that Muslims weren’t all terrorists. We were also good, balanced humanitarians, as my mother and father had taught me to be.

My mystical sister-cousins, first cousins to most of the world, Lucy and Esther, taught me the year before how to wrap my scarf so that only my eyes would be visible. It came in handy in the dust storms of the Himalayan mountains as we climbed on razor’s edge through the rocky mountain passes in a Tata Sumo just last year for a pilgrimage with the Dalai Lama. On the long white cotton dupatta my dadi had sent with my father, she wrote a message in the corner in Urdu, urging me to use it to do the namaz, prayer, that is required of Muslims five times a day.

Back in Morgantown, I folded the dupatta in half. I wrapped it around my head over the bridge of my nose and knotted it behind me so that an opening remained in the bottom. The fold was on the side. I pulled the top layer to my forehead so my eyes could peek out and draped the edges over my shoulder. The bottom layer I allowed to remain over my nose, so only my eyes were visible, the rest of my head, shoulders and chest shrouded in white. Did I look menacing? Frightening?

I checked in with the only ones around. I nudged awake my cat, Billlie. He opened his eyes to a slit. I shouted, “Billlie! Billlie!” He saw the truth of the one who fed him Cat Chow behind the veil.

My inquiry into identity wasn’t complete. I plucked the American flag Samir had gotten from his Cub Scout troop, ventured outside with the scarf pulled down from over my nose so the mailman could see my face, lest he drive by, and planted the American flag in a pot of geraniums on our front porch.

That night, a Muslim brother calls my father. “It’s urgent,” he warned.

When my father called back, he told him that the board of the Muslim Students Association should cancel the Friday jummah, the afternoon prayer that starts at 1:30 p.m. For Muslims, Friday is what Sunday is to Christians and Saturday to Jews. The mosque in Morgantown began in a room by the Monongalia County Jail in 1981. My dad has been the faculty student advisor for years, watching recently as the mosque has grown to two houses on the WVU Evansdale campus, one house with a sand volleyball court on which I hadn’t yet dared to pass the ball.

“There are bombings of mosques in Texas,” the brother says, ominously, though there hadn’t been any actual bombings, only threats.

I stand in the background, bobbing between my father’s phone call and Samir’s reading of Mulan, the Chinese girl warrior. “Don’t cancel!” I urge him.

“No, we will not cancel,” my father insists. “Why should we be afraid?”

Soon, I am going off to New York to keep my friend Dan, a Wall Street Journal colleague, company. A universe that I had known intimately had been destroyed. It was in the basement of the World Trade Center where I would disembark for work every morning. It was to the J. Crew store on the concourse level where Dan rushed over with me to settle on a petite cashmere camisole sweater for my appearance on the Brian Williams’ show on MSNBC. And it was at Windows on the World where one Valentine’s Day I allowed my romantic fantasies to unfold, cheesy as they were, watching the assembly line of brides and grooms that had won free wedding ceremonies atop the World Trade Center. Now, an image of a couple jumping from one of the WTC towers during the morning of Sept. 11 replays in my friend Dan’s mind, like a broken movie reel. And now mine.

With airports shut down, the best way to get to New York is the Greyhound. I plan to go with my head covered. My sister-in-law’s eyes widen when she sees the dupatta wrapped over me. This was the past from which she came, clad in a black burkah in Hyderabad since she was 11, the sweat pouring down her face, the dizziness of faint engulfing her as she rushed to catch buses in the heat of India’s summer. Now, married to my brother, she is liberated from this religious expectation, living in Morgantown, wearing a new wardrobe of cotton shirts and stretch pants from the Limited.

She is worried. She, too, has heard the reports of Muslim women under attack. In Urdu, the language of Muslims in India and Pakistan, she tells my mother, “Write ‘al-Hafiz’ in the air on her forehead,” so that I will have the protection of God.

My mother takes her finger to the air, staring over my left temple and crosses my forehead with Arabic script. She blows a breath toward me. We call it a pook. It is like a blessing.

We go to the Greyhound station. I soon slip into a seat beside a woman. “Phoopu has already found a friend,” Safiyyah tells her dadi, mother and brother, as she waves to me from below. Phuppi means brother’s sister in Urdu. Phoopu becomes our nickname. Sometimes, even Phoopu Head. At our lowest, Phoopu Butt. I’m off to New York, still not sure my journey will eventually lead me back to Pakistan.

My journey on the Greyhound brought me many surprises, like the middle-aged African-American woman from Charleston who jabbered with me about the great buys she finds at the Dollar Store and Gabriel’s, a Morgantown-based discount store that keeps small towns in high fashion.

“Got 20 sports bras for my goddaughter at the Dollar Store last year,” she says, as we roll through rural Pennsylvania. “She said, ‘What am I going to do with all these? I said, ‘Give ‘em to your girlfriends.”

Not a word about my dupatta.

She gets off in Baltimore. I stand at the station. I notice a few stares, but nothing hostile. Then two of the cutest guys walk up to me and start talking. They’re fresh-faced freshmen at WVU, Jay and Dan, on their way home to New Jersey to see their high school senior girlfriends.

Don’t they see me in this bizarre dupatta? Why would they want to talk to me? We talk food in Morgantown. They’re tired of Sbarro pizza. I rave about the steak and cheese sandwiches at Spruce Street Sub Shop. I promise to invite them over to our house for Indian food. I can’t resist.

But that will not happen for a while, now, for I am with my Dadi in Lahore, eating Japanese apples that aren’t really Japanese. My travels will weave me through this region for some time to come. She slips into the room as I write, the ceiling fan a blur of whirring blades overhead. She sits upon her haunches on the bed beside me. She has something that she forgot to tell me. It’s about zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam where we have to give money the poor if we can afford it. She tells me to send 1,500 rupees (about $33) to Bombay for qurbani, the sacrifice of goats for distribution to the poor after Eid, the equivalent of Christmas for Muslims that follows the month of fasting, Ramadan. It is said in the Quran, she says, tapping the side of my leg to punctuate her point, that we will get in heaven that which we give on earth. Her five silver glass bracelets jingle as she waves her hands. We will not get in heaven any of that which we left on this earth.

She shows off her English, reciting the multiplication tables she learned from tutors who came to her house before she married.

“Say this. You will have a good marriage.”

Oh. We’re back to that again. I change the subject back to her.

“How are you?” I ask, intrigued to hear her English.

“I am,” she says, pausing, thinking, and then recites her name, “Zubaida Nomani.”

Close enough. How many people can say that much in a second language? But it’s her thoughts on war to which we return.

She spots the flyer that I have brought from New York City. “Miss-ing,” she reads, amazing me more with the English I didn’t know that she could read. “One World.” She stumbles over “Trade.” She continues: “Center.”

It’s a name foreign to her: Roger Mark Rasweiler. I explain that I met the man’s son-in-law as he was posting flyers like this one on the New Jersey PATH train from Newark, N.J. His father-in-law had gone to work that morning and was missing along with thousands of others.

“Allah!” she say. “Bapray!” Oh my goodness.

It was National Solidarity Day today, but for all the Girl Guides of Pakistan who joined the marches, I couldn’t find a soul to go to the rallies with me. Put up a flag? “Chor dho,” was the answer I got. The Urdu version of fawgetaboutit.

It was green and white on PTV, where the news starts with “Bismillah ir rahman ir raheem” — “In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful.” PTV aired broadcasts of a music video with members from the Pakistani rock band Junoon, (yes, you read that right: Pakistani rock band) jamming to a ditty about the struggles of partition with patriotic flashes of Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

What I do get from PTV and others I speak with is a level doubt. It’s not that Pakistanis aren’t loyal. It’s just that they aren’t convinced. Here, the U.S. has become “a dada” — literally a grandfather, specifically on the paternal side. But, in this reference, it’s not a term of respect. It means a “gonda,” a bully. Never before, people will say openly, have they missed so much the balance of power the Soviet Union represented. They want more proof about this Osama bin Laden — a nobody, they say, until he became the target of the United States — and his involvement with the bombings. They want the proof that Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to deliver … before backing away from the promise a few days later.

They’re skeptical, and they want proof, and without it, they’re left to generate alternative explanations. From the minute I step off the airplane, I hear references to a “Yahudi” conspiracy, suggesting that somehow Israel is behind the WTC catastrophe. And they are dimly amused at President Bush’s grandstanding, equating him more to a cowboy than the U.S. president. And they generally see capriciousness in U.S. foreign policy, exhibited by America’s support of the Pakistani and Afghan mujahedin during the war against the Soviets and the U.S. disappearance afterward. They shake their heads remembering how they boasted that even its poorest citizens at least wore “chappals,” sandals. Now, they lament, young Afghan boys walk barefoot in the bazaar here in Lahore picking up trash to make small change.

Dadi comes into the room as the muzzein’s call for the sunset magrib prayer makes it to our ears even through the closed windows. “Proof deh-koy,” she says, curling the end of her sari’s “pallu” around her waist, mixing her little English with Urdu. Show proof.

Meanwhile, the rumblings of war continue. Dadi warns me to travel with only a notebook and small bag, so I can run quickly in case of trouble. I know I’ll at least have dadi’s dupatta, the paper bracelet my niece Safiyyah made for me with the message, “Be Happy,” and my mother’s invisible inscription upon my forehead. God keep you in his protection. Oh, and of course, I’ll also have a photo of a cousin, another marriage Dadi is trying to arrange.

Jason was trouble. That alone is not too surprising: An examination of local court records shows an extensive history of trouble with the law by Jason’s immediate and extended family. And that history may very well have played a part in the development of Jason’s latest identity: as a key character involved in the alleged murder by white teenagers of a young, gay black man that has drawn intense national media attention.

The bloodied, broken body of 26-year-old Arthur Carl “J.R.” Warren Jr. was found around dawn on July 4. In death, Warren has become a cause for gay rights activists and black leaders, who are incensed that the Marion County sheriff said no evidence pointed toward the murder as a “hate crime.” To civil rights groups like the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign, the tragedy that befell Warren should make him a national icon: Imagine a brutal cross between James Byrd, the black victim of the truck-dragging murder in Jasper, Texas, and Wyoming gay-bashing victim Matthew Shepard.

But here in Grant Town (population: 400), the focus is on the three white boys involved in the events leading up to the murder, including Jason, who was there when Warren was killed. Their every past move is being remembered and deconstructed by townsfolk wondering why they behaved as they did.

There was the time Jason drew a stick figure on the palm of his left hand and another stick figure on the palm of his right hand. Clenching his left hand, the children remember, he declared, “This person is good.”

Then he waved his right palm and said: “This person is bad.” He smacked his left fist into his right palm and said: “Now, you’re dead.”

This parable of good fighting evil has taken on more than symbolic meaning to those who know Jason well. Instead of a tale of a mixed-up kid who predictably turned to violence, Jason’s story is how a mixed-up kid ultimately stayed out of the worst kind of trouble by telling police what he says actually happened to Warren.

Now, detained at his parents’ small house, wearing a police ankle bracelet over bare feet, Jason watches wild rabbits run on the lawn nearby with a freedom he doesn’t enjoy. Perhaps, because of what he told the police, Jason will bring some understanding — for the activists, for the media, maybe even the Warren family — about what could have led to such a brutal tragedy. His story offers a vivid look inside a culture of violence and crime.

Is that any consolation? In a slow drawl, Jason says, “A little bit.”

There are numerous obstacles, natural and man-made, to reaching Grant Town, a former coal-mining town resting in a valley in the Appalachian Mountains. The sign on the bridge just before Rivesville says it’s closed. It’s not. After crossing it, there’s a right turn at the green Huntington Bank sign right after the Monongahela River sweeps into view on the left. From there, on Route 17, it’s a windy road of four miles straight out of “Huckleberry Finn” — past grazing horses, young boys fishing at Paw Paw Creek and more railroad crossings than a visitor can remember to count.

To get to Grant Town, you have to cross Paw Paw Creek on a one-lane bridge that has been festooned with white, pink and red plastic flowers as a memorial to Warren from his friends. On a recent night, with the full moon overhead, bullfrogs croak. Crickets chirp. Fireflies twinkle. The power plant roars. It’s a town where local commerce isn’t much more than two Pepsi machines, a phone booth and a lawn mower repair shop on Main Street. People know the details of each other’s lives; anyone, for example, can tell you that the lawn mower repair shop is run by Larry “LaLa” Merico, previously a coal miner, then the town cop, then a writer for the local newspaper, penning a column called “LaLa’s Porch.” (“One of the Pepsi machines doesn’t work,” Merico says. But the two machines “make the town feel a lot bigger.”)

Before it was even time for the fireworks show this past Fourth of July, the town was already abuzz about the death of J.R. Warren. Four days later, Warren’s body was laid out at Mount Beulah Baptist Church in an open casket, as demanded by his father, who wanted people to see what had happened to his son: his lips sliced with blood-dried cuts, his cheeks bruised, his forehead swollen and protruding as if a water balloon had been tucked inside.

Through his death, the country has learned that Warren was a developmentally challenged young man who was also gay, and who lived in a town with a sign that reads: “Grant Town, A Growing Progressive Community.” But the country knows very little about what really happened to Warren during the night that led to his death.

Lawyers, officials and immediate family members involved in the case declined to comment for this story. But by all accounts, Warren left his house around 11:30 p.m. on July 3. His mother told friends she reminded him that he had a curfew, and that he had told her he’d be back in an hour. He left his house on Paw Paw Street, which is called “Black Bottom” by some of the town’s white residents because it’s at the bottom of town, and most of Grant Town’s black residents live there in small bungalows with tiny yards.

Warren walked up to Main Street and made a right turn up to 101 View Ave., a one-level wood frame house famous around town as the home where Olympic gold medal gymnast Mary Lou Retton’s father, Ronnie, grew up.

Sources close to the investigation say that a boy Warren knew, 17-year-old David Parker, summoned him over to his family house. The house was empty while David, along with Jason, 15, and Jared Wilson, 17, were painting it.

The three boys had hung out together since childhood. David and Jared were second cousins, and Jared and Jason were cousins through Jason’s older half-brother. The two older boys had earned quite a reputation in the neighborhood and school as troublemakers, David in particular.

David had asked Warren to bring two specific items with him to the house: cigarettes and Xanax tablets. According to sources familiar with the investigation, Warren recently had been prescribed Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug. It was like Warren, say people who knew him, to be “a people pleaser,” even fulfilling the requests of someone like David, whom many in the neighborhood recall having heard call Warren “faggot” and “queer.”

When Warren showed up, the boys began to crush the Xanax, and then started to snort it as a way to get high. There can be adverse effects to taking Xanax, including hostility, irritability and excitability, if it hasn’t been prescribed correctly. Those effects can be aggravated further when the drug is snorted, a more potent way of ingesting the drug. And when it’s mixed with volatile personalities and alcohol — which it’s understood David, Jared and Jason were consuming — the consequences can be unpredictable and violent.

As the boys snorted the powdered Xanax, according to sources close to the investigation, the following ensued:

Tempers started getting out of control. David accused Warren of spreading a story that he and Warren had engaged in some sort of sexual activity. Warren denied the charge. Things cooled down, and Warren stepped into another room with David, leaving his wallet and a cigarette lighter behind. When he returned, his cigarette lighter was gone and $20 was missing from his wallet. Jared angrily denied taking the money, calling Warren a “dumb nigger.”

Warren apparently found his lighter tucked inside a toilet paper roll in the bathroom.

But then, something snapped. David and Jared went into another room with Warren, and David began kicking him with his steel-tipped work boots. Before joining in, Jared also switched into a pair of steel-tipped work boots. There was some punching. David threw Warren into a front room, where Jason saw the bloodied young man.

Nauseated by the blood, Jason fled the room to vomit in the bathroom. As for the beatings, Jason told police he did not participate, and has an excuse consistent with the violent bruising of Warren’s body caused by the work boots: Jason was wearing only flip-flops.

David continued the beating on a porch and even outside, where two spruce pine trees stand tall between the front door and View Avenue. At one point David said, “I cracked his skull. Somebody call 911.”

“I’m not going to do it,” said Jared.

Jason stood frozen still.

The entire assault was over quickly. (Neighbors in a trailer home just 20 feet away have said they heard nothing unusual.) Talk of a 911 call was quickly dropped and replaced with a plan for a coverup. The boys put the badly bloodied Warren into the hatchback of David’s Chevy Camaro. David drove. Jason asked to sit in the front seat because he was sick to his stomach. Jared sat in the back seat.

But Warren wasn’t dead. According to sources familiar with the investigation, Warren apparently tried to crawl into the back seat of the Camaro and Jared kept pushing him back. He pleaded with them from the hatchback, asking to be taken home. Among the last sounds he uttered, according to one recollection, was: “Are you taking me home? Please take me home.”

David kept driving through the dark, quiet town, stopping near the one-lane bridge at the mouth of the town, which didn’t yet have the red, white and pink plastic flowers. There, David and Jared moved Warren’s body to the ground. Jason stayed in the front seat.

David ran over Warren’s body once, according to the sources. He backed up over the body. He ran over Warren a second time, and then a final time, trying to make it seem as though Warren’s death was the result of a hit-and-run accident. Jared jumped back into the Camaro.

According to the sources, the three boys returned to 101 View Ave., cleaned up the blood and burned the bloodied clothes in gasoline. David then “huffed” the fumes from the gasoline can, inhaling them as another trick to get high.

Jason then turned to go home. But first, according to the sources, both older boys told him that if he revealed the crime to anyone, he, too, would wind up dead.

Jason returned home, just about 500 yards up View Avenue. His father was home, but it was his mother, Norma Shoemaker, who he called and told what happened during her night shift on staff in the emergency room at Ruby Memorial Hospital, about 45 minutes away in Morgantown. If Warren had been found alive, he might have been rushed to the emergency room where Jason’s mom worked. As it turned out, his body was brought to Ruby Memorial for an autopsy.

Norma Shoemaker called the police later that morning. After her call, police had switched what they had thought had been a suspicious-looking hit and run to a homicide investigation. Soon, Jason spoke before Circuit Judge Rodney Merrifield, who, in a recent court action, described the witness as “nervous while testifying.” However, the judge went on to say: “There was never any reason for a prudent person, including the Court, to suspect that he was lying or fabricating his testimony.”

Last week, Merrifield transferred David to adult court, and sources close to the case expect Jared to be transferred as well. Both have been charged with murder. Jason, meanwhile, has been charged with a misdemeanor as an accessory after the fact.

For Warren, sexuality was a particularly sensitive topic. His mother, Brenda Warren, is a regular member of the Mount Beulah Baptist Church, whose members hold the traditional view that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination.

Still, Warren was embraced by the tightknit church congregation, most of them Paw Paw Street neighbors who call each other “sister” and “brother” despite having no relation. The Sunday service the day after the memorial was loud, dynamic and inspiring, with cries of “Go ahead, Reverend!” and “Amen!” After the service, members said privately that they applied the common Christian philosophy to Warren that you can hate the sin but still love the sinner.

Warren’s homosexuality was understood but kept quiet. Mount Beulah’s pastor, the dapper, hard-singing Rev. Nelson Staples III, had broken the public silence at Warren’s memorial when he called upon members not to judge Warren’s homosexuality. “There are people who wrestle with their sexual orientation. If you’ve never had to wrestle,” he shouted, “if you’ve never had to weep because you feel one thing and the Book says another thing, you don’t know!”

Afterward in his church office, amid the elephant figurines he collects, Staples compared the violence to Warren’s body to the violence Warren’s sexuality inflicted upon his soul. A passionate pastor with the singing voice of Luther Vandross, Staples imagined a conversation between the dead young man’s body and soul, sitting across from each other, the soul telling the body, “You can’t bother me anymore. I’m free now.”

But Warren’s sexuality has been a key part of the talk swirling around this murder. The West Virginia Lesbian and Gay Coalition led the call for local law enforcement to classify the murder a hate crime, saying Warren had told a local support group that local youths had harassed him, calling him “faggot” and “queer.” The Human Rights Campaign dispatched a team of investigators to Grant Town, and later arranged for the Warrens to visit the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights in Washington, which sparked an inquiry by that agency.

And media reports have spurred rumors of Warren’s sexual activity. Vicki Smith of the Associated Press filed a story on July 13 reporting that “sources close to the investigation” told the AP David and Warren “had a sexual relationship” and that “there is evidence indicating he also was involved with Wilson.” The story’s lead paragraph read: “A gay black man was beaten to death because he wanted to reveal a sexual relationship he claimed to have had with the teen-agers accused of his murder, sources told The Associated Press.”

The next day, Marion County prosecutor G. Richard Bunner told Jenni Vincent, the dogged local reporter at Morgantown’s Dominion Post, “I’m reading stuff in the newspaper that I’ve never seen before during this investigation.” He added: “These allegations of a sexual relationship between the juveniles and Arthur Warren are all hearsay. There’s no proof of it.” The AP, meanwhile, stands by its story.

Jason Shoemaker’s father, Willis Eugene Shoemaker, has known trouble. Before his son was born, Ohio police arrested him on charges of driving while under the influence of alcohol, burglary and possession of a stolen vehicle. According to court records, he served one year in a correctional facility in Mansfield, Ohio, and was then paroled to West Virginia for one year. Over the following years the family was torn by a man struggling to conquer his addiction to alcohol and, perhaps, overcoming it — but not before wreaking havoc on his family.

When Jason was 5, his father started becoming well known to the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. On Sept. 2, 1990, his father was arrested for DUI after he had a single-vehicle accident in his 1974 Chevy outside Grant Town. He served 24 hours in jail. That was about the time Jason’s kindergarten teacher noticed he would sit with his head buried in his arms, reluctant to answer questions.

Jason spent the rest of his childhood watching his father break the law. About a year later, despite having a suspended license, Willis Shoemaker hit another car while driving a black 1979 Dodge Diplomat. The state trooper wrote in his report that one and a half hours after the accident, Willis Shoemaker was “passed out on his couch, smelling of an alcoholic beverage.” He “could not respond to his wife trying to wake him up except for a few incomprehensible sounds that he made.”

Less than a year later, then-officer “LaLa” Merico went to the site of an accident on View Avenue. Eyewitnesses identified the driver, now gone, as Willis Shoemaker. Merico and a deputy eventually found Shoemaker “hiding under a blanket in a shed in the backyard” of his house, according to the police report. In 1994, he was charged with indecent exposure after the chief of police from nearby Rivesville spotted him urinating behind the Pantry Store. The charge was later dropped.

In 1995, Shoemaker pleaded guilty to a third DUI and driving with a license suspended or revoked for DUI. He was given a jail sentence that was suspended to give him one-year home confinement with work release.

Finally, two years ago, Shoemaker told police he had consumed about seven beers with a friend at Smiley’s bar in Rivesville before driving to a mall in neighboring Monongalia County to buy one of his daughters a CD for her birthday. He hit a Jeep Grand Cherokee and then a pine tree. “I had one hell of a headache.”

The inch-thick Monongalia County Circuit Court file on Willis Shoemaker is a window not just into his life but also into Jason’s home life. It contains psychiatric evaluations and notes from support-group meetings Shoemaker attended before sentencing. He wanted to show the court that he was working hard to get his life in order.

On June 1, 1998, Shoemaker admitted himself into Chestnut Ridge Hospital, a psychiatric facility tucked behind Ruby Memorial Hospital where his wife works. His statements were recorded in staff intake and release reports. It was reported that Shoemaker was one of six children and had been drinking alcohol and smoking dope since high school. He also told hospital staffers he felt “ignored as a child by his dad.”

“He states that his dad always had time for his brother, but did not have time for him,” according to the report. He reported trying to hang himself at the age of 12.

His records report that he admitted to a 20-year “on and off” drinking history, with a two-year stint at going cold turkey that ended three years before. He said it took 18 beers to get him drunk, and that was how much he had downed just the previous Friday. He also reported being “a daily pot smoker” for “at least 20 years” with a drug history that included experiments with cocaine, hallucinogens and inhalants. He said alcoholism ran in the family, afflicting his brothers and father — though he said that his father had been sober for 20 years.

At home, the reports show, there were big problems. He reported that he was “having marital problems with his wife, thinking she spends more time with the kids than him and has lost interest in sex.” Asked if he had homicidal thoughts, he replied: “towards my wife.”

The records note: “Although he has not been crying, he has been very sad.”

“His wife complains of a personality change when he drinks,” one report reads. “The patient reports that he has ‘hit bottom’ again. He wants to get his life back.”

The attending social worker recommended that Shoemaker stay at the hospital because of his “depressive symptoms.” He stayed for 10 days and then began outpatient treatment that included support-group meetings at the hospital and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in town, at a former furniture store with its name, “Loving,” still on the front.

On June 16, 1998, his outpatient report stated: “Sober 16 days.”

But then less than a month later, his report showed he “smoked pot yesterday, attributed to depression.” The report reads: “Did not discuss problem w/ anyone & kept pot in home ‘just in case.’ … Feels the energy to do things comes from Pot!”

He also regularly struggled with feelings of guilt over what he had done to his family. “He feels that they have to pay for something that he did,” according to a report.

On Dec. 16, he discussed “issues regarding his son who was kicked off the basketball team.”

Shoemaker “seemed to vacillate between believing that discussing the issue with the coach was appropriate as opposed to becoming physically aggressive with the coach,” according to a report. He “feels as though he let his son down by not becoming physically aggressive with him.”

On Feb. 17, 1999, with a jail sentence approaching, “He thinks his kids will be ashamed of him, if he goes to jail. He connected his alcoholism to family dysfunction.” Later, Shoemaker “became tearful” after telling his support group of “his satisfaction fulfilling his role as husband and father more fully since he has been sober.”

In March 1999, Shoemaker pleaded guilty to more charges of DUI and driving with a revoked license. Shoemaker’s social workers gave him an optimistic diagnosis of “alcohol dependence in early full remission,” and he reported with pride to his support group that he took his wife out on a bowling date.

A relapse prevention therapist at West Virginia University’s School of Medicine also chimed in with a letter to the court, reporting that Shoemaker had “made tremendous progress in his recovery.”

“He has improved his relationship with his three school-aged children” and “has shown insight into how his drinking has affected the lives of others and is taking responsibility and ownership of his disease.” Going to jail “will severely disrupt a family” that “is slowly healing from the effects of alcohol.”

The court was not so sympathetic. Shoemaker was sentenced to one year in the county jail, and one year to three years in the state penitentiary, consecutive to the county jail sentence. He was released to attend alcohol treatment counseling sessions and work at his job as a contractor at Morgantown Heating, Cooling and Plumbing, most often walking the couple of miles from the jail up a steep hill to his job. By September of 1999, hospital records show, he had been sober for a year. In April, the court granted him electronic home incarceration for the balance of his sentence.

Long ago, Willis Shoemaker could see he wasn’t setting a good example for his son. When Jason was 13 Willis suspected his son was smoking, and he told the group he believed his son “has an attitude problem and does not want to follow in his father’s footsteps.”

Two years later: Jason and his father sit at home wearing matching electronic ankle bracelets.

David Parker’s father, William Lee Parker, is called “Parker Bill” to distinguish him from all the other area Parkers. Just after police discovered Warren’s battered body up by the bridge on the morning of July 4, Parker Bill drove the two alleged murderers, David and Jared Wilson, out the other end of town, to the Fourth of July festivities in nearby Fairview.

First, they stopped at a cousin’s trailer, located behind the Fairview fire hall, for a Parker family party. David told a relative he had dropped out of North Marion High School but was taking vocational technical education classes and intended on taking his GED. Jared shuffled his feet quietly and tugged at the brim of his baseball cap.

Soon, the boys left the gathering and wandered off. Just before the local parade started at 10 a.m., David ran into his kindergarten teacher and played a guessing game to see if she could recognize him.

Then, a local cop ran into one of Parker Bill’s first cousins, 60-year-old Bob Parker, behind the fire hall listening to a lay preacher speak, and told him that the cops were looking for Parker Bill. “Tell him to get down to the house because something important’s happened,” the cop said.

Cousin Bob found Parker Bill nearby, telling him, “You’re wanted at home. It’s important.”

“What’s it about?” Parker Bill asked.

“I don’t know,” said his cousin, who suspected it might have involved David, thinking he might have been picked up for drugs. Parker Bill drove back home and, upon hearing the allegations being made about his son, fell to the floor.

The Parker family house at 101 View Ave. has seen its share of problems. On the night of April 4, 1995, when David was 12, the Marion County Sheriff’s Department advised officers to watch for a blue 1970 Chevy Nova hot rod allegedly being driven by an apparently intoxicated Parker Bill, who was “threatening to shoot people.”

On Route 17 outside of town, Parker Bill illegally passed a vehicle on a double yellow line “at a high rate of speed.”

When he was finally stopped, he failed a horizontal gaze test, one-leg stand test and a walk-and-turn test. At 9:06 p.m., his alcohol level registered at 0.246, more than double the legal level. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of DUI and his license was suspended until September of that year, by which time he had completed the West Virginia Alcohol Safety and Treatment Program. He had to pay a fine of $262 and spend 24 hours in the Marion County Jail.

The next day, Parker Bill’s wife, Kathy, filed a complaint against her husband, “alleging abuse or danger” the night before at 101 View Ave.

“Bill had a fight in a bar. Blamed me. Was very drunk,” she wrote. “Bill accused me of hireing [sic] someone to kill him after he got beat up. He’s been having Vietnam flashbacks. Has been drinking excesively [sic] and acting very strange.”

She ended by writing: “He threatened to go get a gun” and “shoot everyone who has caused him problems. Because of past abuse I am scared for my life.”

Kathy requested that the court prohibit Parker Bill “from abusing me and/or the other person(s) named in this petition.” She sought temporary possession of 101 View Ave., $200 a week in child support, temporary custody of her two sons and only supervised visitation by her husband. The petition listed sons Brian, who was 15, and David, who was then just 12. Less than a month later, David’s mother filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences.”

The divorce was finalized quickly, and Parker Bill got custody of Brian, while Kathy, who was unemployed, won custody of David, $157.34 in monthly child custody payments and $700 in legal fees Parker Bill had to pay her. Parker Bill, meanwhile, who listed his monthly income at $764.57, won use of the garage at 101 View Ave.

After his divorce, Parker Bill moved a few doors down the road on Main Street from first cousin Gary Parker. The Parkers will admit they’re not a tightknit extended family, but Gary remembers a change in his cousin after he returned from Vietnam, including an increase in his drinking. “The war changed him a lot. He never talked about it with me, but I could see that he was a little different,” he says. “Anybody in town will tell you he’s a good, decent fellow, hardworking and pretty loyal. Everybody’s got a little complication in their life.”

Cousin Bob, meanwhile, found God and became a devout Christian, but he says, “I know something about alcohol and violence in coal mining towns, having experienced it firsthand.”

One night out drinking in his youth, he got stabbed. His dad used to call alcohol “courage juice,” says Cousin Bob, a retired Ohio school psychologist, who says young cousins David and Jared were small guys who struggled with bad school grades and battles with authority. That doesn’t even factor in a broken home, drugs and alcohol.

“It’s a dangerous, dark and dirty combination,” he says. “The only guy they could beat up in Grant Town was J.R.”

Two Saturdays after the murder, Jason is home alone. It’s a clear evening on View Avenue. A neighbor rakes his lawn. At a nearby house, the mayor’s son works outside in his driveway. The blaring TV at Jason’s house can be heard near the end of the dead-end road.

There’s a large cardboard carton on the side porch, a lace curtain over the window on the side door and a bird feeder dangling at the porch’s edge. When a visitor knocks, it takes Jason a few knocks to hear the door. When he arrives at the door, he is just another teenager in the middle of a hot summer, bare-chested, with long droopy Champion athletic shorts hanging so low that the elastic of his boxers peeks out and, of course, an electronic bracelet strapped around his right ankle.

He is polite and has a calm demeanor, leaning on the side door. He can’t talk about any details related to the murder, he says. The judge has instructed all parties not to talk about the case. Some details are already known, including Jason’s confession of his involvement in the crime.

He didn’t have to do it. The local police originally said the case seemed like a hit and run, and there’s a possibility no one — the media, the activists and certainly not the Warren family — would ever really know what happened otherwise. He has no great pride in going to the police; his reaction is swift: “It was the right thing to do, even though I knew all three of them.”

Some gray rabbits hop by. Jason explains they were a neighbor’s pet rabbits that got loose, and have since turned wild. He says he knew Warren from around town, but didn’t know the Warren family at all.

There are a few rumors buzzing around the neighborhood that Jason has heard. David, according to the rumors, allegedly threatened to hurt Jason’s two younger sisters if he squealed.

“Nah, he never said anything about my sisters,” Jason says.

But David threatened him, right? “Yeah,” Jason says in a long drawl, blinking through thick curly lashes.

There are also rumors that Jason obsessively washes his hands, because of the memory of cleaning up Warren’s spilled blood. He’s already heard that rumor. “None of that is true,” he says.

He speaks softly with a steady gaze. He says he’s been going to church some, and gives a reporter directions to Noah’s Ark, a Pentecostal church outside Fairview. Soon, the town mayor, a neighbor, comes over to find out who the stranger is talking to Jason. He asks him, “Are you OK talking with this lady?”

“Yeah,” Jason drawls.

The next morning, Jason’s mother, Norma, does indeed drive him to Noah’s Ark. The sign on the grassy knoll out front reads “Find Love Here.” This is where Jason plays basketball on Friday nights, in a slick new gymnasium where the church’s band, Flames of Fire, practices. Rules to the gym on the front bulletin board are explicit (“1. Adults are in charge”) and inspirations are taped up in every corner. (“The Dragon Slayer and the God of Peace shall soon crush Satan under your feet,” a quote from Romans 16:20.) The youth pastor here counseled Jason, at Norma’s request, after the alleged murder.

The Sunday before, Norma had gone forward during services for a special blessing from the pastor, fiery grandmother Louise Tennant, known as “Pastor Louise.” Pastor Louise asked her if she had declared the “Sinner’s Prayer,” which is an initiation as a born-again Christian. She told her she had.

Jason sits in the second to last pew on the left side, atop a long mauve cushion. He blends in with the rest of the boys in the youth ministry who always sit there. Beyond his distinguishably long lashes, it’s obvious that it’s Jason. Between the cuff of his black denim jeans and the top of his black Nike sneakers, Jason itches at his white athletic sock, where his ankle bracelet makes a slight impression. A stud earring glistens in his left ear along with a tiny hoop.

A couple of guys pop green Tic Tacs, a trick to stay awake. To a visitor, everything seems filled with meaning. David and Jason’s kindergarten teacher softly plays background music on the piano as Pastor Louise strolls from the front, where Jason’s mother sits, to the back, where Jason is.

“I pray the devil will stay away from your doorstep!” she shouts.

She stops eerily next to Jason’s pew. “Will you seek forgiveness for your sins?” she asks softly. “Jesus will give you redemption!”

She speaks in a murmur: “Say, ‘Lord, I am sorry. Take away all my pain. Heal me with your Holy Spirit.’ Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

What’s happened in Grant Town can make for a heyday for any sociologist or activist — or even a journalist — determined to prove a point. But what’s clear about the death of J.R. Warren is that other, fairly banal factors — drugs, alcohol and the problems that come with a troubled family background — probably played a more important role in Warren’s untimely death than homophobia or racism did. It’s simpler, and surely more dramatic, to see it as a crime motivated purely by an unimaginable hate. It’s more realistic to see it as the product of society’s own, self-perpetuating cycle of violence.

At Noah’s Ark, amid the sadness, there seems to be a real hope for Jason Shoemaker. Whatever can be learned of the murder is the result of his willingness to come forward, risking his own safety, in a young life where doing the right thing hasn’t always been the obvious choice. It’s a dim light of optimism, but it’s one that members of this congregation cling to.

“Did you see? He was looking straight at me,” Pastor Louise says after the service.

Back in Grant Town, at Mount Beulah Baptist Church, an unexpected visitor slips into a back pew. It’s cousin Bob Parker. Before the end of the service, the Rev. Staples motions for him to speak to the congregation.

“I am sorry,” he says to the congregation. “I am here to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the Parker family.” The congregation sits quietly and a woman gets up and gives him a hug. Brenda Warren sits stoic and silent in the front.