1
She smothered me with her affections and her affectations, no doubt expecting marriage and a life away from the sooty skies and endless hours of working in a dark coal basement by the light of sulfur, her lungs growing blacker and her heart growing weary, even in her early twenties. She was pretty, for a poor young woman, as I was perhaps handsome for a poor youth, and we found our pleasure by meeting in the woods and sheep meadows behind the shambling manor houses on the hillside. It was a dangerous meeting. Many a boy had an ear cut off for wandering on the landowner’s property. Still, it was early spring and the master of the house was off in distant London. The youth of the area often dallied there, finding the warmth of lust in the tall grasses, or against a rock, or behind the old stone wall overlooking the paddock. I recall now that she swore like a boatswain in a brothel when I brought my greater self into her, and she clutched me around the middle and whispered obscenities that would’ve made a whore blush.
This was my first rite of manhood, the chief pleasure of one who worked from four in the morning until eight at night from the age of eight years onward. It was the only happy moment of my life at home. Pleasure, physical pleasure, taught me that there was more to the world than what I had known. The stroking, the rocking, the gentle tug of war between her skin and mine, the lapping of tongues and the wet feeling between us, and within my own body, the building of pressure into an explosion . . . it is not a subject that the world speaks much of, but for those of us who are born to want, it is the first we know that within our own beings, we can create our own worlds. The flesh itself provides knowledge, entertainment, craft, and heaven.
Pleasure led me to pleasure.
My next chief pleasure became learning.
I learned about physical pleasure then, but books were more my calling. I taught myself to read by quizzing the local schoolmistress, and eventually seducing her as well. She was not more than two years my senior, and we had bouts of pleasure in bed, on the floor, against the schoolroom wall. She taught me what I had not been able to learn in many years of our one-room schoolhouse. She brought me great books and Latin primers. She met my thrusts with declarations taken from Shakespeare and Marlowe. We sweated against each other, making ungodly noises that would surely make the angels weep, as I made her read me Paradise Lost. This was my earliest blasphemy, for we moved on to the original Italian of Dante’s Inferno, and I was never not inside her body as she taught me that foreign tongue with her own tongue.
My love of England grew as she cupped me in her hands and whispered sonnets and lusty ballads of medieval origin in my ear.
2
In the meantime, I managed to work the mines fewer hours, and instead took on shoemaking and clock-fixing work, as I was fairly mechanically inclined. I found a burning within me to learn more, do more, make more money, and find more pleasure. I found pleasure in things outside the bedroom, in whatever new that I could learn, whatever theory I could grasp. I borrowed books on physics and naturalism from the manor’s library, whose master had begun to enjoy my company as I repaired his mistress’s boot, or worked on the great clock in his grand hall.
My sexual companion, whom I shall, for discretion’s sake, call Miss French or Bootsy, as I called her for the peculiarly tromping but elegant lady’s boot she wore, didn’t like my other work.
She felt that I should be available to her for her pleasure and to assuage her never-quenched loneliness.
Eventually, we tired of each other, for I had learned more from her than she had from me. And the scandal came out—from her own mouth, for she could not refrain from boasting to her sewing circle that she regularly trapped the most handsome youth in our little village and intended to marry him once she was with child. These were not enlightened times, and although every schoolboy knew of the factory girls and their easy ways, we had fire and brimstone on Sundays and were taught that our lower regions were tools of Satan, who longed to misguide us and condemn us to eternal perdition.
It was a horrifying moment for me, to walk into our hovel and have my mother slap me for “that devilry,” and for my father to want to throw me bodily from the house. In some families, fathers might be proud of their son’s swordsmanship, but my father was puritanical and harsh to each of us, and believed we were the stain of sin for his having married someone not Methodist but “of the Roman scourge,” as he called the Catholic Church. We children were mongrels, unworthy of salvation, unworthy of anything but lifelong penitence.
My father and I began fighting, arguing, throwing chairs—of which we had few to spare—and cursing at each other. My mother sat in the corner and wept as my father chastised me for my ways, and I crowed about wanting to leave this graveyard of a home. Finally, I drew out my trump card.
The bones themselves would speak.
3
I dashed through the back window and ran to the outhouse. Digging through the rags, I picked up the bundle of my brother’s bones and sped straightaway back into the house, like a monkey leaping tree to tree. I held the small sack up, crowing, “I know what happened to Lloyd!”
My father put his hands on his hips, eyeing me with suspicion. “What are you yapping about?”
“What you did! What you did to him! My brother. My twin brother. I know it wasn’t the Miasma!” With this I opened the sack, and poured my brother out onto the hearthstone, near my mother, who screamed when she saw it. Although I had some remorse for this overly dramatic revelation, I felt it was the moment that needed to happen. The truth had to come out! I had to throw in their faces what I had known and kept secret for several years.
“And what is it you think you know, you worthless whelp?” His voice had quieted a bit, but was like an incision in a fresh wound: sharp and painful and precise. “What is it you think you’ve discovered?”
“Dear God!” my mother cried out, all of a sudden. “He died of the Miasma. It was terrible. Dear God in heaven!” Her sobs were now peppered with little shrieks of agony, the like of which I had never before heard from anyone.
“No,” I said, feeling triumphant to finally bring this to light. “He didn’t. You knew it.” I pointed at my father as a judge to the convicted. “You killed him. You bashed his head in. You murdered my brother! You didn’t even have the decency to baptize him! You buried him in secret, in the night! You monster!”
My father shook his head, glaring at me all the while. “You fool,” he spat. “Is this how you repay your mother for caring for you, for cleaning you, for feeding you? Is this how you repay us for giving you food and shelter and a Christian upbringing?”
“You’re a monster!” I shouted at him, pointing my finger as if laying a curse.
“Look at you,” he said. “Look at you, grave-digging, stirring things up, lifting the skirts of the local whores and ruining girls, generating bastards for all we know. You, my boy, are the monster.”
My mother’s weeping increased, and she covered her face with her hands. Through her heaving sobs, I heard her say the Hail Mary.
Monstrously, my father began laughing, roaring loud. “You want to know what happened to your twin? You want to know why he is in that grave and you are not?” Turning to my mother, he said, “Why don’t you tell him, my love? Why don’t you let your son know why he is alive and his twin lies in the graves of the angels?”
I looked at my mother, but her face was covered and her weeping copious. I was torturing her with this, I felt. I had not wanted to reach this position of uncorking the family vintage, of raising my brother’s death and its mystery, but I had done so, nonetheless. Her heartache was readily apparent, and I realized I was the curse of the household.
I did not belong there anymore.
What surprised me the most in all this was that my father did not raise his hand against me. I almost had the feeling he was frightened of me now.
I went to embrace my mother, but her trembling body seemed unwelcoming. I gathered my brother’s bones, as many as I could quickly grab, including his skull and ribcage, and put them in the sack.
My father had calmed, although his eyes smoldered as he watched me.
“I am leaving. For good,” I said.
My father bid me good riddance, saying I was far too old to be sharing their roof anyway, that my older brothers had left at fourteen and I should have followed their examples and that I had brought heartache and damnation into his home.
I left, with my mother’s sobs like a banshee’s wail, following me along the streets of the village.
I thought of Lloyd, the small bones in the sack bundle and the chips of his gentle barely formed skull pushed in, smashed. I felt confused by my father’s taunting, but my mother’s tears had been unequivocal. That my father had killed him seemed certain. Or did it? Had my mother, perhaps, murdered him? Why had my father laughed at mention of his death? My mind conjured possibilities: that my mother, with two babies still nursing, and now twins, had not enough milk to go around. Or perhaps she had been sick after our births and had dropped my brother, or again, the thought that a surgeon had been called to relieve some pressure on his brain. Why had my father laughed? What monster would laugh when remembering the death of his child?
I had no answers still.
Whatever had happened to my brother would remain a mystery, for I would abandon the family of my birth and seek my fortune in the world.