him, “Hold out your hand,” and he did. He could feel the heat from the kitchen stove; he could see the deep gouges in the kitchen table from which his mother scrubbed away, every day, every trace of human hunger. His hand was steady and his trust was infinite. He was six years old.
“What is hell like?” His mother’s hand flew through the stifling air of the kitchen as her son stared into her piercing eyes. She stabbed her needle deep into the soft part of his hand, at the base of his thumb, and the pain tore through his arm and into his brain, but he did not move, just watched his mother’s fierce and steady eyes.
She twisted the needle. He could feel it scrape against bone. It sent a pain like nettles in his bloodstream, through every vein of his body, straight to his heart.
Her voice was patient and loving and sad, without anger. “That’s what hell is like, son. But it’s like that all the time. Forever.”
And she took the needle out of his hand without ever taking her eyes from his and wiped it on the apron she always wore except to church. She calmly resumed her sewing. He did not cry, and they never spoke of it again. He never told his father or his brother or anybody. And he never for one moment ever forgot or forgave what she had done.
“The pain of hell never heals. It never stops burning for one second. It never goes away.”
He never forgot it because he knew she was right. Whatever happened or did not happen to his faith after that night, whatever happened as his hand got infected and swelled until yellow pus oozed from the wound and then got better, whatever happened as the scar rusted over from deep purple to a faint and tiny dot that only he could see, he knew she was right. And he never, for one moment, from that night on, he never breathed a breath without hating her.
Later, years later, when he was leaving the house to go to college, she said to him, “You were born a wicked child, so wicked I wouldn’t pick you up for a year. And you’ll grow into a wicked adult. Born wicked. Die wicked.” Then she turned and slammed the door, leaving him alone on the wide porch with his new leather valise, and he wondered how she knew, for he knew she was right.
He saw women on the street, and they were not like his mother. Their graceful necks rose from their high- collared dresses like fountains of cream; their skirts smelled of iron and naphtha and talc. When he walked downtown with his father, they would sometimes take his hand or touch his chin, and an electric current would pass through him, so exactly like, yet so different from, the pain of his mother’s needle. There was a luxuriousness in this other pain, and though he was only seven or eight, he suddenly felt languid and hot and helpless before any woman, and he didn’t know where the feeling came from and he didn’t know what to do with it, but he knew it was all he ever wanted.
The young girls he knew and was occasionally allowed to speak to were different from these women. Once he touched his finger to the finger of a neighbor’s daughter, older than he was, and he felt a sudden tingling rush to his groin, and he withdrew his hand quickly. These young girls, the ones his age, their skin was milk, not cream, and their scent was floral, without the metallic aftertaste that made the sweetness sharp, that made the sweetness burn him to the heart. At night, in bed, he kissed the skin of his own forearm, imagining he was kissing one of the women his father knew.
In his dreams, as now in his fever, the women came to him, held him in their arms. He was never apart from them. When he sat in church or ran across the schoolyard with the other boys, he knew at every minute where they stood and whether or not they were watching him.
He never spoke of it. He never talked to his brother, or his father. He knew they knew. He knew that when his mother read the long passages from the Bible which they suffered through every night and morning, he knew that his father and his brother knew as well as he what the stories were really about.
They were about how the world began with one man’s hunger for one woman, how the serpent’s venom ran through every man’s veins so that he could not forget himself in work or sleep, but only in a woman’s arms.
Lust. It was about lust, and lust was his sin, and hell would be his natural home forever. His manners were perfect; his demeanor was calm and dignified; his longings were painful beyond endurance.
At fifteen, he would bite his pillow in the dark and silent house, and scream his muffled lust until his throat hurt. His hands were tired from groping, and eight or ten times a day he would find his hands inside his pants, his pants around his ankles, his thin hips thrusting into his fist. Afterward, more times than not, he would feel the sharp stab of his mother’s needle. A pain so severe that sweat would break out on his forehead, his hands grow clammy and the small of his back damp. It was a pain that ran upward from his groin through every vein in his body, like the first sting of the nettles. And the more it happened, the more he hated God.
After that first time, he never touched a girl. He felt that the violence of his desire, the rotted malevolence of his lust would kill any woman he touched. He believed it literally, and his belief did not waver. He felt he was dying of some disease that had no symptoms and that he could not name, but he knew it would kill others as well as himself as sure as typhoid, as sure as a knife to the heart.
He was born wicked. He would die wicked. Sometimes a woman would touch him by accident, would sit with him on a step, for instance, with a thigh brushing his thigh, and he knew that this woman would die, and he would move his leg, would move away until he found himself alone in a quiet room, his pants around his ankles, the pleasure followed by the serpent’s certain fang.
His father was a man. His father had touched his mother and had not died or killed. Still, he knew what he knew.
Everywhere he turned he saw evidence and heard gross rumors that what would surely happen to him was already happening to others. Women ripped out their insides with knitting needles. Men spat in their wives’ faces and dropped dead of heart attacks. People photographed their dead babies in tiny coffins; the black silk dresses were stiff as dead flesh. Lust was a sin and sin was death and he was not alone, but he was in pain, constant pain, and there was no one to tell.
He was mistaken, of course, although he knew it only years later. Almost anyone could have told him he was wrong, if he had found a way to describe to anyone the terror he felt. If he had found someone to tell. But there were no words for it at the time, the sure and deadly mark of that serpent’s bite.
He grew tall and handsome. His father was rich, and this he learned not from his mother or father, but from the taunting of other boys in the schoolyard, in the fact that all the boys he knew had fathers who worked for his father. As strict as mothers in the town were, any mother would have sold her daughter to Ralph Truitt for a dollar.
His mother prayed over him. His father read to him from the Morte D’Arthur, the old stories of the round table and the Grail, and wanted him to be educated in the city. His sweet brother had neither the head nor the blood for business, and his father demanded that the empire he was building every day must last after his death. Ralph understood he was marked for the inheritance.
Ralph didn’t long for his father’s life. He longed for the life of Lancelot du Lac, who woke from a sleep to find four queens under four silk parasols gazing down upon him. Lancelot’s mother, the Lady of the Lake, sending him into the world to be a knight, letting him go though she loved him and feared for his soul, explained the difference between the virtues of the heart and the virtues of the body. The virtues of the body are reserved for those who are fair of face and strong of body, but the virtues of the heart, being goodness and kindness and compassion, are available to anybody.
Such is the sweetness of boys that Ralph believed these words with all his heart, even as he believed the virtues of goodness would always be denied to him, and that he would never be tall or handsome or wanted. He felt displaced in his body, homeless in his heart.
And so, Lancelot left his mother and ventured into the world, where he was strong and brave and utterly helpless in the face of women. His purity and his strength and beauty and courage were doomed to end in failure and corruption. He would never see the Holy Grail. Lancelot’s helpless lust destroyed the world, not his strength, and Ralph understood all this as his father read to him. Ralph felt the hot tears in his eyes.
Lust and luxury. In the end, the virtues of the body came easily to Ralph. Believe what he might, he was tall, and good-looking and strong and rich. The virtues of the heart were unknown to him, and through his mother’s incessant prayer, he knew, whatever they were, he would never have them. She sat in a bare church on a plain wooden bench and saw heaven. He sat next to her and thought of nothing but naked women and rich surroundings, silk parasols and fine carriages and endless pleasure.
His love of women, and his fear of them, of his death and theirs, grew into a hatred that never abated. It took away the sweet and left only the sharp. His childhood was desire and nightmare mixed inextricably.
