Born Beneath an Unlucky Star

I was born beneath an unlucky star.

You may think that an ordinary thing to say. Many people claim the moon looked thin when they were born, or that the crows cried from the chimney, or that some old woman in a shawl crossed herself at the door and said, “That child will suffer.” People are greedy for tragedy when it makes them look chosen.

But mine was true (at least my mother told me so often enough).

She said the wind howled when I came into the world, that the shutters banged as though the night itself objected, and that by morning the milk had curdled, the bread had gone stale, and my father had disappeared into the woods for three whole days. She did not say this tenderly. She said it with a look I came to know very well: that narrow, pinched, exhausted look of a woman who believes she has been personally insulted by the shape of her own life.

From the beginning, then, I understood two things.
First: I was meant for a grand and terrible fate.
Second: no one would help me bear it properly.

This is how a man learns to suffer beautifully.

As a child, I was delicate. The other boys said lazy, but boys are cattle-hearted things and mistake refinement for weakness. I could not be expected to carry pails as they did. The handles bit into my hands. I could not chop wood in winter. The axe blistered my palms. I could not rise before dawn. My body rejected harshness. Whenever I explained this, the adults only sighed.

Do you know what it means to be sighed at?

It is a cruelty too small for courts and too sharp for knives.