My Father, Edgar

Edgar was the middle son and he was a bull. In youth he swerved very early and took up the father's likeness, and learned to drink and love women And learned the street and how to make money. He was young and fierce, and feared none in the fray for he was fast to win over beast or man. A friend with a good laugh, an enemy with heavy hand yet in his vices was his life lost, and his doom with his hands wrought. How Marie his old good mother used to wait for him night after night as he was out, and how late was his sorrow and love when she finally came to die. He married a young sweetheart of town beauty. and they fell in love. She was named Helena, and had white arms and lovely curls. He was too brath a lover for her tenderness for so often did he hurt her heart and nested in other arms. But Helena bore him two sons. and he was but loving at whiles, yet what his heart longed for was something else. In three years Ariel, come of age, chanced to leave father and go with mother, but Jesus had married young and now had a family, and Edgar was left alone in that house, with years to pass he remembered the joys where he was now bitter and weary and struck the walls and cursed the day, and drank himself numb and cried, for what he had lost, and what he had become.