When We Were Animals by Joshua Gaylord Read Free Book Online Page A

lascivious words to each other, to the night, to those holed up in houses. They fought with each other, brutally. They went into the woods to engage in acts of sex.
    My father referred to the full-moon nights as bacchanals, but a bacchanal, I learned from the encyclopedia, had to do with Dionysus, the wine god, and it refers specifically to drunken revelries. The breachers were almost never drunk—unless they had gotten drunk before the sun went down. Their indulgences came from a place deeper than wine or virtue or vice.
    The mornings after the full-moon nights, the breachers found their ways home and were tended to by their parents, who understood that this was the way of the town and there was nothing to be done about it. Sometimes people got hurt, sometimes seriously—and it was accepted that the damage was simply a physical corollary of the deleterious effects of getting older and being alive in the world. My town had a certain secret pride in that it refused to cosmeticize the realities of adulthood.
    And of course the breach was temporary—it was just a stage. It occurred only three nights a month, and for each individual it lasted only for around a year. After that time you were a true adult, and the next time the full moon rose you stayed inside with the others and listened to the howls in the distance and were only just reminded of your time in the wild.
    Some people called it coming of age—as though you were ageless prior to that time, as though aging were something you enter by going through a doorway. Did that mean that coming of age was the beginning of dying? I looked it up in the encyclopedia—all the cultural and religious rituals associated with coming of age. In Christianity there were confirmations, in Judaism bar mitzvahs. The Apache had a process called na’ii’ees—which was a beautiful word to look at—but that was just for girls, and I never found what the boys’ equivalent was. The Amish had their Rumspringa—and this was as close to our breaching as I was able to find. The sober toleration of wildness. The trial by fire. The wide-eyed gaze upon the violent and colorful sins of the world. Some of the articles I read directed me to something that seemed at first to have nothing to do with coming-of-age rites: mass hysteria. Some people believed that such rituals were related to the kind of localized group thought that led to the Salem witch trials. For my part, I never knew how you could tell an illegitimate witch from a real Jesus or vice versa, so I was always careful to give concession to any magic that might be at hand.
    I asked my father why it was called a breaching, and he did not know. It had just always been called that, he said.
    I found nothing about it in the encyclopedia, of course, but right where the article on breaching should have been there was instead an article on breeching—which was a rite of passage for boys who grew up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was called breeching because it was the first time in their lives that the boys wore breeches, or pants. Up until that point they wore little dressing gowns. I was tickled by the idea of all those mighty men in history, like Louis XIV, growing up in dresses—I had not known such a thing occurred. Breeching happened earlier, though, between the ages of two and five. Still, it was considered a significant moment in the boys’ development into men.
    So I liked thinking our breaching was related somehow to that antique practice.
    Of course the difference in spelling must have been significant. I looked up breach in the dictionary. “A legal infraction.” Definitely. “A break or a rupture.” Plenty was broken, plenty ruptured. “A fissure made in a fortification.” That one stumped me for a while until it occurred to me that the civilized world, the daytime world, is a kind of fortification against nature and night and brutishness—then it made sense.
    But it was the fifth definition of the word that