Will Leggat (17)
No More Sinners, No More Saints
I sunk back into the warm water and brought the book down with me. At five years old, I didn’t quite realize what a bad move that was. At five years old, I also didn’t care. I read the sopping pages until the ink ran too fast for me to follow. D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, before its pages were too warped to read, taught me what the world had in store before I knew there was a world outside my apartment. It told me that every villain in the world came with a hero, and every hero with a villain. Good and evil incarnate lived in Olympus and in Hades. On Earth, you could be one or the other without much room for in-between.
But, for all they taught me, I can no longer subscribe to the fantasies of my childhood. No, I wish I could say that the myths D’Aulaire’s taught me were true. I wish the binary of good and evil could be that defined, or that it could even be accurate. Unfortunately, I did not learn the truth about the nature of the world when I was five. And I don’t claim to know it now. But when I passed a Hudson News on my flight home from school, fumbled out the money my grandma had sent me for my birthday, and slipped Tara Westover’s Educated into my backpack, I took a step closer to that truth by taking a step away from the myths I had been taught.
In Educated, I saw complicated people. I saw Gene, a father who wanted the best for his children, but who didn’t know what that meant. I saw Shawn, a brother torn between his anger and his love. I saw a family divided by their inability to accept each other’s faults alongside their virtues; I saw the consequences of believing in the myth of good and evil.
When I was a child, it was easy for me to assign the roles; in my own mythology, my dad was the good guy, my stepdad the villain. When my parents divorced, my stepdad was filling shoes he wasn’t quite meant for. To me, he was taking a place—stealing something from my dad—and, in doing so, stealing a family from me. After their marriage, seeing more of him confirmed what I had thought. But when he started to lose his temper, when he took it out on me, my stepdad didn’t actually become any eviler—he just reaffirmed the role I’d already placed him in.
Each summer, I’d visit my dad in San Francisco and spend each day in awe of this man I barely knew. He was good, I thought, just because. That’s not to say my affection wasn’t deserved—I still love my dad, and for good reason, but his “goodness” was no more earned than it was me finding what seemed a necessary counterpart to my stepdad: since the evil existed at home in New York, there had to be good in San Francisco. So, at nine, when I watched my dad lose his battle with colon cancer, I cried uncomplicated tears.
In May of 2016, I left class early. My teacher answered a phone call from the front desk and told me to pack my bag, and I joined my mom in the car not knowing what to expect. The day itself was unremarkable: the sky was dotted with clouds but mostly clear; it was just mildly warm. Maybe it’s fitting, then, that the news didn’t come with the same weight as it had when I was nine. When my dad died, it rained and I cried. When my stepdad died, I balanced between emotions—a sense of relief, a sense of complicated grief; I kept a blank stare that admitted nothing.
The car pulled into a driveway I didn’t recognize filled with some faces that I did—my stepbrothers: 9, 17, 20 years old, and their families. I felt out of place—if it was the bond of marriage that joined us, then what were we now? Was my younger stepbrother still my brother? He walked over to me, and I knew the answer as I held him in my arms, as I felt his sobs rise and fall on my chest.
Later that night, as he fell in and out of sleep on my lap, I watched history repeat itself. I saw my face in his, saw him cry as I had at nine. And I realized, regardless of who my stepdad was or what impact he and his actions had on me, he was gone. I would not pretend that our past did not exist; I would not and still don’t forgive all the memories my stepdad has left me with. But I determined then, as my brother rubbed the last of the first set of tears from his eyes, that this man could not have been wholly evil. At least not in the sense that I imagined that word.
The reality is that “good” and “evil” are caricatures. They suggest absolutes that reality often fails to replicate. For all the times I felt scared to go home, there were as many times that I listened with admiration as my stepdad related some advice or laughed as he cracked a joke. But because the nature of each of those words negates any sense of an in-between, because we imagine them so separately, I find it so hard to remember the good times. Any recollection of a happy memory seems to diminish the gravity of a painful one.
But I don’t think it has to. In my mind, there is a nuance that escapes these words, a nuance that the language we use should aim to address. When I relate stories of my family to my friends, they often jump to their own moral conclusions. Recognizing good and evil has become a badge of merit in itself—it makes one a good judge of character. But if people must be either sinners or saints, we end up excusing behavior that seems uncharacteristic of them.
Two years ago, I went back to San Francisco for the first time since my dad’s death. My mom and I walked to Crissy Field, and I knew that each step I was taking was filling the same footsteps I had each year before. We found the spot where we had spread his ashes six years ago and laid a bouquet of yellow roses—my mom and dad were big fans of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey—across a tree that’d fallen nearby. While we listened to “Creep,” play on repeat, my mom and I talked and watched the waves roll in and out of the bay. I learned that day that my dad did not leave to California out of choice. He had cheated on my mom.
For a long time after, I couldn’t accept that. There was a dissonance between the man I had loved—even after his death—and the man who had actually existed, and I couldn’t rationalize the one with the other. It was easier to deny the “evil” and cling to the good I thought he represented. But in Educated, I learned there was another option: to deny both and accept the good in him and the evil in him as facets of a larger identity rather than as identities in themselves. When Tara left home, when she traveled from degree to degree and, eventually, when she left her family behind, she did not idolize her memories of home. But she did not demonize them either. She accepted them for what they were: complicated, flawed, human.
If we continue to believe in this myth of good and evil, if we continue to place an emphasis on that binary, we risk not only mischaracterizing those who lie somewhere in the middle, but also excusing acts that fall at either end. My father was not a hero, my stepfather was not a villain. Each was great and each was awful in their own wicked, human ways, and I do their memories a disservice when I remember them for anything but the totality of who they were.
So, I don’t want to enforce these categories anymore. I will no longer play into these myths: good and evil just aren’t good enough.
Will Leggat is a seventeen-year-old high school senior from Brooklyn, New York who attends Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he is the editor-in-chief of his school’s literary magazine, The Courant. He is also a graduate of the 2018 Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the 2019 Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and has received a National Silver Medal from the Scholastic Writing Awards for his fiction, which primarily focuses on issues of family, grief, and belonging. In addition, Will is a Prose Reader for The Adroit Journal and a Second Reader for Polyphony Lit, and his work has previously been published in Rare Byrd Review and The Daphne Review.
No More Sinners, No More Saints
I sunk back into the warm water and brought the book down with me. At five years old, I didn’t quite realize what a bad move that was. At five years old, I also didn’t care. I read the sopping pages until the ink ran too fast for me to follow. D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, before its pages were too warped to read, taught me what the world had in store before I knew there was a world outside my apartment. It told me that every villain in the world came with a hero, and every hero with a villain. Good and evil incarnate lived in Olympus and in Hades. On Earth, you could be one or the other without much room for in-between.
But, for all they taught me, I can no longer subscribe to the fantasies of my childhood. No, I wish I could say that the myths D’Aulaire’s taught me were true. I wish the binary of good and evil could be that defined, or that it could even be accurate. Unfortunately, I did not learn the truth about the nature of the world when I was five. And I don’t claim to know it now. But when I passed a Hudson News on my flight home from school, fumbled out the money my grandma had sent me for my birthday, and slipped Tara Westover’s Educated into my backpack, I took a step closer to that truth by taking a step away from the myths I had been taught.
In Educated, I saw complicated people. I saw Gene, a father who wanted the best for his children, but who didn’t know what that meant. I saw Shawn, a brother torn between his anger and his love. I saw a family divided by their inability to accept each other’s faults alongside their virtues; I saw the consequences of believing in the myth of good and evil.
When I was a child, it was easy for me to assign the roles; in my own mythology, my dad was the good guy, my stepdad the villain. When my parents divorced, my stepdad was filling shoes he wasn’t quite meant for. To me, he was taking a place—stealing something from my dad—and, in doing so, stealing a family from me. After their marriage, seeing more of him confirmed what I had thought. But when he started to lose his temper, when he took it out on me, my stepdad didn’t actually become any eviler—he just reaffirmed the role I’d already placed him in.
Each summer, I’d visit my dad in San Francisco and spend each day in awe of this man I barely knew. He was good, I thought, just because. That’s not to say my affection wasn’t deserved—I still love my dad, and for good reason, but his “goodness” was no more earned than it was me finding what seemed a necessary counterpart to my stepdad: since the evil existed at home in New York, there had to be good in San Francisco. So, at nine, when I watched my dad lose his battle with colon cancer, I cried uncomplicated tears.
In May of 2016, I left class early. My teacher answered a phone call from the front desk and told me to pack my bag, and I joined my mom in the car not knowing what to expect. The day itself was unremarkable: the sky was dotted with clouds but mostly clear; it was just mildly warm. Maybe it’s fitting, then, that the news didn’t come with the same weight as it had when I was nine. When my dad died, it rained and I cried. When my stepdad died, I balanced between emotions—a sense of relief, a sense of complicated grief; I kept a blank stare that admitted nothing.
The car pulled into a driveway I didn’t recognize filled with some faces that I did—my stepbrothers: 9, 17, 20 years old, and their families. I felt out of place—if it was the bond of marriage that joined us, then what were we now? Was my younger stepbrother still my brother? He walked over to me, and I knew the answer as I held him in my arms, as I felt his sobs rise and fall on my chest.
Later that night, as he fell in and out of sleep on my lap, I watched history repeat itself. I saw my face in his, saw him cry as I had at nine. And I realized, regardless of who my stepdad was or what impact he and his actions had on me, he was gone. I would not pretend that our past did not exist; I would not and still don’t forgive all the memories my stepdad has left me with. But I determined then, as my brother rubbed the last of the first set of tears from his eyes, that this man could not have been wholly evil. At least not in the sense that I imagined that word.
The reality is that “good” and “evil” are caricatures. They suggest absolutes that reality often fails to replicate. For all the times I felt scared to go home, there were as many times that I listened with admiration as my stepdad related some advice or laughed as he cracked a joke. But because the nature of each of those words negates any sense of an in-between, because we imagine them so separately, I find it so hard to remember the good times. Any recollection of a happy memory seems to diminish the gravity of a painful one.
But I don’t think it has to. In my mind, there is a nuance that escapes these words, a nuance that the language we use should aim to address. When I relate stories of my family to my friends, they often jump to their own moral conclusions. Recognizing good and evil has become a badge of merit in itself—it makes one a good judge of character. But if people must be either sinners or saints, we end up excusing behavior that seems uncharacteristic of them.
Two years ago, I went back to San Francisco for the first time since my dad’s death. My mom and I walked to Crissy Field, and I knew that each step I was taking was filling the same footsteps I had each year before. We found the spot where we had spread his ashes six years ago and laid a bouquet of yellow roses—my mom and dad were big fans of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey—across a tree that’d fallen nearby. While we listened to “Creep,” play on repeat, my mom and I talked and watched the waves roll in and out of the bay. I learned that day that my dad did not leave to California out of choice. He had cheated on my mom.
For a long time after, I couldn’t accept that. There was a dissonance between the man I had loved—even after his death—and the man who had actually existed, and I couldn’t rationalize the one with the other. It was easier to deny the “evil” and cling to the good I thought he represented. But in Educated, I learned there was another option: to deny both and accept the good in him and the evil in him as facets of a larger identity rather than as identities in themselves. When Tara left home, when she traveled from degree to degree and, eventually, when she left her family behind, she did not idolize her memories of home. But she did not demonize them either. She accepted them for what they were: complicated, flawed, human.
If we continue to believe in this myth of good and evil, if we continue to place an emphasis on that binary, we risk not only mischaracterizing those who lie somewhere in the middle, but also excusing acts that fall at either end. My father was not a hero, my stepfather was not a villain. Each was great and each was awful in their own wicked, human ways, and I do their memories a disservice when I remember them for anything but the totality of who they were.
So, I don’t want to enforce these categories anymore. I will no longer play into these myths: good and evil just aren’t good enough.
Will Leggat is a seventeen-year-old high school senior from Brooklyn, New York who attends Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he is the editor-in-chief of his school’s literary magazine, The Courant. He is also a graduate of the 2018 Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the 2019 Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and has received a National Silver Medal from the Scholastic Writing Awards for his fiction, which primarily focuses on issues of family, grief, and belonging. In addition, Will is a Prose Reader for The Adroit Journal and a Second Reader for Polyphony Lit, and his work has previously been published in Rare Byrd Review and The Daphne Review.