The Art of Living (32 page)

It wasn't until the following summer that my family visited Remsen again. Letters passed back and forth two or three a week in the meantime, Aunt Kate telling us of, among other things, Uncle Charley's gradual recovery—not as quick as it should be, she let us know—my mother sending back our family's encouragement and sometimes inspirational poems from my grandmother's magazines. When we finally went to visit it was partly because a Cymanfa Ganu—a singing festival—was to be held nearby, in Utica. At Uncle Ed's I learned to my surprise and dismay—since I disliked change, hated to see any slightest hint that the universe might not be orderly to the core, as smooth in its operations as an immense old mill—that my uncles and aunt, though they'd never before shown much interest in such things, were planning to go to the festival with my parents and grandmother. I learned it by eavesdropping. When I was supposed to be asleep—as Uncle Charley was, down in his basement room, snoring with his mouth open (I'd sneaked down earlier and seen him there, lying with one arm hanging over the bedside)—I crept without a sound down the front-hallway stairs and settled near the bottom to listen to the voices in the livingroom, just to my left.

Aunt Kate was saying, speaking more softly than usual, “He could do with the lift.”

“He's still down, isn't he,” my mother said.

“Oh, Cholly'll be fine,” Uncle Ed said, hearty as ever, and gave a laugh.

I listened, uneasy, for what my grandmother would say. When she said nothing, I let myself believe she'd fallen asleep over her sewing.

“He keeps in too much, that's all,” Aunt Kate said, as if shyly, embarrassed that Uncle Ed hadn't agreed with her.

“So anyway, we'll all go,” my father said, settling things. “Take Buddy too. He's never been to a Cymanfa Ganu yet. High time he went!”

“Heavens to Betsy!” my grandmother burst out. “You'd let that poor whippersnapper stay out till midnight with a bunch of wild lunatics howling their miserable heads off?”

A shiver went up my back. I was much too literal-minded a child to fit her description with any kind of singing I'd ever heard of, much less any I'd been in on. I remembered stories my uncle Ed had told me of how the Welsh were all witches in olden times—how they used to fly around like birds at night, and make magic circles among trees and stones.

The following day I was so filled with anxious anticipation I could hardly breathe. Out in the mill I kept close to Uncle Charley, trying to guess every move he was about to make and help with it. He seemed smaller all over, since the accident. Though he wore arm-elastics, his cuffs hung low, as did the crotch of his overalls. His hands trembled, and he no longer bothered to put his teeth in. In the past he'd pretended to appreciate my help. Now, as I gradually made out, it annoyed him. “I'll get that,” he'd say, kicking a twine-bale from the aisle as I reached for it. Or as I ran to push a heavy door open further, he'd say, “Leave it be, boy. It's open far enough.” In the end I did nothing for him, simply stayed with him because I was ashamed to leave him and go look for Uncle Ed.

He no longer did the kinds of work he'd done before. The hundred-pound sacks were too heavy for him—he wasn't much heavier than the sacks himself—and when he pushed the feedtruck, after Uncle Ed had loaded it, both Uncle Ed and I would watch him in distress, afraid it would tilt too far back, off balance, and fall on him. Mostly, Uncle Ed had taken over the pushing of the feedtruck. “Go ahead, then,” Uncle Charley said crossly. “It's your mill.” To keep busy, Uncle Charley set rat traps, wound wire around old ladder rungs, swiped down cobwebs, swept the floors. He still joked with farmers, as he'd always done, but it seemed to me the lightness was gone from his voice, and his eyes had a mean look, as if he didn't really think the jokes were funny or the farmers his friends. Sometimes in the office, when the farmers were alone with Uncle Ed and me, one of the farmers would say something like, “Cholly's gettin better every day, looks like,” and I would know by their smiles that none of them believed it. I would stand by the heavy old desk full of pigeonholes and secret compartments—Uncle Charley had once shown me how to work them all—trying to guess what Uncle Ed might need: his pocket-sized notebook, one of his yellow pads, or one of the big white pencils that said “E. L. Hughes” in red—but I could never guess which object he'd want next, so I could serve no useful purpose except if he happened to look over and say, “Buddy, hand me that calendar there.” Then I'd leap. Out in the mill Uncle Charley moved slowly back and forth with a pushbroom, needlessly sweeping white dust from the aisles, or hammered nails into loosened bin-boards, or mended burlap sacks not yet bad enough to leak. Now and then he'd poke his head in, the buttoned collar much too large for his neck, and would ask Uncle Ed if he'd gotten to Bill Williams' oats yet. “I'll get to it, Cholly,” Uncle Ed would say, waving his cigar. Uncle Charley would frown, shaking his head, then disappear, going about his business.

Sometime after lunch I found Uncle Charley sitting on the floor beside one of the bins, nailing a round piece of tin—the top of a coffeecan—over a hole where bits of grain leaked out. I stood awhile watching him. His hand, when he reached to his mouth for a nail, shook badly. He pretended not to notice me. After a while I went over and hunkered down beside him, thinking I might hand him nails from the zinc-coated bucket beside his knee, though at the moment his mouth was as full as a pincushion. When he said nothing, I asked, “What's a Cymanfa Ganu, Uncle Charley?”

“Welsh word,” he brought out through the nails, and carefully finished driving the nail between his fingers through the tin. Then he glanced at me guiltily, took the nails from his mouth and laid them on the floor between us. “Means ‘Come on back,' ” he said, then suddenly—his heart not in it—grinned. “ ‘Come on back to Wales,' that is. That's what all the Welshmen want, or so they think.”

He tipped his head back, as if he were listening. The way the sunlight came slanting through the mill—great generous shafts full of floating white specks all whirling and swirling in patterns too complex for the eye to comprehend—it was like being in church. Even better than church. I thought of the trees where Uncle Ed had told me the Welshmen used to worship their peculiar bug-eyed gods—“River gods, tree gods, pig gods, Lord knows what,” he'd said. (My grandmother wouldn't speak of it. “Your uncle Ed,” she said, “has peculiar ideas.”) Abruptly, Uncle Charley dropped his head back down, snatched up a nail, cocked it between two fingers over the tin, and started hammering. “Damn fools,” he said, then glanced at me and frowned, then winked.

“Tell me something else in Welsh,” I said.

He thought about it, placing another nail. At last he said, squinting, “You know what ‘Buddy' means?” Before I could answer, he said, “Means ‘the poet.' They used to set great store by poets, back in Wales. Only second to kings—maybe not even second. Same thing, kings and poets. Different kinds of liars.” He looked solemn, his face ash-gray under the age-spots. I studied him, perturbed—no more perturbed than he was, I realize now; but at six I knew nothing of the confusion of adults. All I knew was that his eyes were screwed up tight, one brown, one blue, and his moustache half covered the black hole of his mouth like a sharp-gabled roof of old straw.

I asked, “Are we
all
going to the Cymanfa Ganu?”

His eyes slipped off axis, then abruptly he reached for another nail. “Course we are,” he said. He lined up the nail and with two angry raps drove it home. “Don't worry,” he said, “it don't hurt much.”

I remember only the inside of the building where the songfest was held. It must have been a church, very large, with wooden walls, as yellow-gray as the walls of a new barn. It was brightly lighted, the walls and overhead beams high above us all glowing as if waxed. Everyone my parents had ever known was there, it looked like. The people milled around for what seemed to me hours, shouting and talking, pressing tightly together, my father moving behind my mother from group to group, carrying me on his shoulders. My grandmother, wearing a light black coat and helping herself along on two brown canes—it was only that winter that she'd begun to need them—went from one old white-haired Welshwoman to another, talking and nodding and laughing till she cried, sometimes pointing a bony, crooked finger across the room and gleefully shouting out a name, though no one could possibly have heard her in all that uproar.

Then somehow we got to seats, all of us together, me wedged in between my father and Uncle Charley. A man got up in the front of the room—he looked like a congressman or a well-to-do minister—and said something. Everyone laughed. He said something more, they laughed some more, and then from somewhere, booming around us, came organ music. Uncle Charley was jerking at my elbow, making me look down. He held a small Bible-like book with writing in it—no music, as in the hymnbooks in our church at home (I hadn't yet seen the ones my grandfather left my mother), just writing, and not a word anywhere that I could read. “You know your
do re mi?”
he asked, looking at me sternly, his face very bright. I shook my head, noticing only now that above the hymn words, all in Welsh, there were little words—
do, re, mi,
and so on—as meaningless to me at the time as all the others. Uncle Charley looked up at my father as if in alarm, then grinned, looking back at me. “Never mind,” he said, “you sing what
I
sing.” On every side of us people were standing up now, a few of them beginning to tap their feet, just barely moving the toes of their lumpy shoes. My father and Uncle Charley helped me stand up on my chair. Suddenly, like a shock of thunder that made the whole room shake, they began to sing.

Most of them seemed to have no need of the hymnbooks and couldn't have used them anyway, singing as they did with their heads lifted, mouths wide as fishmouths, proclaiming whatever it was they proclaimed not so much to the front of the hall as to the gleaming roof. They sang, as Welsh choruses always do, in numerous parts, each as clearly defined as cold, individual currents in a wide, bright river. There were no weak voices, though some, like Uncle Charley's, were reedy and harsh—not that it mattered; the river of sound could use it all. They sang as if the music were singing itself through them—sang out boldly, no uncertainties or hesitations; and I, as if by magic, sang with them, as sure of myself every note of the way as the wisest and heartiest in the room. Though I was astonished by my powers, I know, thinking back, that it was not as miraculous as I imagined. Borne along by those powerful voices, the music's ancient structure, only a very good musician could have sung off key. And yet it did seem miraculous. It seemed our bones and blood that sang, all heaven and earth singing harmony lines, and when the music broke off on the final chord, the echo that rang on the walls around us was like a roaring Amen.

Hymn after hymn we sang—old people, children, people my parents' age—ancient tunes invented before the major mode was thought of, tunes like hugely breathing creatures. We were outside ourselves, caught up in a
hwell
, as the Welsh say. It really did seem to me, once or twice, that I looked down on all the congregation from the beams above our heads. My father's hand was closed hard on mine; Uncle Charley held my other hand, squeezing it just as tightly. Tears streamed from his brown eye and blue eye, washing his cheeks, dripping from his moustache, making his whole face shine. Afterward, when we were leaving, I saw that Aunt Kate and my mother had been crying too, even my grandmother, though not my father or Uncle Ed. On the steps outside, lighting his cigar, Uncle Ed said, “Good sing.” My father nodded and hitched up his pants, then turned to look back at the door as if sorry to leave. “Good turn-out.” Uncle Charley, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground, said nothing.

The following night Uncle Charley didn't come in for supper, though they called and called. I watched through the kitchen window as Uncle Ed and my father, gray as ghosts in the moonlit garden, shouted toward the trees across the road, the glittering creek, the blacksmith's shop, then turned and moved heavily, as if gravity had changed and the air had grown thick, toward the mill. Later, Uncle Ed, in the wooden armchair in the kitchen, holding his cigar in the hand that had three fingers missing, stared into space and said, “Poor Cholly. I wonder what's got into him.”

Aunt Kate stood over by the sink with her head bowed, thinking, folding the dishtowel, then unfolding it, then folding it again. “I guess we better phone the police,” she said at last.

“No, don't do that!” Uncle Ed said suddenly, as if she'd startled him out of a daydream. He leaned his forearms on the arms of the chair and hefted himself up out of it. “I'll run out to the office and phone around among the neighbors a bit,” he said, and at once went to the door.

“Why not phone from here?” Aunt Kate said, or began to say, then glanced at me and stopped.

“Here, let me give you a hand,” my father said. The two of them went out, bent forward like shy boys, and closed the door quietly behind them.

“I'll give Buddy his supper,” my mother said. “I suppose it won't hurt for the rest of us to wait.”

“That's fine,” Aunt Kate said, still folding and unfolding the dishtowel.

“We should never have taken him to the songfest,” my grandmother said. “I
told
you it wouldn't be good for him!”

My mother, herding me over to my chair, said, “Mother, you never said any such thing!”

“Well, I meant to,” my grandmother said, and firmly clamped her mouth shut.

Toward morning they found him, I learned much later, right across the road in the creek behind the blacksmith's shop. I still occasionally dream of it, though of course I never saw it, Uncle Charley lying face up below the moonlit, glass-clear surface, staring, emotionless, at the perfectly quiet stars.