The Season of Migration (11 page)

Paul, still smiling gently at me, nodded. “Well, good. To me it is just a barn, but I am happy that you see all those things here. We'll have to get it cleaned up a bit, but before too long it will be ready to use.”

“Oh,” I said, “I think it is ready just as it is.”

As we left the salon, Paul asked me what my schooling was like when I was a boy. Walking behind him, I was so struck by the question that I had to brace myself against the salon's door frame before I could answer. Thoughts of Zundert are never far away, but to be asked a direct question about my boyhood invited me to bring my melancholy into the open. I didn't want Paul to know how much of a failure I had been.

“I went to the school across the square from the parsonage where we lived,” I said finally, walking next to Paul toward the village cottages. “And then I was schooled at home for a few years before going off to boarding school. My mother believed that a man's education was a stamp of his class. Both of my parents were very serious about all of us children succeeding in school.”

But I didn't succeed, not ever, did I? Not like you did. I skipped school, got into fistfights with the other boys, and was beaten more than once by the schoolmaster, sent home across the Markt, to mother's disapproving face. I sat diligently next to Father for lessons for three years before he gave up, sending me away to the Provily school a few towns away. Was that the first time Father gave up on me? Certainly it was not the last. Oh, what must it be like to give up again and again on someone you love? What is that, Theo, that giving up? It seems to me the opposite of faith, which otherwise Father has so much of. Now that you, too, have given up on me, perhaps you can tell me what it is, how it feels, where it comes from.

It was raining the day Mother and Father drove me to the Provily school. I can still see the bare trees with the rain falling among them, making the bark shine and gleam, the carriage growing smaller as it raced away, seemingly never to return, driving on ever faster through the meadows until it could no more be seen. You and the others were still at home, and I imagined you all sitting around the table together with my empty chair, filling my absence up with your joy to be free of me, the moody, unpredictable one, the sullen one with the disposition of a grumpy old man. I watched the carriage drive away from me and I knew that my worst fears were true. My family had gotten rid of me.

Paul and I walked together back to the Denis house, where he left me. Mostly, we walked in an agreeable silence. I told him the committee had granted me six months, and he nodded and smiled at me. “I am happy to hear that,” he said.

*   *   *

The salon was ready for the boys' school in just a day. I swept the cobwebs and pine needles out with a broom I borrowed from Hannah Decrucq, and put a number of my favorite prints up on the walls: Weissenbruch's
Mill by the Trekvaart
—a man on his horse stands next to a dog on a path overlooking a river, in the distance an old windmill, all dwarfed by a patient sky; Breton's
The Feast of Saint John
, which I got to see at the exhibition in Paris in 1875—a group of barefoot peasant women dancing, holding one another's arms in a joyful circle around a glowing fire; Millet's
Fields in Winter
—a wide snow-covered field with an abandoned plow and harrow in the foreground. I wiped the windows with an old coal sack and stepped back, pleased with my work. Paul had found me a few old schoolbooks and picture books somewhere in Wasmes and had brought them to the salon; I lined them up on the windowsill as if it were a shelf. They are still here now, collecting dust.

It was cold, though—even after the boys arrived. No one was older than seven except for Alard, for he was the only one excused from work in the mine. The boys huddled in their coats and leaned over the books with their hands tucked into their armpits, their breath coming out in white clouds. Alard must have mentioned the cold to his mother, for a few days later, at noon, a near crowd of women appeared outside the salon, most of them carrying the ubiquitous burlap mining sacks. A few of the women pushed wheelbarrows and small wagons. Madame Denis handed me a sack. Alard was with her, and he smiled at me shyly. In the back of the group I noticed Angeline Dubois, who nodded her head at me. She and I had grown a bit more familiar, as she had continued to attend my Bible classes, asking me questions that I could not always answer. One day we had spoken to each other for quite a while outside the Aertses' hut, and her persistence in asking me questions about a Bible passage made me wonder why it was she seemed to not want to go home. I was happy to see her that day at the school.

“Come on with us, Monsieur Vincent,” said Madame Denis. “It is time you learned how it is we find our coal.”

The women took me up on one of the nearby slag heaps to collect coal. Each family is typically given eight hectoliters of coal each month, and particularly in cold months this is an inadequate amount, so the women either buy more from the company or go scrambling for more over the heaps. Madame Denis told me this as we made our way to the heap we were to scavenge, Alard walking next to us, scrambling to keep up. Most families were too proud and too poor to buy more of the coal that they spent their days and sweat excavating from the earth, so most often the women and children took to the slag mountains to scavenge for themselves. But this was no simple thing, Theo, lest you get the wrong notion: Not only did the company police often patrol the heaps—“even the refuse is company property, after all,” Madame Denis said with a tone of real frustration—sometimes confiscating the women's sacks and breaking their wheelbarrows and wagons, but also the mountains of slag could shift underfoot, and every once in a while a woman was swallowed by the quicksand of shifting slag. They timed their visits to the pyramids carefully, aiming for the first number of hours of a shift at the mine, for it wasn't until after the coal had been excavated and sifted through the breakers, the good stuff separated from the bad, that the cars were ready to move to the slag heaps.

We approached a small mountain that looked more like a ravine or the bank of a small creek, though of course there was no water running through it. Madame Denis said this one had been recently begun, but that it was always good to pick coal on the banks that were most recently in use, for these were the least picked over. There was a roughly built scaffold along the side of it, the planks of wood hastily nailed together, a rickety way for the company to lug the coal cars up to the top to dump them. Atop the mound was a thin dusting of snow, like an icing of sugar. I thought again of black Egypt, feeling that we were about to tread on holy ground.

I glanced around at the little group as we came close, the women all dressed in long, thick skirts and aprons, the bottoms of their skirts darkened from the mud and soot they walked through—stains they could never quite clean away. Some of them had their heads covered with cotton scarves and bonnets, and many of them smiled if they met my eyes. Else Aert, my gossipy Bible group hostess, was there, as was Clara Gilmart, Hannah Decrucq, and a number of other women I knew. There were a few little girls who were dressed just like their mothers, and I recognized two of the boys from my school, Pierre and John, in their little black caps, their earnest faces looking to the mound of discarded coal with determination. Angeline Dubois blinked and looked away, shy of me in a way that flattered me and made me uncomfortable all at once.

We took to the mountain. I pictured how we must look from above, tiny figures scrambling up a dark, shifting mound, dwarfed by the blackness, using our hands to try to gain some traction to get higher, though it seemed that every time I looked up I had gained no ground. We were a group of ants crawling up the side of an anthill. Some women began sifting and picking as soon as their feet touched the bank, but Madame Denis called to me, “Monsieur Vincent! It is always best to try to pick near the top!” so I clambered up after her and Alard, who was already near the ridge. There was immediately soot in my eyes, and when I looked down at my hands I could not see them, for they were the same color as the ground.

Something strange was happening to me, Theo. I had the momentary feeling that I had disappeared. I could feel my muscles moving, but it seemed that my limbs had plunged into the body of some unknown creature and had been absorbed. I was moving over the surface of something that had no surface, which meant that I was inside of it, climbing up its body from underneath its skin.

Through my soot-covered eyes I looked up and saw Alard, and the sight brought me back to myself. Alard's hat had flaps that covered his ears. “Monsieur Vincent,” he called, “you are looking for the pieces that look like this!” He held up a piece of coal, proud of himself for finding one so fast. His face was swept with soot as with a thick paintbrush, his hat just as dark. Madame Denis was standing near him, looking pleased. I tried to stand, and took a scoop of the mound up to my face to inspect it. A handful of dark matter sat in my palm, and it all looked the same to me. I let a couple rocks fall, for I was sure they were not what I wanted. Already I could feel cuts on my skin from trying to keep my balance as I scrambled up the hill.

“There,” I heard a voice next to me say, and I turned to find Angeline. I was relieved to see her, as if she could pass me a map to all the treasure hidden in the mountain. She was pointing at my palm. “You've got a piece.”

I blinked at her and used my arm to try to wipe the soot from my eyes. It did only a little good. The image of her was darkened around the edges. “I do?”

“Yes,” she said. “Here, show me.”

I lifted my palm to her, and she pulled out a piece of the rubble. She held it between her thumb and forefinger, up by her face, and smiled at me. “Coal!”

We picked through the coal for over an hour and I barely had a third of my bag filled. Most of the women had bags so full, they could barely carry them. My hands were scraped and bleeding, my face chapped by the soot and wind, but I was exhilarated by the work, which made my body feel vibrant and alive. What were we doing but ministering to the earth? We picked our way back down the mountain and Madame Denis clapped me on the back and raised her voice to the other women. “Has any other evangelist climbed the heap with us? Monsieur Vincent is different; he is one of us!” A few of the women laughed, and I could see derision in a few of the faces I had encountered less often. I shook my head and raised my voice—“It takes a lot more than a trip up a slag heap to make a miner”—and I could feel my cheeks blushing underneath the soot that covered my skin. Inside of me I was on fire, Theo; I had found a way to belong to these people, to this place, and it was by digging my hands deep into the coal. Angeline came down the mountain next to me, and I could feel her presence by my side as pricks of cold ice all the way down my skin.

It was the first time I had done any physical work in the Borinage, and in the euphoria of the exercise and the vision before me, I felt sure I saw something new: Physicality was the way the people of the Borinage expressed their version of God. It was in their muscles and their bent-over backs; it was in their breasts given to an infant, in their broken ribs healed wrong. What a beautiful scene; the peasant women moving in dark skirts and white bonnets over the black mountain were like Millet's images of women sowing, yet they were excavating a heap of the earth's insides. Remembering Millet, I was invigorated, struck by the melding of art and life. How strange, to be moving in your life and at the same time feel you are an image, perfectly realized, seen by yourself from the outside!

I was exalted; even remembering it I can feel the charge, a coil of fire that comes up from inside of me and lights me all the way up. I felt powerful and clear, as if I understood everything all at once: the coal, the darkness, the filth, the warmth of the people and the blood on our hands, the way the earth communicated with our bodies to bring us understanding, the way we were born from that coal and then returned to it, and the way that God provided us with the ability to see. Just by looking around us we could learn what it was to be alive; we could be fully present; we could fully communicate. No words were necessary, only this place! Only these hands and these faces streaked with black!

When we had all descended the mountain and walked back to the path, I took Alard, Pierre, and John with me back to the salon for our afternoon lesson. The other boys came soon after. By the time they arrived, I had forgotten about the coal dust on my face, and only one of the boys mentioned it when he saw me, a particularly precocious boy named Harry. “Monsieur Vincent,” he said, “you look like a real miner now!”

“Welcome, boys,” I greeted them, feeling a new charge of confidence. “Alard, Pierre, John, and I have just been up one of the slag mountains collecting coal. This is something you have all done before, I am sure, with your mothers or sisters or aunts.”

There was general nodding and smiles from the boys, who were no doubt thinking how different I looked with my face smeared black. Carel, a boy who sat at the back and always wore his cap indoors—an eccentricity I did not mind—spoke up. “Monsieur Vincent, you should be careful doing that. My next-door neighbor went collecting one day and the slag heap swallowed her. She never came back. Now my mother won't let me go with her anymore.”

It amazed me that these boys could be forbidden to go up the slag heap but were allowed to go down in the mines and haul coal. I asked the boys if the slag heaps scared them, and though they vehemently said no, there were a couple of boys who said nothing, and I took that to mean yes. Though they were tough children, they were children nonetheless, and I thought they were not old enough yet to be deliberately dishonest.

“It's all right to be scared of things,” I said, trying to coax them. “All of us, even the toughest of us, are scared of certain things. Being scared can help us to protect ourselves, and to tell good from evil. Tell me some things that you
are
afraid of, if those slag heaps don't scare you.” There was silence. The boys looked at one another and then at me. I could see I would have to go first. “Okay,” I said, “well, I'll tell you some things that I'm afraid of. Sometimes I wake up in the dark and for a little while I'm frightened of the shapes in my room. I think I see the chair moving like an animal before I realize it's a chair. Sometimes I'm afraid of running chickens”—at this the boys laughed—“really I am! And when I was a boy, I was often afraid of my father when he was angry … and sometimes I still am.”