The Season of Migration (16 page)

I sat up, blinking into the light. “Father?”

“Of course. Did you think I would not come when I heard about this decision of yours?” He came into the hut and stood near my pallet, looking around. “And do you think this is a home fit for a man of God?”

Getting to my feet, I felt my cheeks flushing with shame, though as I stood next to Father, I was not sure why. Father looked me over in the dim light, leaned his head close, and sniffed at me. “When was the last time you washed, boy?” he asked, his face twisted in disgust.

I kept my eyes on the ground. Do you remember how he always made us show him our hands before supper? That was how I felt, like I was waiting for him to pronounce them clean enough for me to eat. I ignored this last comment and said quietly instead, “If this is a home fit for miners, why not for a man of God? Are they not the people of God?”

Father looked at me sternly. “There is not even any place clean enough to sit,” he said.

We went for a walk in the snow to see the coal brought up from a mine called the Three Mounds. While we walked, Father spoke. “We have spoken of this before, Vincent,” he said. “Degrading yourself is not the way to reach God. Surely it is not the way to get what you are after in this case, which is a permanent position. How do you expect to serve if you starve yourself, or are too tired to rise to preach?”

I didn't know how to express myself to him; you know I have never quite been able to. I scrambled to think of ways to explain myself that he might understand. “But Father,” I said, “how can I be a friend to the poor if I do not suffer like them? How can I minister to this flock if I know nothing of what life is like for them?”

“Did you ever consider that your job is other than to be their friend?” Father responded. He reminded me of the days when I used to go with him to visit the Zundert countrymen, how the friendship between them and him was different from one born of collective circumstance. “If God had wanted you to be a miner,” he said, “He would have made you one!”

It was God's will, said Father, that I be who I was, and that I help the miners in the way that I knew how, and was sent there to do, by teaching them the Word, and by being with them in Christ. That was all God wanted from me. “Each of us has his own trials,” he said. “Each of us has his own sufferings to face. Yours are different from those of these miners, but that does not mean you cannot understand them as men and women who are on this earth the same as you are, and, the same as you, are in need of fellowship, and the path to Heaven.”

I was confused, of course, because this was precisely what I thought I was doing—understanding the miners as best I could. If my way was different from his, did that make me any less capable or pious? But I couldn't speak with him about this, Theo; we simply didn't have the same language, and I didn't want to argue.

He asked me how I was keeping up with the preaching, whether I was holding regular services where the miners would have a chance to learn and pray. I assured him, yes, though I admit to you that I had begun to think of the preaching as less important than the other kinds of fellowship I could offer.

Despite the scolding, I was glad to have Father with me. I pointed out to him the way the blackthorn bushes burned like black flames against the white snow, and how our footprints left white craters that were traced with black, imprints of our humanity on the otherwise pure expanse of nature. When we reached the mine, we stood by the place where the carts were brought up from the earth and went up the ramp to the breaker. I told Father what I knew about how the operation worked. Father was pleased, and remarked at how the carts of coal were signs that there was life underground; he said, “Think of all the activity, all the work that is being done beneath our feet!” He looked at the ground with reverence, as if it were glass and he could see through it. I was happy to see him so moved.

On the way back, I agreed to return to the Denises', and we gathered my things from the hut and climbed the hill. I washed in the Denis tub and donned my suit, which I hadn't worn since my first days in the Borinage. When I came into the kitchen wearing it, my face scrubbed clean, Father was sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves, Madame Denis standing nearby, wearing her apron. Both of them looked at me with relief and joy. “There's my boy,” said Father, and I felt my heart swell with a confusing mixture of pride and rebellious anger. Why should he love me more when I wore a suit?

I took Father to visit the Decrucqs, and on the way there we passed Angeline. She was coming from the slag heap; her face was swept with black and she carried a filthy sack stuffed with coal. I saw her eyes dart over me, taking in my suit and my cleaned-up appearance, and I felt caught, embarrassed, as if I had betrayed her, though of course I had not.

We stopped to say hello next to a house that had been partially consumed by the earth. It had been built over land that had been weakened significantly by the mining underground, and at some point the ground had shifted and the kitchen had been swallowed. This was apparently not too uncommon an occurrence, for when I asked about it, I was met by nonchalance. What did a person expect, if he lived in mining country? The family that lived in the collapsed house lost most of their furniture, but they managed to salvage their stove before it went too deep, with the help of a few of their neighbors and a long length of thick rope.

I introduced Father and Angeline, and they briefly spoke, and I explained to Father that the slag heap was where the villagers gathered their coal. Angeline told Father she worked in the mine but that still she had to climb the heap to gather coal to heat her hut. Father expressed surprise at her mining—I do not know if he thought no women worked in the mine, or if he just didn't expect those women to look like Angeline. “It is hard,” she said, looking down at her hands clutching the bag. “My family has many mouths to feed.”

“Is there no other way?” Father asked, and I could see his mind trying to come up with one. “There is no other way,” she said stoically. She nodded to us and went on, and I could tell Father was moved, because he said nothing the rest of the way to the Decrucqs'. I wondered at his silence: What was he puzzling over? It seemed possible that Angeline had taught him something in that brief encounter, something that I had been trying to say but could not. Her presence, her circumstance had silenced him. What could he say back to her? Nothing—there was nothing to say. It made me feel vindicated, I admit it, Theo, and I admired Angeline all the more.

In the Decrucq house, they were just sending the boys to bed. Charles was placing the hot bricks in the bedclothes at the foot of the bed before the boys climbed in. This is a frequent technique in the miners' houses; they heat the bricks in the oven and then wrap them in towels or cotton cloths or even, when there is nothing else, sacking, and transfer them to the beds to keep them warm after they have tamped out the fire. Usually it is just one or two bricks, but in the dead of winter a family uses as many as four to a bed. “When you wake up in the morning,” Decrucq said, tucking in the boys' thin blanket, “the bricks are often still warm.”

I was happy to see Decrucq and Pa talking, Decrucq telling him all the same stories about his accidents and scars, and Pa leaning back in his chair and nodding, holding his warm cup of coffee, as I had so often seen him do in the cottages of so many other peasants in what seemed such a long-ago and familiar time.

That night I sat up with Pa in the Denis kitchen with its sweet smell, and we spoke of many things. Father said, “That man Decrucq strikes me as a very solid person,” and then he recalled a parishioner of his back in Zundert, a man who looked a lot like Decrucq but with fewer physical scars. Father was leaving in the morning, and I suddenly felt as if I were mourning for him, though he sat right there before me; I had such a melancholy feeling, I thought for sure I was going to weep. I remembered when he came to visit me in Amsterdam at Uncle Jan's, and after having taken him to the station, after having watched the train until it disappeared and the smoke was no longer visible, I returned home; Father's chair was still near the table with the books and copybooks we had examined that day, and though I knew that we would see each other again soon, I cried like a child. This is not a side of me that I like to show to Father, or really to anyone, even to you, Theo, but there are times when I cannot hold it back.

There, in the Denis kitchen, across from Father, I had that same feeling. He was saying, “She was a fortunate woman, Mrs. Beelin, with two beautiful children,” speaking of another parishioner, and I was fighting against time. I watched him and slowly I couldn't hear his words at all, I could only see him, his lips moving and his familiar face expressing his thoughts, and it was as if he were drifting away from me even as he sat there unmoving. I felt time coming at me like an enormous ocean wave. I thought myself too weak to face it. I wanted to grab hold of Pa's body and cling; I wanted to reach and hang and grip and clamber and hug, for fear of being swept away.

If only it were true that a man, holding tightly enough to another man or woman, to his mother or his father or his lover or his friend, could stop the moving of time. If only! If only there were a way to shield ourselves, to stop it from pulling us down and away and along. If only our bodies were strong enough to keep us tethered to the shore.

December 10

Dear Theo,

No doubt you remember my friend Harry Gladwell, whom I lived and worked with in Paris—the one who took over my position when I left Goupil's? He must be your colleague now; I admit this is strange to think about.

Harry and I used to stay up late in our tiny apartment and read together passages from the Bible; he was new to it, and I was just coming into my fervor for it then, having recently left London and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the art-dealing life. I remember I dragged Harry to countless sermons on our off-hours, walked him to churches all over the city to listen to different preachers and sit in different halls of worship. He said he was interested, and humored me well, but often I could see he was tired, his hair falling in his face and his feet dragging, and had only come with me so I wouldn't be alone. I suppose I did a lot of that with you, too, didn't I, when we were young—though then I dragged you to birds' nests rather than to churches.

I was thinking of Gladwell today, remembering a trip I took to London to see our sister Anna—must have been three years ago now—and how I stopped off along the way to see Harry's parents. I was in Ramsgate, England, at the time, working at that boys' school on the coast, and every day at dusk I would walk along the ocean. It never ceased to be amazing, watching how the day waned, the waves growing luminous in the slowly dimming light, the seagulls flying lower and seeming to hush out of respect for the ritual of the coming night. I would take off my shoes and walk barefoot in the sand, enjoying the sensation of the grains against my feet. Occasionally I saw a seal emerge from a wave, its dark, massive head turning to calmly observe me before going under again, and I thought of how at ease the creature was in the ocean, which was such an inhospitable place for me. Some evenings I walked so far away from the school that I missed supper and was late putting the boys to bed, arriving back long after dark, making my way back by the light of the swinging beam of the lighthouse.

Those walks were a great balm to the confusion that roiled in me then; they encouraged me, with their joyful solemnity, to continue on despite my fears. I walked for hours and hours, back and forth over that beach, when I was preparing my very first sermon, which I gave at the little church near the school.

I remember all of that so well, and it is so strange to think of it now. I paced the floor the whole night before I gave that first sermon, wanting so much for it to go over well, hoping I was not keeping the boys, who slept in the room with me, awake with my feverish movement. The next day, after the sermon was done, there was a charge in me, the feeling that my whole body was lit from the inside, that I had a power inside my fingertips that was magical and true. I thought it was because I had spoken the word of God; I thought it was because I was on the right path, because I had identified what I was meant for and was moving toward it. Now I know that was not true. So what was the source of that powerful feeling, and how can I make it come back again?

A few days after that first sermon, that energy unabated, I walked from Ramsgate to London to see Anna, who was teaching in Welwyn, just past the outskirts of London. It was a journey of about a day, if I walked fast, and slept a few hours somewhere along the way.

I arrived at Gladwell's parents' house in the evening, where I was to stay the night. His parents settled me in Harry's bedroom, which had a familiar sensation even without my friend there.

“Vincent,” Gladwell's mother asked me over supper, “are you happy in your new position?”

The room was warm and smelled of yams and a sharp spice I couldn't identify. Gladwell's sister was there, her hair tied back in a braid; she did not look at me, but kept her eyes on her plate while she cut her meat. Gladwell's father chewed his beef while he waited for me to answer.

“Oh yes,” I said. “The boys are such fun, they don't give me much trouble, and the other teachers at the school look out for me because they know that I'm new.”

“So is teaching what you want to do, then?” asked Mr. Gladwell, still chewing, then taking a sip of wine. He looked at me with purity—he was not judging me, he was only genuinely curious to know who I was.

“Well, right now I'm just an assistant teacher,” I said. “I'd say my job is more to be with the boys than it is to really teach them. We read together at night, we play games together and go for walks. I don't really prepare any of their lessons.”