The Art Of Living And Other Stories Part 12

Vlemk, confounded, looked over at the Prince for help.

The Prince shrugged broadly, grinning. "G.o.d help you, Vlemk. For most men one such unpredictable creature would be enough!" He gave the cane a little toss, so that it went gracefully end over end and came down onto his fingertip, where he balanced it as before. "Well," he said, "since everything seems to be all right again, I'd better hurry home to my wife." He turned to leave.

"Wife!" shrieked the Queen and the picture at once.

The Prince's face reddened and the cane fell off balance. He grabbed it. "How was I to tell you?" he said. "You were sick-perhaps dying, for all I knew...."

"You're married?" asked Vlemk.

"Two weeks ago," said the Prince. "Politics, you see. But when I heard that the Queen-"

"You did the right thing," said Vlemk at once. Abruptly, he laughed. "I thought you were acting a little strangely!"

Neither the picture or the Queen even smiled. "Oh yes," said the Queen, and angrily rolled her head from side to side. "You can laugh. What if I'd gotten better because I thought he loved me and then I'd found out? Say what you like, it's a cruel, cruel world full of falsehood and trickery and delusions!"

"It's true, all too true," said Vlemk, trying not to smile. "All the same, I notice there's color in your cheeks. One way or another it seems we have muddled through!"

In secret, the Queen was noticing the same thing. As a matter of fact she had a feeling that if she put her mind to it, she could jump up out of bed and dance. Nothing could please her more than having the Prince with the moustache as only a good friend-he was a wonderful horseman-and not having to worry about that other business. The difficulty was that any minute now he would leave, and so would Vlemk, and there were important matters not yet decided between Vlemk and herself. The thought of his leaving was like a knife in her heart; she would gladly give up her life, her very bones and flesh, and be nothing but a summery warmth around him, a patch of sunlight on his head, anything at all, but near him. Yet try as she might, she could think of no way to keep him here now except petulance and sulking.

"Well," Vlemk was saying now, fiddling with his hat, stealing a glance at the flowers near the door.

"Oh yes," said the Queen bitterly, "trickery and delusion are just fine with you. They're the stock and trade of an artist."

Vlemk looked at her, then down at his shoes, and sighed.

Her eyes became cunning. It crossed her mind that if she knew how to put some kind of curse on him, he'd figure out some way to be near her till the day she lifted it, which would be never.

"Well, it's getting late," the Prince said.

Vlemk the box-painter nodded.

All the while the box had been watching them with her lips slightly pursed. Suddenly she said, "Vlemk, why don't you marry the Queen and come live with us?"

"Yes, why not?" said the Queen quickly, a little crazily. She felt her face stinging, an enormous blush rushing into her cheeks.

"Me?" Vlemk said, then hastily added, "I was thinking the same thing myself!"

"Wonderful!" cried the Prince. "We can visit each other and go riding!"

Vlemk smiled eagerly. The thought of riding a horse made him faint with terror.

"You mean we-you and I-" stammered the Queen. Her face went pale green, then red, then white.

"If you like," Vlemk said.

"Oh, Vlemk, Vlemk, I'm sorry about the curse!" the picture wailed. "It was just-I mean ..." Now all at once her words came tumbling. "One has to have something to hold back-a woman, that is. If she just gives the man she loves everything, just like that-"

Vlemk nodded. "I understand." He was thinking, absurd as it may sound, about box-painting, about the risks one ran, the temptations.

"But is it possible?" asked the Queen. "You and I, a box-painter and a Queen?"

"Well, it's odd of course," said Vlemk. "No doubt we'll have our critics."

"You won't go back to sleeping in gutters or anything?" the Queen asked.

"I don't think so," said Vlemk, "though life is always full of surprises."

Abruptly forgetting her fears, the Queen reached out her arms to him, smiling joyfully. He bent to her, smiling back, and they embraced, quick and light as children.

Now the servants, having noticed the change in mood around the Queen's bed, crept in nearer to find out what was happening. The Prince too had noticed that everything had changed entirely. "Well," he said, "I must go now, as I said." He made no move to leave.

"You're welcome to stay to supper if you like," the Queen said.

Vlemk, as if the palace were his own, reached out his hand to the Prince. The Prince looked from Vlemk to the Queen. He stood for a long moment staring into s.p.a.ce, puzzling things through; then abruptly his face lit up. "No," he said, gripping his cane with a sort of easy firmness, "but I'll come for the wedding. I must go home to my wife."

"And I," said Vlemk, "must go home and make my various preparations."

It was now clear to even the least of the servants that everything had changed and all was well. They seized Vlemk's hands, also the Prince's, kissing the backs and fronts of them and thanking both Vlemk and the Prince for what they'd done. Vlemk beamed, nodding and bowing and telling them on every side, "It's nothing! It's nothing!" moving them along with him to the door as he did so, walking with the Prince, waving his repeated farewells to the picture and the Queen, who'd come out to the bedroom door, the box in the Queen's left hand. In the high front room the driver of the carriage was waiting, more elegant than ever, and on either side of him stood servants with armloads of flowers for Vlemk and the Prince. "Come back quickly," cried the Queen and the picture, both at once.

Vlemk waved his hat.

"Well," said the driver, bowing and falling into step beside Vlemk and the Prince, "things have turned out better than I thought they would."

"So they have," said Vlemk. "It's good to have everything settled at last. It's good to know exactly where we stand!"

They came to the high arched door and the driver stepped ahead of Vlemk to seize the door-handle. As he opened the door, a sharp blast of wintery wind swept in, filling out the female servants' skirts like sails and hurling in fine-ground blizzard snow.

"Oh!" cried the Queen and the picture on the box, astonished.

"It's winter!" cried the Prince, so startled he could hardly believe his eyes. Instantly the flowers in the servants' arms began to tremble and wilt, and the leaves of the flowers inside the room began to blow around crazily.

"Winter," said Vlemk, full of wonder, his voice so quiet that only the carriage driver heard.

They had to lift their feet high, Vlemk, the Prince, and the carriage driver, to make it through the drifts to the black leather, gold-studded carriage. The carriage of the Prince stood just beyond. In every direction except straight above, the world was white and lovely, as if the light came from inside the snow. Straight above-or so it seemed to Vlemk, standing with one hand on his beard, the other in his pocket-the sky was painfully bright, blinding, as if someone had lifted the cover off the world, so that soon, as usual, everything in it would be transformed.

COME ON BACK.

Forty-five years ago, when Remsen, New York, was called "Jack" and nearly all the people who lived there were Welsh, my uncle, or, rather, my maternal great-uncle, E. L. Hughes, ran the feedmill. His name is no longer remembered in the village, and the feedmill is in ruins, set back behind houses and trees so that you have to know it's there to find it. There's a big sprawling Agway that already looks ancient, though it can't be more than fifteen or twenty years old, on the other side of town.

I seldom get up to that area anymore, but I used to visit often when I was a child living with my parents on their farm outside Batavia. My grandfather Hughes, whom I never knew except by the wooden chest of carpenter's tools he left my father and a few small, tattered Welsh hymnbooks he left my mother, had originally settled in the village of Remsen, or just outside it, and for years, even past the time of my uncle Ed's death, my parents made pilgrimages back to see old friends, attend the Cymanfa Ganu festivals, visit the white wooden church called Capel Ucca, and keep a casual eye on the mill's decline. At the time my grandfather and his brothers came over, Remsen was generally viewed, back in Wales, as a kind of New Jerusalem, a shining hope, a place of peace and prosperity. There was a story of a Welshman who landed in New York, and looking up bug-eyed at the towering buildings, said, "If this is New York, what must Remsen be!"

In those days it was a sleepy little hamlet beside a creek. Though the Depression was on in the rest of the country, you saw no signs of it in Remsen. On the tree-lined streets with tall houses set back from them, each with its roses, small vegetable garden, and grape arbor, there were shined-up square cars, mostly Model A Fords, and occasional buggies. (My uncle Ed, one of the richest men in town, had a black-and-green Buick.) Milk was still delivered in squarish gla.s.s bottles by an orange horse-drawn cart; coal for people's furnaces came on a huge, horse-drawn wagon, black with white lettering: W. B. PRICE & SONS, COAL & LUMBER. The horses were chestnut-colored Belgians, I remember, so immense and so beautiful they didn't seem real. At the end of almost every driveway, back behind the house, there was a two-storey garage with chickenwire on the upstairs windows. If you shouted from the driveway, one or two of the chickens would look out at you, indignant, like old ladies; but however you shouted, even if you threw pebbles, most of them just went about their business. The people were pretty much the same, unexcitable. There weren't many houses, maybe twenty or thirty, a couple of churches, a school, Price's lumberyard, and a combination gas-station and market.

As we entered, from the south, my uncle Ed's high gray mill reaching up past the trees into the sunlight was the first thing we'd see. The mill was to the left of the narrow dirt road, a three-towered, barnlike building set back beyond the lawn and flower garden that rose gradually toward the brown-shingled house where Uncle Ed had lived for years with his wife, my great-aunt Kate. I remember her only dimly, as an occasional bright presence, soft-spoken and shy, in my uncle Ed's kitchen or in his "camp," as they called it, on Black River. She wore thick gla.s.ses that made her eyes look unpleasantly large. They shared the house, or anyway the bas.e.m.e.nt, with Uncle Ed's younger brother, my great-uncle Charley-Cholly, they called him-who helped out at the mill for room and board and a trifling wage. Across the road from the mill and Uncle Ed's house stood a blacksmith's shop, then still in operation, a dark, lively place full of coal smell, iron smell, and horse smell. All day long it rang like a musical instrument with the clanging of iron on iron, just far enough from the house and mill to sound like bells. The creek ran just behind the blacksmith's shop, a bright, noisy rattle. I used to catch tadpoles and minnows there, though it was deep in places, and if my grandmother found out I'd been playing in the creek I got spanked. The building's gone now, and the creek's fallen silent, grown up in weeds. I remember the building as small, made of stone burned black inside, crowded outside with burdocks whose leaves were always wet with the mist from the waterfall that rumbled day and night not far upstream.

I was five or six, still at that age when a day lasts for weeks and everything you see or hear or smell seems vividly alive, though later you can get only glimpses to serve as memories-or anyway so it seems until you start to write. This much comes at once: the large, grinning figure of my uncle Ed, Uncle Charley next to him, timidly smiling, dwarfed beside his brother, and standing not far from them Aunt Kate with a dishtowel and teapot. I get back, too, a little of the sunlit world they inhabited, seemingly without a care, as if forever. On one kitchen wall they had a large black pendulum clock on which the four was written IIII; I could never decide whether the thing was a mistake (I was already aware that the Welsh were p.r.o.ne to make curious mistakes) or something more mysterious, brought down from the ancient, unimaginable time when, according to Uncle Ed, the Welsh lived in caves and trees and couldn't talk yet, but had to get along by singing.

In those days everything was for me-for me more than for most children, perhaps-half real, half ethereal. It was not just the stories Uncle Ed liked to tell. In our farmhouse I slept with my grandmother, and every night before she turned off the bedlamp she would read me something from the Bible or the Christian Herald. I don't remember what she read, but I remember seeing pictures of bright-winged angels playing harps and singing-beings she insisted were entirely real, as real as trees or hay wagons. She made my world mythic-her own as well. During the day she would sometimes go out in our front yard with a hoe and kill gra.s.s-snakes. It made my father, who was a practical man, furious. "Mother," he would ask, "what harm do they do?" "They bite," she would say. Sometimes my mother would try to defend her. Grandma Hughes had lived in Missouri for a time, where there were rattlesnakes, and she was too old now to change her ways. "Even a darn fool mule can be reasoned with," my father would say-he was a breeder and trainer of plough-horses-but he wouldn't pursue the argument. To me, though, steeped in her Bible and Christian Herald stories, nothing seemed more natural than that my grandmother in her righteousness should be out there in the dappled light below the maple trees, her bright blue eyes narrowed, her hoe-blade poised, every nerve on the look-out for serpents.

"Did you ever really see an angel?" I once asked her. Since there really were snakes, it seemed to me probable that there were angels.

"Not that I'm aware of," she said.

I thought it over. "Did my dad?"

"I doubt it," she said, then bit her lips together, trying not to smile.

So I knew on my grandmother's authority, to say nothing of Uncle Ed's, that there was more to the world than met the eye, or rather, knew that there were two worlds, and it came to seem to me that Remsen, like the valley where Jacob saw the ladder, was one of the places where they connected. Perhaps it was Remsen's peculiar, clear light, or the sense of peace my whole family seemed to feel there, gathering with relatives and friends to sing hymns in Capel Ucca those bright Sunday mornings; or perhaps it was simply the otherworldliness of a village that spoke Welsh. It was true that time had stopped there, or at very least had paused. We had no blacksmith's shops in Batavia. Mr. Culver, who shoed my father's horses, came with his equipment in a panel truck. And the mill where my father took his grain, the G.L.F., was like a factory-freightcars on one side of it, track on track of them, and inside, wherever you looked through the billowing white dust, big iron machines and men in goggles. My uncle Ed, when he worked in the old-fashioned mill in Remsen, wore a suit. It was gray with grain-dust, and it was a little dishevelled; but it was a suit. (Uncle Charley wore striped bib-overalls.) Uncle Ed's machinery was mostly made of wood and made very little noise, just a low, sweet humming sound, with rhythmical thumps.

I would sometimes be left over night with the two old men and Aunt Kate while my parents went off with younger relatives to some "sing." There was always a sing on somewhere around Remsen. "Every time three Welshmen meet," people said, "it's a choir." In those days it was more or less true. Everywhere my parents drove, they sang, almost always in a minor key and always in harmony; and every time relatives got together they sang, in almost as many parts as there were people.

I'd be alarmed when my parents began dressing for a sing, telling me in falsely sweet voices that I was to stay with my uncles and aunt and be a good boy. My grandmother, if she was there, would insist on going with them. Though she was nearly eighty, she had a voice like a bird, she claimed. The songfest wouldn't be the same without her. Uncle Charley would shake his head as if disgusted, though everyone said he'd had a wonderful tenor voice when he was younger. In those days, they said, he wouldn't have missed a Cymanfa Ganu or an Eisteddfod-the really big sing, where hundreds and hundreds of Welshmen came together-for all the tea in China. Uncle Charley would blush like a girl when they spoke of his singing days. "Well, a body gets old," he'd mutter. "Pride!" my grandmother would snap. "Sinful pride!"

She was a woman of temper; she'd been a red-head when she was young. But for all her sternness, she loved Uncle Charley as she loved n.o.body else-her husband's youngest brother, just a boy when she first knew him, all his life the one who'd been of no account. "That voice of his was his downfall," she said once to my mother, wiping dishes while my mother washed. "It gave him ideas."

To me, a child, it was a puzzling statement, though my mother, ruefully nodding, apparently understood. I tried to get my grandmother to explain it later, when she was sitting at her darning in our bedroom-more my bedroom than hers, she would say when a certain mood was on her. Another puzzling statement.

"Grandma," I asked, "how come Uncle Charley's voice gave him ideas?"

"Hush now," she said. That was always her answer to troublesome questions, and I knew how to deal with it. I just waited, watching her darn, making a nuisance of myself.

"Well," she said at last, then stopped to bite a thread. She looked at the end, twirled it between her fingers to make it pointed, then continued: "Singing's got its place. But a body can get to thinking, when he's singing with a choir, that that's how the whole blessed world should be, and then when he comes down out of the clouds it's a terrible disappointment."

I suppose I looked as puzzled as ever, tentatively considering the idea of people singing up in the clouds, like the angels in her pictures.

She leaned toward me and said, "Uncle Charley never found a good woman, that's what's wrong with him. Bills to pay, whippersnappers-that'll bring you down from your la-la-la!"

I gave up, as puzzled as before and slightly hurt. I knew well enough-she never let me forget-what a burden I was, not that she didn't kiss me and make a great to-do when I was dressed up for church or had done something nice for her, dustmopping the bedrooms without being told to, or helping her find her bra.s.s thimble. (She was a great mislayer of things. It made my father sigh deeply and shake his head.) I was, in general, as good a child as I knew how to be, but it's true, I was sometimes a trouble. I justified her existence, I realize now: living with my parents, too old and poor to live alone, she didn't have to think herself a nuisance to the world. As my babysitter, she made it possible for my mother to teach school and for my father to work in the fields all day. All the same, I'm sure I ran her ragged, and there were times-especially when my parents had somewhere to go after dark-when I was as much trouble as I dared to be.

I hated those nights when my parents left me-for a Grange meeting, at home, or for a sing when we were in Remsen. I'd live through them, I knew-I might even enjoy myself, after a fashion-but the night would be darker than usual, outside the big old Remsen house when my parents and grandmother weren't somewhere within call, upstairs, or in the elegant, dimly lit livingroom. The mill, much as I loved it by day, looked ominous from Uncle Ed's kitchen window after dark. It would seem to have moved closer, blocking out the starlight like an immense black tombstone. I would hear the clock on the kitchen wall solemnly knocking the seconds off-tock ... tock-the silence so deep I could also hear the clock on the desk in the livingroom, hurrying as if in panic-tick-tick-tick-tick! The sunflowers at the end of the garden would be gray now, staring back at me like motionless ghosts, and the blacksmith's shop across the road, a darker blot in the surrounding darkness-weeds all around it, hushed as if listening to the clatter of the creek-was transformed in my mind to a terrible place, the overgrown hovel of a c.u.m-witch.

I would whine, hanging around, clinging to the white porcelain doork.n.o.b as my parents dressed. "Why can't I come with you?" I'd say. My mother's eyes would remain on the mirror, concentrating hard on the eyebrow pencil. Though she was fat, I thought she was amazingly beautiful. Her hair was dark red. "You can, when you're bigger," my father would say, standing behind my mother, chin lifted, putting on his tie. In the bathroom my grandmother would be singing, loosening up her voice. She did sound like a bird, I thought grimly. Like a chicken.

In the end, knowing I had no chance of winning, I would pretend to be seduced by Aunt Kate's mola.s.ses cookies and the promise that Uncle Ed would tell me stories. Sulking a little, to show them I didn't intend to forget this, I'd walk with my parents as far as the door, keeping an eye on their red, beaming faces and listening, full of disapproval, to their loud, cheerful talk as they took leave of my uncles and aunt and went down the wooden steps between the house and the big, dark mill to greet the relatives who'd come for them in their car. The inside lights of the car would go on as the car doors opened, and in that little, square-windowed island of light I'd see grown-up cousins and children cousins just a little more than my age squeezing over, climbing onto other cousins' laps. The alley between the mill and the house would fill up like a pool with laughter and shouts of "Watch your elbows!" and sometimes my father's voice, carefully patient, "That's all right, Mother. Take your time." Then the doors would close, leaving only the headlights, and the car would chuff-chuff-chuff past the mill and, listing like a carriage, would go around the corner at the end of the garden, then, listing again, taillights like two garnets, would veer out onto the road, briefly lighting up trees. When the taillights were out of sight I would turn, trying not to cry, to Uncle Ed, who would lift me and carry me on his shoulder like a feedsack to the kitchen. "So," he would say, "I guess you didn't know I used to work for a bear!"

"I don't believe it," I would say, though I did, in fact.

"Big old black bear name of Herman. Used to live up by Blue Mountain Lake."

He often set his stories on Blue Mountain Lake, or on nearby Black River, where his camp was (he would take us there sometimes, to my grandmother's dismay)-an immense log-and-stone lodge filled with stuffed lynxes, wolves, and owls, j.a.panese lanterns overhead, and on the rustic tables a whole museum's worth of strange objects Aunt Kate had collected-little models of birch canoes, carved figures, a stereopticon with pictures of Paris long ago. The lodge was set in among trees, all but inaccessible, a wooden dock below it, where Uncle Ed's guideboat was tied during the day. The water on the river, shallow and clear as gla.s.s, seemed hardly to move, though when you dropped a leaf on it it quickly sped away. Fish poked thoughtfully in and out among the shadows of underwater weeds, and when you looked up you saw a world almost equally strange-pinewoods and mountains, large hurrying clouds of the kind I thought angels lived on, huge white mounds full of sunlight. Whenever Uncle Ed began to speak of the Adirondacks, you knew that in a minute he'd be telling of his childhood in Wales, where people lived in cottages on dark green hills with their sheep and collie dogs, and nothing ever changed.

All through supper Uncle Ed would tell me stories, Aunt Kate tisk-tisking, moving back and forth between the table and the stove, patting my head sometimes, telling me not to believe a word of it. Uncle Charley would sit grinning as if sheepishly, sometimes throwing me a wink, sometimes saying a few words in a high-pitched voice, trying to make me think it was the parrot, Bobby Watson, who stood watching and pecking at lettuce in his cage in the corner. Uncle Charley was as small-boned as a sparrow and had startling eyes, one brown, one blue. Though he was almost as old as Uncle Ed, he had light brown hair and a brown moustache-a shiny, soft brown with hardly any gray in it. Perhaps it was partly the way he sat, head forward, eyes lowered, his hands on his knees except when he raised his fork or spoon: he seemed, even with all his wrinkles, just a boy, no bigger around than Uncle Ed's right arm. People who didn't know them thought Uncle Charley was Aunt Kate's brother, not Uncle Ed's. She too was, she liked to say, pet.i.te. After supper, while Aunt Kate washed dishes and the two old men went out to the mill to "catch up"-really to smoke cigars-I would bang on Aunt Kate's piano in the livingroom. The piano was a good one, a Storey & Clark upright. In the tiffanied dimness of the livingroom, its coal-black surfaces shone like mirrors, or like Black River at night, and everything I played on it sounded to me like real music. I would lose all track of time, closing my eyes and tipping my head to the piano sound, dark, sustained chords that in my mind made a shadowy place you could move around in, explore like an old-time Indian. When my uncles and aunt came together again, after the dishes and cigar smoking, they'd call me back and we'd play dominoes at the kitchen table. After an hour or so, Uncle Charley would say, grinning, not meeting anyone's eyes, "Well, time to turn in by gol, ant-it?" and he'd go down to his narrow, yellow-wallpapered room in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

I'd sit a little longer with Uncle Ed and Aunt Kate. They must have known how I hated to go upstairs alone in that big, quiet house; but it was Aunt Kate's habit to listen to her records-some of them old, thick Edison records, most of them opera-and sew for a while before going up to bed, and it was Uncle Ed's habit to settle down across from her, heavy and comfortable as an old gray cat, draw on his steel-rimmed spectacles, and read. They were both too old to go climbing that narrow back stairway twice. (The front-hallway stairs were wide and glossy, with a runner down the steps; I don't remember anyone's ever using them much except my cousins and me, playing Chinese School.) Aunt Kate was brittle and climbed steps one at a time. As for Uncle Ed, he was huge, for a Welshman, with hair as white as snow. When I began to nod, he'd say, looking at me over the spectacle rims, "You run and put your pajamas on, Buddy. We'll be up in a jiffy." As I think back to it, it surprises me that I didn't make a fuss; but I obeyed without protest, knowing I'd be long asleep before they got there.

Once in a while I'd wake up for a minute when they came, and I'd see them in their white flannel nightgowns, kneeling beside the bed. Pretending to be asleep-I slept on a cot across the room from them-I'd watch them bow their heads, side by side, and press their hands together just below their chins, and I'd listen to their whisperings in Welsh. Uncle Ed had three stubbed fingers, cut off in a gristmill when he was young. His rounded shoulders were enormous. In my memory, no doubt inaccurate, they went a third the length of the bed. In the mill, during the day, Uncle Ed was like a king, lifting heavy feedsacks as if they were nothing, chattering lightly past his dead cigar, mostly in that clicking, lilting gibberish he spoke; but now, for all his size, he was as subdued and meek as Uncle Charley, or Aunt Kate there beside him. The only light in the room was the dim one on the table beside the bed. It made his hair look soft, like a baby's. Aunt Kate's hair was like fine silver wire.

One time when we were visiting, Uncle Charley took what they all called later "a tumble." I'm not sure how much of it I actually saw. I was, as I've said, only five or six. A few sharp images have stayed with me all these years, but for the rest I must trust imagination and family stories. I remember sitting in the office at the mill-that time or some other time-drawing on one of the yellow, legal-sized notepads Uncle Ed used for figuring and keeping records, the pot-bellied stove unlit in the corner. It was August; I know because farmers were bringing their wheat in. All around the stove stood pale, bluish saltblocks, the slippery blue-white of bone in a butchershop, and stacked around the saltblocks there were bales of twine and barbed wire, kerosene lanterns, and zinc-coated buckets set one inside the other, the top bucket filled with nails. Outside the window I could see Aunt Kate's garden, aglow at that time of year with roses, zinnias, and sunflowers, vegetables down the middle, at one end a scarecrow in a washed-out, ragged coat and straw hat that had once been, no doubt, Uncle Charley's. There were farmers in the room with me, ritched back on their round-backed wooden chairs, talking and joking as they always did while they waited for Uncle Ed to grind their grist and then for Uncle Charley to load the bags on the two-wheeled feedtruck and roll them to the dock, then lift them down a foot or two onto the wagon. No doubt I'd been running back and forth with Uncle Charley for most of the morning, since that's what I usually did, neither of us talking-Uncle Charley almost never talked, except when he pretended to be the parrot in the kitchen-I, for my part, trying to be of help: s.n.a.t.c.hing an empty feedsack from his path, though in fact there was plenty of room; trying to push a heavy door open further. But now I was in the office, weary of the game, half listening to the singing of the wooden walls as they resounded to the mill-wheels, and drawing rabbits so much like those my father drew (rabbits were all he knew how to draw) that if you'd asked him later, he couldn't have told you for sure which one of us had done them.

I heard no shout, no noise of any kind, but suddenly the farmers were up out of their chairs, running in their heavy boots from the office into the mill, and as fast as I could get down out of my chair I was after them. Where the wooden machinery thudded and sang, sending up white powder, nothing was wrong. Uncle Ed stood blinking as the farmers ran up to him and past him; then he pushed the worn-smooth wooden lever that made the rumbling stop, caught me up in his arms, and ran after the farmers. When we came into the sunlight beyond the open door, we found Uncle Charley climbing up from between the loading dock and one of the farmers' wagons, furiously shouting and wiping dirt from his mouth and moustache. The wagon had been carelessly parked, a threefoot gap between the dock and the wagonbed. On the wagon, where Uncle Charley had dropped it when he stepped into the gap and fell, a sack lay split open, slowly drizzling grist down through the slats onto the ground. He shouted louder than before, no doubt swearing in Welsh-an amazing sound from a man always so quiet-and with a look half enraged, half guilty, he tried to get up on his feet and save the grain. Then another look came over him-surprise, indignation-and one leg, c.o.c.ked like a corn-knife, flipped out from under him. Uncle Ed set me down, almost threw me from him, and jumped onto the wagon, holding out his arms as if to pick up Uncle Charley, then thought better of it, or got confused. He just stood there, bent at the waist, arms thrown forward, like a child playing catch.

At the top of the stairs across the way, the back door of the house opened, and my grandmother came out in her knitted black shawl. "Land of Goshen!" she cried in a loud, angry voice. "Now look what you've done!" My father came out behind her, looking baffled and apologetic, as if if he hadn't been taking a nap he could have prevented it. "Now stop that," he said to my grandmother, almost absentmindedly, and instantly she stopped. Tears ran down the sides of Uncle Charley's moustache and he clung to his leg with both hands, not shouting now, clamping his lips together and whimpering. Then Aunt Kate was there with them, near-sightedly bending forward. "I'll call the doctor," she said, turning, and went back into the house.

"It's all my fault," one of the farmers said, shaking his head and working his jaw as if in a minute he meant to hit himself.

"Here now," Uncle Ed said, "let's get you inside," and carefully fitting his arms under Uncle Charley, taking pains to support the broken leg, he lifted him like a child or a newborn calf and carried him up onto the loading platform, over to the steps at the far end, then down and across the way and up the wooden stairs toward the kitchen.

"Mercy!" my grandmother said, unable to control herself, her eyes as bright as when she went out with a hoe to kill snakes. My mother took her arm and patted it.

I was of course not aware at the time that they all felt as guilty as I did. Even my grandmother, I realize now, must have felt guilty, shouting at us all as if she secretly believed she should have taken better care of us. But whatever they were feeling, they soon got over it, once Uncle Charley was inside, on the couch in the livingroom. I myself took longer. It was a matter of fact to me that if I'd been doing my job, running along with Uncle Charley and his feedtruck, keeping his way clear and watching out for trouble, he'd never have fallen down and broken his leg. The doctor, when he came, was professionally grave. Aunt Kate wrung her hands in her ap.r.o.n. I offered, bursting into tears as I did so, to pay Uncle Charley's doctor bills. Uncle Ed just looked at me, lips puckered in surprise. None of the others seemed to have noticed what I'd said. "I really will," I bawled, clinging to his leg.

"Here now," Uncle Ed said. "Katy, get this boy a cookie!" And then: "Go on, now. Away with you both!"

I went with her, looking over my shoulder at Uncle Charley, gray-faced on the couch, the doctor in his black suit bending down beside him. They were all smiling now, even Uncle Charley, all of them describing what had happened as "a tumble"-or all except my grandmother, who always took, according to my father, the darkest possible view of things. My mother and father had a fight that night, when they thought I was asleep. My father said my grandmother was an Angel of Death. (His anger may have made him unusually poetic-though now that I think of it, he said the phrase as if he'd used it against her many times.) "If you hate her so," my mother said, "why don't you just send her to the old folks' home?" Thus my mother won, as she always did. When it was clear to them both that she'd won, she said, "Oh, Bill, she's just worried. You know that. She's like a child." I lay in the darkness with my eyes open, trying to make sense of the queer idea.

It wasn't until the following summer that my family visited Remsen again. Letters pa.s.sed 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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, embarra.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 b.u.t.toned 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 G.o.ds-"River G.o.ds, tree G.o.ds, pig G.o.ds, 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed up a nail, c.o.c.ked it between two fingers over the tin, and started hammering. "d.a.m.n 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?"