* * *
In front of a cottage, three boys and a girl sit in a circle, playing a game with a pile of pebbles. They are very intent, their voices low and murmuring, and only one of them looks up at Vincent as he approaches and passes by. The light is too dim to see them clearly, but he can see that they wear the usual uniforms of peasant children—the girl in a gray dress and her hair in a braid, the boys in short pants, all of them barefoot.
A week or so ago, the day before he left the Borinage, a trio of boys just like these, with ragged pants and dirty skin, threw rocks at him as he made his way down a winding path past them. Only one of the rocks hit him, on his right ankle, and raised a welt. He walked on, pretending not to notice that the boys were there. If it weren’t for the prick on his ankle, he might not even have heard the words they yelled after him: cracked and crazy and dog. It wasn’t the first time the Borinage children had thrown rocks at him, nor the first time, even before the Borinage, that peasant boys had bullied him. The irony is not lost on him: These were exactly the type of children that he would have wanted to play with as a boy, his father inside their huts, ministering to their parents: rough-edged, easily amused. They were just the kind of boys that he tried to teach at the school in Ramsgate, England, along the coast, and just the kind of boys he tried to teach at his makeshift school in the Borinage. What is it about him and boys like that?
When Vincent was a boy, he would watch them play, wondering at their stamina for such simple games—what fun was it to push a wheel around the school yard with a stick? After trying and failing too often to be like them, he found he much preferred long walks to school-yard games, no one commenting on his behavior or calling him odd, not the bird eggs he collected or the insects he brought home to push down onto pages with pins, labeling them in meticulous script. The Brabant countryside, unchanging and everlasting: the starlings all along a low tree branch, leaping from their perches and floating, circling in long, wide arches, exercising their wings and their throats as they swooped and squawked and squabbled; the white sandy path along the cornfields and gently sloping hillsides, his feet shuffling, a gentle breeze blowing against him; and the landscape, forever shifting, cottages appearing in the distance, crows drifting through fog, starkly black against a wet and heavy white, women in bonnets and dark skirts bent in the fields, unmoving, so that they, too, were as trees, growing up from the earth. The green of the potato plants, the amber of the wheat, the fluffy gray sheep moving across the distance, butterflies landing gently on the open and patient face of a flower: He never grew tired of the world he saw when he walked, it was never familiar to him no matter how many times he saw it. When he was alone, he would sit on a tree limb for hours, letting his eyes relax, listening to the noises around him, and feeling a sense of peace that he never felt in the world of men.
He thinks of Alard, his friend in mining country, another boy who was different, and the drawing that he had given to Vincent a month or so ago, a portrait of Smoke, the cat that lived in the now-empty salon, all fast lines and squiggles, the cat’s eyes round and exaggerated amid sharp tufts of hair. Alard was a boy as he had been, not satisfied by the games of the other children. He thinks of Alard’s little voice after he handed the picture to Vincent, and Vincent was holding it in his hands: “Do you like it, Monsieur Vincent? Is it good?”
Vincent’s parents worried about his long absences from the parsonage, for he never alerted anyone to his departure and was often away for hours at a time, even at night. He especially loved to walk in storms, the sky and the flashing light enhancing the natural drama of the landscape. He almost always carried a fishnet on a pole and a jar for carrying home the specimens that he found.
One day he brought home a jar that was nearly full of crawling beetles, some he had found in the water of a canal and others in the mud on the edge; he had a notion that putting them all together in a confined space might bring out some interesting instincts among them, and he was interested to see if they would naturally separate. His sisters Elisabeth and Anna were waiting for him when he came home, and upon seeing the jar, they broke into squeals of distaste, calling him queer and saying he was horrible and insisting that he put the jar out at once. He did, leaving it just by the door of the house, not wanting to release the beetles for fear that he’d never find quite the same mix of them again. But when he came out to them first thing in the morning, they were all dead.
It was a horrific sight, that little jar filled with the carcasses of beetles that had been so energetic the day before. There seemed to be so much more space in the jar than there had been, the black shells lying carelessly about on top of one another, twisted legs jutting up and pointing left and right. Vincent held it in his hand and felt a revulsion that twisted his insides from his neck to his groin. It took all of his strength to carry the jar to the garden, twist the cap, and dump the beetles behind a flowering bush, to watch the way they tumbled out over the rim like pieces of weightless black licorice. The sound they made as they fell to the earth was almost the sound of a scouring brush lightly touching fabric. He spent the next few days inside, mourning those beetles and staring at his hands.
He felt a wonder toward learning, as a boy, despite his hatred for school. He remembered awe at the power of his hand, that he could take a delicate piece of lead and draw, and what he created was both an image and a word. What a miracle! When a word was written down, it became an image as well as a word; this was a revelation. The recognition of it allowed him to learn how to see words even when they were spoken, not only the shape of them but the pictures they called to mind. What was the world if not words and pictures?
But still, he had failed. His parents had removed him from the local school after a few too many scuffles in the school yard, and then for three years, his father had tried to teach him. “I will be unlike that man, that disciplinarian across the street,” Vincent overheard his father saying to his mother one day in the kitchen. “If his own father cannot teach him, who can?” But schooling at home was no better—long afternoons in the front room at the parsonage, his father hovering over him, the smell of wood chips drifting off his clothes and enveloping Vincent, a reminder of his father’s presence even when he couldn’t be seen.
How could anyone stand it? How could he be blamed for slipping out of the parsonage when his father left for church, through the path in the garden hedge and out into the heath beyond? More and more he fled the house, sleeping for whole afternoons in patches of sun in empty fields, lying down next to fallen birds’ nests and rising without knowing how long had passed, stumbling home, only to find his father had gone to bed, his fury at Vincent’s delinquency present, for Vincent, in the silence that greeted him when he sneaked quietly in the front door. After three years of it, three years of his father’s checking his homework when they had finished eating dinner and then sitting next to him at the same table in the morning, his father’s constant presence next to him, judging him, shaking his head, saying, “Try again,” try again, try again, neither of them could continue.
The last day was in the summer, and the front room, which was dim and close and normally cool even in the summer, was sweltering. Vincent wore a short-sleeved shirt and his father had taken off his jacket; Vincent was trying to focus on multiplication tables, but the numbers were dancing and forming patterns and pictures and he could not make them sit still. He was sweating. Was it fear or was it the heat? “Which is it, Vincent?” asked his father. “What is the answer?”
How could he tell his father that the numbers would not lie still? Perhaps he should guess—perhaps a wrong number was better than telling his father the truth: that when he looked down at the page, he saw the numbers as a waterfall, the twos and threes falling over the sixes and fives.
He said a number. His father stood still for a moment, looking at the floor, and Vincent wondered whether it was possible that he had guessed correctly. But then his father erupted.
“NO!” he shouted, and then turned fr
om Vincent to the mantelpiece, composing himself, his shoulders rising as he took a deep breath. “Vincent,” he said slowly and softly without turning around—Vincent knew this tone was reserved for his most angry moments—“how do you ever expect to learn if you do not try?” He took a breath. “You are a smart boy; I know this. But you seem determined, just DETERMINED”—he paused again as his voice grew louder, forcing his tone down—“determined not to apply yourself. I do not know what we can do with you. I’m afraid I’ve done all I can.”
He left the room then, abruptly, Vincent still sitting at the table with the waterfall of numbers and their checkerboard companions. He was trying to see them clearly; it was they that would not lie still.
And then came boarding school. His first night, he lay in the unfamiliar bed with its stiff starched sheets and pictured his family at home, all of them sleeping soundly, the sound of the clock in the main room ticking through the rest of the house. As he drifted off to sleep, he began to feel that he was still in his bed, and that Theo was there beside him, and that the ticking that he heard was in the room with them. All was quiet; all was familiar and safe and warm. But gradually he began to be aware of his body beneath the blanket next to Theo; it was not the body he knew, the gangly limbs, long and floppy and awkward, but something much smaller, much different from that, much more foreign and confining. He tried to move his arms and his legs, to feel his torso with his fingers, to roll over, but it was all wrong. He was cramped and tiny; there was no heft to him. He tried to stretch and felt fingers that were barely nubs. It came to him slowly and with horror: He was an infant. He was the baby Vincent.
He walks on, thinking of those children in that circle behind him, unfazed by his presence, just another man on a road. It will be dark soon, and he will need to find somewhere to sleep. What will those children turn into? Their parents, no doubt, the keepers of their family’s land, the bearers of babies and future land keepers, and on and on into the future. Alard will become a baker; the miner boys will become miners. None of them will break from the flock; none of them will ask, most likely, what they are meant for, because the path for them is clear.
He thinks of Angeline, in his hut, her eyes pleading and sad; Monsieur Vincent, will you tell me of other places? Angeline, who wanted a different future for herself but did not find one.
* * *
He stops and gazes at a glowing field. His body is aching from the walking and the recent bout with fever in the farmer’s barn after the storm, and as he stands, watching the last raindrops on the field catch the moonlight and glisten, he feels the chorus of aches in his body as music. He is looking over the field while a symphony plays in his ears. The music is melancholy and sad; then it is threatening, the pain in his legs rising at the sudden stasis. The field glints and shines; it seems to glimmer from within its very soil. He imagines a hole opening up in the center, blooming, growing, beckoning him to crawl inside.
Who is he without his brother? Who is a man without the skin he lives inside?
Then, his father’s voice: Who is a man without a goal, a pursuit, a vocation?
Gradually he becomes aware of a cow, standing nearby, its nose in the grass and chewing. The cow does not notice him, or does not care. There is a haystack nearby where the cow is standing, and Vincent moves slowly over to it and sinks down. He wants to be near the beast for a moment, wants the simple animal to silence the voices in his head. He has always loved the sound of large animals chewing—the muffled crunching, the lap of the giant tongue, the snorting of the nostrils as big as his fists, the deep bass of the breathing into the grass. There is something joyous about it, something simple and joyous. It is the sound of a need being met, the sound of desire fulfilled, and yet it is more than that. It is the sound of patience, the sound of no rush, the sound of natural time, of no thought, of pure existence. It is the sound of the way things are.
He takes his stack of paper from his pocket and smoothes it against his knee. Watching the cow intently, listening to the sound of it chewing, he attempts to draw what he sees: the curve of the animal’s back, the shape of its face, a distorted figure eight. He is frustrated that the drawing cannot contain the sound that he is hearing.
He draws the tail flung out from the body, wishing to capture its motion, the casual, content swing from side to side, an expression of the cow’s satisfaction. The cow stands for its portrait without protest, only occasionally raising its eyes to take in the man crouching before it. What might an animal understand of a man’s instinct to capture what he sees?
He remembers one night not too long ago in the Borinage, when he witnessed the birth of a calf in a stable. The expression on the mother’s face was strained, her eyes threatening to burst from their sockets, her teeth bared. It was the middle of the night, and there was a girl there, a brown peasant face with a white nightcap. She had tears of compassion in her eyes for the poor cow when the animal went into labor and was having great difficulty. Vincent stood toward the back of the room, taking in the scene and imagining how it could be painted by Correggio: a black background, the cow illuminated from the center of the image as if from the inside, the moment of the calf’s birth like the birth of an angel; or by Millet: an ominous sky, the calf birthed outside in a field, a peasant woman in an apron bending over to receive the animal; or by Israëls: the barn rendered in browns the same color as the cow, the peasant girl in the corner with red circles of blush on her cheeks barely visible except if one was to look closely. When the calf was born, wriggling on the stable floor in a casing of sticky liquid, the farmer turned to Vincent. His eyes questioned him: What was he doing there? What did he have to offer? Vincent stood forward and uttered a line from John 11:40, “Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” but his words sounded hollow to his ears in the face of that calf wriggling on the ground. He saw the farmer’s eyes roll over him, taking in his shabby clothes, his bare feet, and a familiar mixture of shame and defiance swept over him. He had been seeing that look more and more from the people of the Borinage. Yet in front of them was that newborn miracle, and surely this outweighed the judgments of men? He said nothing more, but took in the details of the image before him—the slick membrane that surrounded the calf, the way the mother immediately moved her body to lick the animal that had just come from inside of her, and always that little peasant girl in the corner, quietly watching.
He folds the sketch and reaches for his knapsack to put it away. With the bag open, he peers in at the stack of letters on the bottom. His heart speeds up at the prospect of touching them, remembering the possibility that they may no longer be readable. The labor of all these months of silence! He is nearly amazed that the stack is so small, holding as it does so many months of time. He reaches in and pulls the letters out; the stack is intact, still bound by the twine, and as he pages through he is relieved to see that the words look legible. He sits there, holding his voice in his hands, and watches the cow.
Something about the animal kingdom, he thinks; respite from the burden of choice, perhaps, or the capacity for wonder. He is grateful. The animal is fuel for him, the intact letters a message that he should continue on.
* * *
In the deep of night, his body exhausted, he lies down in a pile of discarded hay near a locked barn—not quite a bale, but enough of a pile that he tells himself there will be some warmth there.
He lies looking up at the sky. The sky is stunning, the stars spread across it in an ancient twinkling language, the moon exerting its bright dominion, giving permission to the smaller stars to shine. It occurs to him that he hasn’t seen the sky like this in a good many months—in the Borinage, there is too thick a layer of soot between the ground and the sky for the firmament to reveal itself. Is this why it is so hard to dream in that land?
He watches the stars and a feeling of peace comes over him. His body aches, his muscles tense and tingling; he brings his mind to each part of him and wills it to q
uiet. Shoulders, neck, stomach, hands, thighs, toes: Piece by piece he calms himself, sinking farther into the hay. It’s a technique he used to use when he was a boy, coming in after a long walk on the heath and being sent straight to bed, his body still walking and Theo already asleep. How do you calm a creature that will not be calmed? You hold it close and speak softly to it.
He thinks of Angeline, her body close to his, the curve of her neck where it met her shoulder just visible in the flickering lamplight. A sharp pain jabs in his chest. He tries not to think of her—it is not productive, he hears his father say—but the last portrait he made of her floats up behind his eyes: repeated nervous lines back and forth over one another in a frenzy of movement, revealing jaw, neck, head a bit too large for her shoulders, round shape of knee, her cheek half in shadow and somehow glowing pink even without an application of color. The image trembles in his mind just as the sight of her trembled in the light of the lantern, ghostlike and ephemeral, yet undeniable, alive. Where is the picture now? Reverend Pieterszen’s house, propped up in his study in front of his easy chair, next to unfinished portraits of his wife. Somewhere in the world, Angeline looks out over a room—unwavering gaze, bemused expression. He hears her voice, soft and inquisitive: Monsieur Vincent, is that you?
He wills himself to stop thinking of her—Stop!—and closes his mind over the thought of her like the lid of a trunk. In her place comes Theo—another apparition he doesn’t want to abide.
His brother’s August visit nine months ago comes back to him in painful detail. He tries to will it away, but it returns. He had stood for hours waiting for Theo’s train—he was so excited about his arrival that he had gotten there far too early. For hours, he leaned against the wall of the train station, watching the tracks. A cluster of people stood near, chatting and cooling themselves, waving their hands and their hats and their unfurled fans at their faces. Every few minutes one of the men stepped closer to the tracks and leaned out, peering down the line and watching for distant movement. The women’s fans, constantly moving, fluttering like the wings of butterflies, were flapping patches of color—purple, blue, and pink—against the train station’s landscape, grays and dusty browns as far as the eye could see. Vincent watched and imagined them taking flight, the women grasping after them as they took wing and flew away, and then the women floating up after them.
The Season of Migration Page 5