We were down for about six hours before Paul took pity on me and we made our way out. I didn’t complain, but I felt sure Paul could tell how I was suffering. In the last cells the air was terrible: When I breathed in, it seemed to ignite the dust in my throat, I had to swallow again and again to settle what I imagined was a raging fire that lit up my insides all the way into my nose and made my eyes water. Paul inspected the men’s lamps and showed me how they were glowing blue, which indicated that there was gas in the air; he chastised them for working in these conditions, arguing they should leave for a day to have the bosses clean the air out. Decrucq was in that particular cell, it turned out, for I heard him call out, “Fontaine, you know the mine can’t kill me!” The other men grumbled that they couldn’t afford a day without pay.
The shadows danced and grew; they became menacing and then they disappeared when I looked at them; they were there and then they were not there. I saw a hand and I heard the noises of scraping in the darkness, of men grumbling and sighing, men sweating. There was a black ankle and then there was a rock. All was darkness, all was flickering fire. Inside my body was a mine filled with soot; inside my body was darkness, darkness was all we were, all of us, darkness. Coal. I tried to grow my eyes in their sockets, I thought if I could make them bigger that perhaps I could overcome the darkness, but of course there was no escape. I fixated on the flickering flames through the gauze in the lamps, for they were the only concrete things I could see, though after a while they were no real comfort, for they would not stay still. I would not complain; I would not permit myself to want out; this was how these men lived. As the mariners ashore are homesick for the sea, notwithstanding all the dangers and hardships which threaten them, so the miner would rather be underground than above it.
I was peering through the darkness, trying to use the dim halos cast from the blue lamps to discern a particular chin, an eyebrow, the hook of a nose. It was of sudden and dire importance that I know who the people were that were toiling before me. I had to identify them, Theo; I had to reveal them in their work and danger. I slunk toward them, feeling a desperateness, a compulsion to see. The lamps cast a light that was in itself a kind of shadow, so that all the men I glimpsed were unreal, men made out of wax and mud. They would have surely moved away from me if there had been room—a few gasped with surprise when I came close to them and then grumbled for me to move away.
I was making a list in my head, a kind of census. Hubert Aert, Joseph Trouls, Nim Parling. Who knew these people were down there, Theo? It felt in that moment like the whole town was there, mothers and fathers and boys and girls and babes—they were laboring there for a world that had forgotten them, carving out pieces of darkness in darkness so that others might have a light for their suffering. Now, writing this, after what has happened since then, I can see that such a census was necessary; that work is a laying down of life as much as on a battlefield. And I was there. I saw them, Theo, and I knew them and will remember them all until I die. I might grow old and daft, I might even forget one day that I had a brother, and that he deserted me, but I will never forget those faces, or how hard I had to look to discern an eye, a cheek, a chin.
I was still moving around, peering into the darkness like some kind of deranged explorer, when I heard a voice next to me that had the effect, in that underground inferno, of making my skin turn to ice.
“Monsieur Vincent, is that you?”
It was Angeline, Theo; I was sure of it from the sound of her voice, although I could not quite make her out. Angeline, who I had thought was in the upper part of the mine, who I had imagined was free to move her limbs and breathe better air! There she was next to me, in that place of extreme derangement, asking me if I were me.
I could not answer her. I panicked. I turned to move away; I had to get out of there. I struck my arm against what must have been a haulage cart. “Paul,” I croaked into the darkness. “Paul!” My throat felt like two hands clasped tightly around a piece of string. “Paul!”
“I’m here,” I heard him say. “Follow me; we’re on our way out.”
I couldn’t catch my breath the whole way back, even when we got to where the air was cooler and we could walk once again; the panic was still plaguing me, my heart beating fast, and the sound of that gentle voice—Monsieur Vincent, is that you?—echoing in my mind. We walked for what seemed like forever along the big main passageway, the air growing cooler and cooler, carts and horses hurtling by us constantly, boys shouting orders and galleys opening up off the right and the left.
Theo, do you remember when we were boys and I used to tell you that if you looked down the inside of your mouth that you could see all the way down into your stomach? I remember the two of us standing face-to-face, one of us opening wide and the other peering in, holding up the lamp to get a better look. I want you to look inside me now, just like that. How am I different now? How have I changed? Look! Inside me is the machinery of the mine, the cage dropping down that shaft, the thick passageways with the blind horses hauling rumbling carts through, the big cells and then the ladder down to the smaller ones and then down still more to the darkness, the heat and the blindness and all along the hands scraping at the walls, scraping away the refuse of the walls and hauling the discharge away, and those canaries all around, carts rolling on wobbly wheels carrying coal, and then, there at the very bottom, Angeline with her barely blue light.
Do you see, Theo? What do you see?
Monsieur Vincent, is that you?
We stopped at the stable while Paul had a coughing fit, and in the darkness I came up close to one of the horses and laid my hands on his mane. The hair at the top of his neck was coarse and long, it fell down over the side of him, and I ran it through my fingers and thought of Mother brushing our sisters’ hair in the sitting room while I sat and looked on. I always wished I could have hair like theirs so that I could experience that treatment, our mother touching a part of me so gently.
I laid my forehead against the horse’s shoulder and breathed in, and the horse breathed out quickly and shook his head, snorting loudly and stamping his foot, a gesture perhaps of pleasure and perhaps of annoyance. I didn’t care; the beast was alive. His hair against my face was warm and soft, and I felt it slowly rescuing me. I held on to the horse tightly, as if we were on a sled hurtling down a hill.
I felt such love for that horse in that instant, and for all of the creatures toiling in that strange underworld, countless people moving and sweating and carting, the birds in their hanging cages, and Paul behind me, leaning on the rock and spitting onto the earth, the other horses breathing loudly into their hay. I felt I could hear it all, the small noises in that magical place thunderous and deafening; they moved through me, along with all the innumerable bodies, human, bird, beast, insect, rat. We were all in the darkness together and we were all alive.
That’s it, Theo! We are all in the darkness, and we are all alive.
December 20
Petit Wasmes, the Borinage
Dear Theo,
After going down in the mine, I saw everything in the Borinage differently. Finally I knew where life really took place: it was not in the village, though this may be where the miners slept and very often where they died. The villages look desolate and lifeless and forsaken, and then I understood why: The heart of the place was underground. Decrucq once said something to me about toiling in a hole in the ground only to be buried in one at the end of one’s days; the distance isn’t very far from those cells underground to the cells a man’s body lies in for the rest of time.
In March, after the visit to the mine, I moved out of the Denis house for good, preferring my hovel once and for all to their home of comfort. Can you understand this? To me, it was as clear as a mathematical equation: I simply could not sleep in a home like theirs while men were naked in those mines with those flickering lamps, while men and women, my sisters and brothers, were coming home from that terrible underworld to dinners of potatoes and maybe a leek. I capitul
ated to Father when he came to visit, but I could not do it again, not after what I had seen. Another man could have, perhaps, Father and his colleagues, maybe even you could have, but I could not.
Madame Denis pleaded with me; she told me that the miners knew I was a good man, that I had nothing to prove, and that times had changed since the days of Jesus Christ. I could not explain to her that I was in need of a different sort of comfort, a sort that could not be found under a quilt or with a warm bath. I remembered what Father said when he was here, but this was no sacrifice, this was no altering of station. It was not a punishment; it was not an eccentricity, as I am accused of again and again. It was an honest act of fellowship, an act of love. How else can I explain it? Why does no one understand? I thought at least you would understand. I wondered when you would come to visit me, and how I could possibly explain all that had happened since we had last seen each other. I thought that when you finally arrived, you would see it as clearly as I.
I stuffed the holes in my shack’s walls with sacking to keep the wind out. I bought myself a month’s worth of coffee, cheese, and bread. Then I gave the rest of my salary to Madame Decrucq, so she could buy her children warm clothing. Whatever money I had from then on would no longer be for me. The spider and the mouse were happy to have me back. I asked Paul Fontaine if I might have one of the canaries from the mine—perhaps one that was too old to serve its purpose properly. He brought me one in a wire cage; it had only one leg, though despite a few years underground it was still a bright yellow. It was the strangest thing, this bird, for it was almost always silent; I would stand in front of its cage and coax it with my finger, trying to make it sing.
After being in the mine, I felt a new fever to try to capture what I saw; nothing could touch the darkness, of course, but I quieted the impossibility of capturing the mine by trying to draw everything else. I took my pencil and paper with me nearly everywhere, sketching what I saw: women carrying coal home from the slag heap, goats eating carrots while tied to a post, a little boy chasing a chicken, the trees standing sentinel by the mine fence. I admit there were times that I missed my duties—a sermon or a Bible class or even a scheduled visit to a parishioner—because I was out sketching and lost track of time. The sketching quieted my mind and occupied my hands. Some nights I was up all night trying to perfect an image that I had begun during the day, and although I sometimes threw these drawings into the fire in disgust, there were still more of them that I kept, neatly stacked in a pile near where I slept. I was seeing so much that I felt I could not capture in words. I would start letters to you and tear them up in frustration, all my words seemed so pedestrian, so inadequate, and so I would think instead of what drawings I would send you: Alard in his cap and jacket, Madame Denis cooking a stew. But the drawings frustrated me no less than the torn-up letters, for I couldn’t do them right, either.
I dreamed of pictures—I did then and I still do now—like the ones I used to see all day in the galleries in The Hague and London and Paris. Those galleries were so much the same, paintings crawling across the walls and ceilings, hanging from every spare inch of visible space, paintings covered in brown paper and leaning on one another in the back storage room, prints and drawings and sketches piled in boxes and drawers, organized by artist and subject, with brown cards dividing them. And though I came to feel suffocated in those galleries, selling the same cheap prints day after day to people who wanted the least expensive and least inspired images to hang on their walls, pretending that their choices were good when behind me was a Maris or a Mauve overlooked on the wall, smiling through my teeth when they looked at a print I loved and called it “sentimental,” though I came to hate my days in the galleries, I see those rooms before me now. There are no pictures in the Borinage, and I have been starved for them as if they are food. All those beautiful pictures, I see them in my mind, all those gilded frames, squares of life in color and fine line hanging on the wall.
I was thinking today of Millet’s picture The Evening Angelus, the one we spoke about back when I was living in London. I remember when I first saw a print of it—one of the Germans I stayed with before I moved to the Loyers’ brought a copy of it to a café where we were all having lunch. He laid it right down on the table in front of me, and I nearly lost my breath. That was “it,” as Mauve says; that was poetry, that was beauty. A woman and a man bent gently over a bassinet in a field, the sun setting softly behind them, lighting their vigil in peaceful hues. I had admired Millet already, but that might have been the first time that I understood him, or truly felt his power. It was like I used to feel as a child, looking at the Weissenbruch print Pa kept over the mantel; I would be a boy in that landscape rather than a boy in our house. And it was like that, too, with that Millet print—suddenly I was standing on that field, the sun setting before me, and I could hear the murmurs of the child in that bassinet, the soothing coos of its mother standing over it. That was it; that is it.
Everything belongs to the world of pictures. Everything we see.
December 27
Dear Theo,
It snowed here last night; the world is white again. I am reminded of what this place looked like a year ago, when I first arrived, and remembering my awe that a landscape could look like this, all white and black, so beautiful and so full of stark contrast. It is as if the very land here expresses the state of life.
Not too long after I went down in the mine and then moved out of the Denis house, Angeline’s father, Charles, was injured in a firedamp explosion. He was carried home from the mine by the black cart pulled by the white horse, a sight ubiquitous in the village, a sight of dread and fear. When the miners’ wives heard the cart coming, they approached it wailing and weak-kneed, carrying babies and with toddlers clinging to their skirts. They called out to the cart as it came down the lanes, “Who is it? Who is it?” They turned from where they were gathered at the water pumps or ran from the factory store and clustered around the cart, elbowing and pushing and peering inside to see who it was that was being carried home.
I didn’t know it was Angeline’s father until I went to visit the house. It was the third explosion in as many days; the miners were on edge and frightened. I heard about the accident and saw the horse and cart returning from the mine; I ran to the group of remaining women who stood in the lane, sharing in their relief that the injured was not one of their own. When I reached them, I had to stop and catch my breath, placing my hands on my knees. One of the women leaned over and asked if I was all right. She put her hand on my back and then pulled it away, exclaiming over how thin I was. “Pastor Vincent!” she exclaimed as I stood up, and shook her head at me, making a tsking sign with her mouth. “Look at you! Do you think you are a miner? Why do you starve yourself? Why do you not wash your face?”
I looked at her blankly. I did not know how to answer her; there was no time for questions like that. How could I give adequate words in the face of the constant arrival and departure of that white horse? I had lost track of what I looked like. Surely a man’s appearance was the least important fact of all?
Inside the Dubois house, I found Charles lying naked on his bed, facedown; the back of him from his waist up was charred black and swollen, ridges of skin snaking up his shoulders and the back of his neck, slipping under what was left of his hair, a handful of wisps at the base of his skull. He must have taken the explosion entirely from the back, for his face against the pillow was intact, only the very edges of it disfigured.
His women surrounded him, his wife and two daughters, both of them still wearing their clothes from the mine, covered in soot, though their faces were clean. They did not look up as I came in, and I did not see that one of them was Angeline. There was a washtub near the bed with the habitual film of dirt floating at the surface. The women were gently lowering compresses soaked in oil onto the remains of the man’s skin; in the dim light of the lamp near the bed I could see his eyes scrunch tightly closed as the cloths touched him. The pain must have been un
bearable. The women touched him gently, and his wife and one of his daughters wept silently. At the base of the bed stood a boy of about fifteen, who seemed paralyzed. He looked on at the women working on his father as if he were watching from a great distance.
I stood by the bed for a minute or two before any of them looked up. The room was filled with love and concern, every inch of space taken up with tenderness; when I breathed in, the care filled my lungs and crawled under my fingernails. I stood in awe. There is no limit to how people can love one another.
One of the women looked up from the bed, and then I saw that it was Angeline. For a moment our eyes met in surprise. Recovering, Angeline said, “Pastor Vincent,” and then, quietly, “Mama, Monsieur Vincent is here.”
Her mother turned to me with tear-stained cheeks. “Oh, Monsieur Vincent,” she said, “thank you for coming.” She held out her hand, which was slick with the oil from the rags, and I took it in both of mine. “Madame Dubois,” I said, “God bless you. Your husband is a brave man, and he will come through this trial.”
I didn’t know if I believed it, Theo, but I knew it was what she had to hear.
The Season of Migration Page 15