He gets to his feet and starts to walk again. They had a cat once when he was a boy—a stray that wandered over to the parsonage and would not leave, appearing every day and mewling desperately at the door until one of the children came outside. Eventually they convinced their mother to let the cat inside, where it swished happily across the living room, rubbing its body against all of their legs and hands. Anna suggested they call it Roo, a name that quickly stuck. Roo lived with them for only a few months, and then one day she didn’t return from her afternoon wanderings and was never seen again.
One day during those months Vincent came across Roo in the garden in back of the parsonage with a mouse clamped between her jaws. The mouse’s body was limp and hanging from the corners of her mouth, and Roo looked up at him as if she were carrying a prize that she would share with him only if he were lucky. He did not touch the cat then, merely shooed it away to go do its terrible business where he could not see. But that evening, when Roo came back, he sat with her in the front room and prayed over her, one hand on her tiny head, asking God to forgive her for her trespass and to take away all desire for murder from her heart. He concentrated, his eyes shut tight, fervently aiming his prayer to the sky. Wasn’t that the way prayers were heard? When he released her, he felt sure that she swished away from him with a new lightness, a sense of relief at being forgiven. He was seven years old.
He thinks of this now, remembering the lightness and relief, the feeling that a prayer could fix something, that it was that simple. He mourns for that simplicity; he wishes to have it back with all of his soul. In his head everything is so confused, and at the end of the long trail of puzzlement is yet another question mark, for what can a man make of his life if he is so perplexed?
He is alone. He sees the sweep of the countryside; he imagines the horizon extending out past where he can see to other villages and fields and rolling heaths and eventually to oceans and ships and men in other lands. The earth is moving with human life and activity and he is alone on a road, his mind roiling in chaos, in awe at the grandeur and cowering at the fact of it, the incredible pressure, the challenge of being alive. How to be equal to the task? He does not belong to the birds. They have one another; what does he have?
He hears her voice, again and again: Monsieur Vincent, is that you? He doesn’t know.
1880
January 10
Petit Wasmes, the Borinage
Dear Theo,
In 1755 there was an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, that nearly completely destroyed the city and the surrounding areas. Forty minutes after the initial earthquake, there was a massive wave, and for days afterward fires raged. Nearly 100,000 people are said to have died.
January 10
Dear Theo,
A seventy-three-year-old convicted murderer named James Legg was hanged in 1801 for his crime. Three Royal Academy of Arts members convinced the surgeon at Chelsea Hospital to let them have the body after death. They wanted to use Legg’s body to study the physiology of the crucifixion of Christ, which they thought had been depicted all wrong in popular artistic renderings. The men erected a cross near the sight of Legg’s hanging and affixed the corpse to the cross just as Christ had been affixed. When the body, still warm after death, had cooled, the men made a cast of it, so they could study it; they also, then, flayed the body and made a different cast of it without its skin.
January 10
Dear Theo,
Sometimes I am visited by our dead brother, Vincent, the one who died the year before I was born. I have never told anyone this. He comes to me, Theo, I see him, and sometimes he speaks to me.
January 10
Dear Theo,
Why is it easier to tell you all of these things than to tell you about the explosion? I will tell you about anything else; anything that I know, even things I don’t, I will tell easier than this.
The explosion was two days after Angeline stayed the night in my hut.
I didn’t think there was anything worse than what I had already seen in the Borinage, but I was wrong.
The sound of it was a clash of thunder thicker and more ominous than any I had yet heard. I felt the tremor in my hut; the earth beneath me turned to liquid for an instant; it rolled as if in the wake of a boat. Then all was still. I instantly descended into dread. Outside my hut there was sure to be death and destruction and suffering the likes of which I had not yet experienced.
In a moment I heard the breaker whistle blowing from the mine. I ran toward the sound with a churning stomach and tingling limbs, and met many others running toward it, too. Many women were already crying, anticipating that the tragedy they had been waiting for daily was surely upon them at last. There were men running also, their faces fixed and stern, though their eyes were wide and their speed gave away their fear. Who was it they had lost this time? What kind of destruction would they find, and how far would it reach? It was a run of only a minute or so, but in the minds of each of us there was the conscious crossing over from before and into after.
As we came within sight of the mine we slowed our speed, for the vision before us was fresh with darkness and evil. There was a column of dense black smoke climbing to the sky from the center of the mine, where the pit was; the blackness had erased the sun. The air was thick and choking and rife with the sound of ominous crackling and snapping. Through the smoke I could see that the wheel at the top of the pit, that giant piece of machinery that helped to move the cages, was on fire, the flames reaching through the smoke as if they, too, were suffocating and desperate for escape. The buildings surrounding the pit were damaged and charred, their windows blown and hanging, flapping like pieces of cloth. One of the buildings had half collapsed, as if it had been brought to its knees.
It was a vision of Hell. It was more than a vision; it was Hell materialized. Hell has been raised, Theo, I saw it with my own eyes. On the ground approaching the mine there were the bodies of injured men, legs broken and skin smeared with char and dust and blood. Men were shouting and wriggling and squirming, using their elbows, their hips, their shoulders, even their chins to inch themselves farther away from the pit. Some were not moving at all. Scattered among the bodies were severed limbs—a hand, a forearm, a thigh and knee, a calf and ankle and boot, pieces of flesh both recognizable and not—mere objects now, bloodied and ragged, where a few minutes before they had been part of a man’s identity, part of how he loved and lost, part of the body he had awakened with that morning.
All was chaos, all was terror, all was noise and dust and flame. Where to run? Whom to tend to? The landscape was awash with need, and I was only a man with two hands. I staggered from man to man, this one with blood rushing from his ear, this one with an elbow bent the wrong way, bone torn through skin like paper. I bent to hear requests and pleas, murmuring words of succor and support, quickly learning that without supplies there was nothing at all I could do.
A man with a mustache lay with a hole in the center of him. He was seemingly intact and howling, but when I drew close to him I saw that his center was open as a window. He fumbled with his insides as if they were clothing overflowing from a bureau drawer. But he had only his hands, and they were not enough. He did not seem aware of me or of anything else beyond his task. For a moment, I could do nothing but stand over him, paralyzed with shock and fear, my eyes fixed on those desperate hands. Through the man’s fingers his insides oozed; his hands were solid objects grasping at a hole full of snakes. They were butterflies, those hands, butterflies fluttering over an expanse of living quicksand.
I was mesmerized; the color of the hands was a pale shade that was quickly darkening, saturated by blood, dyed from the inside and the outside. I was a monster, standing over the man and gazing at him, watching him die. I was a monster, but I could not stop; I felt horror that was so complete that it stripped everything away save for my eyes. The man died within a minute or two, his hands growing limp and sinking ever so slowly into his body. Man is made in the image of God, Th
eo, which is also the image of grief, of terror, and of fire.
Behind the man with the hole in his stomach was a man whose legs were severed. As I approached I saw that it was Louls Hartmann, the man who had lumbered before me down the passage in the mine when I went down. He whimpered like a child. I took off my shirt and tore the sleeves from it to tie around Hartmann’s thighs. He had already lost so much blood that this was most likely a futile act. Blood was pooling around him, the puddle creeping toward his chest. He was sputtering but making no words. I tied the sleeves tight, praying that I could stem the flow. I told him he was going to be all right, feeling a liar and not sure Hartmann could even hear me. His eyes were bulging and full of awe, as if he were watching Heaven approach.
Men and women were arriving with stretchers, planks of wood, horses and mules, anything they could find that might be able to transport bodies away from the mine. In the blur of faces I saw Else and Hubert Aert, their faces twisted, Jan Gilmart lifting a stretcher, Paul Fontaine bending over a man in the dirt. The Denises were there, all of them except Alard, whom they must have made stay at home. I called out to a boy leading a mule—the man without his legs would easily fit on the back of his beast. The boy came toward me, but when he saw the body at my feet he hesitated and then shook his head. “It’s no use, Monsieur Vincent!” he said, and moved quickly on, for there was no time to pause for the dead. Louls Hartmann was gone: his chin on the earth, his eyes still wide and staring, but his soul departed. I paused a moment, then bent to remove my sleeves from his thighs. I used them on someone else.
January 12
Dear Theo,
How do you represent horror? How do you speak about your nightmares? If you know everything about how things should be, then tell me how to do it. When you are dreaming something horrible, you wake up in your bed and the dream disappears—sometimes as slowly as a fog burns off in the sun, but nonetheless eventually it is gone. The horrors that you see when you are awake do not disappear. When a man is burned in a fire, his skin turns to putty and runs like sand. I know this because I saw such men, such flesh. In the aftermath of the mine explosion I saw a man’s face drip off of him, his skin a kind of liquid that pulled away from his eye, which stared up at me, unblinking and dead, like the eye of a fish.
Have you ever seen anything like that, Theo? Have you? Has Father? Has Mother, or Anna, or Lies? Do you think the men of the evangelism committee have seen such things? God sees such things, Theo, God sets them in motion and then lets them live, those moments, those images—they live on inside those of us who see them. What have you seen? What lives in you?
January 13
Dear Theo,
I started a letter to you about the explosion that happened here in the days soon after it happened, but I could not get my words to touch it. I still can’t. Now I wish I had told you about it, or more than that, that you could have been with me to see it. If you had been here with me, then you probably would not judge me so harshly, for you would see that my time here has been anything but idle. If I am not the same any longer, it is because of what I have seen. If Father had been here for that, would he have picked up his Bible and run into the destruction to recite verses? Put any of the reverends in a scene like that and watch what they do. If they stand on a cart meant for bodies and raise their voices to the suffering herd, and if that is what you would have had me do, then I think it is best that we no longer speak, for then it is surely you who has changed, and not me.
January 19
Dear Theo,
It wasn’t until much later that I learned the fate of Angeline.
I did not think of her. I did not worry. My brain was full but empty. In the hours after the explosion I thought of no one and nothing, only the particular flesh before me, blistered and ragged, and how I could soothe it, how I could tear my clothing into smaller and smaller strips and apply them to that skin. I ran from house to house and gathered olive oil from pantries and hot wax from candles, drenching the last of my clothing in this mixture and applying the linens to scorched and rippling skin.
Skin was divorced from bodies, from personalities and names; my vision was focused on pieces of people, as if these patches of wound were canvases of fine art. I didn’t know what I was doing, whom I was tending, the need was so great and so constant. Now when I think of it, I suppose that somewhere inside I assumed Angeline to be all right, to be somewhere among the rest of them, overwhelmed and exhausted and running from place to place. My brain was filled only with the sounds and images. It was as if thought were a sin, in that sea of need, as if to think of anyone in particular would be to ignore all the others, to raise one need above the others, make one body more worthy than another. A few times people tried to give me relief. There was a hand on my shoulder, or Mrs. Denis with a look of concern, saying, “Vincent, slow down, have a rest,” for I had been running nonstop since the explosion, and was that a day ago? Two?
But with every bandage I laid, every hand I held, every brow I wiped with a damp handkerchief, I fought the constant and gnawing presence of the conviction that nothing I was doing was of any use. Some of the miners expected prayer from me; they expected comfort in the form of assurance of the next world, of God’s plan, of all the usual declarations of Christian faith and goodness in the face of horror. But with every crippled man and child I saw, every broken piece of flesh, I found my mouth was more and more set tight. How could there be any comfort to be found there? I was angry and growing angrier.
After three or more days, Charles Decrucq had still not returned from the mine. Hannah was beside herself; she sat by the entrance of their hut and could do nothing but stare absently in front of her and wring her hands. I felt sure that he would return, and I told her this, but she seemed not to hear me. Her boys threw themselves into the rescue mission, spending the day at the mine, where men were digging slowly toward the tunnel, where they thought they might be able to reach whoever was trapped, if there were any survivors. There were rumors that the rescuers had heard shouts and tapping from inside the tunnel. The boys thought that perhaps they, being small, could wriggle into passages that grown men could not enter, so they hung back and waited for their moment. They supplied the digging men with fresh tools and lamps refilled with kerosene, and remained there through the night.
I was coming back from a trip to the mine on what must have been the day after the explosion. The sky was a gentle pink, unearthly, like the sky before a storm. I stopped on the trail between the mine and the village and turned, looking around me. To the west the sun was disappearing fast; the sky darkened by degrees every few seconds, a visible and invisible change: pink to mauve to nearly purple, a beauty complete and indifferent, as breathtaking a sunset as I had seen in weeks.
I often watched the sunset in the Borinage, having discovered early on that it was one of the few opportunities to see bright color, particularly in the winter months, which seemed to last forever. Perhaps because of the drabness of the landscape, or the chemicals in the air, the sunsets were often spectacular. I’d watch them up by the Denises’ house, or on the fence by the mine, enjoying the contrast between the heavenly delights and the earthly toil. That evening, though, I saw something else written in the sky: The sunset was a taunt, it was a pair of eyes looking down and laughing. I stood for a moment, looking at the streak of deep purple turning to red, and I felt only rage.
As I turned back to the path, I saw Madame Dubois, Angeline’s mother, who was hurrying toward the mine. Immediately it rushed over me: Angeline! Where was she?
Her mother looked haggard and drugged, her face drawn and pale. “Madame Dubois,” I said, stopping before her. I had no words to follow those.
“Any news, Pastor Vincent?” Her tone was pleading and desperate, and I knew then that some part of her family was lost. I blinked, and a silent cry shot through me: Lord, not Angeline.
“They’re still digging,” I said, and then my throat knotted against my words: “Who is missing?”
She looked at me with great sorrow and, I felt sure, with pity and a flash of anger. How could I ask her such a thing? How could I not already know the answer? Her eyes filled with tears. Her mouth opened to speak and then she closed it again and shook her head. She covered her mouth with her hand, looking at the ground, the tears spilling over her eyelids and falling to the dry earth. I reached out and rested my hand on her shoulder. I knew, of course, what she would say; maybe I had known it since I first felt the tremor in the earth. Maybe all of my frenzied fever in the last hours had been so that I would not have to be confronted, like this, with what she was about to say, and with what I already knew.
“Both of them,” she whispered, her eyes still lowered. “Both of my girls are gone.”
January 26
Dear Theo,
There is something that ties me to this earth; there is more than something. I want to declare this and let this be. A good Christian would take comfort in his unworthiness, perhaps; a good Christian feels this unworthiness and offers it up to God. Thomas à Kempis says in his Imitation of Christ, “Learn to be unknown and be glad to be considered despicable and as nothing.” We are to despise the world, we are to withdraw from earthly things, we are to consider ourselves unworthy and as nothing, and in so doing we are to grow closer to God; we are to surrender, we are to ascend to the kingdom of Heaven. Presumably there is a point in all this struggling where a man can let go, where he fully surrenders his own will, and this is the point at which he begins to find peace. But I have never been able to find this place. Always at the end of my writhing and cudgeling there is a string that holds on, holds on, grips this world so tightly that it cannot be severed save, I suppose, in death, and who really knows if even then. And there is always a voice in me that says that God does not disapprove; that loving the world is a way to God as well. Do any of us, really, have any purpose here except a passing through on our way to the next world? And if not, why all this beauty, why all this pain, why even the sense of hatred that curls my hands into fists and sets my teeth against one another as if they were enemies?
The Season of Migration Page 18