The Season of Migration (6 page)

He wanted to be like his father so much that it hurt like a wound. He wanted to change himself to be like his father; he wanted the supernatural power to twist and fiddle with his insides until he could be a saint, until he could be the son that his father wished him to be. Inside the cottages, his father pulled from his pockets a gift of tobacco or a slim package of meat, sometimes a few coins, and without ceremony laid it down on the table or the mantel. He knew which families would be too prideful to accept his gifts, and for these he made sure to lay them down in moments when they were all otherwise occupied, tending to their fire or to their stove, where a bubbling pot of potatoes mumbled and hissed, or leaving them in places where they wouldn't be found until after he and Vincent had gone—even once slipping some money into a man's boot that sat inside the door. Vincent watched his father's face in those homes, taking in the group of peasant women sitting together on the floor, peeling potatoes with thick and blunted knives, the children so thin and needy, clambering at his pant legs because they knew the good pastor often traveled with treats in his pockets. He saw compassion and sorrow in his father's eyes.

The one thing Vincent never saw in him was anger. Though he may have shaken his fist on occasion at his eldest living son, he never shook his fist at God. He sat with the peasants, the weavers and shepherds and farmers, and he took their hands and listened to their troubles, and nodded and sighed and told them that it was God's will that some should suffer in this life. He told them that there was another world ahead of them where they would not suffer, and that they should take comfort in this while they struggled in this world. He sat with them and read a passage from the Bible, and then he told them that God had a reason for doing all that He did, and blessed them, and then he and Vincent ducked back out into the open air.

It often upset Vincent that his father could be so unflappable in the face of extreme distress. Once, when Vincent was eight or so, they visited a home where two people lay dying: an old woman, who had taken to her bed months before but was now near the end, her breathing short and shallow, her figure a skeleton surrounded by a nest of white hair; and a young boy, who had fallen from a horse he was riding with his father. The young boy's sister had been infirm from birth, one of her legs a few inches shorter than the other, and now the house seemed truly to be cursed. Vincent stood in the doorway and took in the scene, his father sitting with the parents of these children between the beds of the dying, holding their hands and praying with them, their heads all bowed to the floor, their bodies shrouded in shadow. In the corner of the cottage, two other children sat in near rags and played with a handful of wooden blocks, the sound of them against one another as they were stacked a sharp knocking that Vincent felt in his chest. A feeling of hopelessness overcame him; eventually he sneaked through the door to wait for his father in the yard, and had to recover his breath as if he had been running.

On the way home, Vincent tried to get his father to express his anger about the state of things in that hut, but all he would say was that it was God's will. This answer incensed Vincent. Why should it be God's will for good people to suffer? He considered the peasants his friends, his brethren, and he wanted his father to be furious that they were made to bear pain. His father was patient with Vincent's anger; he nodded his head and told him he was right to be upset. But Vincent could not understand. If he was right, why wasn't his father upset, too? Was it God's will that he, Vincent, should be angry and that his father should not? How could God's will explain agony and also joy? He wondered if that was just a phrase people used, or if it really had meaning, and then he felt guilty for the thought. It gave him a headache; he picked up rocks along the side of the road and threw them, hard, until his arm ached, so he could feel something else.

*   *   *

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 from 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.