The Art of Living (30 page)

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 glass 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 glasses that made her eyes look unpleasantly large. They shared the house, or anyway the basement, 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 prone 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 grass-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 nobody 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 brass 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 cum-witch.