The Season of Migration (4 page)

And where were the people? There were very few figures about, save for the few I saw moving around the mine buildings, pushing carts and pulling levers, their breath visible even from where I stood.

I had made it to the bottom of the hill when a bell rang three times, and soon after, men began to stream through the gate. Black men. Their clothes, their necks, their faces, their hair, all was black, too black even to draw an arm across a brow and leave a smudge. Only their eyes were white, and they squinted and held their hands up against the sun, so painful, I imagined, after hours underground with only the occasional dull lamp to see by. It was eerie, those triangles of white in an otherwise-uniform sea of moving blackness; the whites of their eyes looked like fresh and unnatural grubs, like they were not attached at all but could leap clear out of their sockets and land on my skin. The bodies blended together as they moved by; it was like one giant and throbbing black creature was on the move, a creature with a voice the sound of a crowd, a creature that trailed a cloud of dust and breath.

There were children in the crowd, their clothes tattered and worn, some of them wearing hats. A few of the miners looked at me, the white eyes landed on me and lingered, but no one ventured to find out who I was. The image that they made as they passed through the gate was so striking that I felt my voice had been stolen away. The monster moved on, through the gate and over the lane to the other side, dividing and depositing its limbs on the paths and cottages. The village came to life, doors opening and closing, voices rising and exclaiming, dogs barking, and all the while the black monster moving across the lane and dissipating, breaking apart, discarding its unified form and becoming once again what it really was, more than a hundred humble souls going home.

Soon I became aware that a miner had stopped and was watching me while the rest of the crowd moved by. Our eyes met; I tried to make out something that would distinguish this one person from the rest. It was the strangest thing, Theo, to be looking at a person and be unable to see any distinguishing features, to be unable to see what an individual actually looked like! But slowly, as I gazed at the miner, I became aware with gradual amazement that it was in fact a woman—a girl, perhaps; I couldn't tell her age, though she was nearly as tall as I am. Something about the quality of her gaze marked her, the way her eyes were soft as they watched me, curious rather than confident, about the way that she blinked rapidly, and then about the sweep of hair that disappeared under her cap. She stood watching me for one more moment, our eyes locked, and then she turned without fanfare and moved toward the village. My suspicion was confirmed by the slight sway to her hips as she walked away from me.

*   *   *

Supper that first night was in the Denis kitchen at the thick wooden table, the largest table to be found anywhere in the village. All three of the Denis boys were there, along with Jean-Baptiste Denis, the baker, his wife, and two guests: Paul Fontaine and his daughter Christine. Christine was engaged to the Denises' eldest son, Karl, and the Denises thought I should meet her father, Paul, who was a foreman at the mine and lived in Wasmes, though he grew up in Petit Wasmes and had worked in the Marcasse mine for many years. He had a lung disease and could no longer stand the work down in the mine. “But still, Monsieur Vincent,” Jean-Baptiste said in his booming voice, a marvel of unself-consciousness, “despite his promotion, he is still a good friend to the miner.” He clapped Paul on the back, and Paul blushed at his plate. “Which is a lot more than can be said for many others who have been promoted,” added Karl, across the table.

“Yes,” Jean-Baptiste went on, “more than once during a strike Paul has been the only person with any influence on the miners; they will listen to nobody, they will follow no one's advice but his, and he alone is obeyed in the critical moment. Don't be shy, Paul,” he said, with his hand still on Paul's shoulder; “it is true. We have seen it happen.”

Paul continued to blush while Jean-Baptiste spoke about him. He was not a large man, Paul, but I found him commanding nonetheless, a confidence exuding in the way he moved and in his ease. His eyes were circled with dark, the skin beneath them sagging in ripples like the movement of mud; his cheekbones, however, were sharp and defined, chiseled as if out of rock. His daughter was fair and quite beautiful, resembling Paul only in her nose, which was shaped with the same slight curve. She sat quietly next to Karl and, once the meal started, she ate lightly while the rest of us shoveled it in. Her cheeks had a lovely flush, in the warm kitchen, and I thought silently that Karl was a lucky man. Then I thought of the woman I had seen at the mine, and wondered what she looked like when she was not covered with coal dust. I kept seeing the image of her, standing before me with that curious gaze, even as I sat there in the warm kitchen.

“Will you say grace for us, Vincent?” Madame Denis asked me, and I did so happily. The meal was rabbit with rosemary and potatoes and asparagus, simple food prepared simply. When we raised our heads and began to eat, Madame Denis said, “I don't know, Paul, but if I don't have a good feeling about this Monsieur Vincent. I daresay he will bring something good to Petit Wasmes as an evangelist.” She was smiling at me, and I smiled back at her with a grateful nod, but when I looked at Paul, he was shaking his head. He quickly looked up from cutting his meat, hoping I hadn't seen the gesture; when he saw that I had, he flushed.

“I am sorry, Monsieur Vincent,” he said. “You will have to excuse my manners and my skepticism. It has been many years of the same thing here in this valley, and many kind souls like you have come to try to help us. I am just not sure anymore what there is to be done.”

I wasn't sure how to address this statement. “Can you tell me more of what you mean?” I said. “I must know all I can about conditions here.”

Paul shook his head again, chewing and swallowing his food, and I was sure I saw a change in his eyes, an assertion of sorrow that swept down the inside of them like a shade. “Conditions are not good, Monsieur,” he said. “For me, okay, they are not bad, I always have food for my family and I no longer need to go down into the mine, which is a daily blessing. I became a foreman when I was twenty-nine, about fifteen years too late for my lungs, unfortunately. But I live in a brick house and we are never cold. For the miners, it is a different story. They struggle for everything. And though the belief in God is of course important, and can make a man keep on longer than another man who does not believe, I am afraid you will find that often the word of God cannot be heard in a place like this.” He paused, and then said again, “Forgive me.”

Silenced, I chewed for a few moments, thinking. The food was so tasty, it was distracting, the taste buds rejoicing while the mind pondered in difficulty. I hadn't eaten anything all day. I had been so excited to arrive—instead of food, I ate the sky, those coal pyramids across the horizon, that woman miner standing at the edge of the crowd. No one said anything, though Madame Denis looked at Paul with a hint of distress that he would challenge the newcomer so soon.

I took in the room, the eight of us around that table, the three Denis boys next to one another in gradually ascending height, then Karl's fiancée with her flushed cheeks, a porcelain doll at a table of bears. I saw the wooden frame of the kitchen, the table laid with plates of food and pitchers of drink, the clock on the wall looking at us like a sun on a landscape, Madame Denis at the head with her apron still on, her wonderful girth surpassed only by her husband's, at the table's other end. It was an image of fellowship, of abundance and joy, but it was not an answer to Paul's statement.

Finally, I spoke the phrase that was repeating in my mind. “When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in me.”

“Isaiah?” asked Paul.

“Jeremiah eight eighteen.”

Paul smiled mildly and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “that is just it.” Soon after, he was racked by a fit of coughs, accompanied by the gurgle of liquid deep in his chest, and had to excuse himself to go to the yard and spit numerous times into the hedge.

*   *   *

After supper, Paul took me down into the village. He wanted me to meet someone, he said, an exemplary miner whose name was Charles Decrucq.

In general, Paul explained as we made our way down the hill, no one told the miners when a new lay preacher was on his way, but they would not be surprised at my arrival and I should expect them to be skeptical. For years, evangelists had been popping up in their villages, ducking into their huts with eyes full of pity and speaking to them of the kingdom of Heaven and the nobility of their sufferings. But whoever came soon went, and because of that the general attitude in the village would be skepticism, not of the teachings that were offered so much as of my very presence, of the idea that I could be there to stay.

Could I be here to stay? I wondered quietly. The evangelism committee had given me a three-month trial period. Was it possible that I could succeed? I dared not even think of it, for what would happen if I did not? I had failed at everything else.

Yes, do you think I don't know it, Theo? Do you think I don't feel the weight of my failures like a monster on my back? I was desperate, Theo, desperate for this trial to work, not only because I didn't want to disappoint you and Father and everyone else all over again but also because this time I thought I might really have a chance. You knew how desperate I was, didn't you? And do you not think of that in your judgments of me now?

Charles Decrucq was a commanding man, not unlike, I thought, our own father. If fate had made our father a miner, he would have made a good one; I could easily imagine him there, with a different family, and many sons more thick-blooded than you and I. Always upright, never complaining or downhearted, never particularly striving or eager to move beyond the community radius: Our father has the qualities of an ideal mining man.

Paul told me that Charles had worked in the Marcasse mine for thirty-three years already, and he was only forty. I thought of the children I had seen that afternoon coming out of the mine, and then again of the woman stopped on the edge of the crowd. How old was she? We were making our way to the cottage, winding through the huts on what were barely paths, so close were they to the doors and windows of houses, hands and faces disappearing as I glanced at them, plain curtains swinging closed. Chickens scampered away from us, dusty gray feathers lingering after the frantic scurrying bodies; a goat tied to a post stared after us with a serious expression. A pair of mangy dogs cautiously approached, sniffing at our pants to see if we were carrying food. The sun was almost set, and the remaining light made everything seem sharper, the angles of the wood, the soft green-brown moss on the slanted roofs, the gnarled limbs of the blackthorn bushes, tree branches holding empty birds' nests tipped with snow. The landscape made me think of a print I had already put on the wall next to my bed in the Denis house: do you know Maris's
Washerwoman
? A woman bent over her washing in a crowded country lane, surrounded by chickens, a pig, a few ducks, and a young girl looking on.

I was overwhelmed by what I was seeing and could barely take in what Paul was saying: Decrucq was the man who could tell me everything I needed to know. His wife had worked in the mine with him for many years before they were married, hauling the coal away from the seam where Decrucq and his men were working. This was generally what the women did in the mines: haulage. She was twenty-seven now, and hadn't been down in the mine since their second child was born.

A few times Paul had to stop to cough and spit; the sound of Paul's coughing was like the sound of a large animal coming awake in a thick swamp. The cough bent him over, and I could see his back heaving through his canvas coat. I fought the instinct to put my hand on Paul's back as he coughed. He spit dark liquid from his lungs that landed on the ground like dollops of mud.

Finally Paul stopped before a house and knocked on the door. A man answered, stripped to the waist, the top half of him clean and the bottom half still wearing his filthy mining pants. He was huge and looming, filling the whole doorway; there was a streak of dirt on his arm, but otherwise his skin looked well scrubbed, pink and fresh, though it was marked all over by scratches and scars. On his right side where his ribs should have lain flat, there was a jutting lump that I quickly drew my eyes from. When the man saw Paul, his face broke into a wide grin.

“Why look who it is!” he boomed, “Paul Fontaine! To what do we owe this honor?”

I blushed at being announced so completely to the whole neighborhood, but Paul grinned just as widely as Decrucq and clapped him on the shoulder. “Decrucq!” he bellowed. Volume, apparently, was a feature of this community. “It has been far too long.”

They stepped into the house and Paul introduced me. Decrucq shook my hand. His grip was formidable and I could feel my bones roll against one another; I resisted the urge to massage my hand afterward. Inside the hut, it was warm and dim and smelled like mud and potatoes; it is a smell common to all the miners' homes, and though it overwhelmed me at first, I soon became used to it. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. Hannah Decrucq appeared from somewhere in the depths of the room and shook my hand, as well. She wore a faded dress and a night bonnet that had once been white but was now a light gray. She looked exhausted, her face sagging as if the skin were being pulled from below by a heavy hand, and I wondered if she were unwell. She was only two years older than I was but looked as if she had lived three more lifetimes.

We sat at the table by the stove, which was glowing pleasantly and heating the room. Hannah put the water on to make coffee. My eyes were clearing and I noted two beds in the back of the room, one of which was presumably full of all three sleeping children. Something moved beneath the bed—a snort and a shuffle and a flicker of shadow—but I thought it rude to point or stare. I learned later that it was the Decrucq's goat.