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.
I would whine, hanging around, clinging to the white porcelain doorknob as my parents dressed. “Why can’t I come with you?” I’d say. My mother’s eyes would remain on the mirror, concentrating hard on the eyebrow pencil. Though she was fat, I thought she was amazingly beautiful. Her hair was dark red. “You can, when you’re bigger,” my father would say, standing behind my mother, chin lifted, putting on his tie. In the bathroom my grandmother would be singing, loosening up her voice. She did sound like a bird, I thought grimly. Like a chicken.
In the end, knowing I had no chance of winning, I would pretend to be seduced by Aunt Kate’s molasses cookies and the promise that Uncle Ed would tell me stories. Sulking a little, to show them I didn’t intend to forget this, I’d walk with my parents as far as the door, keeping an eye on their red, beaming faces and listening, full of disapproval, to their loud, cheerful talk as they took leave of my uncles and aunt and went down the wooden steps between the house and the big, dark mill to greet the relatives who’d come for them in their car. The inside lights of the car would go on as the car doors opened, and in that little, square-windowed island of light I’d see grown-up cousins and children cousins just a little more than my age squeezing over, climbing onto other cousins’ laps. The alley between the mill and the house would fill up like a pool with laughter and shouts of “Watch your elbows!” and sometimes my father’s voice, carefully patient, “That’s all right, Mother. Take your time.” Then the doors would close, leaving only the headlights, and the car would chuff-chuff-chuff past the mill and, listing like a carriage, would go around the corner at the end of the garden, then, listing again, taillights like two garnets, would veer out onto the road, briefly lighting up trees. When the taillights were out of sight I would turn, trying not to cry, to Uncle Ed, who would lift me and carry me on his shoulder like a feedsack to the kitchen. “So,” he would say, “I guess you didn’t know I used to work for a bear!”
“I don’t believe it,” I would say, though I did, in fact.
“Big old black bear name of Herman. Used to live up by Blue Mountain Lake.”
He often set his stories on Blue Mountain Lake, or on nearby Black River, where his camp was (he would take us there sometimes, to my grandmother’s dismay)—an immense log-and-stone lodge filled with stuffed lynxes, wolves, and owls, Japanese lanterns overhead, and on the rustic tables a whole museum’s worth of strange objects Aunt Kate had collected—little models of birch canoes, carved figures, a stereopticon with pictures of Paris long ago. The lodge was set in among trees, all but inaccessible, a wooden dock below it, where Uncle Ed’s guideboat was tied during the day. The water on the river, shallow and clear as glass, seemed hardly to move, though when you dropped a leaf on it it quickly sped away. Fish poked thoughtfully in and out among the shadows of underwater weeds, and when you looked up you saw a world almost equally strange—pinewoods and mountains, large hurrying clouds of the kind I thought angels lived on, huge white mounds full of sunlight. Whenever Uncle Ed began to speak of the Adirondacks, you knew that in a minute he’d be telling of his childhood in Wales, where people lived in cottages on dark green hills with their sheep and collie dogs, and nothing ever changed.
All through supper Uncle Ed would tell me stories, Aunt Kate tisk-tisking, moving back and forth between the table and the stove, patting my head sometimes, telling me not to believe a word of it. Uncle Charley would sit grinning as if sheepishly, sometimes throwing me a wink, sometimes saying a few words in a high-pitched voice, trying to make me think it was the parrot, Bobby Watson, who stood watching and pecking at lettuce in his cage in the corner. Uncle Charley was as small-boned as a sparrow and had startling eyes, one brown, one blue. Though he was almost as old as Uncle Ed, he had light brown hair and a brown moustache—a shiny, soft brown with hardly any gray in it. Perhaps it was partly the way he sat, head forward, eyes lowered, his hands on his knees except when he raised his fork or spoon: he seemed, even with all his wrinkles, just a boy, no bigger around than Uncle Ed’s right arm. People who didn’t know them thought Uncle Charley was Aunt Kate’s brother, not Uncle Ed’s. She too was, she liked to say, petite. After supper, while Aunt Kate washed dishes and the two old men went out to the mill to “catch up”—really to smoke cigars—I would bang on Aunt Kate’s piano in the livingroom. The piano was a good one, a Storey & Clark upright. In the tiffanied dimness of the livingroom, its coal-black surfaces shone like mirrors, or like Black River at night, and everything I played on it sounded to me like real music. I would lose all track of time, closing my eyes and tipping my head to the piano sound, dark, sustained chords that in my mind made a shadowy place you could move around in, explore like an old-time Indian. When my uncles and aunt came together again, after the dishes and cigar smoking, they’d call me back and we’d play dominoes at the kitchen table. After an hour or so, Uncle Charley would say, grinning, not meeting anyone’s eyes, “Well, time to turn in by gol, ant-it?” and he’d go down to his narrow, yellow-wallpapered room in the basement.
I’d sit a little longer with Uncle Ed and Aunt Kate. They must have known how I hated to go upstairs alone in that big, quiet house; but it was Aunt Kate’s habit to listen to her records—some of them old, thick Edison records, most of them opera—and sew for a while before going up to bed, and it was Uncle Ed’s habit to settle down across from her, heavy and comfortable as an old gray cat, draw on his steel-rimmed spectacles, and read. They were both too old to go climbing that narrow back stairway twice. (The front-hallway stairs were wide and glossy, with a runner down the steps; I don’t remember anyone’s ever using them much except my cousins and me, playing Chinese School.) Aunt Kate was brittle and climbed steps one at a time. As for Uncle Ed, he was huge, for a Welshman, with hair as white as snow. When I began t
o nod, he’d say, looking at me over the spectacle rims, “You run and put your pajamas on, Buddy. We’ll be up in a jiffy.” As I think back to it, it surprises me that I didn’t make a fuss; but I obeyed without protest, knowing I’d be long asleep before they got there.
Once in a while I’d wake up for a minute when they came, and I’d see them in their white flannel nightgowns, kneeling beside the bed. Pretending to be asleep—I slept on a cot across the room from them—I’d watch them bow their heads, side by side, and press their hands together just below their chins, and I’d listen to their whisperings in Welsh. Uncle Ed had three stubbed fingers, cut off in a gristmill when he was young. His rounded shoulders were enormous. In my memory, no doubt inaccurate, they went a third the length of the bed. In the mill, during the day, Uncle Ed was like a king, lifting heavy feedsacks as if they were nothing, chattering lightly past his dead cigar, mostly in that clicking, lilting gibberish he spoke; but now, for all his size, he was as subdued and meek as Uncle Charley, or Aunt Kate there beside him. The only light in the room was the dim one on the table beside the bed. It made his hair look soft, like a baby’s. Aunt Kate’s hair was like fine silver wire.
One time when we were visiting, Uncle Charley took what they all called later “a tumble.” I’m not sure how much of it I actually saw. I was, as I’ve said, only five or six. A few sharp images have stayed with me all these years, but for the rest I must trust imagination and family stories. I remember sitting in the office at the mill—that time or some other time—drawing on one of the yellow, legal-sized notepads Uncle Ed used for figuring and keeping records, the pot-bellied stove unlit in the corner. It was August; I know because farmers were bringing their wheat in. All around the stove stood pale, bluish saltblocks, the slippery blue-white of bone in a butchershop, and stacked around the saltblocks there were bales of twine and barbed wire, kerosene lanterns, and zinc-coated buckets set one inside the other, the top bucket filled with nails. Outside the window I could see Aunt Kate’s garden, aglow at that time of year with roses, zinnias, and sunflowers, vegetables down the middle, at one end a scarecrow in a washed-out, ragged coat and straw hat that had once been, no doubt, Uncle Charley’s. There were farmers in the room with me, ritched back on their round-backed wooden chairs, talking and joking as they always did while they waited for Uncle Ed to grind their grist and then for Uncle Charley to load the bags on the two-wheeled feedtruck and roll them to the dock, then lift them down a foot or two onto the wagon. No doubt I’d been running back and forth with Uncle Charley for most of the morning, since that’s what I usually did, neither of us talking—Uncle Charley almost never talked, except when he pretended to be the parrot in the kitchen—I, for my part, trying to be of help: snatching an empty feedsack from his path, though in fact there was plenty of room; trying to push a heavy door open further. But now I was in the office, weary of the game, half listening to the singing of the wooden walls as they resounded to the mill-wheels, and drawing rabbits so much like those my father drew (rabbits were all he knew how to draw) that if you’d asked him later, he couldn’t have told you for sure which one of us had done them.
I heard no shout, no noise of any kind, but suddenly the farmers were up out of their chairs, running in their heavy boots from the office into the mill, and as fast as I could get down out of my chair I was after them. Where the wooden machinery thudded and sang, sending up white powder, nothing was wrong. Uncle Ed stood blinking as the farmers ran up to him and past him; then he pushed the worn-smooth wooden lever that made the rumbling stop, caught me up in his arms, and ran after the farmers. When we came into the sunlight beyond the open door, we found Uncle Charley climbing up from between the loading dock and one of the farmers’ wagons, furiously shouting and wiping dirt from his mouth and moustache. The wagon had been carelessly parked, a threefoot gap between the dock and the wagonbed. On the wagon, where Uncle Charley had dropped it when he stepped into the gap and fell, a sack lay split open, slowly drizzling grist down through the slats onto the ground. He shouted louder than before, no doubt swearing in Welsh—an amazing sound from a man always so quiet—and with a look half enraged, half guilty, he tried to get up on his feet and save the grain. Then another look came over him—surprise, indignation—and one leg, cocked like a corn-knife, flipped out from under him. Uncle Ed set me down, almost threw me from him, and jumped onto the wagon, holding out his arms as if to pick up Uncle Charley, then thought better of it, or got confused. He just stood there, bent at the waist, arms thrown forward, like a child playing catch.
At the top of the stairs across the way, the back door of the house opened, and my grandmother came out in her knitted black shawl. “Land of Goshen!” she cried in a loud, angry voice. “Now look what you’ve done!” My father came out behind her, looking baffled and apologetic, as if if he hadn’t been taking a nap he could have prevented it. “Now stop that,” he said to my grandmother, almost absentmindedly, and instantly she stopped. Tears ran down the sides of Uncle Charley’s moustache and he clung to his leg with both hands, not shouting now, clamping his lips together and whimpering. Then Aunt Kate was there with them, near-sightedly bending forward. “I’ll call the doctor,” she said, turning, and went back into the house.
“It’s all my fault,” one of the farmers said, shaking his head and working his jaw as if in a minute he meant to hit himself.
“Here now,” Uncle Ed said, “let’s get you inside,” and carefully fitting his arms under Uncle Charley, taking pains to support the broken leg, he lifted him like a child or a newborn calf and carried him up onto the loading platform, over to the steps at the far end, then down and across the way and up the wooden stairs toward the kitchen.
“Mercy!” my grandmother said, unable to control herself, her eyes as bright as when she went out with a hoe to kill snakes. My mother took her arm and patted it.
I was of course not aware at the time that they all felt as guilty as I did. Even my grandmother, I realize now, must have felt guilty, shouting at us all as if she secretly believed she should have taken better care of us. But whatever they were feeling, they soon got over it, once Uncle Charley was inside, on the couch in the livingroom. I myself took longer. It was a matter of fact to me that if I’d been doing my job, running along with Uncle Charley and his feedtruck, keeping his way clear and watching out for trouble, he’d never have fallen down and broken his leg. The doctor, when he came, was professionally grave. Aunt Kate wrung her hands in her apron. I offered, bursting into tears as I did so, to pay Uncle Charley’s doctor bills. Uncle Ed just looked at me, lips puckered in surprise. None of the others seemed to have noticed what I’d said. “I really will,” I bawled, clinging to his leg.
“Here now,” Uncle Ed said. “Katy, get this boy a cookie!” And then: “Go on, now. Away with you both!”
I went with her, looking over my shoulder at Uncle Charley, gray-faced on the couch, the doctor in his black suit bending down beside him. They were all smiling now, even Uncle Charley, all of them describing what had happened as “a tumble”—or all except my grandmother, who always took, according to my father, the darkest possible view of things. My mother and father had a fight that night, when they thought I was asleep. My father said my grandmother was an Angel of Death. (His anger may have made him unusually poetic—though now that I think of it, he said the phrase as if he’d used it against her many times.) “If you hate her so,” my mother said, “why don’t you just send her to the old folks’ home?” Thus my mother won, as she always did. When it was clear to them both that she’d won, she said, “Oh, Bill, she’s just worried. You know that. She’s like a child.” I lay in the darkness with my eyes open, trying to make sense of the queer idea.
It wasn’t until the following summer that my family visited Remsen again. Letters passed back and forth two or three a week in the meantime, Aunt Kate telling us of, among other things, Uncle Charley’s gradual recovery—not as quick as it should be, she let us know—my mother sending back our family?
??s encouragement and sometimes inspirational poems from my grandmother’s magazines. When we finally went to visit it was partly because a Cymanfa Ganu—a singing festival—was to be held nearby, in Utica. At Uncle Ed’s I learned to my surprise and dismay—since I disliked change, hated to see any slightest hint that the universe might not be orderly to the core, as smooth in its operations as an immense old mill—that my uncles and aunt, though they’d never before shown much interest in such things, were planning to go to the festival with my parents and grandmother. I learned it by eavesdropping. When I was supposed to be asleep—as Uncle Charley was, down in his basement room, snoring with his mouth open (I’d sneaked down earlier and seen him there, lying with one arm hanging over the bedside)—I crept without a sound down the front-hallway stairs and settled near the bottom to listen to the voices in the livingroom, just to my left.
Aunt Kate was saying, speaking more softly than usual, “He could do with the lift.”
“He’s still down, isn’t he,” my mother said.
“Oh, Cholly’ll be fine,” Uncle Ed said, hearty as ever, and gave a laugh.
I listened, uneasy, for what my grandmother would say. When she said nothing, I let myself believe she’d fallen asleep over her sewing.
“He keeps in too much, that’s all,” Aunt Kate said, as if shyly, embarrassed that Uncle Ed hadn’t agreed with her.
“So anyway, we’ll all go,” my father said, settling things. “Take Buddy too. He’s never been to a Cymanfa Ganu yet. High time he went!”
“Heavens to Betsy!” my grandmother burst out. “You’d let that poor whippersnapper stay out till midnight with a bunch of wild lunatics howling their miserable heads off?”
A shiver went up my back. I was much too literal-minded a child to fit her description with any kind of singing I’d ever heard of, much less any I’d been in on. I remembered stories my uncle Ed had told me of how the Welsh were all witches in olden times—how they used to fly around like birds at night, and make magic circles among trees and stones.