The following day I was so filled with anxious anticipation I could hardly breathe. Out in the mill I kept close to Uncle Charley, trying to guess every move he was about to make and help with it. He seemed smaller all over, since the accident. Though he wore arm-elastics, his cuffs hung low, as did the crotch of his overalls. His hands trembled, and he no longer bothered to put his teeth in. In the past he’d pretended to appreciate my help. Now, as I gradually made out, it annoyed him. “I’ll get that,” he’d say, kicking a twine-bale from the aisle as I reached for it. Or as I ran to push a heavy door open further, he’d say, “Leave it be, boy. It’s open far enough.” In the end I did nothing for him, simply stayed with him because I was ashamed to leave him and go look for Uncle Ed.
He no longer did the kinds of work he’d done before. The hundred-pound sacks were too heavy for him—he wasn’t much heavier than the sacks himself—and when he pushed the feedtruck, after Uncle Ed had loaded it, both Uncle Ed and I would watch him in distress, afraid it would tilt too far back, off balance, and fall on him. Mostly, Uncle Ed had taken over the pushing of the feedtruck. “Go ahead, then,” Uncle Charley said crossly. “It’s your mill.” To keep busy, Uncle Charley set rat traps, wound wire around old ladder rungs, swiped down cobwebs, swept the floors. He still joked with farmers, as he’d always done, but it seemed to me the lightness was gone from his voice, and his eyes had a mean look, as if he didn’t really think the jokes were funny or the farmers his friends. Sometimes in the office, when the farmers were alone with Uncle Ed and me, one of the farmers would say something like, “Cholly’s gettin better every day, looks like,” and I would know by their smiles that none of them believed it. I would stand by the heavy old desk full of pigeonholes and secret compartments—Uncle Charley had once shown me how to work them all—trying to guess what Uncle Ed might need: his pocket-sized notebook, one of his yellow pads, or one of the big white pencils that said “E. L. Hughes” in red—but I could never guess which object he’d want next, so I could serve no useful purpose except if he happened to look over and say, “Buddy, hand me that calendar there.” Then I’d leap. Out in the mill Uncle Charley moved slowly back and forth with a pushbroom, needlessly sweeping white dust from the aisles, or hammered nails into loosened bin-boards, or mended burlap sacks not yet bad enough to leak. Now and then he’d poke his head in, the buttoned collar much too large for his neck, and would ask Uncle Ed if he’d gotten to Bill Williams’ oats yet. “I’ll get to it, Cholly,” Uncle Ed would say, waving his cigar. Uncle Charley would frown, shaking his head, then disappear, going about his business.
Sometime after lunch I found Uncle Charley sitting on the floor beside one of the bins, nailing a round piece of tin—the top of a coffeecan—over a hole where bits of grain leaked out. I stood awhile watching him. His hand, when he reached to his mouth for a nail, shook badly. He pretended not to notice me. After a while I went over and hunkered down beside him, thinking I might hand him nails from the zinc-coated bucket beside his knee, though at the moment his mouth was as full as a pincushion. When he said nothing, I asked, “What’s a Cymanfa Ganu, Uncle Charley?”
“Welsh word,” he brought out through the nails, and carefully finished driving the nail between his fingers through the tin. Then he glanced at me guiltily, took the nails from his mouth and laid them on the floor between us. “Means ‘Come on back,’ ” he said, then suddenly—his heart not in it—grinned. “ ‘Come on back to Wales,’ that is. That’s what all the Welshmen want, or so they think.”
He tipped his head back, as if he were listening. The way the sunlight came slanting through the mill—great generous shafts full of floating white specks all whirling and swirling in patterns too complex for the eye to comprehend—it was like being in church. Even better than church. I thought of the trees where Uncle Ed had told me the Welshmen used to worship their peculiar bug-eyed gods—“River gods, tree gods, pig gods, Lord knows what,” he’d said. (My grandmother wouldn’t speak of it. “Your uncle Ed,” she said, “has peculiar ideas.”) Abruptly, Uncle Charley dropped his head back down, snatched up a nail, cocked it between two fingers over the tin, and started hammering. “Damn fools,” he said, then glanced at me and frowned, then winked.
“Tell me something else in Welsh,” I said.
He thought about it, placing another nail. At last he said, squinting, “You know what ‘Buddy’ means?” Before I could answer, he said, “Means ‘the poet.’ They used to set great store by poets, back in Wales. Only second to kings—maybe not even second. Same thing, kings and poets. Different kinds of liars.” He looked solemn, his face ash-gray under the age-spots. I studied him, perturbed—no more perturbed than he was, I realize now; but at six I knew nothing of the confusion of adults. All I knew was that his eyes were screwed up tight, one brown, one blue, and his moustache half covered the black hole of his mouth like a sharp-gabled roof of old straw.
I asked, “Are we all going to the Cymanfa Ganu?”
His eyes slipped off axis, then abruptly he reached for another nail. “Course we are,” he said. He lined up the nail and with two angry raps drove it home. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it don’t hurt much.”
I remember only the inside of the building where the songfest was held. It must have been a church, very large, with wooden walls, as yellow-gray as the walls of a new barn. It was brightly lighted, the walls and overhead beams high above us all glowing as if waxed. Everyone my parents had ever known was there, it looked like. The people milled around for what seemed to me hours, shouting and talking, pressing tightly together, my father moving behind my mother from group to group, carrying me on his shoulders. My grandmother, wearing a light black coat and helping herself along on two brown canes—it was only that winter that she’d begun to need them—went from one old white-haired Welshwoman to another, talking and nodding and laughing till she cried, sometimes pointing a bony, crooked finger across the room and gleefully shouting out a name, though no one could possibly have heard her in all that uproar.
Then somehow we got to seats, all of us together, me wedged in between my father and Uncle Charley. A man got up in the front of the room—he looked like a congressman or a well-to-do minister—and said something. Everyone laughed. He said something more, they laughed some more, and then from somewhere, booming around us, came organ music. Uncle Charley was jerking at my elbow, making me look down. He held a small Bible-like book with writing in it—no music, as in the hymnbooks in our church at home (I hadn’t yet seen the ones my grandfather left my mother), just writing, and not a word anywhere that I could read. “You know your do re mi?” he asked, looking at me sternly, his face very bright. I shook my head, noticing only now that above the hymn words, all in Welsh, there were little words—do, re, mi, and so on—as meaningless to me at the time as all the others. Uncle Charley looked up at my father as if in alarm, then grinned, looking back at me. “Never mind,” he said, “you sing what I sing.” On every side of us people were standing up now, a few of them beginning to tap their feet, just barely moving the toes of their lumpy shoes. My father and Uncle Charley helped me stand up on my chair. Suddenly, like a shock of thunder that made the whole room shake, they began to sing.
Most of them seemed to have no need of the hymnbooks and couldn’t have used them anyway, singing as they did with their heads lifted, mouths wide as fishmouths, proclaiming whatever it was they proclaimed not so much to the front of the hall as to the gleaming roof. They sang, as Welsh choruses always do, in numerous parts, each as clearly defined as cold, individual currents in a wide, bright river. There were no weak voices, though some, like Uncle Charley’s, were reedy and harsh—not that it mattered; the river of sound could use it all. They sang as if the music were singing itself through them—sang out boldly, no uncertainties or hesitations; and I, as if by magic, sang with them, as sure of myself every note of the way as the wisest and heartiest in the room. Though I was astonished by my powers, I know, thinking back, that it was not as mirac
ulous as I imagined. Borne along by those powerful voices, the music’s ancient structure, only a very good musician could have sung off key. And yet it did seem miraculous. It seemed our bones and blood that sang, all heaven and earth singing harmony lines, and when the music broke off on the final chord, the echo that rang on the walls around us was like a roaring Amen.
Hymn after hymn we sang—old people, children, people my parents’ age—ancient tunes invented before the major mode was thought of, tunes like hugely breathing creatures. We were outside ourselves, caught up in a hwell, as the Welsh say. It really did seem to me, once or twice, that I looked down on all the congregation from the beams above our heads. My father’s hand was closed hard on mine; Uncle Charley held my other hand, squeezing it just as tightly. Tears streamed from his brown eye and blue eye, washing his cheeks, dripping from his moustache, making his whole face shine. Afterward, when we were leaving, I saw that Aunt Kate and my mother had been crying too, even my grandmother, though not my father or Uncle Ed. On the steps outside, lighting his cigar, Uncle Ed said, “Good sing.” My father nodded and hitched up his pants, then turned to look back at the door as if sorry to leave. “Good turn-out.” Uncle Charley, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground, said nothing.
The following night Uncle Charley didn’t come in for supper, though they called and called. I watched through the kitchen window as Uncle Ed and my father, gray as ghosts in the moonlit garden, shouted toward the trees across the road, the glittering creek, the blacksmith’s shop, then turned and moved heavily, as if gravity had changed and the air had grown thick, toward the mill. Later, Uncle Ed, in the wooden armchair in the kitchen, holding his cigar in the hand that had three fingers missing, stared into space and said, “Poor Cholly. I wonder what’s got into him.”
Aunt Kate stood over by the sink with her head bowed, thinking, folding the dishtowel, then unfolding it, then folding it again. “I guess we better phone the police,” she said at last.
“No, don’t do that!” Uncle Ed said suddenly, as if she’d startled him out of a daydream. He leaned his forearms on the arms of the chair and hefted himself up out of it. “I’ll run out to the office and phone around among the neighbors a bit,” he said, and at once went to the door.
“Why not phone from here?” Aunt Kate said, or began to say, then glanced at me and stopped.
“Here, let me give you a hand,” my father said. The two of them went out, bent forward like shy boys, and closed the door quietly behind them.
“I’ll give Buddy his supper,” my mother said. “I suppose it won’t hurt for the rest of us to wait.”
“That’s fine,” Aunt Kate said, still folding and unfolding the dishtowel.
“We should never have taken him to the songfest,” my grandmother said. “I told you it wouldn’t be good for him!”
My mother, herding me over to my chair, said, “Mother, you never said any such thing!”
“Well, I meant to,” my grandmother said, and firmly clamped her mouth shut.
Toward morning they found him, I learned much later, right across the road in the creek behind the blacksmith’s shop. I still occasionally dream of it, though of course I never saw it, Uncle Charley lying face up below the moonlit, glass-clear surface, staring, emotionless, at the perfectly quiet stars.
Aunt Kate, it turned out, had known all along that he’d gone off to take his own life, though she’d refused to believe it and had therefore told no one. She’d found his clothes that afternoon, just a little after sunset, neatly folded and stacked on the chair beside his bed in the room they let him live in downstairs. He’d left them as a message, my grandmother said: for what they were worth, the world could have them back. (“Now that’s enough of that,” my father said sharply.) Aunt Kate had told herself one foolish lie after another, she explained to us, her hands over her eyes, her glasses on the table in front of her. Perhaps he’d found a lady-friend, she’d said to herself, and had gone out and bought himself new clothes, even new socks and shoes.
The following night, when everyone knew Uncle Charley was dead, though no one was admitting it was suicide (they never did admit that), Uncle Ed’s livingroom was filled with people. All the chairs were occupied, even the arms of them, where boys or young women sat, most of them cousins, and there were people on the chairs my father had brought in from the diningroom and kitchen, too. The people were all talking in low voices and sniffling, their eyes wet and red. I sat on one of my father’s legs, watching.
They talked of the singer Uncle Charley had been; the festivals would never be the same without him. They spoke of what a shame it was that he’d never had a wife and children; it would have made all the difference. Then for a while, since sad talk made them ill at ease, they talked about other things—crops and the weather, marriages, politics. Sometimes they talked now in groups of three or four, sometimes all as one group. Aunt Kate served tea. Some of the men had whiskey with them, which Aunt Kate didn’t approve of, but she looked at the carpet and said nothing. The clock on the mahogany desk ticked on and on, but neither in the darkness outside nor in the dimly lit livingroom was anything changing. People stirred a little, now and then, shifting position, moving just an arm or a foot, sometimes blowing their noses, but no one got up yet, no one left for home. Slowly the whole conversation died out like embers in a fireplace, and as the stillness deepened, settling in like winter or an old magic spell, it began to seem that the silence was unbreakable, our final say.
Then an old farmer named Sy Thomas, sitting in the corner with his hands folded, twine around his pants cuffs, cleared his throat, pushed his chin out, face reddening, eyes evasive, and began to sing. Tentatively, then more boldly, others joined in with him. Aunt Kate, with an expression half timid, half cunning, went to the piano and, after a minute, sat down, took off her glasses, and began to play. They were singing in parts now, their heads slightly lifted. On the carpet, one after another, as if coming to life, their shoes began to move.
THE ART
OF LIVING
There used to be a cook in our town, a “chef” he was called in the restaurant where he worked—one of those big, dark Italian places with red fake-leather seat cushions, fake paintings on the walls, and on every table a Chianti bottle with a candle in it—but he preferred to think of himself as simply a cook, since he’d never been comfortable with high-falutin pretense, or so he claimed, though heaven knew the world was full of it, and since, whereas he knew what cooking was, all he knew for sure about chefs, he said, was that they wore those big, obscene-looking hats, which he himself wouldn’t be caught dead in. In all this he was a little disingenuous, not to mention out of date, since everybody knew that, in the second-floor apartment over Custus’s Sweet Shop, Newsstand, & Drugstore, where he and his family lived, he had hundreds of books and magazines about cooking, as well as books and magazines about everything else, even a couple of those San Francisco comic books, and all his talk about being an ordinary cook, not a chef, was just another pretense, in this case low-falutin, an attempt to seem what he would never be in a hundred years, just one of the folks. His talk about chefs’ hats was just empty chatter, maybe something he’d thought up years ago and had never thought better of. He did a lot of empty chattering, especially after his son died in the war. He could get all emotional about things not even locked-up crazy people cared about. At the time of this story there weren’t many chefs’ hats in the town where I lived, up in the northern part of New York State, but they were standard garb in the pancake houses, hamburger islands, and diners of the larger cities, like Rome or Utica. The cook’s name, I forgot to mention, was Arnold Deller.
Cooks are notoriously cranky people, but Arnold was an exception. Why he should have been so even-tempered seems a mystery, now that I think about it—especially given his fondness for rant and given the fact that, as we all found out, he was as full of pent-up violence as anybody else at that time. Nevertheless, even-tempered he was. Sometimes when certain kinds o
f subjects came up, his eyes would fill with tears; but he never swore, or hardly ever, never hit anybody, never quit his job in a huff.
He had it easy, I suppose, in some ways at least. He’d worked in the same place for twenty-some years, almost one of the family, and the working conditions weren’t bad, as such things go. The place was respectable. If you got out a joint, just held it between your fingers, the next thing you knew you were out in the alley on your back, looking up at garbage cans and waste bins. And the kitchen he worked in was large and sufficiently well designed that he didn’t have to run his fat legs off all the time. He’d gotten them to copy it from a restaurant he’d seen in San Francisco or someplace, some convention he’d gone to on saving the endangered species. He and his daughters were big on things like that, also politics and the Threat of Drug Abuse, the same things everybody else was into, except that Arnold and his daughters were more serious. When people wore fur coats, Arnold’s daughters would practically cry. Arnold’s wife mostly slept and watched TV. After their son’s death, she hardly ever left the apartment.
As I say, it was a good job for Arnold. He had a helper, part cook, part dishwasher, a half-Indian, half-Italian kid named Ellis. And all across one wall of the kitchen there were windows, which Arnold and Ellis could open if they wanted to, summer or winter, so the heat was only slightly worse than elsewhere. But above all, the job was ideal for a person of Arnold’s inclination and temperament because the owner, an old man named Frank Dellapicallo—a gray-headed, gloomy man we hardly ever saw—would let Arnold cook anything he wanted, so long as the ingredients could be found and weren’t wildly expensive and the customers would eat it so the old man, Dellapicallo himself, didn’t have to. All he ever ate was spaghetti.