There will be two readings next week.
On Wednesday night in the terrace lounge
five students will read.
They are Mary Clark, Laurie Craig, Michael Noll, Rhonda
Opits and Walter Willett.
That's one week from tonight in the student union terrace
lounge.
And on Thursday night, Writers at Work sponsoring a joint reading
by Ed Abbey and Clyde Moneyhun and that
will be in this auditorium, that's Thursday the 16th.
We would like to put out one more newsletter
before the semester is finished.
So we've made Friday our deadline to get news.
We publish only good news.
I hope you can all come to the reception
tonight to meet Mr Gardner who'll
be in the usual place in the terrace lounge
in the Student Union.
If you've not been over, go to the most inaccessible corner
of the Union and that's the terrace lounge.
It's a great treat to have John Gardner with us.
His reading is sponsored by the drama department.
He's here in conjunction with a very fine presentation
of a dramatization of his novel, The Sunlight Dialogues
and the play will be nightly through the 12th
with matinees on the weekend.
For information, call the drama department.
Mr. Gardner is currently at State University of New York
at Binghamton, New York.
He also teaches at Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
In addition to his novels, he's written
The Life and Times of Chaucer, two collections
of short stories, King's Indian and the Art of Living
which has just been published and copies
of that will be available for sale tonight at the reception.
Very well known for his criticism on moral fiction
and you may not be aware that he also
writes books for children and opera libretti.
His most recent novel is Freddy's Book.
I'm very happy to introduce to you, John Gardner.
[APPLAUSE]
I haven't decided for sure what I'm
going to read to you tonight, but it'll come to me.
But I know that the first thing I'm
going to read to you tonight is the thing
I wrote for a friend of mine named Peter Blue Cloud.
Peter Blue Cloud runs a magazine which is called Coyote's Journal
and well, he with some friends and coyotes no doubt.
Anyway, it's a journal which is devoted
to anything anybody wants to say about coyotes.
He is, as you might guess from that name, Indian.
And Coyote is an old Indian mythic figure
of cunning and intellect and represents
everything Athena represents in the good old days.
And there's another figure of intellect,
I'm telling you all this because you
need to know it for the story, otherwise the story
will be totally meaningless, which it will be in any case.
Another figure of intellect is the crow.
The crow is associated with the wisdom of the poet, which
of course from the point of view of any good microbiologist
is stupidity.
And this is a story about Coyote and Crow.
The magazine, one can send anthropological articles,
articles on Indian Affairs, if you can somehow coyote
slanted, anything, including zoological studies of coyotes.
I think it's wonderful that there's
a magazine in the world that's devoted to one animal.
Instead of a fiction magazine, I mean
that's a very mixed up animal.
But everything OK.
This is called Coyote and the Dead Man.
I'm really reading it to you because I'm in Arizona.
I was trying to think, what can one do from Pennsylvania
to impress the Arizonans?
And if you know that I have a story about Coyote,
maybe you won't hate me.
This is called, Coyote and the Dead Man.
I should also mention that when Peter Blue Cloud asked me,
I maybe just talk to you tonight but, when
Peter asked me to write this story,
I was very embarrassed because he's a very fine writer.
A legendary, he calls himself.
An Indian writer, they don't like
the word fictionist and poet and that kind of stuff.
And he writes beautiful coyote stories.
So I told him, I just can't do that.
It's not my culture and it would be an insult to you guys.
For me to write a coyote story would be an effrontery.
And I said, but maybe if you
let me just do a Saturday morning cartoon coyote,
it'll be all right.
And he allowed as how that was all right.
One day Coyote opened his door to step into the world
and what should be lying there right across the stoop
of his door but a dead man.
Coyote scowled, then glanced back to see if his children had
noticed, but they hadn't.
Then he slid his eyes around to see if any of the neighbors
were looking, but so far so good.
He stepped over the dead man with delicate feet then leaned
back to pull the door shut, then carefully dragged
the dead man into the bushes and sat down to think.
He thought, lightning fast as was his way,
about why such things had to happen in the world, why
this particular dead man should be laid at his door,
and not Crow's, for instance.
The smell of him ruining the morning.
And then Coyote thought of a plan.
He leaned down to the dead man and said,
"listen brother, we've got to change the world.
Are you up to it?"
The dead man opened his eyes to look at Coyote
with deep disgust.
"Dead friend," said Coyote, "Let me phrase it another way.
What is it that interests such elevated spirits
as yours and mine except truth and justice
and the dignity of life?"
This was not really what was deepest in his heart
but he felt it would be wise to take
the high line with the dead at least in the beginning.
You get one of them riled up, there was no
telling what it might lead to.
The dead man closed his eyes, he was tired.
"Let me put it in yet another way," said Coyote.
The dead man's eyes closed tighter.
"Listen you," said Coyote and leaned far over
to whisper behind his paw into the dead man's ear.
"I know your kind.
Get up and follow me and believe you me, you won't be sorry."
The dead man groaned.
He thought it would be just the same old thing.
But he stood one finger then another,
and pretty soon, not so steady, a little absent minded,
he was up on his feet.
"It better not be far, " he said.
"Believe me," said Coyote, "it's not far."
Coyote set off whistling under his breath darting back
and forth on the road to have a look at things, whatever
other travelers had thrown away was sadly left behind
or accidentally dropped, but there was nothing, just junk.
And the dead man came slowly behind him.
His eyes were closed to slits and he
was too tired and bored to pick up his feet.
He just slid them first one shoe then the other on the dirt.
His hands hanging down past his pockets never moved at all.
It took them so long to get 50 feet that Coyote was secretly
in a fury and could hardly remember his plan
but all he did was whistle under his breath a little harder.
Coyote led the dead man to the window of a house,
and they looked in, and lo and behold,
there was a beautiful maiden kissing a chicken on the head.
"Wow," said Coyote, putting all his soul into it.
"What a beautiful maiden.
Look at that hair, look at that soft pretty mouth."
The dead man's eyes were falling further shut.
And carefully, so the dead men wouldn't
notice what he was doing, Coyote reached up
and opened them a little.
Then Coyote smiled tenderly letting his own eyes fall
closed a little as if his heart were ravished
and he were half in a dream.
He said, "Look at how sweetly she's kissing that chicken."
The dead man was fast asleep so that when Coyote tugged
at his arm he almost tipped over,
but Coyote caught him and with difficulty, led him around
to the front of the house and finding the door open,
let him in where the maiden was.
"Tell me beautiful maiden," Coyote said, as if faint
with emotion, "why are you kissing
that chicken on the head?
Is it really your father that's been transformed by a witch
or is it perhaps that you're so saddened by life that you're
willing to take anything?"
"I don't know," said the maiden blushing a little
and becoming even prettier.
"She's my pet.
That's all.
Is there something wrong with that?"
Then she saw the dead man and began to scream and bat
in the air to drive out the smell of him.
"No matter," thought Coyote and helped the dead man back out
through the door.
It was obvious that dead people cared no more
for beautiful maidens than for turnips.
Getting rid of the dead man, he was
beginning to see might not be all that easy.
They went about 60 or 70 feet and found the part
time residents of a visiting chieftain who'd
been all around the world and had
all the good and evil spirits at his bidding.
They found a ladder against the wall left by some thieves who
tried to sneak into the place a while before
but had been chased off by the dogs.
When the dogs saw the dead man, they
went slinking away with their tails between their legs.
Coyote and the dead man climbed the ladder, Coyote pushing
the dead man from behind.
It was hard hard going.
And looked in at the window, the whole room
was filled with gold and jewels and priceless artifacts
gathered by the spirits and by the chieftain's own hard work
and sound business practices.
"Wow," said Coyote.
"Will you look at all that treasure."
With apparent greed and avarice, he
smiled up at the dead man on the ladder just above him
and then instantly Coyote's smile turned to dismay
for the dead man who was now in a deep sleep,
no more interested in treasure than a bundle of sticks
was tilting backwards far off balance
and would soon come crashing down on Coyote and both of them
would go banging down the ladder onto the paving stones.
Coyote reached up and pushed the dead man's hind end
and got him balanced again.
Then carefully, slowly, back down the ladder
went the two of them.
Coyote gnashed his teeth.
100 feet later, they came to old Mountain Lion's house.
And Coyote thought, "What was there to lose,
you might as well try it."
So finding the door open, he went into old Mountain Lion's
house with the dead man.
As usual, sure enough, old Mountain Lion
was doing the various things he believed
one should do to keep fit.
He let out a bolt of lightning from the bottle
where he kept them and then raced the bolt
to the far wall of his house, running so fast
he could no longer be seen and then he would throw himself
against the wall just in time for the lightning bolt
to hit him: crash!
Sometimes, he would take it directly
in the chest, sometimes with an elegantly casual look,
he would tip up an elbow and take it there or take one
on the heel.
Occasionally, showing off, he would take a small one
in the eyeball, which would briefly
turn the eyeball bluish white like a sapphire.
He'd let out lightning bolts and allow them to hit him
for an hour or so, he would sit down
panting hard and wiping his forehead
and then he'd begin on his muscle builders.
He would pick things up, set them down again,
pick them up again, and set them down again and so
on, starting with relatively light things like the house
and moving to relatively heavy things like the mountain.
"Wow," cried Coyote and old Mountain Lion
had the mountain over his head straining every muscle
and trembling with the effort, his eyeballs
bulging, sweat pouring off him like water from a waterfall.
"Look at that physical power and fierce determination."
The dead man said nothing.
And when Coyote looked around, he
saw that the dead man had allowed
himself to sink back onto the mountain lion's chicken coop.
His arms stretched wide, head fallen limply to one side,
mouth open, eyes shut.
Grimly whistling under his breath harder than ever, Coyote
headed the dead man on down the road.
"Come on, come on," he nagged.
"Be much farther," mumbled the dead man.
They came to where the people were all taking
part in a great festival.
Coyote couldn't remember which one; traveling with a dead man,
he'd lost all track of time.
Or whatever the name of the festival might be,
they were all eating roasted chicken and Coyote realized
that he was hungry.
He stood in line with his straw dish and the dead man
came along behind with his and after they'd
been served pieces of chicken and cups
of red willow tea, Coyote and the dead man
went over to where it was shady and found a place to sit.
Coyote ate his chicken.
It tasted just wonderful and he was
thinking of sneaking through the line
again when he glanced over at the dead man
and saw not to his surprise that the dead man hadn't taken one
single bite but was sitting with his feet crossed
leaning against the tree and looking dead again.
His eyes closed slits.
"Here I'll trade you," Coyote said
and gave the dead man his empty dish
and took the dead man's full one.
As he ate, he racked his brains for something in the world
that might interest a dead man, and the more he
turned the question over, the more he
realized how vexatious it was.
Beautiful maidens were no better than turnips
to a dead man and vast treasures were worth no more than bundles
of sticks.
Power and quickness were so tiresome to the dead man
that they could put him to sleep even
on the sharp roof of a chicken coop.
And not even the rich smell of roasted chicken
could entirely bring a dead man to his senses.
Coyote had stumbled, he saw, onto a hard, hard question.
He was thinking with such concentration,
he didn't notice at first that a little
to the left of the tree with the dead man
was an old woman in black with grayish black hair
who had come with some children to sit down on the grass and eat.
And the old woman to keep the children
from hitting each other or stealing each other's food
was telling them all the story.
It was one of those stupid complicated stories
about Coyote and Crow, the kind of story Coyote hated.
The story with no lesson or purpose in the world, not even
so much as a sneaky half virtue to justify its existence.
One of those stories that do nothing but pass the time.
Coyote painfully slit his eyes to the children
and the old woman but none of them noticed.
"Well," said the old woman, smiling and rolling
her black flashing eyes around from child to child,
"Crow thought long and hard about which
of the baskets to open.
The basket made of grass, the basket made of sticks,
or the basket made of braided hair."
Coyote shook his head and stretched to the corners
of his mouth down.
There had never been any such basket.
It was all lies and foolishness.
He wished the old woman would go away and let
him think about his problem.
But the old woman chatted on, her cracking, dry voice
distracting him.
She said, "Then Crow got to thinking
how Coyote was the trickiest spirit that ever got trapped
in a skin, but Chicken on the other hand,
who had given Coyote the baskets, was a witless and blissful--or small
minded and spiteful, if that mood was on her--
it was hard to be sure she had any spirit at all
under her skin."
The old woman chuckled.
Coyote stood up and narrowing his eyes,
lowering his head so that he looked like a hunchback, carried
the dirty straw dishes and cups to the trash ravine.
Then returned to get the dead man
and continue on their search.
The dead man sat with his eyes a little open and one large
led gray ear tipped slightly in the direction of the old woman.
"Stranger and stranger, thought Crow,"
the old woman was saying.
"And he looked long and hard at the three trap doors:
one with a ring handle of stone, one with a ring
handle of buffalo horn, one with a ring
handle of turquoise framed in silver."
"Come on," said Coyote to the dead man
and tapped him on the shoulder.
Slowly, the dead man raised one finger to his mouth
signaling Coyote to silence.
Coyote stared in horror from the dead man
to the old woman who was croaking
on and on, her black eyes aglitter,
her hands absentmindedly picking small wildflowers mixed
in with the grass around her and dropping them
onto the pile of trash she already had.
Bits of bright cloth, gleaming metal trinkets,
gray and white stones, one robin's egg long since hatched.
And his delicate feet rolling his eyes
toward heaven and disgust, remembering now
that this had been his plan from the beginning.
The old woman was obviously Crow in a typically stupid
disguise.
Coyote sidled off and when he was sure
he was rid of the dead man for good turned around grinning
and flew like lightning straight back to his house.
Ran in and slammed the door and leaned his back on it.
[APPLAUSE]
I don't usually like to read anything that I've written
that's already been published, that hasn't.
But since this book is available only in Tucson, the publication
date of The Art of Living, the last collection of stories,
I thought is May 1st, but in Tucson, it's
earlier because here I am.
I thought I'd read one of the stories in this collection.
I thought I might read any one of the stories
but it comes to me now that this is the one I'm going to read.
My excuse for reading this story is
that it's the only other thing that I
know that could be remotely related to the West.
And the only reason for that is there's this song,
Old Bill Jones had two daughters and a song.
That's a Welsh name, right?
And clearly, this is a story about the Welsh and that's all.
It's called, Come On Back.
And that's all I'm going to read you, just this story.
I'm sorry you can't see the pictures.
Pictures are nice.
Four to five years ago--I wonder if I should tell you
anything about this story.
I mean, since I'm here, I'll tell you.
I always wanted to get in the New Yorker.
I really, really wish they'd chosen--
[LAUGHTER]
New Yorker.
And they won't.
I write faggotized stories.
No, I write stupid stories, I write experimental stories.
I try and try but they won't work.
So I thought maybe a reminiscence,
coming to the--New York is famous for its reminiscences.
A reminiscence is essentially the stupidest, dullest,
most boring story in the world.
So eventually you get fooling around with it a little bit
and a plot starts creeping in when you really didn't mean--
I mean, you know the minute plot comes
in you're dead at The New Yorker,
but you can't help yourself.
And then symbolism starts rearing its disgusting head
and that really is bad at The New Yorker
but that's what happened.
So it's my New Yorker story, not of course
published in The New Yorker.
Four, 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 feed mill.
His name was no longer remembered in the village
and the feed mill 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 15 or 20 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 hymn books
he left my mother, they 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 each with its roses, small vegetable
garden, and grape arbor, there were shined up square cars,
mostly model 8 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: WBS Price and Sons, Coal and 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 story garage with chicken wire
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 20 or 30,
a couple of churches, a school, Price's lumber
yard and a combination gas station and market.
As we head from the south, my Uncle Ed's huge grain 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 barn like 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 on 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 Charlie.
Charlie, 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 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 shop,
a bright, noisy rattle.
I used to catch tadpoles and minnows there,
those deeping 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 back at once, the large grinning figure
of my Uncle Ed, Uncle Charlie next to him timidly
smiling, dwarfed beside his brother
and standing not far from them, and Kate with a dish towel
and teapot.
I get back to 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 I-I-I-I.
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 world lived in caves and trees
and couldn't talk yet but had to get along by singing.
In those days, everything was for me more than 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 bed lamp,
she would read me something from the Bible or the Christian
Herald.
I didn'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 to change her ways.
"Even a darn fool mule can be reasoned with,"
my father would say.
He was a breeder and trainer of plow 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
and her righteousness should be out there in the dappled light
below the maple trees, her bright blue eyes
narrowed, her whole blade poised,
every nerve on the lookout 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 meets the eye,
I rather knew that there were two worlds,
that 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.
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 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 GLF, was like a factory,
freight cars on one side of it, track on track on the inside.
Wherever you look 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 disheveled
but it was a suit.
Uncle Charlie wore striped 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 overnight
with the two old men and Aunt Kate
when my parents went off with younger relatives to some sing.
There was always the sing on somewhere around Remsen.
Every time two Welsh men 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 a falsely sweet voice
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 80, she had a voice like a bird, she claimed.
The song fest wouldn't be the same without her.
Uncle Charlie 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 the Cymanfa Ganu or an Eisteddfod,
the really big sing where hundreds
and hundreds of Welshmen came together,
for all the tea in China.
Uncle Charlie would blush like a girl
when they spoke of his singing days.
"Well, the body gets old," he'd mutter.
"Pride," my grandmother would snap, "sinful pride."
She was a woman of temper.
She'd been a redhead when she was young.
But for all her sternness, she loved Uncle Charlie
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
but 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 in my bedroom than hers, she would say
when a certain mood was on her.
Another puzzling statement.
"Grandma," I asked, "How come Uncle Charlie'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 has got
its place but a body can get to thinking
when he's singing with the choir that that's
how the whole blessed world should be
and then when he comes down of the clouds
it's a terrible disappointment."
I suppose I looked as puzzled as ever tentatively considering
the idea of people sitting up in the clouds
like the angels in their pictures.
She leaned toward me and said, "Uncle Charlie never
found a good woman, that's what's wrong with him.
Bills to pay, whippersnappers, that
will 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, dust
mopping 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 before a sing
when we were in Remsen.
I lived 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
in the elegant dimly lit living room.
The mirror, much as I loved it by day,
looked ominous from my Uncle Ed's kitchen window after dark.
It would seem to have moved closer, blocking out
the starlight, an immense black tombstone.
I would hear the clock on the kitchen wall solemnly knocking
the seconds off, tok tok tok.
The silence so deep, I could also hear the clock
on the desk in the living room 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 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 were 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.
Because 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.
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,
tail lights like two garnets, would veer out
onto the road, briefly lighting up trees.
When the tail lights 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 feed sack
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 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 lynx wolves and owls, Japanese lanterns
overhead and on the rustic table,
the 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 guide
boat was tied during the day.
The water in the river, shallow and clear as glass,
seemed hardly to move.
But 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.
Pine woods and mountains, large hurrying clouds
of the kind I thought angels lived on,
huge white mountains 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 and dark green hills
with their sheep and collie dogs and nothing ever changed.
Well, through supper Uncle Ed would tell me stories.
Aunt Kate just kept moving back and forth
between the table and the stove patting my head sometimes
telling me not to believe a word of it.
Uncle Charlie 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 the lettuce
in his cage in the corner.
Uncle Charlie was as small boned as a sparrow
and had startling eyes, on brown, one blue,
but he was almost as old as Uncle Ed.
He had light brown hair and a brown mustache,
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
than Uncle Ed's right arm.
People who didn't know them, thought Uncle Charlie 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 living room.
The piano was a good one, a Story and Clark upright.
In the total dimness of the living room,
its cold 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 and 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 Charlie
would say, grinning, not meeting anyone's eyes, "Well, time
to turn in, by gaw, ain't 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 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 Pete 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 to nod, he'd say, looking
at me over the spectacle rims, "You run up
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.
And my memory, no doubt inaccurate,
they went a third the length of the bed.
In the middle during the day, Uncle Ed
was like a king lifting heavy feed sacks
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 a subdued and meek
as Uncle Charlie 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 and Kate's hair
was like fine silver wire.
One time when we were visiting, Uncle Charlie
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 salt blocks.
The slippery blue white of bone in a butcher shop
and stacked around the salt blocks that
were bales of twine and barbed wire,
kerosene lanterns, and zinc coated buckets
sat one inside the other, the top bucket filled with nails.
Outside the window, I could see Aunt Kate's garden
glow 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 Charlie's.
There were farmers in the room with me, reached back
on the 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 Charlie
to load the bags on the two wheels food truck
and rail them to the dock then lift them down a foot or 2
under the wagon.
No doubt I'd been running back and forth with Uncle Charlie
for most of the morning since that's what I usually did,
neither of us talking.
Uncle Charlie 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 feed sack from his bat,
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.
But if you'd asked him later, you
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 passed 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 to the sunlight beyond the open door,
we found Uncle Charlie climbing up from between the loading
dock in one of the farmer's wagons,
furiously shouting and wiping dirt
from his mouth and mustache.
The wagon had been carelessly parked, a three foot
gap between the dock and the wagon bed.
On the wagon where Uncle Charlie 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 now,
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 cut 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 Charlie, 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 to 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 running down the sides of Uncle Charlie's mustache
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 Charlie,
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 Charlie was inside on the couch
in the living room.
I myself took longer.
It was a matter of fact to me that if I'd been doing my job,
running along with Uncle Charlie and his feed truck,
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 Charlie'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, "Katie, get this boy a cookie
and then go on now away with you both."
I went with him looking over my shoulder and Uncle Charlie
gray faced on the couch, the doctor and his black suit
bending down beside him.
They were all smiling now, even Uncle Charlie,
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
because 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 Charlie's gradual recovery: not
as quick as it should be, she let us know.
My mother was 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 of 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
and smooth in its operations as an immense old mill,
that my uncles and Aunt who'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 Charlie was down in his basement room
snoring with his mouth open, I'd sneak down early
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 living room just to my left.
Aunt Kate was saying speaking more softly than usual,
"He could do with the lift."
I learned it by eavesdropping.
When I was supposed to be asleep as Uncle Charlie was down
in his basement room snoring with his mouth open,
I'd sneak 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 living room just to my left.
Aunt kid was saying speaking more softly than usual,
"He could do with the lift."
"He's still down, isn't he?"
My mother said.
"Oh, Charlie'll be fine," Uncle Ed said, hardy 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 when will we all go?" my father said, settling things.
"Take Buddy too, he's never been to a Cymfana 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 drunken
lunatics howling their miserable heads off."
A shiver went up my back.
I was much too little in the mind of a child
to fit a description of 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 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.
The following day was so filled with anxious anticipation,
I could hardly breathe.
Out in the mill I kept close to Uncle Charlie, trying
to guess every move he was about to make and help him 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 pretended to appreciate my help, now,
as I gradually made out, it annoyed him.
"I'll get that," he'd say kicking
the twine bale from the aisle as I reached for it,
or as I ran to push a heavy door open further, he'd say,
"Let it be boy, it's open far enough."
Excuse me.
In the end I did nothing for him,
simply stayed with him because it
was a shame to leave him and go look for Uncle Ed.
He no longer did the kinds of work he'd done before.
The 100 pound sacks were too heavy for him.
He wasn't much heavier than the sacks himself.
And when he pushed the feed truck
after Uncle Ed had loaded it,
both Uncle Ed and I would watch him in distress
afraid it would tip too far back off balance and fall on him.
Mostly, Uncle Ed had taken over the pushing of the feed truck.
"Go ahead then," Uncle Charlie said crossly. "It's your mill."
To keep busy, Uncle Charlie set rat traps,
wound wire around old ladder rungs, swept 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, "Charlie's getting 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 oak desk full of pigeonholes
and secret compartments.
Uncle Charlie 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 can over there," then I'd leap.
Out in the middle, Uncle Charlie would move slowly back
and forth with a push broom needlessly sweeping
white dust from the aisles or hammering 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 Charlie," Uncle Ed
would say, waving a cigar. Uncle Charlie would
frown, shaking his head, then disappear,
going about his business.
Sometime after lunch I found Uncle Charlie
sitting on the floor beside one of the bins
nailing a round piece of tin, the top of a coffee
can, over a hole where bits of grain leaked out.
I stood a while watching him.
His hand when he reached 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, but at the moment,
his mouth was as full as a pin cushion.
When he said nothing, I asked, "What's
a Cymanfa Ganu, Uncle Charlie?"
"Welsh word," he ground 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
through 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 kept 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
or whirling and swirling and powders too complex for the eye
to comprehend.
It was like being in a church, even better than church.
And through in the trees where Uncle Ed had
told me the Welshmen used to worship
their peculiar bug-eyed gods.
"Weather 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 Charlie dropped his head back down,
smashed 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.
"You've heard 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 sullen, his face ash gray under the age spots.
I studied him perturbed, no more pertubed 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 mustache half
covered the black hole of his mouth
like a sharp gabled roof of old straw.
I asked, "Are we're all going to the Cymanfa Ganu?"
His eyes slipped off axis then abruptly
he reached for another nail. "Of 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 milling
about for what seemed to me hours
shouting and talking and 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 rural, white-haired Welsh woman
to another, talking and nodding and laughing until she cried,
sometimes pointing a bony, crooked finger across the room
and gleefully shouting out a name,
though no one could possibly have heard it
in all that uproar.
Then somehow we got the seats, all of us together,
me wedged in between my father and Uncle Charlie.
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 Charlie 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 hymn books 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 Charlie looked up at my father as if an 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 Charlie helped me stand up in 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 hymn books
and couldn't have used them anyway,
singing as they did with their heads lifted,
mouths wide as fish mouths, 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 is clearly defined as cold, individual currents
in a wide, bright river.
There were no weak voices,
though some, like Uncle Charlie's, were reedy and harsh.
Not that it mattered.
The river of sound could use it all.
They sang as if the music was singing itself
through them, sung 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 hardiest
in the room.
I was astonished by my power, as I
know, thinking back, that it was not
as miraculous as I imagined.
Blown 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 to have bones and blood that sang.
All Heaven and Earth singing harmony lines.
And when the music broke off from the final chord,
the echo that rang in 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 [? well, 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 Charlie held my other hand,
squeezing it just as tightly.
Tears streamed from his brown eye and blue eye,
washing his cheeks, dripping from his mustache,
making his whole face shine.
After all, 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 a cigar, Uncle Ed said,
'good sing.'
My father nodded and hitched up his pants and turned to look
back at the door, as if sorry to leave. 'Good turnout.'
Uncle Charlie, with his hands in his pockets,
staring at the ground, said nothing.
The following night, Uncle Charlie
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 on the hand that had three fingers missing,
stared into space and said, 'Poor Charlie,
I wonder what's got into him.'
Aunt Kate stood over by the sink or head bowed,
thinking, folding the dish towel and 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 started him out of a daydream.
He leaned his forearms in the arms of the chair
and hefted himself up out of it.
'I'll arrive to the office and phone around among
the neighbors a bit,' he said, and it 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 and 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 dish towel.
'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.
Tomorrow morning we found him, I learned much later, right
across the road in the creek behind the blacksmith's shop.
I still occasionally dreamed of it, though, of course,
I never saw it--
Uncle Charlie 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 in the chair
beside his bed in the room where they let him live downstairs.
'He'd left them a message,' my grandmother said.
For what were 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,
as 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 we knew Uncle Charlie was dead,
but no one was admitting it was suicide.
They never did admit that.
Uncle Ed's living room 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 in the chairs
my father had brought in from the dining room 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 to the singer Uncle Charlie had been.
The festivals would never have been the same without him.
They spoke of it as shame it was that he never
had a wife and children.
It would have made all the difference.
And for a while, some 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 living room
was anything changing.
Peoples stayed a little now and then,
shifting position, moving just an arm or foot,
sometimes blowing their noses.
But no one got up yet.
No one left for home.
Slowly, the whole conversation died out
like the embers in the fireplace.
And as the stillness deepened, settling
in like winter, an old magic spell,
it began to seem that the silence was unbreakable,
our final say.
Then an old farmer named [? Cy Tom ?]
sitting in the corner with his hands folded, twirling around
his pants cuff, cleared his throat
and 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 lightly lifted.
And the carpet, one after another, as if coming to life,
their shoes began to move."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]