Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“It was my grandfather who first taught me about the Bible, as he had wanted me to possess some moral sense of things. He taught me discipline with regular beatings, so that I would learn obedience. But he could be tender, too. He always told me that I did not need a mother. ‘Even without one, you shall yet become a man,’ he’d say. Has it turned out to be the truth? That I cannot say, but it was through him, Miss Tennant, that I felt the first shock of death, for I was watching him tending to some work in a field one morning when, with a gasp, he clutched his chest and, taking three agitated breaths, fell to the ground, dead.

“He had two sons who looked after me for a time, but as they wanted to get married and needed the run of the cottage to themselves, they boarded me out for the price of a half a crown a week to an elderly couple who lived on the other side of the castle. My new guardian’s name was Richard Price; his was a pocked and grave face, and his eyes were watery and teeth quite broken; but he made a livelihood tending to the village green. He was also the sexton of Whitchurch and, therefore, like my grandfather, of a very religious proclivity. His wife was a fat old woman who cooked pease pudding each night, which I disliked but was forced to eat because that half a crown did not provide for much more. They had a daughter, Sarah, and it was she who taught me about the devil, who — and I have since learned this to be one of the truths of life — fights with God for dominion over the world… she loved to frighten me with stories about Satan and the ways he had to trick men into sinning… and about witches and evil spirits, too: and she spoke of ghosts, the disembodied spirits of men.

“She so filled my head with such stories that I trembled each night when it got dark. I trembled whenever I was sent out of the house to fetch water from a well; trembled when I had to enter into the castle-wall shadows. Such tales afflicted me with bad dreams. I used to believe that my grandfather’s ghost would soon be coming after me, for I was not always so well behaved when he was alive and had wished him dead whenever he beat me. The story of Lazarus, raised by Jesus from the dead, troubled me as well, and I would cry out night after night, waking everyone in that household, thinking that Lazarus had come to visit me.

“Then I take it you believe in ghosts?”

“Of the mental kind, yes. Children, especially, see so many things that we cannot; in fact, I did see a ghost, not in a dream but in actuality, on one of those nights when I went to fetch some water. As I approached the well, I saw a very great shadow moving out from behind some trees: It was no man, just the shadow of a man, stretching high over the castle walls. Well, I instantly ran back into the house, leaving my bucket behind, and from that time on I slept ever more restlessly and cried out from ever more frightening dreams.

“And so, Miss Tennant, as I disturbed their peace at night, and as they found me a difficult sort of child, they demanded more money from my uncles for their troubles. But this extra my uncles refused to pay, nor would they take me back. Shortly came the day when the sexton told me that I would be making a journey; a wagon, driven by his eldest boy, was to take me to the town of Ffynnon Beuno, where I was to be boarded with another of their relatives, a certain Aunt Mary. Being so young and trusting of others, I had no inkling of what awaited me — a very different life from the one I had known.”

Then: “But am I boring you, Miss Tennant, with this flight of words? If I do, I apologize, but as you stand behind your canvas making drawings of me — your eyes so kindly — I feel no hesitation in telling you such things.”

“Mr. Stanley, what things I can learn of you most interest me: Please do go on.”

“WELL, THEN, IT WAS a Saturday in 1847—a Saturday of dreary Welsh weather, the sky gray and air as damp and cold as the sea. With my few possessions stashed in a sack, I rode alongside the sexton’s son, who — and here, Miss Tennant, came another instance of hard learning, this time about man’s capacity for deception — had allayed my anxieties with stories of how pleasant my life with Aunt Mary would be, saying that hers was a beautiful house with a big garden that bloomed sweet in the spring. With the horse clopping slowly along, traveling the longest five miles of my life, he told me that Mary, like the mother of Jesus herself, loved little boys very much, and that she, having no sons of her own, had always wished for one and had all kinds of delicious cakes and sweets waiting for me to eat. In a lovely voice she’d sing me to sleep with Welsh lullabies at night, and he said no ghosts would enter her house to disturb me. But you see, Miss Tennant, when that carriage came to its destination, there was no pretty house awaiting me, and no Aunt Mary; no, before me, in all its stolid glory, stood an immense stone building, which looked something like a prison, with barred windows all around it. As we waited before its gated entrance, the sexton’s son told me that this was only a temporary stop to give our horse some rest, but he had gotten out and clanged a bell by its door. Two clangs of a bell I heard, then footsteps sounding on some paving stones from inside. Shortly a gloomy man stood at the entranceway and had a few words with the sexton’s son; with that he lifted me out of the carriage, and as I had started to cry, fearing the worst, because I did not trust the gloomy man’s face, he told me, ‘Now, wait inside, and Aunt Mary will come to fetch you soon enough.’

“That was the last I saw him; and as there had never been any such person as Aunt Mary, I was taken inside, the gloomy keeper leading me into the inner courtyard of that place, which to my young eyes seemed like bedlam, for I could see, trembling and crying as I was, so many hopeless sorts — elderly paupers who seemed to have no purpose but to walk in circles around the courtyard, talking to themselves; and I saw an idiot speaking to a wall and a bent-over old woman crying in a corner; and when I looked up at the windows of the surrounding buildings, I could see the sad faces of little children, much like your urchins, peering down at me, and I wanted to run away. But this was not to be, Miss Tennant, for on that day I had been delivered into the care of the Victorian state. My new home went by the name of St. Asaph Union Workhouse. I was but seven years of age and very sad indeed.”

“You poor, dear man,” Dorothy Tennant said.

“Males and females, even married couples, were kept in separate wards. Among the transient population were prostitutes brought in for spiritual reawakening as well as dolts and madmen better suited for asylums but put there by a kindly local vicar. Of the children, there were about seventy: Forty were boys — the girls, kept in a separate ward, were rarely to be seen.

“While the girls were taught by the matron in charge, my schoolmaster was one James Francis, a former collier of some education. He’d lost his left hand in a coal-factory accident as a younger man, and he was of such a bad temperament that at the slightest provocation he often used his good right hand to wield a birch rod. Though this Mr. Francis was a Welshman who could only speak broken English, he taught his lessons, however painstaking and confusing it might have been to his students, in the English language. His words were taken from books verbatim, exactly as they were written, Welsh being strictly forbidden in those classrooms. As I could only speak Welsh, many were the days I spent without knowing a word of what was being taught. But as there were boys willing to teach me some English, I learned to wean myself off the mother tongue — and in a hard way, for whenever I uttered any words of Welsh in the classroom or made an error in my pronunciation of an English word, Mr. Francis would give me a blow on the back of my head or strike a switch against the upheld palm of my hand — I still have two scars to remind me of that, Miss Tennant. But most humiliating was to have my breeches pulled down and be lashed.