The Season of Migration by Nellie Hermann Page A

the fields, unmoving, so that they, too, were as trees, growing up from the earth. The green of the potato plants, the amber of the wheat, the fluffy gray sheep moving across the distance, butterflies landing gently on the open and patient face of a flower: He never grew tired of the world he saw when he walked, it was never familiar to him no matter how many times he saw it. When he was alone, he would sit on a tree limb for hours, letting his eyes relax, listening to the noises around him, and feeling a sense of peace that he never felt in the world of men.
    He thinks of Alard, his friend in mining country, another boy who was different, and the drawing that he had given to Vincent a month or so ago, a portrait of Smoke, the cat that lived in the now-empty salon, all fast lines and squiggles, the cat’s eyes round and exaggerated amid sharp tufts of hair. Alard was a boy as he had been, not satisfied by the games of the other children. He thinks of Alard’s little voice after he handed the picture to Vincent, and Vincent was holding it in his hands: “Do you like it, Monsieur Vincent? Is it good?”
    Vincent’s parents worried about his long absences from the parsonage, for he never alerted anyone to his departure and was often away for hours at a time, even at night. He especially loved to walk in storms, the sky and the flashing light enhancing the natural drama of the landscape. He almost always carried a fishnet on a pole and a jar for carrying home the specimens that he found.
    One day he brought home a jar that was nearly full of crawling beetles, some he had found in the water of a canal and others in the mud on the edge; he had a notion that putting them all together in a confined space might bring out some interesting instincts among them, and he was interested to see if they would naturally separate. His sisters Elisabeth and Anna were waiting for him when he came home, and upon seeing the jar, they broke into squeals of distaste, calling him queer and saying he was horrible and insisting that he put the jar out at once. He did, leaving it just by the door of the house, not wanting to release the beetles for fear that he’d never find quite the same mix of them again. But when he came out to them first thing in the morning, they were all dead.
    It was a horrific sight, that little jar filled with the carcasses of beetles that had been so energetic the day before. There seemed to be so much more space in the jar than there had been, the black shells lying carelessly about on top of one another, twisted legs jutting up and pointing left and right. Vincent held it in his hand and felt a revulsion that twisted his insides from his neck to his groin. It took all of his strength to carry the jar to the garden, twist the cap, and dump the beetles behind a flowering bush, to watch the way they tumbled out over the rim like pieces of weightless black licorice. The sound they made as they fell to the earth was almost the sound of a scouring brush lightly touching fabric. He spent the next few days inside, mourning those beetles and staring at his hands.
    He felt a wonder toward learning, as a boy, despite his hatred for school. He remembered awe at the power of his hand, that he could take a delicate piece of lead and draw, and what he created was both an image and a word. What a miracle! When a word was written down, it became an image as well as a word; this was a revelation. The recognition of it allowed him to learn how to see words even when they were spoken, not only the shape of them but the pictures they called to mind. What was the world if not words and pictures?
    But still, he had failed. His parents had removed him from the local school after a few too many scuffles in the school yard, and then for three years, his father had tried to teach him. “I will be unlike that man, that disciplinarian across the street,” Vincent overheard his father saying to his mother one day in the