Uncle Joe

   Joe lived with us for as long as I can remember, the last 20 years or so in our  final family house.  His room was the small one, at the top of the stairs  in the back of the house.  The room boasted a closet and a single window, and of course the private entrance that the second stairway allowed.  In the room were a single bed and a small kerosene stove, all he needed he said. He must have been lonely, but was doubtless accustomed to it because his wife had died young of cancer, his son drowned in the Hoosic River at the age of 11 years, and Joe had lost his arm in an accident while working at the Powder Mills.  When we  were little kids, we spent a lot of time outside with Joe.  He didn't play with us exactly, but talked to us and listened to us as we followed him around while he did chores in the yard. He often carried a hoe which he used to tend a small vegetable garden, and more fascinating to us, he would divert streams of water through areas where mud had formed. When he would put his hoe away in the shed, us following him, he would sing words to the song, "Hang up the shovel and the hoe, for there's no more work for Poor Old Joe," thus adapting the words way before the time of racial consciousness.   Our father was always at work, and my mother's life consumed with household and farming chores, so Joe was a constant presence in our lives, and as memory serves, he treated us quite as adults.
     We kids grew up, as children are destined (or doomed) to do, and we came to abandon his presence in our lives, ungratefully, as children also do.
One cold winter night in January, Joe died in that small room. Once the bed and the small stove were taken out of the room, there was little evidence that he had ever lived there.  I was in college then and a year or so later, with the help of a friend, I made the room into a small study for myself, with a cot and a desk and a wardrobe for my winter clothes, as well as the room's closet.  A luxury of a sort, as I'd never had a room of my own or a closet either.  In cold months, I could spend  only limited time in the room, as the house had no central heat and no heat at all upstairs.  Those were the days when we would grab our clothes in the morning and run downstairs to dress near the living room stove. In the summer, I would lie on the cot and read--a simple but most desirable pleasure.  But there was a peculiar thing that would happen at times, always in that room and always when I was alone.  I would hear voices in my head.  No, that's not true; it was more like a refrain running through my head, wordless, but struggling to become words.  I was in my early twenties with no history of illness, though that was about the time I started to develop migraines. It was before the time of self analysis or pseudo-psychology, so I never strove to make any connection, and none was apparent.  I do remember that when I would feel the sensation of the unspoken coming on, I would run, not walk, down those stairs into the company of anybody who happened to be in the house.  I never mentioned it to anybody, though years later I discussed it with Dorothy, and she said she had similar experiences.  When we had these rare conversations, and after she had married and moved away, Dorothy would say she had felt the presence of ghosts, or spirits, in the house.  Not too surprising, I suppose, because in our lifetimes, my mother, father, and Joe would all die in the house, in different rooms, and I believe that my father's father also died there, in still another room.  Helen, in her later and lonesome years, claimed to have seen angels in the middle room, and could hear them singing.  She would describe the sight and the sound.  Years later, I would research the topic, and learn there is a recognized and identified phenomenon of choir voices in people who have suffered hearing loss.  Helen didn't dislike the voices or the vision, but rather was  in awe of them, and religious as she was, seemed to attach some feeling that the angels were preparing a way for her.  After a while, and a long life, dreams and reality appear to merge as one, which could be a stark reminder that the way is being prepared, ready or not.