I stopped to look at him again. His sweet and rueful smile. His stooped shoulders, like those of a mule who has carried long and heavy loads in patience and peace of mind. How I envied him. How I wanted him.
“You do have the guts,” said Paul at last. “You always did.”
We looked at each other. Silence between us.
“All right,” I told him at last. “Let him go.”
“Are you sure? The drugs Louis found in his pocket—”
I gave a laugh, which sounded strangely carefree in my dry mouth. “You and I both know there were no drugs. A harmless fake, that’s all, which you planted on him when you went through his pockets.” I laughed again at his startled look. “Poacher’s fingers, Paul, poacher’s hands. Did you think you were the only one with a suspicious mind?”
Paul nodded. “What will you do then?” he asked. “As soon as he tells Yannick and Laure…”
I shook my head.
“Let him tell them,” I said. I felt light inside, lighter than I had ever felt before, thistledown on the water. I felt laughter rising up inside me, the mad laughter of a person who is about to throw everything she possesses into the wind. I put my hand into my apron pocket and drew out the scrap of paper with the telephone number written on it.
Then, thinking better of it, I fetched my little address book. After a moment’s searching, I found the right page.
“I think I know what to do now,” I said.
9.
Apple and dried-apricot clafoutis. Beat the eggs and flour together with the sugar and melted butter until the consistency is thick and creamy. Add the milk little by little, beating all the time. The final consistency should be a thin batter. Rub a dish generously with butter, and add the sliced fruit to the batter. Add cinnamon and allspice and put into the oven at a medium temperature. When the cake has begun to rise, add brown sugar to the top and dot with butter. Bake until the top is crisp and firm to the touch.
It had been a meager harvest. The drought, followed by the disastrous rains, had seen to that. And yet the annual harvest festival was something we usually looked forward to with anticipation, even Mother, who made her special cakes and left bowls of fruit and vegetables on the window ledge and baked loaves of extravagant and intricate loveliness—a wheat sheaf, a fish, a basket of apples—to sell at the Angers market.
The fair was always held at the end of October, and that day all the Sunday-schoolers would file around the fountain (paganly decorated with flowers, fruit and wreaths of corn, pumpkins and colored squash hollowed and cut into lantern shapes) dressed in their best clothes, holding candles and singing. The service would continue in the church, where the altar was draped in green and gold, and the hymns, resounding across the square where we would listen, fascinated by the lure of things forbidden, dealt with the reaping of the chosen and the burning of the chaff. We always waited until the service was over, and then would join in the festivities with the rest while the curé remained to take confession in church and the harvest bonfires burnt smoky-sweet at the corners of the bare fields.
It was then that the fair would begin. The harvest festival with wrestling and racing and all kinds of competitions—dancing, ducking for apples, pancake eating, goose racing—and hot gingerbread and cider given out to the winners and losers, and baskets of homemade produce sold at the fountain while the harvest queen sat smiling on her yellow throne and showered passersby with flowers.
This year we had hardly seen it coming. Most other years we would have awaited the celebration with an impatience greater than Christmas, for presents were scarce in those days and December is a poor time for celebration. October, fleeting and sappy sweet with its reddish gold light and early white frosts and the leaves turning brilliantly, is a different matter, a magical time, a last gleeful defiance in the face of the approaching cold. Other years we would have had the pile of wood and dead leaves waiting in a sheltered spot weeks in advance, the necklaces of crab apples and bags of nuts waiting, our best clothes ironed and ready and our shoes polished for dancing. There might have been a special celebration at the Lookout Post (wreaths hung on the Treasure Stone and scarlet flower heads dropped into the slow brown Loire), pears and apples sliced and dried in the oven, garlands of yellow corn plaited and worked into braids and dollies for good luck around the house, tricks planned against the unsuspecting and bellies rumbling in hungry anticipation.
But this year there was little of that. The sourness after La Mauvaise Réputation had begun our descent, and with it the letters, the rumors, graffiti on the walls, whispering behind our backs and polite silences to our faces. It was assumed that there could be no smoke without fire. The accusations (NAZI WHOAR on the side of the henhouse, the words reappearing larger and redder every time we painted them over), coupled with Mother’s refusal to acknowledge or deny the gossip, along with reports of her visits to La Rép exaggerated and passed hungrily from mouth to mouth, were enough to whet suspicions even more keenly. Harvesttime was a sour affair for the Dartigen family that year.
The others built their bonfires and sheaved their wheat. Children picked over the rows to make sure none of the grain was lost. We gathered the last of the apples—what wasn’t rotten through with wasps, that is—and stored them away in the cellar on trays, each one separate so that rot couldn’t spread. We stored our vegetables in the root cellar in bins and under loose coverings of dry earth. Mother even baked some of her special bread, though there was little market for her baking in Les Laveuses, and sold it impassively in Angers. I remember how we took a cartload of loaves and cakes to market one day, how the sun shone on the burnished crusts—acorns, hedgehogs, little grimacing masks—like on polished oak. A few of the village children refused to speak to us. On the way to school one day someone threw clods of earth at Reinette and Cassis from a stand of tamarisks by the riverside. As the day approached, girls began to appraise one another, brushing their hair with especial care and washing their faces with oatmeal, for on festival day one of them would be chosen as the harvest queen and wear a barley crown and carry a pitcher of wine. I was totally uninterested in this. With my short straight hair and froggy face I was never going to be harvest queen. Besides, without Tomas nothing mattered very much. I wondered if I would ever see him again. I sat by the Loire with my traps and my fishing rod and watched. I couldn’t stop myself from believing that somehow, if I caught the pike, Tomas would return.
10.
Harvest festival morning was cold and bright, with the dying-ember glow peculiar to October. Mother had stayed up the night before—out of a kind of stubbornness rather than a love of tradition—making gingerbread and black buckwheat pancakes and blackberry jam, which she placed in baskets and gave to us to take to the fair. I wasn’t planning on going. Instead, I milked the goat and finished my few Sunday chores, then began to make my way toward the river. I had just placed a particularly ingenious trap there, two crates and an oil drum tied together with chicken wire and baited with fish scraps right at the edge of the riverbank, and I was eager to test it out. I could smell cut-grass on the wind with the first of the autumn bonfires, and the scent was poignant, centuries old, a reminder of happier times. I felt old too, trudging through the cornfields to the Loire. I felt as if I’d already lived a long, long time.
Paul was waiting at the Standing Stones. He looked unsurprised to see me, glancing briefly at me from his fishing before returning to the cork floater on the water.
“Aren’t you going to the f-fair?” he asked.
I shook my head. I realized I hadn’t seen him once since Mother chased him from the house, and I felt a sudden pang of guilt at having so completely forgotten my old friend. Maybe that’s why I sat down next to him. Certainly it was not for the sake of companionship—my need for solitude was stifling me.
“Me n-neither.” He looked almost morose, almost sour-faced that morning, his eyes drawn together in a frown of concentration that was unsettlingly adult. “All those idiots getting d-drun
k and d-dancing about. Who needs it?”
“Not me.” At my feet the brown eddies of the river were hypnotic. “I’m going to check all my traps, then I thought I’d try the big sandbank. Cassis says there are pike there sometimes.”
Paul gave me a cynical look. “Never g-get her,” he told me tersely.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “You j-just won’t, that’s all.”
We fished side by side for a time, as the sun warmed our backs slowly and the leaves fell yellow-red-black, one by one into the silky water. We heard the church bells ringing sweet and distant across the fields, signaling the end of Mass. The festival would begin within ten minutes.
“Are the others going?” Paul shifted a bloodworm from its warming place in his left cheek and speared it expertly onto the hook.
I shrugged. “Don’t care,” I said.
In the silence that followed I heard Paul’s stomach rumble loudly.
“Hungry?”
“Nah.”
It was then that I heard it. Clear as memory on the Angers road, almost imperceptible at first, growing louder like the drone of a sleepy wasp, louder like the buzz of blood in the temples after a breathless run across the fields. The sound of a single motorbike.
A sudden burst of panic. Paul must not see him. If it was Tomas I must be alone—and my heart’s sick lurch of joy told me, told me with a clear rapturous certainty, it was Tomas.
Tomas.
“Perhaps we could just have a look in,” I said with fake indifference.
Paul made a noncommittal sound.
“There’ll be gingerbread,” I told him slyly. “And baked potatoes and roasted sweet corn…and pies…and sausage in the coals of the bonfire.”
I heard his stomach rumble a little louder.
“We could sneak in and help ourselves,” I suggested.
Silence.
“Cassis and Reine will be there.”
At least I hoped they would. I was counting on their presence to enable me to make a quick getaway and back to Tomas. The thought of his closeness—the unbearable, hot joy that filled me at the thought of seeing him—was like baking stones under my feet.
“W-will she be there?” His voice was low with a hate that might in other circumstances have surprised me. I never imagined Paul to be the kind who bears grudges. “I mean your m-m-m—” He grimaced with the effort. “Your m-m-m—Your m-m-m—”
I shook my head. “Shouldn’t think so,” I interrupted, more sharply than I intended. “God, Paul, it drives me crazy when you do that.”
Paul shrugged indifferently. I could hear the sound of the motorbike clearly now, maybe a mile or two up the road. I clenched my fists so hard that my fingernails scarred my palms.
“I mean,” I said in a gentler tone. “I mean it doesn’t matter really. She just doesn’t understand, that’s all.”
“Will she b-be there?” insisted Paul.
I shook my head. “No,” I lied. “She said she’d be clearing out the goat shed this morning.”
Paul nodded. “All right,” he said mildly.
11.
Tomas might wait at the Lookout Post for an hour or so. The weather was warm; he would hide his motorbike in the bushes and smoke a cigarette. If there was nobody around he might risk a dip in the river. If after that time no one had appeared, he would scribble a message for us and leave it (perhaps with a parcel of magazines or sweets carefully packed in newspaper) at the top of the Lookout Post, in the fork under the platform. I knew this; he’d done it before. In that time I could easily get into the village with Paul, then double back as soon as no one was watching. I would not tell Reinette or Cassis that Tomas was here. A burst of greedy joy at the thought. Imagining his face lit up by a smile of welcome, a smile that would be mine alone. With that thought I almost rushed Paul toward the village, my hot hand tight around his cool one.
The square around the fountain was already half filled with people. More people were filing out of the church, children holding candles, young girls with crowns of autumn leaves, a handful of young men fresh from confession—Guilherm Ramondin among them—ogling the girls prior to reaping a new crop of sinful thoughts. More, if they could get it; harvest was the time for it, after all, and there was precious little else to look forward to…. I saw Cassis and Reinette standing a little way away from the main body of the crowd. Reine was wearing a red flannel dress and a necklace of berries, and Cassis was eating a sugared pastry. No one seemed to be talking to them, and I could sense the little circle of isolation around them. Reinette was laughing, a high, brittle sound like the scream of a seabird. A little distance away from them my mother stood watching, a basket of pastries and fruit in one hand. She looked very drab among the festival crowd, her black dress and head scarf jarring against the flowers and bunting. At my side I felt Paul stiffen.
A group of people by the side of the fountain began a cheery song. Raphaël was there, I think, and Colette Gaudin, and Paul’s uncle, Philippe Hourias—a yellow scarf tied incongruously about his neck—and Agnès Petit in her Sunday frock and patent shoes, a crown of berries on her hair. I remember her voice rising above the others for a moment—it was untrained, but very sweet and clear—and I felt a shiver raise the hairs on the nape of my neck, as if the ghost she was to become had walked prematurely over my grave. I still remember the words she sang:
A la claire fontaine j’allais me promener
J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baignée
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime
Jamais je ne t’oublierai.
Tomas—if it had been Tomas—would be at the Lookout Post by now. But Paul at my side showed no sign of mingling with the crowd. Instead he looked at my mother’s figure across from the fountain and bit his lips nervously.
“I thought you said she wouldn’t b-be here,” he said.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
We stood watching for a while as people refreshed themselves. There were jugs of cider and wine resting on the ledge around the fountain, and many of the women had, like my mother, brought loaves and brioche and fruit to distribute at the church door. I noticed that my mother kept her distance, though, and few came near enough to claim the food she had so carefully prepared. Her face remained impassive, however, almost indifferent. Only her hands gave her away, her white, nervous hands clenched so tightly against the basket’s handle. Her lips were bitten white against her pale face.
I fretted. Paul gave no sign of leaving my side. A woman—Francine Crespin, I think, Raphaël’s sister—held out a basket of apples to Paul, then, seeing me, let her smile stiffen. Few people had missed the writing on the henhouse wall.
The priest came out of the church. Père Froment, his weak mild eyes bright today with the knowledge that his people were united, his gilt crucifix mounted on a wooden pole and held in the air like a trophy. Behind him, two altar boys carried the Virgin on her yellow-and-gold dais decorated with berries and autumn leaves. The Sunday-schoolers turned to the little procession with their candles held in the air and began to sing a harvest hymn. Girls primped and practiced their smiles. I saw Reinette turn too. Then came the harvest queen’s yellow throne, carried out from the church by two young men. Only straw after all, with head and armrests made of corn sheaves and a cushion of autumn leaves. But for a moment with the sun shining on it, it might just as easily have been gold.
There were maybe a dozen girls of the right age waiting by the fountain. I remember them all: Jeannette Crespin in her too-tight communion dress, redheaded Francine Hourias with her mass of freckles that no amount of washing with bran could fade, Michèle Petit with her tight braids and eyeglasses. None of them could hold a candle to Reinette. They knew it too. I could see it in the way they watched her, set slightly apart from the others in her red dress with her long hair unbound and berries woven into her curls, with envy and suspicion. With a little satisfaction too: no one would vote for Reine Dartigen as harvest queen this year. No
t this year, not with the rumors flying about us like dead leaves in the wind.
The priest was speaking. I listened with mounting impatience. Tomas would be waiting. I had to leave soon if I was not to miss him. At my side Paul was staring at the fountain with that look of half-stupid intensity in his face.
“It has been a year of many trials….” His voice was a soothing drone, like the distant bleating of sheep. “But your faith and your energy have brought us through once again.” I sensed impatience akin to mine from the people in the crowd. They had already listened to a long sermon. Now was the time for the crowning of the queen, for the dancing and the celebration. I saw a small child reach for a piece of cake from her mother’s basket and eat it quickly, unnoticed, behind her hand, with furtive, greedy bites.
“Now is a time for celebration.” That was more like it. I heard a low shushing from the crowd, a murmur of approbation and impatience. Père Froment felt it too.
“I only ask that you show moderation in all things,” he bleated, “remembering who it is that you are celebrating—without Whom there could be no harvest and no rejoicing—”
“Get on with it, Père!” cried a rough, cheery voice from the side of the church. Père Froment looked affronted and resigned at the same moment.
“All in good time, mon fils,” he admonished. “As I was saying…now is the time to begin our Lord’s festival by naming the harvest queen—a girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen—to rule over our celebrations and to wear the barley crown—”
A dozen voices interrupted, crying out names—some of them quite ineligible. Raphaël yelled out “Agnès Petit!” and Agnès, who wasn’t a day under thirty-five, blushed in delighted embarrassment, looking for a moment almost pretty.