“Bitch!” His voice was hardly recognizable, thickened with something more than drink. “Come out, bitch, before we decide to come in there and get you!” A kind of roar accompanied his words, punctuated by stamping, cheering and a volley of fistfuls of gravel and clods that spattered against our half-closed shutters.
Mother half-opened the broken window and shouted out. “Go home, Guilherm, you fool, before you pass out and someone has to carry you!” Laughter and jeering from the crowd. Guilherm shook the crutch on which he had been leaning.
“Brave talk for a German bitch!” he yelled. His voice sounded rough and beery, though his words were barely slurred. “Who told them about Raphaël, eh? Who told them about La Rép? Was it you, Mirabelle? Did you tell the S.S. that they killed your lover?”
Mother spat out of the window at them. “Brave talk!” Her voice was shrill and high. “You’re one to be talking bravery, Guilherm Ramondin! Brave enough to be standing drunk outside an honest woman’s house, frightening her kids! Brave enough to get sent home in the first week of battle while my husband got killed!”
At this Guilherm gave a roar of fury. Behind him the crowd joined in hoarsely. Another volley of stones and earth hit the window, sending pieces of earth spattering across the kitchen floor.
“You bitch!” They were through the gate now, pushing it up and off its rotten hinges with ease. A dog barked once, twice, then fell quiet with a sudden yelp. “Don’t think we don’t know! Don’t think Raphaël didn’t tell anyone!” His triumphant, hateful voice rang out even above the rest. In the red darkness below the window I could see his eyes as they reflected the firelight like a crazywork of broken glass. “We know you were trading with them, Mirabelle! We know Leibniz was your lover!” From the window Mother hurled a jug of water onto the nearest members of the crowd.
“Cool you off!” she screamed furiously. “You think that’s all people can think about? You think we’re all at your level?”
But Guilherm was already through the gate and pounding on the door, undeterred. “Get out here, bitch! We know what you’ve been doing!”
I could see the door trembling on its latch beneath the pressure of his blows. Mother turned to us, her face blazing with rage.
“Get your things! Get the cash box from under the sink. Get our papers!”
“Why—but—”
“Get them, I tell you!”
We fled.
At first I thought the crash—a terrible sound that shook the rotten floorboards—was the sound of the door coming down. But when we returned to the kitchen we saw that Mother had pulled the dresser across the door, breaking many of her precious plates in the process, and was using it to barricade the entrance. The table, too, had been dragged toward the door, so that even if the dresser gave way no one could enter. She was holding my father’s shotgun in one hand.
“Cassis, check the back door. I don’t think they’ve thought of that yet, but you never know. Reine—stay with me. Boise—” she looked at me strangely for a moment, her eyes black and bright and unreadable, but was unable to finish her sentence, for at that moment a terrible weight crashed against the door, splintering the top half right out of the frame, exposing a slice of night sky. Faces reddened by fire and fury appeared in the frame, boosted up onto the shoulders of their comrades. One of the faces belonged to Guilherm Ramondin. His smile was ferocious.
“Can’t hide in your little house,” he gasped. “Coming to get you…bitch. Coming to pay you back for what…you did…to—”
Even then, with the house coming down about her, my mother managed a sour laugh.
“Your father?” she said in a high, scornful voice. “Your father, the martyr? François? The hero? Don’t make me laugh!” She raised the shotgun so that he could see it. “Your father was a pathetic old drunkard who’d piss on his shoes more often than not when he wasn’t sober. Your father—”
“My father was Resistance!” Guilherm’s voice was shrieky with rage. “Why else would he go to Raphaël’s? Why else would the Germans take him?”
Mother laughed again. “Oh, Resistance, was he?” she said. “And old Lecoz, I suppose he was Resistance as well, was he? And poor Agnès? And Colette?” For the first time that night, Guilherm faltered. Mother took a step toward the broken door, shotgun leveled.
“I’ll tell you this for nothing, Ramondin,” she said. “Your father was no more Resistance than I’m Joan of Arc. He was a sad old sot, that was all, who liked to talk too much and who couldn’t have got it up if he’d stuck a wire through it first! He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the rest of you idiots out there! Now get yourselves home! All of you!” She fired a single shot into the air. “All of you!” she yelled.
But Guilherm was stubborn. He winced when the shards of pulverized wood grazed his cheek, but did not drop down.
“Someone killed that Boche,” he said in a more sober voice.
“Someone executed him. Who else but Resistance? And then someone tipped them off to the S. S. Someone from the village. Who else but you, Mirabelle? Who else?”
My mother began to laugh. In the firelight I could see her face, flushed and almost beautiful in her rage. Around her, the ruins of her kitchen lay in pieces and shards. Her laughter was terrible.
“You want to know, Guilherm?” There was a new note in her voice, a note almost of joy. “You really won’t go home until you know?” She fired the gun again into the ceiling, making plaster fall like bloody feathers in the firelight. “You really want to fucking know?”
I saw him flinch at the word more than at the blast from the shotgun. It was all right for men to swear in those days, but for a woman to do so—a decent woman, at least—was almost unthinkable. I understood that in her own words she had condemned herself. But my mother didn’t seem to have finished.
“I’ll tell you the truth, shall I, Ramondin?” she said. Her voice was breaking with laughter, hysteria, I suppose, but in that moment I was sure she was enjoying herself. “I’ll just tell you how it really happened, shall I?” She nodded gaily. “I didn’t have to report anyone to the Germans, Ramondin! And do you know why? Because I killed Tomas Leibniz! I killed him! Don’t you believe me? I killed him!” She was dry-firing the shotgun, though both barrels were empty. Her capering shadow on the kitchen floor was red and black and giant. Her voice rose to a scream. “Does that make you feel better, Ramondin? I killed him! I was his whore all right, and I’m not sorry! I killed him and I’d kill him again if I had to! I’d kill him a thousand times! What d’you think of that? What do you fucking think of that?”
She was still screaming as the first torch hit the kitchen floor. That went out, though Reinette began to cry as soon as she saw the flames, but the second one caught the curtains, and the third the cracked ruin of the dresser. Guilherm’s face at the top of the door had vanished now, but I could hear him shouting orders outside. Another torch—a sheaf of straw much like those from which the harvest queen’s throne was made—came flying over the top of the dresser and landed smoldering in the center of the kitchen.
Mother was still screaming, out-of-control, “I killed him, you cowards! I killed him and I’m glad I did and I’ll kill you, every one of you, any one of you tries to mess with me and my children!”
Cassis tried to take her arm and she flung him back against the wall.
“The back door!” I called to him. “We’ll have to go out through the back!”
“What if they’re waiting?” whimpered Reine.
“What if!” I yelled impatiently. Outside, rumors and catcalls, like a fairground turned suddenly savage. I caught my mother by the arm. Cassis took the other. Together we dragged her, still raving and laughing, to the back of the house. Of course they were waiting. Their faces were red with firelight. Guilherm barred our way, flanked by Petit the butcher and Paul’s father, Jean-Marc, looking slightly embarrassed but grinning like a sickle. Too drunk, perhaps, or perhaps still too wary, building thems
elves up to the act of murder like children playing double-dare, they had already set fire to the henhouse and the goat shack. The stench of burning feathers married with the dank chill of the fog.
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Guilherm sourly. Behind us the house whispered and snickered as the flames took.
Mother reversed the butt of the old rifle and, with a gesture almost too quick to see, punched him in the chest with it. Guilherm went down. For a second there was a gap where he had been and I leaped through it, pushing under elbows and wriggling between an undergrowth of legs and sticks and pitchforks. Someone tried to grab me, but I was slick as an oiled eel, scrabbling away into the hot crowd. I felt myself pinned, suffocated between a sudden surge of bodies. I clawed my way to air and space, barely feeling the blows that fell upon me. I sprinted across the field into the darkness, taking cover behind a stand of raspberry canes. Somewhere far behind me I thought I could hear my mother’s voice, beyond fear now, enraged and screaming. She sounded like an animal defending her young.
The stink of smoke was getting stronger. In the front of the house something collapsed with a splintering crash, and I felt a soft buffet of heat reach me across the field. Someone—I think it was Reine—screamed thinly.
The crowd was a shapeless thing, all hate. Its shadow reached as far as the raspberry bushes and beyond. Behind it I was just in time to see the far gable of the house collapse in a spray of fireworks. A chimney of superheated air rose redly into the sky, sending spume and fire-crackers squawking into the gray sky like a geyser of flame.
A figure broke from the shapelessness of the crowd and ran across the field. I recognized Cassis. He made a dash for the corn, and I guessed he would make for the Lookout Post. A couple of people started to follow him, but the burning farm held many of them hypnotized. Besides, it was Mother they wanted. I could make out her words now over the twin throats of the crowd and the fire. She was calling our names.
“Cassis! Reine-Claude! Boise!”
I stood up behind the raspberry canes, ready to run if anyone came toward me. Standing on the tips of my toes I glimpsed her briefly. She looked like something in a fisherman’s tale, caught on all sides but thrashing furiously, her face red and black with fire and blood and smoke, a monster of the deep. Some other faces I could see too: Francine Crespin, her sheep-eyed saintly face distorted into a scream of hatred; Guilherm Ramondin like something back from the dead. There was fear in their hatred now, the kind of superstitious fear that can only be cured by destruction and murder. It had taken them a long time to get to it, but their killing time had come. I saw Reinette slink out from one side of the crowd into the corn. No one tried to stop her. By then most of them, blinded by blood lust, would have been hard put to recognize who she was, anyway.
Mother went down. I may have imagined a single hand rising above the grimacing faces. It was like something from one of Cassis’s books: Plague of Zombies or Valley of the Cannibals. All that was missing were the jungle drums. But the worst part of the horror was that I knew these faces, glimpsed mercifully briefly in the gleeful dark. That was Paul’s father. That was Jeannette Crespin, who’d almost been harvest queen, barely sixteen and with blood across her face. Even sheepy Père Froment was there—though whether he was trying to restore order or was himself contributing to the chaos was impossible to tell. Sticks and fists hammered onto my mother’s head and back, she holding herself tight like a curled fist, like a woman with a baby in her arms, still screaming defiance, though muffled now by the hot weight of flesh and hate.
Then came the shot.
We all heard it: the yark of a large-gauge weapon, a double-barreled shotgun perhaps, or one of the antique pistols still hoarded in farm attics or under floorboards in villages all over France. It was a wild shot—though Guilherm Ramondin felt it scorch his cheek and promptly voided his bladder in terror—and heads whipped round curiously to see from where it had come. No one knew. Beneath their suddenly frozen hands my mother began to crawl, bleeding now from a dozen places, her hair dragged out so that the scalp showed slick in patches, a sharp stick actually pushed through the back of her hand so that the fingers splayed out helplessly.
The sound of the fires—biblical, apocalyptic—was now the only sound. People waited, remembering perhaps the sound of the execution squad in front of Saint-Benedict’s, trembling before their own bloody intentions. A voice came (from the cornfield, perhaps, or from the burning house, or even the sky itself ), a booming, authoritative man’s voice, impossible to ignore or to disobey.
“Leave them!”
My mother continued to crawl. Uneasily the crowd parted to let her through, like wheat before the wind.
“Leave them! Go home!”
The voice sounded a little familiar, people said later. There was an inflection they recognized, but could not quite identify.
Someone cried out hysterically, “It’s Philippe Hourias!”
But Philippe was dead. A shiver went through the people. My mother reached the open field, staggering defiantly to her feet. Someone reached out to stop her, then thought better of it. Père Froment bleated something weak and well-meaning. A couple of angry cries faltered and died in the superstitious silence. Warily, insolently, without turning my face away from their collective gaze, I began to make my way toward my mother. I could feel my face burning with the heat, my eyes full of reflected firelight. I took her good hand.
The wide dark expanse of Hourias’s cornfield lay before us. We plunged into it without a word. No one followed us.
21.
We went to Tante Juliette’s. Mother stayed a week, then moved away, perhaps out of guilt or fear, ostensibly for the sake of her health. We only saw her a few times after that. We understood that she’d changed her name, reverting to her maiden name, and had moved back to Brittany. Details after that were sketchy. I heard she was making a reasonable living in a bakery, baking her old specialties. Cooking always was her first love. We stayed with Tante Juliette, moving away ourselves as soon as we decently could, Reine to try for the movies for which she had so long yearned, Cassis escaping to Paris under a different name, I into a dull but comfortable marriage. We heard that the farmhouse in Les Laveuses had been only partially gutted by the fire, that the outhouses were mostly undamaged, and that only the front section of the main building was completely destroyed. We could have gone back. But word of the massacre at Les Laveuses had already spread. Mother’s admission of guilt, in front of three dozen witnesses, her words—I killed him! I was his whore and I’m not sorry—as much as the sentiments she had expressed against her fellow villagers, sufficed to condemn her. Soon after the Liberation a brass plaque was dedicated to the ten martyrs of the Great Massacre, and later, when such things became curiosities to be contemplated at leisure, when the ache of loss and terror had diminished a little, it became clear that the hostility against Mirabelle Dartigen and her children was unlikely to dwindle. I had to face the truth; I would never return to Les Laveuses. Never again. And for a long time I didn’t even realize how badly I wanted to.
22.
The coffee’s still boiling on the stove. Its smell is bitterly nostalgic, a black burnt-leaf smell with a hint of smoke in the steam. I drink it very sweet, like a shock victim. I think I can begin to understand how my mother must have felt, the wildness, the freedom of throwing everything away.
Everyone has gone. The girl with her little tape recorders and her mountain of tapes. The photographer. Even Pistache has gone home, at my own insistence, though I can still almost feel her arms around me, and the last touch of her lips against my cheek. My good daughter, neglected for so long in favor of my bad one. But people change. At last I feel I can talk to you now, my wild Noisette, my sweet Pistache. Now I can hold you in my arms without that feeling of drowning in silt. Old Mother is dead at last, her curse ended. No disaster will strike if I dare to love you.
Noisette returned my call late last night. Her voice was tight and cautious, like mine; I
pictured her leaning as I do, her narrow face suspicious, against the tiled surface of the bar. There is little warmth in her words, coming as they do across cold miles and wasted years, but occasionally, when she speaks of her child, I think I can hear something in her voice. Something like the beginning of softness. It makes me glad.
I will tell her in my own time, I think; little by little, drawing her in. I can afford to be patient; after all, I know the technique. In a way she needs this story more than anyone—certainly more than the public, gawking at old scandals—even more than Pistache. Pistache doesn’t bear grudges. She takes people as they are, honestly and with kindness. But Noisette needs this story—and her daughter, Pêche, needs it too—if the specter of Old Mother is not to raise its head again one day. Noisette has her own demons. I only hope I am no longer one of them.
The house feels oddly hollow now everyone has left, uninhabited. A draft skitters a few dead leaves across the tiles. And yet I don’t feel quite alone. Absurd, to imagine ghosts remaining in this old house. I’ve lived here so long and never felt a single shiver of a presence, and yet today I feel…. Someone just behind the shadows, a quiet presence, discreet and almost humble, waiting….
My voice was sharper than I intended. “Who’s there? I said, who’s there?” It rang with a metallic sound against the bare walls, the tiled floor. He stepped out into the light and I was suddenly close to laughter, closer to tears at his presence.
“Smells like good coffee,” he said in his mild way.
“God, Paul. How do you manage to walk so quietly?”
He grinned.
“I thought you…I thought…”