The Corsican landscape in summertime was dry to the
bone: olive branches grew thin and sharp in the height of the season. Even at a
distance from the coast, the feverish air enveloped your skin so you couldn’t
breathe. Then the cicadas began to sing—one day, suddenly—with their endless
rubbing of legs, the raspy sound that grated, the drone that was the soundtrack
of every summer we were there. By August there had been no rain for months.
Everything was tawny brown, the cicadas blending in with the tree trunks that
hosted them. The cicadas, at least, were invisible, especially from a distance
when the sunshine eclipsed all view. We might have learned something from this:
the capacity to fit into one’s surroundings, to follow local norms. But we were
‘the Americans’, and refugees ourselves: we were the new blight on the
landscape.
This became apparent the day the
gendarme came to visit. He arrived just before noon, wearing a dusky brown
jacket and pants like jodhpurs. It would have been a Sunday as I was home from
school, which at that time ran year-round, all but a few weeks at end of
summer. Ordinarily we’d have thought nothing of an unannounced visit; even I
knew the man had taken a shine to my aunt Eloise. But she was not around that
morning, and my elder brother Andy was in town.
The man stood at the stone wall beside
my father. My mother and I watched from the dappled shade of the olive tree
near our picnic table. I remember his cap, poised on his damp brow at such a
jaunty angle I was certain it would fall.
“Monsieur Église,” my father began.
“Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul,” Église said, as
if to suggest he didn’t have all day. “Monsieur Henrique—George…” He pronounced
my father’s first name in a distinctly American way.
They shook hands and fell into discussion.
I couldn’t make out their words, but then: “Combien allez-vous payer les
travailleurs?” (“How much will you pay the workers?” I was translating
French in my head by then.)
“Vingt-cinq francs,” my father said.
“Vingt-cinq francs
par jour? C’est impossible.
C’est trop d’argent!” At the blank look on
my father’s face, Église defaulted to English. “The Moroccans, they are not
paid this much.” His face tightened. “Ten francs.”
My mother pursed her lips, then slipped
inside to finish preparing lunch. I hoped to remain invisible. I drew a deep
breath and slowly released it. The scent of myrtle, growing wild as it did
everywhere on the island, was pungent that morning.
“I cannot pay them so little. It is so
… dry,” my father said, in his beginner French, then corrected himself.
I cringed as my father stumbled over
his words. Blending in was something I longed for as a salve on the sting of
leaving home.
My father rocked back slightly on his
heels, which he did when he was thinking. “They are working hard,” he said,
“and in this heat!” The cicadas seemed to grew louder in that moment, as if to
emphasize my father’s words.
Like I said, we were all bound up in
the heat, not just the cicadas. Ninety-five degree days crested to 100,
insisting on reprieve: early afternoon naps, dinners after dusk. At night, we
gathered around our picnic table as the temperature dropped. Daytime, we
retreated from the unassailable sun—a brutal environment to work in, especially
at the height of day. But that was the hour the Moroccan workers my father and
mother had hired were expected to work.
“It is just a wall,” Église said. “They
build stone walls for much less than this, you can save the money,” he said,
appealing to my father’s pecuniary side, although he couldn’t know that my
father had one. “If you pay them too much, it will … upset the balance.”
My mother returned just as ‘Eloise’s
gendarme’ left, his Renault spinning up dust as he sped toward Oletta. I could
almost feel it settling. My father turned to my mother. “Serena, ten francs a
day for back-breaking work is nowhere near fair for those Moroccan workers.”
“But he was clearly uncomfortable,
George. If you pay them something different, it may cause trouble.” Money
enterprises weren’t my father’s strongest suit.
“Are you saying I shouldn’t set a fair wage?”
My mother didn’t respond. She was
setting a pan on the picnic table. Her hand trembled slightly from the weight.
I hovered beside her, awaiting her response.
“No, I’m just saying: think this
through.”
My father chuckled, then gave me a
wink, as he placed the bottle of red wine between his legs and worked out the
corkscrew. It popped loudly; and he straightened triumphantly. By age fifty-two,
his golden-brown hair had grown thin, his forehead prominent in the fashion of
Kings: bold, rounded, suggesting a measure of power. His forehead was freckled,
the skin already worn to leather. It shone in the noonday light, the thin layer
of sweat that coated everyone’s skin by this hour.
Eloise arrived just in time to overhear
my parents’ exchange. She’d been picking blackberries. Her fingers were stained
a deep, reddish black. Her shift clung to her in the heat. Eloise was tall,
with a wraithlike figure, but she had a toughness about her that I admired. She
slid one leg over the bench of the picnic table, our makeshift dining room.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s the Corsican mafia!”
She wasn’t joking; some nights we could hear gunfire on the hillside near Oletta.
My mother laughed and then returned to
the kitchen. I followed her. Meals were our religion, you might say, as my
mother spent hours preparing them. It was my job to help bring out the food at
the lunch hour; everyone had a task.
Inside our stone-walled home it was
shockingly dark in contrast to the outside light. Sometimes I found myself in
utter darkness when I stepped inside and had to wait for my eyes to adjust. The
air was noticeably cooler, especially in the height of summer. The doors often
did not close properly because the rain showers, when they did come, were
strong and led to warping in the wood. When I slipped inside that afternoon, I
could smell the calf’s brains, doused in garlic and white wine, sweet and
sharp; they’d not yet told me it was beef brain I was eating. Of course, I’d
have refused.
“Can you carry this? Is it too heavy?”
My mother handed me a hot pad that was stained from the pie-making we’d done
the day before.
“I’m okay,” I said. I put the hot pad
in both hands, picked up the cast-iron pan with the calf’s brains and steered
out of the cool hallway back into the heat. It wasn’t heavy, but like so much
else in my life at that time, it weighed on me, hard. At the picnic table, I
set down the pan with a thump. My father smiled at me.
“I’m going to pay the men 25 francs a
day,” he told to Eloise. “Anything less? Well, it’s cruel.”
My mother told her the going rate.
Never fearful of countering my father, Eloise said, “If you scratch the surface
hard enough, you’ll find it’s economics. Wage rates, labor supply and demand,
what the market will bear. There’s the question of your moral stance, but
what’ll it cost to break the local mores?” She had studied economics at
university as one of the few women in her class.
My mother nodded. She wore an
expression of curious indifference sometimes. “George, you could aim for
slightly less than double their rate. That might keep the gendarme at bay.” I
scanned my mother’s face, in search of clues for what this all meant. I
wondered what my brother Andy would think of all this, but he was away in St
Florent.
We operated like our own little
island—my father, mother, brother, aunt, and me. My father had retired from
inventing and may have felt too solitary. Perhaps that’s why my parents took in
travelers, or brought others in under their wing, like the Moroccan workers: to
shore up our small tribe. Some of us knew the language. On the plane ride over,
I had garnered a few phrases—like où est
la bibliothèque and je t’adore—suggesting
the limited preparation involved in our move. But these did not prove helpful:
we soon learned there was no library in the neighboring village, and at age 10,
I was too young for love. Still, that summer, when the Moroccan men came to
work in our orchards—a haphazard set of pear trees, cherries and plums too,
planted in disorderly rows on the other side of the stone wall that bordered a
vineyard to the south—I learned something of the gaps between knowing and
acting, and difference, and things that rubbed. Although the gap between
knowing and understanding, I would come to see, was vast.
On Monday morning, a truck arrived containing a half
dozen men. You could hear its rumbling sound for half a mile or more as the
vehicle wound its way down to our house. The men were seated on the flatbed of
the truck; all wore long brown trousers, frayed at the edges. The cloth was
worn, torn in the knees. I noticed one tall, very thin man whose elbows cut
sharply away from his shoulders. He slipped off the back edge of the truck as
it pulled up. My father spoke to the driver in French. My mother sat close by,
set down her Josephine Tey mystery novel and looked up.
“Why so many, George?” she asked, when
the van pulled away and six men loitered at the base of our driveway, speaking
quietly amongst themselves. The leader glanced over at my father and lifted his
head in inquiry.
“It’s because of the rate,” my father
said. “They learned about the day rate, and everyone wanted in—right away.” He
looked nonplussed, even for my father, who did not ruffle easily. Then he went
to join the men. It was early: the hum of the cicadas was low, if ever-present,
like a host of weary bees.
My mother raised a brow at my father.
But she didn’t say a word. The door slammed behind her this time when she went
inside.
At lunchtime, on the instructions of my mother, I
carried a tray out to the back of the house. Our home featured a long stone
wall at the back, with an archway and door in between, which separated the
front from the back, slicing our property, the few acres that it was, in two.
From a distance, this created a sense of size that did not accurately reflect
the size of the house. It suggested a mansion, when really, from the front of
the building, one saw that the house featured quite a small floor plan. It
would, like my father’s bank account, look larger than it actually was.
I stepped through to the back of the
property. That day I’d washed my hair in the bath—we had no shower. My hair was
long, blonde and wispy. I wore a short skirt my mother had bought in Bastia,
with a small, carved wooden ring stitched into the front. My top was thin to
allow heat to escape. The sun overhead beat strongly down on us, the cicadas
chirping as if in celebration. It was 11:30, and the men had been working since
7 am, my mother told me. It was time for lunch.
Five men sat resting in the shade,
beneath the wall, in the crook of one of the gnarled olive trees. The tall thin
man I’d seen earlier rose and came toward me. He looked surprised, as if it’d
rained in the worst of the summer heat, or sunshine had broken through clouds
on a cold winter day. He stood at a distance from me. But I stepped forward.
The dry, dusty soil crept into my sandals and between my toes.
“Tiens,”
I said, handing him the tray. “Voici le
dejeuner.”
My mother followed behind with another
tray, then I went back for the final one. When I returned all the men were
gathered, stooped over their trays, balanced carefully on their laps. One man,
who was seated at a distance, had placed his directly on the dusty soil. It
didn’t seem right that they didn’t have a picnic table. The tall, lanky man
threw me a smile. We didn’t speak the same language, but I knew gratitude when
I saw it. As I walked away, I felt the wisp of an olive branch strike my
shoulder, tugging at my thin shirt.
After the lunch hour, my mother and I
walked to the back of the house. The man I spoke to earlier sat with his long
legs stretched out, relaxed, as he fingered the wisps on his chin. He stood up
swiftly, as if he feared that sitting too long should reflect poorly on his
work. He reached out to stack the trays, handing them to me swiftly. I noticed
the thick lines of dirt beneath his nails.
“Merci
beaucoup,” he said.
The trays were heavy, and it took a
moment to balance them. “De rien.” And it was: it was only lunch. “Comment
vous appelez-vous?” I asked, because that is what I had learned at school,
that was how I made friends.
“Emir.”
“Et lui?” I asked, motioning to
the shorter man, who seemed to be the leader.
“Aamir. Dans ma
langue,” he said, “ça signifie ‘prince’.” He smiled.
“Il est un
prince?” I very much liked this idea.
When my father arrived, the man
withdrew. The shorter man—Aamir, sitting on the wall in the shade of the
tree—came forward. He reached out and shook my father’s hand. Above him the
leaves of the olive tree glistened in the sunlight. “The lunch—it is very good.
We do not often get lunch. Never.” He laughed.
Back on our side of the wall, as we ate
our lunch around the picnic table, my father told my mother about the exchange.
“Suppose lunch might break the
gendarme’s back?” she asked. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t get around.”
A few nights later, when the Moroccan men had worked
several days for us, I heard the screen door slam and knew Andy was home. He
stepped stealthily into the living room, where I slept in a double bed in the
corner. Andy slept in a small room toward the back of the house, where he could
come and go, my parents having decided he was wild—not feral, but in the sense
that his behavior was changeable. (More like my father than anyone cared to
think.) I’d put out the light: my parents had gone to bed, my aunt, seven years
my mother’s junior and the most adventurous of our lot, had retired to her tent
by the creek. Andy sat at the base of the bed, his weight jostling the
mattress. I sat up. At nineteen, his limbs were gangly. Andy had always treated
me like I was his child, not a younger sibling. He reached out and grabbed my
ankle.
“Hey there, you awake?”
I muttered something, I don’t recall
exactly.
“Want to come into St Florent
tomorrow?” Andy had been working at the yacht club.
“What are you getting paid?” I could
see Andy peering at me in the dark from the edge of my bed, as if wondering why
I cared.
“What am I getting paid? Like 12
francs a day.” I knew about his dock work: he was coiling lines and delivering
blocks of ice for the yacht people.
“The gendarme said the Moroccan workers
should not get more than ten.”
“What’s dad paying them? That’s hard
work they’re doing.”
“Shush, don’t talk so loudly.
Twenty-five.”
“Wow, that is good.” Andy
snorted. “No wonder they’re upset…” He had caught only part of the drama: he
was on the periphery, gone so much of the time, it was like having no siblings
at all.
“So you want to come to town?” he asked
again. Andy had the freedom to come and go, and he knew I resented it
sometimes.
“Sure thing.” I wondered if my parents
would agree; they never let me ride his motorbike with him—for obvious reasons.
But I always asked.
The next afternoon, when I got home from school—I rode
the school bus in daily on the road to St Florent—I asked my parents if I could
go into the village with Andy as a treat.
“Certainly not,” my mother said.
My father glanced over at her. We were
standing, all three of us, in the dark hallway. The scent of myrtle from the
outside mixed with the smell of the varnish my father had applied on the
flooring the day before. I stood still, waiting.
“Serena...” I did not have many
friends, except the son of the headmistress, who came to lunch on occasion. I
missed my friends from home and my father knew this. For my mother, though,
this was immaterial. It was a miracle they’d let Andy keep the motorbike he had
come home with one day, bought from his own earnings in St Florent. But as my
father told her: “Look, it’s this or drugs.” My parents had heard there was a
lot more than pot smoking going on among the youth of St Florent. My father was
adamant: “So long as he wears that helmet, it’s the risk we take.”
It was agreed finally we would all go
into town to get an ice cream, and then onto the small beach where we sometimes
went when the wind was from the wrong direction. We’d often go later in the
day, even toward the end of the season, to avoid the damaging rays of the sun.
We rarely did something, all four or us, anymore. Blue sky stretched such a
distance on those hot summer days, going thin at the far edge of the bay. There
was a light, pleasant breeze. Andy and I began to swim while our parents sat on
the beach. Then we threw the football we’d brought, back and forth, my father
reminding us to watch out for the sinkhole. We always
watched out for the sinkhole; but with the sun reflecting off the water, you
couldn’t always see the sandy bottom. We didn’t know how deep the hole went, we
only knew that people—children mostly—had fallen in and drowned. Our father surmised
it was six-foot wide and might run ten-foot deep; we knew it to be in a wading
depth of two or three feet, but we were playing ball in deeper water than that.
After two hours, when we wandered back to the car along the main road, we saw M.
Église in his Renault driving toward us.
He stopped on the road, the car idling
still—there was no traffic behind him—and glanced at our small group. Église
pulled over and rolled down his window. “Eloise es là?” He yelled,
motioning toward the beach. Small waves, crashed at the shoreline, the
direction of the waves paralleling that of the wind. My father shook his head
and approached Église. They began to speak. The wind had picked up and changed
directions; for the sound of waves and wind, I couldn’t hear anything this
time. In my wet suit, the strong breeze made my skin prickle. My mother must
have seen this as she put her arm around me and drew me closer.
Andy stood apart from us, as he often
did, watching the exchange. When my father and Église stopped speaking, the man
glanced over at my brother in a way that made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t name it; it was just an odd feeling.
My father’s sun hat—a straw thing that
made him look strangely like a golfer, not the ex-pat that he was—nearly blew
off his head as he walked back across the road. He clutched it with one hand.
“What is it? What did he say?” my
mother asked.
“He’s upset about the lunches,” he
said. “No one does this. We are treating the men too well, apparently. He was
emphatic.” My father looked grim. My mother only shook her head and took take
me to the car, while Andy trailed behind.
Three days later, just before noon—on another Sunday—M Église
came to see my father. He drove in a Citroen DS, a sign of his growing income,
this time with another man. They stood beside the part of the stone wall that
remained to be built. My mother dropped the dish rag at the sink and went out
to listen. I think she thought I hadn’t followed her out. The heat hit me like
a wall; my skin felt parched already. The cicadas, which we never heard inside
our house, were in full force, a steady drone.
“Qu’est qui se passe? (What is
going on?)” My father asked, a pinched expression on his face. These visits
from the gendarme, it seemed, were beginning to mount up.
“C’est
inacceptable,” M Église said. He pulled off his
jaunty hat this time and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “Les salaires, les déjeuners. Ça
doit finir” (“This must end”). He blinked at my
father.
The other man pointed toward my
brother’s motorbike. He spoke in French so swiftly even I could barely
understand; but I did hear him say, “Les accidents peuvent se produire”
(“Accidents can be made to happen”).
My father did not respond.
“Vous comprenez, oui?” the man
asked, raising his hand as if he might strike him.
Then the men drove off.
My father returned to us, visibly
shaken. “They threatened me. They threatened us. They threatened Andy,” he said. “He said to me,
‘Accidents, they can be made to happen.’”
My mother looked at me as if in
confirmation. The expression on my face must have confirmed my father’s words.
“Jesus!” my mother said.
I must have gasped, as my mother swung
around and said, “Go back inside.”
That night, when Andy did not come home, I heard my
father in the hallway, preparing to go out to find him. The screen door slammed
at the back side of the house; it was Andy. My father spoke to him sharply.
Their voices echoed in a singsong of anger and defense. After my parents’ door
closed, my brother slipped into my corner of the living room and sat at the
foot of my bed again. The springs creaked sharply as if in pain.
“Everyone was worried,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“They threatened you—the gendarme,” I
said.
“For what?”
“Because of the wages!”
“Phff,” he said, an expression we often
heard from the locals when discounting an opinion. Then he turned to stare out
the kitchen window. “It’s quieter out there,” he said. He was right: the
cicadas were muted, the lull after the daytime chatter. “The damn cicadas are
going to sleep,” he whispered. “Finally.”
The following day, we learned there’d been a drowning
in St Florent. It was one of the Moroccan men who had worked for us. Eloise,
who had been in town all day, told us at dinner. It was dark now, 9 pm. We
always ate late, mealtimes driven by the movement of the sun. Several Moroccan
workers had taken a dip at the local beach, and one of the men had drowned in the
sinkhole. “They said it was because he didn’t know how to swim.”
“Eloise, no!” my mother exclaimed, setting down her fork. We were eating the last of the
blackberry pie from Eloise’s berries. Hearing her story, though, I’d lost my
appetite.
“A warning sign wasn’t on the beach,
because supposedly ‘everyone’ knew about the depression.” The shadows of the lantern left a hideous expression on her
face.
“How come we knew about it, but they
didn’t?” I asked. My mother squeezed my hand; was she
comforting me or silencing me?
“Because we’re not Moroccans, you fool,” Andy quipped.
He was home that night, grounded for staying out late the night before.
The
air had gone heavy around us, if not from the heat, which subsided at this
hour. No one spoke for a time.
“Bastards,” my father said. “Well, they
wouldn’t advertise it, would they? It’d keep the tourists at bay.” His face
went a steady, angry red.
“He was nineteen,” Eloise said.
It was Andy’s age. I shuddered: my mind
returned to the six men who came that first day. Was he my favorite? The one
with the long legs, the one who had fingered the wisps on his chin in such
careful thought?
“How did you find out today? Was he one
of the group working for us?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know. The gendarme told me. He
stopped by the beach where I was swimming.” Eloise curled a bitter smile. “He
took me aside—it seems he’s always looking for an excuse to take me aside—but
he did say there’d been fighting in the Moroccan camp about who gets to work on
the wall.”
My mother shook her head. My father
stared past the lamp into the trees beyond the light. No one spoke about the
earlier incident with Église, although my mother later told me she would speak
to my father to decide whether they should put a stop to the lunches.
After breakfast, the following morning, my mother and
father had words. They rarely fought, except for when my father had locked
himself in the study to design the drum to be used in the first Xerox machine,
an invention later replicated without pay, although the initial pay-out would
support our family’s departure. They stood over the picnic table.
Eloise was at the sink with me, washing
dishes. I was drying them beside her, the damp towel clinging to my hands.
“It’s a meal. It is only a
meal,” my father said.
“Of course, it’s just a meal. It’s
ridiculous, I know, but—”My mother was insisting we stop the lunches for the
Moroccan men.
Eloise watched me watching them. Her
lips made a flat line. “She’s disappointed,” she said, under her breath. “It’s
your mother’s cooking.” The food had become everything by then for us. “It’s
her way of giving.”
“Or, George, just drop the wages—by
a token amount. Remember the threat!“
“They are not going to do anything to
Andy’s bike. I’ve got witnesses,” my father said. He stood up suddenly, which
pitched his wooden chair against the floor with a clatter. “What would they
rather have, a meal or a proper wage? Let’s drop the meals.”
I thought of one of the men, the thin,
lanky one. I thought about my mother placing the food on the tray for the men
the day before: a look of such repose that it had made me smile. Was her
disappointment now because of my father’s stance—how he put his ethical
treatment of others before our family? Was she scandalized he’d risk his
son?
The next day was Wednesday, and it was to be our last
time taking out lunch to the men. My
mother felt strongly that we should warn them as a courtesy. I was home by
noon; Wednesday we had only half-day at school, a religious holiday I never
quite understood. Outside I sat at the picnic table, working sums. In the heat,
my forearm stuck to the sheets of writing paper. I didn’t want to be in school
most days; I stared at the sums, but they swam in front of me.
When my mother came out, she said, in
irritation, “Why are you crying? It’s not about you. It’s about those men. They
are treated abysmally by the locals. It makes me angry.”
That was all she said.
We carried out the trays. The
temperature had reached 100 degrees that day, and the men sat huddled in the
shade. The cicadas, it seemed, had only grown louder with the heat. There were
only four men, and they looked bewildered, either from the heat or the news of
the drowning. My favorite, I noticed, was not among them. “Can they not have the
day off?” I asked. My mother stayed behind to speak to Aamir, while I sought
refuge in the coolness of our kitchen. When my mother rejoined me, she said,
“Greedy bastards,” meaning the gendarme. Since my father hadn’t dropped the
wages, the men, she learned, now had to give the gendarme a percentage of their
pay. She set down the trays, her arms hanging limp by her side. I realized then
this had nothing at all to do with fairness; it was the opposite of fairness. I
returned to my sums but could not focus. I was angry that my parents, in spite
of their kindness, could do nothing.
I couldn’t sleep that night. There was no moon out and,
although it was warm still, it reminded me of wintertime when storms would put
out the lights and we’d be in pitch dark. I stared out the kitchen window at
the lights of Oletta, relieved that my brother was home. When I got up to use
the bathroom, I stopped in the hallway and strained to hear my parents’ words.
It sounded as though my mother was crying. Outside it was very dark, and I
thought about the Moroccan worker, the tall thin one. And I wondered if he had
died, or if he was friends with the boy who had died. And when I lay back in
bed, I began to cry. It wasn’t homesickness this time, or the Moroccan worker I
was worried about; it was the strangeness of this new world and how hard it
seemed for us to find our place in it.
On Thursday, when the truck arrived, only two men were
on the flatbed. The first man off the truck was the tall, lean fellow—my
favorite, Emir (it meant ‘local chief’, I had looked it up)—now wearing a brand
new shirt; it was thin-checked, a little like my dad’s. Beside him was the
short, stout man, Aamir—the leader of the group, who had shaken my father’s
hand on their very first visit. Emir threw me a shy smile. I smiled back,
relieved he was safe. The wall was near completion, so perhaps fewer men were
needed. Although we knew about the fighting, we had not heard how the community
had responded to the drowning.
My father went out to greet the men.
They were here somewhat later that day. The thin, pointed leaves of the olive tree
left a spattering of tiny shadows across my father’s tanned head. He looked
solemn. I didn’t hear their words, but I knew what they were saying. Aamir
nodded, several times quickly, the way you do when you want to reassure. The
high temperatures had dropped that morning, and the air felt lighter.
My father shook hands with him, then
joined us near the picnic table. “It’s their last day of work,” he said to my
mother. “I say we feed them.” The wall was nearly done. “What can they do to
us, at this point?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m going
to work on our lunch now,” my mother said, and turned to walk into the dark
interior of our home.
Saturday morning I woke to find my parents gone. Our
car was still there, so I thought they might be down by the creek with Eloise.
They sometimes breakfasted with her there. I noticed the Citroen; only after my
petit pain and butter did I realize it was the gendarme. What was he doing here
at this early hour on a Saturday?
I gathered my digging tools and bucket
to go down to the stream. The sound of the cicadas was not yet deafening this
morning. The scents—olive trees and dusty soil hardened by the lack of
rain—rose around me in the growing heat. I could smell the stream, low in
summertime, but it still emitted a coolness that relieved all the same. As I
rounded the bend toward my aunt’s tent, I heard a sound, a cry, then a slapping
sound, and I saw the back of M. Église, the tawny brown of his
jacket, heaving, a scuffling sound, another muffled cry. In horror I saw what
he was doing—or trying to—to my aunt. I scanned the bushes beside her tent,
searching for a stick, anything. The dirt plunged into my nails, my hands
filthy from rooting around in the summer dust.
He turned around, faced me like a bull
dog set to pounce.
Eloise’s cheek hosted a splotch of
purple, I recognized in the sunlight, from his blow. “Run, run,” she screamed.
“Go!”
Confused, fearful—as he turned back to
Eloise, confident that I was leaving—in a single moment, I sprung toward him
and began beating his back with the stick.
He wheeled around. “Batarde,” he
screamed, as a leafy branch jutting from my stick scraped his round rosy cheek.
“Vas-y,
vas-y,” I yelled. “Arrête!” I
had used the child’s address, not the formal conjugations for adults we were trained
in school to use; but in my rage, language fell away. I was screaming; he stood
in horror of me, a child fighting him, letting loose with my whip-like stick.
It whistled each time I swung at him. Whether it was horror or fear, or
humiliation, he raced past me toward the house, the limbs of the bushes
snapping back in response.
I dropped to the ground and began to
cry, cradling my stick. Eloise pulled herself to her feet. She crouched beside
me. I could smell her sweat, her fear. She was shaking. She held me until I
began to calm. “It’s okay,” she said. “You are okay. I’m okay, we’re okay,” she
kept saying. As we huddled together, in the distance, I heard the sounds of the
Citroen firing up and peeling out. Then all I could hear was the faint trickle
of a nearly dry stream.
Eloise decided not to report the gendarme’s attempted
assault. She knew the critique she would get—a single woman, living by the side
of the stream. An American. “It wouldn’t go well,” she said. But I could see
he’d taken something from her by the opaque expression in her eyes. He steered
clear of our property, and when we saw him on occasion in St Florent, I looked
directly at him and glared. He always avoided eye contact. “They will never
apologize,” my father said, “for how they treated the Moroccans, for how they
treated us. You know the Moroccans turned the tide for the Allies here in
Corsica. Operation Vesuvius.” I hardly understood what this meant. But my
mother ignored the comment; I noticed she had spoken to him little since the
assault on her sister. When I asked my mother later if she was okay, she
replied, “Your father too needs to apologize.”
At lunchtime, one day, I went out to the picnic bench
to lay the table, and my gaze fell on the new wall that had caused so much grief
and pain. As I waited for my mother, who was inside finishing our meal, I laid
my head down on the table. My father stroked my hair. It was a few weeks since
the incident, but it still troubled me. I wondered who had won. We had beaten
them back, the gendarme, I decided. But what had it all been for, my father and
mother standing their ground to treat the workers fairly? We hadn’t changed
anything that I could see, although we did change sides. I had seen Emir in St
Florent, walking along the road past the boules game, held Sunday afternoons in
the town square. Sunlight filtered through the tall leafy trees of the village,
emitting a cleaner, clearer light. It was beginning to feel like the turn. I
ran to him, straight across the worn grass that bound the boules court, my
mother trailing behind, if apologetically, to the elderly men’s irritation,
while my father, in an effort to respect the men, skirted the court (whether to
repair his reputation or show he could uphold local mores, I didn’t know). The men’s
bald heads shone in the early morning light, as they pushed back their ragged
sleeves, ragged as the Moroccan workers’ clothing, suggesting that winning the
game really mattered.
“Emir!” I called out in my enthusiasm.
“Comment ça va?”
He turned swiftly when I said his name,
and grinned. “Ça va bien, es tu?”
My father joined us and shook his hand.
For a moment, they walked together in the village while my mother and I fell
behind.
“C’est terrible,” I heard Emir
say.
Was he referring to the drowning, or to
what had happened to my aunt? The workers had learned of ‘the incident’ from
the leader, he said. But my father only nodded.
In the stillness of that moment, I
lifted my head. The silence was eerie. I scanned the trees, looking for signs
of them in the town square, but there was none to be found. The cicadas had
gone. It had taken a few days to notice: we were past the season. Still, after
they stopped, you kept hearing the noise in your head. Isn’t that what
difficulty does?: it starts up, lingers—then never lets you go.
Backstroke
It was the year loneliness broke my back. September
2007, and I’d only been in town three weeks. Fall was the season I associated
with Boston, so why not build the city into my plan? I’d finished out my job at
the ‘word firm’—that’s what we called it, the editors. My ‘word tools’ thesaurus project had come to
a close. When I sat with my boss, he politely told me there wasn’t any more
work. It was done. We were done. He was nice about it. But I couldn’t help
feeling there was something else afoot. My father didn’t much seem to mind that
I wanted to move after that. I hadn’t thought I was a drifter, but I was
beginning to feel like one.
I
was at the bus stop one morning when Bart—my just three-weeks neighbor, who
lived one floor down—offered me a lift. It was raining, I’d gotten drenched on
the way to the bus stop. I thought, “Why not?”
We’d
chatted a few times in the hallway. He was sweet, but not at all my type. He
was tall, towering tall, his teeth uneven. His dark cropped hair fell across
his brow, the strands almost perfectly in line. Fastidious seemed too fussy a
word for him, but pretty near close. Though really, I was only making up
reasons not to be interested in him.
“I’m
going downtown anyway,” he said. “Where are you headed, Emma?”
“The
library.”
“The
library? For—?”
“I’m
job hunting,” I said.
He
careened into the right-hand lane. I found Boston drivers terrifying, so I wasn’t
sorry not to have my own car. Besides, I didn’t know how long I would be here.
“You’re
from Portsmouth, right?” he asked. I nodded. Everyone knew it was the poor
Northern relative of Boston. “And you were in…?”
“Editorial,”
I said.
Editing
was what I did because I’d been a voracious reader since the age of fourteen,
the summer my mother died and I read The
Lord of the Rings cover to cover, twice. I hadn’t been much for reading
until then. It was late August, and I lay sprawled on my belly, head shoved in
a book, as I clung to the twin bed in the rental my father had found. He
thought we needed to get away after she died.
“So—did
you want to leave the job, or —?”
“They
pretty much let me go.”
He
raised an eyebrow, his finger hovering above the turn signal. I watched the
raindrops gather on the windshield. It had not let up.
“Yeah,
I wasn’t thrilled about that part. I mean, we all want to walk away, right?” I
paused.
“So
you figured leave town?” Bart slammed on the brakes at a red light, the metal
screeching. The dampness, I figured, wasn’t helping.
“Are
you metal-to-metal?” I asked. “You know, your brakes. Are they worn thin?
Metal-to-metal means you’re going to need a serious brake job—they can’t just
turn the rotors.”
Bart
looked at me with a mix of worry and confusion. He drove a 1990 Toyota Camry,
which meant it wouldn’t be that expensive a job, I said.
“How
do you know so much about cars? I mean, for a girl—woman.”
I’d
spent several months answering phones at a mechanic shop after freshman year at
college. I’d gotten into Smith College on scholarship, but that summer I stayed
on in Northampton to work at the local mechanic shop. After all, what was there
to come home to? Tory, nearly a decade older than me, had left years ago.
I
laughed. He should have gone to Smith, I told him.
At
the corner, he hung a right. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think that’s pretty
cool. Not Smith, I mean. But the cars.”
When
he dropped me at the corner of Congress and Water Street, I insisted he just
pull over. I told him I’d walk the rest of the way. It was coming down now,
sheets of unforgiving rain.
“Are
you always this self-effacing?” Bart asked. He was a computer geek; we all know
they’re self-effacing.
All
artifice had left his face, if there was any to begin with. Beneath his narrow
spectacles, dark lashes framed his eyes. I felt badly then that I’d lied to
him. I wasn’t going to the library at all. And why? Why had I lied? I was going
to the Y for a swim. But I didn’t want to go into my private life, because for
me swimming was a private matter. Most people don’t really get it: why water
would fill the space of so much else missing in your life.
The year my mother died, she’d been sick six months so
I stayed home all summer. I knew what was coming. She had bone cancer and by
early August, she was breaking bones when she flipped over in bed. The smell in
her room had gone from lavender to stale clove, the scent of the candle she had
burning most of the time. She played quiet music and, when she wasn’t sleeping,
read. My dad was busy doing a summer school stint. Daily I brought her
breakfast, because Dad had early morning classes. When I carried in the tray,
she would lift her gaze from the book she was deep into. Her cheeks had gone
hollow; her tan skin sallow, icy black hair grown thin and lank. I used to make
myself smile. “Look at you. All sunshine,” she’d say, as I walked out of the
room.
I
didn’t do it for her; selfishly, I did it because her face would brighten, for
an instant, and that was the look on her face I made myself memorize when I lay
in bed at night, trying to sleep.
The
day of her funeral, I turned fifteen. It was bad timing, my dad knew, but my
aunt from Burlington was in town and we had to hold it that day. That evening,
I went to my best friend’s home and stayed for a week. Departure, I’d learned,
had its place.
At the pool, the man took my money and gave me the
change. “Hey, don’t forget to drop your towel in the bin, swimmer. Will ya?”
I
piled my items in the locker but had forgotten to bring my lock. I carried out
my towel, my wallet buried in it, and set it on a plastic chair inside of the
pool area, like the tidy little package I believed I had made of my life.
“Lady,
you wanna shower?” called out one of the swim guards. “We mean it here.”
I
stifled a smile; I liked the guy for calling me out. Because, well, too few
people had.
I
stood beneath the spray of water and through the steam and spray light
refracted off the glass portions of the roof, I marveled at the Art Deco-style
of the place. It was one of the nicer Y pools I’d been to in a while.
My
mother had been a swimmer; she’d swum on a team in college, competed
nationally, and was known for an exceptionally fast backstroke. She’d broken
records in her college, if not the country, so when she met my father he’d
taken to calling her Speedster. The name stuck, and throughout my growing up
years, as the last child in our house, I heard a lot of “Hey, Speedster, you
gotten her up yet?” Or “Speedster, where’s Emma, seen her?”
One
evening, midsummer, I stepped into the backyard to find my father sobbing under
the willow, holding his chest. His breath came out in gasps. He looked up at me
with an expression so profoundly sad I turned around and ran into the house. I
couldn’t fathom what he felt, when I couldn’t manage what I was feeling. I
guess you could say I fairly hated him that summer, not just because he was
gone a lot teaching, but because he stole my sadness. I couldn’t be that sad at
her bedside. Even at fourteen, I knew that.
In
the fast lane, I noticed a tall slender woman at the far end, bending down to
gather her kickboard and flippers. Then she righted herself like a tall tree,
flowing upward; I felt my breath catch. She looked every bit like my mother had
in photographs I’d seen, when she was young, decades before her illness.
I
couldn’t take my eyes off her as I swam. She kept to her side of the lane; we
weren’t doing a clockwise rotation the way they did at some pools. But she held
to her lane and kept at her freestyle with an even cleanness I found engaging,
if impossible to match. She was rhythmic and solid, the swimmer I imagined my
mother to be. With her hair pushed back into the cap, all I could see was the
tan hollow of her cheek.
As
I swam, I thought I could ignore the images that flooded me. I saw my mother in
my bedroom, curled up on the sofa with King
of the Wind, which she read to me unceasingly—even though she knew I hated
horses—because she’d grown up reading it herself. And At the Back of the North Wind, which I finally made her stop
reading because something bad happened in it. She told me it was okay for bad
things to happen. It was, after all, made up, right?
“It’s
just a story, Em. And stories don’t have power our lives.”
Even
then I knew that was only half true. My mother worked for two summers in the
library in Portsmouth before I was born. She was making a point.
“They
don’t have power unless we give them power. Stories. You could turn your back
on them, if you wanted to. Or you could decide they’re the only way we can know
our world.”
I
knew my mother from her stories, I realized, as I watched the woman on the
other side of my lane, stroke after stroke, relentlessly crossing the pool. She
swam faster, and I tried to swim faster too to keep up with her. I wanted to follow
her, to change our lane structure and go counter clockwise to trail after her.
The way I had trailed my mother in the backyard of our Portsmouth home, where
the willow hung low and the creek, a quarter of a mile from the house, grew
silent in summer. She wandered back there sometimes. One time I followed her,
watching furtively as she picked a will-o-the-wisp and stuck the stalk, the tip
of it, in her mouth. She carried a book beneath one arm, and as she walked she
hummed. It was the Anthem, not the National Anthem, but the ‘Marseillaise’,
which her family sang—her French mother, who’d emigrated to Canada before
Maine. She hummed it loudly and with verve. When she reached the creek—it was
spring, then, and the water was high—she dropped her book on the bank and
stripped off her clothes, every last one of them. She caressed her breast—to my
horror—her nipple, briefly—with the tip of the will-o-the-wisp and then dove
into the water.
Years
later I would ask myself why that scene had horrified me so. Was it because my
mother was a sexual being and I’d never discovered it until then? Or was it
because my dad, I realized, wasn’t the sole source of her sexual pleasure? But
either way, the image left me unsettled. I wanted to forget it.
The
summer she was sick, as we sat on her bed together reading, she said to me,
“Emma.”
I
looked up.
“You’re
fourteen.”
I
nodded.
“You’re
going to have the change soon,” she said.
I
blinked.
She
adjusted herself on the bed, the quilt splayed across her chest and beneath it
I could see underneath her nightgown, the single solitary point of a nipple. It
stood out, and as she spoke I found I couldn’t stop looking at it. She told me
about “the change,” about getting my period—which I hadn’t, miraculously,
gotten by then. And then you can have a child,” she said. “And,” she said,
“you’ll have pleasure, Emma.”
I
colored, even then.
“It’s
nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said.
I
laughed uncomfortably.
She
held my gaze in hers. “A body—your body—isn’t something to fear.” I noticed the
bone of her shoulders, the thinness of her wrist, and I saw the degree to which
her body, what once had given her pleasure, had failed her. It had fought back,
stolen from her, what she had.
She
turned to the candle burning, the clove scent rising and filling the space
between us. “You’ll love many men, Emma. But will you do one thing for me?”
I
looked at her, spellbound and fearful.
“Love
yourself,” she said.
My
breath caught in my chest. I wanted to ask, did she mean to love myself in my
heart? Did she mean to love myself with the touch of the will-o-the-wisp, when
even the man you loved failed you? I didn’t know this then, entirely, of
course. But I knew she meant something other than what I wanted her to mean.
“Don’t
be afraid of all that you are.”
Then
she set down her book and closed her eyes. I knew she needed to nap now and I
left the room. And when I went to my own, I shut the door, closed my eyes, and
wanted to forget everything she’d said to me. I wanted to pretend she hadn’t
just told me what every woman needs to know. I wanted to pretend she wasn’t
leaving me when everything she said was precisely because she was leaving me.
She didn’t want to leave any one of my bones unturned.
The woman in my lane pulled herself up onto the edge of
the pool, swung her legs over and onto the cement in a single, supple move and
pushed to standing like a long egret. Her suit, navy with a solid white stripe,
stood out against the white-tiled walls at the far distance of the pool. Water
dripped from her. I had stopped now at my end of the lane. I knew I was
staring; then I felt a flush of something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I
felt a wave of nausea or fear, I wasn’t sure. I pulled myself up onto the edge
of the pool, clumsily, in an effort to exit as she had. By the time I reached
the showers, she was gone. Then, as I stood in the steady shower stream, I let
myself do something I hadn’t done in years. I felt something let go. I turned
my back to the rest of the changing area, wrapped my arms around my chest as my
father had done below the willow tree, and began to sob.
“Good swim?” the guy asked at the front desk, when I
dropped my damp towel in the bin.
I
couldn’t say anything, but outside, when I caught the bus home, I sat in the
front seat surrounded by two mothers with toddlers on their laps, an elderly
man whose face was concealed by a newspaper, and two teenagers whose earphones
were draped over their bodies. Beneath the thin colored wires, their breasts
were forming and I wanted to tell them what my mother had said. And for reasons
I still don’t understand that day I began to feel not so alone. My mother had
worn her alone-ness the summer she died. What she hadn’t taught me then I
figured out that day at the pool. In the length of the woman swimmer’s body, in
her breadth, and in the shaking of my own ribs as I stood crying in the shower.
Someone
once told me that when people we love are dying they teach us how to live. My
mother taught herself how to live. It was the swimmer in her that taught me how
to love.
At the apartment complex, I took the steps in two. When
I reached my flat, Bart poked his head up from the stairwell and called up to
me, “I’m onto you, Emma.”
I
looked down at him blankly. My hair was still wet.
“Why
did you say you were going to the library, when you were going to the pool?”
I
felt a tightness in my lungs. It might have been the chlorine. Was he stalking
me, or just calling me out? For once I didn’t mind. And then I relaxed.
“Because,” I said to him, “I never really considered myself a swimmer.”
Deck Hand
Lenore poked her head above the foc’s’le that morning
to find the night’s rainfall had left the teak decks wet. The smell of
dirt—rich, pungent, earthy—was pervasive, and in sharp contrast to the sweet
sting of sea air, which represented more or less a constant when they sailed.
She luxuriated in the earthy scents, even if the rain was costly. It was April.
The Leeward Islands, in which Antigua was situated, did get rain at this time
of year, but the timing was bad. The wet decks meant they couldn’t varnish
until well into the day. The boat—an old wooden ketch, an Alden classic—was set
for charter shortly, and Suaz from the agency would be visiting in the next day
or two. Keeping her happy was an obsession of the captain’s as consistent
bookings kept his boat sailing and the money ticking over.
At the far side of the harbor, an outboard engine was
cranking up, but on board, it was silent: the rest of the crew—Captain and
Denny, the other deck hand—were gone or sleeping. The pealing bells of the
church could be heard from the mountainside above English Harbour: it meant it
was Sunday and the locals would be wending their way up the hill to attend
church. For many it would be a day of rest. But not for her and Denny.
She pulled herself up through the hatch and onto the
deck. As she walked aft, she examined the teak. Immaculate bright work was a
major selling point in the industry. The agency was touring the boat in advance
of the charter because there had been a complaint about the cleanliness of the
galley. The last group, a high-maintenance set of fifty-somethings from
Delaware—Lenore’s home state—must have gone straight up the dock to the agency.
They’d also drunk every last bit of liquor on the boat, until Captain finally
locked it up. “They’re paying three grand,” Suaz had said, with a grimace.
“That’s not enough to drink me out of boat and home,” Captain said.
To Lenore, at age twenty-one, three grand was plenty:
she figured she was helping him pay off his boat so he might make some kind of
living on the other side of his mortgage. She wasn’t paying a thing off for
herself, only biding time, which often grated on her.
“Where’d captain go?” Denny asked, poking his head out
from the cabin.
Lenore spun around. “No idea,” she said, “gone ashore
for something.”
Find you copy here
about th author
Alicia J Rouverol is co-author of “I Was Content and Not Content”: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry, which was called “compassionate and sorely needed” by The New York Times and nominated for the OHA Book Award. Dry River, her debut novel, was published by Bridge House in 2023. Nominated for five literary prizes, it was read in book clubs on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives with her family in Manchester, where she teaches at the University of Salford. Granite Rock is her first story collection.
“Worried about Suaz, isn’t he?”
“Yep, she’s hard line,” Lenore said.
Denny stood up on the cabin top and stretched. “Okay,
then—breakfast?”
Lenore clambered below decks. She made scrambled eggs
with rolls and butter. They ate in silence; she’d learned not to speak,
generally, to either him or the captain in the mornings, as everyone would have
had more alcohol than usual ashore here in Nelson’s Dockyard. After breakfast,
she did the washing up while Denny climbed above board again.
She was to be directing their morning work on the
boat, but the captain hadn’t left much by way of instruction. She had learned
to apply common sense rather than track him down. The captain often distracted
himself with constant runs to the marine store for more sandpaper, a fresh can
of polyurethane, or a new halyard or bumper. Every trip ashore cost him. She
could see it in his grimace, in the tension along the ridge of his tanned
shoulder, when he threw the gear onto the deck. “Go easy with that,” he’d say,
“I’m not buying another.” At the navigation station, as he added up the
receipts, she wanted to ask, Was it worth it? Did sailing around all
these islands, vegetation so beautiful you could starve just looking at, really
amount to something—enough?
Above decks, she approached Denny, who was bent over a
bucket, washing one of his shirts in salt water. He knew better than to waste
the water on board. She turned her cheek to determine the wind’s direction,
then scanned the sky, anticipating the day’s weather.
“So, you think caulking maybe, if it dries up enough
soon?” she volunteered.
“Too wet. So you’re thinking it’s dry enough for
caulking but too wet for varnish? I don’t think so!”
“Okay… I guess we wait then?”
“You directing the yard work, or what, Lenore?” He
strode up to the foredeck, then dumped the water over the side.
“Technically speaking, it’s my job,” she said, but he
was out of ear shot by then.
Being twenty months older than Denny did not afford
Lenore any sense of authority. Denny had left high school; she’d left college.
Neither had finished. There was a parity of a kind, but she knew it stopped
there. Beyond their love of sailing, little drew them together.
Dennis
Charles was from the island of Dominica, which lay between Guadeloupe and
Martinique in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. Denny had crewed with the
captain thr
