by Michelle Wan
“Apéro” he stated rather than asked, and led the way inside.
Mado was within, talking at the bar with Gaston, the fat, big-nosed postman, who was finishing up his rounds with his usual coup de blanc. Lucien Peyrat, as thin as the baguettes he sold, was also there, eating a solitary ice cream at the back of the room.
“Her husband’s in the hospital,” Gaston was saying. “Liver. It’s serious.”
“Ah, Paul, did you hear? Yvette’s old man is dying.” Mado pecked Julian and sized up Mara before saying briefly, “Bonjour, madame.”
They sat down near the window. Julian had a pastis, Mara accepted coffee, Paul drew himself off a pression, Mado smoked a cigarette, and Gaston, who himself looked like a candidate for a serious liver complaint, joined them for another coup.
Mara gave them a shortened version of her sister’s disappearance and her discovery of the photos, more for Gaston’s benefit, since Paul and Mado had already had it from Julian. It was the first time Julian had heard her speak French. She was fully fluent, although he found that she had an oddly flattened accent and a way of swallowing her vowels that he could not immediately place.
“Wait a minute.” Gaston scooted forward in his chair, his beetroot nose quivering with emotion. “I remember! Years ago. La canadienne disparue—c’est ca?”
“Yes, that’s right,” cried Mara eagerly. “The Vanished Canadian. That’s how the papers described her.”
“And she was your sister? A terrible business, madame. To come all the way from Canada to disappear like that. Montreal, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” replied Mara. “We’re from Montreal.”
“Ah,” said Mado knowingly. “Montreal.”
Gaston went on, “I remember because all of us facteurs were told to be on the lookout for her. Or anything suspicious. For me, that was the bad part. I have daughters, you see. It could have been someone from around here. It made me think, I tell you.”
“The countryside is full of cretins and perverts,” snapped Mado, drawing hard on her cigarette.
They all looked at the photocopies of the pigeon house that Mara handed round.
“It’s a very bad photograph,” said Gaston. “Eh, Lucien,” he called to the thin man as he slid past on his way out. “You seen this?”
Lucien, who had pale eyes set very wide apart, giving him the look of a startled horse, stared at Mara rather than at the photocopy that Gaston held out. He shook his head, left money on the bar, and slipped like a shadow through the bead curtain.
“Scared of his own farts, that one,” Gaston grinned, as Lucien’s battered vehicle shot off in a spurt of gravel.
Paul, who had been studying the photocopy intently, blew out his cheeks. “Needle in a haystack,” he concluded. Absentmindedly he fondled Jazz’s massive head. The dog gazed up at him adoringly, great jaw agape in an idiotic grin. A moment later, however, something on the wind caused the animal to tense and shoot out the door.
Mara said, “Isn’t there anything—those poplar trees, for example—that could give you a clue?”
Paul said, “There have been half a dozen big windstorms in the past ten years alone. Poplars grow fast. Then they rot. They could have all blown down. Or been cut for firewood.”
“Nothing at all distinctive about the pigeonnier?”
Gaston pushed his lower lip out. “Plenty like it. This one might not even be still standing.”
“Or recognizable,” added Paul. “Big ones like this are being converted into holiday homes nowadays.”
Mado had been studying one of the copies with slit eyes through a cloud of smoke. She tapped it with a red-enameled nail. “That’s a sheep.”
They all craned forward. The object she indicated was faintly outlined and could have been anything because it was largely obscured by a stain.
Julian had to admit that he hadn’t spotted it before. “Looks more like a goat to me.”
“Sheep, goat. So what?” said Paul.
“Not everyone raises sheep,” said Mado.
Paul said, “It’s one sheep.”
Mara asked, “Is there any record of—of sheep farmers in the region?”
“Are you kidding?” This was from Gaston, who had slumped back in his chair.
“You have to find someplace with a pigeonnier, poplar trees, and sheep—nineteen years ago. It won’t be easy,” Mado concluded, not unsympathetically, nodding in Mara’s direction.
“I’m prepared to offer a reward.” Mara sounded desperate. “One thousand euros.”
“Seriously?” asked Gaston, sitting forward again.
“Seriously.”
Gaston’s bulbous snout twitched. “Not bad, that.”
Paul shrugged. “Still a needle in a haystack.”
Gaston drained his glass and stood up. “Well, I’m off.” He held up a copy of the print. “Can I take one of these? I’ll ask around. You never know.”
He saluted the company and went out, also leaving money on the bar. They watched as, a moment later, his canary-yellow minivan, with La Poste scripted on the side, trundled down the road.
“Poor Gaston,” said Mado. “He has seven kids. All girls. On a postman’s salary.”
Julian and Mara rose to leave. Paul walked out the front with them and around to the side of the house, where Mara had parked her Renault.
“Look, I’ll show my father this picture. He may come up with something, or one of his cronies may remember this maudit pigeonnier—” He broke off abruptly. For a moment he stared unbelieving at what was happening in his beloved potager, then stuffed the photocopy into his back pocket and gave an outraged bellow.
Jazz was humping Edith lustily among the newly planted lettuce and tomatoes. For her part, the bitch, tail flagged coquettishly to one side, appeared to be trying to walk away, requiring Jazz to hop athletically behind her and causing a widespread trampling of young seedlings. Human attempts to move or separate the coupling dogs—the scene by then had attracted a small but interested crowd—only resulted in worse damage. There was little to be done except stand back and let nature take its course. It lasted nearly half an hour, during which time the dogs wound up end to end before Jazz finally came free. He was panting hard but looking smug.
“Oh, Paul, I’m so sorry,” Mara moaned, surveying the wrecked garden in dismay.
Paul seemed to come out of a trance. Slowly he shook his head. “Quel dogue!” he breathed in admiration.
“Swine,” muttered Julian.
•
“I’m going to have to persuade Prudence to hire Mado and Paul to cater her party,” Mara said as she drove Julian back to his cottage. “It’s the only way I can make it up to them for their garden.”
Jazz, tongue lolling, lay splayed out across the backseat. Edith, who had never in her life accepted a ride home, had trotted off on business of her own.
“Oh, don’t worry about Paul,” said Julian tartly. “He’ll get over it. Besides, he liked you. Did you notice the way he wouldn’t look at you? Whenever he refuses to look at a woman, it means he fancies her.”
“I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life!” Mara laughed. “However,” she said after a moment, “Mado has her eye on you.”
“Eh? What makes you say that?”
“The way she checked me out. She regards you as her property. You two haven’t got something going, have you?” Her tone was bantering.
“I hunger for her cooking, not her body.” Julian replied with mock dignity. Nevertheless, his conscience twanged as he spoke the words. There had been one or two occasions, usually when he had drunk too much on a Saturday night after rugby, when he had found himself swirling like a drowning vole in the vortex of Mado’s powerful attractions. “Besides, Paul’s one of my best friends, practically family.”
“That’s why they call it a ménage à trois,” Mara said.
•
“She’s French Canadian,” Mado said to Paul when they were alone. “Did you hear her accent?”
“What accent?” Paul sat on one side of the bar, studying rugby scores in the local daily, while Mado dried glasses on the other. In a region where people spoke a lazy patois and where all words were drawled out to end in “ng,” an accent was hardly a thing to be remarked on.
“Joual.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Joual. She speaks joual.”
“What joual?”
“It’s the Montreal argot. That’s how they say ‘horse.’ They eat their words, so cheval winds up sounding like joual. I think she’s got her eye on Julian.”
“About time somebody did.” Paul buried himself more deeply in his paper.
Mado watched him. “Are you going to show that photo around?” she asked a moment later.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, like Gaston said, it could have been anyone around here. You’ll want to go carefully. Don’t forget, the man was never caught.”
“How do you know for sure it was a man?”
“Use sense. It had to be.”
“Well, who?”
“Anyone. Lucien Peyrat, for example. It’s usually the repressed type.”
Paul looked up. “For Christ’s sake, he’s a bread man, not a murderer.”
“Or old Benoît. Being a butcher, killing would have been easy for him. Even you.”
“Are you joking?” Paul gaped, incredulous.
“All I’m saying is, you could stir up something. Especially if she’s really offering a reward. A thousand euros is a lot of money.”
“Hou!” Paul went back to his sports page. “I’ll wave the photo under people’s noses. No one’s going to identify this bougre of a pigeonnier. Besides, the boyfriend probably did it, even though they couldn’t hang anything on him. Or else the sister drowned in the river or fell down a hole.”
Mado shrugged. After a pause, she resumed, “She’s not his type, you know.”
“Who?”
“This Mara. She’s all wrong for Julian.”
Paul threw his paper down at last to squint ferociously at his wife.
“What’s right? The problem with Julian is, he’s got no staying power. He takes up with a woman for a while, and just when things start to look serious, fsst. It fizzles out. Sometimes I think he doesn’t really like women. He wants them, but he doesn’t like them.”
“He likes me,” pouted Mado.
“You’re different,” her husband pointed out. “You’re safe.”
“Safe?” The redhead bristled.
“Unavailable. Married. He can fantasize without running any risks. In any case, he has no idea what makes a woman tick.”
“You do?” Mado challenged, rubbing the glassware hard.
“At least I’m not scared of them.” Paul retreated from possibly thin ice. “Anyway, if this Mara’s putting moves on him, she’s as good as any. Julian needs a woman, any woman. He’s going to seed. You should have seen him watching that dog of hers hump Edith. Pure envy.”
Mado gave a throaty laugh, put away her towel, leaned across the bar, and nuzzled her husband’s ear.
“Poor Julian,” she whispered throatily. “Poor, poor Julian.”
FOUR
He had been christened Armand some fifty years ago, but round about they simply called him Vrac. The name meant “in bulk” or “loose goods.” He grew up large and brutish, with an oversized head, slack mouth, and pale hair that stood up in tufts. He lived with his mother in a grim farmhouse, eking out an existence from a few hectares of soggy land in a valley below the village of Malpech.
The mother, Marie-Claire Rocher, otherwise known as la Binette, was herself no beauty: a hulk of a woman, with a massive jaw rising out of a creased dewlap, and a livid birthmark covering one eye. Her nickname suited her, for the word binette meant “hoe,” an implement she had once nearly decapitated a man with for trespassing on her land. Its more archaic meanings, “visage” and “wig,” could equally be taken to refer to her unsettling face or to the coarse yellow clump of horsehair that sat on her head like a turkey’s roost.
Of Vrac’s father, nothing was known. Everyone suspected it had been old Rocher himself. “Mon dieu, his own daughter and barely thirteen!” they had exclaimed those many years ago as the smock front of the young Marie-Claire grew daily shorter for all to see. Over time, Vrac the child and Vrac the man came simply to be accepted by the scattered farming community as an unpleasant feature of existence, like bad weather or mud. If he was shunned—children ran when they saw him, and women crossed themselves at his approach—he was at the same time tolerated and even protected by the fierce local loyalties that defined a region where in times past a person’s entire universe was measured by how far he or she could walk out and back in a day.
In fact, it might even be said that Vrac enjoyed a kind of ill-favored celebrity. Local farmers sometimes employed him to fell trees and heave tractors out of ditches, for he was enormously strong. He also had a certain understanding of the darker side of machinery and was often able to bludgeon exhausted and antiquated farm equipment, which normally would have been left on a hillside to rust, into some level of fitful functioning. These odd jobs gave Vrac cash in his pocket, a tenuous claim on society, and a kind of preposterous self-conceit.
All the same, Vrac understood murkily that he was not wanted. Even his own mother called him names. These rejections filled him with an inarticulate rage that erupted from time to time in crude acts of violence perpetrated randomly against inanimate objects and living things that chanced to cross his path.
Like a bear, Vrac covered a vast territory, killing and taking at will, poaching on reserves and fishing on private land where the streams and rivers of the region formed pools attractive to pike and perch. There was only one place that he avoided—a deep pond in the forest where tall reeds whispered and frogs and small fry abounded. For reasons known best to him, he would not eat things taken from its muddy depths.
La Binette was a more complex being. She assessed the world about her with a cynicism that usually worked to her benefit. Her son she treated like an animal, with a bitterness that arose from her belief that he was a punishment for past sins. He was of her making, and he never should have been made. Nevertheless, need arising, she probably would have defended him to the death. And if she attended but minimally to his bodily needs, it must be said that she did no more for herself.
For the rest, la Binette tended her sheep and made a surprisingly good cheese from ewe’s milk. In fact, her brebis was something of a local specialty, which she sold at nearby periodic markets, arriving with much backfiring in an ancient wood-paneled truck. Occasionally, she augmented the household income by picking up unwary hitchhikers or motorists in distress, driving them not to where they wanted to go but to some isolated spot where she demanded a forfait, usually what cash their wallets contained, for “transportation services rendered.” Most paid and were then dumped, shaken but relieved, to make their way back to civilization as best they could.
Curiously, mother and son slept together. Whether they joined in an incestuous relationship was beside the point. The point was that, apart from routinely cooperating out of necessity to till the soil or harvest or slaughter, these two creatures went their own way from dawn to dusk. At night, however, like beasts made uneasy by the dark, they drew together, sharing a sagging double bed. Vrac had slept with his mother since his first day of life, when she had given him the breast, the only bounty he had ever received from her, and continued to do so unthinkingly into adulthood and middle age.
In a region where places took the names of the inhabitants, the Rocher farm was simply referred to as La Binette. Its narrow fields lay between the forest and the road. The house, built over a byre, a style more typical of Quercy than Périgord, stood in a wooded combe.
The byre, once used for stabling animals, served la Binette (the woman) as a cheese cellar and Vrac as a storehouse. There Vrac kept his fishing tackle, gutting knife, shotgun, and other
items—a book (he could no more read than fly, but he liked the pictures of the flowers); a dog collar; a canvas backpack; old boots; a green bicycle bearing the stamp Phoenix Made in China, which he occasionally rode.
For the most part, the mother was incurious about the son’s treasure hoard, her only interest being the possible value of a given object. However, one day many years ago, la Binette happened to notice that a camera had been added to the collection. She picked it up and examined it because it looked to be expensive. Then she heard a noise behind her. Turning, she saw her son’s form, framed in the low doorway of the byre, blotting out the light.
“No,” Vrac croaked hoarsely, hands dangling heavily at his sides. “Put.”
Dropping the camera back onto the pile, la Binette pushed roughly past her son to the outside. Sometime after that, she saw that the camera had gone.
•
High on a prominence above La Binette (the farm) and at the top of a tortuous road, stood the grand but decrepit château of Les Colombes. It, too, was heavily screened by trees—from most angles, nothing more than its numerous chimneystacks could be seen. To the northwest, it looked across a broad valley to the village of Malpech. In all other directions, it was surrounded by forests and fields.
At one time all of the land for leagues around, La Binette included, had been part of the Seigneurie of Les Colombes, owned by the powerful de Sauvignac family. However, over the course of ten generations, the Seigneurie had been so parceled, hacked, sold, and ceded that only the château, with its adjoining woodland, remained. Nevertheless, the fact that the estate was still in the hands of an unbroken line of de Sauvignacs was a matter of local pride.
How la Binette’s father, a drunken day laborer with never two sous to rub together, had come to acquire a corner of Les Colombes was a mystery. “Silence is golden,” the more cynical locals said knowingly, tapping the sides of their noses, suggesting that the scoundrel Rocher had rooted out something about the family worth the price of a parcel of land. When Rocher died—“Fetched by the devil,” they said, for he had been found in a ditch one winter morning, frozen stiff, mouth wide open as if mid-shout—the farm had passed to his stony, antipathetic daughter and her son. And so things had continued over the years, with la Binette and Vrac tending their sheep and wresting their harvest of root crops from the wet, exhausted soil.