The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All

by Don Wallace

  Sterenn proved an easy and down-to-earth hostess. There were hors d’oeuvres, olives, gherkins, and little toasts smeared with pâté. Sardines and boiled potatoes—the basic Belle Île meal. Butter and salt the only condiments. She assumed our interest in the early expatriate society of Kerbordardoué, so incongruous, and explained that there’d been a time—yes, in those crazy, wonderful sixties—when she and some friends had settled here. They’d just wandered into the village and rented or squatted in abandoned cottages. “Like you,” she said.

  So we’d been observed.

  “Kerbordardoué is a spirit center,” she said. “You know it was marked on the old maps as the place of the devil. But that was the Christian missionaries’ doing. The pagan belief here was too strong for their crucifixes and rosaries. They were afraid. Shall we do the Tarot?”

  The deck was at hand. She began laying out the cards.

  Mindy and I stayed up after we got home that night, comparing notes. Sterenn had been elusive on the subject of Brando. But her other famous ex-lover was the film director John Boorman, whose witchy Arthurian drama Excalibur we’d seen (along with his Southern gothic Deliverance). He and she had laid out the mosaics in front of her house—under the influence of a magic potion, of course. “You see Kerbordardoué in his work,” she said.

  “You are writers,” she added, “so you will want to know there are influences here that are unavoidable. The spirit world that was centered here in the Gulf de Morbihan seven thousand years ago had followers in the dark forests and deep glens of Ireland and Scotland in the north, down to Spain and Egypt in the south. People in Brittany still accept that profound darkness is necessary for summer’s golden light. It makes no sense to try to avoid the dark, or its king, Mister Death, known as Ankou… And so the culture is defined by fatalism, ghost stories, and harvest rites, such as the one that celebrates the opening of the door between life and the underworld. This is Samhain,” she intoned, “which falls at the end of October—”

  “Our Halloween,” we chorused, well-schooled by Gwened’s library of Celtic literature.

  Sterenn spoke of the root myth of the hound of hell, which Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed for The Hound of the Baskervilles. And there was much more: birds, beasts, mists, cries in the night, apparitions, and strangers met on the road who stop your wagon and ask for a ride…

  The way we’d met Sterenn.

  • • •

  And so, in a way, we were warned. If we could’ve but read the signs, understood what it meant when the fog settled only a foot or two above our heads, followed by the mackerel clouds of sunset, the hoot of an owl. But after all the obstacles and rejections and disappointments that had come between us and our house, we felt we had a right to rejoice. This year, the second since we’d completed the house, would be the summer we finally kicked back and enjoyed. And looked forward to years more of the same.

  That was when the cold spirit of Ankou, Mister Death, accompanied by his familiar, known as La Chienne, blew into town. Howling across the moors, the Great Bitch, as they call the hound of hell in Brittany, came calling one evening in August.

  We’d arrived a couple of days before and were almost over our jet lag. Our friends Celeste and Henry had bought and assembled a “picnic table, ees that what you call eet?” We were invited over for grilled merguez and chipolata sausages. The table of honor had been placed by a screen of young alders, beyond which our host’s gravel driveway ran through a tunnel of trees. Behind that was the small forest of elms at the rear of the Vicomte’s yard.

  Henry had come to our house to get us. We walked with him down the allée to where it met the village road. Le Vic was sitting on his slate stoop, smoking his pipe. We hailed him, as we do. He gave a nod and a grunt. As we walked past the elms, Henry nodded at their ghostly trunks in the dense greenery. “Next year they will all be gone.”

  “What? Why? Is he going to cut them down?”

  “No, but he should.”

  “Why?”

  “The malady. Do you have eet? Les ormes sont condamnés.” The word was easily grasped, but the meaning sounded more dire in English: condemned, like a prisoner who’s going to the guillotine.

  It took the rest of our walk to sort it out. Dutch Elm disease had come to Europe. No, wait, it’s called Dutch for a reason, so we guessed it must have returned. We watched the kids set the table (Rory and Devo watching as well, not being well-brought-up compared to French children). Food came out. Sausages sizzled. Lemonade and wine. Meal done, the table cleared off, the tablecloth flapped to shoo away crumbs, we all moved up to the house to go indoors, have a coffee, and sit at the long table and talk. The kids could even watch TV—a huge decision for Henry, who has a vision of Kerbordardoué as a haven from electronics.

  At last there was only the bare blond picnic table at the edge of the dark forest in the rear of the Vicomte’s yard, and Rory sitting alone, reading his chess book.

  We were at the door to the house when for some reason we all turned: me, Mindy, Henry, and Celeste, who said affectionately, “Rory lit toujours.” He always reads. Then we heard it—and a moment later, saw it—a disturbance in the blue, transparent yet roiling. Next an immense gust of wind came out of the north, bending the tops of the trees. La Chienne.

  From the ghostly trees, I heard a crack. It wasn’t even a loud crack, more of a mushy crunch. It conveyed the rottenness of the tree way down to the roots, a totality of dead wood. Then one of the towering white trunks began to fall, at first almost silently, with just a whooshing sound. When it reached the living trees that screened the driveway, though, the sound became a muted roar of breakage, an oncoming freight train.

  And this is what we will remember after: we barely had time to see the falling tree, let alone calculate its direction and sprint across forty yards of uneven grass to get to Rory. We never moved.

  The tree roared forward now, snapping first at the ten-foot mark, behind the driveway. It must’ve been four feet in diameter, but the break was clean. The rest of the tree kept on coming. The trunk snapped again at the screen of alders. Now the great white Y of its forked upper trunk was flying forward, freed of the bottom half, like a twenty-five-foot-long ghost with outstretched arms. It was heading straight for Rory, who sat, head hunched over his book in the failing light, completely absorbed.

  Doing the math, I’d already realized it was too late. My one hope was that it would fall short but I knew it wouldn’t. I considered yelling, though there probably wasn’t enough time—just enough time to pray, Please, please…

  The tree hit the ground and exploded in a rippling motion. The sound filled the air like armies clashing. As the great Y slammed down on either side of Rory, its limbs shattered and the crotch of the Y kept moving, sliding forward, reaching out, stretching for Rory. A cloud of white rotten wood fragments blew up and swept ahead. The main branches, fragmented, still more than a foot in diameter, bracketed the picnic table. As they hit the ground, they bounced up and down and around like the bones of a dancing skeleton.

  Smaller branches lashed the ground all around Rory. A white cloud of chips and fungus-ridden wood engulfed him. As the cloud settled, it revealed Rory sitting untouched in a little clearing. A spinning woodchip flipped slowly end over end and bonked him on the side of the head.

  We finally were running.

  He hadn’t noticed a thing.

  There would be plenty of tears and wails. But only for a little while because, as Mindy and I agreed, exchanging a look over Rory’s head, it was better if he never knew how close he’d come.

  Nobody could really talk after that. We stayed together in the living room and watched the television for hours, until the sound of Rory and the boys laughing at some idiot police thriller gave us permission to unclench, relax, exhale. But nobody talked about it.

  Terror is one more thing best recollected in tranquility.

  • • �
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  The next day the woodcutter arrived with his chain saw, his apprentice, and his expertise. He had a slicked-back Elvis hairdo and wore rather fashionable slacks and nicely polished shoes—not your average lumberjack. A styling French lumberjack.

  First the bottom third of the tree was cut, because it blocked Henry and Celeste’s driveway. Their car was actually trapped. Henry decided he deserved the wood. The woodcutter explained that he took away half as part of his fee.

  Henry was scornful. “Half! Well, I’ll take the other half.”

  The Vicomte begged to differ. He was paying the lumberjack, so he got the wood.

  “But it fell on my land.”

  “But it is my tree.”

  “Yes, and it nearly killed Rory. Maybe he should get the wood.”

  Up to that point, things had been getting testy. Hearing the previously unspoken outcome finally voiced put a different spin on the issue. The discussion became calmer, civilized, and finally exquisite. We left them to it.

  A couple of hours later, Henry arrived at our door out of breath from pushing a wheelbarrow up our allée. It was full of wood: logs, branches, twigs, all neatly sorted—a survivor’s portion. There were also two enormous cucumbers. “From Le Vicomte,” said Henry. We invited him to stay and have a drink of whiskey.

  Later, after he’d gone, the Vicomte’s two grown sons stopped by. They nodded when they saw the wood. “Oh, good. Rory gets his share,” said Thierry, whose English was now better than my French. “And you, Don, get les concombres.” We served them whiskey, too. They were happy to get it out of sight of Maman.

  The next morning we gave the cucumbers to Suzanne. After that, I took the longer pieces of wood outside to cut with a saw. Suzanne came out to watch and laugh. Waving me aside, she grabbed a large bough and broke it with a stomp of one blucher-shod foot. Gesturing, she shamed me into doing the same. Ow! screamed my knee. She watched, delighted, as strapping Young Strudel hopped around on one foot.

  After lunch we visited the site. There was a white sawdust silhouette, like a crime scene’s chalk outline, where the deadly elm had fallen. The picnic table was gone, too. Henry was concerned about his children now. He’d already moved the table far away, far from any trees, to a bare rise overlooking the moors and fields.

  Over the next couple of days, there was some village ire directed at the Vicomte for his forest. People said he loved it too much to cut it down. There were too many children in the village to indulge him. We stayed on the sidelines, happy that ours had been spared, but in the end, Gwened, Henry, and others felt there should be a discussion of all the rotten trees. After some hesitation Le Vic joined in. The village walked the wood.

  The following week the woodcutter returned. An entire small forest fell that day.

  The averted tragedy had unlocked something. The village had had to decide if it was more than a collection of nice houses and pretty flowers. The village had made the right call. Any doubt about that was laid to rest when the Vicomte and Yvonne threw an apéro for les propriétaires, the owners of village houses. Then Celeste and Henry held their apéro, and then the married professors held one. Even Gwened held one.

  When we got to her secluded patio, the first to arrive, Mindy and I looked around in puzzlement. Finally we realized what was different. Where were the beautiful Belgian youths, the white-robed acolytes drifting about the jardin? Gwened smiled at our covert inquiry and careful expressions.

  “I sent them home,” she said, adding, “I have met a beautiful man.” She nodded at our expressions. “He is coming here this weekend.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Beau Temps

  Here’s one for an omen reader or Chinese soothsayer: happily warbling, a bird flutters into my dreams. An instant later I open my eyes to see a real swallow backpedaling in midair confusion above my head. With an anxious squeak of disapproval at the sight of our stunned bodies under the twisted sheets, it flees out the open dormer.

  In dreams begin reality, a poet once said. Or was it responsibility? For me, the swallow shakes the slumbering beast of worry. “Ohhh…” I can barely move my lips from jet lag. “We didn’t have swallows before, did we?”

  “No… They don’t…” My wife clears her throat. “Ruairrrriiii-aaadddhhhh.”

  Mindy sounds like she’s wrestling a yeti under the tangle of sheets, quilts, and that impossibly configured French duvet that took us twenty minutes to figure out last night, when we finally went to bed after seventeen hours of travel from New York and another five of opening the house and walking down to the beach and fixing a spartan supper of tinned sardines, bread, and butter. But I can sense a smile lurking somewhere under the duvet. After all, we’re here. Back again. At home.

  Mindy tries out her voice again: “Swallows don’t like…living places…” Catches herself. “I mean, where people are living. They prefer ruins.”

  Oh.

  Now the bird irks me. It must be confused. This house is no longer a ruin. Both upstairs bedrooms look snug as a ship’s forward cabin, up near the bows, an illusion assisted by the slanting roof and nautically ruggedized skylight opposite the dormer. This is our ark. That’s why we’re here.

  The sky outside the window is baby blue. A soft cross breeze flows from the skylight. I look at Mindy, eyelids closed and trembling during a brief dream sleep, russet hair wild and long. She looks like a Rossetti—no, a Matisse—against the rose-green-yellow pastels of the parrot-patterned duvet and pillowcases. Eyes, be my camera!

  The bedding set, a present from my mom, turned the room into a tropical hothouse the moment it was unfurled from clear plastic cases. Five years on, everything is still bright as the day when she spotted the linens in a Vannes boutique. Got to hand it to the mom. We may not always agree, and our tastes are an ocean apart, but here she got it spectacularly right.

  “A lesson to always listen to your sainted mother,” she’d growled when I told her, her playful mood and high spirits a total change from that first visit.

  Her taste made a revolution in more ways than one. Thanks to the check she wrote us for Christmas following The Dreadful Affair at Hôtel du Phare, we’d ordered a handsome armoire in the old Breton style from Madame Morgane’s grandson. We didn’t know it, but that was his first commission. It came out beautifully for him and for us. We got a place to store our clothes where they wouldn’t mildew, and for him, our house became a convenient showroom, which meant it got a regular dusting and cleaning the whole year long. So the house didn’t mildew, either.

  We also earned the extended Morgane family’s approval, which manifested itself in a curious way. No sooner had we returned to New York than we received a letter from Madame Morgane’s sweetest niece. She lived on the mainland now and was getting married on the island. She wondered if she and her fiancé could spend their wedding night in our house. “Just the bedroom,” she said. “With the sheets and duvet. We would be happy to pay.”

  Of course we didn’t charge. Our reward was to hear, on our return to the island that summer, how the village filled with over two hundred îliens and mainland Bretons, eating galettes and drinking cidre brut long into the night, singing and dancing in a serpentine line to the droning bagpipe, huffing accordion, and thudding hand drum. These sorts of events are held in the late fall or winter and, I get the feeling, pop up like flash mobs so tourists and étrangers like us won’t stumble upon them. It was nice to think of the village reconstituted, time rolled back. We felt lucky to play a small part; it was the next best thing to being there.

  The following year, another Morgane relation, this one a niece from the mainland who’d seen the bedroom while attending the wedding, wrote to ask a similar favor. Though we didn’t know this niece—and wondered if all two hundred of the guests had trooped up the stairs to stare at Mom’s Matisse parrots and would soon be requesting conjugal visits—we said yes, of course.

 
Next, a friend from New York, traveling with his girlfriend in France, wrote to ask if they could stay. Sure! When they returned to the United States, they announced their engagement.

  Was it just our imagination, or did our little house have a certain aphrodisiac effect?

  • • •

  While the house gained a reputation for having the power to make villagers and other lovers happy, it all would have been for nothing if our parents had continued to disapprove of us and our folly. The first to come around was Mindy’s mother, Dolly, just after the Dream Team had finished the staircase and floor. We’d barely digested the news that she had a new boyfriend, Brian, when she called to say he was taking her to Europe—and wanted to visit Belle Île.

  Not having seen the finished job, we said yes with real misgivings. Dolly was nobody’s idea of a country girl. But off they went, and in the moody month of October, too. Brian managed to turn on the electricity and the water all by himself, and even made a few home improvements. (A towel rack! Now why didn’t I think of that?) Of course, no sooner were they back in Hawaii than they, too, got married.

  That left my parents. The year after they ruined our seeing the finished job for the first time, they decided to give us a second chance and come out again—a total surprise.

  What had made the difference? For my mother, there was the ongoing influence of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and the unflagging curiosity of the Bixby Knolls Book Club, her reading group. Mom and Dad were also taken by Rory’s stern lecture at the Hôtel du Phare, which grows funnier with each retelling. It’s now part of family lore.

  But those weren’t difference-makers. No, it took a peculiarly French moment that befell my father on the last full day of their first trip. It didn’t seem like much at the time. But it came to mean everything, in a way, to me.