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

by Don Wallace

  Mindy and I tried not to get nervous. I told myself that my doubts were undoubtedly common, given this unsettled time of war, terrorism, climate change, and political extremism. At least the economy was booming.

  Still, I worried: Was our idyll coming to an end?

  • • •

  Brittany can seem a hard land. Its fields are a lovely gold in the fall, but much of the year is wet, green, and black. The Catholic worldview dominates, strong and grim, like my gloom-and-doom Scottish Presbyterian ancestors. We are sinners and we die; purgatory is certain, hell probable—you know God knows that you stole Tintin’s butter from the cold safe by the spring! Do not be deceived by Gauguin’s paintings of Brittany, those pure blocks of color. His most famous Breton scene, of country women in white lace caps, coiffes, pausing after church to watch the Angel Jacob wrestle Death, is a parable of you in your daily life, because your soul is always in the breach and someone, somewhere is wrestling over it.

  In Brittany the nights are darker than elsewhere. I’ve never quite understood why. Fewer big cities, yes, but plenty of small ones. It’s a rural quiet, a feeling that you are surrounded by fields and moors stretching all around you. Best to stay indoors. It’s easy to see how the Bretons would sit around the hearth and tell ghost stories. They take Halloween seriously, though they call it Kala Goañv, better known throughout the Celtic world as Samhain.

  When the portal opens between our world and the underworld, out pour the spooks, grabbing at the living, who dress up in guises to confuse their pursuers and go from tomb to tomb in the graveyard, demanding food that has been prepared by families for their departed ones. Even if you think you recognize your neighbor in that black shroud, face chalked white as a skull, you’d still better play it safe and give him a drink of milk and a winter apple.

  • • •

  The real specter of Death isn’t bought off so easily. We’ve all heard the stories. Over in the next village, they tell the one about the sobbing, wavering cry in the fields at night that drew a farmer outside to look around and see if his cow was all right. We all know what happened to him. When the hound of death catches some poor devil, and you hear his howl of triumph, don’t listen too long or you will be next. La Chienne, roaming the moors and bogs and desolate wastes, is not man’s best friend.

  Sometimes referred to as a great wind, La Chienne tears out a man’s throat as he slogs through the marsh to reach the duck he shot—think The Hound of the Baskervilles. Bidse an t-saoghail is the root beastie but there’s more to it. She’s a whore who gets into a man’s head. Like Stefane who went mad and drove his tractor straight onto the beach at Donnant, scattering sunbathers and screaming children. In his midthirties, he had never had a date, so he screwed up his courage to ask some tourist girl if she’d like to visit his barn. Because that was how it was done in his father’s day. She pressed charges.

  These are only stories, of course. Even that of Ankou, master of La Chienne, who hunts for him. Bringer of death and collector of the dead, Ankou drives a black carriage that had better not come to a stop before your house. If it does, resist the urge to pull back the lace on your window and stare. Because then you’ll see him coming up your steps with his gnarled cane. If you encounter him at work in the fields between villages, he’ll be sitting atop a cart piled with bodies, so many that the scrawny pair of white horses can barely pull it along. If he sees you—and he will—say your prayers. Because he’s reaching for his scythe.

  He has no face. That is known.

  “Ankou” is also a season. When many die in a short time period, people say, War ma fé, heman zo eun Anko drouk: On my faith this one is a nasty Ankou.

  The last weeks of the old year and the first day of the new belong to Ankou. This probably has to do with the simple biological fact that the old and infirm are most vulnerable in the dark of winter—when it’s cold, damp, and smoky indoors. The air fills with animal dander from the cows and goats that share the living quarters; manure gets in the milk; and nobody washes their hands. The ergot mold that grows on the rye makes you hallucinate a black-shrouded figure out of a shadow—and then you die, hooting his name: “Ankou! Ankou!”

  On New Year’s Day, the old Ankou goes looking for his replacement. He’s not particular. He’ll take a stillborn. But if he can’t lay hands on someone newly dead, then he’ll strike someone down. That person then becomes the new Ankou, going door to door with his wheelbarrow for the next twelve months.

  If you hear an owl’s cry, it’s an omen. Ankou is here in the village and will not go away empty-handed. If you hear the creak of a wheel at night, don’t make a sound. It’s him with his karrigell an Ankou, the wheelbarrow of death.

  If nothing else works and he’s coming for you in the fields or tap-tap-tapping up the path to your door, quick, pick up a tool. Not a weapon: a shovel, a plow, a spinning wheel. Ankou only fears honest work by patient men and women.

  Ghost stories… What would we do without them on long winter nights?

  • • •

  As the years go by, Ankou makes his rounds. The amorous cowherd Dede, who’d proposed to Mindy faithfully every summer for several years, comes in from tending the cows, sits down to his dinner, and dies. Dede feels like a big loss; it’s hard to explain how much just the sight of him, walking his herd daily up and down the side vallon, wool newsboy cap on that square head, meant to all of us. Of course we bought his eggs and, once in a great while, a duck or chicken. (He always let his sister do the garroting.)

  He never married. That gold digger from Paris didn’t last a week before her shrieks were heard all over the village and she was seen throwing things into her car and driving away fast. She’d wanted the land, of course. Got more than she bargained for, evidently.

  Other news begins to trickle in—by letter, by phone, and lately, by email:

  This summer Le Vicomte cannot come. It is pneumonia.

  Suzanne, poor thing…her first time away from the island in her whole life and it’s by air ambulance! The helicopter took her to the hospital in Vannes. She said she enjoyed the overhead view of the island, though. Said she’d never seen Locmaria—too many witches! Really, that’s what she said. She’s back now, in good form, says she is content with her life now that she’s seen the end of the island.

  My dear husband, Francis, we have sadness to report (wrote Gwened). He has a malady, a “crab,” in his intestines.

  Theophile’s mother, too young, quite sudden—it has left his father devastated. And then America starts in.

  I think I feel a lump, Anne says.

  Donnie, there’s bad news about your father.

  Mindy, this is your brother, please pick up. I’ve been trying to reach you about Mom.

  Donnie, looks like a stroke, but your mother is conscious. Sister is talking to specialists. We may go back to the first doctor. This new doctor… The second surgery…

  It’s to buy time.

  • • •

  Karrigell an ankou—wheelbarrow of death, its creaking wheel heard coming to a halt outside your house at night means your time is up, Ankou has come for you.

  • • •

  Gwened writes the letters from Belle Île. From her we come to expect a dignity and restraint that softens the blow for the amount of time it takes to read of the death of Francis, her beautiful man; Le Vicomte, beloved of Yvonne, hero of Dunkirk; Suzanne, the hardest one to tell about…

  Her last letter is brief:

  My friends, it was a hard winter, an old adversary returned, and I have been ill… How fortunate I am, Daniel is here with me…

  On my faith, this one is a hard Ankou.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A Last Swim in September

  The cell phone is on the end table. No bars. I raise it to the skylight and hold it facing the relay tower I know is out there, a couple of miles away over the hill, its crow’s nest of satellit
e dishes poking above a grove of cypresses.

  “Stop it!” Mindy snaps, not fooling.

  “I’m just getting a signal.”

  “Stop looking out the skylight. If Madame Morgane sees you…”

  Neither of us says anything about the likelihood of that happening.

  I sit back down on the edge of the bed and check the cell phone again. We’ve got bars, but they’re going away before my eyes. But not before I see—nothing.

  “No messages.”

  “What is he doing?” sighs Mindy. “Okay, call him—no, better text him.”

  “So now it’s okay if I poke my head out of the vas-ist-das? Because that’s the only way to get a sig…”

  “Don’t call it a vas-ist-das. It’s a chassis Velux.”

  “Suzanne called it a vas-ist-das. She thought it was funny.”

  “She did not. She hated the Germans.”

  “She liked Heinrich well enough.”

  “She wouldn’t sell him her grange, though.”

  “Of course she didn’t sell him the grange. Where else would she go to the bathroom?”

  We’re in a rhythm now, letting the old familiar patterning of recollection and story ease us back into village life—its characters, rules, and mystery. (Who owns that cement mixer?) It’s the sort of thing we start up without realizing, then, once we become aware, enjoy spinning out, sometimes for hours.

  What is the joke here? That the Germans occupying Belle Île had never seen skylights before. Vas-ist-das? they asked when they searched houses on Belle Île for contraband like eggs and butter. Vas-ist-das became the name. It was a way, I believe, to point up the invader’s stupidity, and to his face, too, while the whole time he’d be thinking it was a friendly overture.

  It’s possible I’m overthinking this. But remembering Suzanne’s gruffness with Heinrich, her neighbor in the adjoining stone cottage for thirty years, I don’t think so.

  Mindy shifts in the bed and a board groans. “I think it’s broken,” she says.

  My first job upon arrival is always to check the bed for broken slats and, if necessary, to make repairs. But we got in too late yesterday. “I’ll get on it,” I say, but am provoked by her silent Oh sure. “Just as soon as you get off it, slugabed.”

  I’ve stalled long enough. After tapping out a short text to Rory, I head downstairs.

  • • •

  From the moment we stepped off the ferry, we were overwhelmed by the rush of old memories and the ever-present beauty of an ageless Belle Île September. Everywhere we turned, people popped up and extended a welcome and an invitation to a drink, dinner, picnic at the beach. Our younger Bellilois surf gang, once so wild but now married with children, dragged us into madcap adventures for old times’ sake. We walked the moors with Yvonne, the Vicomte’s widow, debated the world news with our psychiatrist friends, feasted at the tables of locals and étrangers, woke to the quiet of another village morning in our pine-paneled chamber.

  Is that a knock on the door? Yes, it’s Pierre-Louis, the president of some hyper-learned World Society of Psychoanalysts. He stands there holding a portable electric power drill—says he has one quick job to do—and mounts the stairs. Yes, he’s come to fix our once-again-broken bed.

  “But how did you know it was broken?”

  Pierre-Louis laughs heartily and wags a finger.

  How we wish Rory were here. We know it would cheer him up.

  • • •

  Last summer was the first without Gwened Guedel, but her presence was everywhere, especially in the overgrown gardens and laden fruit trees where we wandered in conscious acts of remembrance. This year it’s final: her spirit is gone. The sale of her house and land was done coldly and hastily, at a loss, by the son she’d always hoped would take over the place and love it the way she had, the way we did, the way she taught us.

  To be clear, Daniel had no choice—he lives in Chicago, he’d lost his job, like us, and had a new baby on the way. Annus horribilis 2009 played no favorites, that’s for sure.

  In a sense we are only now coming to fully appreciate, Gwened prepared everything for Daniel: the house, the village, us, the rest of the cast of characters, controlling as much as she could. Then she sat back and waited, waited, waited for thirty years, for Daniel to come back. And when death approached she made every arrangement with the taxes and title so he could inherit without cost. And all for nothing, it seems. Though he was with her during the desperate treatments and later on in hospice, he simply couldn’t build his life around Kerbordardoué the way she had. Poor Gwened. She prepared a snare of love and beauty and belonging, and instead of catching Daniel, all she caught was us.

  We, the Americans, whom she lured here, installed here, schooled here and prodded and spurred to finish our house. She chose to put us next door to her, not somebody else, so it was done out of love and friendship, right?

  Except that there was also Gwened’s unyielding perfectionism—the same controlling behavior that probably drove Daniel away. Because when she needed to bait that snare of love and beauty and belonging, Gwened must’ve decided she needed something exotic. What better than a couple of American writers for a young man who wanted to be a writer himself? It’s not so flattering, maybe, to us, but I can’t get the suspicion out of my head that we were the cheese.

  Yes, she loved us—that we know. But in the back of her mind always, I suspect, was the Plan. I know it would be in mine, if our positions were reversed.

  When we heard Gwened’s house was up for sale, I emailed Daniel. I know and like him. We pleaded with him to slow down, wait out the economic crisis; good advice which we ourselves were unable to heed in the case of our New York apartment and life. (We would eventually leave, in tears and undignified haste, half of our furniture on the curb as the taxi pulled away.) Though I regret his selling, I know we also considered the same course of action. What Daniel does is really none of my business—except for this matter of the years we spent next door to his mother, watching Gwened wait.

  It just feels wrong that we’re here when he’s not. But we have another, more personal and compelling reason to care about what drove Daniel away—because we have a son, too. A son who hasn’t picked up on his cell for the past three weeks, won’t answer an email to save his life, doesn’t respond even to a goddamned text message written all in $#)$&#$& and emoticons and all the other poetry of the new gen. A son who, if only he knew it, needs this island, too. A son who isn’t here with us. Again. For the sixth year and counting.

  • • •

  The losses hit Rory hard. Who can blame him for feeling down? He’s an only child. Growing up and living in New York, he didn’t see as much of his family or his cousins. At least his grandparents knew it and lavished attention on him when he was with them. His bond with his Aunt Anne was also magical; everyone noticed it. And Gwened—another good witch—gave him so much love, too, and not only because she missed having her own grandchildren.

  Now they are all gone, except my mother who’s had two strokes. All this and losing his New York City home makes Rory one worried boy. Just turned twenty-one, he seems older. Like so many students at Stanford, he’s taken a start-up job on top of his studies. He dug up a scholarship to pay for his junior and senior year tuition. We feel guilty, and tell him to quit the job and focus on his classes, that we can afford it. And we can, theoretically, even after losing our jobs and the economic system’s meltdown. But he’s wise in his own way. He doesn’t listen to us anymore.

  So we come to Belle Île alone.

  • • •

  Toward the middle of the stay, we find ourselves alone in the village. The rentrée fell early this summer and all the Parisians are gone. Only members of Madame Morgane’s extended family remain, spread out among several houses well-hidden by tall hedges. We have our pick of several large gardens heaving up a cornucopia of fat blood tomatoes,
stout zucchini and cucumbers, lime-green frisée, runner beans, carrots, parsley and basil and fenouil. The trees drip with small red crab apples. The fig’s boughs hang low with fruit. Even Gwened’s single pear tree by the former dojo produces one perfect little tear-drop Bosc. The owners beg us to take some of this produce off their hands.

  We have everything we want, except for who we want.

  The empty lanes and long afternoons are made for wandering. Our rusty Renault has died and gone away, so now we sway over rutted moor roads in a tiny opalescent Twingo. We go by eye and whim and memory.

  Late September on the last full day of our stay, we’re out on the cliffs between Port Kerel and Pointe Saint Marc when we come to a stop at the end of threshed fields that overlook a 300-foot drop. “Isn’t this where we first came to swim with Gwened?” I ask. Mindy nods, squinting up and down the coast.

  “Yew-Yew? Was that the name?”

  “No, Calastren.”

  “That’s a village, not a beach.”

  “Port Guen?”

  We smile at the realization that, yes, Gwened would go for a nude swim at a cove bearing her name.

  We get out and stare down at the crescent of sand hemmed in by walls of blue-green schist. Remembering how warm and protected it was, how Gwened wanted no other place, even with its difficult scramble down precipitous hillsides full of prickly gorse, we give it a good, long look but don’t go there.

  Instead we retrace our tracks and worm our way through narrow village lanes and a steep descent under a shady grove. We park and walk into a bowl valley of dense lush ferns that cover every inch of ground in sight. Somewhere down there at the end of the sandy path we’ll have our last swim. There will be no postcard awaiting us when we arrive back home in the United States, as there was after our first plunge—les derniers baigneurs de Septembre —with just a little scrawl below that followed by a tiny signature: Gwened. But we’ll always be the last swimmers of September.