He waved his hands in the air. “The store can take a day off, too. Tell your parents they’re invited. We’ll leave at eight. I want to get to the best spots before anyone else does.”
Marco had a little grocery store, but selling food wasn’t his main interest in life. Whenever there was a postcard show, or a meeting of the historical society, or if the day was perfect for walking in the mountains, or if there was the smell of mushrooms in the air, he would simply close his shop and disappear for the day.
Still, a lot of people depended on him. Sometimes they would show up at the counter – he didn’t have a cash register, and he added up the totals by hand – with their basket full of food, and admit shyly that they didn’t quite have enough money to pay.
“Don’t worry,” he would tell them. “I’ll put it on your bill.”
Half the time, he never asked his customers for money if he knew they couldn’t pay. Once I saw Rachid’s mother march into the store and happily put a small mountain of bills on the counter.
“For the past couple of months,” she told him. “We’re even now.”
The mountains and the forests were his favorite places to be, and he knew their secrets. Sometimes he would drive down from the mountains above our village and start unloading goat cheeses from a box full of straw that he kept in the back of his old truck. He’d point to the runny cheeses that smelled like the boys’ locker room at school.
“I had to get out for some fresh air on my way down here. I couldn’t stay in my truck another minute. Those cheeses sure aren’t embarrassed to be who they are!”
A little like Marco himself.
In the end, I understood what he meant about the air smelling like mushrooms. After an hour’s drive in the back of his beat-up delivery truck, squished in with Tempo, his very furry dog, and being rocked this way and that, we got out at the edge of an oak forest.
After that, we hiked for another hour on a stone path that had been used by people and their donkeys for centuries – or at least that’s what Marco told us. Everything in France is so old!
We finally reached his secret spot. It was in a wide clearing in the middle of the woods, surrounded by giant trees. Just the way snails like rain, mushrooms like oak trees.
Suddenly the rays of the sun filled the clearing, and I could smell a rich, woodsy, earth smell.
“Boletus edulis!” Marco exclaimed.
That’s the Latin name for the mushrooms we were hunting. Big fat ones, as wide as the palm of my hand. Having Marco as a guide was very useful, because he showed us which mushrooms tasted good and which ones would kill you dead before dessert. Pretty important information, don’t you think?
Though Marco would never tell anyone else about his secret mushroom-hunting spots, he was willing to share them with us. That’s because we were foreigners, he said. He wanted us to see all the best things in his part of the country. He also knew that we were here only for the year, so his secret spots were safe with us.
Sometimes, being a foreigner can be a real advantage.
SIX
Christmas time in our village
One morning, I was awoken by the screechy voice of Madame Mendes talking to her dog.
“No, no, no,” she scolded Linda. “You can’t go out. You’ll freeze your little paws in the snow.”
Snow? I thought to myself. How can that be?
I rushed to the window and looked out. Sure enough, there was snow, but barely enough to cover the ground. I went to the back window and looked out there, too. Everything was white, even the little palm tree in our yard.
Rachid came running down our narrow street. When he reached the front door of our house, he tripped and slid head-first on the snow that covered the paving stones. It would have been a perfect slide if he’d been playing baseball, which of course he wasn’t.
“Hey, Charlie!” he shouted from below. “There’s no school today. Classes are canceled!”
“How come?” I called down.
“What do you mean, how come?”
He got up and brushed the snow off his jacket. Then he stared up at me as if I were blind.
“Look! Can’t you see?” He waved his hands in the air like a windmill. “It’s because of the snowstorm.”
Snowstorm? I thought. This wouldn’t even be a blip on the snow radar screen back home. There were no cars buried up to their roofs in snow, and no drifts that you had to shovel your way through just to get out of the house.
But I didn’t say anything. Rachid was so excited that I didn’t want to disappoint him.
I went downstairs, grabbed my jacket and went outside. It was the kind of snow that was mostly made of water. If you squeezed it real hard in your hand, there wouldn’t be much left. But apparently, this was a blizzard for Celeriac.
Ahmed came running up, too, but he managed to stay on his two feet.
“I’ve never seen snow,” he said, “except on TV.”
Madame Mendes opened her front door a crack.
“Be careful, boys,” she warned us, “or you’ll get lost in the storm!”
Before we could answer, she slammed her door tight, then locked it.
My brother stepped out, pulling on his jacket.
“Have you ever seen snow before?” Ahmed asked him.
“Maybe once or twice,” Max told him.
“Come on,” Rachid teased Ahmed. “He’s from Canada, remember?”
“Sure,” I said, “we live in igloos. But only during the winter.”
Ahmed didn’t know whether to believe me or not.
We crossed the square where we played soccer. Just then, a big clump of snow fell right on Ahmed’s head, slid past the collar of his jacket and ran down his back. He jumped.
“Who did that?” he asked, looking around.
“The trees,” my brother laughed.
That gave me an idea.
“Let me show you what we do when it snows,” I told Rachid and Ahmed.
I bent down and made a snowball. I took aim, fired. Bull’s eye! I hit Max right in the shoulder, but not too hard. He fired back, but I dodged his snowball, and it hit the tree behind me.
“Cool!” Rachid yelled.
Let me tell you, it didn’t take him and Ahmed long to learn how to have a real snowball fight.
We decided to go exploring. We headed toward the main square where the fountain and the cafés were.
Just then, old Monsieur Vilain came careening past us on his bicycle, down the slippery street. He was headed down the slope that runs toward the Vidourle, and fast.
“Help!” he called. “I can’t stop! My brakes…”
We lost sight of him at the edge of the river, where benches stand along the side of a low wall.
“He fell into the river,” my brother said. “He’s going to drown!”
We started running down the street, following Monsieur Vilain’s wobbly tire tracks. My brother’s always exaggerating. But we decided to go and see anyway.
At first, because of the wall, we couldn’t see anything. But we sure could hear a lot! The ducks were all quacking angrily. They hated to be disturbed, especially by an old guy on a bike who had ridden right into them. And we could hear him, too.
“Confounded snow!” he muttered. “The brakes don’t work at all… Never saw anything like it! The weather’s gone crazy, that’s for sure.”
We peered over the edge of the wall. Luckily, it wasn’t far down. There was Monsieur Vilain brushing himself off as the ducks crowded around him, quacking in outrage and nipping at his pants.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
He looked up at me.
“You’re the Canadian kid, aren’t you? This must be your fault. Did you send us all this snow?”
“Really, it’s
not very much,” I told him. “Can I help?”
He lifted his bicycle and we grabbed it from above. Then we all pulled and tugged until we had it back on the street. He climbed up the set of steps in the wall and took his bike from us without even saying thank you. I guess he really did blame us for the snow.
We walked back through the town. The cars were skidding and sliding every which way. People sure didn’t know how to drive in winter here! They could have used Roger-Roger to help them out, but he was too afraid of the snow. I saw him standing in the doorway of the café. He was wearing a hat made out of a soggy newspaper, and he was staring nervously at the fat flakes that were falling from the sky.
In the distance, we started hearing sirens. Lots of them. We followed the sound and came to the edge of Celeriac, where the town’s only traffic light stood. The snow must have done something to it, because the light was green for everyone. And there were two cars and a truck in the ditch.
I recognized the truck. It belonged to Marco. He had climbed through the back door, and now he was trying to get his dog Tempo out, but Tempo was in too much of a panic to listen. He was barking up a storm.
Then I saw Didier, Daniel’s father, trying to push one of the cars out of the ditch all by himself. Meanwhile, the drivers were standing by the side of the road, shouting and waving their hands in the air. At least no one was badly hurt. The police were trying to get everyone to calm down, but since they were shouting and waving their hands in the air, too, they weren’t very much help.
In the middle of the crowd, I saw Dr. Rosalie checking people’s arms and legs to make sure no one had any broken bones.
She waved to us.
“Enjoying the storm?” she called out.
“It’s just a little snow,” I answered.
“Maybe for you.”
Then she went back to work. She was having a hard time examining the drivers, because they didn’t want to stop arguing about whose fault the accident was.
“Let’s go by the school,” I suggested. “And organize a snowball fight like in The Dog Who Stopped the War.”
“Nobody will be there,” Ahmed said. “The schoolbuses didn’t come in because of the snowstorm.”
But no one had any better ideas, so we trudged through the snow, which barely came up to the edge of my sneakers, in the direction of school. Maybe there would be a few kids from the village.
As we walked along, the clouds started to lift and the sun shone through.
“If we’re going to have a snowball fight, we’d better hurry up,” I said.
And sure enough, by noon there wasn’t a single snowflake left. The Great Celeriac Blizzard was over.
Christmas was different in Celeriac. First of all, there were no decorations. No colored lights, and not a single plastic Santa Claus. It wasn’t like in our neighborhood back home, where there were contests to see who could put up the brightest lights, and where the Christmas decorations went up right after Halloween.
No wonder! No one celebrated Halloween here either.
The square where we played soccer had a church, but all year long it seemed as if no one ever went inside except for us kids, when one of us scored a goal through the open front door. But a few days before Christmas, people seemed to wake up and remember that the church was there. Women started going in and out with brooms and dustpans and buckets. After they were finished, men came in with boards and bales of hay. We heard hammering from inside.
Now that the Great Blizzard was over, the temperature had warmed up again, and my brother and I and Rachid and Ahmed were watching the preparations from outside.
“They’re fixing it up for Midnight Mass,” I told them.
“I’ve never been in a church,” Ahmed said. “Not even to get the ball.”
“I always have to chase down the ball,” Rachid teased him, “even if he scores the goal. It’s not fair.”
“Just go in,” Max told Ahmed.
“My father doesn’t want me to.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
“He just doesn’t,” said Ahmed. Then he looked away.
I knew Rachid and Ahmed were Muslims, which meant they didn’t go to church. They went to a mosque, but I didn’t even know if there was one in Celeriac. They never talked about it.
Our family liked celebrations. If there was a holiday to celebrate, we were always ready. My mother is Catholic and my father is Jewish, so I’m a little of both. My grandmother says that I have my father’s eyes and my mother’s nose. It’s sort of the same thing. Anyway, we end up with two sets of holidays, which is fine with me.
That night, we got ready for Midnight Mass. We were going to be part of it. Our Midnight Mass, it turned out, didn’t actually start at midnight. There was only one priest for all the little towns around ours, so he was very busy on Christmas Eve. Père Plomteux had to say Mass in one town after another, so he couldn’t stay in any church for very long.
Ours was scheduled to start at ten o’clock. First, the organ music started. The organ was very old and out of tune. The organist, Monsieur Poire, had hair sprouting out of his ears and nose and big, bushy eyebrows. Actually, he looked like Santa Claus, but without a beard. As the kids paraded past him, he shouted orders at them. Monsieur Poire shouted because he was deaf. He didn’t hear himself, but we sure did!
A lot of the kids from the village played in the Nativity scene. Pipo, the goalie on our team, played Joseph. He’s always getting red cards during our games for arguing too much. Madame Soulier’s daughter carried the baby Jesus. She was wearing a long dress, which she tripped over, and nearly fell. Everybody in the church gasped. At least Pipo could have caught the baby if she’d dropped him, since he’s a pretty good goalie. Other kids from school wore gold paper crowns. They were the Three Wise Men.
Even Max and I got to play a part. Max was a sheep and I was a camel. We didn’t have to speak, or even dress up, and that was just as well, because I wouldn’t have wanted to wear a camel costume. All we had to do was carry our animals, that were actually little figurines, and place them in the manger. That wasn’t too hard. Still, my mother looked on proudly as we walked past her.
Putting up with the organ music was a lot harder. I wouldn’t have called it music at all. It sounded as though Monsieur Poire was playing with his elbows and his knees. No one could make him stop, since he couldn’t hear everyone complaining.
Finally, Père Plomteux arrived. He looked as if he was in a big hurry. He went over to the organist and tapped him hard on the shoulder. The church went silent. Max and I walked up to the manger and held up our animals, and the other kids from the village started saying their lines.
But before Joseph and Mary could finish saying what they were supposed to, the organist started torturing his instrument again. The priest was angry because everything was taking too much time. He tapped the organist on the shoulder, twice as hard. The kids started laughing, though Max and I didn’t dare. We were afraid of being impolite, though I think we were the only ones who worried about that. Even the adults were laughing at the organist.
Finally the Mass was over. Père Plomteux practically ran out the door, his robes flying, on his way to the next village. Meanwhile, Monsieur Poire chased everyone out by playing as loudly and as badly as he could.
Outside, I spotted Rachid and Ahmed sitting on a bench, waiting for us. They looked a little lonely.
“How was it?” Rachid asked me.
“Noisy,” I told him, “and pretty funny.”
“Funny?” said Ahmed. “They do funny things in a church?”
I told him about the organist.
“And I got to be a sheep,” Max piped up.
“I’m not surprised,” Rachid teased him. “With that curly hair of yours, you look like a sheep.”
Max was mad. “Yeah, well
, Charlie was a camel!”
My brother made a camel face and bobbed his head up and down. Rachid and Ahmed nearly fell off the bench laughing.
“What do you guys do in a mosque?” I asked them.
Rachid shrugged. “We pray. We listen to the imam.”
“But it’s not funny,” Ahmed added. “Not like in a church.”
Just then, my mother came to get us.
“Let’s go. Your father is making dinner and it’s probably waiting.”
We waved goodnight to our friends and headed home. My mother was right. Dinner was on the table. A roast pheasant stuffed with chestnuts that we’d gathered ourselves in the forest. It was really good, especially since I was so hungry. No wonder! It was nearly eleven o’clock at night.
But we had one more holiday to celebrate. My father had made a menorah out of the foot of a grape vine, which looks a lot like a tree trunk, only thinner. In each of the knots of the trunk, he placed a candle. There were eight of them, because it was the eighth night of Channukah, the last one, that just happened to fall on Christmas Eve.
Then our parents told us what our Christmas present was. And you won’t believe it…
SEVEN
The never-ending journey
You guessed it. Our Christmas present was another trip!
And there sure was lots of time to travel, with all the vacations we had.
“The schools are closed half the time,” my mother complained. “There’s this holiday, and that vacation. I wonder if you’ll learn anything at all this year.”
I thought we were working hard enough. There was homework nearly every night. If you ask me, they made us work double time to make up for all the vacations.
My father announced, “You know, kids, we haven’t been anywhere for a while.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “We’re here. And we only just got here.”
I was starting to enjoy life in our village, and I was in no hurry to pull up stakes again.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Some place new and different.”
On the Road Again Page 5