***
After supper, during which the propriétaire had guzzled his couscous and two carafes of last year’s vintage, Sophie Cacheux left the room without explanation. She’d avoided her son’s eyes throughout and now he called her name through the empty living quarters, even down into the cave where bats and scorpions were the only living things.
“Maman!”
Taking his torch instead of his gun, he secured his Breviary and rosary inside his soutane pocket and took the track east in the direction of Pech d’Oriole. Despite the meal, he still felt giddy and rested for a moment near the Chȃteau sign while Orion dominated the windy sky. He called again, afraid his father might hear, and set off walking between the ruts on higher ground, feeling the lumps of limestone through his shoes and using the beam to check for snakes.
Maman had been kind and gentle, and even though the night wind ripped his hair from his head and found his skin through his soutane, she was still there. Her scent, her words; oh, how she loved him, and how he’d always longed for time to turn around, for her breast to fill his mouth and feed him with herself. But now there was someone else, and during the breathless, joyful petit mort, he had told her of Robert Vidal. The man with the look of Christ himself.
Was that so terrible? That he was in love? He glanced up, but the sky held no answers, and the vines whispered only to themselves as he reached a fork in the track. Left for Pech d’Oriole and his church, right for ‘Vilabou,’ the Cressy place, and the biggest slum in the Commune. He stopped at the spindly iron cross embedded in a heap of stones, listening hard, not for natural noises of the night, but to gauge if any of the peasants were at home.
The stench of chicken shit suddenly reached him instead. Sweet rotting air from the pens and then the dog, a Fauve de Brétagne, hungry for blood, howled into the wind from its compound near the gate.
Cacheux had been there just once as a kid and never again. He had some vague memory of fooling about with the brothers in the small orchard. For a bet he’d had to drop his shorts then they’d called their father over from the barn to have a look. He’d never told his mother, it was too shameful. And he would hate that place for ever more.
Amongst the paradise of vines, the twelve Cressy hectares lay like an open sewer, with the two sons pissed as farts every day and night, and the old widow not much better. Even when Muriel Cressy had been alive, they’d never set foot inside the church of St. Honoré, not for the simplest Mass or worse, any baptism. Doomed to free fall down to Hell in their filthy rags, along with Jews, yuppie Cathars and anyone else arrogant enough to stay outside the Church of Rome.
Cacheux touched the cross and held his rosary for the moon’s bright benediction and his prayers uniquely refined for the situation he was in. Not mess, although he could easily have used that word, but this new calling was of his own choice. There’d been no coercion, in fact the first letter in June had given him a week to decide. But he’d only needed an hour. One hour to feel needed and valued. Besides, the money on offer was more than his Deacon or Bishop would earn after ten years and, in Confession afterwards, he’d admitted a great honour to be truly in the service of God.
It wasn’t enough for Pierre de la Palud to agree with Gregory IX that Jews attend Christian sermons – oh that the world could be made so simple and the grip of Zion be loosened so easily...
He turned his torch to the stars – two hundred and ninety-nine thousand kilometres per second to reach The Hunter’s hand – and here, in the ancient silence, the openness of space, he could at last speak the truth and ask for a miracle. In his third year at Montpeyrous, he’d been flogged for a moral theology essay supporting Rousseau’s claim in Letters Written From the Mountain, that miracles are the main obstacles to Christianity. And now, how he craved one more than ever.
“Pater noster, who sees me humble and bowed before you, I pray let me be worthy of my comrades in arms for my dedication and my skill for the glory of Thy name... and please Lord Jesus, let another of your servants, Father Jean-Baptiste love me as I love you and seek to remove all obstacles to the consummation of our devotion.”
Suddenly, without warning, the torch was knocked from his grip. Chicken stink on the hand round his throat. Alphonse Cressy, a giant against the sky with beer fermented on his breath had heard every word.
“So this is God’s travelling salesman. My, my, we were all riveted by your performance in the Bois de Boulogne, I must say... My old man made me watch to see what other bummers you might have picked up in gay Paree. And we weren’t disappointed.”
“If you would kindly let me go, Monsieur,” Cacheux said as reasonably as he could, “I’m trying to reach my church.”
“My church, he says. That’s ripe from someone whose more bent than any old vine roots round here.” He kicked the verge, shooting stones into the dark. “And anyhow, who are these comrades in arms, I’d like to know? What dirty little deeds are you using your skirts to disguise?”
He let go, but stayed close enough for spittle to land like fine rain, and close enough to seize Cacheux’s cloth which he held like vermin found in the straw.
“And who, may I ask, is the lovely Father Jean-Baptiste?”
Where was reasonableness now?
“I don’t have to take this, you peasant shit.”
“It’s you who likes the stuff round his dick. Christophe de la Bonté, my arse!” He laughed in Cacheux’s face. The priest turned away, wishing he’d got his gun.
“As your humble parishioners, we have a right to know.” Cressy persevered, pressing himself close.
“You’ve never come near the church.”
“I ask again, Father. Who are the comrades in arms you spoke of? Tell me.” Both hands now, as though his victim was a broiler with a second left to live.
“I made them up. It’s stress.” His voice thin with fear.
“I may not have your education, Father, but you continue to insult me and my family who...”
“Who what? Squat on the midden. Piss up the wall...”
Cressy tightened his grip.
“Risked their lives for France under Vichy.” His voice oddly quiet and Cacheux could hear the bloody dog start up again. “In the morning, mon ami, someone will find you. Just another stiff with his eyes picked out. Tell me the names of your comrades.”
Cacheux felt the wind up his nose, the blood tight in his head. He had to see the beautiful Vidal again, and his own mother. He had to live.
“At Montpeyrous, at the Seminary. I was lonely...”
“You’re a liar, Cacheux. You crawled around like a viper with an empty gut. Everybody knows how it was for you there. You and Tessier.”
Raymond Tessier. Cacheux’s breath came in short desperate gasps. The Devil from Béziers with the dreaded silent footsteps.
The priest felt bile on the rise, his body giving out.
“I never touched him! He was damned.”
“We can go and meet my dog, if you prefer.” The younger Cressy’s black eyes caught the moon as his filthy thumbs pressed in on the priest’s pulsing carotid. “I don’t feed him until morning, so he should be very interested in a piece of white meat.”
Cacheux could hear the animal clawing at his cage, the wires singing like a Jew’s harp into the night.
“Alive or dead, makes no difference. He’s grateful for any small mercies.”
A blackness blocked out the stars, and his voice seemed far away. Cacheux began to murmur his own last rites when a light wavered through the dark, casting both men black and gold.
Albert Cressy pushed his son away with such force that Cacheux heard the crash of dry grass and the scatter of stones. “That’s not the way to do things, do you hear?”
Cacheux scrambled for his torch and almost fell. “Th... Thank you, Monsieur.”
“I don’t want your bloody thanks. You just bugger off and keep pretending to be holy. One thing though, Father...”
“Yes?”
“Just tell your miser
able old conard of a father that the track you’re standing on happens to be ours. Always has been.”
Cacheux swallowed hard. The bruising stung.
“That’s between you and him, monsieur.” He flicked on the beam and saw Alphonse Cressy getting up, his mouth darkened by blood. ”I’m afraid I can’t intervene.”
“Oh, yes, you can.” The elder son began picking grit from his arms, wincing. “We’re the heroes of the Corbières. If it wasn’t for us, your precious vines would be ripening on corpses.”
Cacheux listened, unsure whether to stay or make a dash for it, but he doubted if his legs could run as far as the church. “We can all over-dramatise.” He tried his most priestly tone, but Alphonse lunged at him, only to be held by his father’s steel arms.
“Say it, papa. Say how it was. How we had Jews up to here.” He stabbed his forehead with a black finger. “And gyppos, you name it...”
“He’s right. We kept twenty from Forca Réal in with the cows. When we had a few, that is. Winter 1943. Their tongues frozen, like so...” He stuck his out, pink, even in the dark. “Was it worth it, I ask? Were those wretched lives worth more than mine? The boy here not seven months and my wife poorly.”
“I’m sure God in his wisdom gave you courage, monsieur.”
Alphonse muttered obscenities but his father remained focussed, his lank grey hair still loyal to his head despite the sea wind rising.
“It wasn’t courage, Father. No half-decent man needs that when he sees such terrible things. They’d escape that camp whatever the weather, some even had kids.” But his hand span meant babies, the newborn.
“Camp? Where?”
“Fraisjean of course.”
Cacheux bit his lip. Several of his flock worked there, mostly women.
“It’s a meat processing place, surely?”
“What’s the difference?”
A grim silence in which Cacheux thought of his mother.
“Are there graves?” Cacheux asked.
“Don’t be so bloody stupid. There’s nothing whatsoever. After doing their little make-believe course in crochet or woodwork, stuff like that, they’d be carted off. Tour de France to Drancy. Not many lasted here, mind.” A sadness softened his voice, and fleetingly the priest remembered Plagnol’s drab flat and the twenty-three-year-old who’d died looking into his eyes.
Suddenly Alphonse nudged his father, his expression eager like a child’s. “You haven’t finished yet. Shall I do it?”
Cacheux flinched, placing his torch over his heart.
“No. Let me.” The old man rested on his rifle, and faced the priest, holding his gaze. “The last lot we saved – just three – two youngsters and a man, say fortyish, but to me and Muriel he looked more like eighty.”
More restless howling, and in the distance, headlights of some camionette strobed amongst the vines. Cacheux strained to listen to the peasant’s strong patois, part Languedoc, part elsewhere. “He brought me a gift, just a little frame for a photograph or suchlike. In iron – kind of fussy, but the sort of thing they like in Paris.”
Alphonse shifted impatiently, and from his pocket pulled out a can of Krönenberg. He cracked the lid open with a sound like gunshot and the old man hit him in the chest partly from shock and partly because he didn’t like being interrupted.
“So, where’s all this leading, Monsieur?” Cacheux, chilled through to his bones. His church, St. Honoré now seemed too far away.
“Let me finish, papa.” The overgrown son wheedled and passed him his can. “There’s not much more to say.”
The chicken farmer tipped the beer down his dry, old throat, Alphonse took his oil lamp and held it so that the priest resembled a figure from a Caravaggio he’d seen in one of his grandmother’s books.
“The man was called Sorbey. Éric Sorbey.” Albert Cressy burped.
“Éric?”
“Not a common name in 1944, least not round here. He was a Jew from Prats le Mollo. Told us his family was killed in the ’quake of ’22, and after that he went to Prades as a metalworker. Oh, yes, he also played the violin.”
“Clever chap.” Cacheux saw the moon now visited by strands of cloud. He shivered, and instinctively felt for his rosary. These people were repellent. Their smell of ordure, their unwashed filth, they were animals themselves and yet he was transfixed as the man they described became more than words – he actually began to live in his imagination. “Where’s he now?”
Alphonse imitated gunfire and pointed towards the Pic Castellan, one of the highest and most bare of all the Corbières.
“And the others?”
“Ditto. Shot. We could do nothing. He wanted to take his chance, but the fucking Milice were like lice. Everywhere and hidden.”
In the deep silence that followed, Albert Cressy drained his can and flung it into the scrub.
“After that, our farm went downhill. No-one was buying. They couldn’t prove anything, just gossip, but your father...” He uttered the last word with difficulty. “Your father tried to get me killed. He was one of them. That is fact.”
Cacheux looked from one to the other, their words like a winter sea rising up his body, numbing and slow.
“Then he took the road from us. Kicked us when we were down, the bastard. He greased a few palms, fiddled the Cadastre at the Mairie, no problem. Course, all that made my wife ill and she never recovered.”
“I am truly sorry. But the sins of the fathers cannot be visited upon their children.”
“That’s not all, Monsieur le curé.” Cressy interrupted. “Take the name Éric. Yours too, unless I’m mistaken.”
“Don’t be absurd!”.
“I’m not. It’s no coincidence. Your mother wanted the same for her only child.”
“My mother?” Cacheux’s torch clattered to the ground. His mouth fixed open.
“She’s a Jew. But of course,” his voice lowered even in that wild lonely place, “nobody else knows.” He put a finger over his lips. “We have at least done the Cacheux family that favour.”
The priest’s thoughts spun back like a tape on rewind. Graves. Her never-ending searching... His trembling was nothing to do with the wind.
“Course, what she did for you was to leave you uncut, and a good job, too.”
Cacheux stared, nonplussed suddenly recalling that hot day at Vilabou. “And, funny thing, we still see her around, don’t we, ’phonse? Poking about, still hunting for him. Some say she’s a bit touched, but they’d never tell you – a man in your position and all that. But we’re not impressed as you know. We’re outside your stupid flock.”
“Too right.”
“But as one voisin to another, we‘ll keep stumm, unless...”
“What do you mean, unless?”
“We want our road back. No ifs, no buts. It’s ours by rights, but your old man could block it, keep us in our place with no access. Do what he bloody well likes, whatever he bloody fancies.”
“I’m sure it won’t come to that.” Cacheux could barely speak.
“You’ll see that it won’t, Father. We can rely on you.” Alphonse picked up the torch and shone it into the priest’s eyes. “After all, you have God on your side.”
The wind now a tide in that dry exposed place with nothing to impede its run in from the sea, snatched Cacheux’s soutane and lifted it behind him. He faced the force, leaving behind the two men and their spectres. Did he really have God on his side, or were they just liars and wreckers? It was easier for him to keep walking, to shift his confusion and the acid numbness in his stomach.
He was back in the Hôtel Marionnette seeing Plagnol’s circumcised penis, and he wondered what sort of mother could hand her son such a passport to peril? But he’d been almost proud of it, The Pigface, strutting about, jiggling it in his hand like some soft toy. And then, like a meteor imploding inside his head, the implications of his own mother’s legacy, hit him.
As if drunk, Cacheux followed the slope down between vines that led into an
alleyway between a new barn conversion and his church. One hand tight around his rosary, the other on the torch whose bulb was fading fast until the first street lamp and the luxury of light.
Well don’t think I’m going to do a Dan Burros and blow my brains out. I won’t give anyone that pleasure, not round here at any rate. God made me leave my gun behind for a reason, didn’t you, Lord? Speak to me...
***
Pech d’Oriole, once a cluster of cabanes, was now a small centre for tourist wine tastings. The purpose-built two-tone building painted with bottles of the Chȃteau de Fourcat and Domaine de Dufort wines was as big as the Romanesque church of St. Honoré itself. It also drew in more paying customers tired of the blowing sand along the barren coast and those looking for bargain second homes.
He noticed the Tuzons sitting on old wooden chairs outside, and smiled a ‘Bonsoir’ as he headed for the Virgin’s Arch. He quickened, fearful that they might see the black halo which now hung about his head.
“Father, not so fast,” Old Tuzon got up and beckoned. “We want to thank you. Me and the wife.”
The priest sighed. All he’d wanted was to check things for the morning, and have a few quiet moments to clear the Cressys’ words from his mind.
“Our grandson’s doing very well, after your prayers.”
Florence Tuzon nodded agreement. “Christophe de la Bonté, you must have special gifts indeed. That’s all I can say. Our little Marc is back in school and full of life again.”
“That is good news.” Cacheux brushed her shoulder with his hand. “However my Indulgences are no different from others the world over. It is God you must thank.”
“We have done and still do.” But the woman was peering intently into his eyes as though detecting the blight that had settled there. “How come you’re so pale, Father? Pale as death. Come and share a bite of something with us. Nothing special, you understand, but it’ll put some colour back in your cheeks.” And before he could stop her, she’d reached up to his throat and straight away clucked alarm.
“Yvon, look, he’s been hurt. Mother Mary, your neck, it’s full of bruises!”
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