Nevers

by Sara Cassidy

  Odette is enraged. “Are you a thief?” she calls. “Stealing a glimpse?” She takes a fistful of weeds and stuffs them into the hole. There is no sound from the other side. “I hear you breathing,” Odette lies. She stands and puts her hands on her hips. “Sounds like you need to blow your nose.” She studies the wall, takes in the places where the stones are not flush, maps a jagged path of toeholds and handholds, then springs.

  In an instant she reaches the top.

  At the same moment that he does.

  Their faces are so close, the boy’s breath curls up Odette’s nose.

  “What do you want?” she demands.

  “To know who you are,” the boy pants. “That’s all. I’m sorry. No one has lived here since before I was born. Except for the black hen.”

  “Lisane.”

  “Niçois,” the boy says. “Nice to meet you, Lisane.”

  “Lisane is the hen.”

  “Oh.”

  Niçois’s hair is black and curly and down to his shoulders. His face is long, his nose too. His skin is nearly black. His eyes are gentle.

  “At least could you tell me how to get to the baker’s?” Odette asks.

  “If you tell me your name,” the boy counters. He swings himself up and sits astride the wall.

  Odette remains silent.

  Niçois gives up. “Fine. South until you meet the river, then east until you run into the cathedral, then northwest up the alley. People will be coming toward you with baguettes under their arms. When people start moving away from you with baguettes under their arms, you’re there.”

  “Clever,” Odette says, dropping to the ground.

  The boy’s face falls. “I’m not. Come back up!”

  Odette doesn’t have time to sit on a wall, swinging her legs and chatting. “I can’t.”

  “Then tell me your name.”

  Odette sighs. What can she do?

  “Odette,” she spits, and immediately feels lighter—as if she has been robbed.

  Five

  Odette hurries first to the blacksmith’s. The man has dark hair, and his knuckles are lined with soot. He looks familiar, like a stranger she may have watched from a distance or someone in a dream. But, of course, she has never seen him before. She has never been to Nevers. He simply reminds her of other blacksmiths, she guesses, large with muscle and wet with sweat.

  He turns the horseshoes over in his thick hands. “These are lovely. Beautifully made. I can melt them down,” he says in a voice so deep Odette’s sabots hum on her feet. “Who knows what they will become. Tool or weapon?”

  The blacksmith drops several francs into Odette’s hand. It’s a good price. With the coins Odette buys a pot with only a few mends from a tinker, and a hunk of beef from the butcher. It would have been wiser to buy a cow’s tongue, so much cheaper, but its texture—just softer than her own tongue—always makes her gag.

  She scavenges an onion from the marketplace. It has been mildly crushed, by a cartwheel, likely, or a hoof, the skin cracked and its layers exposed, but after a rinse in the city’s wide river, it will be fine to eat—perhaps even more flavorful, Odette thinks, than an onion that has experienced nothing. That’s the kind of thing Félix would have said.

  Finally Odette stands at the bakery’s back door with one of her sabots in her hand, lined with dirt so it won’t catch fire. She coughs to get the attention of the baker’s helper, a boy with an uneven thatch of wheat-blond hair who, without a word, shovels up embers from the bread oven and tips them in.

  As Odette hobbles on one sabot down the lane toward her new home, a large, well-dressed man follows after her. “Miss!” he calls. “May I smell your hands?” It is the man who giggled when the piglet sniffed at Anneline’s ankles.

  Odette is shocked. “My hands? No!”

  “Just a sniff. To identify where you are from, since it’s clear you aren’t from here. Those shoes, that tunic—”

  “No.”

  “I am a scientist. A professor. I study hand smells. At the Sorbonne.”

  “The Sorbonne?” Anneline always boasts that her first husband studied at the Sorbonne.

  “Well, I was a professor.”

  “Maybe one day,” Odette says doubtfully. She gestures at the ashes smoking in her shoe. “I’m in a hurry.”

  The professor wishes her well and bows low. Odette hears him sniff as his nose passes near her hands.

  She is nearly giddy as she flies home. She has food for supper, a cooking pot, embers to start a fire and enough coins left over from selling the horseshoes to pay M. Gustave the first moon’s rent. Mother will be proud, she thinks.

  No. Anneline is never proud—only tired or bored, unless she is blissfully in love. Odette finds her still curled up under her cloak on the sad mattress.

  “Is that you?” Anneline asks weakly. “I’m so cold.”

  “I’m starting a fire. I’ll make a beef stew with carrot root, onion and mint.”

  “Good. I’m ravenous.”

  But Anneline starts to snore just as Odette gets the fire crackling. Odette shakes her when the stew is ready, but Anneline doesn’t waken. Her mother is very warm, Odette notes. Perspiring.

  Anneline sleeps through the entire afternoon, while Odette fills gaps in the house’s stone walls with a paste of mud and grass. Anneline snores through the evening, while Odette sweeps the floors and replaces the missing windowpanes with roof slates she finds in the street. Anneline doesn’t even wake as Odette removes the rotting straw from the mattress beneath her to cram in fresh, new grass, which she has cut from the yard with the folding knife.

  As she always does when she holds the knife’s smooth olive-wood handle in her hand, she had thought of Félix. He had taught her how to sharpen it. “It mustn’t reflect a speck of light,” he had said, holding the sharp blade toward the sunlight. “But don’t get carried away: every time you sharpen a knife, you lose a bit of it. You could sharpen it to nothing.” He’d then held the knife over his black hat so she could watch the dust of the blade’s steel fall like fine silver rain.

  After Félix died Odette claimed the knife for herself. Whenever she produces it, Anneline turns her head sharply. Félix was not like her mother’s other husbands.

  Of the deaths Anneline has inadvertently caused, five were those of her own spouses. The deaths hardly affected her though. She adjusted each time by adopting a small, eccentric habit. When the teacher died, she stopped eating raspberries. Ever since the bank manager died, she stomps when a robin comes near. And ever since the mill owner succumbed, she butters her bread heavily. When Odette’s librarian father died, Anneline stopped wearing panniers, she told Odette—which actually made sense.

  The two had been married only one month. By the time Odette was born, the pale, long-faced, drop-of-royal-blood librarian had been crushed under the wheels of a horse cart. He had been holding Anneline’s hand, helping her hop across a puddle, but as she leaped she knocked him into the street. “My Paris panniers,” she’d explained to Odette.

  There persists a foolish affectation among women who, to be fashionable, strap baskets to their hips before putting on their dresses. The panniers make their hips appear impossibly wide—sometimes as wide as a harpsichord. Women often have to turn sideways to get through a door. To me the fashion is inexplicable. Are women boasting that they can afford the silk required to cover these exaggerated hips? Are they hoping to lure men, indicating that they will surely birth healthy children, having so much room to incubate them? Sometimes I wonder, with all the burdens on them, do women simply want more space? Whatever the reason, the silly fashion killed the librarian who was responsible for Odette’s elongated nose and sizable ears.

  But while the death of the father of her only child had hardly affected Anneline, Félix’s death nearly undid her.

  Félix’s love had been solid, earthy and hearty. When he died Anneline forgot the language of her true self, which Félix, who through his work understood life better than most, had
kindled. His love had revealed the spritely girl with laughing intelligence and easy depths that Anneline had been before she was plunked in a convent school run by cruel nuns. With Félix, Anneline had been happy. Filled to the brim. This had made her generous. For the first time, Odette had been able to be a child.

  Odette was only five when Félix and her mother married, but she remembers him perfectly. The memories are immediate and as deep as dreams. Odette remembers the boom of his laugh—a laugh, her mother once said, that could make flowers bloom. He could be serious though. Thoughtful.

  Odette had often kept Félix company as he dug fresh graves in the cemetery. Her mother liked her out of the house, and Félix was happy to have her near. Odette felt warm when she was with him, when he made her a grass doll or talked to her about the lives of the dead or lifted her onto his shoulders for the walk home, singing “à la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener.” At those times she had felt that of all the places in the world, she was in the right one.

  When she calls Félix to mind, she sees the worn toes of his boots and hears his shovel—schlunk—sliding into the earth. She remembers the dirt that filled the wrinkles of his knuckles and the thick yellow rivers that flowed from his nostrils until he wiped them on the back of his sleeve. Anneline’s husbands before and after Félix were calm men who took pride in being respectable. Félix was not interested in respectability, and he was suspicious of pride.

  When Félix spoke the words dropped from his lips as sure as fishing weights. It seems to Odette that everything Félix ever said has stayed with her, that his memory is bound up with hers. Perhaps that is the nature of grieving someone so large and alive. Their life burrows into yours. How else can you say goodbye?

  Once, Félix had reached into a grave, then straightened and perched two small skulls on Odette’s shoulders. They were children’s skulls that he had dug up by accident. “A couple of playmates for you,” he had said. “I will have to bury them again, but why don’t you give them an afternoon in the sun?”

  Odette had played for hours with the skulls. She’d danced with them in the shade of the lime trees and, during a short rain, cowered with them in the hollow of a tulip tree’s trunk. She’d propped them on a gravestone and given them a lesson in counting. As she counted “one, two…” a pair of yellow-rumped warblers had flown down and perched one on each skull. They had begun to sing there, to trill, and a shiver went through Odette. She imagined that the birds were the children’s souls, returned to earth.

  With Félix, Anneline had breathed deeply. She’d scratched her mosquito bites vigorously. She’d eaten with gusto, her hands pressed close to her lips. Her voice had been full and resonant. In those days she’d squat to stir the fire. She’d draw Odette between her legs, give her the poker and teach her how to make sparks fly and coals throb. But ever since Félix died, nearly ten years ago, her mother’s voice has been as light as gauze, vulnerable to any wind, each word a fleck of ash.

  One morning about nine years ago, while Odette and Félix were in the graveyard, Anneline plucked a chicken, stuffed it with turnips and roasted it over a fire, which she—she, who had not started a fire in years—had raised expertly from a single ember. Roast chicken stuffed with turnips was Félix’s favorite repast. Anneline carried the meal to the graveyard in a basket along with bread, cheese and Hungarian wine, and she and Félix perched side by side on a gravestone to consume their feast, Odette skipping around them as they talked.

  In the middle of their conversation, Félix went silent.

  He fell to his knees, then crawled to Anneline and wrapped his arms around her waist. His face was blue.

  Anneline screamed. “What is it? What are you doing?”

  And then, his head on Anneline’s lap and a hand reaching toward Odette, Félix died. He had choked on a bone from the roast chicken.

  In the days that followed Anneline cried until the trails where her tears ran down her cheeks scabbed over.

  She left no room for Odette to cry too.

  Now, when the moon is high and gleaming like a freshly sharpened scythe, Odette lies down next to her mother and falls into a sleep that she has earned with every muscle and hair. Her mother is still very warm. She seems to have a terrible fever.

  Six

  A magnificent croak cracks the night open, startling Odette from her sleep.

  The croak sounds again. Something needs oiling, Odette thinks.

  She leans out the window and listens. She is sure it is a donkey, braying with surprising earnestness.

  “Chut! That’s enough!” someone yells from a window down the road.

  “Silence, you noisy donkey!” shouts another.

  “You will be all right,” calls a third more gently. “All will soon be well.”

  But the donkey continues its hoarse cries. It is trying to tell us something, Odette thinks, remembering a small dog that had once persistently nipped at her apron until she noticed the shard of blue glass lodged in its leathery paw. Odette had dislodged the piece of glass, using the tip of Félix’s knife, and the dog bounded off, barking twice. Another time, while braiding Anneline’s hair, Odette had been vexed by distant high-pitched whimpering. She had followed the sound and discovered a mouse struggling to stay afloat in a well. This mouse also Odette rescued.

  Odette can hear the townspeople violently slamming their shutters against the donkey’s voice. Should she join the others of Nevers, as heartless as they seem, and return to sleep?

  She listens closely for a few more moments. Perhaps the dear animal has a toothache or a hoof swollen from laminitis.

  Hi han. Hi han.

  Well, all donkeys can sound as though they’re in pain, Odette reflects.

  But then, incredibly, she understands what the donkey is saying. The donkey is braying in Latin. Odette is sure of it. Vos, in lectis vestris! she hears. The wide forehead of Anneline’s fourth husband, Victor, the polyglot, comes to mind, with his thin lips and bad breath, scolding Odette when she grumbled about his lessons: “Latin is a wellspring. There is no French without it. Honor your roots, child!”

  Odette listens intently to the donkey’s congested whinnies, teasing out the words. “You in your soft beds!” it shouts. It then goes on: “Asleep and dreaming. Be glad that you do not stand ankle deep in mud at odds with the horizon. Be grateful that you are not a donkey.”

  Odette’s ears labor. Stellae aequo frigido animo spectant. “The stars stare with icy indifference. The moon is a silent howl. Insects scuttle. Rats leap.”

  Finally, energy waning, the donkey repeats, Cupio asinus non esse. “I wish I were not a donkey. I wish I were not a donkey. I wish I were not a donkey.” At last, silence returns.

  When Odette wakes in the morning, with not even the hem of Anneline’s cloak over her—Anneline has taken it all for herself—she decides she must have dreamed the donkey. Donkeys don’t speak. Not in French. Certainly not in Latin.

  On the other hand, Odette has never once been fooled by a dream.

  She rises and blows on the coals in the fireplace, planning to make some tea and porridge.

  Anneline stirs. She stretches and yawns. Then she freezes, horrified. “Did I have a baby last night?”

  “Of course not,” Odette answers.

  Anneline gestures toward her feet. “Look!”

  Odette’s eyes trace the outlines of her mother’s legs under the cloak and then, between them, a surprising third lump. The lump moves. It thrusts.

  “I’ve always been careful,” Anneline cries, her eyes wild. “After you, I mean. A sponge dipped in vinegar works. Animal intestines are handy too—you tie one end and pull it over like a sock. Of course, simply separating at the right time, just before the big excitement—”

  “Mother!”

  The lump tosses and twists under the cloak. “Well, if it’s a boy he will have to share your inheritance. Thanks to the revolutionaries, daughters matter as much as boys. In the old days you would have gotten nothing.”

>   “You have nothing to leave, Mother.”

  “There’s still time. I’m not going to die tomorrow.” Anneline pats her chin. “Does my neck sag so you think I’m at death’s door?”

  The lump between Anneline’s legs snorts. Odette yanks the cloak away and there, snout gleaming, wriggles the freckled piglet.

  “Oh!” Anneline says and sighs.

  Odette eyes the front door. When she latched it the night before, she had doubted the keeper, which was wobbly on its nails. Sure enough, it now lies on the floor. The excited piglet must have pushed on the door and knocked the keeper loose, gaining entry.

  With another snort the little animal bounces off the bed, trots to the armoire and sniffs at the cupboard’s crooked door.

  “Eggs,” Odette tells Anneline. “About to hatch. Oh no!”

  In a flash the piglet has nosed open the armoire door and leaped inside. Lisane, surprised, squawks and flaps her wings frantically in the small space, knocking an egg to the floor.

  Odette hurries over and cradles the egg in her hands. It has a single fine crack. The piglet leaps excitedly around Odette as if the egg were his. His little snout knocks the egg from her hand. This time it hits the floor with a crunch, and a damp clump of yellow feathers rolls out. Before Odette can retrieve the helpless chick, the piglet starts to lick it. Lisane, still flapping about, stabs at the piglet with her beak, but the piglet continues to lick the yellow ball. Slurp, snuff, snort. It is single-minded. Nothing in all the universe is more important.

  The chick begins to move. Its thin legs tremble and stretch. Its little shoulders shrug, and finally its dewy eyes open. The chick stares at the piglet, who calmly stares back. They keep their round black eyes on each other.

  “This chick is quite big,” Odette calls to Anneline. “The others can’t be far behind.”

  “How many others?”

  “Five. Once they’re grown and laying, roosters aside, we’ll have all the eggs we want.”

  “Well”—Anneline smooths the cloak over her legs—“at least I haven’t had another baby. One slows you down enough.”