Blackbird Fly (28 page)

She led him through the house into the garden where
the ladder sat where she’d left it, leaning on the wall. “I hope it
still works.”

Albert grumbled, angry with the ladder as he carried
it over his head and then out the gate. What was she going to do
about the chimney grate? Pascal stepped out the kitchen door.

“
I began upstairs,” he said. “The
door was unlocked. That is not a good idea, I told you, leaving
doors unlocked, even in the daytime —” He stared at her cast. “What
happened?”

“
The ladder,” she said. “It
toppled.”

“
What were you doing on the ladder?”
His dark eyes looked angry. “That is not for you to do.”

“
So said the doctor. I was looking
at the chimney. I want a grate over it. I think the loir came down
that way.” She sighed. “I kept thinking about his little
whiskers.”

She lay back on Tristan’s bed after Pascal went
upstairs to work. No work for Merle today. Next door, in Yves and
Suzette’s bedroom, the lace curtain blew out on the breeze. She
opened her own window to feel the air and heard Yves’s voice,
murmuring, and Suzette’s high-pitched laughter in response. Were
they making love? A hand appeared and their window snapped
shut.

Upstairs the hammering began. It sounded like the
clatter of her heart.

Chapter
29

The room is dark and Virginia is tired. She’s been
struggling with the baby for at a good half-hour and he won’t
settle down. She’d found milk for it, then changed the diaper so
she knew he was a boy. He wore rags, nothing more than strips of
fabric wrapped around his strong young body.

Outside the noise has been muffled and gone out. That
was so brief she thought maybe she dreamed it. But Weston came
inside and told her the woman had run away. Without her baby,
Virginia asked. It seemed unnatural. She had no business here, she
was a squatter, a whore.

The baby tires of squirming and wailing, nestling
into her shoulder. He is quite big, not walking yet so she thinks
maybe a year old. She doesn’t know much of babies but this one is
not a newborn. He is heavy and uses his hands well, grabbing her
hair, her earrings.

Virginia looked into her purse earlier and found a
few francs. Weston was busy in the back as she slipped out and
bought milk and a loaf of bread. The baby quieted as she walked
across the square.

But that was hours ago. Now he has awakened again,
though it appears another sip of milk has calmed his fears. He
looks at her with wide, startled eyes, as if she means him harm.
Then his body loses the tension and he melts into her shoulder,
rubbing his face on her dress.

Soon his breathing slows and he is sleeping. The
quiet of room is deep. She rubs his little stiff back and he
wiggles, sucking his thumb. Outside Weston is working. She knows
better than to ask what he’s doing. She adores him but she knows
the limit of his patience.

She strokes the baby’s cheek. Someone loved him, he
is fat and adorable with black swirls of hair and big serious eyes
that make love to her.

Weston is washing outside. She has never known him to
be so industrious. He has sweated through his shirt, made his
trousers filthy. She laughs at him, but he is in a black mood,
angry about something. Probably having to work. He goes upstairs
and comes down with a suitcase. He changes his shirt, brushes off
his pants. He is ready to go.

Virginia bundles up the baby, finding a blanket, some
diapers, the bottle of milk. Weston barks at her, what the hell?
She insists, the baby must come. They can’t just leave him. No, he
yells. Yes, she says again. He will be ours now. She holds him
tight against her, perhaps too tight. He whimpers.

We’ll take him to the convent, Weston says. She holds
him tighter. No, she says. We will call him Harold. My father’s
name. He is ours now.

Chapter 30

In the morning the sun promised a hot day. Her wrist
had ached all night and she scratched her forehead with the cast in
her sleep. She was struggling with the espresso maker when Pascal
arrived.

He brought cans of paint and bags of dry plaster
along with plastic bags and a broom. She watched him mount the
stairs with only a nod her direction. Could it be he was almost
done? She’d gotten nothing done yesterday, the ache was so bad in
her arm. Today work called out to her as if punishment for her
stupidity.

Odile Langois called on the new cell phone. She’d
gotten the number from Albert. Could she tour a group tomorrow? Oh,
why not. She wouldn’t be painting. Merle wrote down the time with
her left hand and hoped she could read it tomorrow.

The espresso wasn’t happening. She walked down to the
square to buy a
café au lait
from a small bar where men
stood even at nine in the morning and had a glass of wine or some
eau de vie
in their morning coffee. Merle hadn’t tried that
unique concoction — a pear or plum liqueur, heavily alcoholic, that
oldsters like Albert made at home. It looked like the white
lightning of her youth.

She nursed her
café au lait
at a table on the
sidewalk and made some phone calls. At least she could push buttons
with the fingers on her bad arm. Arnaud Rancard was on vacation
now. She called one of her colleagues at Legal Aid and tried to
have a short conversation about getting a name of a homeless agency
official in Bordeaux before she realized it was after midnight in
New York and apologized. She dug out the phone number of the
criminal lawyer in Bordeaux, and called. She explained to the
secretary, at least she tried to explain, that she couldn’t come
for an appointment, she had to stay in the village. Could Monsieur
Lalouche call her on this number?

As she turned to signal for her check, she saw the
old locksmith, Andre Saintson, at the bar. He leaned forward,
barely upright, raising a cup to his lips. She gathered herself,
bad arm and purse, and went inside.

“
Bonjour, Monsieur. Comment
allez-vous?”
He frowned at her from under bushy eyebrows.
“Merle Bennett,” she reminded him, and they shook hands. He did not
comment on her cast, just shook the ends of her fingers.

“
How is your house?” he
asked.

“
I tried to find you to open the
garden gate. But I got it open. Someone gave me the key.” He nodded
warily. “Remember the garden?”

The bartender, a round man with a three-day beard and
black hair, wiped the bar and listened. She turned to him. “My
garden is like the Tuilleries. Justine Labelle took great care of
it.”

The man flinched. She said, “Did you know
Justine?”

“
Non
,” he answered quickly,
eyes darting at the other man at the bar.

“
Did you know Justine Labelle?” she
asked the stranger, a farmer by his looks. He threw down some coins
and stalked out. She turned back to Andre. “
Et
vous
?”

He sneered, nodding. “
Une
putain
, a
whore.”

“
Where did she live before she came
to my house?”

He lit a cigarette, taking his time. “I don’t know
where.”

“
Bordeaux,” offered the bartender.
“So says Jean-Pierre.”

“
Why did she come here? Did she just
like this town?” Neither man commented. “Or for business?” The
bartender leered and muttered something.

“
Qui sais
?” Andre mumbled.
Who knows.

What had happened to him after he changed her locks?
Had he been threatened by the gendarme? Or had he just decided to
hang out in bars all day, avoiding her? She didn’t think she’d get
an answer.

“
It must have been disgraceful,
having a
putain
here.” The bartender squelched a smirk. “Are
there others? My husband’s parents would not have liked her living
in their house. You, monsieur,” she said to the bartender. “Do you
know anyone of the Chevalier family?” He said no. “The family gave
the house to my husband’s mother. She was a Chevalier. Someone must
know them.”

The bartender spoke rapidly to Andre who told her,
“They all left town years ago, when he was a kid. Some kind of
scandale.
”

“
About what?”

Andre and the bartender talked so fast she hardly
caught a word. Andre, who spoke slowly, said, “His mother was very
upset. She was a friend of one of them and she never saw them
again.”

“
Does his mother still live
here?”

“
She died last winter.”

“
Can you think of anyone who might
remember the scandal?”

Andre smoked. The bartender had no ideas up his
wine-stained sleeves.

“
This town is full of old people.
You must know someone who likes to wag his tongue.”

“
Not many in this town.” Andre
drained his cup. “How about your neighbor?”

“
Madame Suchet? She’s not old enough
to remember, is she?”

The bartender was glaring at the old man. “Perhaps
not. You’re right. Too young.”

Merle held the small plum tart from the patisserie
against her cast as she knocked on Madame Suchet’s door. The pear
tart had broken the ice, she was hoping plums would continue the
thaw.

Madame opened the door, smoothing down the front of
her blouse. A full-breasted woman, she often left her blouse
unbuttoned to her décolletage, probably because the buttons refused
to hold. Today she burst from a white blouse with tiny blue flowers
embroidered on the collar. Her skirt was pleated in green. Her hair
was simple, bangs across her forehead and a platinum dye on her
chin-length bob.

“
Bonjour, madame
,” she said.
She presented the tart and smiled, and with hesitation, Mme. Suchet
invited her inside. She was just having her morning coffee. She
sliced the tart and served it on china plates. They tasted it in
her small living room, a salon that had a formal air with doilies,
old black-and-white framed photographs, and a bit of
dust.

Madame asked how the house was coming. “
Bien,
bien, merci
,” Merle smiled. A little accident with the ladder
yesterday. She grimaced and held up her cast.
You have a lovely
home.
Have you lived here long, she asked.

“
All my life,” Madame said, smiling.
“Except for the years I was married and lived in Paris.”

“
Then perhaps you knew the owners of
my house?”

“
My parents knew them, the people
who lived there during the war.”

“
The Chevalier’s?”

“
That was not the name.” Madame
frowned, looking out the window at Merle’s house. “Sebastien? He
was Italian. Sabatini, that was it.”

“
And his wife, she was
Italian?”

“
No, she was from nearby. Perhaps
here in the village. “

“
Was she the aunt of Marie-Emilie
Chevalier?”

Her finger flew to her chin as if this had not
occurred to her. But yes, she said, that is how the house passed to
Marie-Emilie and her husband. During the war the Sabatini’s left,
abandoning the place. Things were very bad here then. The
resistance fighters were everywhere, working against the Vichy
government. That often brought retaliations, accusations of spying
or hiding Jews or black-marketeering. People learned to keep to
themselves, to lay low. Monsieur Sabatini had fought for the French
and was gone for much of the war.

It didn’t take much to get Madame Suchet remembering
the past. Mme Sabatini had asked the young Madame Suchet, she was
only a girl then, to help in the garden, to pick fruit or hang
laundry or help pluck chickens. Things children did in every house.
The woman softened into the chair, cuddling her cup in both hands.
Her face had lost that hostile air as she remembered the old days.
Merle felt the wall fall away between them. They were just two
women, alone, and not so very different.

“
Where was your father during the
war?”

“
He had gone into the army early,
drafted because he did not have a farm to maintain. He was a mason
here but in the army he learned explosives. But after the surrender
he was taken prisoner. He came home after the war a broken
man.”

Madame went to the mantel and took down a faded
photograph of a young man in uniform, so proud, so young. He was
twenty-seven at the war’s start.

“
Did the Sabatini’s have
children?”

“
No. They were young too, younger
than my parents.”

“
Do you know what happened to
them?”

“
For the first few years of the war
she took in laundry, bartering for food. But as things got worse
and he didn’t come home, she grew thin and sick. Finally she went
to live with relatives somewhere. She came back for a little while
after the war, but things were very bad here. No jobs, the farms
abandoned, no animals or men to work the fields.”

The woman was talking slow enough that Merle could
understand almost everything. Maybe her French was getting better.
“But your parents kept their house.”

“
And so did the Sabatini’s. But
eating was another matter. Unless you had land, with animals to
slaughter, chickens for eggs, a goat, room to grow vegetables, you
didn’t have food. My mother and her older brother went to work for
a dairy, and that kept us alive.”

“
Did you know
Marie-Emilie?”

“
Non.
After the war I went
north to find work, and met my husband.”