In This Hospitable Land (23 page)

The brothers finished up for their father then hurried to the café crowded and abuzz with lively chatter about Hitler meeting with Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his plans to meet with Pétain.

The brothers explained to Louis Brignand what they had in mind.

“Baptiste,” Louis called, introducing a compact, balding man with scarred and grimy hands.

“Good thing you got to me when you did,” Baptiste told the Sauverins cheerfully. “By tonight the snow will freeze hard. Then it will be too late.”

The brothers and Baptiste went into Vialas and bought the last piping available: lead. The question of lead poisoning was controversial. André allowed himself to be swayed reluctantly.

“Galvanized iron or stainless steel would be better but there’s none to be had,” Baptiste complained. “Copper would be good too but it was always a luxury up in these mountains and it was all used up in the French defense effort.”

Snow fell throughout the afternoon. Baptiste seemed impervious to it. There was just enough pipe to reach from the spring through the rough hole he laboriously carved into La Font’s thick back wall and then to the spigot, which splashed water into the newly installed basin.

The basin was shallow and the water flowing into it was icy cold. They worried about what would happen in a hard freeze but Baptiste assured them the water would always be there.

In the middle of the night Geneviève was awakened by a moaning sound right beneath her bedroom.

“Alex. Alex!” she whispered, shaking him, hoping not to wake anyone else.

“What? What is it?” Alex grumbled groggily.

The eerie keening unnerved Geneviève, but Alex said, “Must be that pregnant goat. Want me to have a look?”

“No, you sleep,” Geneviève said, slipping into her farm clothes.

She lit a lantern and carefully made her way down the stone steps to the lower level. Alex’s offer to go had been sweet but what did he know about pregnancy and birth? Not that Geneviève had experience with gravid animals. She just hoped there was some similarity between the two-and four-legged kind.

Inside the arched space she immediately realized the goat was in trouble—wheezing and moaning and writhing in the dirt. The goat was well past her prime and probably shouldn’t have gotten pregnant.

The creature looked up at Geneviève with such pitiable pleading in her huge, liquid eyes that Geneviève sat beside her despite the unpleasant smell. She stroked the beast’s brow and softly told her to try to stay calm though she felt foolish talking to a goat.

As the night wore on Geneviève felt hypnotized by the steady stroking and the goat’s stertorous breaths and periodic whines. Then the goat gave a start and a terrible cry and started licking feverishly at her nether region. Peering through the very dim light Geneviève saw the head of the kid had appeared. She was about to participate in an animal’s birth!

The goat’s desperate struggle panicked them both. Didn’t beasts of burden simply and easily drop their newborns in the field? Not now. All progress ceased.

Acting on instinct, Geneviève tenderly took hold of the kid’s head and began to pull gently but steadily. The process was agonizingly slow but at last one shoulder came through and then the other. Soon the slick, sticky body was lying before her. It didn’t move at all.

Inexperienced though she was Geneviève understood the kid had been born dead. But the mother goat didn’t. Instinctively the old goat licked and licked in a frantic futile effort to bring the stillborn back to life. It was painful to watch the poor thing keep at it. Then it just stopped.

The miserable creature put her mournful head on Geneviève’s shoulder and moaned a very different moan. Were those tears falling from the heartsick goat’s eyes? Geneviève couldn’t tell because she herself was weeping inconsolably.

The old goat recovered quickly and began producing milk. Denise contrived to relieve the goat’s swollen udders by a process of trial and error. Soon she was an old hand at the twice-daily milking, delighted to be able to supply the children with this excellent source of nutrition. At first the cousins complained about the flavor, so different from cow’s milk. Before long they acquired a taste for it.

That was important because having ration coupons did not guarantee the apportioned foodstuffs would be available when Denise and Geneviève made the six-kilometer roundtrip between La Font and Vialas. Some days the greengrocer and butcher had good items on display. Often there was nothing to buy with or without coupons.

Shopkeepers sometimes held back what they could for favored customers. That included the Sauverins because André was highly regarded as a professor. But when there was simply little or nothing edible at hand, how grateful the family was for the lactating goat!

On the last Tuesday of October, Denise made the trek to Vialas alone. The day was frosty but Denise was bundled up and the exertion helped keep her warm, as she was enjoying her rare solitude. She tried to make her mind blank, the better to take in the lovely pristine landscape and the marvelous bracing air, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what she might find in Vialas.

Basics were all she hoped for. She certainly didn’t expect much meat. Even the farmers the Sauverins met at the café, who always showed them the greatest kindness, could only afford to sell them some lamb occasionally—and even less frequently rabbit since everyone wanted to hold on to a breeding pair till spring.

Meals had acquired a sameness that aggravated everyone—Louis in particular. The Sauverins had no choice but to partake of the traditional local breakfast:
bajana,
a soup consisting primarily of dried chestnuts from which the husks had been laboriously peeled by hand. The chestnuts would then be left to soak overnight, after which they would be cooked for the better part of three hours along with some goat’s milk, onion, and maybe garlic.

It took the Sauverins—especially the children—quite a while to get used to the flavor and texture. Fresh bajana was reasonably agreeable—and with a little wine added, as per village custom, even more so. Sour, though, even a pig might refuse to touch it.

Eggs were a special treat for which the Sauverins were grateful to their chickens. Big round loaves of dark, heavy country bread could sometimes be purchased in Vialas. Like the bajana this bread took getting used to but it was very good with the soup and for mopping a plate clean.

Dinner, the day’s largest meal, was taken in early afternoon. Although Denise did the little she could to produce variety, dinner, like breakfast, almost always consisted of soup—usually barley soup for now and for as long as the large sack of grain Alex had sent from Bédouès lasted. The soup was supplemented with a bit of rabbit when they could actually get some, or sometimes fatback, of which they had a fair supply thanks to Camille Mousand and her poacher husband.

“I finally understand the value of Camille’s gift,” Geneviève said. “It certainly makes it a little easier to withstand the chill we must put up with even inside.”

Supper tended to be comprised of leftover soup and some added-in goat cheese. It wasn’t always appetizing but even Louis managed to be cheerful about it since at supper he felt free to indulge his penchant for wine. Rose could hardly chastise him for this indulgence given the circumstances, but she was a little surprised that wine was so readily available.

“I think the Germans made a conscious decision to leave the winemaking industry alone,” André said. “Maybe they hope the French will drink themselves into further acquiescence.”

“The German army drinks a lot of wine too,” Alex put in. “They may be patriotic but they can’t deny French wine is far superior to the swill they produce in Germany.”

When Denise arrived the butcher shop was closed “for lack of product.” But the greengrocer’s was open and though the shelves were mostly bare the shopkeeper reached under the counter for some secreted supplies.

“This is very bad about Laval,” he said weighing out white flour.

“Excuse me?”

“If you ask me the former prime minister invented Vichy. I blame him for this hideous armistice. And now that idiot Pétain has named him foreign minister. I bet Laval is working hard right now to cede even more power to the Nazis. The politicians disgust me! But you’ll see. The Americans will save us just as they did the last time.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Denise told him. “My husband likes many of the Americans he’s met individually but he says they’re a terribly close-minded, isolationist people.”

“I believe that. But now they’re drafting young men even though they’re not under attack. Surely that’s not just for self-defense.”

Denise doled francs from her small purse one by one. The greengrocer amiably double-checked her count and thanked her.

When she turned to go he called, “Just a moment, Madame Sauverin!” He ducked behind the counter and came up with a handful of sweets. “For the little ones,” he said warmly, giving her a friendly little wink.

Walking home with her tiny but precious bundle of purchases, Denise marveled at the greengrocer’s unexpected generous gesture. Surely he had legitimately been thinking of the children but it also seemed as if he had been trying to communicate something more: that the people of Vialas as well as those of Soleyrols knew all about the Sauverins and intended to treat and protect them as they would their own.

These Cévenols might not have much,
Denise cheered and encouraged herself,
but they will never let us go hungry.