At last the fire is smoored, the table cleared, and the house retires. In their room, the brothers lie speaking into the darkness above them, exchanging stories of their father. It is a ritual between them, a thing they must always do, the dead man’s life and character in a dozen worn anecdotes picked from a shared hoard, like that time in the middle of the market he told old Tissot what he thought of him, and the night he dragged the pedlar half drowned from the river and carried him home over his shoulder, and how, at his workbench, with his needles and grommets and waxed thread, he looked like a bull making a daisy chain. .
Such tales comfort the brothers. Such stories make it possible not to tell other stories, like those in which their father is making free with his fists or his belt, his ashplant, his boots, with strips of hide or a pair of newly stitched gauntlets, thrashing the brothers or Henriette or his wife until he fell back, spent and shuddering. Nor do they speak of the last year of his life, though it is this Jean-Baptiste thinks of when they have fallen quiet and Jean-Jacques begins to snore. How their father became lost inside his own head, forgot the names of his tools, then forgot how to use them. How he took to addressing his wife as though speaking to his mother, called Henriette by the name of a long-dead sister. When the crisis was close, Jean-Baptiste was summoned home from the Ecole des Ponts and sat for hours on the stool by the sickbed talking of Maître Perronet, of roads and the grey wings of bridges, while his father lay with his head motionless on the bolster, eyes open, mouth slightly agape. The white lilac was in bloom. Bees and butterflies drifted through the narrow window and, having circled the room’s shade, found their way out again. Twice a week the doctor came from Eperrais, fussed uselessly over his patient. In the family they took turns attending to the glover’s needs, spooning soup into his mouth, propping him on the side of the bed to piss into the pot, wetting his lips, calming his fidgeting. All summer it went on — a whole summer viewed through the green diamonds of the sickroom window — until one afternoon, the air thickening for the last big storm of the season, the stricken man suddenly sat up in bed, grappled Jean-Baptiste’s hands into his own, stared into his face and with a voice hauled from the ice within him said, ‘I do love you.’
Love? Nothing of the kind had ever been said between them before. None of the children would have expected to hear such words from their father. So who, in that little resurrection, did he imagine he was speaking to? Did he know it was his eldest son? Did he think it was Jean-Jacques? Or perhaps his own brother, Simon, with whose absence he had several times held long, muttered conversations? There was no sequel, nothing that might have made anything clearer. Two days later the glover was gathered into an immense and private silence. Two weeks after that, he was dead, a man who, to all appearances, no longer knew his own name.
On Christmas morning — and early even for the country — Jean-Baptiste goes with his mother to the house-on-the-hill, the Protestant house, where she and a clutch of others will pray in the way they prefer. The few who see them on the road pretend not to know where they are headed. Madame Baratte is a decent woman, and there are plenty in Normandy for whom the gospel of Jesus Christ means nothing at all. Let her have her little heresies.
They pass through a well-swept yard, are admitted to the house the moment their faces are seen. To the left of the door is a broad flight of stairs, the stones so well trodden they are like the cast of an ancient riverbed. At the stair’s turning is a pillar, a plain cross scored into the stone, and here there is space enough for six or eight to gather together. A small window gives a view of the road — a view that must once have been more necessary. The pastor is a Dutchman. He speaks French with an accent Jean-Baptiste has always found faintly comical. He is smooth-shaven, has eyes like a child’s. He opens his Bible. The pages are worn to a grey nothing, but he does not need to read from them. He recites.
‘ “Beware the Lord will empty the earth and turn it upside down and scatter its inhabitants. .” ’
No infants? No stables? No shepherds or journeying kings?
‘ “The earth dries up and withers, the whole world withers and grows sick, the earth’s high places sicken, and the earth itself is desecrated by the feet of those who live in it. .” ’
Ezekiel? Isaiah? The others will know.
‘ “Desolation alone is left in the city and the gate is broken into pieces. . If a man runs from the rattle of the snare, he will fall into the pit; if he climbs out of the pit, he will be caught in the trap. .” ’
He does not spare them. He would not consider it kind to spare them. At length — great length — he shuts the book and the little congregation is left to pick through their consciences in silence, while Jean-Baptiste, hat in hand but head unbowed, looks out at the sky and is lost for a time in the beauty and mystery of what is most ordinary. When it is over, the company embrace one another, stiffly, solemnly, then quit the house in pairs, melt into the brightening day.
At the farm, the kitchen is already strewn with relatives. Children — a boy and girl Jean-Baptiste only vaguely recognises — clamber onto his back the moment he sits down. Cousin André is there, of course, looking prosperous, masonic, entertaining the women with tales of small-town scandal. And there too the poorest of the relatives, old Dudo and his wife — pure Baratte peasantry — their eyes untellable from those of the beasts they husband on their scrap of Norman mud. They speak only old Norman, understand no French, and sit at the end of the table smuggling slices of white sausage under their smocks. A plate of it is always left near them for this purpose. Even the children know better than to notice what they do.
In the midst of this, this amiable hubbub, Jean-Baptiste works at his cider. The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes? Having longed to escape Paris, he is anxious now to return. Whatever his life will be, whatever fate it is he is pressed against, it will be lived out somewhere else, not here among the still-loved fields and woods of his boyhood. He drains his mug, chews at something in the bottom of it, and stretches for the jug. His sister settles on the bench beside him. When they were younger they used to fight, and she had seemed to him spiteful, proud, yet now — plain and twenty-three — she is all kindness, and with a wisdom she has pulled down from who knows where, an enviable wisdom. She asks him more questions about Paris, about the fashions, about those Monnards he lives with. He knows she knows he has not told her the half of it. She asks more particularly if he has been in good health. A little fatigued, he says, shrugging. He has not been sleeping as he used to. And then it occurs to him what she might be referring to.