A little yellow fluff sits at our feet nibbling contentedly on sandal straps and pant hems. He’s a guinea fowl just out of the nest, imprinted on my Uncle Louis (or great-Uncle, or Uncle-once-removed, or whatever he is—the husband of the daughter of the sister of my mother’s father, for what it’s worth).
The grass around us is brilliant green except where the sheep file through between their shed and the fields beyond. The sheep always take the same route, wearing the grass down to dirt in a single thin line that looks like a bicycle track, field to shed to field again, where they plop down in the unmowed grass and gossip until someone comes along to spook them. Which is everyone, anyone passing through—they’ll startle at anything, fleeing in a heavy clatter of hooves to the shade of another tree on the farm, where they’ll settle down again to pass the time.
For dinner we’re eating mutton, stringy and chewy in a thick brown sauce. That and about a dozen other selections from the farm: sweet cherries plucked from the orchards out back; wild strawberries that grow in the forest nearby, each fruit barely as big as a fingernail; potatoes and green beans, beets, and organic bread from the only baker in the little town of one hundred. Pommes et haricots verts, betteraves et pain bio, because it seems odd to name things in English when they’re eaten in French.
And pretzels, cheese puffs, salted peanuts, couscous, cubed ham from a can, tuna, sardines, even cheese from Alsace, nearly the length of a country away. Bottled water alongside the home-brewed hard apple cider, the pommeau, pride of the family. All the leftovers on our plates chucked over the fence to the chickens, who scrabble and claw for the bits of food with a ferocity that sends the ducks skittering into their protected run. (A tube of wood paneling running alongside the fence—because these ducks, unwelcome in the chicken coop, had been falling to hawks one by one as they slept outside.)
The hills are made of gray slate, and there’s slate everywhere, poking out of the ground in towering outcroppings. Everything builds on it, like the shed that uses a cliff of slate as a back wall. A multistory furnace that looms over the property, an oven that was once used for making chalk. There’s a gentle slope of hill up to the top of it, where you drop in limestone and let it heat and later, from the bottom, retrieve a bundle of chalk. But those days are long gone, and the hill is thick with grass and flowers and weeds (and sheep droppings).
I know that just out of sight, behind a low wall, there’s a magpie trap. You trap one magpie, clip its flight feathers, and imprison it in a chicken-wire box barely large enough for it to turn around in. Give it food and water, and surround it with layers of empty traps. The caged magpie, horrified at its predicament, throws itself against the walls of the enclosure until it bloodies itself, maddened by fear and claustrophobia. It’s crazed screeches draw in other magpies, which are caught by the ring of traps around the central bird. All the magpies in the traps beat furiously against the wire, but the traps are well-built, farm-built, made by hand, and they’ll last longer than the birds’ own flesh and blood.
In the sheep field a series of dead ducks are strung out along the slope of a broad hill, tantalizingly white and plump. They’re laced with poison, gifts to the hawks that ate my Uncle’s ducks weeks before. Don’t tell anyone, he instructs me with a smile—it’s illegal. Of course I am terrible at not saying things, but so is everyone in the family. My relatives say the good and the bad, that it’s cheaper to live on unemployment than to farm, that the only members of the family who weren’t poor were the ones who moved to the city and started a business (and lost it in the war, while the farmers farmed on). That there are ten generations of my family buried in a lot nearby, and I see that the graves are falling apart, dark gray rocks cracked and crumbling, sinking into the ground, covered in black and red and white mosses. On some of them you can’t even read the names anymore.
But for now the air is thick and hot and wet. The Sun beats down, the guinea fowl nestles between my mother’s feet, and the chickens complain in the background about something or the other.
Cathy, this is beautiful.
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