In This Hospitable Land

by Jr. Lynmar Brock

  Most farms had no springs and water coming only from irrigation trenches presented a major challenge. André understood spring-fed water was not often found along these rocky hillsides but he had no desire to depend on the runoff from another property, although ancient right allowed the use of such water. His family’s health was the overriding consideration.

  Parking beside a small café opposite the only house on the road, André looked over the small gathering of homes of Soleyrols ranged down the valley side below, their red-tiled roofs sticking up through the trees. Breathing in the loamy smell of summer’s end, he could readily imagine almost nothing had changed since these buildings were erected two or three hundred years ago when families much like his own had come to this remote locale to escape persecution and attempt to scratch out a precarious existence on this marginal land.

  Perhaps a bite to eat and a cup of coffee would restore his energy and lift his spirits. The café’s proprietor might know something about the farm suggested by the notary that supposedly sat on the mountainside well above the road. The café looked inviting: a two-story building with a single front door opening directly onto the roadway, flanked by three windows, the shutters of which had been flung wide open. Smoke drifted up from the chimney in white wisps curling in the gentle breeze. André entered the larger of two rooms containing a few tables bare of any setting but salt and pepper shakers and an ashtray. A woman stood beside the counter up front. Several older male customers who were hunkered over glasses of wine stopped speaking when André appeared.

  “You’re new here,” Madame Brignand announced, introducing herself as a member of the family that owned and ran the café. In her early forties, Madame was ample but firm and wore her blonde hair pulled tight, tied in a knot at the back of her head. As her arms reached out to serve the coffee André requested, her sweater pulled up enough to reveal a hint of belly. Her fingers were red and cracked from constantly washing and drying dishes and from carrying in wood to feed the small fireplace. Her teeth were straight and white. Little crow’s-feet poked out from the corners of her blue eyes.

  Smelling the soup simmering on the stove in the back room and the round, earthy bread sitting out on a cutting board with butter, cheese, and country pâté laid out beside it, André asked if he might also have some of these. Madame Brignand nodded assent and led him to a table. The clientele resumed their talk.

  Then Madame brought him his big bowl of soup and asked, “What brings you here?”

  Blowing across the surface of his dipped spoon to cool the soup, André answered, “I’m looking for a farm known as La Font. Suggested to me by the notary in Vialas as a place where my family might live.”

  “Refugees?”

  André acknowledged his situation. “Perhaps you can tell me about the place.”

  It might not have been discreet to ask directly but he hoped Madame Brignand or one of her patrons would say more about the property than the notary had. But Madame and the others held back until André explained how he had come to be there, including a brief reference to Mr. Turnip. Then Madame Brignand underwent a remarkable transformation.

  “That crazy brother of Suzanne Maurel’s?” she asked excitedly, and when André confirmed that by asking in turn, “The high school teacher?” Madame began chattering on familiarly about what a wonderful person Madame Maurel was and what a shame that they saw her in Soleyrols so rarely—though that was understandable, her poor husband having gone blind.

  Silently she led André by the hand to the front door and pointed across the road.

  “That house is ours,” she said with obvious pride, “and it’s available.”

  André complimented her on the attractiveness and quality of the dwelling but explained it was simply too small for so many Sauverins and sat on a plot too tiny for farming on the scale he anticipated. At best it would accommodate an herb garden. His family could not live on herbs.

  Grasping André’s real need, Madame suggested hiking up the slope behind the café. “I’ll show you the way.” After bringing him back through the café into the storage room, she opened a small door hidden from the road and indicated a path leading uphill to and through trees. “You might find what you’re looking for there. At La Font.” She smiled and gave him a little push. “You can pay up when you come back to tell me what you think,” she said, winking. “And when you do? Call me Albertine!”

  The next day Denise hid her trepidation, keeping an encouraging smile on her face because André was so excited—more excited even than after solving the plum problem. He couldn’t wait to take her to Soleyrols and the farm he hoped they’d move to.

  It would be good if she agreed this was “the right farm,” to end André’s wearying search and because Louis, Rose, and the children were restless after a week and a half week at the Hotel Guin. But she was worried. André acknowledged that the property was a little rundown and he hadn’t met the owner yet. What if the owner, like Claude de Montfort, proved a brute?

  Approached from the east Soleyrols seemed pleasant but wasn’t particularly distinguishable from other little hamlets nearby. But its tiny size and anonymity were appropriate for people who wished to blend undetectably into the landscape.

  André led Denise into the crowded café. The clientele consisted mostly of older gentlemen dressed in traditional farming garb. Two young women in their late teens—nicely built light blondes wearing matching floral-print cotton dresses draped just above the knee—skittered about responding to constant calls for “a bit of marc.”

  Emerging from the café’s back room, Albertine Brignand explained, “Marc is our locally made brandy. Goes with coffee!”

  André greeted Albertine as he would an old friend and she—effusively delighted to meet Denise—expressed her hope that Madame Sauverin would be as enthusiastic about La Font as her monsieur. She informed them the farm’s owner, Gustave Chatrey, would be up there soon. But there was no reason André and Denise couldn’t hike up the hill to look around. The hillside was steep enough to make Denise grateful for her athletic youth and the enduring strength of her legs. She could just make out the property some twenty minutes away.

  Soon she could see the place more clearly. Impressively large, it consisted of an exceptionally long farmhouse and four outbuildings all made of stone. The house and two small barns had roofs but the other structures had lost theirs.

  It was the highest residence on the mountainside. Denise could just make out the extent of the pasturage.

  As they got closer the farmhouse looked even more massive. The stone walls stood tall and straight—solid, enduring testimony to the hard and thoughtful work of the farmhands and masons who had set these great weathered stones in place long before.

  The farmhouse was built against the slope of the hill which rose through various mountaintops to the peak of Mont Lozère. “The highest mountain in all the Cévennes,” André said. Huge horseshoe arches undergirded the stone veranda that ran the length of the house. Underneath, where the ground sloped up and away, the arched areas were filled with brush and other remnants of the distant time when this had been a working farm.

  “Shelter,” André enthused, “for chickens and rabbits, maybe even pigs.”

  With the pride of possession André showed his wife the other buildings and described their potential uses: a big barn with large rafters divided into two sections (“One for goats and sheep, the other for hay and feed”), a smaller barn (“Good for winter storage: potatoes, turnips, cabbage, carrots, beans, and maybe more in the loft”), and a small woodshed presently empty apart from rusting hoes, rakes, and pitchforks. Beyond the woodshed lay the main gardens and the grave of the Chatrey family’s older brother. The depression was never filled in, Albertine had explained to André, after the surviving brother and sisters moved off the farm and took the body with them.

  At the rear of the main house a back door led to what had been kitchen gardens and into the pasture sloping up the mountainside. Farther beyond,
a few apple trees had been planted in careless rows. Then came the chestnut trees which covered land too steep to cultivate and unsuitable for haying. Above that the soil gave out leaving only scrub, scraggly grasses, and isolated, thinly wooded copses.

  “There are some old fallen trees up there,” André said, “with naturally hollowed-out trunks that house beehives—so we’ll even have honey. If we take the place, I mean.”

  What pleased André most was the freshwater spring uphill, not far from the house and from which the house derived its name, short for la fontaine, “the fountain.” The water came clear and cold from the mountain above, running untouched down the hillside to La Font before coursing on to provide water to the café, farms, and houses below.

  “The only farm of all I’ve seen with its own source of pure water,” André proclaimed.

  They mounted the front steps to the stone-paved veranda of the farmhouse and entered through a simple wooden door. The walls of the house were two feet thick.

  Left rough, the outside walls had weathered over the centuries to look like the surrounding mountainsides. Inside wood partitions defined the rooms, guarded against cold drafts and exemplified the simple, modest style of the place.

  The four rooms were laid out railroad-style. Each had one small window set high. At one end of the house was the storage room, its walls and rafters lined with hooks.

  “That’s where we can keep all the foodstuffs we’ll need on a daily basis,” André said.

  Then came two bedrooms, each containing an ancient armoire, tall and severe, and a large wood-framed bed covered with a canvas mattress filled with old straw. In the middle bedroom an extra bed had been improvised with two chairs facing each other to support a number of boards.

  “I suppose the children will have to sleep here two to a bed,” Denise said.

  “Not ideal but it might suffice,” André suggested.

  Last and largest was the common room: kitchen, dining room, living room, and playroom in one. The kitchen part, running along a section of the back of the house nestled into the hillside, featured a long refectory table and a sideboard that had stood in place since the 1700s. The wooden chairs had seats of canvas or straw and reeds. Most had holes in them.

  “Two of us can sleep here. Again not ideal,” André said, “but if we can make do…”

  The only source of heat was an open fireplace in the common room—a huge space lined with large stones, with a great mantel above it and a solid chimney venting into the sky. The fireplace was the only place to cook food or heat water in kettles hung on a metal rod stretched above the fire.

  “We can get a woodstove too,” André recommended. “Perhaps Alex can have Lucien Mauriac look into it or Alex might find one himself in Florac.”

  Denise lingered in the back of the kitchen, looking.

  “There’s no running water,” André answered before she could ask. “We’ll have to use chamber pots.”

  Not ideal. But Denise understood they couldn’t have everything. She didn’t even mind that there were no window curtains since privacy was not an issue with no near neighbors. Besides she would be able to purchase material in Vialas to sew curtains of her own for some domestic warmth in the otherwise primitive setting.

  “It’s one of the very few farms with electricity,” André said encouragingly. “At least we can have a little light at night. Maybe we can even get a radio.”

  After long thought Denise said, “I think this will be all right for most of us. But I’m concerned for Louis and Rose. It’s quite a trek up the hillside.”

  “I thought that too,” André said grinning. “But here’s a solution: the little house across from the café. The Brignands have agreed to let us use it rent-free—their contribution to the struggle of refugees like us. It’s just two rooms, but I think my parents will be happy there. It’s level with the road. It already has a woodstove for heat and cooking.” He looked at Denise and said quietly, “Of all the places I’ve seen, this is the largest and most remote. Hopefully we’ll not be obvious to the Vichy authorities or the Germans.”

  Denise smiled and nodded her head in agreement.

  Looking around they were silent, each lost in their own thoughts, until someone outside called out, “Hallo!” Gustave Chatrey pushed open the door. A gnarled, grizzled older gentleman, he was no longer interested in working the slopes of La Font or gathering the plentiful chestnuts. These days he found living in the village far more agreeable and was pleased to think someone might make the farm productive again.

  “We’d like to rent your place,” indicated André.

  “I am a hunter of long habit,” Gustave Chatrey responded. “Of rabbits and pheasants and the occasional deer. I ask only for the game. And you must give me half the apples and chestnuts you gather as is the tradition. Agreed?”

  André asked, “How much do you think that will be? What quantity?”

  “Between twenty and twenty-five hundred kilos,” Gustave allowed. “That’s what we used to collect anyway.”

  “Is that the apples and the chestnuts?” André asked.

  “Just the chestnuts.”

  “And is that the whole or half?”

  “No, no, that’s all of it.” The old farmer saw André’s troubled expression. “It’s some work without doubt. But you’ll see it’s possible. I’ve done it.”

  Gustave showed them his hands rough and calloused from decades of hard work.

  André gave Denise a look as if to say, The quantity of chestnuts is fantastic, all to be picked by hand. Denise tried to answer also with her eyes, We must do what we must do and you know how hard I’ll work to help you!

  “Naturally,” Gustave added, “the property must be cared for. But the first year at least I can help you. I’ll show you the best way to pick the chestnuts and dry them.”

  As he described the age-old drying process, Denise foresaw the demanding labor that lay ahead. But, she thought, La Font is available and viable. It can be made to meet our needs and André believes it’s the best we’ll find.

  Gustave repeated his willingness to help get them started, smiled and held out his hand.

  Very briefly André turned a questioning glance on his wife. She replied with a quick nod of agreement, encouragement, and reassurance.

  André took Gustave’s hand and said, “We’ll take it.”

  The old farmer grunted and gave André’s hand a hard but friendly squeeze.

  “Good,” he said warmly. “The pact is made.”

  Walking home after church, Lucien Mauriac tried not to think about ongoing air battles between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. The loss of so many fighter planes was almost unimaginable but the loss of human life troubled him more deeply. Those numbers too continued to rise. To distract himself he called to mind the astonishing discovery by four schoolboys of wall paintings thought to be ten thousand years old at the Cave of Lascaux. Shouldn’t the people of the world concentrate on preserving such cultural marvels rather than destroying everything humankind had struggled across countless millennia to create?

  Passing the Porfile place he was startled by a piercing shriek. Geneviève was chopping logs to fit inside the woodstove and the wedge holding the steel head onto the shaft came out, letting the ax head fly into her leg. Blood flowed copiously as she sat on the ground in shock.

  “Alex,” she called weakly.

  The mayor of Bédouès couldn’t tell if she was aware he was standing there. Alex came on the run from the other side of the house and the two men stooped to help her.

  “You certainly didn’t miss—your leg I mean,” Lucien said lightly.

  “I suppose you’ve seen cut legs before,” Geneviève said flatly, without amusement.

  Turning to Alex, Lucien quietly told him they must stem the blood loss quickly.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Geneviève announced. She pulled off the scarf tying back her hair and the mayor helped her bind her leg clumsily, trying to tighten the scarf enough to stau
nch the flow without cutting off all circulation.

  As he and Alex helped Geneviève hobble toward the house, blood spurted from the sodden material and Geneviève fell into a swoon. Lucien supported her while Alex clasped his hands tightly around the leg. The scarf slipped to Geneviève’s ankle, leaving the gaping wound exposed to dirt. The cut’s red, fleshy edges throbbed with the pulse of pumping blood vessels.

  The mayor held Geneviève under the arms. Alex lifted her legs, pressing the scarf against the wound. They carried her into the kitchen area and set her down carefully on a short bench.

  “It really doesn’t hurt,” Geneviève said, amazed and bewildered.

  “She needs a doctor,” Alex said.

  Geneviève chuckled a low chuckle. “You don’t believe in doctors.”

  “There is no doctor in Bédouès,” Lucien said anxiously. “Or even in Florac anymore. Because of the war. They’re all away, in hiding or forbidden to practice by law.”

  “What does the big book of homeopathy say?” Geneviève asked.

  “I think she’s delirious from blood loss,” the mayor said softly to Alex.

  “We need to wash out the wound,” Alex said. Positioning Geneviève’s hand to hold the scarf in place he went to the sink for soap and a pan of water. “Is there any medicine available?” he asked the mayor as he bathed the wound gently.

  “I’m afraid not,” Lucien replied, impressed by Geneviève’s bravery.

  “Then I’ll have to use some wine to disinfect the leg,” Alex fretted.

  “I hope not good wine!” Lucien joked as Alex fetched a bottle. Geneviève still didn’t smile.

  After the application of wine and a fresh clean cloth the men carried Geneviève to bed.

  “Now you are truly one of us,” the mayor said sympathetically. “You’ll see: even without stitches or medicine your body will recover with its own natural powers. Just like ours.”

  “Oh that’s nice,” Geneviève said, beginning to drift away. “Funny. It hardly bothers me at all. And I’m glad of the excuse to get some rest.”