Nevers

by Sara Cassidy

  Odette long ago devised a way to stop her mother’s thoughtless words from piercing her heart —she imagines a Gaul warrior’s breastplate where her ribs are.

  “I suffered last night,” Anneline says. “But I’m better now. Even the bed seems softer than it was.” She stands and pulls her cloak tightly around her. “Do you have a coin so I can get some paper? I must post my notice.”

  “You shouldn’t go out,” Odette says. “You were fevered in the night.”

  “New town, new hope,” Anneline recites. She runs her fingers through her hair and re-pins her chignon. “I have a good feeling.”

  “You always do,” Odette says.

  “This time I really do.”

  “You always really do.”

  “Well, this time I really, really do.”

  Every time they land somewhere new, Anneline posts a note in the town square.

  Five summers ago, the year that Robespierre was guillotined, you arranged delivery of a small package marked “for A and child” to Madame Lamont’s boarding house in Cluny. It held a key and directions to a bridge where a wooden box was wedged between the girders. The key worked, but the box was empty. I am sorry to have failed you. Contact me at…

  No one has ever responded. But Anneline persists.

  The letter that came with the key said the contents of the box wedged under the bridge would unite Anneline with her “dead husband’s wealthy family.”

  Anneline had a few dead husbands from wealthy families—families she knew had no wish to be reunited with her, considering her culpability in the men’s deaths. Still, she was curious. The merest hint of wealth stirs curiosity in people, I have noticed. They stop talking incessantly about themselves and start asking question after question. It is as if they hope to ferret out a secret path or some potion that will secure riches for themselves.

  Odette thinks there is something more than greed that drives her mother to keep searching though. She thinks that Anneline hopes the box somehow concerns Félix. Félix had lost touch with his only sibling during the Revolution, which aggrieved him. Perhaps this brother has fallen into riches and wants to share them with her.

  Anneline has no siblings. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father followed soon after, dead of a broken heart. So Anneline was delivered to a Catholic orphanage when she was three.

  “We didn’t even have our own beds,” she told Odette one night after she had had too much wine. “We were moved every night.”

  Odette is grateful sometimes when her mother drinks too much wine. It opens her like a book, and her memories pour onto her tongue. “They didn’t want us to get attached to anything or anyone. If we did, we might unite and defy the nuns. If two of us laughed together, we were separated. Some of us developed ways of laughing that didn’t look like laughing. Hopping on one foot, for example, or tugging an earlobe. Trust me though—we cried far more than we laughed.”

  So when Anneline received a package with a key and a note mentioning wealth and family, she had been intrigued. Odette, though only nine, had found a farmer willing to rent out his rowboat and had rowed her mother down the Saône until they reached the bridge. As soon as they spied the box wedged between its beams, Anneline had leaped up, upsetting the boat. Odette, trying to restore balance, fell into the cold, murky river.

  The box was empty except for a scrawled note. It read:

  I got here first!

  Soggy and dispirited, Anneline and Odette hadn’t spoken the entire way home. Odette rowed and Anneline sobbed. Silently. Chest heaving. Shoulders shaking, tears digging gullies through her face powder. Her quiet sobbing had struck Odette. Normally when Anneline cried, she made ample noise, her sobs demands for attention, for favors. Odette realized in this moment of Anneline sobbing quietly with a kind of purity that her mother had wishes Odette had never imagined.

  “Why are you crying, Mother?” she had asked softly.

  “I-I—” Anneline blotted the streams of kohl pencil beneath her eyes with the backs of her index fingers. “I wanted some independence. That is all. Let’s not speak of it again.” Anneline shook her long, shining hair and looked over the boat’s edge. “If Félix were here, he would bash one of those fish with the back of an oar. He would tear out the backbone and vertebrae as a tailor would stitching. And we would feast.”

  Odette had itched to bash one of the pale bodies that swarmed around them, but she knew it would rock the boat dangerously again, which her mother would not appreciate. Three nights later, however, she wove a trap from reeds and left it in the river for an hour. But when she presented her prey to her mother, Anneline stared at it blankly. “A dead fish? Really, Odette.”

  Now, in Nevers, Odette hands her mother a coin for her to buy some paper. Her mother doesn’t ask where the coins came from. She never does. Visibly shivering, Anneline steps into her satin shoes. The shoes are pink, embroidered with silver thread, perhaps the most beautiful item she owns, but the color is fading, and the toes are frayed.

  “Do you have to put up the notice?” Odette asks. “No one ever responds. And we need the coins to pay M. Gustave. And buy a chicken from him. You promised him.”

  “Of course I need to post the notice,” Anneline answers. “You’ll see. Someone will answer one day. You, girl, need to learn about persistence.”

  Seven

  The chicks tap steadily at their shells. Odette pours water into a piece of a pottery jug she found in the yard and picks nasturtiums to add to the corn, so that Lisane can stay near her chicks while they hatch, a high-pitched parade that could take three days. Meanwhile, the spotted piglet carries its beloved chick gently in its jaws and sets it near the fire, then lies down and curls around it.

  Odette firmly secures the keeper to the door, then returns to the yard to start a garden bed. While digging, she feels in her shoulder blades a humming alertness, a self-awareness that makes it difficult to concentrate on her work.

  “I see you,” she says.

  “You can’t possibly see me. Unless you have eyes in the back of your head.”

  “Then you see me. I know you are watching me.”

  “Meet me up top,” Niçois begs through the chink in the wall.

  “I’m busy.”

  “You’re shy.”

  “That’s presumptuous.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means you think you know things before you actually do.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Niçois scrambles up the wall. “Come up. It’s fun.”

  Odette continues to dig.

  Sitting on top of the wall, Niçois swings his feet and whistles as he peels bark from a stick. His frivolousness makes Odette work harder at clearing the ground. She gathers fallen branches to map out a hexagonal shape for the small plot.

  “That’s pretty,” Niçois says. He lies along the top of the wall and crosses his hands over his belly. White moths flit around him. He closes his eyes. “Where are you from?” he asks sleepily.

  “Places,” Odette grunts. “Lots of places.”

  “I was born in this town. In Nevers. I learned to crawl here, to walk here, to run here. I know every corner. As my mother likes to say, my ears have heard every church bell that has rung in the past thirteen years, and every clap of thunder.”

  Odette thrusts her hoe into the ground.

  Niçois continues. “I have consumed only water from its wells, and bread made from the wheat of its fields. I am made of this place. Made of here.”

  Odette clenches her jaw. Would he ever be quiet?

  She is made of tumult. The only steady thing in her life is her unsteady mother. It is very important for Odette to get the six edges of the garden straight and sure. And to keep digging. To keep working.

  But life was tumult for everyone, wasn’t it? Always changing, whether they realized it or not. Every bell Niçois heard had rung differently—the clapper striking in new plac
es—at a different hour on a different day, hadn’t it? Way back when Odette was small and hopeful, Félix had once told her, as he stood waist deep in a new grave, “You can never step into the same river twice.”

  Odette had sat at the edge of the grave, her chubby legs swinging in the dark, cool air, heels brushing against the new grave’s side, loosening sprays of soil. “Or the same grave,” she had answered, smiling.

  Félix laughed heartily. “That is true. I have been hopping in and out of this one all day, and each time I do, it’s a little deeper.”

  “You’re like a gopher,” the young Odette said.

  The gravedigger reached out and tousled her hair, peppering her scalp with crumbs of dirt. He grew serious. “I guess everything stops when you’re dead. The same forever.”

  “Don’t ever die,” Odette whispered.

  “I’ll do my best,” Félix had said. “For you.”

  Odette plunges her garden spade into the dirt.

  On top of the wall, Niçois yawns. “When you close your eyes, do you see church windows?”

  Odette knows just what he means. “No,” she answers.

  “Pieces of colored glass, shimmering. Or sunlight on the back of a river.”

  “No,” Odette repeats. She stands and stretches. She watches the piglet as it trots out the back door, hops down the top two steps, then turns around and squeals. The chick, already on its feet, wobbles after it and peeps. The piglet squeals encouragingly. The chick edges toward the stairs, then tumbles and rolls. The piglet leaps down the next two steps and this time guides the chick with its snout. They continue this way, with the piglet squealing and snuffling and the chick peeping, until they reach the yard.

  “I wonder if we sound like that to them,” Niçois says.

  Odette laughs despite herself.

  “Peep,” Niçois says.

  “Snort,” Odette replies, and then she flushes. She sizes up the hexagonal patch of dirt.

  “You need a pitchfork,” Niçois says, leaping off the wall and out of sight into his own yard. A minute later he arrives at the top of the wall again, panting a little. “Stand back!”

  Odette steps back, and Niçois hurls the pitchfork so that its teeth sink into the hexagon of bare earth. Then, its grip not deep enough, the pitchfork falls over.

  Niçois leaps down so that Odette and he stand face-to-face. They are of identical height.

  “How old are you?” Niçois asks.

  “Fourteen.”

  Niçois smiles. Something thrums in Odette, a slow lightning bolt, warming her from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.

  “My mother says that work is best accomplished if you take regular periods of rest,” Niçois says. “When a woman gives birth, she’s wracked with pains for a minute or two. And then she gets to rest between them for several minutes. Contractions, they’re called. The seizing pain.”

  Odette wonders how this boy knows more about childbirth than she does.

  “Well, I can’t rest. There’s no time.” She doesn’t like how her voice sounds. She draws her lips between her teeth and gnaws them to get them to soften. “I did need a pitchfork,” she says, prying up a block of dirt and flipping it over. “Thank you.”

  The chick totters over to Niçois. The boy takes a chunk of Odette’s freshly turned soil and holds it near the chick, pointing at the beetles scurrying across it, and making kissing noises with his lips. The chick clicks her beak, then clamps onto a bug and gobbles it down. Then another. She eats until her eyes shrink and she collapses into sleep. The piglet carries her gently between his teeth to a shady spot and lies beside her, kicking away any fly or ant that comes close.

  Odette wipes her face with her apron. She surveys her work.

  “My mother has seeds,” Niçois says. “Mostly for herbs, but vegetables too.”

  Something loosens in Odette. The spacious feeling is unfamiliar—frightening and pleasant at once. She takes a deep breath of the earthy air and feels she has not breathed so deeply in a long time.

  “I heard something very strange last night,” she tells Niçois. “A donkey, I think.”

  Niçois laughs. “You and everyone else. That was Anne. He doesn’t mean to wake us all up. He can’t help himself.”

  “Clever name for a donkey,” Odette says (since âne means “donkey.”) “Though it is a female’s name.”

  “It just seems to fit. People have tried others. The Great Disruptor was one. But really, he’s softhearted.”

  Odette considers telling Niçois about understanding Anne’s brays. But he would think she was silly, which she isn’t. She must just have been tired, she tells herself.

  Niçois’s eyes light up. “You must meet him! He stands in a small field in the shadow of the cathedral. Let me show you. I’ll show you all of Nevers! Its roads and alleys, the paths to the river, the faïence factories—they’re closed up now, nothing but piles of broken pottery. Let me show you why Nevers is the best town in the world.”

  “How would you know?” Odette laughs. “You’ve never been to any other.”

  “It must be the best town in the world,” Niçois says, “because I am perfectly happy here.”

  Odette looks at him doubtfully.

  He smiles. “You will be too.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Niçois looks down at his feet. “Presumptuous.”

  Odette thrusts the pitchfork into the dirt so that it stays. “Show me.”

  Eight

  To a bird in the sky, the town of Nevers is a handful of stones flung on a grassy slope facing the slow, wide Loire River. Poor people, who can’t afford land in town, build houses on the other side of the river, which floods in spring when the river rises. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that the poor have fewer choices than the wealthy. Poverty is like a prison or a bad spell that is nearly impossible to break.

  Niçois leads Odette to a green expanse beside the river. They watch boatmen moving coal from one boat to another. On the river’s edge, not far away, a crowd of women wash mountains of clothes. The air reverberates with the spanks of their paddles.

  “My mother is down there with all five of my shirts,” Niçois tells Odette as a yellow butterfly alights on his head. “Well, except this one that I’m wearing. The women of Nevers wash the family clothes twice a year. It takes three days. They call the first day Purgatory—you know, where people wait after dying to see whether they’ve made it into heaven or not? That was yesterday. The clothes were boiled in water and ash and left to soak overnight.

  “This morning the laundry cart rolled through the town’s streets. Women load their wet laundry onto the cart, then climb on top and bump down to the river. Sometimes they sing. Perhaps you heard them?”

  Odette had. She had wondered drowsily if it was a traveling band that would be singing for coins in the marketplace.

  “Today the work is hard, as you can see,” Niçois says. Odette watches the women, their backs bent over rocks, kneading and slapping their clothes incessantly. “Their arms will ache for weeks. Today is Hell.

  “But tomorrow, when the clothes are clean and dry and have the smell of green air and crisp sunshine—tomorrow is Paradise.”

  Green air and crisp sunshine, Odette thinks to herself. She knows those smells but would never have found words for them. Niçois uses words in ways she has never heard.

  Two women gather up the washed pants and shirts and jackets and twist them until no more water squeezes out. Then they lay the clothing across the tall grass to dry. The side of the hill is covered.

  “For a few sous, older boys watch over the clothes at night,” Niçois explains. “The women used to just leave the clothes unattended. But sometimes river birds would walk across them, leaving wayward tracks, or martens would chew on the ties, and once a fox got its head stuck in the sleeve of a white sleeping gown.”

  Odette laughs.

  “He zigzagged though town, frantic. He was like a shooting star that had t
ouched down on earth. A couple of women cornered him in the cemetery and cut him free. He ran off with his tail between his legs.”

  Niçois looks at the river and shudders. He tells Odette the story learned by every child in Nevers. When the Roman empire blanketed France, Caesar kept the empire’s treasury and food supply in Nevers, in a camp by the Loire. The ancient Celtic people of the area, the Aedui, attacked the camp, taking all the treasure and as much of the Romans’ stores of corn as they could. What corn they couldn’t take they burned or dumped into the Loire.

  Odette tries to imagine it—men yelling in pain, blood washing down the banks and swirling pink when it meets the river, fires crackling, the sweet smell of corn.

  But the chatter and splashing of the women dissolve her visions to nothing. They talk vigorously, often exploding into what sounds like naughty giggles.

  “Hell or not,” Odette says, “they’re having fun.”

  “Yes,” Niçois agrees. “My mother likes to complain about washing day, but she comes home excited with lots to tell.”

  Children play around the women. Every so often one is scolded for splashing mud on a clean shirt or going too near the river. One child gets a wet cloth across her face—a sobering punishment that makes Odette wince. For all her faults, Anneline has never touched Odette in anger.

  “What is your mother like?” she asks Niçois. “Would she ever slap you with a wet cloth?”

  Niçois stretches back onto the grass. “She’s the mother of mothers,” he says. A second yellow butterfly has joined the first atop his hair. They perch there trustingly, as if Niçois were some kind of plant. “She has hundreds of children.”

  “Impossible!” Odette says. “A woman in the Jura, where I once lived, had twenty-eight babies. But I’ve never heard of someone having hundreds.”

  Niçois smiles. “My mother is a midwife, the only one in Nevers. I have sometimes been her assistant. She chases the husbands out of the houses, sends them on silly errands, then coos to the women, You are doing fine. I can feel the head. A hairy one, this one. Turn onto your heart side.