Nevers Read online

  “Then suddenly she’ll shout, PUSH! PUSH! PUSH! and out comes the newest citizen of Nevers, squalling. My mother wraps the baby in a length of new hemp, puts her finger in its mouth and, once it starts to suck, declares, This is a strong one. She’s good, my mother. Warm. And cold when she needs to be.”

  “Why would she need to be cold?”

  “When she has to take action. When the baby’s too quiet, because the navel string is wrapped around its neck. Or sometimes the baby wants to come out legs first. Sometimes the mother gets a terrible fever afterward, and those are the saddest days. Sometimes mothers die.”

  Niçois’s eyes cloud over. Then he brightens. “But usually not. She has the best reputation. Another midwife tried to open shop in Nevers, but everyone wants my mother. She is already delivering the babies of the babies she guided into the world.”

  “So she’s a grandmother.” Odette smiles.

  “I guess! Which makes me an uncle.” Niçois laughs. The butterflies lift off, flit about in the air, then land again on his head. He doesn’t seem to notice them.

  “And you have many, many siblings.”

  “Well, yes. But no. None. My mother had no other children. There are few like me—people with no brothers or sisters.”

  “I am like you,” Odette says.

  Niçois looks up at her and grins. The lightning warms her from head to toe again.

  “Now, to answer your question, my mother would never hit me with a wet cloth. But my father might have. Once, when I left the gate open and the goats got out, guess what he did?”

  “What?”

  “Pulled down my pants and spanked me—with nettles!”

  Odette laughs.

  “I haven’t been naughty since.”

  Niçois unplugs a dandelion from the ground and chews on its pale root.

  Odette lies back on the grass alongside him. She is surprised by her ease. The sky above is blue for as far as she can see.

  But she has a lot to do today. She sits up and looks around. Out on the river two muscled fishermen haul a full net of wriggling fish out of the water and into their boat.

  Then Odette’s heart squirms. Not far away at all, half hidden behind the wrinkled trunk of an acacia tree, a small man with straight, yellow hair is watching her through a spyglass. As soon as Odette sees him, he ducks out of sight.

  Nine

  Odette gathers the courage to look toward the tree again, but the man is gone. She wonders if perhaps she only imagined him there, if her mind played tricks with the tree’s shadow. But she’s unsettled. She stands and nudges Niçois with the toe of her sabot. “Show me more of your favorite town.”

  Niçois opens his eyes. “The factories first. You said you needed dishes. Then I’ll show you the mill and then introduce you to Anne, the noisy donkey.”

  Niçois and Odette walk along the river until they reach the Pont de Loire, a long bridge that halfway across the river, strangely, turns from stone to wood. Niçois explains that a flood nine years earlier washed five of the bridge’s stone arches into the river.

  Once across the bridge, they arrive at an abandoned factory. The hand-painted faïence bowls, plates, cups, tureens, busts and inkwells Nevers is famous for were once baked in great kilns there, Niçois says. Blackbirds flap in and out through broken windows, and shattered pottery litters the floor. Odette and Niçois dig through the piles and find two bowls and two cups, mostly intact, that are decorated with blue flowers.

  Then Odette finds a plate with neither a crack nor a chip. On the front is painted a girl, standing in a street and holding a small basket.

  “She looks like you!” Niçois exclaims. “With the same brown hair and serious face.”

  Odette knows she is a serious girl—her mother has often teased her about it unkindly. But the way Niçois says it is kind. Without judgment.

  She studies the plate again. The girl is her age and wears wooden shoes and a similar apron and dress. She stands in front of an arch Odette saw on their first day wandering through town. But the girl on the plate looks stronger. More sure. Less lost.

  “I will need a basket like that when Lisane’s chicks start laying eggs,” Odette muses aloud. “For selling door to door.” Her voice softens. “Until then I don’t know how I’ll earn any sous.”

  Niçois shrugs. “That’s easy. Mother always says she doesn’t have enough hands as a midwife. I can only help so much. I’ll talk to her.”

  The idea both thrills and frightens Odette. Once, in Sigy-le-Châtel, Odette had come upon a distressed nanny goat. Her newborn kid lay motionless in the grass. Odette, who had once heard farmers speak of “swinging a kid,” first spoke gently to the new mother, then gripped the baby’s back hooves and swung it gently in a circle. The kid choked up fluid and took its first breath. Odette was elated for days. After that the kid always licked her hand when she was near.

  But human babies? She looks at Niçois.

  He smiles as if he knows just what she’s thinking. “You’ll learn quickly.”

  Odette and Niçois peer out a factory window at the scene below. Niçois produces a heel of bread from his pocket and tears it in two for them to share.

  “What about your father?” Odette asks. “What does he do?”

  “My father is dead.”

  “Oh!”

  “As a boy, he fished with his mother and father, but when he got older he got his own boat and delivered faïence destined for Paris. My father was an excellent boatman, famous for having never delivered a broken piece. Not one. The Loire’s waters get rough, but he seemed to know its every gurgle and burp.” Niçois pointed across the river. “Do you see that pile of rubble? That’s the hut he grew up in. He said there were so many gaps between the stones that during storms the house whistled like someone playing the clavichord.”

  Odette laughs.

  “He was funny. He cleaned his ears with twigs, danced right up on the supper table when he was happy. He’d weep when my mother told him about babies that didn’t make it, how she had had to close their eyes, their life no more than a blink. He believed in the Revolution. And that’s what did him in.”

  “But the Revolution was for people just like him.”

  “Yes. And he embraced it. He organized. He was taught by Chaumette.”

  Odette gasps. “Pierre Gaspard Chaumette? The great revolutionary? My mother sobbed the day he was beheaded, and ate an entire baguette, dipping each hunk in cream. I swear her tears turned white from all the milk.”

  “Chaumette was born here in Nevers. He changed his name, you know. Pierre was too Christian for him.”

  “He didn’t believe,” Odette says.

  “He believed in equality. But the church believes some people are closer to God than others. I’ve seen a lot of babies,” Niçois says. “Every one is born naked, wailing and amazed. Equal.”

  “Anaxagoras!” Odette exclaims suddenly. “That’s the name my mother sighed between bites of her baguette.”

  “That’s the name Pierre Chaumette took, yes.”

  “My mother’s husband thought she was mooning for Chaumette, that she was in love with Chaumette, but…”

  “What?”

  Odette falls silent. She can’t believe how much she’s talking. What she is thinking is that her mother’s sympathy for Chaumette was really for herself. Chaumette was a simple cobbler’s son who had risen in the world to become a surgeon and then a leader of the Revolution, fighting for the lowly. Anneline had been a lowly little girl in an orphanage, counting her hungry ribs at night, crying herself to sleep only to be scolded by the crow-like nuns for keeping the other children awake. Chaumette had been that girl’s champion.

  “The original Anaxagoras was a Greek thinker,” she says instead. Her mother’s fourth husband, Victor, had told her this. “He believed the world is made up of tiny things that never change. Everything in the world—including us!—is made of two or more of these tiny ingredients. Everything is a mixture. A recipe. But, he s
aid, Each one is… most manifestly those things of which there are the most in it.”

  Odette has chewed over those words many times. She plays a game with herself, guessing the main ingredient of the things around her. Some are easy. Bread is mostly wheat, clothing is mostly hemp or flax, a pot is mostly iron, a candle mostly wax. But what about her? What is she mostly made of? She and her mother had eaten a lot of potatoes when her mother was been between marriages. So perhaps that. But they had also eaten well during some marriages, so perhaps lamb and gooseberry pie. When she was with Félix, she’d been made of something other than food. Something that filled her heart the way sunshine warms the body.

  “Anaxagoras said each of us has an unseen apparatus in us. Nous, he called it. The organ for thinking and remembering.”

  Niçois taps his forehead. “Our minds.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t have the best one. Mother says I’m all heart.”

  Sometimes Odette’s mind is so full it seems to be all of what she is. It’s filled with memories and chunks of knowledge people have shared with her, cooking directions, bills to be settled, items needing mending, chores to be done. So many chores. That’s it. Odette is made of chores. Work is her chief ingredient.

  Odette glances at Niçois. He is gazing foggily across the river as an ant ambles along a seam of his shirt, dragging a dropped crumb of bread. This boy is not made of work, Odette thinks. What is he made of? Laziness? Light, her mind answers.

  Niçois turns to face her. “My father fell under Chaumette’s charm. He started to give speeches and organize protests in the streets. Share the land! Everyone is equal. No rich, no poor. All are free to chart their destiny. He spent all of our money on torches and paper and ink and—weapons. He gave the Revolution a home in Nevers. Robespierre spent a night at our house.”

  Odette can’t believe it. “The-king-must-die-so-the-country-can-live Robespierre? Terror-is-justice Robespierre? Pity-is-treason Robespierre?”

  “That Robespierre, yes. He came to rouse us with speeches.”

  “Robespierre was in Nevers?”

  “He slept in my bed.”

  “Can I see your bed?” Odette claps a hand over her mouth. What a thing to ask!

  “Of course.” Niçois smiles happily. “You should have seen the crowds when he was here. People came from fifty miles away, traveling farther than they had ever traveled in their lives.

  “My father was the first to speak. He told the people of Nevers that they worked hard in the sun and rain to feed the people of France. They made the plates the wealthy ate from. They worked harder than the rich, he said, and what did they have to show for it? Shoes with holes. Children swollen with hunger. Pennies wrapped in a kerchief at the back of a drawer. While the wealthy in Paris danced under chandeliers and gorged themselves on finger foods!

  “Do you have pocket watches? he asked. Do you have silk handkerchiefs? Baths and bidets and tailored suits? No! But you build this country from earth and seed. You are the true children of France.”

  “It worked,” Odette says.

  “Sure. People rose up. They fought the rich with knives and the guillotine.” Niçois looks suddenly weary, windblown. “It was an exciting time, but it was horrible too. In the big cities blood flowed in the streets, fast as rainwater. Nevers was calmer, but at times my mother kept me in the house for days on end. I was not allowed to look out the window.”

  Odette has always been grateful that during the bloodiest months of the Revolution, she and her mother lived in a small village. She was seven at the time, and Anneline left Odette alone to travel briefly to Lyon to see things for herself. She came home wild with pride and fury and fear.

  “If I prick my finger on a thorn, my mother hardly glances at it,” Odette says. “That is nothing, she’ll say, compared to the Revolution.”

  “It undid my father,” Niçois says. “He scrubbed his shoes long after the blood was gone. He cried all the time. I once slipped on a puddle he made with his tears. He was devastated by how viciously people hounded the nobility from their castles and mansions, dragged them naked through the streets and then cheered as their heads fell and rolled.”

  “Yes,” Odette says. “My mother says the sound of a head falling to the ground echoes forever.”

  “And then, with no more rich people in Paris, there were no more orders for faïence. The faïence factories shut down. People left their homes—left Nevers!—and moved to Lyon to work at looms in dark textile factories, far from their parents and even from their children. My father felt it was his fault. Mother tried to soothe him. Change is never free, she would murmur.

  “One morning two years ago, he kissed me on the forehead and said he was going for an early morning walk. In your marriage shirt? Mother asked him.

  “He did more than take a stroll. He walked every street of Nevers. People remember seeing him. He patted every tree he passed and kissed every child he saw. Then he wandered down to the river. He took an enormous faïence vase out of his boat and stepped from the muddy shore into the water, holding the vase tightly to his chest. We heard later that two fishermen yelled, Stop! For the love of God! But he didn’t stop. He kept walking.”

  Niçois begins to cry. Odette touches his arm, as if to steady him.

  After a minute he wipes his eyes on the back of his shirtsleeve. “The river poured over the lip of the vase. The water quickly filled the vessel, weighing my father down and pulling him deeper into the river, past its eddies and its currents, through shoals of fish, deeper and deeper, to its murky bottom.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Odette says. It’s what people say to her whenever one of Anneline’s husbands dies.

  “When my mother heard, she ran wailing through the streets,” Niçois continues, as if in a trance. “Her screams were so loud and high pitched, they caused a horse to bolt. The horse went into the cathedral and knocked over a pew, which knocked over another, which knocked over another. Then, even though my mother can’t swim, she dove into the river after my father. The fishermen who had tried to stop my father threw a net and dragged her out, choking, weeds tangled in her hair.

  “I have not been able to eat fish from the Loire since. Sometimes, if a fishmonger has wares from the ocean, my mother gets me mackerel. You see, the fish of this river ate my father’s flesh. Sometimes when I close my eyes, all I see are the pale clouds of their feasting.”

  Niçois and Odette sit in silence for a long while, staring out at the town.

  “Thank you,” Niçois says finally.

  “You’re thanking me? What for?”

  “I have never told anyone all that. It feels good to put the pictures out there, out of my head. Spread them on the grass, like newly washed clothes.”

  Ten

  Odette ties her new dishes into her apron. She and Niçois cross the bridge again and, after a short walk, arrive at the mill. They crouch on the stream bank and watch as the waterwheel whips the stream into froth. Odette plugs her ears against the noise of the millstones grinding the wheat. She can’t understand how the mill doesn’t fly apart with all the shuddering.

  Drenched from the spray, the two climb higher up the stream bank and watch the flour thunder down the mill’s chute, the white powder dusting the air so thickly that they cover their mouths, and sticking to their damp skin until they look like a pair of ghosts. They wipe each other clean with new oak leaves.

  Away from the mill the world feels calm again. Niçois shows Odette the farm that sells the best milk, and the cobbler’s, in case she ever has enough sous for leather shoes. He points out the tavern where Robespierre and Chaumette spoke to large audiences, and where now, even in the middle of the afternoon, a table of men sing “La Marseillaise.”

  Niçois and Odette stand in the street, listening to the great song of the Revolution.

  The day of glory has arrived!

  Against us, tyranny’s

  Bloody banner is raised.

  To arms, citizens,


  Form your battalions.

  Let’s march, let’s march!

  They walk under the same stone arch that is painted on the plate. It is the Door of Paris, Niçois tells her, dedicated to France’s win in the great battle of Fontenoy against the Austrian Succession. Then they are in Canot Place, a square where children scamper and men throng noisily around something that Odette can’t see.

  “The public notices,” Niçois explains. “They’re getting the latest news, from a duke’s death to goats for sale. I don’t know why they’re so excited today.”

  Odette thinks she might know. She cranes her neck and, indeed, spies at the center of the crowd a head of haphazardly pinned chestnut hair.

  “Give her room!” someone yells. It is Guillaume, the painter, perched on a ladder, touching up a sign. “Yes, she is beautiful, a lovely stranger, but let her breathe!”

  Guillaume shakes his brush, spattering the hats and shoulders below with green. While the affected men shake their fists at him, something ripples through the crowd. Odette watches as her mother crawls out from the forest of legs. Anneline’s cloak is snagged under someone’s heel. She gives it a tug, lifts her skirt high and runs for freedom from the amorous mob.

  A moment later a man bursts out of the crowd, looking wildly about. His hair is yellow and straight. His mustache and beard are unusually trim and tight on his face. His eyes are small, and his face twitches. He is like a dog catching a scent. Odette realizes with a start that it is the spy from the riverbank.

  Anneline vanishes around a corner before the yellow-haired man spots her. The man looks left, right, high and low, then dives back into the crowd. He emerges moments later and, with the other men hollering after him, runs out of the square, clutching a piece of paper in his hand.

  “I wonder what that was all about,” Niçois says. He turns to Odette. “You look pale.”

  “I’m fine,” she lies. She is shaken, in fact. She fights the overwhelming urge to run after her mother. It feels as though today she has entered a new world, and chasing her mother would only lead her back to the old one.