France at Seven
We were always travelling when I was young. This was when we were in France, uh, when I was seven.
c 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
“I can not believe you brought those condoms to school!” my mother said as she drove me home. My two younger brothers sat in the back. “I’m really pissed off at you!” This I had already gathered. Being seven, I thought they were merely balloons. Their oiliness and strange smell had seemed odd but I thought nothing of it. Madame Bouvior had looked at me with a strange smile when I showed them to the rest of the school during recess. The school was small, and we all studied in one room, the twenty desks, holes in them for inkpots, roughly arranged by student age. We had fun with the balloons in the courtyard and Madame said nothing to me. But her smile bothered me. She had smiled once before like that, when telling my mother that perhaps I should have my hair cut and treated for lice. Both times my mother fumed, embarrassed and furious at Madame’s condescension.
“She already thinks I’m a bad parent! Now what does she think? Jesus! Did you not think that maybe condoms were inappropriate?” she said as we wound along the side of a hill on our way home.
After a few tense minutes she added, “You know these people are straight, you know they think we are hippies. Jesus!”
I kept quiet and stared at the side of the road, feeling bad.
We turned a corner and to my astonishment, I saw a little man on the upper side of the road just ahead. I jumped but nobody noticed because my mother had looked back at my two brothers who were arguing. He was not an ordinary man. He stood about a foot and a half tall, not counting the pointed red had he wore. He had pointed red shoes and striped pants with a blues vest. He had been taken by surprise and he jumped too. We made eye contact for a split second. He quickly stepped to run up the hill, but then vanished as if he had become invisible. I watched in amazement, unable to speak.
“You’ve got to become more aware, Gennaro,” my mother was saying. “She is a very straight woman.”
“Did you…” I said, pointing to where the little man had been.
“Are you listening to me?” she screamed. “I wish for once you would stay in this world!”
“Yes, but…” I trailed off. That was the last time I tried mentioning what I had seen. It was too real. If it had been any less real then I would have.
“Okay. Then let’s leave it at that. I bought a turkey. I thought it would be nice to make a big meal. We haven’t had a big meal since dad left. It’s a really big turkey. I got it from the farmer up past Girac. It was the biggest one he had. It’s still alive. I put it in the bathroom.”
Girac had seventy-five inhabitants and except for my mother, my two younger brothers, and me, they were all over the age of fifty. We were also the only ones who hadn’t been born there. The French village had younger people once upon a time, but they all left in search of the industrial revolution, leaving Girac in an aging medieval stupor. The castle on the hill looked down upon the village in crumbling loneliness and the three or four streets were quiet except for an occasional tractor pulling a load of fresh walnuts. We lived across from the walnut factory, run single handedly by the old Monsieur and Madame Rouen. Napoleon had owned our house, or so I thought when my mother said it was built a hundred and fifty years ago in Napoleon style. The house had two sections, the front and the back. We lived in the front part. The back was where the servants had lived, scuttling up and down the back stairs that were now dusty and dark, inhabited only by mice. It was closed off now. We had no servants. My father had run off to Peru and gotten himself arrested for drug smuggling. So, my mother, twenty-seven at the time, kept house as best she could with small savings and help from friends. My dad was gone for years and I slowly replaced him with a fantasy father that looked like my real father but probably had very little in common with him.
As I helped my brother Felix, who was only two years old and still wobbly on his legs, get out of the car I heard my mother scream from inside the house, “Oh! Where’s the turkey! The window! I forgot to lock the window! Quick, the garden!”
We rushed inside and she scooped Felix up with her arms on our way to the garden. It was a large garden. At one end was a six-foot deep water canal that channeled a waist deep stream. Beyond the canal were fields with cows. On the other side of the garden, where the wooded hill began, an eight-foot wall led out from the side of the house and wound around in a wide ark to the stream. The turkey stood looking at us, perched high on the eight-foot wall, his long red chin bouncing from an arched beak and trailing down his rounded chest. Behind him, his large tail spread out in a fan. He clucked once, as if to say goodbye, and disappeared over the wall into the forest up the hill.
“Oh, no,” my mother groaned.
“Quick! I have to catch it,” I said, running back into the house and out the front door. I ran around the house and into the underbrush where the turkey had jumped. I could hear him but could not see him.
“Gennaro, wait for me. I want to come too,” my brother Cisco whined.
“Go away! You’ll scare him,” I whispered. He was only four and pestered me wherever I went.
“But I want to,” he whimpered.
“Go away!”
I lost my brother and pushed deeper up the hill. I could still hear the turkey farther ahead. After half an hour, I came upon it sitting in a tree, but it jumped to the ground again and scuttled off. It was getting dark and the shadows made me uneasy. I was now far enough up to see the crumbled tower of the castle, still lit up by the setting light.
“No luck? Tomorrow I’ll tell Jacque and he’ll shoot it,” mother said when I came home.
“I’m gonna get it tonight, when it’s sleeping,” I said, excited by the new challenge.
I used my cowboy belt to hold the rope and the bottle of water. My pants were tucked into my boots, and I had two flashlights. I left the house at seven thirty, walking around it to where the hill started. At the mouth of the woods I paused, staring into the winter blackness. My ears rang with heightened awareness. I stood there for a long time. Finally, I took two steps into the woods, turned, and ran as fast as I could back into the house. It was seven thirty four.
“Didn’t find it?” my mother asked.
“He’s too quick,” I said.
“Yea, he’s a fast one. Maybe you’ll have better luck in the morning before school. It’s time for bed anyway. Go get in bed and call me when you’re ready.”
“Can you come with me,” I said, “to check that the servants’ door is locked.”
“Of course I can. Look, it’s shut and locked. Nobody can get through here. Now get in bed. There’s Bugs the Bunny waiting for you. Cisco move over for your brother.”
I awoke with my pet rabbit’s whiskers tickling my ear. It was still dawn and from our second story window I could see the steam rising from the fields. My brother was still asleep, his breathing gently ruffling the rabbit’s fur. I quietly dressed and ran out of the house. The woods were bright and fresh. I made good headway, and within ten minutes I reached the crest of the hill, the castle looming above me. I ran to the tower and ascended it, spiraling upwards, my footsteps echoing in the stone cylinder. Towards the top, I slowed down and tiptoed the rest of the way. Black, cigar shaped, droppings littered the stairs and a strong smell hung in the air. I peered around the last turn and saw Merlin, the tower’s falcon. He rested on the ledge of the crumbling staircase, peering intently at something down the hill.
“Hello,” I said.
He turned his head towards me, gave a cry that echoed down the stairs and flew off with two cracks of his wings, gliding out into the valley.
I peered over the hillside like the falcon had just been doing and looked for what he had found so interesting. In a little clearing made by a collapsed shed, I saw the turkey, pecking at the ground with focused effort. Fixing the spot in my mind, I rushed down the tower and made my way through the woods towards him. When I got near the clearing, I lay on my stomach and crawled towards him, hiding behind an old, rotting wall. He had his back to me and continued pecking, seeming to have found a spot rich in food. I crawled almost within reach. Up this close I realized how big he really was. He was almost as big as I was. I counted to three and jumped on him. For a split second I looked right into his face. I saw his eyes, very wide and round, and hesitated. I lost the moment. My hands reached out and flailed over his body. They failed to get a grip and slid over his feathers to his tail. I grabbed on as hard as I could while he dragged me a few feet. Then he was gone.
I was left lying prostrated on the ground with an enormous bouquet of tail feathers. He ran into the forest, his bare red ass disappearing into the foliage.
I looked at the feathers, a trophy, second best to actually catching him. I thought of his eyes and decided to let him go.
“There you are! Hurry, you’re going to be late for school! You can’t be late,” my mother said when I got home. She was dressed in an ankle length dress and cotton shirt. “Oh, feathers! Did you get him?”
“He didn’t want to be caught,” I said.
“Smart of him,” she answered. “Come on, here’s your porridge, you can eat it in the car. Cisco! Felix!”
“Fifi is in the Garden,” Cisco said. He sat under the table playing with the cat.
My mother went to the garden. She checked in the rabbit hatch. There was a knock at the front door. A man with an English beret and riding pants stood in the entranceway, holding Felix upside down by the ankles. They were both dripping wet and Felix was crying.
“Excuse me, madam, but is this your child?” he asked in an English accent. His voice was perfectly calm. “I’m told it is. A local was washing her clothes by the river a few hundred meters that way when this child came floating by. She was much too old to do anything about it, so I volunteered. My wife and I are camping here for the day. Would you like him back? He’s rather heavy.”
My mother gasped.
“I presume he fell in over there?” he nodded to the stream in our back yard. “Do you not look after your children?”
“Yes, oh god, Felix.” she said.
“Oh he’s perfectly fine. In fact, he was not bothered in the least when I fished him out. He was floating on his back as if he did this all the time. Does he?” he asked reproachfully.
“Oh god no,” she said, fussing over Felix.
“Babies take naturally to water, you know,” then he added, looking at me, “And do your children go to school?”
My shirt was stained from being dragged.
“School? Oh god, school. I forgot. He’s late. They’ll just have to miss school today,” she said.
“And not get educated? I think not. Where is this school, I will take him,” he said. My name is Mr. Bidsbey. I am a cat breeder. We, my wife and I, have thirty-five cats in the caravan over there as we speak. But school is calling young man, come along.”
And so I went to school with Mr. Bidsbey, arriving late and incurring a snide smile from Madame. But my day at school passed quickly, the condom escapade forgotten due to a child who accidentally spilt ink all over Madame Bouvoir’s white starched shirt. She cancelled class and let her husband watch over us as she went home to change. We played in the courtyard for the rest of the day.
My mother picked me up from school. On the way home I watched intently for the little man on the side of the road, but I did not see him. I never saw him again.
When we arrived at the house Jacque was waiting in the garden. He was married to my mother’s best friend. He had knee high leather boots and a black bushy moustache. His hands were large farmer’s hands, and they held a big black shotgun. At his feet lay the turkey.
“I found it,” he said, smiling.
I went up to the turkey to look at his eyes but they were no longer there. His head was blown off, leaving a ragged red stump. I left to my room. My mother watched me.
I could hear them talking, then I heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs.
“Honey, are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, lying on the bed, stroking my pet rabbit.
“Jacque’s going to take the turkey. I told him he should take it. We can have something else for our big dinner.”
Then she added, “Hey, Mr. Bidsbey said you could come over and see his cats if you want.”
“Really?” I got up.
“Yes, and don’t you worry about that turkey. It was over before he felt a thing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, now go see those cats and when you come back we’ll have ice cream.”
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