Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [87]
At Barran, Roman tied on the leather apron, with its pouch for nails and hoop for a hammer, and ignoring everyone climbed the ladder up the side of the belfry until he was back in solitude once more, with nothing but a jarring wind and the echo of his hammering and voices that shouted below him like the barking of foxes. It reminded him of the charivari, those hoots in the darkness. Such wordless events and small gestures converged on Roman in this way. Up there, high on the belfry, he recalled the image of that swooping magpie with something stolen glittering in its mouth, as if it had been a sign.
There was a suckling child carved out of wood in a nearby church at Monteyzal that he took. The embroidery on kneeling stools hidden among pews, that he cut and pulled free. Portraits of saints from walls. A marble bowl. A rug. An ebony cross. A felt-covered ledger. In Fontanilles and Douelle and Brouelle and Malemort and Senilla—everywhere he rode, he fell upon ancient churches empty at midnight, alone in their small grandeur, unheated and in darkness. So there were nights when he did not travel the simple twenty kilometres to the farmhouse, but rode into those villages on the periphery of the great forest and entered churches, slept in their darkness, and took what he needed or what he felt the churches did not need, the lace, the rims of silver from a portrait, a graven image; he brought them to a clearing in the Bois de Mazères, and waited until there was faint light. Frost covered everything. The passereaux and the rapaces were awake already with tentative songs in the dark. He dug up his previously buried tarpaulin and added to the cache the new things he had taken. He would trade such objects for plants and grain and clothing.
The final stage of work on the belfry was the slate covering. Slates had been brought from the Angers region and were to be installed without overlap. The men hammered them on with rifled copper nails. Ten metres below the cross and the rooster, Roman balanced himself on a single spike. He could see the forest of Mazères in the northwest, shaped like a green cloverleaf in all the whiteness, for snow fell deep and unseen into those trees. Whatever he had taken from the churches was buried there, save for a painted wooden flower he had pulled off a carved saint’s blouse for Marie-Neige, a stolen thing like a live alouette in his pocket.
He paused in his hammering, and looking into the distance saw Marie-Neige on horseback. Even with all that space between them he could recognize her shape as she and the animal nudged forward on the last half-hour of their journey to Barran. She would never get to tell him, after the fight that occurred shortly afterwards, why she had come to Barran that day, what news she wished to bring him. He saw her foreshortened figure tie up the horse and begin walking towards a group of carpenters. He imagined the men gazing openly at her; she was the only woman there, it must have been brazen. Then they had looked up, pointed to the tower, and he heard laughter. For a long time he did not move, high on this strange tower that people insisted had been created originally by a sudden and perverse wind or by the madness of a roofer in love.
Fields
Whenever Marie-Neige returned from visiting her husband in prison, she walked the periphery of their two fields—one that surrounded the barn like a horseshoe, and a larger one that sloped uphill. Roman had boarded horses and pigs for neighbouring farmers, and this had brought in minimal subsistence. Now, with him in jail, she could hardly keep up. But walking the property at dusk made its possibilities clearer. She could live on what she grew within the horseshoe and turn the larger field into a market garden. But she had to learn how to replenish the