Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [88]
She bundled weeds at the edge of the larger field and let them dry, and a week later heaped them all into a fire. The acrid smell drifted downhill to Lucien’s house and slipped into his workroom, so that he came to the window and watched her in the distance, outlined by smoke and flame. She trod seeds into the earth instead of broadcasting them with her hands. They called this plombage in Lucien’s military monograph. She cut down brush and left just a few fruit trees along the fences. In the new vegetable gardens, she discouraged sparrows by laying out white cotton along the seedbeds, and dissected earthworms and dipped them in nux vomica, then slipped them into mole holes. She was as gentle with seedlings as she was brutal with pests. She loosened the moist earth and carried the bundle of shoots in her cupped hands as if it were a fallen bird to be returned to its nest. She saw her work now as a path through the seasons, seeding onions and celery between February and April, leeks and winter cabbage from May to July.
She was older now. She had wept when she married, and then had seen her new husband try to murder someone during the darkness of her marriage night. He was a man who had grown up with the harsh etiquette of self-protection he had witnessed on a farm. But the world they were in was harsher. And Roman was now in a prison, having attacked a man near the square base of the belfry, almost killing him in a rage of jealousy. It had taken seven men to hold him down. As if he were a stag. When he had looked down at her among the carpenters from that great height, he did not know she was pregnant.
Marie-Neige visited him every week in his cell in Marseillan. A month after he was imprisoned, while walking home, she had a miscarriage. She lay down in a stranger’s ditch and lost all of what she and Roman had created. She got up after an hour. One rich thistle had been growing next to Marie-Neige, and it became burned within her memory. She tied two sticks together into a cross and planted it by the roadside, gathered whatever was there into a fold of her yellow cotton dress, and brought it home and buried it in the horseshoe-shaped field near the house.
She saw her life then for what it was. There would always be this pointless and impotent dreaming on farms, and there would always be a rich man on horseback who galloped across the world, riding into a forest just to inhale its wet birch leaves after a storm.
‘Where is your yellow dress?’ Lucien asked when giving her a lift into Marseillan, and her answer stuttered into silence. One evening shortly afterwards, she and Lucien talked for long hours into the night. Roman was still in prison, and she believed she herself did not have much more than the fate of a mule. She spoke to Lucien about everything, confessing her poverty, and he admitted his unawareness. Even though he was her closest neighbour, he had been preoccupied by his own life.
He went to Marseillan and bought the property she lived on outright from the Simone family, partly with money and partly with an exchange of fields. A day or so later, everything was notarized and he walked up the hill to her farmhouse with the papers. He saw her by the well and called out her name, but she did not move. She kept staring down into the well. He came up to her, and her focus of intent