The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [84]
She paused, gazing at a bird rippling the ivy. “Robert … It’s very sad.”
LATER, AFTER THE CHAMPAGNE had worn off, she suggested a walk.
“Do you ride?”
“Ride?”
“I have horses.”
They walked outside the courtyard to see the horses.
“My son and I hike,” she said. “Sometimes my daughter. And all of us ride, so I keep their horses here with mine. My husband always had horses. You noticed the chickens. There used to be a goat, a donkey, a pony, all kinds of wounded things that we rehabilitated. An owl used to live in the rafters over the terrace, but I have not seen any owls there in three years.”
They walked down the street to the small field where the three horses grazed. The dog came with them, playfully running ahead.
“Bernard,” she called after him. “Don’t be a child.”
“I’ve never been on a horse,” Marshall admitted.
“You wanted Pegasus,” she said, smiling. “But is it true you are not permitted to fly anymore?”
“Not on the airlines. I could rent a plane and tool around. Or I could buy a plane if I had the money. But the airline tells me I’m too old to fly for them.”
“But you must fly! If you rent a plane, I will go with you! You must not give up what you love.”
He grinned, immediately imagining the two of them on a sky jaunt, performing barrel rolls and nose-dives. The horses had come running to her, and she held out some carrots for them. She stroked them and called them by name—Peppy and Fifi and Charleroi, or something similar-sounding. Marshall enjoyed watching her caress the horses. She was more than fifty years old now, but she still seemed youthful. She had ample, well-formed breasts, and her skin was smooth and fresh.
They walked down a road to the river, passing stone dwellings that could have been there for centuries. The vegetation was thick along the side of the road, and gardens were bursting with tomatoes and squashes. It had been a long time since he had paid attention to anyone’s garden. His grandmother had grown vegetables in the holler below the mountain, and he remembered her singing as she worked her slanted patch of ground. He remembered her shelling a basket of beans.
Blackberries grew in profusion by the side of the road. “My grandmother picked wild blackberries in the mountains of Kentucky,” he said. “I picked them too when I visited in the summer, but I had to be forced to do it. I loved to eat them though.” He laughed, as if he were unfamiliar to himself.
“These are not ripe yet,” Annette said. “Oh, look.”
Resting on a blackberry leaf was an unusual brown-and-yellow butterfly with ovoid wings.
“I have always loved these butterflies,” she said.
“I don’t think we have that kind in America.”
“A butterfly is born to fly, just as you were,” she said, smiling up at him. “But the butterfly flutters and takes its time to see the sights.”
“It doesn’t burn jet fuel,” he said. He remembered once flying through a swarm of butterflies during a takeoff. A flash of color, a cloud, gone before he truly saw it.
They passed a field of what appeared to be corn. “It grows nicely,” she remarked.
She called out some greetings to a man and a boy fishing from the riverbank. “They bring me fish sometimes,” she said.
They walked on, making idle observations. He didn’t want to go back to Paris. He could sleep behind her armoire, he thought.
SHE INVITED HIM to return the next day. After that, she would be in Normandy with her family for a week. She recommended a modest hotel in Cognac, on a street of ancient stone structures. After checking in, Marshall walked around in the fading light. Cognac seemed both ritzy and ruined. At a sidewalk café he ate a fish of some kind, just off the boat. He didn’t want any wine. A light rain fell briefly, then cleared.
He managed to sleep in the hot, tattered room above the hotel bar, and the next morning he read the newspaper in the cramped breakfast room. The United States seemed remote,