Cicadas
The Corsican landscape in summertime was dry to the bone: olive branches grew thin and sharp in the height of the season. Even at a distance from the coast, the feverish air enveloped your skin so you couldn’t breathe. Then the cicadas began to sing—one day, suddenly—with their endless rubbing of legs, the raspy sound that grated, the drone that was the soundtrack of every summer we were there. By August there had been no rain for months. Everything was tawny brown, the cicadas blending in with the tree trunks that hosted them. The cicadas, at least, were invisible, especially from a distance when the sunshine eclipsed all view. We might have learned something from this: the capacity to fit into one’s surroundings, to follow local norms. But we were ‘the Americans’, and refugees ourselves: we were the new blight on the landscape.
This became apparent the day the gendarme came to visit. He arrived just before noon, wearing a dusky brown jacket and pants like jodhpurs. It would have been a Sunday as I was home from school, which at that time ran year-round, all but a few weeks at end of summer. Ordinarily we’d have thought nothing of an unannounced visit; even I knew the man had taken a shine to my aunt Eloise. But she was not around that morning, and my elder brother Andy was in town.
The man stood at the stone wall beside my father. My mother and I watched from the dappled shade of the olive tree near our picnic table. I remember his cap, poised on his damp brow at such a jaunty angle I was certain it would fall.
“Monsieur Église,” my father began.
“Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul,” Église said, as if to suggest he didn’t have all day. “Monsieur Henrique—George…” He pronounced my father’s first name in a distinctly American way.
They shook hands and fell into discussion. I couldn’t make out their words, but then: “Combien allez-vous payer les travailleurs?” (“How much will you pay the workers?” I was translating French in my head by then.)
“Vingt-cinq francs,” my father said.
“Vingt-cinq francs par jour? C’est impossible. C’est trop d’argent!” At the blank look on my father’s face, Église defaulted to English. “The Moroccans, they are not paid this much.” His face tightened. “Ten francs.”
My mother pursed her lips, then slipped inside to finish preparing lunch. I hoped to remain invisible. I drew a deep breath and slowly released it. The scent of myrtle, growing wild as it did everywhere on the island, was pungent that morning.
“I cannot pay them so little. It is so … dry,” my father said, in his beginner French, then corrected himself.
I cringed as my father stumbled over his words. Blending in was something I longed for as a salve on the sting of leaving home.
My father rocked back slightly on his heels, which he did when he was thinking. “They are working hard,” he said, “and in this heat!” The cicadas seemed to grew louder in that moment, as if to emphasize my father’s words.
Like I said, we were all bound up in the heat, not just the cicadas. Ninety-five degree days crested to 100, insisting on reprieve: early afternoon naps, dinners after dusk. At night, we gathered around our picnic table as the temperature dropped. Daytime, we retreated from the unassailable sun—a brutal environment to work in, especially at the height of day. But that was the hour the Moroccan workers my father and mother had hired were expected to work.
“It is just a wall,” Église said. “They build stone walls for much less than this, you can save the money,” he said, appealing to my father’s pecuniary side, although he couldn’t know that my father had one. “If you pay them too much, it will … upset the balance.”
My mother returned just as ‘Eloise’s gendarme’ left, his Renault spinning up dust as he sped toward Oletta. I could almost feel it settling. My father turned to my mother. “Serena, ten francs a day for back-breaking work is nowhere near fair for those Moroccan workers.”
“But he was clearly uncomfortable, George. If you pay them something different, it may cause trouble.” Money enterprises weren’t my father’s strongest suit.
“Are you saying I shouldn’t set a fair wage?”
My mother didn’t respond. She was setting a pan on the picnic table. Her hand trembled slightly from the weight. I hovered beside her, awaiting her response.
“No, I’m just saying: think this through.”
My father chuckled, then gave me a wink, as he placed the bottle of red wine between his legs and worked out the corkscrew. It popped loudly; and he straightened triumphantly. By age fifty-two, his golden-brown hair had grown thin, his forehead prominent in the fashion of Kings: bold, rounded, suggesting a measure of power. His forehead was freckled, the skin already worn to leather. It shone in the noonday light, the thin layer of sweat that coated everyone’s skin by this hour.
Eloise arrived just in time to overhear my parents’ exchange. She’d been picking blackberries. Her fingers were stained a deep, reddish black. Her shift clung to her in the heat. Eloise was tall, with a wraithlike figure, but she had a toughness about her that I admired. She slid one leg over the bench of the picnic table, our makeshift dining room. “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s the Corsican mafia!” She wasn’t joking; some nights we could hear gunfire on the hillside near Oletta.
My mother laughed and then returned to the kitchen. I followed her. Meals were our religion, you might say, as my mother spent hours preparing them. It was my job to help bring out the food at the lunch hour; everyone had a task.
Inside our stone-walled home it was shockingly dark in contrast to the outside light. Sometimes I found myself in utter darkness when I stepped inside and had to wait for my eyes to adjust. The air was noticeably cooler, especially in the height of summer. The doors often did not close properly because the rain showers, when they did come, were strong and led to warping in the wood. When I slipped inside that afternoon, I could smell the calf’s brains, doused in garlic and white wine, sweet and sharp; they’d not yet told me it was beef brain I was eating. Of course, I’d have refused.
“Can you carry this? Is it too heavy?” My mother handed me a hot pad that was stained from the pie-making we’d done the day before.
“I’m okay,” I said. I put the hot pad in both hands, picked up the cast-iron pan with the calf’s brains and steered out of the cool hallway back into the heat. It wasn’t heavy, but like so much else in my life at that time, it weighed on me, hard. At the picnic table, I set down the pan with a thump. My father smiled at me.
“I’m going to pay the men 25 francs a day,” he told to Eloise. “Anything less? Well, it’s cruel.”
My mother told her the going rate. Never fearful of countering my father, Eloise said, “If you scratch the surface hard enough, you’ll find it’s economics. Wage rates, labor supply and demand, what the market will bear. There’s the question of your moral stance, but what’ll it cost to break the local mores?” She had studied economics at university as one of the few women in her class.
My mother nodded. She wore an expression of curious indifference sometimes. “George, you could aim for slightly less than double their rate. That might keep the gendarme at bay.” I scanned my mother’s face, in search of clues for what this all meant. I wondered what my brother Andy would think of all this, but he was away in St Florent.
We operated like our own little island—my father, mother, brother, aunt, and me. My father had retired from inventing and may have felt too solitary. Perhaps that’s why my parents took in travelers, or brought others in under their wing, like the Moroccan workers: to shore up our small tribe. Some of us knew the language. On the plane ride over, I had garnered a few phrases—like où est la bibliothèque and je t’adore—suggesting the limited preparation involved in our move. But these did not prove helpful: we soon learned there was no library in the neighboring village, and at age 10, I was too young for love. Still, that summer, when the Moroccan men came to work in our orchards—a haphazard set of pear trees, cherries and plums too, planted in disorderly rows on the other side of the stone wall that bordered a vineyard to the south—I learned something of the gaps between knowing and acting, and difference, and things that rubbed. Although the gap between knowing and understanding, I would come to see, was vast.
On Monday morning, a truck arrived containing a half dozen men. You could hear its rumbling sound for half a mile or more as the vehicle wound its way down to our house. The men were seated on the flatbed of the truck; all wore long brown trousers, frayed at the edges. The cloth was worn, torn in the knees. I noticed one tall, very thin man whose elbows cut sharply away from his shoulders. He slipped off the back edge of the truck as it pulled up. My father spoke to the driver in French. My mother sat close by, set down her Josephine Tey mystery novel and looked up.
“Why so many, George?” she asked, when the van pulled away and six men loitered at the base of our driveway, speaking quietly amongst themselves. The leader glanced over at my father and lifted his head in inquiry.
“It’s because of the rate,” my father said. “They learned about the day rate, and everyone wanted in—right away.” He looked nonplussed, even for my father, who did not ruffle easily. Then he went to join the men. It was early: the hum of the cicadas was low, if ever-present, like a host of weary bees.
My mother raised a brow at my father. But she didn’t say a word. The door slammed behind her this time when she went inside.
At lunchtime, on the instructions of my mother, I carried a tray out to the back of the house. Our home featured a long stone wall at the back, with an archway and door in between, which separated the front from the back, slicing our property, the few acres that it was, in two. From a distance, this created a sense of size that did not accurately reflect the size of the house. It suggested a mansion, when really, from the front of the building, one saw that the house featured quite a small floor plan. It would, like my father’s bank account, look larger than it actually was.
I stepped through to the back of the property. That day I’d washed my hair in the bath—we had no shower. My hair was long, blonde and wispy. I wore a short skirt my mother had bought in Bastia, with a small, carved wooden ring stitched into the front. My top was thin to allow heat to escape. The sun overhead beat strongly down on us, the cicadas chirping as if in celebration. It was 11:30, and the men had been working since 7 am, my mother told me. It was time for lunch.
Five men sat resting in the shade, beneath the wall, in the crook of one of the gnarled olive trees. The tall thin man I’d seen earlier rose and came toward me. He looked surprised, as if it’d rained in the worst of the summer heat, or sunshine had broken through clouds on a cold winter day. He stood at a distance from me. But I stepped forward. The dry, dusty soil crept into my sandals and between my toes.
“Tiens,” I said, handing him the tray. “Voici le dejeuner.”
My mother followed behind with another tray, then I went back for the final one. When I returned all the men were gathered, stooped over their trays, balanced carefully on their laps. One man, who was seated at a distance, had placed his directly on the dusty soil. It didn’t seem right that they didn’t have a picnic table. The tall, lanky man threw me a smile. We didn’t speak the same language, but I knew gratitude when I saw it. As I walked away, I felt the wisp of an olive branch strike my shoulder, tugging at my thin shirt.
After the lunch hour, my mother and I walked to the back of the house. The man I spoke to earlier sat with his long legs stretched out, relaxed, as he fingered the wisps on his chin. He stood up swiftly, as if he feared that sitting too long should reflect poorly on his work. He reached out to stack the trays, handing them to me swiftly. I noticed the thick lines of dirt beneath his nails.
“Merci beaucoup,” he said.
The trays were heavy, and it took a moment to balance them. “De rien.” And it was: it was only lunch. “Comment vous appelez-vous?” I asked, because that is what I had learned at school, that was how I made friends.
“Emir.”
“Et lui?” I asked, motioning to the shorter man, who seemed to be the leader.
“Aamir. Dans ma langue,” he said, “ça signifie ‘prince’.” He smiled.
“Il est un prince?” I very much liked this idea.
When my father arrived, the man withdrew. The shorter man—Aamir, sitting on the wall in the shade of the tree—came forward. He reached out and shook my father’s hand. Above him the leaves of the olive tree glistened in the sunlight. “The lunch—it is very good. We do not often get lunch. Never.” He laughed.
Back on our side of the wall, as we ate our lunch around the picnic table, my father told my mother about the exchange.
“Suppose lunch might break the gendarme’s back?” she asked. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t get around.”
A few nights later, when the Moroccan men had worked several days for us, I heard the screen door slam and knew Andy was home. He stepped stealthily into the living room, where I slept in a double bed in the corner. Andy slept in a small room toward the back of the house, where he could come and go, my parents having decided he was wild—not feral, but in the sense that his behavior was changeable. (More like my father than anyone cared to think.) I’d put out the light: my parents had gone to bed, my aunt, seven years my mother’s junior and the most adventurous of our lot, had retired to her tent by the creek. Andy sat at the base of the bed, his weight jostling the mattress. I sat up. At nineteen, his limbs were gangly. Andy had always treated me like I was his child, not a younger sibling. He reached out and grabbed my ankle.
“Hey there, you awake?”
I muttered something, I don’t recall exactly.
“Want to come into St Florent tomorrow?” Andy had been working at the yacht club.
“What are you getting paid?” I could see Andy peering at me in the dark from the edge of my bed, as if wondering why I cared.
“What am I getting paid? Like 12 francs a day.” I knew about his dock work: he was coiling lines and delivering blocks of ice for the yacht people.
“The gendarme said the Moroccan workers should not get more than ten.”
“What’s dad paying them? That’s hard work they’re doing.”
“Shush, don’t talk so loudly. Twenty-five.”
“Wow, that is good.” Andy snorted. “No wonder they’re upset…” He had caught only part of the drama: he was on the periphery, gone so much of the time, it was like having no siblings at all.
“So you want to come to town?” he asked again. Andy had the freedom to come and go, and he knew I resented it sometimes.
“Sure thing.” I wondered if my parents would agree; they never let me ride his motorbike with him—for obvious reasons. But I always asked.
The next afternoon, when I got home from school—I rode the school bus in daily on the road to St Florent—I asked my parents if I could go into the village with Andy as a treat.
“Certainly not,” my mother said.
My father glanced over at her. We were standing, all three of us, in the dark hallway. The scent of myrtle from the outside mixed with the smell of the varnish my father had applied on the flooring the day before. I stood still, waiting.
“Serena...” I did not have many friends, except the son of the headmistress, who came to lunch on occasion. I missed my friends from home and my father knew this. For my mother, though, this was immaterial. It was a miracle they’d let Andy keep the motorbike he had come home with one day, bought from his own earnings in St Florent. But as my father told her: “Look, it’s this or drugs.” My parents had heard there was a lot more than pot smoking going on among the youth of St Florent. My father was adamant: “So long as he wears that helmet, it’s the risk we take.”
It was agreed finally we would all go into town to get an ice cream, and then onto the small beach where we sometimes went when the wind was from the wrong direction. We’d often go later in the day, even toward the end of the season, to avoid the damaging rays of the sun. We rarely did something, all four or us, anymore. Blue sky stretched such a distance on those hot summer days, going thin at the far edge of the bay. There was a light, pleasant breeze. Andy and I began to swim while our parents sat on the beach. Then we threw the football we’d brought, back and forth, my father reminding us to watch out for the sinkhole. We always watched out for the sinkhole; but with the sun reflecting off the water, you couldn’t always see the sandy bottom. We didn’t know how deep the hole went, we only knew that people—children mostly—had fallen in and drowned. Our father surmised it was six-foot wide and might run ten-foot deep; we knew it to be in a wading depth of two or three feet, but we were playing ball in deeper water than that. After two hours, when we wandered back to the car along the main road, we saw M. Église in his Renault driving toward us.
He stopped on the road, the car idling still—there was no traffic behind him—and glanced at our small group. Église pulled over and rolled down his window. “Eloise es là?” He yelled, motioning toward the beach. Small waves, crashed at the shoreline, the direction of the waves paralleling that of the wind. My father shook his head and approached Église. They began to speak. The wind had picked up and changed directions; for the sound of waves and wind, I couldn’t hear anything this time. In my wet suit, the strong breeze made my skin prickle. My mother must have seen this as she put her arm around me and drew me closer.
Andy stood apart from us, as he often did, watching the exchange. When my father and Église stopped speaking, the man glanced over at my brother in a way that made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t name it; it was just an odd feeling.
My father’s sun hat—a straw thing that made him look strangely like a golfer, not the ex-pat that he was—nearly blew off his head as he walked back across the road. He clutched it with one hand.
“What is it? What did he say?” my mother asked.
“He’s upset about the lunches,” he said. “No one does this. We are treating the men too well, apparently. He was emphatic.” My father looked grim. My mother only shook her head and took take me to the car, while Andy trailed behind.
Three days later, just before noon—on another Sunday—M Église
came to see my father. He drove in a Citroen DS, a sign of his growing income,
this time with another man. They stood beside the part of the stone wall that
remained to be built. My mother dropped the dish rag at the sink and went out
to listen. I think she thought I hadn’t followed her out. The heat hit me like
a wall; my skin felt parched already. The cicadas, which we never heard inside
our house, were in full force, a steady drone[GJ1] [GJ2] .
“Qu’est qui se passe? (What is going on?)” My father asked, a pinched expression on his face. These visits from the gendarme, it seemed, were beginning to mount up.
“C’est inacceptable,” M Église said. He pulled off his jaunty hat this time and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “Les salaires, les déjeuners. Ça doit finir” (“This must end”). He blinked at my father.
The other man pointed toward my brother’s motorbike. He spoke in French so swiftly even I could barely understand; but I did hear him say, “Les accidents peuvent se produire” (“Accidents can be made to happen”).
My father did not respond.
“Vous comprenez, oui?” the man asked, raising his hand as if he might strike him.
Then the men drove off.
My father returned to us, visibly shaken. “They threatened me. They threatened us. They threatened Andy,” he said. “He said to me, ‘Accidents, they can be made to happen.’”
My mother looked at me as if in confirmation. The expression on my face must have confirmed my father’s words. “Jesus!” my mother said.
I must have gasped, as my mother swung around and said, “Go back inside.”
That night, when Andy did not come home, I heard my father in the hallway, preparing to go out to find him. The screen door slammed at the back side of the house; it was Andy. My father spoke to him sharply. Their voices echoed in a singsong of anger and defense. After my parents’ door closed, my brother slipped into my corner of the living room and sat at the foot of my bed again. The springs creaked sharply as if in pain.
“Everyone was worried,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“They threatened you—the gendarme,” I said.
“For what?”
“Because of the wages!”
“Phff,” he said, an expression we often heard from the locals when discounting an opinion. Then he turned to stare out the kitchen window. “It’s quieter out there,” he said. He was right: the cicadas were muted, the lull after the daytime chatter. “The damn cicadas are going to sleep,” he whispered. “Finally.”
The following day, we learned there’d been a drowning in St Florent. It was one of the Moroccan men who had worked for us. Eloise, who had been in town all day, told us at dinner. It was dark now, 9 pm. We always ate late, mealtimes driven by the movement of the sun. Several Moroccan workers had taken a dip at the local beach, and one of the men had drowned in the sinkhole. “They said it was because he didn’t know how to swim.”
“Eloise, no!” my mother exclaimed, setting down her fork. We were eating the last of the blackberry pie from Eloise’s berries. Hearing her story, though, I’d lost my appetite.
“A warning sign wasn’t on the beach, because supposedly ‘everyone’ knew about the depression.” The shadows of the lantern left a hideous expression on her face.
“How come we knew about it, but they
didn’t?” I asked. My mother squeezed my hand; was she
comforting me or silencing me?
“Because we’re not Moroccans, you fool,” Andy quipped. He was home that night, grounded for staying out late the night before.
The air had gone heavy around us, if not from the heat, which subsided at this hour. No one spoke for a time.
“Bastards,” my father said. “Well, they wouldn’t advertise it, would they? It’d keep the tourists at bay.” His face went a steady, angry red.
“He was nineteen,” Eloise said.
It was Andy’s age. I shuddered: my mind returned to the six men who came that first day. Was he my favorite? The one with the long legs, the one who had fingered the wisps on his chin in such careful thought?
“How did you find out today? Was he one of the group working for us?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know. The gendarme told me. He stopped by the beach where I was swimming.” Eloise curled a bitter smile. “He took me aside—it seems he’s always looking for an excuse to take me aside—but he did say there’d been fighting in the Moroccan camp about who gets to work on the wall.”
My mother shook her head. My father stared past the lamp into the trees beyond the light. No one spoke about the earlier incident with Église, although my mother later told me she would speak to my father to decide whether they should put a stop to the lunches.
After breakfast, the following morning, my mother and father had words. They rarely fought, except for when my father had locked himself in the study to design the drum to be used in the first Xerox machine, an invention later replicated without pay, although the initial pay-out would support our family’s departure. They stood over the picnic table.
Eloise was at the sink with me, washing dishes. I was drying them beside her, the damp towel clinging to my hands.
“It’s a meal. It is only a meal,” my father said.
“Of course, it’s just a meal. It’s ridiculous, I know, but—”My mother was insisting we stop the lunches for the Moroccan men.
Eloise watched me watching them. Her lips made a flat line. “She’s disappointed,” she said, under her breath. “It’s your mother’s cooking.” The food had become everything by then for us. “It’s her way of giving.”
“Or, George, just drop the wages—by a token amount. Remember the threat!“
“They are not going to do anything to Andy’s bike. I’ve got witnesses,” my father said. He stood up suddenly, which pitched his wooden chair against the floor with a clatter. “What would they rather have, a meal or a proper wage? Let’s drop the meals.”
I thought of one of the men, the thin, lanky one. I thought about my mother placing the food on the tray for the men the day before: a look of such repose that it had made me smile. Was her disappointment now because of my father’s stance—how he put his ethical treatment of others before our family? Was she scandalized he’d risk his son?
The next day was Wednesday, and it was to be our last time taking out lunch to the men. My mother felt strongly that we should warn them as a courtesy. I was home by noon; Wednesday we had only half-day at school, a religious holiday I never quite understood. Outside I sat at the picnic table, working sums. In the heat, my forearm stuck to the sheets of writing paper. I didn’t want to be in school most days; I stared at the sums, but they swam in front of me.
When my mother came out, she said, in irritation, “Why are you crying? It’s not about you. It’s about those men. They are treated abysmally by the locals. It makes me angry.” That was all she said.
We carried out the trays. The temperature had reached 100 degrees that day, and the men sat huddled in the shade. The cicadas, it seemed, had only grown louder with the heat. There were only four men, and they looked bewildered, either from the heat or the news of the drowning. My favorite, I noticed, was not among them. “Can they not have the day off?” I asked. My mother stayed behind to speak to Aamir, while I sought refuge in the coolness of our kitchen. When my mother rejoined me, she said, “Greedy bastards,” meaning the gendarme. Since my father hadn’t dropped the wages, the men, she learned, now had to give the gendarme a percentage of their pay. She set down the trays, her arms hanging limp by her side. I realized then this had nothing at all to do with fairness; it was the opposite of fairness. I returned to my sums but could not focus. I was angry that my parents, in spite of their kindness, could do nothing.
I couldn’t sleep that night. There was no moon out and, although it was warm still, it reminded me of wintertime when storms would put out the lights and we’d be in pitch dark. I stared out the kitchen window at the lights of Oletta, relieved that my brother was home. When I got up to use the bathroom, I stopped in the hallway and strained to hear my parents’ words. It sounded as though my mother was crying. Outside it was very dark, and I thought about the Moroccan worker, the tall thin one. And I wondered if he had died, or if he was friends with the boy who had died. And when I lay back in bed, I began to cry. It wasn’t homesickness this time, or the Moroccan worker I was worried about; it was the strangeness of this new world and how hard it seemed for us to find our place in it.
On Thursday, when the truck arrived, only two men were on the flatbed. The first man off the truck was the tall, lean fellow—my favorite, Emir (it meant ‘local chief’, I had looked it up)—now wearing a brand new shirt; it was thin-checked, a little like my dad’s. Beside him was the short, stout man, Aamir—the leader of the group, who had shaken my father’s hand on their very first visit. Emir threw me a shy smile. I smiled back, relieved he was safe. The wall was near completion, so perhaps fewer men were needed. Although we knew about the fighting, we had not heard how the community had responded to the drowning.
My father went out to greet the men. They were here somewhat later that day. The thin, pointed leaves of the olive tree left a spattering of tiny shadows across my father’s tanned head. He looked solemn. I didn’t hear their words, but I knew what they were saying. Aamir nodded, several times quickly, the way you do when you want to reassure. The high temperatures had dropped that morning, and the air felt lighter.
My father shook hands with him, then joined us near the picnic table. “It’s their last day of work,” he said to my mother. “I say we feed them.” The wall was nearly done. “What can they do to us, at this point?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m going to work on our lunch now,” my mother said, and turned to walk into the dark interior of our home.
Saturday morning I woke to find my parents gone. Our car was still there, so I thought they might be down by the creek with Eloise. They sometimes breakfasted with her there. I noticed the Citroen; only after my petit pain and butter did I realize it was the gendarme. What was he doing here at this early hour on a Saturday?
I gathered my digging tools and bucket to go down to the stream. The sound of the cicadas was not yet deafening this morning. The scents—olive trees and dusty soil hardened by the lack of rain—rose around me in the growing heat. I could smell the stream, low in summertime, but it still emitted a coolness that relieved all the same. As I rounded the bend toward my aunt’s tent, I heard a sound, a cry, then a slapping sound, and I saw the back of M. Église, the tawny brown of his jacket, heaving, a scuffling sound, another muffled cry. In horror I saw what he was doing—or trying to—to my aunt. I scanned the bushes beside her tent, searching for a stick, anything. The dirt plunged into my nails, my hands filthy from rooting around in the summer dust.
He turned around, faced me like a bull dog set to pounce.
Eloise’s cheek hosted a splotch of purple, I recognized in the sunlight, from his blow. “Run, run,” she screamed. “Go!”
Confused, fearful—as he turned back to Eloise, confident that I was leaving—in a single moment, I sprung toward him and began beating his back with the stick.
He wheeled around. “Batarde,” he screamed, as a leafy branch jutting from my stick scraped his round rosy cheek.
“Vas-y, vas-y,” I yelled. “Arrête!” I had used the child’s address, not the formal conjugations for adults we were trained in school to use; but in my rage, language fell away. I was screaming; he stood in horror of me, a child fighting him, letting loose with my whip-like stick. It whistled each time I swung at him. Whether it was horror or fear, or humiliation, he raced past me toward the house, the limbs of the bushes snapping back in response.
I dropped to the ground and began to cry, cradling my stick. Eloise pulled herself to her feet. She crouched beside me. I could smell her sweat, her fear. She was shaking. She held me until I began to calm. “It’s okay,” she said. “You are okay. I’m okay, we’re okay,” she kept saying. As we huddled together, in the distance, I heard the sounds of the Citroen firing up and peeling out. Then all I could hear was the faint trickle of a nearly dry stream.
Eloise decided not to report the gendarme’s attempted assault. She knew the critique she would get—a single woman, living by the side of the stream. An American. “It wouldn’t go well,” she said. But I could see he’d taken something from her by the opaque expression in her eyes. He steered clear of our property, and when we saw him on occasion in St Florent, I looked directly at him and glared. He always avoided eye contact. “They will never apologize,” my father said, “for how they treated the Moroccans, for how they treated us. You know the Moroccans turned the tide for the Allies here in Corsica. Operation Vesuvius.” I hardly understood what this meant. But my mother ignored the comment; I noticed she had spoken to him little since the assault on her sister. When I asked my mother later if she was okay, she replied, “Your father too needs to apologize.”
At lunchtime, one day, I went out to the picnic bench to lay the table, and my gaze fell on the new wall that had caused so much grief and pain. As I waited for my mother, who was inside finishing our meal, I laid my head down on the table. My father stroked my hair. It was a few weeks since the incident, but it still troubled me. I wondered who had won. We had beaten them back, the gendarme, I decided. But what had it all been for, my father and mother standing their ground to treat the workers fairly? We hadn’t changed anything that I could see, although we did change sides. I had seen Emir in St Florent, walking along the road past the boules game, held Sunday afternoons in the town square. Sunlight filtered through the tall leafy trees of the village, emitting a cleaner, clearer light. It was beginning to feel like the turn. I ran to him, straight across the worn grass that bound the boules court, my mother trailing behind, if apologetically, to the elderly men’s irritation, while my father, in an effort to respect the men, skirted the court (whether to repair his reputation or show he could uphold local mores, I didn’t know). The men’s bald heads shone in the early morning light, as they pushed back their ragged sleeves, ragged as the Moroccan workers’ clothing, suggesting that winning the game really mattered.
“Emir!” I called out in my enthusiasm. “Comment ça va?”
He turned swiftly when I said his name, and grinned. “Ça va bien, es tu?”
My father joined us and shook his hand. For a moment, they walked together in the village while my mother and I fell behind.
“C’est terrible,” I heard Emir say.
Was he referring to the drowning, or to what had happened to my aunt? The workers had learned of ‘the incident’ from the leader, he said. But my father only nodded.
In the stillness of that moment, I lifted my head. The silence was eerie. I scanned the trees, looking for signs of them in the town square, but there was none to be found. The cicadas had gone. It had taken a few days to notice: we were past the season. Still, after they stopped, you kept hearing the noise in your head. Isn’t that what difficulty does?: it starts up, lingers—then never lets you go.
It was the year loneliness broke my back. September 2007, and I’d only been in town three weeks. Fall was the season I associated with Boston, so why not build the city into my plan? I’d finished out my job at the ‘word firm’—that’s what we called it, the editors. My ‘word tools’ thesaurus project had come to a close. When I sat with my boss, he politely told me there wasn’t any more work. It was done. We were done. He was nice about it. But I couldn’t help feeling there was something else afoot. My father didn’t much seem to mind that I wanted to move after that. I hadn’t thought I was a drifter, but I was beginning to feel like one.
I was at the bus stop one morning when Bart—my just three-weeks neighbor, who lived one floor down—offered me a lift. It was raining, I’d gotten drenched on the way to the bus stop. I thought, “Why not?”
We’d chatted a few times in the hallway. He was sweet, but not at all my type. He was tall, towering tall, his teeth uneven. His dark cropped hair fell across his brow, the strands almost perfectly in line. Fastidious seemed too fussy a word for him, but pretty near close. Though really, I was only making up reasons not to be interested in him.
“I’m going downtown anyway,” he said. “Where are you headed, Emma?”
“The library.”
“The library? For—?”
“I’m job hunting,” I said.
He careened into the right-hand lane. I found Boston drivers terrifying, so I wasn’t sorry not to have my own car. Besides, I didn’t know how long I would be here.
“You’re from Portsmouth, right?” he asked. I nodded. Everyone knew it was the poor Northern relative of Boston. “And you were in…?”
“Editorial,” I said.
Editing was what I did because I’d been a voracious reader since the age of fourteen, the summer my mother died and I read The Lord of the Rings cover to cover, twice. I hadn’t been much for reading until then. It was late August, and I lay sprawled on my belly, head shoved in a book, as I clung to the twin bed in the rental my father had found. He thought we needed to get away after she died.
“So—did you want to leave the job, or —?”
“They pretty much let me go.”
He raised an eyebrow, his finger hovering above the turn signal. I watched the raindrops gather on the windshield. It had not let up.
“Yeah, I wasn’t thrilled about that part. I mean, we all want to walk away, right?” I paused.
“So you figured leave town?” Bart slammed on the brakes at a red light, the metal screeching. The dampness, I figured, wasn’t helping.
“Are you metal-to-metal?” I asked. “You know, your brakes. Are they worn thin? Metal-to-metal means you’re going to need a serious brake job—they can’t just turn the rotors.”
Bart looked at me with a mix of worry and confusion. He drove a 1990 Toyota Camry, which meant it wouldn’t be that expensive a job, I said.
“How do you know so much about cars? I mean, for a girl—woman.”
I’d spent several months answering phones at a mechanic shop after freshman year at college. I’d gotten into Smith College on scholarship, but that summer I stayed on in Northampton to work at the local mechanic shop. After all, what was there to come home to? Tory, nearly a decade older than me, had left years ago.
I laughed. He should have gone to Smith, I told him.
At the corner, he hung a right. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think that’s pretty cool. Not Smith, I mean. But the cars.”
When he dropped me at the corner of Congress and Water Street, I insisted he just pull over. I told him I’d walk the rest of the way. It was coming down now, sheets of unforgiving rain.
“Are you always this self-effacing?” Bart asked. He was a computer geek; we all know they’re self-effacing.
All artifice had left his face, if there was any to begin with. Beneath his narrow spectacles, dark lashes framed his eyes. I felt badly then that I’d lied to him. I wasn’t going to the library at all. And why? Why had I lied? I was going to the Y for a swim. But I didn’t want to go into my private life, because for me swimming was a private matter. Most people don’t really get it: why water would fill the space of so much else missing in your life.
The year my mother died, she’d been sick six months so I stayed home all summer. I knew what was coming. She had bone cancer and by early August, she was breaking bones when she flipped over in bed. The smell in her room had gone from lavender to stale clove, the scent of the candle she had burning most of the time. She played quiet music and, when she wasn’t sleeping, read. My dad was busy doing a summer school stint. Daily I brought her breakfast, because Dad had early morning classes. When I carried in the tray, she would lift her gaze from the book she was deep into. Her cheeks had gone hollow; her tan skin sallow, icy black hair grown thin and lank. I used to make myself smile. “Look at you. All sunshine,” she’d say, as I walked out of the room.
I didn’t do it for her; selfishly, I did it because her face would brighten, for an instant, and that was the look on her face I made myself memorize when I lay in bed at night, trying to sleep.
The day of her funeral, I turned fifteen. It was bad timing, my dad knew, but my aunt from Burlington was in town and we had to hold it that day. That evening, I went to my best friend’s home and stayed for a week. Departure, I’d learned, had its place.
At the pool, the man took my money and gave me the change. “Hey, don’t forget to drop your towel in the bin, swimmer. Will ya?”
I piled my items in the locker but had forgotten to bring my lock. I carried out my towel, my wallet buried in it, and set it on a plastic chair inside of the pool area, like the tidy little package I believed I had made of my life.
“Lady, you wanna shower?” called out one of the swim guards. “We mean it here.”
I stifled a smile; I liked the guy for calling me out. Because, well, too few people had.
I stood beneath the spray of water and through the steam and spray light refracted off the glass portions of the roof, I marveled at the Art Deco-style of the place. It was one of the nicer Y pools I’d been to in a while.
My mother had been a swimmer; she’d swum on a team in college, competed nationally, and was known for an exceptionally fast backstroke. She’d broken records in her college, if not the country, so when she met my father he’d taken to calling her Speedster. The name stuck, and throughout my growing up years, as the last child in our house, I heard a lot of “Hey, Speedster, you gotten her up yet?” Or “Speedster, where’s Emma, seen her?”
One evening, midsummer, I stepped into the backyard to find my father sobbing under the willow, holding his chest. His breath came out in gasps. He looked up at me with an expression so profoundly sad I turned around and ran into the house. I couldn’t fathom what he felt, when I couldn’t manage what I was feeling. I guess you could say I fairly hated him that summer, not just because he was gone a lot teaching, but because he stole my sadness. I couldn’t be that sad at her bedside. Even at fourteen, I knew that.
In the fast lane, I noticed a tall slender woman at the far end, bending down to gather her kickboard and flippers. Then she righted herself like a tall tree, flowing upward; I felt my breath catch. She looked every bit like my mother had in photographs I’d seen, when she was young, decades before her illness.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her as I swam. She kept to her side of the lane; we weren’t doing a clockwise rotation the way they did at some pools. But she held to her lane and kept at her freestyle with an even cleanness I found engaging, if impossible to match. She was rhythmic and solid, the swimmer I imagined my mother to be. With her hair pushed back into the cap, all I could see was the tan hollow of her cheek.
As I swam, I thought I could ignore the images that flooded me. I saw my mother in my bedroom, curled up on the sofa with King of the Wind, which she read to me unceasingly—even though she knew I hated horses—because she’d grown up reading it herself. And At the Back of the North Wind, which I finally made her stop reading because something bad happened in it. She told me it was okay for bad things to happen. It was, after all, made up, right?
“It’s just a story, Em. And stories don’t have power our lives.”
Even then I knew that was only half true. My mother worked for two summers in the library in Portsmouth before I was born. She was making a point.
“They don’t have power unless we give them power. Stories. You could turn your back on them, if you wanted to. Or you could decide they’re the only way we can know our world.”
I knew my mother from her stories, I realized, as I watched the woman on the other side of my lane, stroke after stroke, relentlessly crossing the pool. She swam faster, and I tried to swim faster too to keep up with her. I wanted to follow her, to change our lane structure and go counter clockwise to trail after her. The way I had trailed my mother in the backyard of our Portsmouth home, where the willow hung low and the creek, a quarter of a mile from the house, grew silent in summer. She wandered back there sometimes. One time I followed her, watching furtively as she picked a will-o-the-wisp and stuck the stalk, the tip of it, in her mouth. She carried a book beneath one arm, and as she walked she hummed. It was the Anthem, not the National Anthem, but the ‘Marseillaise’, which her family sang—her French mother, who’d emigrated to Canada before Maine. She hummed it loudly and with verve. When she reached the creek—it was spring, then, and the water was high—she dropped her book on the bank and stripped off her clothes, every last one of them. She caressed her breast—to my horror—her nipple, briefly—with the tip of the will-o-the-wisp and then dove into the water.
Years later I would ask myself why that scene had horrified me so. Was it because my mother was a sexual being and I’d never discovered it until then? Or was it because my dad, I realized, wasn’t the sole source of her sexual pleasure? But either way, the image left me unsettled. I wanted to forget it.
The summer she was sick, as we sat on her bed together reading, she said to me, “Emma.”
I looked up.
“You’re fourteen.”
I nodded.
“You’re going to have the change soon,” she said.
I blinked.
She adjusted herself on the bed, the quilt splayed across her chest and beneath it I could see underneath her nightgown, the single solitary point of a nipple. It stood out, and as she spoke I found I couldn’t stop looking at it. She told me about “the change,” about getting my period—which I hadn’t, miraculously, gotten by then. And then you can have a child,” she said. “And,” she said, “you’ll have pleasure, Emma.”
I colored, even then.
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said.
I laughed uncomfortably.
She held my gaze in hers. “A body—your body—isn’t something to fear.” I noticed the bone of her shoulders, the thinness of her wrist, and I saw the degree to which her body, what once had given her pleasure, had failed her. It had fought back, stolen from her, what she had.
She turned to the candle burning, the clove scent rising and filling the space between us. “You’ll love many men, Emma. But will you do one thing for me?”
I looked at her, spellbound and fearful.
“Love yourself,” she said.
My breath caught in my chest. I wanted to ask, did she mean to love myself in my heart? Did she mean to love myself with the touch of the will-o-the-wisp, when even the man you loved failed you? I didn’t know this then, entirely, of course. But I knew she meant something other than what I wanted her to mean.
“Don’t be afraid of all that you are.”
Then she set down her book and closed her eyes. I knew she needed to nap now and I left the room. And when I went to my own, I shut the door, closed my eyes, and wanted to forget everything she’d said to me. I wanted to pretend she hadn’t just told me what every woman needs to know. I wanted to pretend she wasn’t leaving me when everything she said was precisely because she was leaving me. She didn’t want to leave any one of my bones unturned.
The woman in my lane pulled herself up onto the edge of the pool, swung her legs over and onto the cement in a single, supple move and pushed to standing like a long egret. Her suit, navy with a solid white stripe, stood out against the white-tiled walls at the far distance of the pool. Water dripped from her. I had stopped now at my end of the lane. I knew I was staring; then I felt a flush of something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I felt a wave of nausea or fear, I wasn’t sure. I pulled myself up onto the edge of the pool, clumsily, in an effort to exit as she had. By the time I reached the showers, she was gone. Then, as I stood in the steady shower stream, I let myself do something I hadn’t done in years. I felt something let go. I turned my back to the rest of the changing area, wrapped my arms around my chest as my father had done below the willow tree, and began to sob.
“Good swim?” the guy asked at the front desk, when I dropped my damp towel in the bin.
I couldn’t say anything, but outside, when I caught the bus home, I sat in the front seat surrounded by two mothers with toddlers on their laps, an elderly man whose face was concealed by a newspaper, and two teenagers whose earphones were draped over their bodies. Beneath the thin colored wires, their breasts were forming and I wanted to tell them what my mother had said. And for reasons I still don’t understand that day I began to feel not so alone. My mother had worn her alone-ness the summer she died. What she hadn’t taught me then I figured out that day at the pool. In the length of the woman swimmer’s body, in her breadth, and in the shaking of my own ribs as I stood crying in the shower.
Someone once told me that when people we love are dying they teach us how to live. My mother taught herself how to live. It was the swimmer in her that taught me how to love.
At the apartment complex, I took the steps in two. When I reached my flat, Bart poked his head up from the stairwell and called up to me, “I’m onto you, Emma.”
I looked down at him blankly. My hair was still wet.
“Why did you say you were going to the library, when you were going to the pool?”
I felt a tightness in my lungs. It might have been the chlorine. Was he stalking me, or just calling me out? For once I didn’t mind. And then I relaxed. “Because,” I said to him, “I never really considered myself a swimmer.”
Lenore poked her head above the foc’s’le that morning to find the night’s rainfall had left the teak decks wet. The smell of dirt—rich, pungent, earthy—was pervasive, and in sharp contrast to the sweet sting of sea air, which represented more or less a constant when they sailed. She luxuriated in the earthy scents, even if the rain was costly. It was April. The Leeward Islands, in which Antigua was situated, did get rain at this time of year, but the timing was bad. The wet decks meant they couldn’t varnish until well into the day. The boat—an old wooden ketch, an Alden classic—was set for charter shortly, and Suaz from the agency would be visiting in the next day or two. Keeping her happy was an obsession of the captain’s as consistent bookings kept his boat sailing and the money ticking over.
At the far side of the harbor, an outboard engine was cranking up, but on board, it was silent: the rest of the crew—Captain and Denny, the other deck hand—were gone or sleeping. The pealing bells of the church could be heard from the mountainside above English Harbour: it meant it was Sunday and the locals would be wending their way up the hill to attend church. For many it would be a day of rest. But not for her and Denny.
She pulled herself up through the hatch and onto the deck. As she walked aft, she examined the teak. Immaculate bright work was a major selling point in the industry. The agency was touring the boat in advance of the charter because there had been a complaint about the cleanliness of the galley. The last group, a high-maintenance set of fifty-somethings from Delaware—Lenore’s home state—must have gone straight up the dock to the agency. They’d also drunk every last bit of liquor on the boat, until Captain finally locked it up. “They’re paying three grand,” Suaz had said, with a grimace. “That’s not enough to drink me out of boat and home,” Captain said.
To Lenore, at age twenty-one, three grand was plenty: she figured she was helping him pay off his boat so he might make some kind of living on the other side of his mortgage. She wasn’t paying a thing off for herself, only biding time, which often grated on her.
“Where’d captain go?” Denny asked, poking his head out from the cabin.
Lenore spun around. “No idea,” she said, “gone ashore for something.”
about th author
Alicia J Rouverol is co-author of “I Was Content and Not Content”: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry, which was called “compassionate and sorely needed” by The New York Times and nominated for the OHA Book Award. Dry River, her debut novel, was published by Bridge House in 2023. Nominated for five literary prizes, it was read in book clubs on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives with her family in Manchester, where she teaches at the University of Salford. Granite Rock is her first story collection.
“Worried about Suaz, isn’t he?”
“Yep, she’s hard line,” Lenore said.
Denny stood up on the cabin top and stretched. “Okay, then—breakfast?”
Lenore clambered below decks. She made scrambled eggs with rolls and butter. They ate in silence; she’d learned not to speak, generally, to either him or the captain in the mornings, as everyone would have had more alcohol than usual ashore here in Nelson’s Dockyard. After breakfast, she did the washing up while Denny climbed above board again.
She was to be directing their morning work on the boat, but the captain hadn’t left much by way of instruction. She had learned to apply common sense rather than track him down. The captain often distracted himself with constant runs to the marine store for more sandpaper, a fresh can of polyurethane, or a new halyard or bumper. Every trip ashore cost him. She could see it in his grimace, in the tension along the ridge of his tanned shoulder, when he threw the gear onto the deck. “Go easy with that,” he’d say, “I’m not buying another.” At the navigation station, as he added up the receipts, she wanted to ask, Was it worth it? Did sailing around all these islands, vegetation so beautiful you could starve just looking at, really amount to something—enough?
Above decks, she approached Denny, who was bent over a bucket, washing one of his shirts in salt water. He knew better than to waste the water on board. She turned her cheek to determine the wind’s direction, then scanned the sky, anticipating the day’s weather.
“So, you think caulking maybe, if it dries up enough soon?” she volunteered.
“Too wet. So you’re thinking it’s dry enough for caulking but too wet for varnish? I don’t think so!”
“Okay… I guess we wait then?”
“You directing the yard work, or what, Lenore?” He strode up to the foredeck, then dumped the water over the side.
“Technically speaking, it’s my job,” she said, but he was out of ear shot by then.
Being twenty months older than Denny did not afford Lenore any sense of authority. Denny had left high school; she’d left college. Neither had finished. There was a parity of a kind, but she knew it stopped there. Beyond their love of sailing, little drew them together.
Dennis Charles was from the island of Dominica, which lay between Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. Denny had crewed with the captain thr
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