Louis handed Modestine off to the son of the innkeeper, unstrapped his sack, and, without a word, entered the inn. It was like most of the others he’d encountered—rustic and spare—but the company he’d hoped for before and never quite received finally sat itself around a large table in the kitchen, eating a hardy meal and laughing. Five men who were in the area making a survey for the projected railroad welcomed him. For a brief moment, he thought to wave off the amity and continue with his sack to his bunk, making an early sleep for an early departure. The sooner he reached Alès, at this point, the better. But the smiling faces—as boisterous as his four French friends in Monastier—were too inviting a comfort, and Louis had always been an optimist at heart.
He tucked his sack in a corner and squeezed himself into a place at the table, where the hostess sat before him a sizable plate piled with beef, fish, parsnips, and bread. Louis put his hands together and gazed up at the crude wood ceiling—whomever it was that received his thanks had finally seen that he was at the end of his tether and surely must have sent this night as the cure for the malady that ailed him. He almost wished he could pull Modestine into the kitchen so that she could also partake.
As the walk was uneventful, the evening before bed was as well, in the sense that nothing in particular pulled at his heart and no one was killed. While there was not sufficient wine to be drunk, everyone got on so well that it didn’t matter. Together, they managed to solve all of France’s problems in the matter of a few hours, and all agreed on how to go about it. A rare occasion, indeed. The six men howled and occasionally gave way to hysterics, until at length, someone noted the time and they all scuttled off to the four beds in an upstairs room, snickering and stumbling up the narrow stairway.
Louis, clutching his sleeping sack, followed the group, feeling as much a part of it as he half-expected to begin his new occupation as a railroad surveyor the following morning. Courteously, the five men somehow managed in three beds, leaving Louis to have one to himself—each donned a nightcap, and Louis being without one, substituted his fur hat. The six friends chuckled themselves to sleep.
Louis woke on his own well before the sun threatened to spill over the hill.
“Hé, Bourgeois; il est cinq heures!”[1] came the call through the open window. He stretched inside his sack and counted the five nightcaps lined up at the ends of the other beds. One or two stirred and Louis smiled. Whether weighed with the heaviness of a previous night’s drunk or not, the most satisfying follow-up to a night of good company and good fun is a long and glorious morning of sleep. Not so for these men, who must be up and about soon to get on with the company’s work. Nor for Louis, who swung his legs out of bed and dressed.
The previous day and night had been so unexpectedly without incident that Louis felt perhaps he’d insinuated more into the unfortunate events than was warranted. Whatever was going on—and whatever rules of truth had been broken—was tragic, no doubt, but chances were that it was out of his hands and completely unrelated to him.
He worked to make this new vision more substantial as he packed up. Rolling up his sack into its more convenient wiener shape and securing inside it his myriad effects, he worked through the incidents that had so unnerved him and discharged them as being, frankly, none of his business. As deflating as his life had been prior, it was, he realized, significantly preferable to the death and misfortune he’d stumbled into. Louis did not care that he was picking and choosing what to recall and what to dismiss. He did not concern himself with anything that might ruin his new vision of his experiences, which, as far as he was concerned, were not even his. He was, he told himself, merely a bystander witnessing events that had nothing to do with him. And now, he must only move forward, onto the next town—on through les Montagne du Goulet, through Bleymard and Villefort, to the Pic de Finiels, through . . .
Pont de Montvert. And here his decision to ignore all that had happened ruptured and bled out. For Louis could not reach his final destination without passing through the place his “friend,” the cloaked man, said he would meet him.
As Louis readied Modestine, he tried to save his fantasy by insisting that Father Prior had been wrong and that Louis hadn’t been the only writer in residence at Our Lady of the Snows. The man could easily have been referring to someone else. And Louis did not know this man.
As the sun rose just above the horizon and dawn rolled into full bloom, Louis and his donkey bade his hosts farewell. A few of his surveying friends, now awake, waved with smiles from the upstairs window. Louis smiled and waved back, although his thoughts still heaved against each other, trying to find the right combination of reason and whimsy that would relieve him of any responsibility to anything but himself. The two worked their way from town, Modestine requiring a few early-morning pokes to get her going, and as soon as they rounded a bend that put them out of sight of Chasseradès, Louis stopped and threw the goad to the ground.
“Damn it, damn it, straight to the damned devil with all of this,” he yelled. He picked up the goad and threw it down again, this time stomping on it with his boot. Modestine took a few steps away, eyeing him at an angle.
Louis continued to swear and throw down the goad, sometimes kicking it and running after it to kick it again, until he grew tired. Then he sat down on a nearby rock and stared at the ground. The donkey saw the storm was over and proceeded to find a tasty patch of grass to work over.
Whatever had happened had happened. It was what it was. Why he was involved somehow, he did not know. But he was. And regardless of the present respite, Louis felt deeply that it was not finished. He knew not where the assurance came from, and after having witnessed the beast on Apollinaris’s road, where it came from mattered not. Call it, stupidly, intuition. Fanny would call it second sight, the gift of which she wholly believed she possessed. If only it was a clear picture of what was to come and not just a nagging, sickening feeling of foreboding.
“The devil with it,” Louis muttered and he rose, picked up the goad, and pulled Modestine back on track. He resolved to think about nothing but the book that would eventually come from this voyage and so he set himself to memorizing every detail of everything around him.
They moved across another long plateau like the one before Chasseradès and moved through a number of tiny hamlets set steeply into the Chassezac valley walls. The houses and their presiding church clung perilously to the outcropped ridges; their chimneys sent dissipating trails of smoke that rose to join the high-off clouds. Louis wrote his notes in his head—and would later transfer them to his journal—every blooming broom flower, every hollow, every beech and every birch. He set to memory every corner and every gully until they finally came ascending into the village of Lestampes.
The tight street was packed with sheep, which slowed their progress considerably. Although Louis showed no signs of caring, Modestine snorted and gave the occasional bray. With his hand on Modestine’s bridle, Louis shuffled through and let his eyes bounce evenly from one wooly back to another, the din of their bells forming an ocean of sound that could be pushed into the stern of one’s mind. To bring himself out of his stupor, Louis found one black sheep amongst the field of white and focused on it until they reached the other end of the herd and could continue through the village. As they passed that black sheep, Louis bent and let his fingers trail along its back; it bleated a response that floated over the sound of the ringing bells. He thought, this must be some sign of either good luck or bad—run your hand down the black sheep’s back . . . . Maybe some French folklore he’d never heard of, or better, the legend of some far off Pacific island. Someplace he’d never been.
Louis wondered vaguely if there were sheep in the Pacific and he held the sound of the black sheep in his thoughts until the bells diminished behind them to a faint tinkling. Resetting his stride beside Modestine, he tapped her rump with the goad.
In the village, they passed two men in a tree, pruning the branches. Three little girls danced around the trunk of another nearby tree. One of them sang:
Promenons-nous dans les bois
pendant que le loup n’y est pas
si le loup y était
il nous mangerait,
mais comme il n’y est pas
il n’ nous mangera pas.
“Loup, y es-tu?
Entends-tu?
Que fais-tu?”
“Je prends mon fusil. J’arrive!”
Louis heard the tune, but didn’t translate the words, and so he hummed along as they passed. He waved at the men and they waved back.
The road that ran through Lestampes bent itself before and after, with a straight-away through the center of the village, all of it inclined up and up. As Louis made his way to the end of town, ready for the winding to begin again, the girls’ play song faded and was replaced with the sound of cocks crowing to the air of a flute. It was played by someone Louis did not see, but the sound helped to push the bleakness from his soul. The flute-player could be anyone—the village priest, a talented milkmaid, or maybe a country schoolteacher. Whomever it was, they filled this late day with song and Louis was glad for the player’s leisure. The somewhat shapeless melody structured itself around the song of the children dancing around the tree, and Louis was cheered by the confluence of experience.
Even uphill, Modestine picked up her step a bit and although Louis was reluctant to leave the joyful music of Lestampes, he knew she was right and they’d better keep moving. As much as these small moments lightened the load he carried, and as much as the surrounding countryside warmed his heart —finally made pleasing with good weather—it could not completely erase the solemn sense of dread.
Soon, they were treading past the last few houses and out of the range of the flute player, up and up still, following the road as it twisted and turned past boulders and their companion rocks, and around the occasional ancient tree whose trunk rivaled the width of the road. Higher still they rose until they finally stopped upon a flat to rest before moving ever upwards.
The constant incline was bad enough, but that it snaked back and forth—likely doubling or tripling the length of the walk—was worse. For the first time, Louis was required to consult the map the pamphleteer in Monastier had left him, that previously-silly Beast paraphernalia. He was determined not to think on it, and instead sought a short cut, but there wasn’t one. There was no route but this exhausting upward winding path to breach the summit, and Modestine climbed slower and slower.
Louis rolled a cigarette and smoked it. He examined the donkey’s legs, which were healing well, and dug into the sack in search of the ointment he’d been given in Cheylard. Finding it, he slathered some onto the pink donkey flesh and then stowed it away again. Now, they were ready to continue.
The two moved slow but steadily, Louis’s eyes always searching for another way, when finally they came upon a section not rockily walled in—to their right, the land moved off at a gentle slope and he could see a reasonably straight path through a wood of dwarf pines. He steered Modestine in that direction, but she immediately became stubborn, which was not unusual at first.
He manned the goad, but to no avail. He thwacked her a few times, but, again, nothing. She snorted and reared. This was worse than usual. Louis shouldered her behind and pushed, but she brayed back in retaliation. Little by little, Louis managed to move her off the road and into the small wood, every inch of it a struggle. She wailed and kicked, screeched and bucked with every step, so that Louis was forced to hold the pack onto her back so as not to lose it. A few times she came close to toppling over backwards, so much did she fight on the incline. At one point Louis thought to just give up and lead her back to the winding road, but her obduracy only fueled his own, and from that point on it was a sheer battle of wills. Louis vowed he would rather camp another night on the ground, forgoing the safety of an inn, than give in to this impious little brute.
Still in the wood, Louis went around front and grabbed Modestine’s bridle with both hands, set his boots firmly, and pulled as hard as he could, swearing between clenched teeth. Drops of sweat fell from him and landed on his arms, so profusely he glanced up to see if it was raining. But the sky through the branches was clear. As he continued to pull, he directed his gaze down, where, amongst the fallen and exploded drops of his own sweat on the carpet of pine needles were blood drops of similar size.
Louis stopped pulling so abruptly that Modestine almost fell back head over hooves. He immediately searched his hands and then around the donkey’s bridle. Finding nothing, he re-examined her forelegs, and again found naught. Finally, he looked all about the both of them, trying to locate the source, but they were unscathed. After a moment’s thought, he looked back over the path they’d made and then forward in the direction they’d been going. They had been inadvertently following this trail of blood, which Louis did not notice but Modestine apparently had. Or, she sensed the spring.
[1] “Hey, middle class, it is 5a.m.!”
Sock it to me...