Following the Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stable. So it was said. For the presbytery was closed to them, as were the Church’s good works, closed to these people from France who had no religion, whose daughter had been granted special permission to study at the convent, in hopes of conversion. With her almond eyes, her curly hair, her sun-tinged skin, Madeleine sowed hatred, love, and legends. She claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of the writer Colette, pointing to her name in the Index and showing them her photo as a bayadère; she claimed to be descended from the Porteuse de pain, still honoured by France for who knows what revolution; claimed to be the protegee of Ava Gardner, who would come to fetch her one day.
    When Madeleine started to show, more beautiful than ever with a new, defiant way of holding her head, she too disappeared. Usually they laughed about these accidents of love, about the identity of the father, the sex of the child who would be born somewhere else. This time the whispers were as grave as terror, and virtually forbidden. In a cubicle reserved for the pianists, a fat girl close to the nuns had declared, under seal of a secret meant to be spread, that Madeleine had made the child with her own father, as her sisters had done before her, and that this explained the prolific inbreeding of the family who lived by the pigsty. Marie still wondered if it could be true, and why Madeleine was so cheerful.
    â€œI had no friends,” she said, hands joined around knees pulled up to her chin. She conjured up uglier girls who dreamed only of marriage, and more beautiful ones who dreamed only of marrying in English. She portrayed herself as an outsider who was heading down a literary path. She lied. She, too, had fed herself on romantic novels, on religiosity, on Madeleine’s extravagant stories, on her own diary. She had made every concession. She had danced on her last day at the convent, in her white dress, this first elegance tarnished by the mechanic’s son who had given her a wet kiss at midnight. There had been others, at the movies, at the Moulin Rouge. It was their ritual. She erased it now that it no longer had a meaning, now that she was convinced she had wiped out the pettiness of those days, escaped the triviality of that company of the feeble.
    Because of Ervant, who was so unlike them. She got to her feet, looked down on the dark nape, thick like a labourer’s, like labourers one doesn’t marry. But he had a naked strength she never tired of. It was like rediscovering, at last, the first feelings of excitement, those she had forgotten, too: undressing at thirteen in the harsh hot grass, summoning the sun to the place between her legs, and waiting. Dampness, the corrosion of August.

Five
    T HE PEOPLE OF THIS LAND DON’T PUT down roots. They live where they can, along roads going north, between truck stops. They do not make gardens; they cover their houses with tarpaper, held in place by temporary laths. They wait, then they move on again, amidst the penury that clings to those who open the roads. That is why we know nothing about them. In the few photos kept by the priests are only the house fronts and streets turned grey by badly mixed acids. No adventurers’ faces. The men standing outside their log cabins have expressions that apologize for their humility. Thus the grandfathers, washed up here by the Depression, came to this place by chance, chosen by the first masters. Later on they’ll have wives, bashful women.
    Legends have no faces here, no descendants, are like burned forests in which only aspens grow. Memories are short for children born so far away. In the attic, in trunks whose clasps are never locked, photos tell them of the marriages and deaths in families that will always be strangers, and they don’t believe them. In cardboard cartons smelling of mothballs there are no lace handkerchiefs or jewels: only last year’s rags and tatters, featherless felt hats, sweaters that