Lovers on All Saints' Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

hearing me. I didn’t want to.”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “The shot hurt my ears.”
    I tried to stroke her hair. She dodged my hand.
    “It hurts. I can feel the shot inside.”
    Michelle touched her head. Her hand was pale in the cold air. The gunshot had upset her.
    “Here inside.”
    —
    P IERRE LIVED NEAR the Rue des Trois Maisons, in Modave, so he turned off before we did on the way home. Michelle did not reiterate her invitation to drink coffee by the fireside. We took a few minutes to get away because the dogs refused to follow us when we called.
    “I can’t wait to get back,” said Michelle.
    “I don’t know if there’s any wood.”
    “What?”
    “We’ve had the fire burning all week. If there’s no wood, I can go get some.”
    “Ah,” Michelle said. “No, it’s not that. I feel dirty. I want to get out of these dirty clothes. I can’t stand wearing dirty clothes.”
    It was getting dark when we reached the house. Michelle went in, turned on the courtyard light, and left her boots on the step. I picked them up and carried them into the coach house. In the coatroom, I brushed them off on the doormat, cleaned the caked mud off the soles with an old screwdriver, unloaded the rifle, and looked on the shelf for the .20-caliber box, because in hunting season I accumulated bullets of all kinds in the pockets of my jackets, and sometimes had to go from pocket to pocket and get my ammunition back in order. Then Michelle came in.
    “The truth is I think we could have found it,” she said.
    It took me a moment to understand what she meant.
    “But we looked,” I said. “You saw us.”
    “I don’t think you tried very hard. Have you no pity? The bird is suffering right now. You should have found him and killed him.”
    “The dogs looked. They’re good dogs, Michelle. We did everything we could.”
    “You left it to suffer.”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “You’re cruel. You must not be quite right in the head.”
    She went quiet, waiting for me to say something. She was standing in the doorway, and the room’s yellow light hit her from the side and made her features stand out on her face. I felt worn-out. I had to look at the rifle that I’d already put back in the rack to make sure it wasn’t still hanging from my shoulder.
    “And what do you want?” I said. “You want me to go look for it?”
    “Don’t be sarcastic.”
    “No, I’m going to go,” I said. “See you later.”
    “But it won’t do any good now.”
    “It doesn’t matter. I think I should, Michelle. Give us a chance to take some deep breaths, count to ten, all those magazine recommendations. . . . We just can’t stand each other anymore, can we? Who would have thought it would jump out at us like this.”
    I saw her hand move to her mouth and press her lips together between two fingers. It was her gesture of control, her secret mechanism to not start crying.
    “Fine,” she said. “Tell me one thing.”
    “What?”
    “Are you coming back?”
    There was fear in her question.
    “If you’re not coming back, tell me. On the whole, I like a bit of advance warning for things like this.”
    “Of course I’m coming back,” I said without looking at her. “What a stupid question.”
    I walked out into the courtyard and the cold air hit me in the face. It was night and it was autumn, and the temperature had dropped drastically. Isis barked when she heard me open the gate.
    —
    T HE FIELDS ALONG THE ROAD were the color of the night sky. Streetlights, in this part of the Ardennes, were almost nonexistent, and only the hay bales wrapped in white plastic broke through the darkness, big and round like balloons of light. I drove through Hamoir and crossed the whole village without seeing any lights on. The Maison du Pêcheur was closed, but Luca’s old Ford slumbered on its gravel forecourt. Luca was a friend to all the local hunters; he would buy the day’s catch and paid well, and in the evenings the little