Clay

Whatever was to happen that night would be decided by the heavens alone. The first signs had appeared the previous evening, when the swallows began flying low to the ground. Now a warm wind was walloping the branches of a tall chestnut tree in the courtyard as a mountain range of black clouds formed in the charcoal sky. Thunder rumbled and bolts of lightning flickered in the distance, illuminating the summit of Puy Violent.
Marie was waiting, seated on the edge of the bed, dreading the moment the storm would pass over the farm. She lit the wick of the oil lamp on her bedside table and put on her round glasses with the rusted frame, then stood to cover the distance between the bed and the oak dresser: seven steps heavy with age. Opened the top drawer and took out a locked metal box. All of which she could have done with eyes closed.
She left the bedroom carrying the box and lamp, closed the door to avoid a draft, and entered the kitchen, set both items on the table, and sat, annoyed to find that the others weren’t awake yet. The wrinkles on her wizened face were dancing in the pale light, but her small eyes, discernable through the lenses of her glasses, remained fixed on her clasped hands.
The rolls of thunder became increasingly distinct, words tumbling into one another in a single sentence stripped of punctuation and repeated ad infinitum. Now that the storm had crossed the river, nothing could stop it. Marie’s shoulders slumped at every reverberation, as if struck by an invisible violent force, confusion and fear battling in her mind.
Victor and Mathilde walked in, stepped over the bench, and sat beside the old woman without a word. Marie looked at her son, face stern.
“Why isn’t he here?” she asked coldly.
“We didn’t want to wake him,” said Victor.
“You should have.”
Victor gave his mother a weary look.
“He’s sleeping. There’s plenty of time,” he said.
Marie unclasped her hands and thrust out her chest, perhaps to give greater weight to her words.
“What would you know?” she asked.
“It . . . it can’t strike the same spot twice. Everyone knows that.”
Marie gripped the box, her fingers like fraying strands of knotted rope.
“So it’s you who decides where it strikes?”
“That’s not what I’m saying . . .”
“If he was sitting at this table, I’m not sure you’d be so bold.”
“I’m sorry.”
Mathilde said nothing, wasn’t listening, seemingly oblivious to the storm now hanging over the farm. Her pretty face was marred by fear, a different kind of fear provoked by a different looming storm. A first bolt of lightning through the window. Everyone hushed. Others followed in a series of deafening flashes that intermittently lengthened the shadows in the kitchen, then reduced them to nothing, then revealed them once again. Dazed faces, illuminated then extinguished. Waxen figures frozen in prayer, seeking an omen, some hint of salvation, beyond the thunder.
A deafening explosion set the walls shaking, and in the next second, rain began pounding the windows like stones being cast. The storm passed. The grave danger avoided. Victor watched his mother slowly come back to life. The old woman’s hands were still trembling when she took a key out of her pocket, inserted it into the box lock, and turned it twice. Then she slid off the lid, glanced inside only to shut the box again, and placed the key back in her pocket as she leaned slightly to one side, her head struggling to find balance, like an air bubble in a level.
Victor kept his eyes on his mother. “Go on back to sleep now,” he said. She didn’t move.
“This storm,” she said, raising her voice over the rain beating down on the roof.
“It’s fine, it’s over.”
“It’ll be the same where you’re going,” she said, as though she was talking to the box.
Victor flung his hand in the direction of the lamp, and the flame flickered in the sudden draft.
“Don’t you worry. It won’t take us long to send the Krauts packing with their tails between their legs.”
“Bet the Krauts are thinking the same thing.”
“The recruiting sergeant said it’d be a few weeks,” Victor added, forcing a smile.
Marie lifted her head, and the way the light reflected in her glasses made empty sockets of her eyes.
“And your sergeant knows the future, is that it?!” she snapped.
With a single glance, Victor looked at both his mother and his wife. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“I don’t have a choice,” he said.
The old woman instinctively brought the box closer to her chest.
“Just don’t get yourself banged up. That’s all we’re asking.”
“I know . . .”
“And watch out for lightning.” Marie took a deep breath.
“You’ll send news,” she continued.
“I’ll write as soon as I can.”
“And you leave tomorrow.”
“I have to be at the train station in the morning, with Caesar.”
Marie pressed her fists against either side of the box. “As if it wasn’t enough already, they have to take our horse too.”
“Leonard said he’ll give you a hand with his mule.”
“An old mule can’t replace a draft horse. If they didn’t want her, it’s ’cause she can’t be of much use.”
Victor allowed silence to settle in, hoping that his mother would continue expelling her legitimate anger, which was the same that he had inside of him. But she didn’t.
“They don’t have a clue. Old mules are awful hardy . . . and they’ll give us back Caesar when the war’s over,” he said.
Marie scornfully shook her head.
“Because you think he’ll find his way home all by himself, that it?”
“They’re going to mark him, that way they’ll know he’s ours.”
She shrugged.
“I suppose they’ll go round all the farms to bring us back our property,” she said in a cynical voice.
Victor raised his arm and let his hand slam onto the table. “This isn’t of my making, you know.”
“Did you talk to the boy?” asked the old woman, disregarding her son’s comment.
Victor shuddered, giving his mother a look thick with incomprehension.
“He knows where I’m going,” Victor said coldly. “You ought to take a little time with him.”
“I know what I ought to do.”
“Very well, but I still have the right to tell you what I think.”
Marie looked up at her daughter-in-law, who had yet to move.
“What do you think?”
Mathilde slowly turned her head toward Marie and clasped her hands as if she was about to applaud or pray; it was hard to tell which.
“I don’t know what’s best,” she responded.
“Certain things need to be said so people can hear them.”
“That’s coming from you?” interrupted Victor.
“And? I’m allowed.”
“You really think I need a lecture on top of everything else?!”
Marie hefted the box in her hand, preparing to stand. “Anyways, you two will do what you want,” she said.
“As best we can,” Mathilde retorted in a solemn voice.
Victor was still staring at his mother, defiance in his eyes. “You’ve never told me what was in that box.”
The old woman stopped short.
“All the things that must never burn.”
Then she rose to avoid having to provide further explanation and returned to her room. She put the box back in the dresser drawer that squeaked when it rubbed against the solid wood base.
Sitting on her bed, Marie listened to the rain letting up a little more every second, waiting for the sun to rise. The rain stopped well before dawn. A glimmer of light skirted through the shutters and froze, unable to penetrate the house. A turtledove began to sing somewhere on the roof, in chorus with the dripping water.
Marie was beset by dark thoughts sloshing around her mind like an icy mudslide. If Victor wasn’t to come back from the war, she would lose everything, cut down like a weed by a scythe, and there would be nothing that could lessen that pain, not even the presence of her grandson so like her, and whom she cherished unabashedly. Perhaps such demonstrative feelings skip a generation. She thought of Mathilde too, so unassuming, so fragile. Marie didn’t sense that her daughter-in-law was equipped to confront an empty spot in the bed, the despair that would overwhelm her, a despair with which she herself was well acquainted. Her true fear had nothing to do with a void, but rather with her own falling apart, as a mother. An internal paralysis that she was adamant on hiding, and that had been building inside her since the bells of Saint-Paul had begun to ring out of time.
Marie felt old. Far too old to fend for herself. Her weary heart and body alike could have used a respite, but she loathed inaction and would loathe it even more once her son had left for the front. She knew what a wife could accept in the end. A mother, never.