The First of July(13)

Godet seemed unconscious and there was a terrible wound to his head; his temple looked misshapen. Blood trickled out of his nose; the palm of an upturned hand was burned. Jean-Baptiste thought that this injury was going to be a problem for the old man with his work, even as he realized how irrelevant a burned hand was now.

The groom looked terrified, and the horse stood trembling in the far corner. It was only when two other men entered—Lucien Laporte and smelly Pinchon, the odd-job man—that the groom rose from behind the anvil. Pinchon had a gun under his arm and dead crows and a rabbit in his hand.

He looked puzzled, staring at the horse, and only then did he seem to see Godet on the floor and the fallen tools. The horse was sweating. It had cut its leg, Jean-Baptiste noticed, and its chest was moving in and out like bellows while it lifted its legs up almost daintily as if to avoid the debris all over the floor. All the while, it was making distressed noises and its nostrils flared. Pinchon lifted his gun, pushed in a cartridge. Jean-Baptiste saw a smile cross Laporte’s face.

“Don’t,” he said. Knowing it was all too late.

Pinchon got as close as he could to the bay and fired. The horse stopped, its restless front legs seemed to cross, and it fell to its knees with a crack. Its eyes were staring as it pitched sideways and lay twitching. Despite Godet sprawled on the cobbles, Jean-Baptiste felt sad. His ears were ringing; but as Pinchon walked up to the horse and reloaded, the groom was screaming “What the fuck have you done? What the fuck … ?” There was another shot and the horse stopped twitching and was still, a pool of blood growing underneath it.

Jean-Baptiste kneeled down, touched Godet. Stretched out his hand for a pulse in his neck and wasn’t sure there was one. Where did you feel? Godet’s wiry beard curled around his fingers. The man’s half-open eyes were still, his pupils tiny.

“I’ll get Dr. Vignon,” he said, hoping the doctor had not gone fishing yet. As he stood up, he noticed Laporte taking a thick hunting knife from his belt.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” the groom was almost crying. “He’s my horse. You’ll have lost me my job.”

Jean-Baptiste ran down the street. He ran until his chest hurt but then, at the far end of the village, he reached the doctor’s house, swung open the gate, ran up the path, and hammered on the door. For a minute there was nothing. He banged again with the side of his fist, moved back to peer at the windows. The door opened, but it was Vignon’s housekeeper who stood there, pale and unwelcoming.

“The doctor’s not here.”

“There’s been an accident.”

He could have sworn she shrugged. Didn’t she care?

“Where is he?”

This time she definitely shrugged. “Fishing,” she said.

He ran back down the path. He would fetch his mother to help with Godet, although in his heart he knew the old man was beyond helping.

He and his mother lived nearer the river. The house was always damp and the door was usually open in summer, so he was surprised to find it locked. He went around the back where the latch was broken and took off his filthy boots. As he went in, he heard a noise upstairs and, rather than embarrass his mother by calling out because sometimes, he knew, she still wept for his father in secret, he climbed the stairs quietly.

Halfway up, he smelled something unfamiliar, and it was only outside the door to her bedroom that he recognized it as pipe smoke and knew it was Vignon’s at the same moment that he recognized the doctor’s hairy backside. His mother was on all fours in the tangle of sheets, her hair loose and hiding her face, her breasts hanging downward into points, and Vignon, groaning, was over her, mounting her like a dog.

He went down the stairs even more quietly than he’d climbed them. By the stove was a tin can, where he kept his wages so his mother could use the money as she needed it. He opened it and took out half of what was inside. It was a meager amount. By the front door, Vignon’s linen jacket hung on a chair and beside it a pair of fine black boots, polished as if they had been varnished and on which none of the village dust seemed to have dared lie. Jean-Baptiste tiptoed into the scullery, fetched his own boots from the back: his own dirty, much-repaired boots. The boots that had been his father’s. He set them down, picked up Vignon’s pair, and went out into the street. Only when he was at some distance from the house did he sit on a bank and put them on. They fitted perfectly. It seemed a fair exchange: Vignon could have his mother and he’d have Vignon’s boots. Web-footed. Did he think no one had ever made that joke before?

Of course he would have to leave the village—not just because of the boots, but because he never wanted to see either his mother or the two-faced doctor again. He considered taking the boat now, but immediately remembered that it was lacking a rowlock. He could row for a short distance without one, but not as far as the sea.