The First of July(2)

What started as a muddy trickle in the dense forest of Arrouaise wound its way north for many, many kilometers, past Abbéville, St. Valéry, and Le Crotoy. Befitting its changeable nature, sometimes it was a brisk stream, sometimes a deep pool, sometimes a reedy lake. For a stretch, men had tamed it into a canal; he had seen a school map and there was the canal, straight and regular, and there beside it the untidy undulations of the ancient river, its meres and marshland. He had imagined the canal water always trying to seep back to its wild home. At Amiens, the river was a watery maze where black barges tended the garden hortillonages; from time to time it was a peat-fen rich in wildfowl; but still it kept going. It took in smaller rivers—Jean-Baptiste had himself been born and lived all his life in the small town where the Ancre met the greater river—and then, the schoolmaster had told them, it mingled with the Avre and the Selle and the Hallue, and with the burden of all this water it got wider and fuller as more streams ran to join it in its rush to the sea, and then it opened into a vast mouth: half sand, half water.

Jean-Baptiste knew two men who had seen this. The curé said the mouth was known to be nearly as wide as the whole distance between Albert and Paris; and then, as if realizing nobody could imagine such a distance, he explained that it was so wide, a man would need a horse to ride from one side to the other and it would take much more than a day. He said it was a wild, godforsaken place of screaming birds, knifing, briny winds, and hills of sand and coarse grass. Vignon said it was an in-between place where the sky saw its reflection in the water, where the sea sometimes drew itself so far back that seabed became shore, where the light turned the beach to mother-of-pearl. If you walked barefoot, the sand felt like carved ripples under your toes and the froth of breakers was like lace as the river fought a little before surrendering silently to the ocean.

The sea of course was salty and Jean-Baptiste didn’t know at what point the fresh river water turned to salt, or at what point its greenness would be overwhelmed by the cold slate gray that sailors talked about, but when he rowed away he would find out these things. The boat would not be diverted into fens or lakes; it would find the sea, like a fish returning upriver to spawn, and if he kept rowing he could even reach England. He would see what was to be seen and then come back a strong man with tales to tell, far more extraordinary than those told by boys who had just sat on the border in the rain.

Before then, he would need to learn a few words in English, and he had tried to get Vignon to tell him what might be useful—without giving him grounds for suspicion—but Vignon had been surprisingly vague for a man who had traveled. A man born in an unnamed city rich with treasure left by the Gauls and the Romans and Charlemagne himself. A man who had once lived in Paris. Had seen Monsieur Eiffel’s tower.

“Sausage,” the doctor had said. And then “God save the King.” His lip had curled. “How do you do?”

How do you do what, Jean-Baptiste had wondered, and considered whether he was more inclined to believe the curé’s or the doctor’s accounts of the meeting of the river and the sea. Soon he would find out the truth.

Now Vignon sat back, lighting another cigarette. He picked a yellow leaf off the sole of his boot. The toecaps shone like a conker; the laces were plump and tidily crossed, and the leather was rarely muddy or wet, except on Thursdays. Jean-Baptiste thought of his own boots. After his father’s death, his mother had kept his boots, much repaired though they were, as an earthly relic. If he thought of his father at all, it was only as these boots. He couldn’t remember much else of him above the level of the eyelets for the laces and, somewhere above that, a voice shouting. His father sleeping was a pair of empty boots in the scullery; his father dead was two scarred, upturned soles, one at right angles to the other at the bottom of the stairs. His mother had started making Jean-Baptiste wear the boots when he was twelve, stuffing the toes with rags and putting goose fat on his chafed shins. She was still insisting he keep them, even though it was obvious that he was growing into a much larger man than his father, and he had to curl his toes up when he wore them. His nail beds were bruised if he walked any distance and, out of her sight, he returned to his sabots, his wooden work shoes, with relief. But he rowed barefoot, finding that the sensations in his feet and toes responded to the messages the water transmitted through planks and oars. He steered the small boat precisely and gracefully, having left his sabots under a bush.

“Despite everything, this strange region is quite charming.” The doctor waved his cigarette toward the lagoon. “I’m surprised you weren’t all born web-footed. And how well named your river is,” he said, in the tone he sometimes used that made Jean-Baptiste feel less guilty about intending to steal his boat, a gibe that made it clear that Vignon had seen more reliable land and far bigger, probably more patriotic, rivers, including the Seine itself, and that, in the scale of things, this small town, this Picardy backwater, his patients, even Madame de Potiers, were a temporary amusement.