Small Lives by Pierre Michon Page B

with his scythe, the unbridled luxury of his kitchen, the well, the unchanging horizon. No one spoke of Antoine anymore; as for Fiéfié, who had ever spoken of him?
    Until the end, two or three old women, the best and the worst of humanity, went on visiting that collapsed pantocrator, outlined sharply against his moss-covered Byzantine back window, green and luminous, his kitchen cold as a crypt; sometimes the crimson foxglove chimed there. The Sisters of Mercy placed blackberries on the grimy table, elderberry jam, the inevitable bread. They told him endless stories of bad harvests, pregnant daughters, and tumultuous drunken binges; the old man nodded slightly, as though listening, serious as a police officer, moustache as dignified as General Lee’s at Appomattox after the surrender. Suddenly, he seemed to remember something; he shuddered, his moustache, caught in the light, trembled a bit, and leaningtoward Marie Barnouille, he blinked his eyelids slyly and spoke, proud and confidentially, a bit full of himself, “When I was in Baton Rouge, in seventy-five . . .”
    He had rejoined the son. When by all evidence he held him in his embrace, he heaved the two of them onto the rotten coping of the well where they threw themselves headlong, as one, like the saint and his bull, their arms entwined, their eyes laughing, their indiscernible fall sweeping the centipedes and bitter plants, waking the triumphant water, rousing her like a girl; the father, or was it the son, cried out as his legs were shattered; one held the other under the black water to the point of death. They were drowned like cats, innocent, oafish, and consubstantial as two from the same litter. Together they went into the earth under a fleeting sky, in a single casket, in the month of January, 1902.
    The wind passes over Saint-Goussaud; the world, of course, does violence. But what violences has it not suffered? The forgiving ferns conceal the sick earth; bad wheat grows there, inane stories, demented families; the sun looms up out of the wind like a giant, like a madman. Then it dies out, like the Peluchet family died out, as we say when the name can no longer call up living beings. Only mouths without a tongue still utter it. Who is stubbornly lying into the wind? Fiéfié yelps in the gusts, the father thunders, in a sudden shift repents, redeems himself when the wind turns, the son flees forever westward, the mother moans low in the autumn heather, in a scent of tears. All these beings are dead and gone. In the Saint-Goussaud cemetery, Antoine’s place is empty and it is the last one; if he lay in rest there, I would be buried anywhere, wherever I happened to die. He left theplace to me. Here, the last of my race, the last to remember him, I will lie recumbent; then perhaps he will be completely dead; my bones will be Antoine Peluchet’s as much as anyone’s, beside Toussaint, his father. That windswept place awaits me. That father will be mine. I doubt that my name will ever be on the stone. There will be arched chestnut trees, immovable old men in caps, little things I remember with joy. There will be a cheap relic at some distant second-hand shop. There will be bad buckwheat harvests, a naïve, neglected saint stuck with needles by girls with pounding hearts dead now for one hundred and fifty years, my kin here and there in the rotting wood, the villages and their names, and still the wind.

The Lives of Eugène and Clara
    I do not know how to think about my father directly, since he is inaccessible and hidden as a god. Like a believer – though one who may lack faith – I need the help of his intermediaries, angels or clergy; and what first comes to mind are the annual visits (perhaps they were once biannual, or even monthly at the very beginning) that my paternal grandparents paid me as a child, visits that no doubt constituted a perpetual reminder of my father’s disappearance. Their intrusion was a