Her grave

Thistles and field grass

My husband came home last evening from a day of work, followed by a night on duty and another day of work and asked had I buried the cane. "Cane", pronounced (to Anglo-Saxon ears) like the city of red carpet on the Mediterranean where the champagne flows and some girls in gowns tread those red fibers on the arms of men whose careers, and nothing of their own accomplishments, set them there. I had not.

"Où est elle?" he asked, curious. He knows me enough to be a little worried, too.

"Dans un sac en plastique dans la courette,"I answered, not surprised by his look of distaste. I sometimes leave dead things I am not ready to bury lying about until I know what to do. "Je ne sais pas où l'enterrer, ou si je veux juste l'amener à la Seine."

"Mets-la dans la poubelle," my husband said, perfunctorily, without a real thought that I would do that. I went on to tell him that I had slept badly again, watching over the cane -- a Colbert, as it is called here, or a Mallard as the English-speaking know them (which could give a whole other understanding to the name of that storied Paris brasserie) -- and having bad dreams.

I had been awakened after I last sat her down in the cat travel cage (it has many grills and air holes, being only a little less open than closed) at 4:30 am, knowing I had to remove her from my chest, where she seemed to do best, and try to get some sleep, at 7:15 am by the alarm clock I had forgotten to turn off, again a little later by my own cries from another nightmare, and finally by the sounds of Rapide moving around, whining a bit, reminding me it was past time to take her out and feed her breakfast.

"La cane, elle a dormi sur toi?" he asked, looking like he'd like nothing better in all the world than for me to assure him that there had not been a duck in our bedroom, much less in our bed. I could not. He knew that.

I nodded. He held peace.

"Elle était si faible, et tu aurais-du la voir. C'est comme si elle voulait le contacte, la chaleur humaine. Je me demande d'où elle venait, cette cane." I fell off, wondering less about her seeming wish for human contact and whether ducks nestle together in their nests in the wild for comfort, than about from where she had come to arrive in our closed garden, already injured or injured after. "Je n'aurais pas du la remettre dans la cage," I picked up after a moment, "Elle aurait peut-être survécue la nuit, peut-être." I was already asking myself, And the next day then? "Je ne pouvais rien remarqué pour expliquer le fait qu'elle ne put ni marcher ni voler mais seulement nager. Il n'y a eu aucunes traces sur elle, rien d'évidemment cassé."

I could not, I explained to him, see any evidence of an injury, an attack, anything to explain why she could neither walk nor fly, only swim for a time before seeking the "nest" she discovered and made of the skimmer basket.

"Elle a probablement fait une hémoraggie interne, si elle était si faible," said the doctor sitting en face, my husband. I nodded again.

"Probablement."

I felt relieved. If it had been an internal hemorraghe, there was truly nothing I could have done to help her. I could have held her until she died, but I had to sleep. And my husband would have been pretty upset had he ever learned from my inability to keep anything from him that she had poohed in our bed.

This afternoon, I finished lunch and I decided to bury her. Sam had spent his first night in his first place of his own, his really tiny chambre de bonne in Paris, and would fly later to Barcelona. Audouin was at work. I had spent the morning reading Daniel Deronda, and now I knew where I would bury her. I would not take her to the Seine and let events do as they would with her beautiful limp body and fragile neck, her closed serene dark eyes, and I would not bury her in our garden, where she might get unburied by a future gardener with no foul intent -- how dare I a pun at this moment? No, I would bury her alongside the field down across from the lower gate and the pool, by the fence that separates it from the pasture where someone here grows hay for their horses.

I went and donned my gardening hat and gloves, picked up the square-nosed shovel for breaking into the ground and the cane in one of the miserable Carrefour plastic shopping bags I use for garbage, and I headed down to the gate. Rapide was not behind me when I closed it. I did not want her company. She had already shown enough interest in the duck when it was alive; were she to know where it was buried, I risked never seeing an end of the desecration of the poor thing.

I tried to break the ground in several places, and found it hard, full of stones. I couldn't bury her too close to the field, or the tractor would uncover her when next they till. They had just harvested the wheat they planted this year. Some years it is corn. Those are the years we like least, preferring the grassier grains that flow in the wind and turn from emerald to gold with the seasons. I arrived at a tuft of wild grass and brought the edge of the shovel down. It gave. I shoved my foot in my rubber gardening clogs down onto the top of the shovel and felt both my sole and the ground give a little. I could dig a hole here, enough of a hole, while she waited at the edge of the gravel lane.

I left a clump of field grass dangling by its untorn roots at the edge of the hole and used the sharp edge of the shovel to cut away blades from a clump nearby. These, I placed across the bottom of her hole. I would make her a last nest to protect her from the dirt. Remembering they take feathers from their own chests to line their nests, I took thistles gone to seed to line hers, and added some that were still light purple to give it color, like the bands on the wings of her light-brown body. I added Queen Ann's Lace and went and got her to lay her down.

I regretted the flies that had gotten into the bag and tried to sit on her eyes.

Her body was still soft, and her neck fell from the position in which she had arranged it to sleep, or to die. It fell limp as I removed her, and I caught it, trying with one had to hold it where she had placed it and lower her onto the grass and tufts of thistle seed.

I crossed the field again and went for my pruning sheers. I would give her a rose from our garden to which she had somehow come, although something from the pool made more sense, and I returned with a pink bud, placing it in the curve of her neck on the swelling of her chest.

There were spikes of the recently harvested wheat lying about and piles of the seed hulks the harvester left behind. I covered her with these, thinking of the local men who own and the others who work these fields and purchase the fowl to shoot. They were not responsible for her, I did not think. And then, I covered the wheat with the dirt I had removed, setting handfuls of wild grass I had torn up from along the lane over her, patting the clumps of hard soil around any roots that might be able to take hold in it.

I thought, while I worked, of Baccarat. It is consoling to create a grave, I thought. To add the things that comfort its maker. I thought about burying Chloé and how I had had to walk away and sob three times before I could finish, and how much better I had felt when it was done by my own hands. I had had no choice for Baccarat, and having her ashes to take to a favorite place, perhaps some to keep or to bury when I know what to do with them, was alright. It seemed that it would be alright for me one day, too.

"Je m'en fou de ce qu'on fait de moi," my husband had said when we talked about it last week. That's what he always says. He doesn't care what becomes of his body when he is gone. That is for those who remain to decide as best comforts them, he adds.

"Je me rends compte à quel point c'est personnel," I had said. "Et ce ne serait pas forcément pareil pour chaque animal, ou personne," I had added, musing more than speaking out loud. It was occurring to me that death is as personal as it is universal.

I told the cane that I had done the best I could by her. I asked her to give my love to Baccarat should she see her, and the tears came again, standing in that field, seeing Baccarat with her gold Christmas ribbon on the shorn gold field on which she ran.
....

The nature of Nature and Meaning

Meet the duck

I wish I were a philosopher, but in truth, all I would better know is how to construct the questions that puzzle me and that have taken unassisted sleep away from me.

The sound of the garbage truck reached my Somnifère clouded consciousness and roused me from the sleep it has offered since the night Baccarat would never come home again. Shit! Monday. It's Monday, and we didn't put out the garbage can, sent me flying from bed, grabbing my old terry robe from the bath on the way and down the stairs, past Rapide stretched out at the foot of the stairs and Shadow on her way to her food bowl. The space beyond the table and last chairs to the door to the entry courette is tight, like everything else around here, but I hate missing the garbage truck more than I hate risking a bruised thigh. Especially in the summer, even if the hot weather seems past us now and the garbage really could wait until Thursday.

It's sort of a principle.

The sounds were coming from my left. They hadn't gotten here yet. They were just up the street. I pulled the bin out from behind the telephone booth (quaint, I know), and went back in to make coffee. Awake is awake, no matter how many grams of active ingredient might yet be in the system; I even made scrambled eggs, noticing that my three coriander plants' production is not keeping up with my demand. And there were little bugs on them. Or something. I ate them, too, took my coffee mug and wandered down to the pool to see if the pH Plus and turning the skimmers back on had done the trick.

They had.

But, there was a sound. Movement somewhere in the pool. I looked past the two cypresses in sad need of pruning and treatment for arachnids for some seasons now, and there was a largish bird swimming about. One of those big country pigeons that live in couples, and whose name I can never remember? No. It only took another instant to see that it was a duck. A duck, swimming in my pool. I sat down my coffee mug and ran back up the stairs for my camera and a telephone. It was still there when I returned and sat down with my feet in the water at the steps that take you gradually down into the water at the shallow end, if you are a chicken, and not a duck, and began to take pictures. Shadow appeared, with Rapide, who was quite worked up about this event, close on her heels.

I decided to film it with the only thing I have, my old digital camera.



It was just after my minute of filming ran out and I had just pronounced the unlucky words "we can be happy it's too big to get sucked into the skimmers", or something very close to that, that I happened to look away, and when I looked back, there was no duck, not anywhere to be seen.

I stood up and peered under the pool crown nearest me. No duck.

I thought. There had been no noise. No movement of feathers and flight. Or, could I have missed that? And, how could I if I could hear it swimming? Which left one option. I walked over to the nearest skimmer and lifted the top. Leaves.

I walked over to the other skimmer and lifted the top. Duck. It was full of the duck, sitting there over the basket. Concerned, I took a picture, and then I lifted it gently out, taking care to support its head and fend Rapide's intense interest off at the same time.

"Rapide, it's only supposed to interest you dead, and it's not dead, so go away. Now!" I commanded her. She listens when her interest is not piqued better than when I have a duck in my arms.

The neck appeared limp. I sat in a nearby chair and lectured myself for my irresponsibility. I had sat and filmed it, talking about the skimmers and assuming they would pose no danger, and here the poor thing probably had a broken neck on account of my entertainment and amusement.

It lifted its head.

"So! It's not broken!" I said, rising to see what would happen if I put it back in the pool. Not much at first, and then it began to move away, swimming like before. So much for a sort of broken neck. I had suspected that it couldn't be completely broken if it could sit on my lap and blink, look at me, at Rapide, at the disinterested Shadow and the hydrangeas nearby that I had revived with a lengthy watering Saturday. They really looked much better. Thinking about all this, I watched it glide down the pool and into the skimmer.

Easy as that. Like the boat in the shape of a swan disappearing into the mouth of the Tunnel of Love. I rushed down to recover it again, thinking the pool might not be such a great place for a duck, but why was it here? Why was it not in the Seine, which is right over there, past the garden wall and the field? I picked it up again, and this time we sat for a long time in the chair and tried to teach Rapide to sit, this seeming like as good a time as any to catch her up on her learning, and I wondered. Why? Why was this bird here, and what it going on with animals in general and birds in particular and I?

I stroked its head and tried to determine if anything in the cast of its eyes and the set of its head reminded me of Baccarat. I saw only that it was accepting, gentle and has an exquisite line from the long neck across the top of the head to the curved-under tip of the long beak. Why, I wondered as I told Rapide to "sit" for the 20th time, do we s'ecstasie for the swan, when the duck is so lovely, too? I looked at the colors shimmering on the band across its wings, shades of Kingfisher blue, deep purple and teal green, and decided I really was right to give that eye make-up away as soon as I had misspent a fortune on it at Bloomingdale's on Lexington Avenue back when I thought make-up was less expensive and more effective than clothing.

"Such colors really are better suited to you and tropical fish," I told it.

Rapide sat down.

I wondered what I had to do with these animals, and why they were showing up in my garden, or along my runs, this year in such greater number. Baccarat needing me, returning the sick koi I had been told was good for a plastic bag and the freezer to the fish basin, triumphantly, which I have not even mentioned here in these pages, managing to release one bird from the chimney flue and save the last one I found on a run, or the baby toads brought by the neighbor's small daughter and her somewhat bigger cousin from their sandbox to our garden to live. We could go back to Eugénie G, who I do not believe I have seen again, but at least she didn't fare as poorly as the frog I had to deposit in the weeds along the field, fighting despair for the cruelty of our pool.

Which brings me back to the duck. I stroked its feathers and remembered making the trip by myself by bus to the church and monastery of Saint Francis of Assisi. It was a long time ago, when I was much more romantic and impressionable and still wrote letters home full of descriptive language of sunsets and solitary moments. That was just one such, sitting on the top of the hill, looking over a plain scattered with roads and villages below to the farther hills beyond which the sun sat and turned the prospect gold. A moment later, I would rush to get my bus back to Peruggia, an evening walk in search of sausages and bread for my dinner, and my bunk in the pensione where the showers were cold, but most of the other residents honest, it being October and the off-season, and at the bottom of the village, I realized I had left my gloves in another, and ran against all earnest advice back up the streets I had climbed at a tourist's pace earlier in the day, past the post office where I had sent a postcard home, to the piazza at the top, where the bus was still sitting. My gloves were there, and I was able to catch the last one back.

Did that afternoon in Assisi and Saint Francis have more meaning for me, outside of being one of my most recurrent and fondest memories of a moment when I felt free and confident, than I had ever realized? Does anything hold any meaning we are supposed to divine?

Birds. Les oiseaux.

We had seen a house on Saturday evening that my husband had spied in his occasional perusal of the real estate magazines for our area. There was one that had caught his eye, and he brought it up enough that I called and made an appointment to visit it. The agent wanted to know our budget -- "à peu près ça," said my husband, the price of this house we wished to see -- and showed us others for a little more.

"Non," I told her. None of them please us. We are only interested in moving if we have a coup de coeur for another.

It was lovely. Old. Charming. Picturesque. Stone with an old tile roof, a tiny area of garden in front of it, a leaded window in the living area and in the kitchen, visible beams and roof trusses, or charpente, and rethought with intelligence and taste by the owners. Smaller in height, but not necessarily in footprint, than our own, it was part of a series of four contiguous houses facing another building containing two made of the old farm of the Château de Verneuil, now Notre-Dame des Oiseaux. Or, the school Sam determined to refuse last summer, when they offered him a place in the literature baccalaureate program for his last year. They had sternly cautioned him against continuing in Economic and Social Sciences. His math was far too weak, they said. He knew better. He had a strategy and believed in it, and he was right. "Les Oiseaux", as it is referred to, was just around the corner.

Was this a sign that we are supposed to give greater consideration to that house? Or that I am supposed to remain here, where the real birds come? My own sort of Notre-Dame des Oiseaux.

Last evening, after a light supper alone and an afternoon in which my husband roused himself, and I with him, to taking the petit balcon project back up, he proposed that we finish this house minimally and quickly, find out how many weeks of the year we can likely rent it -- aux anglais, is his idea -- and for how much, and if it is interesting, empty our bank accounts and all our savings to buy it. I had to get up from the table abruptly, overwhelmed by the scope of what he was proposing on the very evening we had signed a lease for a chambre de bonne for Sam.

"Si tu ne veux pas faire ça, il faut oublier l'autre," he intoned. I knew that. I didn't know what to think about all that, but I knew that.

I had been thinking of my fish outside the front door that I couldn't have "aux Oiseaux", but I could return between renters to say hello and make sure the company we hire to see to the garden had done as I had asked. I thought of the weeks when both houses would be ours, and how absurd that is.

"On pourrait chercher plus loin de Paris pour quelque chose avec le même charme, mais plus grande," I had leaned forward to speak into my husband's ear as we crossed les Mureaux, heading back to the A13 and Moosesucks on Saturday evening.

"Comment?" he asked, sounding perfectly astounded. "Plus loin de Paris?" He might as well have asked, "Further from Paris? What has come over you?" The point of the exercise, as he understood it, was to move closer to Paris, not further away.

"Bon. C'était une idée."

I looked back at the gentle curve of its head, its quietly blinking calm, dark eyes, slid my hand back under it and felt the softness and vulnerability of its breast, and myself spoke up.

Can you eat maigret de canard again? Can you, in fact, eat any meat again? I sighed. Myself has a knack for showing up with awkward questions.

"I don't do well with carbs, you know that, and, well, it's not the same. They are raised for consumption by people who manage to keep perspective."

That's what I thought, said myself. I didn't, once again, quite like her tone.

Now, it is raining, and I have a duck falling asleep in a box next to me on the sofa. Wisp came to see, decided ducks are out of her league and went to nap on her favorite chair back. Rapide's attention itself intense but short in span. I cannot return it to the pool, unless I stop the skimmers, which isn't a good idea for the pool, or find a way to place netting across them. I cannot either return it to the Seine because it does not appear able to fly after its encounters with the skimmers. Or the chlorine. I have been wondering if it is the chlorine, and if it will just suddenly get better enough to attempt flight without falling off the sofa like it did earlier.

Anyway, my garden recovery plans for the day are wrecked, but I could take the house project back up, and we'll see about the duck.


....