—
Side by side at the counter, Miriam and I scrubbed the potatoes in a mud-clouded tub, then dropped them into a bucket of clear water. There were beans to be snapped, the table set, and a loud bell rung to call the workers in from field or mill. At dinner, there was hardly any conversation at the long table, not, it seemed to me, by monastic protocol but simply out of awkwardness. Jean-Marie had returned from wherever he had gone with his carload of pipes. He sat down beside a young auburn-haired woman Miriam had been working with in the garden. Jean-Marie undertook to engage her in small talk, but the woman appeared to ignore him. The roofers from the mill, men from Auxerre who had been invited to stay for dinner, made a couple of remarks about the dry weather, about the effect of moss on older tiles, then fell into silence themselves. Miriam kept her hand on my knee. I kept waiting for someone to pour more wine.
—
How many days was I there? A few? Several? We would wake early to help prepare breakfast for the workers, for the monks and nuns who would be on site that day, and for any other visitors. Mornings Miriam worked in the garden with the auburn-headed woman; for my part I was content to take over cleaning duties in the house. It was cooler inside, and when I was finished I could retreat upstairs to the Bernanos novel I’d found. Furthermore, after lunch and dinner, nothing prevented me from polishing off what wine remained in carafes and glasses. I did not know why I was here, but my impatience with what felt like aimlessness yielded to an odd sense of acceptance, less the sense of having accepted something than of having been accepted: I could stay as long as I liked.
—
My second day at the community, a meeting had been scheduled with the prior of the monastery at Leuvray, several of the monastics, and a young couple who had just spent three years in Burkina Faso. The woman had given birth in Africa, and because there had been concerns about the baby’s health, they were contemplating a return to France, where they would take up residence with the community. Motoring into the court in an ancient Morris, the count himself arrived, the benefactor who had deeded the property in the first place. A small, round man in a Tyrolean hunting jacket, he addressed me in colloquial English perfected (he explained) in Alberta, where he had ranched cattle for a decade.
“New York?” he said to me, dumping sugar into his coffee until it flowed like syrup from his spoon. “I prefer Texas. The really big spaces!” His Americanized accent glowed like Technicolor. “Have you visited the King Ranch?…Never? When I arrived, the foreman who met me at the airstrip was wearing a pistol! A real Colt revolver!”
—
“You have joined the community here?” the husband from Burkina Faso had asked. (Through the window behind him, I could see the auburn-headed young woman from the day before. She had not gathered with the others for coffee but had set to work tying the tendrils of a vine to a trellis.)
I repeated that I lived in New York.
“Ah! Perhaps the order has a similar community in America?”
Perhaps it did. I said I had never heard of the order before I’d met Miriam.
“En principe—in principle it is a beautiful idea,” he said, “but to convince people to pool resources, to take on each other’s problems, that’s quite a different matter, no?”
After lunch, Miriam, the auburn-headed woman, and the others gathered in an adjoining room. What were they discussing? Operating budgets? Schemes of governance? From my post in the kitchen, from time to time I heard the baby squall, then smack wetly as the mother affixed it once more to her breast.
The meeting concluded, the count puttered off in his Morris. The Burkina Faso couple conversed with auburn-head, who held the baby against her shoulder.
—
Sunday, the parish priest, a chain-smoking Belgian called Père Albert, arrived on a motor scooter and everyone gathered for Mass in the chapel. The windows had been opened, so an intermittent breeze ruffled the altar cloth, weighed down only by an earthenware cup and dish. The rusticity of the vessels, set off against the new cinder block of the chapel, vaunted (I thought) an ostentatious simplicity, no less falsifying than opulence or pomposity would have been. The wife and husband from Burkina Faso each read from the Bible, and Père Albert coughed and mumbled his way through the invocation and prayers.
Miriam led the chanting of the psalm, and in the open chapel, in the breeze, her voice took on a glassy fragility. When she had concluded, however, the wife from Burkina Faso directed toward me a wide-eyed nod and a gesture of pantomimed ravishment. By the end of the service, a heavy heat had killed the breeze, and an algal odor pressed in from the millpond.
—
Afterward, Miriam and I followed Jean-Marie past the millpond up a wooded slope, through a gate in a hedgerow, and into a pasture where a clutch of cattle turned toward us in wary expectation. One cow hoisted her front hooves up onto the hindquarters of another, who lurched forward as though piloted by the cow behind. Thwacking haunches with a stick, Jean-Marie coaxed the little herd into motion, sending Miriam and me off to the left and right, our arms spread, to discourage the herd from moving in the wrong direction. Each calf kept close to its mother’s flank and, should she pause, butted her udder and nuzzled up to a teat. After the last cow and calf had been prodded into their new pasture, we set about dragging a great translucent tank in behind them. Flipping a stopcock, Jean-Marie sent a gush of water down the length
