Noah Dunn
Noah Dunn is a writer, musician, and avid outdoorsman who lives in the woods outside his hometown of Bellingham, Washington. He holds a BA in Environmental Humanities and German Studies from Whitman College. This is his first published work.
Herbes de Provence
Two concentric circles make the village, one round road nested inside another. Rue du Nord, broad and carefree, marks the edge of town, flirting with the sunflower fields and copses of olive off the side. Rue du Château is narrow and shaded. It runs close-pressed between the rows of old stone houses which seem to grow at odd angles against one another, like a mouth too full with crooked teeth. In the center of town is the Château itself—dusty now, tired. Green things grow in its pockmarked walls, from the street all the way up the tower. The upper patio is level with my bedroom window. It is lost in a potted jungle of herbs and strewn with half-broken furniture in garish plastic colors. These colors, I think, must agitate the unquiet spirit of the woman who was hanged from the tower window five hundred years ago. That window is broken now. Its wooden shutters, meant to hold strong in winter against the wailing winds, hang slack-jawed and heavy, paint beaten from them. I wonder if she smells them too, the herbs below her feet, the rosemary and resinous marjoram and the lavender, that little flower that is the same color as my shutters. When the night weather is fine, as it often is here, I throw them open. The sun echoes in the old stones, and on the warm breeze that tiptoes down the Rue du Château, I smell them, herbes de Provence.
We arrive here in the south of France at the end of June. When the sun is at its most dour, the five hundred villagers of Aigremont store themselves away in their dark stone rooms, like the cloudy wine they will press come fall. They have done this, in these same rooms, for centuries. And so when four Americans move into the old silk mill at 6 Rue du Château, the house with the purple shutters, the town takes no notice. My mother brought us here. She lived in Aix-en-Provence a year in college and is fluent in French. Long before they had my older brother, my parents talked of raising children abroad for a while, for the experience, and started putting away the money. Next thing we knew, Hunter was about to start high school and I was soon to turn twelve—now or never. Dad works from home, and so that year home became the Cévennes.
That name itself is Celtic in origin, and the Irish half of me likes that. Go back far enough and you'll find relatives. At first, though, I don’t know where the Cévennes is. We’re in France. This much I’ve deduced from the months of preparation. I know it’s hot, but this doesn’t immediately tell me that I’m in the southeastern part of the country. My knowledge of the place is a child’s knowledge: I know where the irrigation ditch is shallow enough to be crossed on a bicycle and which yards are safe to retrieve wayward frisbees from. But I’m bookish, too. I read somewhere about Hannibal, and a dotted line on a map shows me the footprints of his African elephants on the impossible march to Rome. North through Spain, over the spine of the Pyrenees and into France, bending eastward around the Mediterranean at the Gulf of Lion, and here. Here—scarcely fifty miles inland from the coast, where I am sitting and poring over this map. My neighbors’ ancestors, perhaps, guided the Carthiginian army across the Rhône River and over the ice-bound Alps; some, maybe, even witnessed Hannibal defeat Scipio on the banks of the Trebia. This part of the world feels ancient, and the more I read its histories and wander in its fields, the more conscious I am of my youth. Roman ruins abound in the weathered limestone valleys, though it hardly feels fair to call them ruins. The Pont du Gard, the aqueduct which brought water to ancient Nîmes, stands as straight and tall as the day it was built. It was the timelessness of that same bridge that so awed Rousseau and caused him to sigh, "Why was I not born a Roman?"
This land is long lived on. As are most places on earth. Here, unlike on my home continent, nobody tried to destroy the evidence. All this to say: I wonder about the woman in the window.
It’s an idyllic summer. We take frequent jaunts to a waterfall on the Vis River to fish and swim. Dad works, but a little less than usual, and always makes time to talk about books and the local history. Hunter has a travel-sized electric guitar, a nifty thing with the tuning pegs built into the body instead of at the head. He's learning to shred and growing his hair out to match. Our parents leave our education largely in our hands, although Dad insists we read Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. We are thrilled to find that the author of so many of our childhood delights traveled these same hills with little more than a donkey and a notebook. Once, caught in a storm and bundled in his furs, he ate his ration of chocolate and dry salami simultaneously and found it pleasant. I elect not to replicate the experiment. In the evenings, when the heat eases and a breeze slinks down from the highlands, Hunter and I ride our bikes through the vineyards. There is an abandoned warehouse south of town, next to an olive grove, and we climb the trees and pelt each other with the wrinkled pits of fruit.
We both miss our friends and the few village children are standoffish. They know, I think, that we are only passing through. In the first few weeks a boy my age named Paul kicks a soccer ball with me and takes me to the corner of the Rue du Nord. There is a house at the corner there, with a big yellow wall around its yard. Paul leads me into a culvert under the street, roomy enough for two skinny adolescents. A grate in the wall shows us the inside of the yard and the dozen half-feral cats who live there. They slide mewling through the bars and allow us to scratch their chins in exchange for oil from a sardine tin. And then I never see Paul again. I don’t mind—he was kind enough, but I also know that I am only passing through, and there are other things to occupy me. Friday mornings find Mom at the market in Ledignan, the next town over, and thereafter creating something marvelous with whatever she had found. She is alive in that kitchen, its floor tiles the color of honey, countertops brick-red and embossed with chubby ceramic cicadas. At midday, when Dad breaks for lunch, we all gather around the little table to talk, read, and eat.
I don't know how to explain my mother's relationship with food. It's not enough to say that, as the youngest of six kids, going to culinary school after grad school set her apart, though that much is true. And it's not enough to say that, after surviving a cancer that she blamed on the plastic American diet, she fell in love with real food, the whole slow urgency of it, the dirt and bugs, the turning seasons and black fingernails, so much so that she made a business out of it—though that, too, is true. Once, I wondered if it didn't have something to do with me and Hunter: if this whip-smart woman who paused her professional life to raise us didn't decide she might as well make the most of the room she found herself in. But to credit something so insidiously mundane for my mother's gift and passion would cheapen them. The simplest truth, I think, is that my mom is an artist.
It's like this: Mom used to wear her hair long. I was five when the chemo tried to take it, one greedy fistful at a time, but Mom sat down on a wooden stool and had Dad buzz her bald. I asked Dad to shave my head later that week, and to this day, Mom wears her hair short because she likes it that way. So the world gives you things. Sometimes a gift, sometimes cancer, or both, and you take the harvest of the season and find a way to make it palatable, even wonderful, because that is the gift you give back to the world. And at the end of that French summer, as I first feel fall nip the air, I too begin to fall in love with food.
I start each day the same: up around six, down to the kitchen, where Dad is just putting on the coffee. Mom will have been up for an hour or more, reading yesterday's newspaper, and she will read aloud to us the stories that interest her as though we can understand them. Hunter, being fourteen, sleeps in. Mom will hand me a few euro to buy the day’s baguettes and a newspaper; as I step out the front door onto the Rue du Château, I smell the neighbor’s morning cigarette wafting down from the patio. The scent lingers as I walk to the antipode of the village, to the épicerie, and greets me when I come back through the door into Number 6. Dad lets me have a cup of coffee, we eat, and I get out a book. A "book." It would be impossible to travel with the paper needed to feed this family. We use clever little e-readers, the size of a dime novel, Alexandria in my pocket. I read a book or two a day, but I miss paper. I’m too young yet to know the reason: Imagination means more when nourished by a solid world.
This is the world I find with my mom. It’s harvest season. My mother's invocation pulls me out of my book, onto my bike, and off to the market in “The Dig,” as we have nicknamed Ledignan. There, I am strangely, wonderfully illiterate. Mom's conversations with the farmers and the vendors I can follow, at least halfway, but those aren't interesting. When she converses with the produce—my God, the produce—I try to listen, and I do not understand a thing. It's nonverbal: a prod, a sniff, or a tap with the knuckles. I don't know what they say to her, but I want to understand them, the voluptuous aubergines and the candy-red tomatoes in their green velvet caps. On the ride home, I hike a produce-laden bag onto my shoulder to better smell its heavenly fresh bouquet. Mom discusses recipes out loud, not that she ever follows them, and suddenly, her imagination makes more sense to me because its seeds are hanging from my arm.
Most of my education happens in the kitchen. I’m too short for the countertops, so I learn to dice an onion while sitting at the table. Strange, I think, that we impose a grid over the circular geometry of concentric rings. The stovetop is a little high for me to see easily, but Mom tells me to rely on my nose: The olive oil is hot enough to sautée the onions when you smell grass and ripe apple. Let them sweat a little and listen for their soft pops to wane before adding the garlic. Did you ever imagine sulfur could smell so wonderful? Quash your imagination a moment and actually taste the food. Now imagine. What’s missing? Mom mixes her own herbes de Provence; bundles of dried plants hang on the wall like some medieval apothecary, and she crumbles them together in a bowl. I mix it once, but I add too much lavender and the whole thing tastes like soap. Good things become great in moderation, Mom says. I turn twelve. So passes the fall.
A small gravel courtyard adjoins the house, just out the kitchen doors. Livestock were kept there once, and now four bicycles lean under the arch of the double-door that leads out onto the Rue du Château. A pair of purple sawhorses stand in line by the woodpile. Winter comes, and with it the beginning of a growth spurt and itching, aching joints that make it hard to sit still. I spend much of my time in the courtyard, splitting wood. The hard oak is so well-cured it has begun to turn silver and catches in the cast-iron stove like a charm. But I build each fire as if its alchemy will fail to transmute that silver and spill it golden across the living room, as if it will not honey the tiles under my mother's bare feet, as if it will not cause the warped and puckered boards of the upright piano by the front door to stretch, creak, and fall a little further out of tune. I think Dad misses his piano. One day he tries to tune this one with a socket wrench, gives up, and plays "If Ever I Would Leave You" from Camelot, skipping the French madrigal at the start, straight to the English love song. In the kitchen, on the other side of the humming house, Mom knows he is singing to her. It's a wonderful thing to know that your parents are very much in love.
With the winter comes the Mistral, the wind that means "master" in the Occitan dialect. It comes howling down from the Pyrenees in the west and the Alps in the east, a wild thing fleeing snow. It gathers speed and fury in the narrow limestone chasms of the Cévennes until, like steam shot from a kettle, it crashes headlong into the Mediterranean surf. I watch it snap a tree in half, and on the high ruined walls of a mountaintop castle called Les Baux, it tries to throw me over the cliff. But the harvest has already come; the master is too late. It threshes rows already shorn of wheat and wanders in fields of set sunflowers and sleeping lavender. On these winter nights, it finds only the woman in the tower. It undoes the knot around her throat and runs with her through the town. While the master stays out in the street, to rub against bolted shutters and howl like a jealous cat, she unlatches them with clever fingers and slips inside the house. She sits at the piano, her foot on the sustain pedal, to lift the dampers from the strings and fill its chest with the echo of taut steel. Most of all, she likes to stand a moment outside my room—the pause in her footsteps wakes me—before pushing the door ajar. What begins as fear becomes gratitude: This sleeplessness is an opportunity, and they become my accomplices, these two, as they cover the sound of my nighttime escapes. I creep downstairs, through the kitchen and into the courtyard. I use the sawhorses: I sit astride them and shimmy up the back, over the neck, and dismount. My feet touch the traitorously loud gravel only once as I ease open the door, lift my bike, and slip into the midnight street—stopping a moment to look up at the broken tower.
I splash through the culvert under the Rue du Nord and bring my sardine tin tribute to the cats. Even in the winter, they live in the yard. They seem glad of a warm body to press against. In the fallow rows off the road, the tractors’ ruts have hardened with the cold. They make for marvelous biking tracks, and once, I follow them all the way to The Dig to walk the market stalls in the dark. A million possibilities are poised at the crossroads between these satin shadows and my imagination. The old warehouse south of town has a loose window that can be jimmied out of its frame, and inside are boyhood curiosities: old cigarette butts, a handful of coins. I like to climb the stairs and look out a broken window onto the olive grove. Moonlight limns the edge of the woman’s ragged dress as she dances with the master amid knuckled branches. They twist and whirl and curtsy and caper until the master leaves, called to the sea, and the woman is left to stand alone. I come down from the window. I take her arm and we walk back home along the Rue du Nord. I introduce her to the cats, who lick my knuckles where a sheen of sardine oil lingers. We stroll up the Rue du Château, and with her quiet hands, she unlatches the courtyard door for me and bids me goodnight. From my bedroom, I watch. Across the street, in the broken tower, she appears. She sits on the sill, ties the noose again around her neck, and falls forward. In the morning, I come downstairs at the usual time. Mom hands me coins for the day’s bread, then makes a sound of concern and takes my wrist. “Sweetheart, what happened to your hand?” She examines my knuckles and finds them undamaged, but tracks of dried blood run where last night, coarse pink tongues had rasped. I stop bringing cans to the culvert.
December comes and readies for its departure, as do we. In our last week in France, we go to our landlords' house for dinner. The Nolders, Caroline and David, are British expats. They have an acoustic guitar that Hunter brings to life. I had helped Mom make some appetizersand Caroline is rather excited by this. She discusses the markets with Mom while David pours Champagne and, being British, hands me a glass without asking my parents. I'm deciding I quite like Champagne when Caroline asks the question.
"So, have you noticed the ghost?"
She's perfectly credulous and Dad, I can tell, is fighting the urge to say something impolite. I keep my mouth shut. Mom furrows her brows.
"What do you mean?"
This is when I learn that a woman was hanged from the Château tower. This is when I assign motive to memory and make it something more than wind. Caroline swears that the lord of the Château ordered it, that his descendants still live there, and I think of the unseen neighbor on the patio and the tar-smelling smoke which hung over the potted herbs.
If 6 Rue du Château is haunted, Dad asks, why haven’t the Nolders sold it?
"Well," says Caroline, "she's perfectly friendly, isn't she?" David hands her Champagne, and she raises the flute. "Happy Christmas, everyone."
Dad's chuckling on the drive back to the house—ghosts. None of us believe in them, really, but Mom tells us then that she'd always notice things. That in the dawn hours, with nobody else awake, she'd sit at the kitchen table and read the paper, and hear…something. Feel a breeze, maybe, that had no place indoors, a breath that rustled the herbs over the stove and prised open doors. I say nothing. The woman kept my secret, and I will keep hers.
"That house is older than the U.S.," says Dad. "The wind gets through."
And he's right, of course. But this is how the mind works, and this is how time works. This is how you take the world outside your head and remake it inside, in the cool, vaulted rooms, away from the sun and the wind. You pull the bung from the barrel, you dip the thief in the wine of your memory, and you taste to see if it is ready. You hope that, in doing so, you don’t change anything, but it’s hard to know if you have. It doesn't happen in a straight line any more than growing up, and borders, like those between the solid and the spectral, will crumble like a dried flower.
I'm on the ground under the Château, before there was a Château. A man looks down at me from a high horse, a man with conqueror's eyes. Legions mass behind him, and the largest creatures I have ever seen, grey titans, slipped from the world of spirits and gods. We do not share a tongue, he and I, but all solid things share language. I will guide you across the river, General. I will guide you over the mountains that birth the wind. To be is impossible, General, so let us do the impossible. First, we will share food. Feed your army on the fruits and flowers of the Cévennes, and then I will guide you to Rome.
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CREATIVE NONFICTION
