A period without incident followed. For a week Christophe was calm and lucid, feeding the children at regular intervals and fulfilling his duties in the garden. Several times he spotted Florian roaming the outskirts of the property dressed like some filth-streaked character from a Beckett play. The old man took to leaving food in a basket, which he hung on the branch of an elm tree he had often observed the boy climbing. The aluminum-wrapped meals disappeared and the basket remained hanging, suggesting to Christophe that the boy was receiving this nourishment in the stead of some wild animal.
Marc’s wounds healed and the boy seemed in relatively good spirits save the occasional bout of violence. Sabine remained unreadable, a wide-eyed somnambulist accompanying her brother wherever he went. As for Lea, she often rode her bicycle through the countryside and had recently taken to keeping pets. Christophe would see them hopping and crawling around the house, a few times crushing one accidentally beneath his shoe. Lea marked each death with a solemn and meticulous burial, leaving a rock or stick as a gravestone.
Rodolphe and Gaëlle became de facto leaders for the smaller children who came to favor the safety of the group. Between excursions into the wilderness they remained mostly in the courtyard, mutilating frogs or building miniature villages out of stones and pebbles. Rodolphe entered occasional fits of rage during which he would spend extended time throwing stones against the building’s façade. He rarely turned this anger against the others, and the children looked to Gaëlle for consistency and gentleness, qualities Rodolphe did not possess.
All of this Christophe observed with satisfaction. Each day of service to the children was another day spent in penance.
At nightfall, after the children were fed and asleep, Christophe dressed in dark clothes and slipped out of the farmhouse as silently as possible. The egg whites would have to be culled from Lucien and Joseph, the reluctant old bats. Surely the lord would forgive a theft with such honorable intentions. The moon waxed favorably through a ring of mist and Christophe could see his own breath escaping in light blue wisps as he jogged the road. It was a cold and humid night, and the dew caused the countryside to scintillate in sporadic bursts beneath the moonlight. Christophe turned left on the road and stretched out his hand to stroke a fern frond bowing over the asphalt. His hiking shoes squeaked and the road curved to the right for a long stretch, then to the left. There, outlined against the blue-black landscape, Christophe could see the crudely cemented cinderblocks of the gypsies’ house, abandoned long before it was fully built, a burned trailer sitting across from it on the wild lawn. Lucien and Joseph did not have to worry about the thieving no-good gypsies after all. The family was swept off with the same broom as the rest of the countryside. The man, his wife, their two teenage children. All useful. All taken.
As the old man approached the gate he slowed and quieted his footsteps, eyes sweeping the darkness behind the chain-link fence for signs of life. A dog. A stray hen. Perhaps even one of the brothers having a late-night stroll. Unlikely. The dog was long dead, his howls not heard for at least a year, the hens would be in their coop before nightfall, and the brothers were fat and very old, older than Christophe even. They needed their sleep.
Christophe pushed one shoe into the chain link and prepared to hoist himself up. Instead he froze, considering something for a moment before uncoupling himself from the fence. The knob grated as it turned, but the old man could not hear it because the wind was hissing in his ears. Christophe pulled the gate open and slipped inside.
The courtyard was bare and empty. The two-story house cast a long shadow and its black windows reflected no moonlight. To its left stood a chicken coop shoddily cobbled from rough planks, a small padlock securing the door. Christophe ran his fingers over the latch and wiped the flaking rust onto his pants. The nails were loose in the rotten wood. From his coat he removed a screw-driver and wedged it between the latch and the door, using it as a lever to separate them. It gave easily and he did not have to struggle. He entered the coop.
Christophe could hear the hens scuffling in the darkness. He produced a plastic lighter from his pocket and struck the flint. Seven birds lined the roost. Two were asleep. The rest watched the old man with their black eyes. They smelled intensely of rotten straw and bird shit. Christophe shushed them as he had seen Lucien and Joseph do, but they did not seem agitated. The old man examined the nesting boxes and found thirteen eggs in the plastic containers. He took eight, slipping them carefully into a plastic bag hanging from his wrist. The hens said nothing. Christophe closed the door behind him and pushed the latch nails back into the wood. They were looser than before, but the brothers would probably not notice. He crept back across the courtyard towards the gate, making sure to close it behind him.
A dull joy rose in the old man’s breast as he walked towards the farmhouse. He did not notice the moon as the clouds drifted from it, nor did he reach out to touch any plants. He walked upright and absorbed in thought, a black shape on the grey road.
Tonight Christophe did not feel old. His bones did not ache in the usual manner, and instead of sleeping he rolled up a piece of scrap paper and used it to light the oven. Because it consumed a great amount of gas, the old man had not used the oven in years, but tonight he would make an exception. Meringue was by definition a wasteful and frivolous thing. He lit two candles so that he might see his workspace and cracked four eggs, passing the yolks back and forth in their shells, and letting the whites drip into a bowl. The yolks he kept separately for tomorrow’s soup.
Christophe beat the egg whites with trembling arms, driving the whisk in tight circles until the mixture looked like sea foam. As he walked towards the pantry Christophe heard the buzz of a fly and turned to see its enormous shape projected onto the wall, black against the orange light. He watched it fall into the bowl and go silent. In the pantry he felt around in the darkness and carried various paper containers into the light until he found the caster sugar. He walked back over to his workspace and set the sugar next to the bowl. He could see a small hole in the mixture where the fly had entered it.
Christophe pushed his finger into the hole and attempted to scoop the insect out, feeling instead the vibrations carried through the hollow muck, the relentless beating of the fly’s wings in the foamy darkness as it struggled to remain alive. In that moment he glimpsed the tremendous solitude of death and the old man cried out, his shadow billowing in the flickering candlelight as he staggered backwards and collapsed against the sofa. Slowly the old man’s head dipped until his chin was resting against his breast and his face was lost in shadow. He stayed that way until the candles had halved.