The forecast was for rain, but for now low-hanging clouds did not mass. In Miradoux, a hilltop village, Priscilla and I posed for pictures, Priscilla wearing jeans, a long-sleeved blue T-shirt, a baseball cap and gloves — because, as she explained, otherwise her hands swelled and her skin became uncomfortably tight. Behind her, the landscape fell away into a patchwork of rolling hills. Crops had mostly gone to harvest, leaving subtle color, shades of tan, rust, and green. Trees grew on hilltops.
I’d bumped into Priscilla the week before on market day in Valence d’Agen. We were blocking the narrow-cobbled sidewalk, and people stepped into the road to walk around us. “Come walk the Chemin with me,” Priscilla said.
“The Chemin,” I said, hesitating, although I didn’t know why.
“Trust me. You’ll want to get out of the Old Port for the weekend. A street fair is taking over. You won’t be able to hear yourself think.”
Now, in Miradoux, I handed Priscilla my camera, sat on a low stone wall, and looked out from beneath my wide-brimmed hiking hat. Priscilla captured a closed-lip smile, not my usual open-mouthed grin. I was trying to be sophisticated. To be perfectly honest, I wanted to emulate her, but impish joy shone in my face. Now, I felt that old sensation spilling from the inside out. Whatever doubts I’d harbored — hardly admitting them to myself — about spending two nights and three days with a woman I’d met the week before, vanished like vapor into the air. We shouldered our packs and followed a path alongside a farmer’s field, at a leisurely pace. We would walk that day, spend the night in a gîte, then walk back to Auvillar on our second day. To our right, patches of tall grass gone to seed. To our left, a row of young trees planted to shield the Chemin from a macadam road. There was no traffic. No noise save the buzz of an insect.
A pilgrim, a thin young man with shaggy brown hair and carrying an old-fashioned frame backpack, approached, head bowed perhaps in prayer or contemplation. He passed, wordlessly. The next group dispelled my thoughts of piety. They were a gregarious group of men and women, Germans who spoke French. Priscilla was their focus. Without language, I stood at the edge of a closed circle, watching Priscilla’s animated face, her gloved hands gesturing. I thought back to the evening in her garden when we met, Priscilla pouring soup, then lifting the lip of the pitcher with a turn of her wrist, Priscilla brandishing a knife to slice a baguette, every movement theatrical and calculated to draw attention.
I noticed a low-growing tree laden with pale green apples blushed with crimson, each apple maybe three inches in diameter. The last time I saw lady apples I was at a farm stand in Virginia. I remembered a basket of them tucked under a wooden table. When the group of pilgrims moved on, I showed Priscilla the tree. Without hesitation, her fingers darted. She twisted a stem, pulled, then bit. “Did you know lady apples date back to the first century?” she said. “Hardy little fruits, aren’t they?”
These apples were so small that Priscilla and I shoved three down into a single pocket. Laughing, we filled a second pocket. As we strolled side by side, I told Priscilla of a gnarled apple tree in my yard at home. “It’s been there for years, way before the house was built. It gets fertilized with its own fruit. Plenty of water. But the apples are inedible.”
Shrugging, Priscilla pulled another apple from her pocket. “Could have been a miserable apple tree to begin with. You live on the coast, right? All that salt air sitting on leaves makes life hard for a tree.” She smiled in a knowing way. “And so, how do you kill a tree? Well, how did the Romans take Carthage?”
I had no idea how the Romans took Carthage, had no idea they’d even taken Carthage, but I liked the thought that Priscilla did.
“By putting salt in the soil,” she said.
My tree, planted years ago, had endured not only harsh temperatures, but indeed, air-borne salt as well. Yet every spring the tree budded, then blossomed, and every fall it bore its miserable, wormy and misshapen fruit. It might not have fed me, but it fed worms, birds, chipmunks, and squirrels. I loved that tree. “Do you think it’s dying?” I asked.
“Slowly,” Priscilla said.
The Commune de Flamarens began, as all these villages seemed to begin, with a steep climb to a height of land. We approached through a narrow street with ancient stone buildings rising like walls. At the ruin of a church, a wooden sign announced a restoration site, but I saw little evidence of recent work. We entered the ruin. Dust choked the air. This place felt and smelled long abandoned. The roof was mostly gone, and remnants of gothic arches and vaulted ceilings reached to the sky. I felt strange inside this wreckage that was neither sanctioned ruin nor rebuilt cathedral.
Along one wall, a wooden stage. Who performed here? Everything about this ruin was out of kilter — piled planks, stacked boxes, a wooden bar with barstools. Off to one side, a small table with chairs. Priscilla and I contemplated lunch, but neither of us wanted to eat inside this gutted wreck.
Leaving the church, or what was left of it, we spied a grassy knoll with tables and chairs. On the other side of the road, a massive stone château with a turret hindered our view. We moved our chairs to see around it. Shadowed hills rolled under clouds. Priscilla pulled a baguette from her pack. She rummaged and extracted two cans of tuna in tomato sauce, one for each of us. I’d brought a wedge of cheese. We were alone, not a pilgrim or villager in sight. Quiet filled the air. “Tell me about those pilgrims,” I said.
“The Germans? They come every year.”
“Religious?”
“Comme si, comme ça. They thought we were very strong, that we’d walked all the way to Santiago and now were walking back.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t known we were walking in the wrong direction, away from the shrine of Saint Jacques, not toward it. How fitting for a Jew.
A drop of rain fell. And another. We pulled jackets from our packs and thrust our arms through the sleeves. The rain stopped. Frustrated, I said to Priscilla, “Oh, let’s keep them on.”
“D’accord.”
Leaving the Commune de Flamarens, we descended a hill and passed houses with low stone walls where roses bloomed. I caught the scent of jasmine and thought of gardens at home in Maine, lush and well-tended.
“Gardens are organic, you know,” Priscilla said. “Soil moves. Plantings change. Take architecture. You finish a project and afterward, it’s all downhill. The paint chips; the rug gets stained; somebody tracks mud on the floors. When you design a garden, you design for the future. Time works on a garden and it transforms.”
Time as transformation, not an end. I liked that.
Suddenly, Priscilla’s voice grew urgent. “Sandell, where’s your camera? Can you get it?” I took off my backpack and dug until I found my camera. “There. That one,” Priscilla said, pointing to a distant hill where three trees formed silhouettes against the sky. “The one that looks like a Mohawk.”
I saw it, a tree sculpted by wind and rain, its crown the shape of the haircut. I took a few pictures.
“I think she’ll like it. And it will work,” Priscilla said.
“What will work? Who will like it?”
“My client. Trees planted just like that.”
The Scot, the woman who’d hired her to design and plant an English garden here in France, the one who wanted lush. A catch in my belly. Priscilla was using me, first by sending me to the pharmacy for items she needed, then putting me up to asking John for a ride, and now by having me take photographs for her design. She was researching. I was researching too. So why did I feel this way?
“You’ll send them to me when we get back, right?” she said.
She knew I would.
After spending the night in our gîte, we set out at about eight the next morning, stole a few figs from a nearby tree, and entered a darkened vestibule inside the Chappelle de Saint Antoine, an impressive church, again built on a height of land. Priscilla translated from a wooden plaque. “The pilgrim meets himself, and he meets others, and he meets his god in the respect of being of things, of nature, and which is offered to him each day. Light and then lighter, he allows himself to grow and he lacks nothing.”
“In the respect of being of things.” What did that mean? Ah, because the pilgrim becomes part of what he sees, “he meets his god” in nature and in what is offered each day. Interesting — “his god.” Not God. As for God, I was mostly a non-believer. I say mostly because sometimes I prayed, thanking God for a spectacular day or a lost mitten miraculously found. I felt thankful. I felt mystery. Was this God?
Leaning, Priscilla palmed open a heavy wooden door. We stepped into gloomy silence. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed frescoes. This was an old painting dating from the fourteenth century recently exposed, a sign said. Although the pigment was faded and the painting incomplete, I made out a group of wealthy gentlemen in the lower left. I saw peasants dressed in short tunics and wearing sandals. All were pilgrims. I wondered if in the restoration, restorers had taken off layers of paint, leaving what looked like an artist’s sketch. Electric lights on timers, some high in a golden chandelier, turned on, then off, moving the fresco into shadows.
I was surrounded by iconic art, paintings in golden frames, alcoves with statues of Mary, statues of Jesus, of Mary and Jesus, of angels, saints, and Jesus again. Too much Jesus always got to me, and I was seeing a lot of Jesus. A few other pilgrims entered, all of us walking carefully and noiselessly.
A glass case held a relic, a silver casting shaped like an arm with what appeared to be precious stones. Priscilla stood in front of the case, looking intently. At the silver? At the stones? I whispered, “I’m Jewish. I don’t get relics. Is that supposed to be Saint Anthony’s arm?”
“I think there’s a bit of bone,” Priscilla said.
“You’re not serious.”
“You say that a lot.”
As I stared at that silver arm encrusted with fake jewels the size of dimes — they must have been fake — deeply held grievances surged. I knew about Saint Anthony. He spent twenty years in the desert. He saw visions. The devil came to him as a black boy with flashing eyes and fiery breath. This black devil was half-man, half-ass, and he had horns. The church transferred those characteristics to Jews. I thought of Arnold, that fifth-grader asking to see my horns. I saw a reflection of my broad-brimmed hiking hat in the glass, Christian history colliding with Jewish history. “I can’t believe this stuff still exists,” I said. “That people worship pieces of bone. This is cultish. Primitive. Divisive.”
Quick to understand, Priscilla clarified, “Because it implies that my cult has the highway to God and yours doesn’t? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly.”
Had I thought my own pluralistic views of religion would protect me from the Chemin’s history, Crusaders marching to the Holy Land and killing infidels along the way, both Muslims and Jews? All day yesterday and today, as I walked with Priscilla, people assumed I was Christian. Raised to disappear inside that larger culture, I let them. What was I supposed to do, cry out, Hey, look at me, I’m not who you think I am?
As I turned away from the glass case, I wondered if I, a Jew, should be walking this Christian path. Or was I truly a pilgrim now, stripped bare and seeing a reflection I didn’t like?
Priscilla touched my elbow. “I don’t let it bother me, Sandell.”
What? What didn’t she let bother her?
Leaving the church, Priscilla and I walked in silence, single file. We walked and walked. Now, sitting on a knoll, the village of Auvillar appeared below, red-tiled roof tops, the clock tower with its bell that sounded the hour, the steeple of l’Eglise de Saint Pierre, each like a photo on a postcard. I leaned back onto my elbows and closed my eyes seeking ease, but I couldn’t put Saint Anthony, his arm, and the Crusaders to rest. Beside me, Priscilla sketched. I listened to the sound of her pencil meeting paper, staying on paper, coloring in. That scratching pencil felt like an itch in the center of my back. The pencil stopped. “Ready?” Priscilla said.
I blinked my eyes open. I thought of my naiveté that day in the mairie when I asked, not only about Jean Hirsch, but about a Jewish cemetery. The only cemetery was beside the church. Jews would not have been buried there, not inside the gates, not inside a Christian cemetery. This tradition went back centuries, and mostly it still held. I knew that. Why hadn’t I paid attention? I pushed myself to my feet.
“Feeling better?” Priscilla asked.
“Much,” I lied.
In my bedroom, I leaned out the window to close my shutters. All remnants of the street fair were gone. No vendors, no tables displaying their wares. The Old Port had descended into its usual sleepy stillness, and I felt as if I were swimming through the complicated current of a dream. A street lamp lighted the road. This, too, was the Chemin, the Way, passing under my window and leading up the hill and into the place des halles. In the morning, pilgrims would tap their way past and I would hear the sounds of their walking sticks. Whatever their path, it was not mine; yet, together our footsteps dropped down into centuries.