Free Claire Marvel by John Burnham Schwartz

still.
    And then Claire, folding her coat into a pillow, curled up against the door. From the corner of my eye I watched her drift off to sleep. She grew still, her legs tucked underneath her, her hip inches from my hand.
    Two hours passed. I was tired yet very much awake, driving to the rhythm of her breathing, seeing France out of every window as she might have seen it. The open farmland of the Loire was giving way to the hill country of the Limousin and Périgord. Here were geologic boundaries where earlier there had been only the man-made divisions of agriculture and industry. Red-tiled roofs were beginning to appear in pockets of land that refused to lie flat.

    At Brive-la-Gaillarde, as we left the autoroute and turned southeast, she woke with a start.
    “Where are we?”
    “No idea, really.”
    She smiled drowsily, picked up the map, gave it a cursory glance, shrugged, and dropped it at her feet. As a general rule she ignored all maps and instruction manuals, considering them the propaganda of the confused. Arching her back against the seat, she stretched. Then she rolled down her window a few inches, sniffing the air.
    “We’re getting close. I can smell it.”
    I lowered my window too. The afternoon was clear and cool. The road was a country road, narrow and winding. It curved and dipped through sparse-wooded hills with fields arrayeddown their sloping backs. Pastures were framed by limestone walls. There were few shadows on this land. Those that existed appeared ancient and fixed, birthmarks of creation. In the shaded hollows flocks of Roman-nosed sheep huddled together, and on the steepest slopes grapevines hung from their crosses like crucified children. There were plum orchards and solitary walnut trees growing in fields of raked bare earth with ragged lines of crows sitting on the gnarled black limbs and discreet herds of cows waiting in mud for their deliverance. The air smelled of all of it.
    Claire said, “Now I know why the French call this region ‘la France profonde.’ ”
    As she spoke we were descending into a valley. A narrow gray-blue river appeared on our left. The road ran alongside it and soon we began seeing occasional white signs written with unpronounceable names—not towns, we saw, not even villages, but hamlets consisting of a few houses, stone walls, a yellow postbox, a donkey or two; and the belled sounds of the animals.
    In time the river ran through the center of a market town. Here Claire suggested we buy food. I pulled to a stop on a main square girded by medieval houses darkly striped with creosoted timbers. We got out and stretched. It was late afternoon; the outdoor market was long closed. A few red-faced old men in blue work clothes stood chatting under a plane tree. They stared at us, then resumed their conversation. Otherwise the square was empty.
    But shops were open. In a food market that might have been someone’s parlor we bought fresh eggs, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, cornichons, pâté, strawberry preserves, butter, milk.Then we found the baker, wine merchant, cheese shop—where Claire asked the old woman for cabécou, white disks of the local goat cheese. The word itself sounded freshly made on her tongue.
    We loaded our provisions into the car, and set off on the final leg of our journey. The river flowed out of the other side of the town. Across it the early-spring sunshine lay thin and slanting. And the spindly poplars that grew alongside the banks could be seen too on the water’s mirrored surface, round leaves turning like coins. Following her father’s directions, we drove over a primitive bridge and turned left, then right, onto a road that wound its way up a mountain. The ascent was slow, circuitous, beautiful. The wide valley was splayed out behind us, first one angle, then another. High on a plateau the climb ended. We turned right again and proceeded slowly down a single-lane road flecked with sheep droppings, between lichen-covered walls and compact