Free The Priest's Madonna by Amy Hassinger

and nostrils, tasting of iron. I thought of a legend we’d heard from Mme Paul: that the devil had buried a treasure in these mountains, and one morning, when he had nothing else to do, had spread the millions of pieces of gold over the earth. “Gold’s all around here,” she insisted, when my mother raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Monsieur Flèche found a piece once when he was a boy. Ask him yourself.” We later did, and though he denied finding any himself, he told us a story about a shepherd who, while looking for a lost ram, had fallen into a cave somewhere on the hillside and emerged hours later with both the ram and a kettle full of gold coins.
    As I walked, I kicked at pebbles in my path, idly searching for a glint of yellow. When I approached the slope descending from the graveyard, I saw Bérenger. He was stepping carefully to avoid the rocks and brambles that interrupted the narrow trail. He wore his cassock, which set off his face, square and tawny above his clean white collar, his cheeks dark with the shadow that clung to them. “Good morning, Monsieur le curé, ” I said, affecting a tone of mild surprise.
    “Marie!” He lifted his walking stick toward me in a salute, then studied the path again until he reached a level.
    “I was just going for a walk,” I said.
    “Well, then, we’re of the same mind, you and I. May I join you?”
    As we descended, the panorama opened before us. There were the fields, planted with wheat, barley, maize, and grapevines, bursting with green and the first tinges of autumnal brown. Bordered by wild growth—large bushes of broom, dwarf and umbrella pine, Kermes oak and cypress—the fields appeared, from a distance, to be patches on a great quilt, laid over the swells and dips of a recumbent body. Above the valley rose the mountains, increasing in height as they increased in distance. They stretched on, one after the next, the larger ones hovering ancestrally over their smaller companions. The ruined ramparts of Coustaussa and Blanchefort hulked over the valley, as natural as if they’d grown out of the rock, wild castle-plants. Limestone broke the surface of the hills now and then, like the bones of an ancient buried skeleton gradually becoming unearthed. The soil, as I’ve said, was red, but there were places where the red blended to brown or beige, as if the color had bled in the rain.
    This vista was what we gazed upon as we walked, Bérenger and I. It relieved us of some pressure, for there could be no such thing as awkward silence in the presence of such beauty—silence was the only way to approve of such a sight. So we walked a ways without speaking, listening to the pebbles crunching beneath our feet, the clucking of hens and the occasional call of a rooster from the village above.
    He spoke first. “I had a view of this hill from my bedroom window when I was a boy. I used to scan the hillside, looking for caves.”
    “Did you ever find any?”
    “Oh, yes. Not from my window, of course. But when I searched on foot, that’s when I got lucky. I noticed a draft coming from within some vines, and when I parted them, sure enough, there was my cave. I was so thrilled, I just squatted there, feeling the cold, smelling the earth. I thought I’d found my own special place, assigned to me by God.” He laughed a little and shook his head. “Foolish. I crawled in. It was deep—it extended straight back for a hundred feet or so and then dipped suddenly into pitch darkness. I had no light with me, so I couldn’t continue.”
    “Did you find anything?”
    “Nothing. Only a ring of stones and some charred wood, which disappointed me, since it meant that someone had been there before. I vowed to return with a light, and I did try, several times, to find the place again. But I never could. I found other caves, but none of them were as deep or as intriguing as that first one.”
    “There’s supposed to be a secret underground passageway through the caves here,”