A Pig in Provence (2 page)

The first goats. Lassie dies. Advice from Mme. Rillier.
Reinette gives birth. Farmstead cheese for sale.

“How much are they?” Donald asked as we stood in the heart of a stone barn in the hinterlands of Provence, surrounded by horned animals whose eyes were focused, unblinking, on us. Ethel, our three-year-old daughter, held my hand. The animals pushed against me, nuzzling my thighs and nibbling at the edge of my jacket. In the faint light cast by the single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling, I could see the dark mass of goats stretching toward the recesses of the barn and feel their slow but steady pressure as they pushed closer and closer. My nostrils filled with their pungent odor and the fragrance of the fresh hay on the barn floor, with the faintly damp, earthy aroma of the floor itself, and with the scent of all the animals that had preceded them in the ancient barn. The heat of their bodies intensified the smell, and although it was a cold November day, the barn was warm and cozy. Its earthy aromas were homey and comforting.

“
Eh, ma foi.
It’s hard to decide. How many do you want? They’re all pregnant. They were with the buck in September and October. They’ll kid in February and March.” The shepherd, a woman, leaned heavily on her cane, making her look older. She was dressed in layers of black, including black cotton stockings, the kind you see in movies set in prewar France, her only color a dark blue parka and a gold cross at her throat. A black wool scarf tied under her chin covered her hair.

We wanted to have enough goats to make a living. Our calculations, based on the University of California and USDA pamphlets we’d brought with us when we moved to Provence a month before, were that a good goat would give a gallon of milk a day and a gallon would make nearly a pound of cheese. French friends had told us that we could make a living with the cheese produced from the milk of twenty to thirty goats.

“Why are you selling them?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m getting too old to keep so many. I have more than thirty.” She looked around, then pointed at a large, sleek goat, russet and white. “I can sell you that one. Look at her. She’s a beauty. Reinette, the little queen, I call her. She’s a good milker, about four years old. Always has twins too.”

She moved across the barn and grabbed the goat by one horn, put her cane under her arm, and pulled back the goat’s lips. “Take a look. See how good her teeth are. She’s still young.”

Reinette was released with a slap on her flank and went over to another goat standing aloof from the others. This one had a shaggy, blackish brown coat and scarred black horns that swept back high over her head.

“This is Lassie. She’s
la chef,
but getting old like me.”

I expected the woman to cackle, but she didn’t. Instead she
sighed and said, “She’s getting challenged by some of the younger goats now, but she’ll be good for a few more years.”

Donald walked over to the goat and stroked her head. She stared at him with her yellow eyes and inky-black pupils.”What others are you selling?”

“Mmm. I could sell you Café au Lait.” She pointed to a large, cream-colored goat with short hair and an arrogant look. “You might have trouble with her. You’ll need to show her who’s boss. She’d like to be
la chef,
take Lassie’s place.”

As if in response, Café au Lait crossed over to Lassie and gave her a hard butt in the side. Lassie whirled and butted her back, a solid blow to the head that echoed in the barn, bone on bone. Ethel pulled closer to me, holding my hand tightly, but kept her eyes on the battling goats.

“Ça suffit! Arrête! Sâles bêtes!”
the woman shouted at the goats, menacing them with her cane. Lassie faced down the larger Café au Lait and the barn settled back into quiet.

“Why doesn’t Café au Lait have horns?” I asked.

“Sometimes I cut them off when they’re kids. I did hers. They looked like they were going to grow in crooked.”

She continued her sales pitch. “Café au Lait is only three years old, and last year she had triplets. She’s a good goat.” She showed us four more animals that she was willing to sell and kept up her spirited commentary on their characters and fertility patterns.

Donald and the woman agreed on a price of 350 francs each, and he made arrangements to pick up the beginning of our goat herd in two days. We all shook hands and said goodbye, then wound our way back toward the square where we had parked our car. I made sure Ethel’s knitted cap, a yellow-and-orange-striped one of her choosing, was tied snugly beneath her chin, then pulled up the hood on my jacket and put my gloves back on.

As we walked through the narrow ruelles, the tiny streets of the near-abandoned village, Donald quietly remarked on the ghostly feeling of the crumbling houses with their fallen roofs exposing rotted wooden beams and piles of fallen stones. Wild berry canes pushed through some of the ruins and fig trees had taken possession of others.

It was hard to imagine Esparron-de-Verdon as a thriving village, and impossible not to think of the woman and her goats living there as relics of the past, clinging to a way of life that was long gone.

Surely what we were doing was something different. After all, we had bought a farmhouse in the country, not in an abandoned village, and we were college graduates. Donald had a degree in animal husbandry from the University of California at Davis, and while we were going to make traditional French cheese, we would bring modern methods to our technique, or so we thought. I was a little scared, though. We didn’t have a lot of money, and we needed to succeed.

First, we had to learn how to make cheese. Our USDA pamphlets, directed at large-scale commercial milk production and cheese making for the United States market, didn’t discuss small-scale production of cheese from raw goat’s milk. So far, no one, including the woman who had just sold us our first goats, had been able to tell me exactly what to do other than add rennet to milk.

“Mommy, can we have chickens and rabbits too?” Ethel asked as we passed a ramshackle chicken coop made of corrugated tin and chicken wire and utilizing the three remaining walls of one of the sturdier ruins. Her favorite toys were her rubber farm animals, and she was delighted by the idea of having real animals, in addition to our dog, Tune (short for Petunia), who we had brought from California.

“Shh,” I said, “not so loud.” The silence was strong and heavy, and I sensed it was best to leave it unruptured.

I bent down toward her. “Yes, of course we can. We’ll feed the chickens every day and collect their eggs. And build a nice house for them.”

I wasn’t so sure about rabbits. Keeping rabbits meant having to kill them for meat. I knew that on a real farm, the kind we were going to have, you couldn’t just have animals as pets. I wasn’t sure I was ready for that part yet. I had no farm experience, having grown up in small Southern California beach town where surfing and sunbathing were the primary occupations. Chickens I could easily see—they had been part of my original vision when I imagined life in rural Provence, along with long, slow days of cooking, reading, writing, and sewing, with the occasional visit to Paris and trips to Italy and Spain, countries Donald and I had fallen in love with during our one-year honeymoon when we were students seven years before.

The first few weeks with our nascent goat herd were difficult, and we were on a steep learning curve. They wanted to roam and eat at their leisure, and we couldn’t let them. The fields in the small valley below our house belonged to a farmer and were planted with winter wheat. He certainly wouldn’t appreciate his crop being eaten to the quick by goats. On the far side of the valley, a vast pine and oak forest stretched to the north and west. If the goats ever reached the forest, we were sure we would never find them. That left only the hectare of land surrounding the house where the goats could feed, and that had to be under our supervision.

We didn’t have an enclosure so we had to devise some means to keep them under control. We tried taking the goats out on
leashes that Donald had made using thick nylon cord and heavy-duty, twist-top hooks fastened to their collars. They not only ate the grass, but pulled us behind them as they climbed the pear and mulberry trees next to the house, chewing on the bark, and fought to get at the oaks and juniper on the neighbor’s hillside. I still have the scar on my knee from the rock Café au Lait dragged me over one morning.

Next Donald filled old tires with cement to serve as anchors for the leashes. The Americans’ goat anchors quickly became the talk of the area as word spread from the postman whose brother owned the only bar in the village. No anchors could hold those goats, though. They would invariably head down to the field of appetizing green wheat, their weighted tires thudding behind them, with Donald and me following, trying to bring the goats back home.

We gave up on the tires and attached each goat to a metal stake we sunk deep into the ground. This was marginally more successful. Fortunately the cold weather and their advancing pregnancies made the goats increasingly content to snuggle in the warm barn and eat the alfalfa and barley we fed them.

We needed more goats, however, and someone told us that two shepherding brothers at La Motte, about forty minutes away, had some goats to sell. The Audibert brothers, legends in the area, could be seen during the winter months driving through the villages in their ancient black Citroën, the kind in old French gangster movies, berets pulled low on their heads, accompanied by their “housekeeper,” a flashily dressed, dark-haired woman who lived with them.

They still practiced
la grande transhumance,
driving their sheep and goats on foot from the hot plateaus and valleys of southern Provence to the alpine pastures in the north for the
summer, then returning to the valleys in late fall to overwinter the animals and let them lamb in the milder south. In the winter they installed themselves in La Motte, in a huge stone farmhouse with a
bergerie
large enough to hold the thousand head of sheep that made up their
troupeau,
or herd.

As we pulled up in front of the farmhouse, we saw the Citroën parked under the single, unpruned mulberry tree, with a sheepdog tied to it, and we knew we were in the right place. We went up the uneven stone steps to the partially open front door. The response to our knocking was a deep
“Entrez.”

The room was lit only by the open door, a small window to the east, and the glowing embers of a fire on the hearth. As we stepped in, I was assailed by the odor of garlic and damp wool. One of the brothers sat at a bare wooden table, a bottle of wine, some bread, and dry sausage in front of him.

“Sit down,” he said, waving his knife. “Some wine?” He got up and took three glasses off a wooden shelf above the sink. He was tall but not heavy, dark skinned and movie-star handsome, the kind of handsome where the dark shadow of a beard is omnipresent and the deep-set eyes are both vulnerable and arrogant. He was wearing a vintage black pin-striped vest and a wrinkled white shirt loosely tucked into black woolen pants, the style that men wore in the 1920s and 1930s, with buttons and flap. I could see a heavy, dark brown, wool shepherd’s cape hanging on the rear wall where it faded into the soot.