Death on the Installment Plan (71 page)

At table his wife asked us for the hundredth time if we’d picked our vegetable … if we’d finally made up our minds … if maybe it wasn’t high time … She suggested beans … she didn’t put it very tactfully, I’ve got to admit … Hearing a thing like that made Courtial jump sky-high …

“Beans? … Beans? … Here? … In these rifts? … Did you hear that, Ferdinand? … Beans? In a soil without manganese! Why not peas? … Or eggplant while you’re at it … Oh, this is too much!” He was scandalized … “Vermicelli! That’s the thing! … Or truffles! … Say, what about truffles?”

He’d thump around the house for hours grumbling like a bear … The indignation aroused by an unwarranted suggestion was good for a long session … On that score he was uncompromising … Free deliberation! Scientific selection! … She’d go off to bed all alone in her windowless cubbyhole, a kind of alcove she’d fixed up for herself, far from the murderous drafts, between the threshing machine and the kneading trough … You could hear her sobbing through the partition … He was pretty rough on her.

You couldn’t say she was ever short on courage or perseverance … or self-abnegation … Not once … She did wonders reclaiming that old shack … She never stopped fixing … Nothing worked … neither the pump nor the mill that was supposed to run the water … The hearth crumbled into the soup … She had to putty all the chinks in the walls, plug up all the holes … all the cracks in the fireplace … patch up the shutters, put on new tiles … She climbed up on the eaves … But at the first storm a lot of rain came into the rooms irregardless … through the holes in the roof … We put glasses underneath … one for each stream … All those repairs and alterations were a rough job, no petty tinkering … She changed the enormous hinges on the big barn door … Carpentry … locksmithing … nothing fazed her … She got to be real good at it … a regular mechanic … And in addition of course all the housekeeping and cooking were her department … She said so herself, no line of work bothered her except the laundry … There got to be less and less of that … Our wardrobe was rock bottom … Hardly any shirts … and no shoes at all …

Plugging the chinks in those thick walls she kind of fouled up … her plaster wasn’t right … Des Pereires was critical, he thought we should do it over … but we had other worries … Anyway we certainly had her to thank if that mangy den finally began to look like something more or less. It was a ruin even so … Whatever you did to patch it up, it kept falling apart …

Our old lady was heroic all right, but that operation with her ovaries kept bothering her more and more … Maybe the overwork … She sweated like a waterfall … her moustache dripped … she was all flushed and congested … By the end of the day she was so het up, exasperated from waiting … that at the least misplaced word … bam! … the storm broke … She’d blow her top … She’d be waiting there all tensed up … She’d explode over nothing … The tirades were endless …

What we mostly had to avoid was the slightest allusion to the good old days in Montretout … She had that on her esophagus … It gnawed at her like a tumor … If a single word escaped us on the subject, she called us every name in the calendar, she said it was a plot … she called us bloodsuckers, homos, vampires … We had to put her to bed by force …

Des Pereires’ problem was still making up his mind about his precious vegetable … We had to think of something else … We were beginning to have our doubts about radishes … What vegetable would we try? … Which would be right for radiotellurism? … And grow to ten times its normal bulk? … And where to plant? … That was no small question … It would require minute investigation … We’d already spaded up samples of every field for ten miles around … We weren’t going into this thing with our eyes closed … We were thinking it over, that’s all …

One day in the course of our explorations we came across a really sweet little village in the opposite direction from Persant, on the way south … Saligons-en-Mesloir … It was pretty far on foot … at least two good hours from Blême-le-Petit … That was one hideout where our old lady wouldn’t ever think of tracking us down … The soil around Mesloir, Courtial discovered right away, was much richer than ours in “radio-metallic” content and consequently, he figured, infinitely more fertile … it would yield quicker results … We came back to study it almost every afternoon … The remarkable thing about that soil was its “cadmio-potassic” and its special calcium … You could tell by the feel and even more by the smell … Its composition seems to have been simply amazing … des Pereires sniffed it out right away … Thinking it over, he even began to wonder if it mightn’t be too rich in telluric catalyst … if we mightn’t get concentrations so powerful as to make our vegetables burst … to make their pulp explode … That was the danger, the one questionable point … He had a hunch … In that case we’d have to give up the idea of growing small early vegetables in this ground that was really too rich … choose something coarse, something vulgar and resistant … Pumpkins for instance … But who’d buy them? … A single pumpkin for a whole city? … A monumental pumpkin? … The market wouldn’t absorb them all … It was time we put our heads together! New problems to face! It’s always like that with action.

In this burg of Saligons they served mostly cider in the cafés … and it didn’t taste like piss, which, you’ve got to admit, is very unusual way out in the sticks … It went to your head kind of, especially the sparkling kind … We got to drinking quite a lot of it on our prospecting tours … That was in the Big Ball, the only tavern in the place … We got to going there more and more, it was conveniently located right near the cattle market … We learned about local customs from listening to the hicks …

Des Pereires made a beeline for the
Paris-Sport
… He’d been deprived of it for a long time … He talked to everybody … In exchange for advice about farming … little lessons about livestock … he was able to give them dope, some really ingenious pointers about placing bets in Vincennes … even from miles away … He made some fine connections … This was a hangout for cattlemen … I let him talk … The maid suited me fine … Her ass was so muscular it was almost square. Her tits too, you can’t imagine how hard they were … The more you shook them, the harder they got … They were solid rock … Nobody’d ever licked her crack … I showed her the whole business … all I knew … It was magnetic … She wanted to throw up her job, at the bar and come back to the farm with us … That wouldn’t have gone down with old lady des Pereires … especially as she was beginning to smell something fishy … It seemed to her that we were spending a lot of time around this Mesloir … It didn’t look kosher … She asked us some tough questions … We were stumped … She set less and less store by our prospecting for vegetables … She was getting persnickety … The summer was getting ahead fast … it would be harvest time pretty soon … Hell!

At the Big Ball a sudden change came over the peasants, they got mighty weird … Between drinks they read the
Paris Racing News
… Des Pereires was kept busy … He sent their little bets, never more than five francs each, to his old pal in an envelope … Fifty francs was the limit … he wouldn’t take more … Tuesday, Friday, Saturday … always through Formerly at the Insurrection … We kept twenty-five centimes a bet … that was our little rake-off. I taught the maid, the ironclad Agathe, how to keep from having babies … I showed her that it’s even more terrific from behind … After that she was really crazy about me … She wanted to do everything for me … I passed her on some to Courtial to show him how well I’d trained her … She was willing … She’d have gone into a house if I’d only said the word … It couldn’t have been my clothes that sent her, we’d have scared sparrows away … Nor my dough … We never gave her a cent … It was the prestige of Paris … That’s the long and the short of it.

But when we got back at night, the hullabaloo was worse and worse … Irène was no joke … We got in later and later … We were in for some wild tantrums … horrible sessions … She tore out her hair to the blood … by the handful, by the bucket … because he couldn’t make up his mind about the “right” vegetable … and his maximum soil … The old girl had started working in the fields all by herself … She spaded up the ground pretty good … She still couldn’t make a furrow quite straight … but for application she was tops … She’d get there … She was mighty good at clearing brush … If she wanted to build up her muscles, there was plenty of room … just about anywhere … In Blême-le-Petit there was nothing to stand in your way … the whole region was fallow … to the right, to the north, south or left … There were no neighbors on the west either … The whole place was a desert … parched … perfectly arid …

“You’re wearing yourself out, angel pie,” Courtial would sing out in the middle of the night when we’d find her on the job, still spading up the ground … “You’re wearing yourself out … It’s no use … This soil is hopeless! I keep trying to tell you … Even the peasants have gradually given up … My feeling is that they’ll shift to cattle … But even there … I don’t know … Cattle on these plains … With the marly subsoil … the calcico-potassic seams… I can’t see them getting anywhere … It’s a perilous undertaking … beset with enormous hazards … abominable difficulties … I can see it all … Irrigate such gook? … My oh my …”

“What about you, you big lug … who’s going to irrigate you? Will you tell me that? Go on … I’m listening …” He refused to say another word … He dashed into the house … I still had work to do. Every night when we got in I had to classify the day’s samples … on separate boards … strewn around the kitchen in little bags … They dried all over the place … samples of the whole country for fifteen miles around … There’d be plenty to choose from when the time came … but our richest selection was certainly from Saligons.

Little by little we’d gotten popular at the Big Ball … Our friendly drunks had developed a keen taste for the races … We even had to preach moderation … They didn’t care how they risked their dough … They’d put fifteen francs on a single pony … Those kind of bets we turned down flat … We didn’t want to get any more people too down on us … We played it safe and cautious … Agathe, the maid, was having a fine time … She was really enjoying herself … turning into a whore right there on the premises … What bothered us more was our battle-ax’s spells … Her fits and ultimatums were more than we could take … She was getting on our nerves … On one little point, though, des Pereires had changed his tactics … He stopped ragging her when he found her toiling … He encouraged her to dig … he egged her on … And actually, patch by patch, week by week, she spaded up enormous areas … Sure she was a holy terror … but if ever she stopped working, it was a damn sight worse … She was fed up with our shilly-shallying, she did the deciding: potatoes … We couldn’t stop her … In the long run, she decided, that was the ideal vegetable … She got to work right away. She didn’t ask for our opinion … Once her tubers were planted, huge fields of them, she went telling everybody in Persant … on her way in, on the way back … that we were experimenting with “giant potatoes,” obtained with electrical waves … The news traveled like gunpowder …

At the Big Ball in the afternoon they bombarded us with questions … up to that point they’d liked us fine, we’d minded our own business at the other end of the county … the local hicks had welcomed us and treated us all right … they’d even expected us every afternoon … And now they began to give us the cold stare … This farming of ours looked fishy to them … They were jealous right away … ‘“Spuds” they started calling us.

We couldn’t goof off anymore. The old cutie had gradually turned into a real terror … Now that she’d spaded up several acres of land all by herself, she was really leading us a life … We were afraid to say a word to her … She threatened to follow us if we went out bumming, if we didn’t get to work within twenty-four hours … Our vacation was over … We had to get started, to haul the motor and the dynamo out from under the tarp … We cleaned the rust off the big flywheel … We started her up a little … We drew up a nifty-looking “table of resistances” … We let it go at that … Anyway we saw we wouldn’t have wire enough … We needed a hell of a lot of it, spools and spools to zigzag back and forth between the rows of potatoes all over the plantation … Fifteen hundred feet wouldn’t be enough … We needed miles … Otherwise it would never work … Without wire no radiotellurism … no intensive cultivation! no cathode rays … Wire was absolutely indispensable … Actually it wasn’t so bad … At first we thought that lousy wire would be the perfect excuse, the airtight alibi, that the price of the stuff would scare our old lady out of this vital purchase … that she’d stop to think and leave us alone a while … But nothing doing, on the contrary … If anything it made her madder … She threatened that if we farted around anymore … if we kept letting things ride, she’d go to Saligons on her own and set up as a midwife … no later than next week … love had flown out the window! She was bluffing … But even with the best of intentions, we hadn’t enough money left for such expensive purchases … Great God, they’d ruin us … And who’d give us credit? … It was no use trying …

On the other hand, we couldn’t very well let the old girl in on our exact situation … Especially we couldn’t tell her we’d just blown our last little reserves, what was left from the sky pilot, playing the races by mail … Well, anyway we’d lost it … It was certainly a terrible blow … the end of our scheme … an intolerable cataclysm … We were really in a jam … Now that she was sold on potatoes, she was getting absolutely fanatical and intolerant … It was getting to be exactly the same as the balloon … or her cottage in Montretout … She couldn’t be budged … Once she threw herself into something, she latched onto it like a rivet, you had to tear the whole house down … It was very painful …

“That’s what you said, isn’t it? … You’re not going to deny it? … I heard you, didn’t I? … You told me ten times … a hundred times … that you were going to run your lousy electrical contraption? I wasn’t seeing things, was I? … That’s what we all came here for, isn’t it? … I’m not making it up? … That’s why we sold the house for a song … And threw up your paper … That’s why you dragged us all here like it or not by force into this swamp … this pigsty … this muck! Am I right?”