A case of curiosities (17 page)

The fat man stood up to offer support for the youth. "You would allow your half-cooked cocks to turn foul? Let the boy attempt to fix what you have broken. Lucille and I insist on it."

"Coachman, despite your obvious commitment to my inn— and half the inns to Paris—1 must inform you that you know nothing about this spit. Only its output concerns you." And with that, he tapped the midsection of the unhappy Gargantua.

The coachman glared until the innkeeper handed him a mug of ale. The bribe was accepted, but after taking a quaff, the coachman said, "This will not fix the spit." Then he burped.

The two men had reached an impasse. Claude stood aside as the atmosphere grew grimmer and travelers moved to the exit. Only the bootcatcher was earning his keep, pulling off the wet and stinking footwear of the new and uninformed arrivals, while working his shoeing horn on the disenchanted but equally remunerative departures. The innkeeper tried to appease the travelers by hanging a small spit from a jack, but this only intensified the anger. Three fuzzy-headed, bare-bodied quail could not feed the passengers who milled about.

The innkeeper said, "How am I to trust the lad to the complexities of my rotisserie? / do not even know what the problem is."

Claude, emboldened by want of food, responded. "The device was sand-forged and poorly quenched. The gears are gritted over, a link is bent, and the fly, crude as it is, needs adjustment."

All eyes turned to the youthful expert.

The fat man spoke. "You see what he says. Gears gritted over. Bent links. Improper quenching. The last predicament, I might add, is one I fully comprehend." He wiped away a mustache of ale from his upper lip and said, "You have no choice but to give the boy a chance. My passengers value my opinions about the inns at which we stop. This route offers others in which to take shelter."

The threat worked. The innkeeper acquiesced.

Claude pulled from his satchel a few of the implements he had inventoried by the roadside. He removed the spit and, clearing some room on the floor, took it apart. He cleaned the mechanism with various twigs and rag-wrapped kindling. Then, over the parts he had disassembled, he squatted and thought. And thought. And thought. He touched nothing for quite some time. At last, he called out to the innkeeper's son to fetch an umbrella, a broomstick, the appurtenances of a bridle, and three or four forks, preferably of iron. He fished in his bag for more of his tools. He built up a fire and constructed a makeshift forge. With nothing more than odds and ends from barn and bar, Claude started his tinkering. He worked intently: measuring, hammering, forging, hammering, cursing, bending, grimacing like the pig, measuring, hammering, frowning, adjusting, fitting, and, eventually, smiling. The smile marked the restoration of the rotisserie depicted on the sign.

There was a round of hoots and howls, over which the innkeeper shouted—after making a mental calculation of the money the boy had saved him — "I offer you as much crackling as you wish to eat, young man."

"You will do no such thing," countered the coachman. "He has protected the reputation of this miserable place. He has paid homage to the patron saint of the rotisserie, who, if memory serves, is St. Lawrence. You will stand the two of us a meal and a bottle of the potable agricultural commodity for which the vineyards of Burgundy are known. You will approach us at regular intervals with game bird and cut-up pork. And you will be thankful to have the chance to do so!"

Just over a quarter-hour later, a once-broken bell in the mechanical spit rang, announcing the need for renewed winding, and by the time the bell rang a second time, the fat of the quail dripped on the skin of the pigeons, the fat of the pigeons dripped on the flesh of the rabbits (there was no squab that night), and the fat of the rabbits dripped on the skin of the eponymous pig—

In fashioning the repair, Claude had added a novelty. He made special use of the umbrella and cutlery. A partridge and some capons were accommodated on the ends of the fork tines, thus extending the capabilities of the fireside tackling.

Pulling up on his knee breeches, the fat man introduced himself. "My name is Paul Dome, coachman by vocation." Dome dispensed with the standard uniform of the coachman, wearing instead loosely fitted garments secured by a massive saddle belt on which he had affixed bits of rope, a drinking cup, various flasks, and a knife of dissuasive dimensions.

The beery fellow began a conversation that led to friendship. "Are you from Geneva? No? Just as well. It is a sorry population that cannot cook a speckled trout." He rambled on about the Republic, until Claude interrupted him to strike a worldly pose.

"An old man I know says the Genevans are as shallow as their hearths, as dull as their house facades, and as hermetic as the pots in which they cook."

"A wise one, that old man," the coachman said, crunching up and swallowing a quail leg, bones and all. "I am always receptive to the language of food."

"Wise, but ..." Claude checked himself. He was determined not to talk about the Abbe. He told himself that silence was the best policy. He knew he could be accused of thievery in the matter of the undelivered watches. But the true, if unacknowledged, reason for silence was that Claude hoped that by not talking about the past, the past could be forgotten. It is a strategy often embraced by convicts and spurned lovers, almost always with unsatisfactory results.

The coachman asked Claude, "Are you a journeyman ironmonger?"

Again Claude faltered. He had a hard time describing his occupation. "No, not an ironmonger." The Abbe intruded once more: "With that old man, I read and worked in enamel and metal. But I never had a chance to specialize my skills. The Abbe—the old man was an Abbe—once told me, The tree of knowledge is there for us to climb. Climb it. Ignore the fences built by the guilds and swing from branch to branch.'

"A bit of a monkish monkey, isn't he?" the coachman jested.

"A monkish monkey? Yes, perhaps so. I was his apprentice, though he hated the term, and until a few days ago I would gladly have kept on swinging."

"What stopped you?"

Despite himself, Claude made a reference, though an oblique one, to the cause of his depattute. "Misadventure struck me ftom the tree, struck me down in a single stroke."

"Rather dramatic, aren't you?" the coachman said. "Nor that I mind."

More game birds arrived. "Unpierced meat is finer than these harpooned offerings," the coachman told the innkeeper. "You should have this fellow make a basket spit."

"And you should be grateful for the free meal." The innkeeper was angered by the coachman's appetite.

"It would be easy enough for me to make a basket spit," Claude said, but by then the innkeeper had left to tend to the needs of paying patrons.

"For you, I am sure it would be," the coachman said. "My skills lie elsewhere. I am a transporter." He ran through his itinerary from Lyon to Paris, stopping to mention his favorite inns, "not for sleeping, mind you, but where fine meals generally can be had." The Spit Pig found a place at the low end of the ranking, and the establishments of Paris, the final stop, were at the top. "Nowhere but Paris can you eat legs of spiced mutton seven days a week, fresh Brussels sprouts in winter, meringues that are both crunchy and chewy, as all fine meringues must be." The coachman dipped his thumb in a small pool of pork fat that floated on a pewter platter. His commitment to consumption was clearly devotional.

As the meal progressed, the coachman grew tipsy, intoxicated by the inn's wine and his own words. The mix spurred him to unkind caricatures of nearby travelers. He mocked the widow of a wealthy chandler, the skinny little dealer in grain, an intolerably affected painter who could be heard boasting of a recent commission. The coachman said, "I am sure the birds on the spit are more lively than one of his oily smudges. And that one!" He directed a drumstick toward a grim woman of advanced age. "She is the worst. I picked her up four leagues from the Pig. Her coach was bogged by the rains. Rather than dispensing gratitude, she kept tapping on the roof, guidebook in hand, informing me that I had gone astray. Astray! To which I had to reply, 'Madame, you have purchased a Faithful Gunk that charts the path from Pans to Lyon. You assume that the route is the same coming and going. It is not. The law of equidistance does not apply to me.' I told her to save the Guide and its useless timetable fot another ttip—one, I assute you, I will not ditect."

The coachman belched before informing Claude that he alternated between two paths in his Lyon-Paris itinerary. One way took him by the royal road through Burgundy, the other through the vineyards of the Bourbonnais. He chose the two paths because of the wine country they parenthesized. "That chalky ellipse of land provides the finest drink in the world. Better than malmseys and other sweet nothings so many fools favor."

The coachman had taken full advantage of the terms to which the innkeeper agreed, and as a result of his excesses felt an urge to stretch himself out in a position of sated recline. The innkeeper, however, was feeling less than generous. He screamed, "If you want to sleep, you can pay for accommodation."

"No need, no need. I must return to Lucille."

"You are not staying at the inn?" Claude asked. He was disappointed to lose the company.

"I eat at inns, but my nights are reserved for Lucille. I should not have left her outside in the storm, but there was no room in the stable."

"Lightning does not worry you?"

"She has been struck more than once. It is not a problem." Turning to retire, the coachman added, "Lucille and I would be most pleased to share your company. It will save you the price of lodging at the Pig."

Lucille was twenty years old, black as ebony, fine-lined, and panniered front and back. She had her name stenciled just above her seat. She was mud-flanked by the storm, and rain dripped from her skirts.

"Lucille weighs less than her younger rivals but can carry so much more," the coachman said.

Claude expressed appreciation.

"Get in."

Claude was soon enveloped by the velours, woods, and shining brass of Paul Dome's coach.

"She is, in my perhaps tainted estimation, a most handsome vehicle for commodious traveling. You will ask me why her name is Lucille. The teason is that Lucille was the only woman 1 ever learned to love. When I met the first Lucille, I changed my dreams from sea to land. I had hoped to be a navigator, but Lucille's father superintended a carriage works. What you arc-sitting in was part of the dowry. The first Lucille, my wife, was almost as pretty as this one. But she died — pus-filled in a neat and tidy lazarhouse six months after the marriage." The coachman took a little gulp from his flask. "That is when I painted her name across the seat back. It was a tribute. I now live out of the coach. What I save in hostelry bills goes to food and drink."

Claude spent the night in the padded comfort of the coach. He felt so at ease that by the time he went to sleep, under the patter of rain, he had struck a deal. The coachman had shown him a broken watch that was as crude and oversized as its owner. Claude said he could easily repair it. "If so," the coachman said, "we—that is, Lucille and I — will offer you transport to Paris."

Paris! A whirl of lantern-slide images ran through Claude's thoughts. A city of crime and creativity, of beauty and brutality real and imagined. Paris! A city in which to suppress, if not to forget, his sadness. Paris! A workshop in which to develop his skills. In the time it takes to say faccepte, Claude accepted. When he woke the next morning, lurching toward metropolitan unknowns, the coachman was urging on an old packhorse and describing the second Lucille in greater detail.

"She is a class of coach known as a diligence. And that, my friend, is appropriate." The coachman said that, under the guidance of a keen driver, she could be cajoled into performing feats of transport commonplace coaches never could. "Do not believe that horses have anything to do with it, Claude. You give me a team of sinew-shrunk mares suffering the vives, and I will tie them up to Lucille—cargoed to capacity — and make the ninety-nine-league run in five days. Give one of those newer coaches a pack of the heartiest Auvergnats, and I doubt they would manage to keep Lucille's pace."

This was nonsense. For in truth Lucille had difficulty keeping to schedule, even when healthy relays were provided along the route. Fixing her wheels regularly caused delay. The coachman said, "Of course, if it is necessary, we will jettison some goods to keep her moving, but only if it can be done in keeping with the law."

The nature of that proviso was demonstrated soon after the ferry crossing at Trevoux. Until then, the trip had progressed uneventfully: passengers and packages picked up, passengers and packages delivered. But once over the river, the balance tilted toward portage, and Lucille's suspension straps ("the finest Hungary leather!") began to groan under the weight of the boxes and barrels. She was loaded up with two demijohns of passable table wine, numerous cloth-wrapped parcels, three cramped though uncomplaining travelers, and the not inconsiderable weight of her driver and his lanky friend. She picked up letters and a trunk in Macon and a horsehair portmanteau in Chagny— all of it bound for Paris.

"That is all she can take," the coachman said. To the consternation of the porters and prospective passengers at the subsequent stops, nothing else was loaded on Lucille. Nothing, that is, until they reached Arnay le Due.

The coachman, who had been cursing the previous provisioning, was strangely pleased to find a cask awaiting transport.

"Claude, jump down and inspect the tags. Where were they registered?"

Claude scrambled down. "Registered in Autun. An inspector cut his mark."

"Anything else?" the coachman asked.

"Nothing else."

"Are you sure?"

Claude checked once more. "Yes."

"Fine, lift it up here. We will manage somehow." The coachman placed the cask between his legs. "Lucille can accommodate what needs accommodating." He whispered words of encouragement into a coach lamp—the vehicular equivalent of an ear—slapped his wife's namesake on the felloe, and urged her forward in a manner more commonly associated with mounts. When they were on the road to Vermanton, the coachman pointed to the crest of the House of Burgundy. "Tonight we revel in the spirit of good fortune. Or should I say, the fortune of good spirits."