A Pig in Provence Read Online Free Page A

out in my direction. I took it. Her handshake was firm, her hand warm and smooth.
    “Yes, yes, I remember the Americans. One in particular.” She laughed. “Very big and handsome, those American boys. Much better than the filthy Germans. The Germans took our house, you know. That’s right. They were here almost six months, four of them. Ate our chickens, our food, everything. You can still see the bullet holes on the barn where they tried to shoot our pigeons.”
    The German soldiers had been right here, at this farm. What stories could be told, I thought. I wanted to ask her when they came and how they looked and what happened to them, and many more questions, but my language skills were not quite up to it. I also wasn’t sure that questioning her on the subject at our first meeting, or ever, would be the correct thing to do, so I simply made some sympathetic sounds.
    Many years later, when I was helping to serve lunch at a reunion of local
Résistance
fighters at the village
café
, I thought of Mme. Lacroste’s grandmother, who died soon after our meeting, and wondered if the Germans who had occupied her farm hadbeen killed by one of the men reminiscing over the roast lamb and potato
gratin.
    Provence is like that. Whenever I am there, I bump into living history, all of it connected. I suppose I’m now part of that history too, the American who kept goats.
    “Maman,”
Mme. Lacroste called as she headed toward the huge
potager,
the vegetable garden behind the house. There, her mother stood bent over a shovel, digging up what looked like onions. Rows of cabbages, greens, and beets stretched out around her in perfect symmetry. Every bit of the huge garden was filled with something growing. Like her mother, she was wearing a black dress, but her sweater was a somber, serviceable dark blue.
    “I’ve come with the American, for you to tell her about cheese.”
    Mme. Lacroste turned to me and said, “My grandmother made cheese too, of course, but now, no matter what question you ask her, she only talks about certain things, like the Germans, her dead husband, her wedding trip to Nice.”
    “Bonjour,
Madame Rillier,” I said to my companion’s mother. She gave me a no-nonsense handshake, and I understood where Mme. Lacroste had acquired her manner.
    “So. You want to make cheese our way. No cheese in America?” She put her hands on her hips and looked me up and down.
    “Yes, there’s cheese, but not goat cheese. Not like the French homemade goat cheese.” The term
artisanal
was not yet in my vocabulary. That would come twenty years later, with the beginning of the boom of artisanal foods in the United States.
    “Well, I’m glad someone is going to make it again. No one does anymore.” No wonder I couldn’t find any cheese, I thought. No one is making it.
    “I used to have seven or eight goats, milked them, and then made cheese,” Mme. Rillier said. “I sold the extra cheeses. A fewothers around did the same. The others are dead now, and it got to be too much for me to do by myself. But I’ll tell you how to do it. Come inside.”
    Mme. Rillier pushed aside the bowls of soggy bread and food scraps set outside for chickens, a dog, and cats, all of whom were hovering nearby, and we followed her through a swinging screen door into the kitchen. The dog, a brown and white spaniel, was on a chain, and the circumference of the ground within his reach was worn bare with his pacing. “We’ve got to keep him on a chain, otherwise he runs off. Loose dogs get shot. My husband goes hunting with him.”
    This was my first invitation into a family home kitchen since our arrival in Provence, and it wasn’t at all what I expected.
    No authentic-looking copper pans gleaming over a well-used fireplace, no exposed wood ceiling beams, no soapstone or red tile sink, no terra-cotta pots filled with olives, no bright Provençal printed fabric. In short, this was not like the kitchen in the farmhouse we had rented one summer