A case of curiosities by Allen Kurzweil Read Free Book Online

pastures offered countless opportunities denied during the long wintet months. Cowpats granted the more imaginative childten houts of diversion. The duller boys and girls tested their relative skills in stone-throwing, early training for a ritualized competition that would bring the men together in adulthood, the annual boulder toss. Others played a game of tag, hitting each other with great and gratuitous force. The Page sisters squatted near a pool of water. Fidelite directed Evangeline to trace the digestive tract of a frog with a hollow stalk of marsh grass. When that proved unrevealing, she ordered Evangeline to feed the frog a worm, slowly. Then the sisters set out to find a cat with which to continue their food-chain tortures.
    Claude kept to himself, his hand and heart still tender. He sat on a clump of damp ground and riffled through the copybook that was sheathed in his new sketch folder. An image forced up a recollection of his father. At the same riverbank, Michel Page had launched a clog boat for his son. He had placed in it a single passenger, a bewildered salamander found under a rock. Claude put down the sketch folder and turned over a few large stones. He inspected the abandoned tunnel of a mole and studied the dank goings-on of bugs that scuttled, flexed, spiraled. He stopped the subterranean investigations and hiked to an outcropping above the mansion house. He decided to draw what his mother insisted he draw, and what until now he had put off. He framed his field of vision to include two farmers, aged brothers of the Golay tribe, who were forever fencing—in the agricultural sense of the term. Claude blocked out their dispute on the merits of horse-hoed root crops. He locked his jaws. The muscles of his face constricted toward his nose—up from the mouth and down from the brow—as he made a sketch of the Abbe's property.
    Even for the architectural historian, the mansion house of Tournay would be difficult to classify. Since 1497, if one trusts the date carved above the keystone, it had been the most significant edifice in the valley. Though the original building betrayed an unyielding commitment to the right angle, subsequent construction by a dozen proprietors had softened the initial rigor. Beyond the main structure stood various outbuildings: a misplaced cow barn of experimental design, a duckless duck pond, an observatory. A large dovecote balanced out the turret that rose at the back. The turret, with its cone of tiles, barely fit into Claude's drawing.
    The only apparent order in the design of the property was an orchard edged in hardy thyme. Fruit trees were espaliered some thirty feet apart. A pruning hook had brought even the most inaccessible branches under control.
    After the Abbe purchased the property, he applied his own haphazard sensibility. He had new windows cut and bricked up others. He installed an iron lightning pole that rose one hundred Paris feet in the air. According to the gamekeeper, an extremely reliable source, it came from London. Given the scale that Claude employed for his drawing, the pole reached far beyond the edge of the Dutch double elephant. At first, this troubled the young draftsman. He resolved to affix another piece of paper, making the sketch L-shaped. But then, when the glue came undone, he decided that he liked the incomplete image better. It would force the viewer to imagine what existed beyond the frame.
    On the first Tuesday of each quarter, peasants rich and poor, clerics corrupt and less corrupt, and tradesmen of diverse endeavors assembled in the great hall of the mansion house. Some came to pay rents. Some came to pay respects. A few paid both. Most paid neither.
    The families that dominated the tax rolls — Rochats, Pages, and Golays—congregated among themselves, clarifying by their proximity the legacies of incest. The mood was what the mood is so often among such crowds — confused. Two or three babies cried quietly. A mother, suckled dry by her