Chateau Laux
By David Loux
A young entrepreneur from a youthful Philadelphia, chances upon a French aristocrat and his family living on the edge of the frontier. Born to an unwed mother and raised by a disapproving and judgmental grandfather, he is drawn to the close-knit family. As part of his courtship of one of the patriarch’s daughters, he builds a château for her, setting in motion a sequence of events he could not have anticipated.
The shepherd boy gave Pierre his bag of culinary spices, assuming Pierre would have need of them and that a good meal was all he could hope for in the civilized wilds ahead, and Pierre clambered down, through precipitous, boulder-strewn drop-offs. For a time, the shepherd stood in plain view, watching him descend the slope, and then the boy was gone, a bit of cloud hanging where he had been. There was the blue sky, the bit of cloud, the leaning fringes of trees, a little apron of meadow and the rocks, the downslope that soon towered above him, the wood smoke and sewer smells of the city, cows with bells and barking dogs, sniffing, trailing dogs with bristling backs, staring people who watched as he approached and then turned their backs, watching him from the corners of their eyes until he was safely past and beyond the reach of harm to them.
Though no one made a friendly gesture, no one challenged him, either, and he found himself in the town square. In the center of the square was a fountain, with water gurgling up and spilling over a mass of stones. An old woman sat on a bench beside the fountain. She wore a black headscarf and a long black shawl. Gray hair wired out around the scarf and she had a dark, leathery face with a beaked nose. She seemed to doze, hands with prominent knuckles folded in her lap, and ankles wrapped in cotton stockings, heavy black shoes resting with the heels apart.
“Do you mind if I sit next to you?” Pierre asked, and she looked at him with a fierce, stabbing eye.
“If you think you dare,” she said.
“Why would I not dare?” he said, cautiously.
“Some say I have the evil eye.”
“Do you?”
She gave a contemptuous laugh and shrugged.
“Some say it and that’s enough for most,” she said, turning her head to the side to spit.
“I’ll sit then, if you don’t mind,” he said, lowering himself to the bench. He paused for a moment, then gave her a sideways look. “But if you do have the evil eye and think you might want to give it to me, I would like to suggest I have had enough troubles without adding to them. I wouldn’t mind a reprieve, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
She opened her mouth and started to silently laugh, drawing in breaths and pushing them back out again.
“I was thinking of taking a nap, sitting here in the sun, but now I think that I won’t. You’ve caught my interest. I don’t get a chance for many conversations and precious few laughs. You’re not from around here, I can plainly see. As can anyone, for that matter. I bet you got a warm reception.”
“Not hardly!” he exclaimed. “No one will even look at me!”
Her shoulders rocked with silent laughter.
“Is it any wonder? You could be the devil himself, come down out of the mountains. Eaten any children, have you? Fancied any of the maidens you might have seen peering at you past partially closed shutters?”
“What makes you think I came down from the mountains?”
“You look like a shepherd and smell like sheep.”
“I do?” he said, astonished at the impression he’d made on the old woman and presumably the townsfolk as well. He was a nobleman’s son, after all, and still thought of himself as such, in spite of the ordeals he had suffered.
“Shepherds are a scary lot, a little bit wild and unpredictable, all that starry sky on the mountaintops. Living with the winds in the trees and making your own medicines out of nature’s herbs. People around here need the likes of you to watch their sheep over the grazing months, but it’s best you stay in the mountains where you belong in the in-between times. Stop in a town too long and some might take a mind to burn you at the stake,” she said, only partly in jest.
“I’m not a shepherd.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” she retorted.
“I’m looking for some people who live here,” he said.
“I figured you wanted something. Nobody sits down next to an old woman with the evil eye unless they’ve got good cause.”
He explained who he was looking for and she gave him a sharp look.
“They were big house people and been gone a long time now,” she said, choosing her words with care. “Is that what you are—a big house person?”
Pierre’s mind reeled at the thought that he had come all this way for naught.
“What happened that they left?” he said.
“To hear it told, it was the house they lived in. It burned to the ground. Some say it was the soldiers on account of they were heretics. Others say it was people from the town who did it. You know how people can be when they get ideas in their heads. I couldn’t rightly tell you what happened, one way or the other.”
Pierre stood up to leave and the old woman softened.
“Goodbye, shepherd boy,” she said.
“How many times do I have to tell you—”
“I know,” she interjected, giving him a rare smile. “But better, perhaps, if you were,” she offered.
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David Loux
David Loux is a short story writer who has published under pseudonym and served as past board member of California Poets in the Schools. Chateau Laux is his first novel. He lives in the Eastern Sierra with his wife, Lynn.
Social Media Links: Website, Twitter, Goodreads, Amazon Author Page
