Les retours. Les haleurs, le soldat

The Returns. The Haulers, the Soldier

Emile Moselly

THE HAULERS

The crew has been working since dawn in the suffocating heat. Unloading a coal barge, the men follow one another on the bending gangplank, their necks crushed under the weight of sacks. A black dust soils the bank, the elms along the towpath, the squat barges low on the water. And the silhouettes of the workers move confusedly in a hot haze, pierced by the oblique rays of the setting sun.

A giant crane stretches its neck, like a sly beast, seeming to survey the work of the wretches.

And the men walk with the same step, on the gangplank.

A dreary desolation rises from the waste grounds, eaten by a leprosy, where rubbish is piled. The sunset pours a leaden light upon the stagnant waters of the canal, where old corks float, newspapers, dead wood, always in the same place. Somewhere a machine is heard panting heavily. And the declining sun brings the earth neither coolness nor relief. Burning breaths rise from the ground, as if the hostile things wanted to set a great blaze around human suffering…

And the men follow one another, with the same rhythmic, swaying step, which bends the gangplank. They go, without hurrying, wound up like machines. Water streams over bare torsos, over bristling chests; the sun bites the brick-colored necks; and the work is accomplished, implacable, without respite, like the labor of a convict.

Sometimes one of them drops his load and, straight as a stake, lets himself slide into the canal. Then he floats on his back, arms outstretched in a cross, pushing out from time to time a grunt of pleasure. And the others cast him, as they pass, a covetous glance.

A thirsty dog descends the embankment; hidden among the reeds, it drinks at length, with a wide lapping that makes great ripples on the surface of the water.

A man appeared at the end of the work site.

He walked, slumped and weary. Before him, his shadow stretched out immeasurably upon the scabrous earth.

He stopped, reflected, and made up his mind.

With the same dragging step, he came and planted himself before the foreman. Seated on a pile of gravel, his legs shod in heavy boots, the latter was watching the work, fanning his sweating face with a rush hat.

“Hello!” said the man. “Would there be any hiring, by chance?”

The foreman did not answer.

He was sizing up the man, who, his hand in his pocket, was whistling a tune between his clenched teeth, trying to assume an indifferent air. His attire did not inspire confidence. He must have come a long way. His espadrilles were white with dust; his bleeding toe poked through a hole. The rags weighing on his shoulders were a collection of tatters, on which clung wisps of straw, dry leaves, twigs of grass, all the nameless things that rot in the ditches of the highways. His earthen face, with hollow eyes, framed by a blond, dirty beard, despite the efforts he made to appear calm, was contorted with anguish. A marauder, no doubt, who wanted to enter the site to do some mischief, steal hardware or planks!

The man spoke:

“I’ll tell you! I’m not demanding. A trifle, you know! A hand if the work is pressing. Enough to earn a poor twenty-sou piece. I’ll tell you, I haven’t eaten since yesterday evening.”

Suspicious, the foreman frowned.

“Where do you come from?”

The man, with a sweeping gesture, encompassed the horizon, bathed in tawny light, where distant mountains crouched:

“From over there.”

He halted, panting:

“Have I seen places, since I’ve been walking! Good country, where there was plenty of everything, wine, lard, potatoes! And others, dog country, where the chickens themselves were starving, so to speak, at harvest time. I’ve walked everywhere, in the flatland and in the hills. Sometimes I was well received, I worked on farms, at harvest. Sometimes they set dogs after me. I slept in hedgerows, and I stole turnips in the fields. I’ve got no more shoes, I can’t go on. At first I held fast: Don’t give in, I told myself. But poverty, that wears you down. I can’t hold together anymore; I’m falling apart like an old barrel…”

He coughed, caught his breath, went on:

“Lately I had a good position, near Pagny, in a cement factory. I was earning three francs a day hauling sacks. But the dust got into my lungs, and the doctor showed me the door because I wasn’t strong enough anymore. It seems that dust is bad for you. Nothing like it to eat away at your chest.”

The supervisor made an impatient movement of his shoulders:

“All right,” he said. “Wait here, we’ll see if we can find something for you.”

Then he brought a horn to his mouth, and drew from it a hoarse sound that ran out far over the waters heavy with sunlight.

The crew stopped.

They were taking their break, to eat a bite, for the work usually continued well into the night. Seated on the muddy bank, the men pulled provisions from their sacks, and they ate, placid and slow, with a quiet working of their jaws. They broke off pieces of savory bread, whose white crumb faintly stained their black hands. The greasy lard was crushed under their fat thumbs, and they cut slices with care, the blade of their knives casting a sharp glint between their fingers. One of them cried: “Ho there, lad.” And a boy of about twelve, frail and blond, rose to the top of the embankment, carrying a tin jug whose rounded belly sparkled. The workers took the jug, and with arms extended, drank from the stream: the jet of water fell into their mouths, ran over their beards, watered their bristling chests.

The wretch devoured this food with his eyes. Laughter awoke behind him:

“The Marquis of Hard Times.” “His Grace the Duke of Empty Pockets!” “Say, old Charles, stocks are falling.” “All loafers, I tell you: they’ve got a hair in the palm of their hand. When they’re starving, they come work at cut rates, to bother honest folk.” “Oh misery! wouldn’t they be better off in prison.”

The starving man heard these words without emotion. Only his face lengthened, expressing desolation, a sort of desperate bewilderment. He bowed his back, that lamentable back that the sun had bitten, that the autumn squalls had lashed with their patter, that servile labor had broken, like the spine of a beast of burden.

He stayed there, standing, in the work site. Then an obscure need for comfort, a vague instinct of sympathy, made him sit down beside the boy.

The child was eating; his hands went back and forth, pulling from a cowhide sack handfuls of mirabelle plums, golden fruits with juicy pulp. Shining with covetousness, the wretch’s eyes followed this movement in spite of himself. The child noticed; he took pity.

“If you feel like it…”

And he pushed the sack; the tempting roundness of the fruit gleamed in the opening; the starving man reached out his hand:

“I won’t say no.”

“Help yourself; when there’s no more, there’s still more!”

And the boy broke his bread, a piece of homemade bread with a crust dusted with bran, and shared it with the man.

There was between them a distant resemblance.

The man ate greedily. He began to breathe heavily, stretching his legs on the grassy slope. With the food absorbed, a gentle warmth flowed through his limbs, while the cramps in his stomach, twisted by hunger, calmed. His cheekbones took on a tinge of red: something passed through the blazing air, like a cool breath of the old hope that lives always at the bottom of life.

Then the boy held out a bottle of red wine, fermented, whose foam turned pink in the glass. The man wiped his lips and drank from the neck.

“That’s better than a kick in the behind,” said the jovial boy.

“Quite so,” answered the man. “That’s better.”

They chatted.

“Has it been long since they built that road?”

He pointed beyond the luminous waters to the slashed flank of the valley, the bank of white rocks taking on a warm coloring in the dust of the sunlight.

[The story continues with “The Soldier,” a companion piece depicting the return of a soldier to his native village in Lorraine, exploring similar themes of rootedness, displacement, and the hard realities of provincial French life in the early twentieth century. Moselly, a writer of the Lorraine soil, renders with naturalistic precision the physical labor, the landscape, and the speech patterns of working people along the canals and rivers of eastern France.]