A Pig in Provence (5 page)

Donald and I focused on herding our goats, just weeks away from giving birth, across the valley to our new house. It was a rental we had taken while hoping to buy something later.

It was in such a state of disrepair that it could have been called a ruin, but the roof was good and the rent low. It faced the southwest, and its ocher stones were bathed in light nearly all day, which I loved. The house had a well right beside it, and a
fireplace inside, but no electricity. We installed new windows, a sink, a cooking counter to hold a two-burner propane cooktop, and a glass-paned door to let extra light into the single downstairs room that served as living room and kitchen.

Donald made us a bed with pieces of oak from an old, dismantled wine press and we set it up in the big bedroom upstairs. A smaller room next to it became Ethel’s room. A door from the big bedroom led directly into the loft behind it, giving us easy, dry access to the hay we fed the goats. Downstairs we put in a similar door from the kitchen into the barn so we would have the same easy, dry access to the goats. I set up my small, screened cheese room in the space under the staircase, which was just large enough to hold the new draining and curing racks, plus a bucket to catch the whey.

Next to the spacious barn we built an enclosure for the goats, using sturdy branches of oak and pine from the forest behind us, so the goats could come and go freely from the barn, yet be contained. Donald fashioned a manger inside for their hay, and by the time the first kids arrived we were as ready as we could be.

When we were settled, we invited our new friends for dinner. Denys Fine, the local schoolteacher, and his wife, Georgette, both of whom were artists, had helped us with some of the work on the house. Mark and Nina Haag, an American couple we had met, were living in the village for the winter and had also helped us.

I grilled pork chops seasoned with wild rosemary in the fireplace. I had never cooked in a fireplace before, and although I relished the idea, I wasn’t very skillful. Half of the chops were burned, partly because it was hard to see what I was doing by candlelight. The stuffed zucchini I cooked in my grandmother’s cast-iron Dutch oven were overcooked, limp and shriveled, besides being out of season. Fortunately I had bought a nut tart
from the
boulangerie
for dessert, and there was wine and good conversation. For months afterward we didn’t have any more dinner guests, not because we didn’t want to, but because we were too busy.

We had just enough time during the day to take care of our basic needs—food, warmth, clothing, and cleanliness, which meant hauling and boiling water and building a daily fire, among other things—and to tend the goats, milk them, and make cheese. However, not until Reinette had been in labor for more than ten hours did I began to realize how closely our lives were tied to the animals we kept in the barn just behind our kitchen.

It began with Ethel.

“Come quick! I think something is wrong with Reinette! Hurry!”

Reinette was lying on her side, moaning, her eyes rolling slightly back in her head. Donald had gone outside briefly and we called him back.

He knelt beside Reinette, gently pressing on her stomach and stroking her flanks.

“She’s getting weaker and weaker. I’m afraid we’ll lose her if we don’t do something. I can’t feel the kid moving. I’m going to reach up inside her. Maybe it’s breeched and I can turn it.”

I heated a kettle of water and Donald washed his hands and rubbed Vaseline on them. Ethel stayed right by us as Donald tried reaching inside the birth canal.

“I can feel it—I think I must be feeling its back. She’ll never get it out that way. I’m going to try to turn it.” She was bleating weakly now, but looked at Donald as if she knew he was trying to help her.

“I can’t. My hand is too big. You try.”

“Oh my God, I can’t! I can’t do that.”

“Georgeanne, you have to try. She’s going to die if we can’t help her get that baby out. I think it’s dead. We’ve got to get it out. Go wash your hands.”

I tried, but my hand was too big too.

Donald turned to Ethel.

“Ethel, do you think you can put your hand inside Reinette like your mom and I did and help her get her baby out?”

“Yes,” Ethel answered, her voice strong. She stood there, her arms straight down at her sides, looking determined. She wore the red-and-white-checked jumper I had made for her and the lace-up brown shoes she hated. Her hair was hanging down around her face.

“Wait,” I said. “Let me tie your hair.” She didn’t like her hair back, but she let me put it in a ponytail and clip her bangs back with a bobby pin.

“You’ll need to be able to see really well,” I said.

Donald, slightly impatient, said, “Georgeanne, wash her hands. Then both of you come back.”

A storm was coming and the sky was darkening, cutting down the already waning light. The first peal of thunder shuddered in the distance. The goats were restless, wanting to be fed and milked. I returned with a camping lantern and hung it on a hook we had put in one of the barn’s beams.

“You ready?” Donald asked Ethel.

Ethel nodded. Donald put Vaseline on her hands and instructed her to reach inside and very gently see if she could feel something hard, like a leg or the head.

“I think I feel a leg,” she said, her hand and forearm deep into the birth canal, her head pressing on Reinette’s flank. “Wait. It’s two legs. I think I can feel the hooves.”

“All right, Ethel, now very gently pull them, ease them toward you. If we can get them close, then I think I can pull the kid out.”

He kept rubbing Reinette’s swollen stomach, soothing her. I did the same. She wasn’t resisting us at all, just lying there.

“I got them!” Ethel cried, and fell backward, holding two severed forelegs.

“Oh, shit. The kid is dead and starting to break down,” Donald said.

Ethel and I were both crying, she with her arms wrapped around my waist, her head buried in my lap, as we sat on the straw of the barn floor, crying from shock and for Reinette’s loss. I took the bobby pin and rubber band from Ethel’s hair, smoothing it, and held her close.

I hadn’t expected this intimacy with life and death and wasn’t prepared for it. It was different for Donald. He had spent five years at UC Davis, hoping to become a veterinarian. He had seen things like this before and knew it was part of the equation of raising animals. I knew it intellectually, but not emotionally.

We went to bed very late that night. Donald had managed to get the dead kid out, and Reinette had discharged the placenta. He gave her antibiotics and made sure she was comfortable while Ethel and I fed the other goats their alfalfa and barley and supplied them with water.

The next morning, the first thing on our minds was Reinette. We found her shakily standing, her udder hard with milk. Fortunately mastitis had not set in, and we were able to milk her to release the pressure. She continued to heal and eventually became one of the most productive milkers in our herd.

We left the kids with their mothers for two weeks, to give them a good start, and then we separated them, feeding the kids a mixture of powdered milk that we purchased by the twenty-kilo bag at a feed store an hour or so away.

It wasn’t the goats’ fault that my cheese was a failure. They
were all good milkers and accepted us as their new masters, allowing us to put a bucket just behind their hind legs and then to squat down behind them and squeeze the milk from their udders. The udders were as distinctive as the animals themselves, and we came to know them by the shape and color of their mammary glands, and to learn the style and rhythm of milking that suited each. Some had long, dangling udders with teats that seemed part of the udder itself. These could be milked in one long, smooth squeeze, the jets of milk going directly down into the bucket. Others had plump, round udders, with small teats pointing out to the sides. These were more difficult to milk, and I often lost a stream or two as I tried to angle the teat downward toward the bucket.

Donald and I usually milked together, in the morning and again in the evening. We clipped the goats by their collars to the manger, where we gave each a half-bowl serving of cracked barley, a grain notable for increasing milk production, but not digestible if left whole. After each goat was milked, we poured the bucket of milk through the double-lined filter set on top of the milk can. As soon as all the goats were milked, we took the can of filtered milk into the house, poured it into one of the white plastic tubs we had purchased in Lyon, and added rennet.

The first batches of cheeses that I made were inedible, coarse and grainy, filled with air pockets, sour and bitter. Watching their progression from curds to cheeses, I had suspected they would be no good, but I kept hoping. It wasn’t until the third day, when the cheese was supposed to be ready to eat and sell, that I admitted they were worthless. I took one to Mme. Rillier and asked what was wrong. She told me I had used too much rennet. I threw all the cheeses on the compost pile.

With the next milking I reduced the amount of rennet, using barely a drop for twenty or so liters of milk. I wrapped the plastic tubs of milk in heavy quilts to keep them warm during the curdling period, and I crossed my fingers. When I looked at them twenty-four hours later, the milk had not separated into curds and whey, but only thickened. When I tried to scoop it into the molds, it ran out the holes. It seemed I hadn’t used enough rennet. I left it another twelve hours, hoping it would curdle with more time, but it didn’t. It, too, went on the compost pile.

Finally, after more than a week of trying to get the amount of rennet correct and to keep the curdling milk warm in the basins, I had produced only inedible, unsalable cheeses. I tried to keep my mounting sense of desperation hidden from Donald and Ethel, and I kept trying. Finally, one day I unmolded a batch of cheese that felt different. Each round, dimpled with marks from the mold, felt firm and heavy in my hand as I turned it out for the final time. They were all sparkling white and looked appetizing, unlike my earlier efforts, which had produced gray to yellowish cheese with cratered surfaces, sometimes slippery with the beginning of pink mold.

I put one of the pristine cheeses on a plate and cut a V-shaped wedge. The interior was solid and smooth, creamy, and white, with not a hint of the air pockets I had come to dread. I tasted it. It was soft, slightly tangy, and very, very good. I called Donald and Ethel, who took tastes, and we danced around the room, holding hands. We had done it! We had made old-fashioned farmstead goat cheese! I got out our labels that had arrived a month before from Lyon, where we had ordered them. They were maroon foil, with a gold-embossed border and gold lettering with Donald’s name, our address, and the fat content of the cheese, as required by law. At last, I had gotten the rennet and
the curdling temperatures right and had made cheese, really good cheese. Everyone had been right. It was a simple process—but mastering it had been difficult.

I put a label on every one of the two dozen cheeses, then carefully placed the disks in a shallow wooden crate lined with food-grade waxed paper. That afternoon I took them around to various people I knew to taste. Mme. Lacroste and her mother declared them perfect and each bought two. Georgette and Denys Fine swore they were as good as any they had ever tasted and bought three, one for Georgette’s parents, who were visiting. Georgette took me up the road to meet Françoise Lamy, who bought two as well, and then to Marie and Marcel Palazolli’s, just across the road from the Lamys’. Marie and Marcel were not there, but the door was open, and Georgette took me inside and told me leave two cheeses for them. They’d pay me later, not to worry.

The last ones I took, at Georgette’s insistence, to a country
auberge
of some repute. The couple who ran it were formidable. She was said to be a harridan, he a sweet and charming alcoholic.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, after the lunch hour and, I thought, a good time to call. I walked up the rear steps that led to the restaurant kitchen, as Georgette had instructed me to do, and before I could knock, the door swung open.

“Yes? What do you want?” asked a tall woman with a curly topknot of orange hair and heavily mascaraed eyelashes, thrusting her face toward me.

“Georgette sent me. I’m the American with the goat’s-milk cheese. She thought you’d like to try some.”

“What about Georgette and cheese?” a male voice called from the background. A tall, thin man dressed in chef’s whites came to the door. He looked at the box of cheeses I held and asked me to come in.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and stepped back.
“Entrez.”

I entered and there before me was a Provençal kitchen. It had heavy wooden ceiling beams, with hanging copper pots and pans of varying sizes. A fireplace was set in one wall, its embers still glowing. A long, black spit was operated by a series of weights and counterweights. Terra-cotta
gratin
dishes were stacked next to big soup pots, and shelves held a collection of Provençal plates and platters in green and ocher. The remains of a meal, theirs I assumed, was spread out on one end of a long, heavily scarred wooden table that ran nearly the length of the room. The other end held a brace of unplucked pheasants.

“Here. Put the cheeses here,” the man said, offering me his hand. “I’m M. Duvivier; my wife, Mme. Duvivier.” We all shook hands.

“Sit down, sit down,” he gestured, putting a chair between the lunch remains and the pheasants. “Would you like coffee? We are just having some.” I accepted, and we had some small talk before he said, “Now, let’s sample the cheese.”

He took a knife, and as I had done, cut a wedge, first for his wife, then for himself. They were quiet when they finished. My heart sank. If these people, experts of the
terroir, gastronomes,
didn’t like my cheeses, I didn’t know what I would do. I hated Georgette for sending me there. I could feel my chest tightening, a sure sign that tears were not far behind, and I got up to leave.

“Sublime. Truly sublime!” M. Duvivier cried. “How is it possible that an American could make such a French cheese? I’ll take them all to start with, then we’ll see. I’ll age a few myself, have others fresh, yes, yes, local cheese. Wonderful!” He grabbed both my hands in his.