How Huge the Night - By Heather Munn Page 0,1

fuel when there wasn’t enough wood.”

Or tie them on your feet for snowshoes. For walking to school uphill both ways.

“We did that during the Great War. There wasn’t enough of anything then.”

Julien looked at the bush, its skeletal green fingers all pointing up at the sky. Dozens like it, all down the hillside, dotted the cow pastures. They didn’t look like anything the cows would want to eat. They didn’t look like they would burn either.

“I don’t know what the next few years hold, Julien. But the people who live on this land—they know how to survive.” Papa looked out over the hills. “You don’t know how deep your roots go till you need them.”

Julien said nothing. His father sighed, and turned, and led the way on down the road to Grandpa’s farm.

They had come here every Christmas since Julien was a kid; he could see it without even shutting his eyes, what it looked like in winter. Snow blowing over rock-hard wheel ruts frozen in the mud, the bitter wind cutting through your clothes: the burle, a wind so harsh it had a name. That was Tanieux to him: a winter town, a cold, stone village huddled on its hillside, Grandpa’s kitchen its one welcoming place. He’d loved that kitchen, golden with firelight, warm with the steam of a pot-au-feu on the stove.

Now it was hot and bright and dusty, and the garden was a vast green jungle, and his back hurt worse than it ever had in his life, and he was less than halfway done with his row of beans. Mama was in the kitchen, her eyes red and her black hair plastered to her forehead, canning the three buckets he’d already picked, with Magali, his younger sister, stoking the woodstove. And Mama wasn’t singing; she was working and not singing. It wasn’t right.

Mama was good. She should have been an opera singer; there’d never been a day in Paris that she didn’t sing. Thinking of it, the sound of it, he was visited with a sudden, painful image of happiness: looking out their kitchen window, down into the little courtyard with the sun shining through the leaves of the tree he’d climbed as a kid, looking at his cousin Vincent standing down there with his brown leather soccer ball under his arm, calling, “Come on, Julien. Let’s go!”

And instead, he’d go home tonight and sit with an aching back, alone in his room, and tomorrow he’d wake up and look out the window and see not his own street but the jumbled rooftops of Tanieux, where nobody wanted him. From the window of his room, he could see all the way down to the boys’ school, a square gray block with a low stone wall around it, standing alone on the other side of the river. It looked like a prison from where he was standing. He’d be starting in a week.

He walked away. Suddenly, and fast.

He didn’t know where he was going. Away. A feverish energy drove his feet: they kicked at the dirt between the rows, they moved like there was someplace to go to get rid of that aching knot behind his breastbone. Between the edge of the garden and the woods was a long, low stack of graying firewood, and an ax stuck in a piece of log.

He looked around. No one. He tugged on the ax, and it came free. He had seen this before: you lifted it up over your shoulder, and then you swung, and it—

Bounced.

It bounced so hard it nearly jerked his arms out of their sockets. He looked quickly around. Then at the wood: there was a mark, a little line cut in its surface. That was what he’d done.

He raised the ax up again—Oh yeah? This is for Tanieux—and smashed it down into the log. It bounced again. He set his jaw.

This is for that soldier yesterday. And that girl—that girl ignoring me. Wham! The ax bounced higher than before, almost over his head, and at the end of its bounce, he bore down wildly and brought it crashing down again with a resounding whack as the ax head hit the log side-on, its blade not even touching the wood. “Aaaah!” Julien roared, and kicked the log over and the ax with it.

“Julien!”

He jerked around so fast the tree line blurred. Grandpa. Grandpa standing with his seamed and weathered face set hard as stone. He had never seen Grandpa look like that.

“Do you know what one