“And what did you see next, I mean the next morning when you walked past that spot?” asked Cry-Baby.
“The morning after, it had gone, nothing was there. Someone had taken the khaki bag.”
There was a moment’s silence until Quirze came out with one of his outlandish comments: “A passing thief or charcoal burner had hidden it so he could squat down and have a shit; that’s why you didn’t see him. Kit-bags don’t walk by themselves.”
“A thief,” said Oak-Leaf, trying to ignore what Quirze had just said, like a card player who suddenly flings an ace or a high trump on the table to try and forget a previous bad play. “One day I did see a thief.”
“Hey!” I chimed in. “How did you know it was a thief? Perhaps he let on to you?”
“It was Charcoal Pete.”
“The one who comes to the woods to make charcoal?” we chorused incredulously.
What a discovery! Charcoal Pete was a thin, short, insignificant little guy, with sunken cheeks and an aubergine nose; the back of his pants were always torn, and he wore a collarless blue shirt, a waistcoat and cap too big for his bonce; a cigarette butt always hung from the corner of his lips; he was as poor as a church-mouse, with stacks of children and a wife as crazy as he was, who could never work because by the time her last child was starting to crawl, she already had another bun in the oven. Charcoal Pete took advantage of the early evenings his job in the textile factory left him free to come to the woods and make charcoal and slack he then sacked and sold in the village for stoves and braziers. When Charcoal Pete had covered the wood pile with earth, he’d light the bonfire and sit down a while to wait until it was all embers, plaiting reeds and herbs he found on the river bank to make round fans with a handle that he hawked around the houses alongside his small sacks of charcoal.
“That scavenger thinks nobody owns the woods,” groused Dad Quirze when the name of Charcoal Pete cropped up in conversations in the house; his son always mentioned his name when he wanted to rile his father. “One of these days we’ll give him a fright and teach him a thing or two. Or hasn’t he heard about poaching?”
“And why should you get hot under the collar about what that poor man does or doesn’t do? Do the woods belong to you? What harm is he doing you?” retorted Grandmother Mercè, pleasantly enough, and we were shocked that Dad Quirze acquiesced to her scolding without saying a word, because he was a man who couldn’t stand anyone contradicting him or raising their voices above his. “Don’t you see what poverty-stricken lives they lead? Better forget him for now. The masters are in Vic where they don’t see a thing.”
When Grandmother talked about poverty, I’d think about the women, alone or with a female friend or neighbour, who came along the cherry tree track to the house to beg for fresh bread, a few potatoes to fill their baskets, oil and fruit, even the maize we gave to the hens. The odd one, according to Mother who knew them from the factory, brought Scotch thread or Egyptian cotton, I don’t remember which, that they hid in their lunch baskets and when they had a bundle, they would barter it for food. Mother never used the word “steal” when she spoke about their actions, she’d say “took with them,” or “put in their lunch basket,” or “they were quick with their fingers,” as if they acted naturally enough like a farm worker who picks a peach or a plum or takes a few lettuce leaves from the orchard at the end of a day’s work. But the fact the textile worker had to hide the thread she was taking away rang alarm bells, warned us something wasn’t quite right in her story. So, of course, discovering the identity of a genuine, downright thief sparked our curiosity.
A year or two later, I saw that thief’s identity confirmed, one he assumed in public as a fate that merited a double-edged reaction of respect and disapproval. I felt silent disapproval was always a kind of respect triggered by a mixture of reproach and envy when Charcoal Pete was caught early one morning snaffling potatoes — the refugees who stayed on after the war called them spuds — from a farmer’s field and was forced to parade at the end of the General Communion procession as an act of penitence. This was one of the most solemn processions in the year, when the entire factory town, led by the ecclesiastical and political powers-that-be, brought communion — that in some cases was also the Eucharist — to the village’s chronic sick who couldn’t leave their beds to go to church and do their Easter duty: confession and Holy Week communion, at least that one time in the year. The skinny, benighted charcoal burner was forced to process carrying a sack of potatoes over his shoulder in full view of all his neighbours who knew only too well how that sad, bluish runt of a man, with his stubbly cheeks and weary eyes scraped a meagre living; he was now forced to trail behind the incense-burning, chanting, ritualistic retinue in an unnecessary, humiliating, offensive spectacle.
It was on a day I happened to be in Mother’s small town. The authorities in the factory town were very fond of these exemplary displays, processions like the General Communion, Remembrance parades, Mission and Penitence weeks and the like because, or so they said, the town served a number of factories and the workers — male and female — lived a life far from the eternal verities, and were in huge danger of neglecting the virtuous straight and narrow. As for Charcoal Pete’s penitence, I thought what was shocking was not so much his humiliation but the public declaration of his new persona as the town’s official thief that from now he’d never be able to cast off, a stigma they’d branded him with forever. The suspicion, doubt, gossip about his stealing was one thing and quite another the imposition he meekly accepted of an activity and skill that would tar him for life — Charcoal Pete, the thief, the potato thief, the town thief. How could he live with that slur that would always remind him of a part of his life he’d have preferred to hide, that indelible mark on his forehead that made him the butt of everyone’s barbs, scorn and banter? It was as if they had the power to take possession of your dreams, your nighttime acts, your darkest secrets, your innermost self, the hidden kernel that set you apart from everyone else. Something deep down told me that this kind of justice wasn’t right, that the desire to destroy an individual deserved no respect at all, and I could tell from the shamefaced expressions of the townsfolk accompanying the procession on the roadside with their tallow or Easter candles, that they were vaguely of the same mind: the punishment was too harsh and simply highlighted the lack of mercy and the arrogance of the contemptible pillars of that society. The wretched, stunted figure of Charcoal Pete, half-swathed in the low morning mist, assumed a luminous sanctity, a yellow and blue aura from the Easter candles, an extraordinary illumination that transformed him into something transparent, beyond punishment, an invisible energy ensuring the thief would necessarily emerge from that test fortified and transfigured like a martyr destined for the lions who at the last moment is protected by an archangel who welcomes him under his wing and vanishes into the low rain clouds.
“Right,” said Oak-Leaf. “While the pile of charcoal is burning, he goes off somewhere or other and comes back carrying all kinds of things in his sack: eggs, rabbits, hens, small bags of grain and flour…”
“Where does he get that all from?”
“Ah!” exclaimed Oak-Leaf, opening her eyes wider and lifting her hands up as if to ward off a punch. “I don’t know. When it’s not eggs, it’s mushrooms or flour. He always hides the stuff by wrapping it in pieces of cloth or paper at the bottom of the sack of charcoal he takes away.”
“I thought you said that while he was waiting for the charcoal to burn, he amused himself by making small fans…”
“The charcoal has to smoulder for ages. Sometimes he lights a pile in the evening, goes back to the village, lets the night go by and separates out the charcoal the following morning. He’s got time to do all kinds of things. That’s a lot of hours.”