WELCOME TO THE WEB PAGE OF ARCHIE SATTERFIELD

Guy and Henri Attend a Wedding

Guy loved Henri in the same illogical manner an elderly person loves a stinking old dog or a parent loves a perpetually petulant child who in turn loves a tattered blanket she will not permit to be washed. Guy could not explain it to himself and was glad the French seldom ask personal questions. He was constantly reminded that deux chevaux are neither practical nor comfortable. Just getting into the car was difficult because the seat and steering wheel were too close together for ease of entry, and after he was seated and ready to drive, the steering wheel was so close to his middle that it was difficult to reach forward to pull the starter handle or to turn the toggle switch on the dash that operated the turn signals. Guy finally admitted to himself that whoever designed the turn signals must have been mean in spirit because they only blinked five times before turning off automatically, meaning that when he was in a town with traffic lights and he wanted to make a turn, he had to repeatedly struggle forward against the steering wheel to keep turning on the signal. Had that designer never heard of traffic lights? Perhaps not.
But Guy didn’t dwell on Henri’s shortcomings, and he still laughed aloud sometimes when he operated the silly gearshift that came out of the dash like a misplaced umbrella handle. He also felt guilty each time he settled into the car because he knew his weight gave it a slight leftward tilt, and sometimes Henri seemed to sigh when he got in, much like Rowdy, a tired old plow horse his family owned when he was a child, whose dread of being harnessed was a pitiful thing to see each morning. Guy silently apologized to Henri and told him he was in need of daily, small adventures.
Each time Guy drove Henri somewhere beyond the nearest village an adventure, great or small, invariably happened that made Guy glad he had moved to France. He lived in a constant state of mild astonishment at how the French commit so many small courtesies and at the same time remain so reserved, if not aloof. He learned that just because someone does an act of kindness for you, it does not mean you are friends and the next time you see them on the street that you must stop and chat with them. The act was not a personal favor. Instead, it was what a civilized person does, nothing more, nothing less.
After Guy absorbed this cultural lore and he stopped feeling snubbed by previous benefactors, he looked forward even more to his outings. At least once a week he stretched his trips into two or three days, avoiding cities and large towns, and staying at small country hotels. He also learned to watch for truck stops, called routiers. In them there were no choices on the menu, except perhaps the dessert, and in many the food was served in the manner of boarding houses with platters heaped with meat and vegetables and several kinds of cheese, and big pitchers of water, coffee and house wine passed from table to table.
After he had been in France a few months he often forgot to take a map with him, secure in the knowledge that as long as he stayed on paved roads, he would go somewhere worth seeing and remembering. France had more paved roads than any country he had visited and he learned that when he reached the pavement end, he was at or near the end of the road and must turn around and retrace his route. He never let the fuel gauge fall below half and carried a liter bottle filled with gasoline as an insurance policy against getting too far from a village.
When he and Henri reached the main highway to begin these trips, only then would he decide which direction to drive. It became a little ritual with him to pause at the highway and make this decision. Sometimes he simply followed the first car that went past. The direction made no difference because he knew that all roads led to lovely villages and natural scenery.
On one autumn morning he decided to drive west on the narrow road that followed the bottom of a canyon straight down the mountains to the valley rather than taking the other road that was a squiggle on the map as it followed the crest of the mountain, then tumbled into the steep foothills where he would have to share the narrow road with logging trucks. He drove Henri slowly through the dark forest, permitting him to coast as much as possible. The little engine hardly made a sound when it was idling, but the loose sheetmetal of the body warned all of their approach.
Once they were on the valley floor, Guy patted the dash as a form of apology, much as he did when he rode horses in his youth, then spurred Henri onward, working his way through the four gears gradually until Henri was near his top speed of about 85 kilometers an hour. Traffic was light and they sped onward, past farmers on tractors, sheep grazing on sloping pastures and small villages crowded against the road. Eventually he turned off the main highway onto a smaller road that almost immediately began climbing into the foothills of the Pyrenees.
Guy loved approaching mountain ranges almost as much as he loved standing on the deck of a ship to watch islands rise slowly out of the ocean. Arriving was always a mixture of promise and mystery, and Guy often wished he could spend more of his life arriving in new places to begin new adventures.
When he reached the highway that ran along the foot of the main mountain range, Guy double-parked outside the bakery in a village and bought a picnic lunch of cordon bleu, an apple tart and a bottle of Orangina. After driving around the village, searching in vain for a place to park, at last a deux chevaux truckette left its parking space just ahead of Guy and Henri. It was still morning but he was hungry so he found a place to sit on the stone steps beneath a small monument to resistance fighters in the last world war and began eating slowly. He liked to believe that an old man in an old deux chevaux became immediately invisible to local residents, allowing him to sit and watch people going about their normal lives without attracting attention.
Then the reason for all the cars in town revealed itself. The central plaza, or place, began filling with people wearing their best clothes. The bar emptied of its patrons, a photographer placed a large camera on a tripod outside the mairie, or city hall. A man wearing a suit with a red rose in the lapel, who Guy assumed was the mayor, came out to chat with the photographer. The men strolled away from the square and down one street and the women went down another street. The group of women stopped outside a house on a narrow street and the men were gathered at the gate that was once part of the city ramparts. Guy didn’t want to be in the way so he put the remains of the picnic in Henri and stood beneath a tree to see what was going to happen.
Now only the mayor and photographer, and Guy, remained in the center of town. A dark blue deux chevaux suddenly, noisily approached and the mayor bustled to the end of a line of cars and removed a wooden sawhorse that had been reserving the last spot. The deux chevaux was festooned with crepe paper, flowers both real and of paper, and balloons that bounced and jerked at the end of their strings much like small leashed dogs. After some maneuvering, the little car was in line. It fell silent and a young woman got out. She chatted with the mayor for a moment, and they walked toward the mairie laughing. The woman saw Henri and Guy and said something to him. He began his litany of “Je ne parle pas français” but she interrupted him. “Oh, sorry. English?” she asked in perfect English. She asked if Henri was his car and Guy said yes, but more accurately he was probably the car’s human. The young woman laughed.
“What is its name?” she asked.
“How did you know it had a name?” Guy asked.
“Just a guess,” she said, laughing. “Mine is named Monique. Today Monique is the voiture balai so tell Henri not to follow.” Before Guy could respond, she said she must go to the wedding, and was quickly gone, leaving Guy both enchanted and confused.
“May I help you? ” a voice asked. Guy looked around and finally saw another young woman with a bag of groceries getting into a car.
“Does everyone here speak English?” Guy asked, laughing.
“No, it is just your lucky morning,” she replied.
“What is a voiture ballet?” Guy asked, trying to imagine dancing cars.
“Oh, the voiture balai. That means the broom car. In French weddings only one car is decorated and it is always the last one in the procession. It is like the little man in a white suit with a bucket, broom and dustpan who follows the elephants and giraffes in the circus parade.”
This made Guy laugh, loudly enough for several people to turn and look. The woman said nothing. She lit a cigarette and prepared to start the car.
“Yours would make a good voiture balai,” she continued. “Maybe someone painted it that color just for the occasion.”
“Aren’t you going to the wedding?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “I am not invited. I was his first lover but not the last.”
With that she started the engine and drove away.
The church bell rang the eleventh hour and while the tolls were still echoing down the streets of the stone village, the door where the women were standing opened and a young woman wearing a white dress with a long train appeared. Guy looked in the other direction and a group of young men strolled through an archway to merge with the waiting men. In the middle was a young man, obviously the groom, wearing a tuxedo with a long white scarf around his neck. He carried a large bouquet. The men shook hands all around and were very quiet as they approached the mairie. They talked and once all laughed quietly but there was none of the joking and jostling one usually sees in groups of young men in their physical prime. One walked with his hand on the groom’s shoulder.
Guy turned his attention back to the bride who had walked down the steps and into the middle of the street, two women behind carrying the train. They began walking slowly toward the center of town. They had gone only a few steps when the bride stopped and called out a name. Guy believed she was saying Marie-Pierre. A girl of about ten came out of a house and stood on the steps. The bride said something else and the young girl ran to her and they embraced and kissed each other three times on their cheeks. The bride said something to the girl and Guy saw her nod her head. The bride spoke to the two women holding her train. The girl took the train from them and proudly, shyly carried it alone as they entered the square.
The bride and groom met in front of the mayor and photographer and stood silently looking at each other and smiling. Then she pointed to him and Guy could tell by the tone that she asked the mayor a question. Everyone, including the groom, laughed and the mayor said something in a stern tone of voice and everyone laughed again.
The photographer organized the group into three lines with the bride and groom in front, and the bride made certain that the young girl was beside her. Guy liked to imagine that the girl and the bride had some kind of bond that transcended their age differences, and that the bride knew this moment, preserved by the photographer, would always be a special memory to the young girl.
Most of the party crowded into the city hall for the civil ceremony, and Guy went on his way. The road out of town was downhill and Guy coasted down the hill so Henri would not interfere with the ceremony. He drove only a short distance before he found a place to park beside a stream. He was sitting on a rock finishing the bottle of Orangina when the bride and groom came past in a car, followed by several honking cars filled with laughing young people. Guy stood and bowed to them. He watched for the voiture balai and when it appeared, the young woman had rolled the top back and she was wearing a scarf. She saw Guy and honked and waved gaily and threw him a kiss. Then Guy was alone again.