Read Online Poached Egg on Toast by Frances Itani - Free Book Online

wails and it is not nine o’clock, you go to your back stoop to look for smoke. There is no fire truck here. Only the bucket brigade. That, and the siren, to summon the villagers.
    Madame Lalonde has another mouth to feed. This one sleeps downstairs. Already, Madame and her husband have moved their own bed to the dining room. No more space upstairs. If you creep to their window at night, you can see them undressing. In the light of the cross you can see them. Madame Lalonde is tired. Her breasts hang down, always being pulled and tugged and chewed. The baby sleeps in the carriage. Amédée they call him. A good name. A hungry devil, too, she says. Monsieur Lalonde has a new job now. He wears a uniform. The children are proud; their father delivers Vachon cakes to the stores in the city. Now Monsieur revs the truck as he roars home, and Pitou has to pick himself up off the road.
    Amélie is outside with her small brother, Jacques. Monsieur Poirot the barber has just cut Jacques’ hair. Amélie has to go with her brother to make sure Poirot knows when to stop cutting. For Poirot keeps an extra bottle on his shelf. He also trades comics with the children when he’s through.
    Amélie and Jacques are returning home; it is seven thirty and they are leafing hungrily through the comics. The siren startles. Already? But it is not yet nine.
    A little crowd clusters at the window of Madame Lalonde. Amélie and Jacques push their way to look through the limp net of curtain. From the back, Jacques’ hair looks as if Poirot has turned a porridge bowl upside down over it.
    Through the dining room, through to the kitchen, they see their parents. Old Hervé is there, too. Hervé the policeman. It is his bike that lies on its side in the gravel. The younger children are spinning the back wheel, holding a cardboard to its spokes. Ra ta tah tat. There is something on the table, a baby, or a doll. A baby, yes, but this doesn’t look like Amédée. This baby is blue and lies very still. Hervé bends over it, breathing into its mouth. Nothing. There is no cry. Nothing. Hervé breathes again and again. The child is fixed like a china ornament on the table. Madame Lalonde wrings her hands. It is no use. You can tell by looking at her face.
    Make way! The priest has arrived. His shining black car thumps over the bumps in the road where grass has grown between old tire tracks. He stops in the puddle of gravel, an inch from Hervé’s bike. His black skirts swish as he walks to the door. “Leave the window, my children,” he says to the sober faces in the crowd.
    Poor Madame Lalonde. The cross has not even lit up yet, for the night.
    When everyone has gone, she dresses Amédée’s cold limbs in the gown in which he was baptized—he and all the others. It has been passed on all the way down from Joseph, the eldest. She stops for a moment beside the still bundle. The tears stream down her cheeks. She turns her head and spits on the scrubbed kitchen floor. Priest or no priest, there will be no other.
    When the weather is warm, Hector, the chip man, emerges from his winter cocoon and plants his white cart squarely behind the horse in front of the post office. Tassé runs the post office from the closed-in veranda of his yellow house. The mail truck arrives from the city; Tassé sorts the letters into the silver boxes that line his veranda. The villagers come and go, up and down the steps, stopping to chat with Hector, slapping his old horse gently on the neck.
    “Ah, Hector, back in business, you scoundrel. You’ve been getting fat all winter. Nothing to do but draw water. Come on, you dirty dog, give me some chips, and make sure you fill up the bottom, too.”
    Behind the murky windows of his cart, Hector scoops thick fries, fresh from the splattering grease, into the cones of waxed brown paper. The children put their nickels on the ledge and hold their breath while Hector adds extra chips on top. As they walk away they cross their fingers,