Family harvests

In the 1960s, my mom and my mom were doing the harvests at Yvonne and Charles Giraud, perhaps some readers of Passadoc knew them. They lived on Rue Saint-Jean in Puget-sur-Argens.

We left very early in the blue tomb fired by Butterfly (all the horses called Butterfly or Bijou) But he was my boyfriend. When my mom cooked artichokes, I wanted to keep the hay of my heart for Papillon.

Charles held Papillon by the bridle and we went at the pace of this crew to Canevère. Rex the dog (all the dogs called Rex or Marquis) followed by trotting, vying for his canine concerns, the truffle at the bottom of the ground, stopping from there to sniff out some smell deposited by a previous congener or launching a brief japping whose only he could know to whom he was destined.

I found it unfair that Rex was forced to walk so I asked permission, always accepted, to walk by holding Butterfly by the bridle; So I made Rex understand that he wasn't alone, which he didn't care about. I was especially proud – even more so when we met a friend – to cross the village, giving me the appearance of mastering this muscle mastodon that would have sent my ass over my head to the slightest simmering of noses.

Rhythmed by the step of the horse the journey lasted a certain time. Once they arrived, the harvesters began to sew two by two in each row, each on one side of the vine, a straw hat or a scarf on the head, as the sun still hit hard in September. While cutting off the clusters, they talked cheerfully, they heard bursts of laughter; Sometimes one of them got up to hold her kidneys for a moment but not too long to be distanced by the other. For making the harvests afterwards I know how much more annoying the grape is than wearing the canesteo.

At the time I was too young to be entrusted with a pruning machine, so I picked up grass that I gave to Papillon, who was waiting placidly between the stretchers of the cart in the middle of the vines. When no one was looking in my direction, I picked a small cluster that I was quick to give to my boyfriend as I had been taught, with my hand open, offering on the palm. He then delicately seized the forbidden fruit from the tip of his big lips as if he were aware that he had to do so so as not to hurt me. I speak of grapes as the forbidden fruit, for if Charles was not a bad man, rather placid like his horse, he was a peasant; A penny was a penny and a cluster a cluster that could have no other destination than coop.

Annoyed by the taons who left him no respite, Butterfly shook his big head or his body shuddered with a violent trembling revealing his powerful musculature, his tail, stuck between the stretchers could not beat his flanks to chase out the annoying insects.

Butterfly wasn't my only boyfriend; There was also Jacky, the porter hired by Charles. Jacky was a vagabond who lived in an old caravan. It is difficult to give him an age because at 7 or 8, it is difficult to estimate the age of an old man who has spent his quarantine. I remember his chestnut tignasse which makes me say now that he had not reached 50. It was one of those cabossed of life, without fire or place, having had a thousand trades, a thousand miseries, a railway came up, it is not known where, nor after what fortune of life he had laid his baluchon here rather than elsewhere and which disappeared one day just as discreetly as he had arrived to never come back again leaving from his passage only a memory that faded over time.

Jacky lived several years in Puget selling his arms for harvests, cherries, strawberries... At the time the vegetable and fruit crops of the Plain of the Argens provided him with work, otherwise he sold himself as a labourer to some mason, brushed up land or cut wood. He was not from home, he spoke like Parisians – to say "canesteù" he said "canestero. " From time to time it skated a little because it wasn't just carrying grapes for the harvest, it sometimes enjoyed more than reason the finished product. But he was a good guy, always polite and helpful and never had anyone to blame him. He used to call my mother "M-dam- Raymond" because my father had sometimes hired to cut wood for my grandparents. He loved us because, in addition to his salary, my parents wanted to eat and my father was generous with pastis; which was not so good to my mother who thought that the aperitif was going a little too long to her taste, but my sister and I were happy, he always had candy or lollipops for us.

He said that he had been a clown in a circus where he practised his art under the name "Patate". I don't know if it's true, but what I'm sure of is that he made me laugh with his faces. He had one that impressed a lot. He smoked grey tobacco, which he dexterized in JOB paper, he lit his cigarette with a Zippo who smoked like a locomotive because he fed gasoline for cars. Once his two-thirds cigarette was consumed, a tongue movement, he could turn it on in his mouth, drank a shot of red, discussed five minutes and another tongue movement, it always came out lit. I tried to imitate, not with a cigarette of course but with a small piece of wood. All I've managed to do is miss the swallow.

At noon we settled in the shadow of the cypress and each took the meal out of his basket. For us it was often a cheese omelet in bread, I loved it, or a scramble of tomatoes that we wore in a military bowl in aluminium, vestige of war that at the time was only about twenty years old.

This aluminium bowl had a little story, it was engraved "vergiss meinnicht, Karl" (Don't forget, Karl). At the very end of the war, the Reich was reduced to enlisting young boys and old men and Karl was one of those kids. He had landed in the Puget completely lost, away from his own, he must have been 16 or 17 years old and needed his mother more than a Mauser. After the landing of the Dramont, my grandparents had taken him under their wing before he could go home without a problem. While waiting above all for the RMS (Resistant of the Month of September) to calm down, they who discovered themselves a vocation of hunters of boaches once they feared nothing when they had done in their pants during the four years of the conflict.
It was during this "captivity" which was not a phrase he had engraved on the bowl. When he was finally able to reach his family on the shores of Lake Constance, he had promised to return and had corresponded for some time with my grandparents and then one day, suddenly nothing more, they never had any more news. One fine day Jacky also left on the tip of his feet. His caravan was found empty, he had filled his baluchon with the meagre things he owned and had resumed his wandering. What happened to him? We never knew.

When Charles rose by closing his Opinel with a dry slam, it was the signal of the resumption of work but more silently because the fatigue of the morning, the more digestion and the heat of the midday did not induce discussion.

I still often pass the property which was then in the middle of the woods and which is now surrounded by houses. If the cabanon and cypress are still there, the vines have long disappeared and the view we had on the forest does not now carry further than the slope of the highway built in the early 1970s.