The Summer the Lavender Came Early

The lavender came early that year, and Élise would always remember the summer by it. Not as the summer Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo—a distant city she could not have found on a map—but as the summer the fields above Valensole turned so deeply purple they seemed almost bruised, and Julien kissed her for the first time behind the Chapelle Saint-Roch, while bees droned around them, as though the whole world were humming a tune meant only for the two of them.

She was nineteen. He was twenty-one with hair the color of sun-warmed wheat and eyes a clear, steady blue. His hands were rough from three summers of harvest work, and his joyous laugh rose from somewhere low in his chest.

Julien had come down from Digne with his uncle for the cutting season. Boys did that every July and they left again in September.

Élise knew this. It did not stop her heart from settling where it should not.

They first met properly at the well behind her father’s farmhouse. She drew water there twice a day and Julien, for reasons he never admitted, found himself thirsty at precisely those hours. Her father grumbled about idle boys who could not find their own well. Her mother said nothing, which, in her mother’s language, meant a great deal.

By the second week of July, they were walking the field paths in the hazy blue evenings, when the heat loosened its hold on the stones and the swifts swept low and fast over the grass. Julien told her about Digne. He spoke of the gorge where the river ran the colour of bottle glass. He told her about his grandmother, who read fortunes in the lees of coffee cups and always saw the same thing for him: a long road for a boy who could not sit still.

He claimed not to believe his grandmother. Élise believed in little beyond the church calendar and the phases of the moon for planting. Still, she wanted desperately to believe it for him and perhaps even for them.

Late in July, they lay among the shorn stubble of a hayfield and watched for falling stars. Half in jest, Julien promised to return the following summer, and the summer after that, until her father grew so tired of finding him at the well that he handed Élise over simply to be rid of him.

She laughed so hard she had to sit up. Julien watched her quietly as though committing the sound to memory.

For a little while longer, the world beyond Valensole seemed too distant to touch them. The first Élise heard of Sarajevo, weeks earlier, was from a newspaper three days old, brought back from Manosque by the baker’s son. It seemed no more urgent than weather in a distant country. She remembered how little it meant to her beside the news that Julien and his uncle would finish cutting the western field by Thursday.

On the first day of August, the tocsin began to ring.

The church bell struck a flat, urgent rhythm that had no place in a summer afternoon. The mayor’s boy ran down from the mairie with white papers beneath his arm. By late evening, an affiche had been nailed to the town hall door:

ORDRE DE MOBILISATION GÉNÉRALE.

Every man liable for service was called to war. Men like Julien.

She found him at the well. For a moment, neither of them spoke. There was nothing left to say that the bell had not already said better.

“It will be over by the grape harvest,” he told her with a wry smile, though his eyes would not meet hers.

Everyone was saying it. The men at the café said it from their wicker chairs, cigarette smoke curling around them as they drank their wine.

Home by autumn. Home before the leaves turned. Home before the harvest.

Several days after Julien reported, Élise saw him again at the station in Manosque, dressed in the blue-grey coat and madder-red trousers the army had given him. It seemed to her a foolish, beautiful, doomed sort of uniform for a man to wear to war. Around him, the platform was crowded with women who, in ten days, had learned to stand painfully straight so no one would have to catch them when they fell apart.

Julien held Élise by the shoulders with a softness that broke her heart.

“I’ll write,” he said. “And when I come back, I’ll find your father at that well and ask him properly. He is going to say yes.”

He did write, for a while.

Three letters came. Each contained a sprig of lavender, dry and nearly colourless by the time it reached her. Élise swore she could still catch its scent if she held the paper close enough and thought hard enough of the field behind the chapel.

He wrote about the mud in a way meant to be funny and mostly was not. He wrote about a river that reminded him of the one near Digne, though this one was bitterer. In the last letter, he admitted that the men at the café had been wrong about the grape harvest. He would not be home before the leaves turned.

At the bottom of the page, where the ink had blurred beneath his hand, he wrote:

I am so tired, Élise. I keep dreaming of the lavender fields and coming home to you.

The final notice came through the mairie in October, when the vines in the valley had been picked clean and the light had taken on the muted gold-grey of a Provençal autumn. By then, villages across France had begun to recognize such news before it was spoken, in the rigid shoulders of whoever stood waiting at the door.

Tué à l’ennemi.

Killed in action.

Julien had died near a river whose name Élise had never heard before and would spend the rest of her life trying, and failing, to forget.

That winter, she continued to visit the well, though no one waited there but her own reflection, breaking apart on the water below.

She kept his three letters in a tin box, the lavender still folded between their pages. Each time she opened it, she knew the flowers would surrender a little more of their scent, and that one day there would be nothing left of the summer they shared. Still, she opened it anyway.

The lavender returned the following July, purple and humming, precisely on time. It rose as though it had never heard the bell that August afternoon. As though a boy with a low, joyous laugh had not once promised a girl beside a well that he would return every summer until her father gave in.

But that summer was over, and so were we.