1451693591 by Alice Hoffman

the back door.
    The rain was still falling, and the puddles were huge, some as deep as ponds. When such things happened, fish would appear, as if brought about by magic. Samuel was terrified of the donkey at first, and hid behind my skirts. I told him it was a baby, nothing to fear.
    “Let’s help him,” I said to Rosalie.
    While I held Hannah and Samuel clung to my skirt, Rosalie and David caught the donkey with a rope, then brought it into the yard, where we offered it soft bread and milk from a tin pan. It was shy at first, but starvation got the best of it and it ate with such abandon we all laughed. Samuel soon lost his fear of the donkey. He asked if he might keep it as a pet. He had already named him Jean-François, and indeed the creature trotted over when called so. I shook my head and told Samuel no. This was a wild donkey, meant to be with its mother.
    “Why does he have to be wild? Can’t he be like Gus?”
    Gus was a goat who lived nearby and who escaped from his pasture every once in a while to terrorize the local dogs.
    “No,” I told Samuel. “Some creatures are not meant to be pets.”
    When the sky brightened, and the donkey was well fed, we set it free. Samuel cried for so long that David teased him and called him a baby, which made him cry even harder. That night when I was putting Samuel to bed I lied and swore that I had seen the little donkey on the road with its mother, and that the day had turned out for the best. He slept easier then, his hand clutching mine. I curled up beside him rather than go into my marriage bed. But the wind arose again, hammering at the roof, and I couldn’t sleep. I felt I had become a different person since moving into this house. Before I’d had no trouble killing chickens for Friday dinner, but now I wept over a wild donkey as I thought of him wandering alone. My dream for my life was slipping away from me, and perhaps that made me more tenderhearted toward this motherless creature.
    I needn’t have worried. In the morning the donkey was in the kitchen. He had let himself in through a door that had been blown open. Maybe it was true what they said, that donkeys and mules would not cross over a shadow, and this one had turned back when he reached the end of the property. The boys begged and begged, and even Hannah wailed and cried, reaching her hands out to the beast everyone now referred to as Jean-François. I relented. When Isaac came home at dinnertime, he found that I’d made his favorite dish, wild mushrooms and rice. I poured him a glass of rum with limewater. I said there was no reason to let our disagreement fester and interfere with our daily lives. Then I told him that the children had a pet they had named Jean-François.
    “Pets are a foolish expense” was his initial comment.
    “Sometimes being foolish is the right thing to do. Look at us.”
    “You’re never foolish. I know that much.”
    “Not even when it comes to Paris?”
    “The business cannot be run from Paris, Rachel, though I wish that it could be. Do you think I haven’t thought a thousand times of leaving this place behind? I have terrible memories here. But I have to think of the children, and children expect to be fed and clothed.”
    “And you would be leaving Esther if you went back to Paris.”
    Whereas other men went to taverns in the evenings, I knew my husband went to the cemetery. Rosalie and I could both tell because there would be red mud on his shoes and red flowers in the pockets of his jacket.
    “I couldn’t leave,” he admitted.
    I went to sit on his lap. He was a kind man, and although I couldn’t change his mind about Paris, when it came to the household I knew how to get what I wanted. “Be ready to be surprised.”
    “You always surprise me.”
    Because Isaac disliked dogs, he was somewhat relieved when I took him out to the barn.
    “Voilà,” I said. “Jean-François.”
    Isaac laughed, despite how tired he was. “Let me guess—he’s a French