Marie Cuvier sat upon the tiny bed she shared with her two sisters, and carefully, as if handling a sacred relic, pasted another article from the Voix de Lourdes about her friend Bernadette’s conversations with the Lady of Lourdes at the grotto of Massabielle into the black, leather-bound scrapbook she had received at confirmation. Despite an almost daily visit to the grotto, Marie herself had not seen the Lady and was beginning to feel unworthy of grace. Bernadette had joined the Sisters of Charity Convent in Nevers, and Marie thought of her constantly.

Hearing a noise in the main room, Marie hid the scrapbook under a loose board in the closet, for her father, like many others, considered Bernadette insane, and if he found the book, he’d destroy it. She heard the voice of Clovis Bettencourt, the young man who had been courting her, and knew he had come, as he said he would, to ask her father for her hand. She knew that Clovis loved her in spite of her plain face and weak body, and though she was fond of him, thought him honest and sincere, she did not want him to do to her what her father did to her mother almost every night, grunting like a pig. Though her leaving would lessen her parent’s burden, she did not want to live in America, that land of savages that had so enslaved Clovis’ mind and spirit. So when she heard her father bless the union and call out to her in his rough peasant voice, she buried her face in her pillow and wept.

Like many who came to America from across the ocean, Clovis Bettencourt had thought of settling farther west, but Missouri, the “gateway to the west” with its rolling hills and rich earth, reminded him so much of his homeland that he decided to stay. With the small amount of money given to him by his adoptive father, he bought forty acres and planted wheat. After they had retired to their wagon and said their prayers, Clovis promised Marie that he would build her a house before winter came, and when he mounted her, she closed her eyes and thought of Bernadette and the Lady of Lourdes.

Clovis built Marie a house as promised, and expanded his land to eighty acres and as other settlers moved in they looked to him for advice, which he gladly gave as best he could, given his limited command of English. He relished his position, took great pride in the fact that from being a poor orphan in France he was now a respected landowner in America. The one thing he did not possess, however, was an heir to the dynasty he desired. It had become abundantly clear that Marie was barren. She had never been as hardy as the other wives, who worked like beasts of burden, but now she spent a good deal of time in bed with headaches and female afflictions. The little farmhouse being too much for his wife to manage, Clovis hired a young Cherokee girl named Tanyanika. One night, after his wife had once again turned her back to him, Clovis sat at the kitchen table and drinking just enough wine to dull his conscience, slipped into Tanyanika’s room. She had been expecting him. This soon became a habit and one evening she went out to where he stood looking over his green, sprouting field and told him she was with child.

As Clovis watched her walk back to the house, wondering how his wife would react, thinking that it would be best to send her back to France, that this life was too hard for her, that she had never been a good wife to him, he felt a sting on the back of his neck as something struck him and clung there. He reached back, grabbed it, and held it before his eyes––a locust. He cast it aside, but soon more came falling, dropping around him like black hail, so that he had to cover his head with his coat and run to the house. That night, as he and Marie lay in bed, listening to the locusts beat against their house, she turned to him in the dark, her breath reeking of sulphur, and said, “God has sent a plague as punishment for your sin.” Then she quoted scripture:

“When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust
to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are
called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face, and turn from
their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal
their land.”

Clovis only grunted, “What I did, you made me do. If you don’t like it here, go back to France. Join the convent like your friend Bernadette.”

“You are not fit to utter her name,” said Marie, turning away. “You are a Godless man, Clovis Bettencourt.”

“We will see. Now be quiet. I need sleep.”

In the morning when he went out to ask God’s forgiveness, Clovis saw that his land was black. In the weeks that followed, the locusts ate the wheat, the hay, the clover, the oats, and the weeds. They even ate the splintered wood of fences and unpainted houses. The settlers suffered greatly, whole families dying of starvation. Clovis’ larder dwindled to nothing and he and Marie and Tanyanika and the baby growing inside her were in great danger. One day Tanyanika put a large skillet full of lard onto the wood stove then went into the yard and scooped up a bucketful of the roiling, ravenous insects. When Clovis came in and saw her frying them, he cried out, “Fille folle! What are you doing?”

“We must eat,” she said.

“I am a man. I don’t eat insects.” Hearing the commotion, Marie came from her room in the frayed robe she never changed from, clutching the walls, and seeing what Tanyanika had done, quoted scripture yet again:

“Among the winged insects that go on all fours you may eat those which have legs above their feet with which to leap from the earth. Of them you may eat.” From then on, though it sickened Clovis at first, sending him running and retching outdoors, the three of them ate locusts and survived.

It was only when the weather grew cold that the locusts left the farms, gathering on the railroad tracks for warmth. For ten days the cars spun their wheels helplessly on the slime-slicked rails. Finally, with the falling of snow, as swiftly as they had appeared, the locusts vanished. By that time, Clovis was poor and the only joy he felt was when Tanyanika gave birth to their child, a boy. Marie insisted that it be named James.

She would gaze upon the baby now and then, but she would not hold it. She stayed in her room and prayed and looked through her scrapbook. She would not speak. She would not bathe and ate so infrequently that she became little more than a skeleton. Finally Clovis had her committed to the State Hospital for the Insane in St. Joseph, nearly two hundred miles away. As she was loaded into the wagon, Marie cried out for her scrapbook, but was told she could take no possessions with her. She cursed her husband. “All the descendants of your sin shall suffer as I have suffered.” From the doorway of the house Clovis built for Marie, he stood with Tanyanika holding their child and watched as his wife, wrapped in a blanket and held upright on the seat of the buckboard by a dust-covered matron in black, disappeared over the hill.