The name meant “in bulk” or “loose goods.” He grew up large and brutish, with an oversized head, slack mouth, and pale hair that stood up in tufts. He lived with his mother in a grim farmhouse, eking out an existence from a few hectares of soggy land in a valley below the village of Malpech. The mother, Marie-Claire Rocher, otherwise known as la Binette, was herself no beauty: a hulk of a woman, with a massive jaw rising out of a creased dewlap, and a livid birthmark covering one eye. Her nickname suited her, for the word binette meant “hoe,” an implement she had once nearly decapitated a man with for trespassing on her land. Its more archaic meanings, “visage” and “wig,” could equally be taken to refer to her unsettling face or to the coarse yellow clump of horsehair that sat on her head like a turkey’s roost. Of Vrac’s father, nothing was known. Everyone suspected it had been old Rocher himself. “Mon dieu, his own daughter and barely thirteen!” they had exclaimed those many years ago as the smock front of the young Marie-Claire grew daily shorter for all to see.
