The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  “I will not become Uncle Ezra,” she said. Philippe was trying to kiss her neck but she squirmed out of reach. “I refuse to be solitary for all of my life.”

  “And what if you are?” he teased. “You will always have a score of admirers, as long as you make that raspberry trifle.”

  “Oaf,” she said, giving him a swat. “I will be alone and you will laugh.”

  “Of course you will not be alone,” Philippe said, going suddenly still. “It is out of the question.”

  “It is not out of the question.” Emma stamped her foot. “I am working his early hours. I am slaving in his shop. I am learning his skills as if they were devotions. Yesterday I spent whole minutes deliberating between two eggs, trying to decide which one suited a recipe better.” Emma’s breath rose as a cloud in the darkness. “For seven years I have skipped down this path like a foolish schoolgirl, without a single moment’s foresight that I could wind up in the exact same life. What is to prevent that from happening?”

  He took both of her hands. “I am.”

  With that, she calmed. Emma accepted his kisses, allowed him to pin her against a tree trunk, and as an immodest Yuletide gift, permitted one of his hands a brief entry within the folds of her cloak. His fingers were cold against her waist and her skin surprisingly warm.

  Mémé disliked Philippe because she thought he was short. In fact he stood an average height but Grandpère, her husband, had been nearly two meters. As Emma’s father, Marcel observed how quietly the young man talked, wondered whether a repairer of engines by trade could support a family, and kept any opinions to himself. He had married against his parents’ wishes, their pressure and ire serving only to drive their son away. When they refused to attend the wedding, the break was permanent. Therefore Marcel vowed on his late wife’s soul that whatever his reservations, he would not inflict that suffering on his daughter. She could give her love to an octopus and he would not object.

  Emma, however, knew things her family did not: Philippe listened to her as attentively as she did to Uncle Ezra. While other boys pawed at their girlfriends without respect, Philippe walked with a hand around her waist only when they were alone. Emma was serious to a fault, whereas he laughed and his eyes became dangerous. When she confessed one day that she could not remember her mother’s face, Philippe held her close and his hands did not wander.

  Afternoons, he met Emma after work at the bakery and leaned near. “You smell like sugar.”

  “Go away,” she laughed, but gave him her knuckles to kiss.

  The sole time he felt fickleness from her came when they encountered the Goat. Philippe could not help wondering what history was between them, that the sight or scent of that young man some days made her ardent, and other days turned her temporarily into stone.

  Philippe had been eleven when his family moved to Vergers, and her enmity was already fully established—as was the Goat’s perpetually lingering, apologetic presence.

  Emma refused to tell the story. A tale in which one is mortified does not bear repeating. However, that is not the same thing as saying the events never occurred.

  He did not call himself the Goat, of course. Didier desired to be known as the Wolf. That was the title he invented for himself, instructing villagers, insisting that people elsewhere knew him by that name alone. Which people? Which elsewhere? Emma knew he was no traveler, with friends in other places, merely a farm boy gone adrift, no more wolf than she was field mouse.

  Kinder villagers were indulgent, though, and called him the Wolf in his presence. Behind his back was another matter. From adolescence on, Didier had sought to be manlier than his nature. It always backfired. He volunteered for the national army, only to be dismissed for weak eyesight. He attempted to join the fishermen, but injured his back hauling a loaded net. He tried to grow a beard but it came in thin and only on his chin. One afternoon at the weekly town market, Odette joked that perhaps Didier had no onions, and Emma wisecracked that he looked like a goat. The gossiping biddies cackled and the nickname stuck.

  Once upon a time, however, Emma and Didier had been classmates, their mothers dear friends. Yet he teased her all through childhood, and not playfully. He pulled her hair, stole her papers, called her names. One day his mother sliced her thumb while butchering a leg of lamb, and the resulting infection killed her in a fortnight. Adolescent Emma found that the funeral and sympathy made Didier oddly interesting.

  His annoying behavior, meanwhile, only increased. One afternoon at recess when she was climbing the ladder to the slide, he ran up from behind and yanked down her bloomers, revealing her bare bottom to the entire schoolyard. Although he was punished—a ruler fifteen times on his backside in front of everyone—it did not absolve the shame Emma felt as she jerked her underwear back into place while all of her classmates stood laughing.

  Years later she still wondered what had possessed him to do such a cruel thing. From time to time she turned the question over in her mind, as though it were a stone in her pocket. Now he was grown and ambitious, yet still he struck her as pathetic, his attempts at manliness not genuine but a compensation for something missing. The Goat wanted to rouse the citizens, to incite rebellion. But if he had a fist, he kept it in his pocket.

  Somehow the occupying army had overlooked Didier at conscription time. Probably a census error by the old town clerk, Émile, doddering between his filing cabinets, which no one was in a hurry to point out. The army ordered the Goat’s father and brother to report, loaded them onto the train, then moved a dozen officers into their farmstead. From the upstairs window, they flew their red-and-white flag with its ugly black emblem. They smashed antique chairs for kindling, fed heirloom mahogany wardrobes to the flames. After that, no one knew where Didier called home.

  Philippe did not need to hear the Goat’s story to observe Emma’s reaction to him, and to steer her wide of wherever he happened to be. Though it perplexed him, Philippe noticed that her affections were most ardent when they had seen the Goat and gone another way. Her kisses made a persuasive compass.

  See Emma then, in the dim hour of dawn on the fifth of June, years later. The yearning for Philippe felt so similar to the hunger of her belly each day, she did not know which want was which. Given time enough, perhaps one can grow accustomed to all pains. So she baked—to save her life, and Mémé’s, and all the others in the village who depended on her secret network of food and fuel.

  The skies threatened rain, the wind blew harshly, but the Kommandant’s expectation of baguettes remained as certain as the tides. Emmanuelle slid on quilted gloves, placed a bowl of water in the oven to harden the crust, and turned the loaves on their sides. They were brown and crisp, the V thinner but visible for anyone who looked.

  Removing her mitts, Emma began her next task: preparing the following day’s straw. The oaken pestle spun quick in her hands, grinding against the marble mortar until the grass shafts became a soft powder the color of her hair.

  The idea had come from the animals, and their departure. The occupying army requisitioned one species after another, cows, then pigs, then sheep, so that the demand for dry straw dwindled to nothing. The soldiers also confiscated all dogs over forty-five centimeters in height, though for what purpose Emma shuddered to imagine. Nonetheless, with no animals needing bedding, straw sat in the lofts unused.

  One afternoon Monkey Boy wandered by, whistling his familiar tune, but shy when he reached the barn door.

  “Are you going to lurk there all day?” Emma asked. “Because I have nothing to feed you.”

  Monkey Boy’s shoulders dropped. He stumbled across the barnyard to the wall of beige bricks that separated Emma’s farm from the eastern well, flopped down with less care than a dog takes to settle on the dirt, and fell instantly asleep. Observing through the open door, Emma rose and crossed the grassless barnyard. As she stood over Monkey Boy, for once considering him with something other than dismissal, it became clear that he had collapsed not from fatigue but from hunger. He loo
ked like a clothed pile of sticks.

  Emma considered the thousands of hours her hands had spent cooking under Uncle Ezra’s critical eye, dicing onions or pinching salt or adding the tiniest soupçon of dry mustard to sharpen a broth. Wasted luxury, pointless education. What good was finesse in the face of starvation? It would be like needlepointing while the barn burned. She needed to do something. Her training, and yes, she could admit it, her talents, demanded better use than frosting cakes or sugaring muffins.

  Emma turned from the emaciated boy and marched back into the barn, her hands in fists. Dough for the next morning’s baguettes sat in metal bowls, three rounds taking their rise on the sunlit sill. She rested a palm on one as if on the brow of a sleeping baby. Outside Monkey Boy whimpered in his sleep. At that moment, her gaze fell on the heap of straw sitting in the loft unused.

  So it began, one pinch ground fine and stirred into the twelve-loaf mix. Emma baked as usual the next morning. She slid the arms of warm bread into the green canvas bag the Kommandant’s aide used when he came to fetch them. She wrung her hands as he motorcycled away with the bag over one shoulder, wondering if she had just sentenced herself to death.

  Emma barely slept that night. If she were found out, who would look after Mémé? She rose before dawn, as ever, and when the dough was ready for final mixing, she added that pinch once again. Later, when the aide motorcycled into the barnyard, he held the canvas bag toward her without a word. No praise, but more importantly, no complaint.

  Soon one pinch became two. Every few days she added slightly more, until a morning several months along when the aide asked in broken words if she had changed her recipe, because lately the crusts were tough. That was the ceiling, therefore, five handfuls, beneath which she remained ever after.

  Now each day Emma scooped powdered straw into a mass of dough the size of three melons, adding salt to aid with concealment. She baked the Kommandant’s twelve loaves, and portioned the extra two among Monkey Boy, or Madeleine whose eyesight had gone bad, or Fleur the veterinarian’s beautiful daughter, or the newly married Argent couple, or Pierre, the cowman too affable to comprehend a time of war.

  “I give them my milk and they leave me alone,” Pierre confided in Emma one day. He removed his pipe from his mouth. “I am not being disloyal to my country, I am protecting my girls.” He blew a kiss to the trio of bovines grazing in his dooryard, with their long eyelashes and bashful ways.

  Emma handed him one third of a loaf. “I only want to keep as many people alive as possible.”

  “Yes, until the liberators come.” Pierre tucked the bread in his coat pocket.

  “They will never come.”

  “Emmanuelle, my dear.” He chomped on the pipestem. “Of course the Allies will free us. At this very moment they might be massing and preparing to attack. Or do you have no hope at all?”

  “You cannot eat hope.” Emma fidgeted with the harness straps on her wagon. “You cannot trade it for butter.”

  Pierre patted his chest. “I fought in the Great War. I know the world will not stand by idly. Therefore I am filled with hope. The day of our liberation will be a great moment in history.”

  Emma turned away to continue her deliveries, calling back over her shoulder, “They will never come.”

  One morning Emma was busy kneading when she heard a noise in the yard. Pirate came charging out from behind the rain barrel, crowing like the last defender of civilization. She slid the mortar and pestle for grinding the straw under a table. Then she gathered her skirts and hastened to the wide barn door.

  Beside the opening in the barnyard wall stood a man dressed entirely in black. At Emma’s approach he turned his head only, glaring back before strolling away toward the eastern well.

  She hesitated. If she did not follow, though, the rooster would awaken half the village. Pirate sought constantly to escape the barnyard confines; Emma thought he probably imagined whole harems of hens on the other side of the wall, each of them eager to be bred.

  She had seen pictures of hedgerows elsewhere, the demure low walls of Ireland, the fence with a gate in England’s Lake District. But in the region of Vergers, hedgerows were something else: thick warrens of bracken and root that stood twice the height of a man, arched over the lanes like a chapel roof, dividing properties as impenetrably as any wall. Those bushes contained all manner of predators that would make short work of a three-pound bird.

  Emma shooed him away, and he quieted once she had passed through the wooden door in the barnyard’s brick wall, pulling it closed behind her.

  The man now stood on the far side of the well. He wore a dark beard, trimmed thin along his jaw, and heavy black glasses. “That infernal rooster should be served for supper,” he said.

  “He makes an excellent watchdog,” Emma replied evenly, wiping her hands on her skirts. “You never know who might be sneaking up.”

  “I was not sneaking,” the man said. “The scent of your baking is a torment.”

  “You know I am following orders.”

  “Emmanuelle.” He shook his head. “Emmanuelle.”

  “That is my name.”

  “Who would know better than the man who baptized you?”

  Emma crossed her arms. “Why does the Monsignor visit me on this rainy morning? Surely my obedience to the Kommandant commits no sin.”

  “I dare not speculate about you and sin,” the priest said. “That is for God alone to condemn. It is for me only to pity and lament. But I am here to make a request. Actually, two.”

  “I have nothing to offer you.”

  “Do I seem that much of a fool?” he said, wiggling his fingers at her. “I know all about your little network.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about, Monsignor.”

  “Your neighbors tell a different story in the confessional booth. You have woven a web with deceptions. By preying on their desperation, you compel them to bear false witness as well.”

  “If I am guilty of deceiving anyone, it is the occupying army. In my opinion, they deserve much worse.”

  “You are guilty of many things, of course.” The Monsignor sidled out from behind the well. “The question is what I ought to do, if I am to obey my conscience.”

  “Your conscience is not my business.”

  “I suspect you are concerned enough with your own.”

  “I sleep well,” Emma answered. “Aside from hunger, fear of the officer upstairs, and worry about Mémé’s mind going foggy.”

  “Poor Mémé, at the moment when she is most vulnerable, to be attended by a sinner.”

  “‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’”

  He rolled his eyes heavenward. “She quotes Scripture at me.” The priest sighed, circling the well, one hand trailing on the stones. “Tell me, Emmanuelle, when did you last attend Mass at St. Agnes by the Sea?”

  She leaned against the brick wall. “Last October. When I realized that my prayers were all for an enemy’s death.”

  “But you know, too, that prayer could remove that hatred. Why did you stop at that time in particular?”

  “I knew that God had forgotten us.”

  The priest stopped in his circling. “Blasphemy. God is always present.”

  Emma pushed up her shirtsleeves. “If God exists, He is resting comfortably on the ocean’s far shore, reclining in plump chairs beside our so-called Allies, who have perfected the art of watching us suffer and doing nothing about it.”

  The priest shook his head. “Proud as your rooster, and it is my fault. I should not have permitted you to apprentice with a Jew.”

  “What? What did you say to me?” She advanced on him, hands balled into fists.

  “You will show respect, Emmanuelle.” The priest raised one finger in rebuke. “At once. I have friends among the officers. Indeed they worship the same Christ as you, and come to Mass accordingly. I imagine they might frown on your secrets.”

  Emma paused, calculating. Pirate stirred behind the brick wall, growling like
an underfoot cur. She approached the priest, quieting her tone to match his. “If you have been hearing those villagers’ confessions, you know I am keeping half of them alive.”

  “Perhaps,” he conceded. “But your ministry of the pragmatic is performed without faith.”

  The priest peered into the well, addressing his words to the darkness. “I did not come here to preach, Emmanuelle. But I must say this, which I know with all my being: to live without faith is to make a hell on earth.”

  Emma threw her hands up. “Why did you come here, then? What do you want?”

  “Two things, as I said. The first—” He straightened, tucking his hands into the wide opposing sleeves of his tunic. “Bread.”

  Emma’s eyes went wide. “You are so corrupt it is comical.”

  “The broken rail lines mean I have not received Communion wafers. You have extra loaves, don’t deny it. Your pride is a sin before God, and your penance is to provide me with half a loaf each day, henceforth.”

  She snorted. “For you to feed your face.”

  “For the holy sacrifice of the Mass, Emmanuelle. For my flock, which in this dark hour hungers more than ever for the bread of life. And yes, young lady, though you scoff at me, my second request concerns the salvation of your immortal soul.” He lifted the crucifix that hung around his neck and kissed it. “Attend Mass this week, and be saved.”

  Emma strode to the door in the barnyard wall, where she paused. “You know, Monsignor, I still remember the day I made my first Holy Communion. I thought you were a living prayer, a direct connection to God. But I am older now. And it turns out that you are merely selfish.”

  “I say again: Life without faith is a hell on earth.”

  “Please.” She passed through the opening. “Don’t come here again.”

  “A hell on earth,” he yelled after her.

  Out of the Monsignor’s sight Emma pressed a palm to the bricks to steady herself. Would he actually betray her to the occupying army? Should she return to the Church? Life was difficult enough without these questions.