The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  The priest opened his mouth to speak, but Pierre had bent to grab one of the wheelbarrow handles, so he took the other and lifted it without saying a word, and together they rolled the dead man off to church. As with the others, Guillaume’s funeral would take place in the morning, right after seven thirty Mass, his body at the front and center of St. Agnes by the Sea.

  But there was a final impression for those still present as the wheelbarrow creaked out of sight: that was the first moment that anyone could remember seeing the Monsignor move with a limp.

  Emma bent and picked up a stone at her feet, wrapping her hand around it and squeezing. She wanted her memory of this day never to escape her mind, to remain as certain as a rock.

  The Kommandant ordered a stricter curfew, which brought groans from the remaining crowd. Limited travel at night was less an oppression than an insult. When people have known free passage through their town, at all hours, under every version of moon or stars or weather, curfew announces that the place is no longer theirs.

  Odette helped Marguerite down the lane to her café, to wash the wound in hot water. The crowd dispersed, Thalheim ordering people away. A group of women ushered Marie homeward, her body racked with sobbing, her daughter, Fleur, silent and a few steps behind.

  All that time, the soldiers who had helped to load Guillaume’s body remained standing by, watching Marie go, giving the new widow a thorough appraisal. One of them whispered to the other, who did not reply, only stood closer and nodded in agreement.

  Sometime that night, despite fences and searchlights and guards, someone poisoned all of the occupying army’s dogs. They died howling. Word spread among the villagers like a bad rash. Who had dared?

  The occupying army gathered nine women at gunpoint, one for each dog, and forced them to dig a mass grave on farmland outside the village. Unused to shovels, the women needed all day for their task. No one had ever taught them how to work a spade around a stone, or where to press their heels to drive the blade deeper. Unfamiliarity with the tool made the job twice as hard.

  The soldiers allowed the women no rest, so that even those with farm-hardened hands watched them grow blistered and raw. No food, no water. Toward sunset the hole in the earth was deep and wide enough. By pointing their rifles, the soldiers communicated to the women to throw the carcasses in.

  In groups of four they lifted the animals by their paws, the bodies stiff and heavy. Once the dogs lay side by side, the inverse of puppies piled on one another to nurse or sleep, the soldiers ordered the women to fill the grave.

  Several wept as they took up their shovels again. The job lasted into the night, past curfew, so that the gravediggers went home with a military escort. Their hands curled into themselves, brittle and dry as autumn leaves. On the march through town they could hear singing from the garrison, lusty songs from young men under a starry sky, not a care in their world.

  The gravesite became known as Dog Hill, villagers by common understanding forbidding the use of that land for building houses or shops, because the dogs had caused Guillaume’s death, but as brute animals they had not deserved to die either, and the mutual wrongs typified the inhumanity of war.

  Marguerite did not die that night, though it appeared as though she might well lose a leg. Odette, who could neglect the café for a day if need be, provided such medical care as she was able, while hoping the old woman’s fever would pass.

  The morning after the burial, the two soldiers who had held Guillaume’s arms appeared at Marie’s door. They brought with them a friend, a redheaded corporal with his arm in a sling. When she answered the door, the corporal grabbed her braid, pulling her roughly outside toward the shed.

  “Fleur,” Marie yelled, following her hair across the yard. “I order you to stay in the house. You must stay in the house.”

  A few mornings later, the villagers saw that someone had stretched a rope between two trees that stood atop Dog Hill. Midway across the span, this someone had hung two broken branches knotted together to make a V. Thalheim sent marksmen to shoot the rope down, but bullets only caused the V to dance in the air. He dispatched the strapping soldier with his chain saw, and both trees came down in short order. Dog Hill was now bald. Later, Monkey Boy’s mother planted the hillside with sunflowers, their bright yellow faces following the sun all summer long.

  Once Marguerite’s fever broke, she recovered quickly. She was no longer able to smuggle tobacco, however, because her supply came from a farm several kilometers from Vergers and now the older woman struggled to visit her nearest neighbors.

  Emma left a mahogany cane on her doorstep, though no one knew where she had obtained such a thing. In return, Marguerite gave her small jars of lanolin to distribute among the women forced to dig Dog Hill, to ease their blisters. There was a jar for Marie, too. When Emma came to deliver it, Fleur stood in the doorway and accepted the gift on behalf of her mother, who did not emerge from the house’s dark interior to say either thank you or hello. Emma was not sure if she heard whimpering from within, or only imagined it.

  Chapter 17

  Darkness lasted months in Vergers, a melancholy that infected each person, all moods, every leaf in the hedgerows. When the light returned, it took the unexpected form of a nighttime butchering.

  The pig was Emma’s crowning achievement, everyone agreed, the pinnacle of her cunning. In a single night she fed the village, outfoxed the army, and concealed the conspiracy so well, by morning everyone insisted that the pig had never existed.

  The incident began with two corporals on an off-duty lark, one skilled with a repeating-fire rifle, one determined to learn the use of that weapon, and both of them drunk as lords on Calvados purchased at an absurdly overpriced cost from Odette’s café. Dark came so late to the north country, especially in the height of spring, that it was still mild daylight when they brought the gun out to the hedgerows for target practice.

  Emma happened to be wheeling her cart homeward, unable to ignore her stomach’s growls of hunger, and she passed the drunken soldiers with her head down to discourage conversation. Occasionally she wondered what she looked like, bowed low and pulling that wagon. She imagined herself as something ancient, an archetype of all women during all occupations, dragging along the weight of survival just as women had pulled similar carts with comparable contents and identical reasons, for as long as human nature had led men to make war, which is to say as long as there was history.

  The first corporal, thin as a whip, instructed his stouter fellow junior officer, pointing at components of the weapon with the tip of his cigarette. Though he spoke a different language, Emma could tell that his words were slurred. She slowed behind them, with the growing feeling that something—drunkards, a gun, a pleasant evening—was about to go horribly wrong.

  The corporal moved a switch on the gun and raised it to his eye. “Bums,” he said, jerking the rifle as though it had fired. His arms moved in an arc, a pantomime of using one shot to see where the next should go. “Bumgens, bums.”

  The other corporal, the larger one, asked a question, and Emma listened as the thin one answered at great length, holding the gun to the side, the other hand on his hip. Was there a tone of superiority in that garble?

  The second officer reached with both hands, but the first one wagged a finger and stepped away. He had more to say, and since he possessed both the gun and a knowledge of its proper use, he would not permit his dissertation to be abbreviated.

  Emma’s sense of approaching disaster grew, and she began pulling the wagon again, hurrying herself out of range. A moment later, however, she heard the second corporal shout. Emma turned to see a quick tussle, then the student overpowered his teacher and stepped aside holding the gun. He raised it, bracing the stock against his hip, and with a cry of glory he fired a rapid volley into the trees.

  Instead of silence, however, or the whine of a ricochet, the gunfire was followed by screams. Both soldiers froze. Had they shot someone by accident? Emma shuddered to think th
at her premonition of tragedy had been accurate.

  But the screams sounded inhuman, so high in pitch and coming so rapidly one on another, as if the person did not breathe between peals, that she was puzzled about who could make such a noise, until she saw a wild boar come charging out of the hedgerow, squealing like the end of the world, a bloody wound in its right rear shank. The boar, plenty quick on three legs, dashed between the corporals, who by then were leaning on one another laughing uproariously.

  Before the wounded animal darted back into the woods, Emma had a better look. He lacked the tusks she would have expected. He was not bristled with coarse hair either, but had skin a bonny pink. This was no wild boar. It was a farm pig, as plain as bacon, escaped from his pen once upon a time and surviving since then by feral foraging, but unfortunately doing so on a spring evening in the wrong place at an unlucky time.

  The surprise had sobered the corporals sufficiently that they straightened themselves, such as they could, shouldered the gun, and marched back to their barracks for an extended off-duty nap. Emma marked well where the pig had run into the hedgerow, calculating how he might find a less tangled path, and therefore where he might choose to rest and wait for his bleeding to cease.

  She hurried the wagon home, leaving it in the barnyard without disturbing Mémé, then hastened to the rectory. The priest was not there, and neither was he fetching a new corpse over which to pray. Thus his wheelbarrow leaned against the cottage’s back wall, idle. Emma helped herself, vowing to return it shortly, and wondering if it was a sacrilege to carry a pig in a device that delivered human bodies to the sanctuary. Hurrying in case the animal proved to be less wounded than it had seemed, Emma decided she was already guilty of far worse blasphemies, and broke into a run.

  No one knew the hedgerows better, not even a pig living amid them. Emma dodged machine-gun placements, a mortar pit, soldiers on guard duty or reading or smoking or cleaning their weapons in an atmosphere of palpable boredom. Had she been a spy, Emma could have delivered these units’ locations to the Allies in half a minute. This time none of the soldiers saw her, or heard her, or noticed the wheelbarrow rushing through the underbrush as she made use of all the routes she’d learned in nearly two years of operating her clandestine network.

  The pig was still alive, lying on its side and panting, but its eyes had gone glassy. They did not so much as turn in Emma’s direction when she trotted past, then caught herself and wheeled back to stand beside the wounded sow.

  “Oh my darling,” Emma said. “You gorgeous thing.”

  It was a wrestling match, loading the pig. She tipped the wheelbarrow on its side, then grabbed all four hooves and rolled the pig into the basin. The animal grunted but did not protest. Emma knelt, pig blood soaking into her dress, dirt grinding into her knees, and hooked her hands under the wheelbarrow’s bin. Pushing with her legs, straining her back, she had to press her face into the warm side of the pig for greater leverage, and with the grunts of a workhorse she lifted one side of the load. After she’d achieved a certain angle, gravity helped and the wheelbarrow fell into its normal stance, one passenger aboard.

  Emma attempted to wipe blood from her face, but only smeared it onto her neck and ear. Then she grabbed the handles and tested the weight. One hundred kilos at least. More than any man in the village, and no one near to help. Philippe, she thought for the thousandth time, where are you? The trees made no answer, only a wren calling from somewhere concealed. But Emma would not abandon such a prize for so small a reason as not being strong enough. She lifted with straight arms, pushed with her thighs, and the wheelbarrow began inching homeward.

  By the time she reached the eastern well, it was almost dark and she was drenched in sweat. The pig had ceased breathing, which made her somehow heavier. Did the body, Emma wondered, change its substance in death?

  Who should be drawing water at that moment but Odette, who set down her bucket in awe. “Don’t tell me,” she said, eyes bright. “Did you really kill him with your bare hands?”

  Emma answered by emptying the bucket over her head. An hour later, Odette returned with all the essentials for their plan.

  Many of the officers had Calvados on the shelves of her café. They would buy a bottle, the label marked in ink with their name, and work at it over several visits. Since Emma insisted that the only successful crime was one that no one knew had occurred, she instructed Odette to steal no more than half an inch from each bottle, too little for an officer to notice, especially given that the last time he had seen it he also had a bellyful of the brandy. The cumulative effect was a near magnum of the drink, which she corked and carried and placed in the center of Emma’s table. Beside it she set two clean glass tumblers.

  When Thalheim returned that evening, Emma was busy scrubbing her soiled dress in the yard. He strode past without a word, at which she flipped the dress over to clean the other side. It made a loud noise, wet cloth slapping down on a washboard. An air-raid siren could not have delivered a clearer advance signal. Thalheim pushed open the house door as if it were his own home. And, as an hour’s rehearsal had prepared for, at that exact moment Mémé rushed the bottle downward out of sight.

  “What was that?” the captain said, pausing by the stairs.

  “Hmm?” Mémé said it in a singsong way, at the same time examining her fingernails with great interest.

  “Something you hid just now. What was it?”

  Mémé studied him, her expression addled, and did not reply.

  “God save me from the simpletons,” Thalheim said. He pointed. “That thing you are now concealing. Bring it out.”

  As though she were a cat being commanded to fetch, Mémé stared at the tip of his finger.

  “Damn it.” Thalheim moved past her, muttering to himself. “Why do they permit of your kind to continue to live?”

  Mémé slid her chair aside, and the captain found the bottle. “Oho,” he cried out. “What have we here?”

  Immediately he removed the cork with his teeth, spitting it out on the floor. He sniffed the mouth of the bottle, then used the nearer of the glasses to pour for himself. When Thalheim put the bottle down and raised his tumbler, Mémé filled hers as well.

  “Is that so?” he asked, then threw the drink back. Mémé responded by doing the same. When she brought her glass down on the table with a hearty whack, the captain took it to mean that he should refill both glasses, though it actually signaled to Emma to put aside her washboard and make further preparations.

  Normally the captain was not one for alcohol. Odette knew this about him, because the other officers often teased. He sent his pay home to his mama, they said, keeping enough for razors and sundries but not for gambling or drink. Still, this Calvados was free, and he poured himself another tumbler. So did Mémé.

  When he’d downed the second shot, Thalheim started for the stairs again. But Mémé banged her glass and he hesitated. Then she poured into both glasses and put the bottle down.

  “Well, aren’t you the souse?” he said, ambling back to the table. He picked up his glass, but before he drank Mémé used her foot under the table to push the other chair backward, and without thought or dispute, the captain sat.

  It took a full hour and more to intoxicate him sufficiently. Mémé matched him glass for glass, sometimes rushing him.

  “Why are you in a hurry?” he slurred.

  “Death,” she said, throwing back her drink.

  “Not anytime soon,” he protested, but he emptied his glass.

  Mémé growled at him, and slapped herself in the face, both sides. Then she poured again.

  Eventually Thalheim’s head began to sway, his words to make less sense to Emma eavesdropping outside. He spent some time with his chin on his chest, Mémé knocking on the table beside his full glass though he was slow to respond. After one last shot, he crossed his arms on the table and lowered his head into that cradle.

  Mémé pushed his shoulder, but the eyes did not open. She thwacked his sk
ull. No response. Though there was half a drink left in her glass, she slid it away and rose. With slow dignity she opened the front door, marched past her granddaughter, and threw up in the flowers.

  “Oh, Mémé,” Emma said, placing a hand on her back.

  “There,” the old woman answered. “There—”

  But another wave of nausea interrupted, and she vomited on the bushes again. So it continued until her belly was empty, and beyond. By the time Emma had given her water to drink, a bit of bread to absorb, and led her to the couch—a mixing bowl nearby in case Mémé needed it later, Pirate meanwhile closed in the baking shed to keep him quiet—a group of neighbors had clustered in the barnyard with torches, Odette at their head sharpening her butchery knives over the pink carcass.

  Yves had built a crossbar of rough lumber, tied the hooves in pairs, and hoisted the pig till it hung upside down. Odette brought her blade up to the sow’s throat.

  “Wait,” Emma said. “If you gut it here, we will have to explain blood and innards in the dirt tomorrow morning. Not to mention the crows that will assemble to pick at the mess.”

  The people murmured, but no one offered a solution. Then a voice called from the barnyard wall. “I have something that will work.”

  They turned as one, and saw the Goat standing with a knapsack on his back. “Give me a minute,” he said.

  No one had seen the Goat in weeks. He looked thinner, a waif struggling with the weight of his pack as he staggered into the hog shed. They heard him drop his load on the floor.

  “I don’t know how he can stand the smell of it,” Odette said to no one in particular.

  “Or how we can stand the smell of him,” Emma replied.

  The people laughed. The Goat heard it all, too, standing in the stench and gloom. But it did not merit a reply. With the two boxes in his knapsack that night, his task was at long last complete. Not once had the occupying army come near this shed. Why would they bother to investigate now?