The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Mémé leaned closer to see if she recognized this person, uncertain but also not afraid. There was something about the confident way the young woman handled the second shoe, a competence, which earned her trust.

  For a moment sun winked through the teeming clouds. Emma raised her head to see if there was a rainbow—no such good fortune—before noticing that Mémé’s face was lifted in the identical way. The drizzle had left drops all over her wrinkled skin. They glinted in the brief light, an illumination. It was as though her grandmother belonged to some aboriginal tribe, in some remote place, whose elders adorned themselves with swirls of glass fragments, lines of tiny diamonds.

  Chapter 24

  They propped the door open always, in all seasons and weather, so that they could see in advance who was coming. Marie would speak to no one but her daughter, and then only in murmurs. Fleur—so beautiful at fourteen that most men and many women could not help pausing their conversations as she passed—kept house, kept watch, kept her hands buried in her patchwork apron’s pockets.

  On the afternoon of the fifth of June, Emma steered the wagon to make sure its wooden wheels crossed the cobbles at the edge of their lane, which rattled Mémé in the back but meant that people inside the house would hear the rumble of her approach.

  Fleur appeared, an apparition in the doorway, so there was no reason for anyone to enter, nor any way to see inside. Slipping off the harnesses, Emma reached into her pocket for a stone, the one she had picked up when Guillaume was executed, and handed it to Mémé for a plaything while they did their business. The old woman passed the stone from hand to hand, then reached a bent arm backward to balance it on her wrist.

  “Good day, miss,” Fleur piped. Her voice rang as high as a bird call.

  “Good day,” Emma said, eyeing the girl sidelong. She was pale, a blue vein visible on her neck. She was also, Emma had to concede, even more stunning than her reputation: an earnest face, high intelligent brow, a cascade of hair on her shoulder.

  Emma marveled at how the occupation squandered the beauty of youth. No men but occupying soldiers would see this girl. No boy of the village would admire her from afar, in silent torment before working up the nerve to say hello. Emma knew her own moment of blossoming had passed with the departure of Philippe. Here was this young creature, no doubt in need of a hearty stew and a month of sleep, but possibly as lovely a vision as the village had ever known. Yet it would all go to waste.

  Not an hour after holding a newborn and feeling despair, Emma tasted renewed bitterness like vinegar. Fleur as yet had no breasts, flat as a boy and with no hips, but these would come with time. What would not come was a suitor, or the dozens of them that this beauty deserved. No infatuation, no courting, no stolen kisses. All she had was a broken mother.

  “How is Marie today?” Emma marshaled the self-control to ask while rummaging in the bags of her cart.

  “Like a saint, thank you,” Fleur replied. “Always silent and mostly at prayer.”

  Not knowing how to answer, Emma kept to business, producing an egg and one third of a baguette. “I brought some things for you.”

  “You are so kind, miss. No one has enough, yet you always have extra. How do you come by these things?”

  “Like a saint, with silence and prayer.” Emma smiled. “Plus the occasional dodge.”

  Unlike every other person in Emma’s network, the girl did not reach for the food. She plunged her hands into her apron pockets and stared at the ground. “Everyone else has shunned us.”

  “They have no reason to do so.”

  “No?” Fleur spoke in low tones. “My father executed, my mother disgraced? And those women’s hands ruined in the making of Dog Hill?”

  “Those evils are not your doing. They were caused by the occupying army. All of the wrong lies with them.”

  The girl raised her beautiful face. “Are you with the Resistance?”

  “No. I am simply trying to survive, and to help those I can.”

  Fleur removed one hand from her apron pockets, holding it out. “I thank you sincerely, miss. We will take the egg, please.”

  “You have no use for bread? You are the first person to turn aside any food I have offered.”

  “Please don’t think us ungrateful, but I am sure someone else can enjoy it. For myself, I eat only what my mother will eat. And, no offense intended, she trusts no food other than eggs.”

  “Why is that?”

  Fleur answered in a whisper, “The shell.” She glanced left and right, then leaned forward. “It means no one has entered it. It has not been poisoned. Only an egg is safe.”

  Emma felt a pain in her chest. She would gladly have offered the girl the entire contents of her cart, if they were not already promised to others. But she did a bit of mental math: if she gave the girl two eggs, there would still be one left to share with Mémé. Scrambled with herbs—atop the third of a loaf Emma had learned months earlier to leave at home, to prevent herself from giving everything away on her rounds—that would suffice for a day. Besides, if any female was to carry the lineage of their people forward, it would not be the one whose life had become utilitarian, like an ox under the yoke. It was this young one’s task to create the next generation of beauty.

  “Wait,” Emma said. She pulled another egg from her bag. “Take this. You need it more than anyone else.”

  Fleur’s eyes went wide. “Two eggs, miss? You give us two?”

  “From now on. Whenever I can, that is.”

  There was a murmur from within and the girl turned her face. “One minute, Mama.” She curtsied to Emma, which was awkward in the narrow doorway and with one hand still in her pocket. “I am so grateful. And I hope you can find some hungry villager who needs that bread.”

  Emma slipped on the harnesses. “It will not be difficult.”

  Chapter 25

  As the fifth of June reached high afternoon, and Mémé slept like an innocent in the back of the wagon, Emma passed soldiers digging in the stream beside Pierre’s fields. She could not imagine why. There was no drainage problem, and the property possessed no military value. Perhaps the work was disciplinary, she speculated, because the clay of that region was heavy on the shovel.

  Then Emma saw: across the stretch of planted wheat, pale new stalks poking out of the dirt like the fingers of children playing in mud, the river appeared to have backed up somehow. It spilled over the banks though the day’s rains had been lighter than expected. But in regular floods—the kind nature inflicts periodically and without mercy, scouring the fields, snatching cows, and leaving homes ruined with mildew and mud—people built dikes or dams to stop the seepage. These soldiers were shoveling hard, almost with urgency, their shirts dark with sweat, to accomplish the opposite. Emma watched them open a sluice from the stream to the field, creating a path for the water.

  This was worse than switching road signs. This was using nature as a tool of propaganda. Pierre’s field would become a pond, but to what purpose? Who would be deceived, and for what benefit? Whoever spent his days devising false road signs had reached another level. Now he was using the landscape to lie.

  One of the diggers straightened. The officer in charge brayed at him, some harsh, back-to-work command. But the man with the spade did not obey. Instead he straightened his arm, pointing past the officer, his finger aimed directly at Emma. It was an accusation, though of what she had no idea.

  But when his commanding officer snapped at him again, the sweaty, muddy digger puffed up his chest like a rooster. All at once she recognized him: Lieutenant Planeg, who had seen her at Michelle’s at noontime as he sped past on his motorcycle. Clearly he remembered, since he answered sharply to the officer, who turned to follow where that finger pointed. It was Thalheim, whose expression changed from crimped annoyance to a steady, cold smile. Thirty meters away, Emma felt the chill of it in her bones. She turned her cart homeward. Her mouth was dry, tasting of worry.

  An hour later in her rounds, hunger overtook Emm
a. One glass of Calvados with Odette when dropping off the lobster was not enough fuel. The pangs became unbearable, the remaining distance to home too great, the weight of Mémé in the back too much. She had to eat something.

  Emma braked the wagon, slid the harnesses down, and turned to dig out the half baguette that Fleur had declined. Too famished to slice a piece off, she bit hard into the loaf and ripped.

  Mémé stirred. “Gypsy?” She rose on one arm. “Gypsy?”

  With a mouth barely able to produce enough saliva for her to swallow, Emma offered the loaf to Mémé. The old woman turned her face sideways, using her good teeth to gnaw off a portion. Chewing in silence, she handed the loaf back.

  In that moment, with those few bites of food, Emma’s mind cleared and she knew where she stood: at the foot of the steps leading into St. Agnes by the Sea. Was this where her day of effort was to end, then, on the fifth of June with the rain done and her rounds almost completed, and in the distance the drone of an approaching aircraft?

  There was no sign of activity in the church itself, no noise from the rectory across the way. Just that airplane, now loud enough that Emma squinted at the sky and discovered there were two. And then three, three large aircraft coming from the north. Well, and so what? They flew from the north all the time, on their way to more important targets. What need had she of worry? The day already had provided more than enough.

  The planes passed overhead lower than usual, so that Emma could see their wings were painted white. A black mouth opened in the metal underside of the lead aircraft. Emma continued to watch, the note of their engines bending downward as they arced away, until that dark mouth spat out an aluminum tooth, roughly above the rail station, tumbling over itself as it fell.

  Seconds later the air rang. Something different happened to the trees: they swayed in a way that was not wind. Air-raid sirens began whining, but they sounded different. The airplanes were not passing over this time. They were bombing the village.

  Emma felt seized by the desire to be home, absolutely as soon as possible. One more chore and day was done. She tore another chunk off the baguette and handed it to Mémé, then jogged up the church steps wishing that her stomach would enjoy the bread it had received, instead of what felt like wrestling with it. She pulled the handle of the church door, entering to the gentle scent of incense.

  Emma heard the bombers passing again, low and bold, not bothering to conceal themselves, but then the door eased closed and she was stilled by the silence. Dim daylight filtered through stained glass. The pews were empty, the pulpit bare. As always, a single candle burned beside the altar.

  She started down the aisle with bread in her hand. Where could she leave the loaf so that no one would see it but the priest? She reached the front pews, hearing the rumble of another bomb, but the side chapel was quiet and the door to the sacristy in back stood open an uninviting inch. Women were not permitted in that area anyway.

  At last her eyes came to rest on the proper spot: inside the Communion rail, where the faithful knelt to receive the sacrament. None but the Monsignor was allowed within that rail.

  Emma considered what she held: one third of a loaf, perhaps less. The moment the priest noticed it, he would know that she had committed a misdeed, by entering where she was forbidden. He would also know that Emma had answered his demands of her. Nor did she worry about mice; a church was no ark. It contained food too infrequently to sustain inhabitants however small or meek.

  Perhaps that was one of the flaws of the faith: life’s pleasures were all sins, as if the senses were the enemy of the spirit, the body its soul’s adversary. The villagers used to worry about such things, argue about them, weigh them in their consciences, but only in the time before. Once the occupation began, pleasures became too simple and rare to consider them sins: a decent night’s sleep, a taste of wine not turned to vinegar, a slice of boiled pork eaten without the army finding out. Emma stood at the center of the church, trying not to become angry. If these were sins, damnation was hereby invited to the table.

  She opened the gate in the rail, the one the priest used when he came forward to baptize a newborn, to shake holy water on a casket, to brandish the incense snifter back and forth before the congregation, a cloud of scented smoke passing over their heads and upward. Emma hastened to the front, and without pause or ceremony left the bread in the center of the altar. Then she quit the place at a run, before God or anyone could catch her.

  Chapter 26

  The meaning of Planeg’s finger became clear when Emma had pulled the wagon past the crossroads and saw, there at the roadside, the lieutenant’s motorcycle. He had left the gas cap on the seat so that anyone—a passerby, a stranger, a commanding officer wanting to know why his lieutenant was impermissibly slow in responding to orders to report—might see for themselves the reason for the machine’s abandonment.

  Emma peered into the tank: as dry as the inside of an oven, the fumes sharp like the memory of a moment of shame.

  A cascade of realizations came to her one by one: Planeg having to walk all the way to his barracks, with all of that time to wonder why he had run out of fuel, recalling the woman in the bushes carrying a jug, suspecting he had been played for a fool, reconsidering his arrangement with the brittle but otherwise generally satisfactory tart in the cabin at the top of the hill, reevaluating the entire comfortable circumstance he had devised for himself for the duration of the tedious occupation.

  Worse, once he had arrived, and explained the empty gas tank to his superiors, as a result of their predictable displeasure Planeg was assigned to the shovel detail, work far beneath his rank, under an officer he didn’t respect and in fact had planned one day soon to surpass. Now he would have to flood the croplands first, for a purpose no one had disclosed. Every dig of the spade into a clay as thick as the skulls of these backward rural gas thieves sharpened the lieutenant’s resentment of rank, of menial tasks, and above all of that woman with the jug, until his hands hurt and she became an emblem of misplaced trust, his arms grew sore and she was a symbol of his deception, his back ached and he was no longer an officer or even human, but some animal force distilled by frustration into a sweating, smoldering, vengeful thing.

  Who should happen along at that very instant, refueled herself by recent bread and an act of generosity, but the one person responsible for putting him in that soggy ditch doing the work of privates. It seemed as if his temper had called her forth, drawing the wagon past that ditch as a magnet pulls at a pin. Planeg had pointed his rigid finger in her direction only because at that moment he chanced to be unarmed.

  All of this possibility Emma understood as she placed one hand on the motorcycle seat, the leather damp yet from the day’s earlier rain. She glanced north to see Apollo the draft horse ambling up the lane, his head low as if lost in thought.

  Yet Emma’s attention next turned west as she heard, and then saw, more bombers, again with their wings painted oddly white. This time, however, there was enough treeless sky for her to see that only one of the aircraft possessed that black mouth in its belly. The others were smaller and quicker, guards of some kind, darting above and beside the big one. Behind that trio came another three, close on its wake, though they did not stand out against the gray sky until they’d drawn close.

  Something fell, then, some small, parachuted item swinging side to side in the air, its landing place hidden by the hedgerow half a kilometer ahead. Prompted perhaps by the continuing angers of her belly, Emma’s immediate thought was: food.

  By the time the second wave passed, the thunder of the first crew’s bombs had reached where she stood. Another sound responded, not an echo but similar in volume and growl, and Emma wondered if these were the antiaircraft guns Thalheim had spoken of so proudly that day upon the bluff. Regardless, it was still her village under attack, still the railroad station that seemed to be the target. But nothing came by train anymore, and the rails had already taken away Philippe and the other conscripted men. Why w
ere the bombers bothering now?

  As quiet returned Emma continued to imagine the afternoon from Planeg’s perspective, how he disobeyed Thalheim in order to explain himself, to identify her with a righteousness that outranked rank, and how the impatient captain had squinted at her, but upon discovering the identity of the fuel thief, what pleasure it had given him. His smile had turned her stomach.

  “Here,” Mémé said. She had climbed down from the wagon and tiptoed up beside her pensive granddaughter. “Watch.”

  She grabbed Emma’s shoulder for balance, pulled her dress up to the knee, raised one foot against the side of the motorcycle’s seat, and shoved. The machine tipped, then toppled, falling on its side with a torqueing of handlebars and the sound of things breaking on the underside. The gas cap tumbled off its perch, rolling into the ditch and the grass below, where it came to rest somewhere out of sight.

  “Home now,” Mémé said, marching to the wagon’s stern and hoisting her buttocks to drop heavily aboard. “Hungry.”

  Emma considered the motorcycle, there in the ditch. Apollo arrived at her side and seemed to contemplate it, too.

  “I guess we can’t get in any worse trouble,” she told the horse. “Right?”

  Emma slipped her arms back into the harnesses, which by this time had formed the leather into the exact shape of her pulling body. Leaning toward home, she started the wagon rolling, planning a route that would keep her on as level a terrain as possible, all the way to the barnyard gate.

  “Do you know what, Grandmother?” she called back over her shoulder. “Everything is about to change.”

  Mémé stroked her eyebrows with both hands. “Change?”

  “Yes.” Emma pulled with her head up while the horse, snorting his nostrils clear, fell into step beside her. “Everything is about to fall apart.”