The Baker's Secret(37)
He pulled away a large canvas tarp, revealing two hundred of those wooden boxes. The Goat had not seen them all revealed together, and he was struck by the magnitude of his feat. Twenty stacks, each ten boxes high, a cache the Resistance would be proud to see, and eager to use, when the proper day came. He half folded the tarp, dragging it behind him into the barnyard.
“Perfect,” Odette said, helping others spread the green canvas under the hanging pig. Then she brought the tip of a blade to the animal’s jugular, and with a hand as swift as a finch, made a deep, perpendicular slice. The pig’s blood poured out in a gush.
By midnight the villagers were lined up, everyone who could be trusted. In recent weeks people had seen DuFour wheeling around the village on Guillaume’s blue bicycle, which offended everyone’s sensibility because the man whose outcry had condemned the veterinarian deserved least to benefit by that betrayal. Yet he rode the blue bicycle everywhere, and on days with clear weather he parked it right in front of town hall. By common assent, no one told DuFour about the pig.
Likewise the priest was omitted, because the dictates of his conscience were so mercurial. No one knew with certainty where his sympathies lay. He slept undisturbed, therefore, while everyone else made a queue that stretched across Emma’s dirt yard, out the door in the barnyard wall, and halfway past it to the eastern well. Pirate hid in the baking shed, overwhelmed by the number of threats, and pacing like an expectant father. The villagers brought buckets or pans, cloth sacks or wooden boxes, into which Emma portioned pork that Odette had butchered and divided with the care of a surgeon.
“Remember, boiling only,” Emma instructed. “If the army smells even one ham baking or rib roasting, they will come salivating, and we will be revealed.”
The people waited without a murmur, and passed not with their eyes lowered in shame as when receiving rations, but upright, and solemn nonetheless. Only Monkey Boy made mischief, blowing into one of the pig’s lungs to inflate it like a balloon, though the moment his mother yanked it away from his mouth, the organ went flat again. Otherwise the villagers took their bundles of meat in silence, saying perhaps a word of thanks or perhaps not, then sidled away, risking a curfew violation in order to receive more meat that night than in a month of rations. When everyone’s portion was gone, Odette collected the remains for sausage. The cleanup took hours, concluding close enough to the time Emma normally rose to make the Kommandant’s bread that she did not bother lying down at all. The wheelbarrow, which Fleur had given a thorough rinse, Emma returned to the rectory during morning Mass.
Mémé rose in unexpectedly fair humor, much of the alcohol purged from her system before Emma put her to bed. A pair of swallows had nested in the barn eaves, and the old woman stationed herself nearby to watch their comings and goings.
By contrast, the baguettes were browned on top and turned once in the oven before Thalheim presented himself at the baking-shed door. As ever, he had shaved as smooth as the back of a spoon, but his eyes were red and his face pale.
“You people are barbaric,” he announced.
Immediately Emma thought they had been discovered. He must have stirred during the night. He had seen, all was lost.
“Whatever do you mean?” she replied, still as a statue in front of the dough she was mixing.
“Drinking such filth. Any liquid that leaves a man feeling this ill in the morning is a poison.”
She could not help smiling to herself. “I’m told it takes practice.”
“Well,” he began, but then stopped, and wandered away.
Emma watched him shuffle across the barnyard, holding himself like something breakable, until Pirate burst out from behind the old hog shed in full disaster, a long night’s frustration fueling his passion, crowing for all he was worth. Thalheim winced, hands to his ears, kicking in the bird’s direction, but the rooster darted out of reach without pausing the fierce defense of his territory. To Emma, seeing the captain in retreat from that noisy annoyance tasted better than bacon.
The villagers obeyed her cooking instructions, neither smoking, roasting, nor frying the pork, enticing though the flavor would have been. For a culinary people, who in another time could have made a two-day village feast out of that pig, boiling was a masterpiece of restraint. Any regret at making that compromise, however, was overcome by the unfamiliar pleasure of a belly temporarily full of meat.
Toward midday, Monkey Boy reached the special sycamore at the edge of the bluff above the beach, its trunk wider than the full stretch of his arms. He had already taken his daily drink from all three of the town’s water supplies: the eastern well just outside Emma’s barnyard door; the central well, which fed the village fountain as well as homes and shops along the square; and the western well, which offered the most dramatic views but could turn salty after especially fierce storms at sea.
The special sycamore was not inviting to a climber, having no branches for the first three meters of its trunk. One limb spread wide over the bluff, however, sculpted by unrelenting ocean winds, and if Monkey Boy leaped his highest, the tree’s extremity hung just within his fingers’ grasp. He wrapped his hands above that limb, hooking his heels as well to hang beneath like a sloth, then shimmying arms and legs up that branch to the trunk. From there it was a scamper, laddering into the highest boughs. The perch he chose leaned this way and that, like the crow’s nest atop a sailing ship. He held the trunk with one arm, and observed.