The Baker's Secret(38)
Here a crew on the beach below measured the height of the previous night’s tides. There the occupying army was driving steel beams into the sand, their jagged edges pointed out to sea, fitting mines to the tips. He counted two hundred and two. The evenness of the number pleased him. To Monkey Boy’s left, a gunnery officer instructed his men in something, pointing and pantomiming. To his right, villagers under armed guard built wooden forms and set steel rods for a future concrete pouring to serve as an antitank wall. This barrier stretched serpentine along the base of the bluff like a physical expression of the word “no.” Above it all stood a group of officers—nine of them, he tallied; Monkey Boy loved to count—overseeing the work, all of them shielded from the weather by a makeshift canvas canopy.
In the distance the village rooftops showed through gaps in the trees, slate or tile or cedar shingles and a chimney, all organized around the spire of St. Agnes by the Sea. Monkey Boy tore off a handful of leaves and threw them in the village’s direction. They did not go far, though. Floating this way and that, they parachuted down through the branches. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful.
But in the next moment, Monkey Boy realized that he had forgotten his body business again. It was exactly like whenever he’d found a hiding place as a little boy, and his mother was looking for him: the moment he had settled into his perfect secret spot, an urge to empty himself would arise, with no regard for the quality of his invisibility. Now it had happened again, and the ground below looked so far away. Not to mention the effort of climbing back again.
Oh, it was urgent. All that drinking water, plus the gorging he had done on pig all night, his body unaccustomed to so much meat. Now it growled in his gut. There was no alternative. He undid the drawstring of his pants, opening the buttons in front. He slid the trousers down.
A half-track of the occupying army motored under the huge tree, stopping directly beneath his bare bum. The vehicle idled there while two soldiers conferred before choosing the direction in which one of them had pointed, the engine rattling as the half-track clattered away. Gripping the trunk with one arm, Monkey Boy hung his backside over a limb above where the machine had paused. He began to giggle, smothering his mouth with a forearm. The mirth of his naughty idea erupted out of him, a guffaw in spite of himself, and he spoke to the branches surrounding him. “Bombs away.”
A week later, Emma asked the Goat where he buried the tarp soaked with pig’s blood.
“Where crows may go sometimes, but the occupying army never,” he replied. “Dog Hill.”
In her café Odette deflected all praise of her butchering, instead spreading the legend that Emma had wrestled the pig to death. A success so great deserved a story as unlikely. From that night forward, everyone treated Emma with respect. Her age and gender no longer mattered; they had eaten well because of her.
The priest stopped her on a lane in the village to remark upon it. “It would appear, Emmanuelle, that your sinful influence has prevailed among the weaker-willed of your neighbors. Fewer of them come to St. Agnes to confess.”
Emma paused in pulling her wagon the opposite direction. “Maybe that’s because I’m not saying prayers with the enemy.”
“The occupying soldiers, like us, are children of God.”
“Then some children of God are murderers.” She began wheeling the wagon past. “Besides, I give our villagers something more nourishing than faith.”
“There is no such thing,” he answered, limping alongside, trying to keep up. “Life without faith makes a hell on earth.”
Emma shook her head and said no more. The Monsignor gimped a few more steps before stopping. “A hell on earth,” he yelled. If he added anything more, it was drowned out by the wooden wheels’ clatter on the village cobbles.
But that conversation came a week after the butchering. On the day immediately following, everyone stumbled around as if in a daze. Moving at half speed, with soldiers of the occupying army scolding them for sluggishness, the sleep-deprived villagers nonetheless possessed a secret, and therefore a new power. Emma stood at the center, but everyone shared in it. Despite their fatigue, all day they winked or grinned at one another, as if the entire village had stayed up late making love.
The hangover arrived one week later, in the form of the most terrifying man on earth.
Part Four
Umbrellas
Chapter 18
In April’s last days the apple boughs were flamboyant with blossoms, hundreds of varieties in rows a thousand trees long, pinking the hills and hollows, the world perfumed with softness and humming from the attentions of bees. The officer supervising construction of the seawall provided a prickly counterbalance, braying at the local men performing forced labor under his command.
“When the Field Marshal visits tomorrow,” he bellowed, his face reddening as he struggled to be heard over the surf, “you will remove your caps out of respect. Failure to do so is unacceptable, and will bring severe penalties.”
The men paused with their shovels and hoes, several reaching unconsciously to touch the brim of their caps. All men wore hats in those days, berets as common as pants.
“Back to work,” the officer said, sauntering down the line of laborers. “And tomorrow you will remove your caps.”
When the Field Marshal arrived the following afternoon, a caravan of cars and security officers preceding his open sedan with flags on all four corners, not one of the laborers was wearing a hat. They had come to work bareheaded, and that is how they toiled all day in the spring sun.