The Baker's Secret(52)
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.