The Baker's Secret(58)
Still, he said a quick prayer for the animals of war, who neither took sides nor carried guns, yet suffered a share of the hardship nonetheless. He wiped his hands on his pant legs and lifted the ladder upright. It leaned against him, the weight nearly toppling them both, but he set his feet wide and pushed with his arms, and the upper end fell against the hayloft.
At various times in his life, Pierre had mistrusted people—a feed salesman from Caen who spoke too fast, a drunkard from whom he bought a field, knowing the man would spend the money dissipating the remainder of his days—but rarely had he mistrusted himself. And now? How long since he had relied upon his balance? How steady were his legs?
There was one way to find out, and the double report of a bomb exploding nearby and its echo off the hedgerows put steel in his spine. He gripped the sides of the ladder and began to climb, the gap between rungs larger than he recalled, though he raised his knees right and left and wiggled his boots after each step until the crossbar underneath felt secure. When he reached the hayloft, Pierre saw that he would have to stretch one foot way out to step aboard, and the distance was farther than his legs had parted in years. How does a man get so damn old?
A fall from the top would be the worst sort of injury, and it could be days before anyone discovered him. Or no, Emma would find him, because she checked each morning, even now when she no longer had tobacco to deliver.
Pierre extended his leg and pressed, making a swift transfer of weight onto the loft. Before he could celebrate, though, he sneezed hard. All around him the bales were dusty, pulled apart by mice or the feral cats who came to hunt them. A man could easily trip.
“You old fool,” he muttered, lowering himself to all fours, remarking to himself not for the first time how aging returned a man to infancy, as he crawled to the loading door. In a lifetime now past, this door had swung wide to accommodate bales thrown from a loaded wagon below, with room for a man to catch and haul them inside, where another man would stack them to keep the horses fed through the winter ahead. How much strength did it take? As much as the task required, because there was no alternative, and the men who helped would need extra hands to barn their own hay in another day or two, and so the wheel went around.
Pierre unlatched the door and swung it back, his land and the surrounding country opening to view. The first thing he saw was that his fields had been flooded. They glistened in the dark. An entire season’s crop planted, and now destroyed. What would everyone live on, when winter came? Who knew why the occupying army had done such a thing? It seemed wanton, done solely to inflict pain, and primarily on the animals, too.
A man who has lived to see his neighbors taken away by force, and to witness the execution of friends, already has the measure of his adversary’s character. All Pierre wanted to know now was how severe the retaliation would be.
Because that is what he saw under way, from his perch in the hayloft: the beginning of a retribution, a strike against the entrenched and mighty. The horizon gave off an unmistakable glow. The waves of bombers had become nearly constant, striking inland, pounding the ground. The occupying army’s antiaircraft fire likewise sounded continuously, tracers arcing into the sky to guide the gunners’ aim until the next wave of bombers roared over Vergers.
The time had arrived at last. Pierre felt glad to have lived to see it. He wondered how bad the devastation would be. Young men were lucky to survive such clashes of might. Old men should not dare to imagine that they would, too.
At that, he knew he had two tasks to perform, if he could get himself safely back down that ladder. Only two, but each was an act of conscience. A man of finite days should not ignore such opportunities.
Pierre left the loft door wide. He climbed down with cautious feet and shaking hands, and when he reached the ground he patted his pocket, confirming that the pipe was still there. He left the ladder in place and the barn door open. If what was coming rivaled what he had seen before, there was no point in closing or locking anything. It would ravage everything in its path.
Entering his house, Pierre removed his old beret and hung it on a hook. He dragged an old trunk out from a closet, searching through its carefully folded contents until he found what he was after: a sergeant’s cap from the Great War, gray blue, round at the crown with a black bill sticking forward. The sight of it straightened him, and he pulled the hat onto his head the same old way, back to front, using the stiff bill to set the correct angle.
The hat still fit after all these years. Pierre smiled: a man’s head does not change size, regardless of the rounding of his stomach or the bending of his back.
His plan required violating curfew, but Pierre suspected the usual guards would be busy elsewhere. He fetched his walking stick, then turned his girls out in the side yard. If no one came to milk them, they would suffer. But he knew from personal experience that hunger would hurt them first.
No one knew the hedgerows better than Emma, with her barters and gambits, but Pierre had learned a few tricks himself over the years. Dogs barked and he could hear people outside their homes, discussing in worried voices the red haze to the east, but he kept to the edges of the road. A military truck roared up suddenly, one poor private with a flashlight strapped to the hood, the rest of a long convoy following in the dark. But they were in a hurry and Pierre hid behind a tree until they had passed. He managed to reach the village undetected. Seeing a thin line of light around the blackout shades of his first stop, he paused to rest a moment. Then, adjusting his hat and with a deep breath, he set out across the square for the home of DuFour.