The Baker's Secret(73)

In the middle of a hedgerow near the village she spied something dangling from a tree. It was just above Dog Hill, the grass June-smooth, the sunflowers only a foot high. When she cleared the shortcut she saw that the something was a person, hung up by his parachute perhaps twenty feet from the ground, the easiest target an occupying army could ask for.

The paratrooper had been shredded with bullets. His head hung as if he had no neck bones. One of his legs remained attached only by a thin band of muscle. As he swung in the wind, the soldier’s leg moved with a delay: The body turned away, then the leg. The body turned back, then the leg.

Emma staggered sideways at the horror of it. Or was she weakened by hunger? She could not recall the last time she had eaten. But the day was advancing without regard for her. She pressed against the straps and trudged toward the village.

On the way she saw a bridge with a gap in its middle. An airplane burning in a field. A mule dead in a ditch, its legs as stiff as wood. At the train station she saw a locomotive engine on its side, the wheels and gears and underside visible. It looked as wrong as a dislocated joint. But Emma pushed on, not resting till she reached St. Agnes by the Sea. Garbage burned in the street. The giant front doors were open wide, one of them hanging by a hinge.

Emma slipped off the straps and dragged herself up the steps. Hymnals lay scattered in the alcove. Someone had ripped the confessional curtains. She tiptoed farther. The candle beside the altar that was always lit now lay on its side, extinguished. All of the stained-glass windows were shattered, like so many dogmas that could not withstand disbelief.

Then she saw the shoes, black with holes in the soles, in the sacristy, where no woman was permitted. Emma knew whose shoes they were, and she hurried despite her aches and the rules.

A shell had struck the church, reducing the back stones to rubble. Day poured in where a wall had stood. The priest’s face looked unharmed, and she felt a second of optimism. But when she knelt to turn his head, and saw the far side ripped completely away, Emma arranged him as he had been.

“Oh, Monsignor.” She sat back on her heels. In a place where everyone knows everyone, where no one’s history is wholly separate from anyone else’s, any death counted as a loss.

Here was the war’s strangest lesson yet. All sorts of people—friends and family, yes, but also adversaries and annoyances—all kinds had died. As they left behind everything, work and home and habits and opinions and even hidden chickens, somehow Emma’s heart broke for all of them, including the ones she couldn’t bear. Somehow their dying made them unhateable.

Emma stood, wondering what to do, who to contact if there was no priest to collect the body. Already flies were circling, she felt a mix of pity and disgust. She could not leave him here to rot.

Sacrilege though it was, Emma opened the cabinet that held priestly vestments. She ran her fingers over the garments, some of which she recognized from the religious seasons: red for Pentecost, rose for Advent, white for Easter.

Memories flooded through her, incense and singing and prayer. Emma remembered her First Communion, when she was more excited about the white dress Mémé had sewn her than about sharing in the bread and wine.

And now the priest was dead, his crime an insistence on his faith, and his punishment the spending of his life’s one mortality.

Emma found a purple altar cloth, from Lent or the Stations of the Cross. The raiments of ritual carried too many meanings on a day with so much death. She latched the cabinet closed and bent to her task.

Rolling the priest to one side, she eased him onto the cloth so he could slide on the stone floor. But Emma had only managed to bring him halfway through the doorway when she realized one arm would not be strong enough. She tried using her injured hand, too, but her fingers could not grip. Returning to the closet, she knotted several shawls together, wrapped them around the Monsignor’s legs, then looped them over her shoulders like the wagon straps.

Now she could pull with her body, and he slid easily across the floor. Emma brought him to the front and center of the church, as he had done for so many others. There she wrapped the altar cloth the rest of the way around, tucking in his arms and his legs. She used the shawls to secure his shroud so no flies could enter. For the second time in two days, Emma opened the Communion rail, taking from the altar the thick red book from which the priest read during Mass and placing it on his chest.

Then she stood over him. This man had baptized one hundred and two villagers, including her. He had placed that first Communion wafer on her tongue. Though Emma had been too young to remember, he had performed her mother’s funeral. She ought to say some sort of prayer. But nothing would come.

“If you see God,” she said finally, “ask Him why He stopped loving us.”

Emma waited but the body made no answer. She hobbled down the aisle, out to the wagon and its open loops of harness. There she stood in uncertainty. What now? Where could she expose herself to Thalheim next?





Chapter 36




By late afternoon people had begun exchanging stories about their first Allied soldier. A boy told his friends about one as tall as the doorframe who gave him candy. The boy’s friends called him a fibber. Marguerite described a man who entered her house with his rifle lowered, but tapped the flag on his shoulder to identify himself, and left a pack of cigarettes on her side table.

They handed out powdered coffee. They climbed poles and cut wires. They seemed loose, athletic, well fed.