The Baker's Secret(76)

It was so humbling, Emma clung to the tree and did not think she could continue to breathe. The weight of their sacrifice might crush her. Here they had died, and up the beach they were still dying, in flocks and willingly for the idea that she, Emma herself, and her friends and family and neighbors, ought to live in freedom. Who on earth deserved such a gift?

She turned again to Monkey Boy, tears stinging the cut on her chin, and she nodded. “For us.”



Monkey Boy pulled the wagon with his chest puffed out. It was easy work compared with climbing. Also the woman who fed everyone rode in back, teaching him all sorts of shortcuts. If he knew trees, she knew forests, and it filled him with awe.

The fighting had moved inland from the beaches, he could tell. But whenever they approached troops of either army, or heard gunfire, or detected suspicious rustling in the leaves, she pointed with a stick and he towed in that new direction.

Soon they arrived at the barnyard of old Pierre. When they called out, no one answered. The river had flooded most of his land, his three cows corralled by water on a rise of grass near the barn. They seemed calm, however, their mouths chewing away at nothing.

Emma climbed down from the wagon, leaning on Monkey Boy’s arm, and they tiptoed into the barn. Pierre’s morning buckets sat untouched by the door. Dipping a stick in the milk, she saw that a skin had formed on the surface.

“Not good news,” Emma said.

Monkey Boy nearly laughed out loud. It was all unbearably exciting. The woman dug in her pocket for a small tobacco pipe, and with a groan from bending over, placed it on his milking stool. She spent a moment enjoying that image—in the dusty barn light it seemed like a painting, an artist’s still life—before shuffling out into the yard.

“There’s another stop nearby,” she said, and after a few minutes’ pulling they arrived at a fence of barbed wire, with a sign announcing that the area was mined. Emma climbed down again, sloshing through knee-deep water to the wire, and with a lift of her skirt she had stepped over the fence.

“But the sign,” Monkey Boy said, pointing.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I put it there.”

Emma waded around the hedgerow, but Monkey Boy could still see when her shoulders fell and her head dropped. She raised her arms and seemed to hug herself, swaying there, and he wondered if she was about to fall down again.

Emma turned and waded back to the wagon. “Drowned in their coop,” she said. “Every one of them.”

She gave no further explanation, leaving Monkey Boy to tow the wagon and ponder what it meant. He had not traveled twenty meters, however, when he thought he heard another cow.

“Wait,” Emma said, rising to her knees in the back.

The sound came again, and Monkey Boy knew it was not a cow. He pulled directly toward it, a place they had passed minutes before, but from the other direction so they had not noticed the man lying there, back in the dense hedgerow. He was tangled in ropes, his face smeared with pitch so that his eyes looked startlingly white, his body bent like a question mark.

He spoke in his language, tensely as if breathing hurt him, and pointed at his legs. Emma knelt beside the man, her face still swollen like an overinflated balloon, and instructed Monkey Boy: where to find scissors in the wagon, how to cut away the ropes, when to lift the branch that lay across the man’s ribs.

Monkey Boy studied the parachute tangled overhead. As the trees leaned in the wind, he considered climbing to pull the fabric free, which branches he would have to grab. The soldier continued speaking intensely, a ring of dried saliva around his mouth, until Emma pressed a finger to his lips to shush him. After that he only watched them with his strange white eyes.

Emma wrapped his legs in old sacks, using a bit of rope to pull them straight, which caused the soldier to growl and thrash his head from side to side.

When eventually he was breathing normally again, Emma held his legs while Monkey Boy took the rest of him, and they hoisted him out of the ferns. He made a yelp with each breath, and it reminded Monkey Boy of the sounds he heard a dog make once, when an occupying soldier had shot her in the leg.

But this paratrooper went silent, eyes closing as they settled him into the wagon. Monkey Boy held his palm over the soldier’s mouth before turning to Emma. “Still breathing.”

After nesting the wounded man in among bags and blankets, he strode to the front to take his place again, but found that Emma had done the same thing on the other side. They each slid an arm into a harness.

“We didn’t see the captain anywhere,” she said. “And I am out of ideas. This man is someone we can help.”

She paused, and Monkey Boy waited, marveling at the notion that they would be pulling the wagon together. The greatness of the day was beyond his imagining.

“It’s time,” Emma said. “Nowhere left to go but home.”





Chapter 37




They came with rifles raised, shouting. Mémé made no sound. The invaders pulled her away from the house, yelling as they pointed at her feet and the ground she stood on, and she knew to stay put. Two men guarded her while others charged into the house. She could hear them shoving furniture and pounding up the stairs. It grew silent for a moment, then they charged down and out again. One of them threw a shirt at her feet; it was from Captain Thalheim’s uniform.

They began shouting again, pointing at Thalheim’s flag on the corner of the house. They waved their arms in front of Mémé. One of them aimed his rifle at her chest. The others spoke to him harshly, but he did not lower his gun.