The Baker's Secret(8)

Years later she still wondered what had possessed him to do such a cruel thing. From time to time she turned the question over in her mind, as though it were a stone in her pocket. Now he was grown and ambitious, yet still he struck her as pathetic, his attempts at manliness not genuine but a compensation for something missing. The Goat wanted to rouse the citizens, to incite rebellion. But if he had a fist, he kept it in his pocket.

Somehow the occupying army had overlooked Didier at conscription time. Probably a census error by the old town clerk, émile, doddering between his filing cabinets, which no one was in a hurry to point out. The army ordered the Goat’s father and brother to report, loaded them onto the train, then moved a dozen officers into their farmstead. From the upstairs window, they flew their red-and-white flag with its ugly black emblem. They smashed antique chairs for kindling, fed heirloom mahogany wardrobes to the flames. After that, no one knew where Didier called home.

Philippe did not need to hear the Goat’s story to observe Emma’s reaction to him, and to steer her wide of wherever he happened to be. Though it perplexed him, Philippe noticed that her affections were most ardent when they had seen the Goat and gone another way. Her kisses made a persuasive compass.



See Emma then, in the dim hour of dawn on the fifth of June, years later. The yearning for Philippe felt so similar to the hunger of her belly each day, she did not know which want was which. Given time enough, perhaps one can grow accustomed to all pains. So she baked—to save her life, and Mémé’s, and all the others in the village who depended on her secret network of food and fuel.

The skies threatened rain, the wind blew harshly, but the Kommandant’s expectation of baguettes remained as certain as the tides. Emmanuelle slid on quilted gloves, placed a bowl of water in the oven to harden the crust, and turned the loaves on their sides. They were brown and crisp, the V thinner but visible for anyone who looked.

Removing her mitts, Emma began her next task: preparing the following day’s straw. The oaken pestle spun quick in her hands, grinding against the marble mortar until the grass shafts became a soft powder the color of her hair.

The idea had come from the animals, and their departure. The occupying army requisitioned one species after another, cows, then pigs, then sheep, so that the demand for dry straw dwindled to nothing. The soldiers also confiscated all dogs over forty-five centimeters in height, though for what purpose Emma shuddered to imagine. Nonetheless, with no animals needing bedding, straw sat in the lofts unused.

One afternoon Monkey Boy wandered by, whistling his familiar tune, but shy when he reached the barn door.

“Are you going to lurk there all day?” Emma asked. “Because I have nothing to feed you.”

Monkey Boy’s shoulders dropped. He stumbled across the barnyard to the wall of beige bricks that separated Emma’s farm from the eastern well, flopped down with less care than a dog takes to settle on the dirt, and fell instantly asleep. Observing through the open door, Emma rose and crossed the grassless barnyard. As she stood over Monkey Boy, for once considering him with something other than dismissal, it became clear that he had collapsed not from fatigue but from hunger. He looked like a clothed pile of sticks.

Emma considered the thousands of hours her hands had spent cooking under Uncle Ezra’s critical eye, dicing onions or pinching salt or adding the tiniest soup?on of dry mustard to sharpen a broth. Wasted luxury, pointless education. What good was finesse in the face of starvation? It would be like needlepointing while the barn burned. She needed to do something. Her training, and yes, she could admit it, her talents, demanded better use than frosting cakes or sugaring muffins.

Emma turned from the emaciated boy and marched back into the barn, her hands in fists. Dough for the next morning’s baguettes sat in metal bowls, three rounds taking their rise on the sunlit sill. She rested a palm on one as if on the brow of a sleeping baby. Outside Monkey Boy whimpered in his sleep. At that moment, her gaze fell on the heap of straw sitting in the loft unused.

So it began, one pinch ground fine and stirred into the twelve-loaf mix. Emma baked as usual the next morning. She slid the arms of warm bread into the green canvas bag the Kommandant’s aide used when he came to fetch them. She wrung her hands as he motorcycled away with the bag over one shoulder, wondering if she had just sentenced herself to death.

Emma barely slept that night. If she were found out, who would look after Mémé? She rose before dawn, as ever, and when the dough was ready for final mixing, she added that pinch once again. Later, when the aide motorcycled into the barnyard, he held the canvas bag toward her without a word. No praise, but more importantly, no complaint.

Soon one pinch became two. Every few days she added slightly more, until a morning several months along when the aide asked in broken words if she had changed her recipe, because lately the crusts were tough. That was the ceiling, therefore, five handfuls, beneath which she remained ever after.

Now each day Emma scooped powdered straw into a mass of dough the size of three melons, adding salt to aid with concealment. She baked the Kommandant’s twelve loaves, and portioned the extra two among Monkey Boy, or Madeleine whose eyesight had gone bad, or Fleur the veterinarian’s beautiful daughter, or the newly married Argent couple, or Pierre, the cowman too affable to comprehend a time of war.

“I give them my milk and they leave me alone,” Pierre confided in Emma one day. He removed his pipe from his mouth. “I am not being disloyal to my country, I am protecting my girls.” He blew a kiss to the trio of bovines grazing in his dooryard, with their long eyelashes and bashful ways.