The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Stealing was out of the question. A missing chicken would bring investigation, with the potential to unmask her entire network. Oddly enough, among Emma’s calculus, the moral prohibition on coveting—particularly the possessions of a priest—did not enter.

  On Sundays the Monsignor said Mass for the villagers at St. Agnes by the Sea at nine o’clock, offering a separate celebration of the blessed sacrament for the occupying army at ten thirty. No one attended both services, but everyone wondered whether he used the same sermon for both Masses, or tailored his homilies to the different congregations. More than once in the rations line, Odette speculated aloud about whether the Monsignor might slant the gospels for the occupying army, downplaying the salvation of all humanity by a Jew.

  On the six other days of the week he performed the liturgical rites once, at seven thirty, as regular as a metronome. Therefore Monday through Saturday, Emma could meander past his coop, performing reconnaissance without fear.

  There were five hens, all good layers. They lived in a small pen for them to wander in the day, plus a hutch in which to sleep securely at night when foxes slunk out of the hedgerows to feed. No rooster stood guard, to make a racket should any person draw near. Chickens, she knew, ate everything, so on each visit Emma brought nibbles of meal or an end of bread, which she arrayed in a figure eight by her feet. Soon the birds grew calm in her presence, puttering around and between her legs. One day, as a hen pecked at a bit of lettuce by Emma’s shoe, she bent slowly, slowly, then snatched the bird up squawking and ran for home.

  Emma did not need to leave the hen loose in the barnyard for long. Pirate woke from his slumber atop the hog shed. Cawing, crowing, a rumpus of feathers and strutting, he swooped down, and proceeded to plunder the surprised hen with the vigor of the long deprived and innately unconscienced.

  After morning Mass, the gossiping biddies liked to stay late with the Monsignor, Emma had learned from her espionage, in order to debate later whose soul he seemed most assured would enter the gates of heaven. Therefore she left the bird to Pirate’s lustful clutches for a full thirty minutes, bouts of breeding so brutal they made a blur, before hurrying the traumatized hen back to the rectory.

  On her way to repeat the maneuver the next day, Emma wondered how she would identify which birds were unbred. Discerning proved simple, however, as one hen kept to itself, preening its bedraggled feathers and starting at the least noise. Emma snared one of the others, rushing it to the barnyard and the waiting rapist.

  So began a rotation, with three ingredients. First, a bird took its turn in the arena of violation. Second, Pirate became intolerable, his aggression and arrogance evidenced by crowing at all hours of the day, greater verve when harassing Captain Thalheim, and a peacocking stiffness to his walk that in a human might be considered swagger.

  Third, Emma searched for the priest’s eggs each morning, held them one by one before a lit candle, and in the space of a week found six instances in which a dark blot cast a shadow within. Those eggs immediately enjoyed a place of honor in her baking shed, beside but not too near the wood-fired oven, incubating. She had to keep them a secret from everyone, even Mémé, because the temptation to eat one would be too great to resist. It required a certain coldness of Emma’s heart, knowing that her grandmother was starving, but denying her one of these fragile jewels of protein because of the larger potential within.

  Meanwhile Emma turned the eggs as regularly as if they were loaves, and in precisely twenty-one days the homestead was proud parent to six yellow chicks.

  The birds would not freshen for months. During the waiting, Emma pilfered from the occupying army several coils of barbed wire, which she hid in the hedgerow behind the eastern well. She returned, too, to the mined land where she’d seen the soldier hammering warning signs, and helped herself to one. Then, in a remote and fallow patch of Pierre’s property, an area long in neglect, she created a false minefield.

  Should Pierre discover her deception, Emma intended to inquire whether the flavor of the tobacco in his pipe was to his satisfaction. But she predicted there would be no objection. In fact she had asked weeks before if she could remove his huge sack of chicken feed, which hung in the barn like an engraved invitation to mice. Without asking why, Pierre replied that it would be a relief if she took it, as the sack reminded him too sorely of the days when he had kept chickens and idly thought himself a rich man, not knowing how abruptly such things could come to an end.

  A passerby presented even less of a risk. Anywhere in that region, upon seeing barbed wire and a minen sign, no sane person would dare to explore. As for the occupying army, Emma reasoned, any soldier would assume some other corps had mined the area, and happily swerve wide of the danger.

  Within her minefield Emma erected a small wooden box with a drop-door to serve as coop, a pen with wire fencing for wandering space, and a wooden water trough that the rain would refill. One morning after Captain Thalheim left to report for duty, and after the Kommandant’s aide had come for the baguettes and motored away, she tucked the six chicks into her shirt, their tiny hearts thrumming against her skin, their fragile wings aflutter, and carried them to their new home.

  The test of her patience had not ended, however. Every day for five months, Emma came to feed the chicks, using different points of entry each time. She did not want to trample the grass into a trail, which would sabotage the deterrent powers of the minen sign. Thus did she grow incrementally expert in the hedgerow shortcuts, learning countless ways to journey from field to field without using roads whatsoever.

  Periodically Emma would stumble across a machine-gun nest or mortar emplacement, one occupying soldier intent in his place at the weapon, while his sleepy fellows paused in their cigarette smoking to inform Emma that she should take a different route next time. Sometimes they snacked, especially the young units, whose average age was perhaps seventeen. The youths in one pillbox discovered a cache of Camembert—some cave for aging cheese abandoned when its owner had fled at the war’s commencement, back when people believed there was somewhere safe to flee—and had so gorged themselves, Emma mused that she could have disarmed them all without a fight. She found other, equally unimpressive soldiers: weak men, injured and tired, veterans of the brutal war on the Eastern Front, sent here to heal, and to guard the coastline against an invasion that would never come.

  Some soldiers did not speak the occupying army’s language. Had they been captured? Was their presence another form of conscription? Emma refused to dwell on that possibility, because it raised the idea that her Philippe might likewise be manning the enemy’s guns far away on the Eastern Front. A few times the soldiers she happened across were sharing a stolen bottle of Calvados, which tasted as sweet as springtime but kicked like a startled horse.

  None of these warriors were her object. Emma had sworn off all things political, and she kept her vow. Her purpose was to feed chicks, day upon day, all steps in her larger plan, which unfolded at precisely the pace of the maturing of a bird. One bright morning, the chicks clustered in one corner of their yard, busily, as if to distract her from the opposite side. Emma followed her curiosity in that direction, knelt, parted the greenery, and there on a clutch of grass as if on a throne: the first egg. Brown and round and silent, the treasure was now hers.

  Chapter 12

  Only a few weeks into Emma’s new profession, Mémé began calling it “Gypsy,” after the Roma people whose wagon caravans had passed through the village once a year or so for most of her life. Once the occupation began, those people had vanished—into the eastern woods, some said. Also Emma was not some minstrel or dancer, wandering out of Bohemia. She was of the village, from birth forward.

  Yet somehow, like the Gypsies, she became a traveling hub of barter and exchange. Somehow she became a deal maker, a keeper of secrets. When did she acquire the wooden-wheeled cart, its horse harness adapted for human pulling? How had she outfitted it with trick suitcases, hidden drawers, a watering can with a false botto
m that concealed other liquids beneath? When did this young maker of bread become so circuitous and sly?

  The villagers were not the only clever ones. One afternoon Emma was pulling her cart through a crossroads, harnesses over her shoulders and her day of exchanges nearly complete, when she encountered soldiers from the occupying army replacing the road signs.

  They were doing it deliberately wrong. One of them was removing the existing signs—bayeux 11 km., with an arrow to the right, caen 29 km., with an arrow to the left. The other soldier hammered replacement signs onto the same post, but saying bayeux 9 km. to the left, caen 51 km. to the right.

  The soldiers were not laughing, or joking, or speaking at all. They were entirely matter-of-fact while they posted falsehoods that would misdirect any traveler who was not a local.

  “You.” One of the soldiers pointed his hammer at her. “Move along. You go now.”

  “Yes,” Emma said, shouldering the harnesses and pulling her way home.

  Of course they wanted to mislead people, she thought. They—with their maps, communication wires everywhere, convoys all in a line—had no need of directions. Changing signs was propaganda of the most subtle and brilliant sort. But who thought of sowing this confusion? Who sat around all day, dreaming up such lies?

  Above all questions, this: How could any reasonable person retaliate?

  Exhausted at the end of her day, Emma was carrying the last of the laundry in from the cart when she heard a scuffling by the door in the barnyard wall. The moon hid behind scudding clouds, so she crept nearer to see what was making the noise. Something harmless, she hoped: a fox, a coypu, so she could finish this final chore and curl up on the floor beside Mémé’s couch. Knowing that the bread task awaited at dawn, she had been imagining that horizontal moment for hours.

  Instead of something small and wild, however, the Goat stepped out of the shadows. Emma put down the basket, trying to summon the energy to deliver a statement of unwelcome that would scour his ears. But he was bent with fatigue, his knapsack appearing to be loaded with lead. From his lowered head down, his gait an old man’s shuffle, Emma recognized her own tiredness, and hesitated.

  That night in the moonlight, long past curfew, and the occupying army would shoot anything moving at that hour, the Goat did not survey his surroundings at all. He scuffed across the barnyard, opened the hog-shed door, and stumbled inside. She heard him drop the weight of that knapsack.

  Although the occupying army had confiscated the last of the pigs years before, the shed still contained a horrible stink. That explained why Didier’s skin was filthy, why no one could bear to stand beside him. The scent clung to him like a garment.

  Was there always to be someone who, by comparison, made your circumstances seem fortunate? Emma had thought so after her conversation with Michelle. Imagine romancing an officer of the occupying army because it was your best hope for survival. And now imagine sleeping in a hog shed because there was no better place to lay your head. It made the parlor floor, snoring Mémé an arm’s length away, seem like luxury.

  Emma did not have the heart to evict the Goat that night. Nor did she have the energy. She hoisted the basket of laundry, heading into the house and the ever more appealing prospect of her pillow. The moon threw shadows across the yard, a painter expert exclusively in the palette of gray and blue.

  Come morning, Emma rose before the sun to bake the Kommandant’s bread, her body hungry, her spirit fatigued. Pirate harassed her ankles while she crossed the yard. As ever, a pinch of feed purchased his silence. Working the dough roughly, she peered outside before adding straw.

  The Goat was sneaking toward the barnyard door. The knapsack hung empty on his back, so he must have moved things in. He was planning to stay in the hog shed. The presumptuousness. Emma would gladly have evicted him, with a salty dose of scorn for the pleasure of it, but it was early and she could not risk waking the captain. Of all things, too, Pirate goose-stepped along beside the Goat, not crowing or attacking, but clucking and bobbing his head.

  The world was a mystery which each day slid further from Emma’s understanding. Was she supposed to help the Goat, along with everyone else? The wants of her fellow villagers were like the ocean, miles wide and the other side beyond sight. Emma already had all she could handle with Mémé, her own hunger, the Kommandant’s infernal bread. Didier was one person too many. Or perhaps he offered a convenient receptacle for her frustration at being overwhelmed. She rushed through the barnyard door, catching him by the eastern well. “What do you think you are doing?”

  Didier had reached the rise of hedgerow across the way. He paused there, glancing back at her and at the path ahead.

  “Don’t think about running off,” she continued. “Or I’ll take your mess from the hog shed and throw it down the well.”

  “That would be a fragrant little chore, wouldn’t it?” He skipped down the embankment toward her. “With the pig memories so strong in that place?”

  “How can you bear to sleep in that stench?”

  “I rest easily in any room the enemy ignores. And your captain—”

  “He is not mine in any way.”

  “Perhaps.” Didier sidled closer. “But the officer would not deign for one moment to soil his hands, would he? I could stockpile mortar rounds in there, and the scent would be all the guardian I need.”

  “Mortar rounds,” Emma scoffed. “You live in a fairy tale.”

  “More like a nightmare, don’t you think?”

  “I think,” Emma said, rolling up her sleeves, “that you have one whale of a nerve, playing house on my land.”

  “Perhaps so,” he answered again, and was he suppressing a grin at her? The cheek of him. “What if I said that I have your father’s permission?”

  “You have no respect for anything. He has been jailed these eleven months, and you know it.”

  “What courage he shows us all,” the Goat said, shaking his head. “Such a shame that his daughter is so fearful.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “You know nothing.”

  “I know that you have tolerated his imprisonment for nearly a year, without once inquiring about his situation, much less demanding his freedom.”

  Emma took a step backward. Should she have done so? “Of whom should I inquire?”

  The Goat swept an arm toward the house, the upstairs room where Captain Thalheim slept—or more likely, at that hour, where he was shaving with his customary vanity and precision.

  “You would have me indebted to that murderer?”

  The Goat shrugged. “He comes to court you nearly every day. I can hear him, abusing our beautiful language for your benefit. You never exercise your power over him.”

  “You sound worse than Mademoiselle Michelle.”

  “I am worse than Mademoiselle Michelle. I have compromised myself far more than she. But unlike her, I have purposes greater than my own survival. I have large reasons.”

  “Oh yes.” Emma rolled her eyes. “You’ll tell anyone who loans you a cup to pour your self-praise into. The Wolf is busy with all sorts of intrigue. Please spare me.”

  Now he did smile, openly. “Actually, Emmanuelle, you ought to join us.”

  “Fairy tales, I told you,” she scoffed. “There is no ‘us.’”

  Still smiling, the Goat shook his head. A noise from the house took their attention. An upstairs window casement opened, a bare arm reached out holding a basin, and it poured soapy water out on the ground.

  “Love to stay and chat,” the Goat said, “but I prefer to continue breathing.”

  He ran then, rabbiting away up the trail. Emma was surprised to see how fast he could go.

  Blast him, though: Emma returned to the baking shed with a head full of questions. Should she have been asking about her father? Was the captain seeking her favor? Could she manipulate him to anyone’s benefit? And how had the Goat so distracted her, that she forgot to evict him from the hog shed? Pondering, she bent to work on the kneading board�
��her souvenir from the tree against which Uncle Ezra had died.

  An hour later Emma had made the baguettes, wet their skins, and laid them parallel in the oven like the beds in an orphanage. They were brown and ready when Thalheim presented himself at the door. “Do you have a whetstone?” he asked.

  Emma was removing loaves, one in each hand. She turned, and the captain was holding an open straight razor. What was he intending? She glanced at the rolling pin, her only ready means of defense, but no match for the small sharp blade.

  The soldier frowned at his razor. “If I don’t sharpen this soon, I will be slitting of my own throat.”

  “No luck,” she said with relief, calming herself by laying the baguettes on the cooling rack. “We always used Uncle Ezra’s.”

  The captain did not leave, however. Reaching for two more loaves, Emma studied him sidelong: uniform immaculate, so impressed with himself. She imagined snatching that razor and slashing him. But then she remembered being a little girl and watching her father shave, how casual he was with his face, how familiar with it, shaking the blade in the water before taking the next stroke, putting a dab of soap on the tip of her nose, stretching his chin to shave his throat smooth.

  Damn that Goat, though. He had awakened in Emma a want, which was a feeling she had learned to distrust. Desire always led to sorrow. And now it swept over her like a breaking wave.

  “I have something else for you,” she said.

  “Some other kind of sharpener?”

  “No.” She removed the oven mitts and lifted a baguette. “Yesterday my rations were larger than usual. So I made extra.” By one end, Emma held the bread toward him.