Emma paused, staring at the ground for a moment, the soil of her home and origin, trodden by the ages into hard-packed clay, and one day, the place her dust would spend all eternity. All at once she found herself struggling not to cry. Odette was in jail, her father gone, so many killed.
And what a day she’d had, the fifth of June. It felt as long as a week. She had nearly choked to death on straw, the army confiscated all of Yves’s fish, the little girl could trust only eggs, there was no one to help Emma, no one to protect her, and meanwhile this very minute another wave of bombers was droning closer to pummel the train station—which, in addition to whatever military value the Allies awarded it, happened also to be Philippe’s means of someday coming home. The wonder was that Emma did not cry all day long.
But no. This was her life, her only life, and so it would always be. The occupying army would never leave, the Allies would never come, and all a person could do was endure. Emma collected herself, steeled her spine, made a spiteful face at the Goat. “I am too damn hungry to listen.”
She pushed against her harnesses, and was surprised to feel the wagon considerably lighter. Emma looked back and Mémé had climbed off. She was holding the bird cage, its cover removed, the dove swinging on his perch like a little ornament.
“Grandmother, please. Can we go in now? You’ll feel better when you’ve had your egg.”
Mémé ignored her, inching toward the Goat with the cage held high. Monkey Boy came to see as well. “Coo,” Mémé said. “See the coo?”
Now it was the Goat’s turn to dance, hopping from foot to foot while he held his head with both hands.
“Perfect.” He stomped his feet. “Mémé, you are perfection, thank you, God in heaven.” He seized her hand and kissed it. “I heard rumors that they were dropping messenger pigeons to us, but did not believe it. This little fellow could not come at any better time.”
“See the coo?” Mémé said.
Monkey Boy poked his smallest finger between the bars of the cage. The bird sidestepped closer on its perch, and pecked the boy’s fingertip twice.
“Bit me,” Monkey Boy cried, leaping away. His face alight, he held his pinkie in front of Emma’s face. “Bit by a bird.”
The Goat sidled up to Mémé. “I know this is a lot to ask. But could I please have that dove? I promise to take good care of it.”
She turned sideways. “Mine.”
“Of course it’s yours, Mémé. Yes. But this is a special kind of bird. It needs special care, because it can do special things.”
“Mine,” Mémé said, taking several steps away.
“No, no,” the Goat said. “You can trust me. I won’t take it from you, not a chance. But I am asking you to give it to me.”
“Mémé,” Emma said, sighing in her harnesses. “I’m not interested in what he wants. But we don’t have anything to feed a bird like that.”
“You see?” the Goat said.
“You feed?” Mémé asked him.
The Goat shuffled his feet a moment. “No. To tell the truth, I won’t be feeding him. What I will be doing is setting him free.” He spread his arms wide. “I will do some special things with him, and then I will let him go home.”
Mémé narrowed her eyes. “Let him go?” She marched past him, toward the barnyard door.
“Mémé, wait.” The Goat jumped ahead, holding her arm. “You have known me since the day I was born. You knew me when I was Didier, back when I had a name.” He fell to his knees. “Please.”
“What is this ridiculous drama?” Emma asked.
But Mémé’s expression softened. She laid a calm hand on the Goat’s shoulder, as if she were knighting him. “Baptism.”
“That’s right.” He nodded emphatically. “My mother said you were the only person at my baptism who was not a family member.”
Mémé smiled at him. “One hundred and two.”
“I know you want a pet to keep you company,” the Goat persisted. “But I promise, there is an excellent reason for you to give me this bird. Please. It could help us defeat the occupying army.”
“Enough exaggeration,” Emma said. “This day has been endless, and I need badly to eat and lie down. Can we please go home?”
Mémé lifted her hand, and the Goat did not speak further. Then with great dignity, she set the bird cage on the ground.
“God bless you,” the Goat cried, jumping to his feet and kissing her on both cheeks. “Thank you.”
Rolling her eyes at Emma, Mémé waved a hand in front of her face, as if to fan away the odor.
The Goat snatched the bird cage and scampered off into the hedgerows. Monkey Boy grabbed a low limb of a nearby chestnut and began to climb. Emma could hear him cooing as he vanished upward into the leaves.
Chapter 30
By nine o’clock that night, Pierre had heard all he needed to know. The familiar thing, oddly enough, was not the noise of explosions, though they had been roaring every minute or so since the sun sank into the sea, and though he recognized the sounds from memories he had tried to bury as deep as his ancestors’ graves. No, it was the feel of the earth, as bombs tore into it. It was the electricity of the air, as if lightning were about to strike. He remembered.
But to be certain, he needed to see. And of all his riverside acreage, only one spot would do. It was no place for an old man, but in those times, the same could be said of his entire country.
The ladder was rough and dusty in his hands, when Pierre carried it from the back of the barn. Once he turned Apollo free, he had no further need to climb for hay. Now he tucked his pipe into a pocket of his old wool vest and set aside a tin of rat poison. When the dog bit Marguerite, when Guillaume killed the dog, when the captain killed Guillaume, how could Pierre not poison the dogs? He regretted their suffering, and that of the women forced to shovel Dog Hill. But this was a war, and he had never stopped being a soldier.
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 ther
e 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.
Pierre rapped on the door with his cane. “Do not shoot. I am not armed.” He listened, but could not be sure if anyone had replied. He gripped the handle. “I am coming in.”
DuFour sat in an armchair by the cold hearth. A bottle of Calvados sat empty on the table. The town clerk lifted his head, recognizing the old farmer, then raised a glass stained pink with the drink. “Here’s to the great noisy world,” he said, and tipped the last sip into his mouth.
Pierre stood evenly in the doorway, feeling strength and a long-forgotten sense of cleanness as he beheld the town clerk. “I am here because I pity you,” he said. “This bombing is the beginning, and I believe an ugly time has come.”
DuFour inspected the Calvados bottle, tilting it to confirm that it was empty. “Why is that my concern?”
“I should not have left you alone with my injured horse. You were young, and weak. I should have mastered my grief and finished Neptune myself.”
“What are you talking about? You are speaking in riddles.”
“I felt it only decent to warn you. I have seen times like these, I lived through them before you were born. Regardless of who prevails, I do not believe tomorrow will go well for you.”
DuFour sniffed. “Pish. Don’t you know who I am now? Whose favor I enjoy?”
“If you stand in the middle, both sides will be shooting at you. My advice would be for you to gather a few things, and several days’ food, and get a head start.”
DuFour set glass and bottle down on the table and folded his hands on his belly. “I am expected at the offices tomorrow. People are depending on me. The Kommandant.”
“He will be too busy trying to stay alive to notice your absence. If he is not gone already. Save yourself while you can.”
“The old ways are done, you know. The new ways are here to stay.” DuFour ran a fingertip around the mouth of the bottle. “And you are the worst kind of fool: boring, and old.”
Pierre drew himself up, tugging on his wool vest. “Think what you will of me. I have warned you. My conscience is clear.”
Outside the nightfall was complete, vague moonlight as the last of the day’s rain clouds lingered overhead. Pierre was glad he had brought his cane. He held it ahead almost as a blind man would, feeling his way around the village, across a hedgerow gap and past the crossroads. The walk to his second task took nearly an hour, though normally it would require one quarter that time. But when the eastern well came into sight, he paused to lean against it, wiping his face with a handkerchief.
What would he say here? How could he be more persuasive than he had been with the clerk? Pierre put a pinch of tobacco in his pipe bowl and struck a match on the stone of the well. In the distance, the bombing continued. The answering fire had become more intense. Pierre could not say for sure, but he thought he had seen a plane with no engine, gliding silently across a bit of cloudless sky. But that would be impossible, and he cursed his old eyes for playing tricks.
Soon the pipe was smoked and no better words had come to him. Pierre followed his cane to the barnyard door, which he eased open, its hinges making a rusty complaint. A rooster perched on a shed perked up his head, but Pierre tapped his pipe out on the boards and the bird, instead of crowing, hopped over, pecking to see whether the ashes were something to eat.
The old man heard the murmur of two women talking. Through a side window, he saw them sitting at a table, lit by a stub of candle. Mémé was carrying on while Emma mended something, a sock, while giving her grandmother half an ear.
He knocked on the door and heard chairs scraping. Emma swept the door open. “Philippe?”
“Ah, no, it’s only Pierre,” the old man answered. “Only me.”
“What are you doing out at this time of night?” She drew him inside. “You could be shot.”
“I’ll only be a moment,” he said, removing his military hat. “I wanted to warn you.”
“You are sweet, Pierre,” Emma said. “But I could be warned about everything I do all day.”
“This is different.”
“I like your hat,” she said. “I wish I could offer you something to eat or drink.”
“Emmanuelle.” Mémé brought a finger to her lips. “Listen.”
“Yes,” Pierre said. “For one moment, please. I know these sounds. I heard bombing like this in the Great War.” He took Emma’s hand. “The true battle has arrived. You must leave at once.”
Emma pulled her hand free. “With all respect, who are you to speak to me like this?”
“An old fool, as I have recently been reminded. But one who cherishes your well-being.” He saw that he still had his pipe in his hand, and he looked for a place to set it down, settling on the near windowsill. “Emmanuelle, who I have known since the afternoon of your birth. For once please put aside your pride and use your ears.” He sighed. “I am too old to leave, and my girls need me for morning milking. But you have a wagon, and I imagine some foodstuffs saved. You could get away.”
Emma would not look at him, but Pierre glanced at Mémé and she was listening. “If anyone from our poor village deserves to survive this war, it is the woman who has kept us alive.”
“That is exactly why I will not go,” Emma answered. “There are people who depend on me for more than tobacco. If I leave, they perish. I will stay until there is no one left to care for.”
Pierre leaned his cane against the table. “The war has arrived at our door, and I am a veteran. I know what that means.” He tottered forward and hugged her with both arms. Emma’s hands hung at her sides, but when he did not let go she raised them and hugged Pierre back.
“Your father would be mightily proud of who you have become,” he said. “I am going to miss you.”
“You are very kind, Pierre. But I will be bringing you freshly smuggled tobacco in a few days.”
He collected his cane and opened the door. “I wish I could believe that.” And the old man wandered out into the night.
Emma stood in the doorway, watching until he had crossed the barnyard and disappeared in the dark.
As she closed the door, Emma heard her grandmother growl. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
Mémé pointed at the windowsill. “Pipe.”
Pierre had left it behind.
“I’ll bring it to him tomorrow,” Emma said.
Mémé looked off to one side. “Tomorrow.”
Emma lay awake for hours, the thrum of bombs distant and then frighteningly close, until she concluded that no degree of exhaustion would bring her the relief of sleep. Even on ordinary nights, real rest did not begin until Thalheim had tromped up the stairs and kicked his boots off without regard for the thumping he’d made.
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