To Find a Mountain

Chapter Nine

The big table was piled with meat.

The German soldiers fighting on the front line near Mt. Cassino were starving. Apparently the German Army was already running low on fuel and the supply convoys to the front were all but halted. The Germans told us their men were in desperate need of meat and that they were weak from lack of proper food. They needed meat, and they need it prepared in a way that would allow it to be packed for days, maybe even weeks and months without spoiling.

Word went out into the village and soon women were arriving at the house with legs of lamb. Pork ribs. Sides of beef. Haunches of wild game. Chickens. Tripe and sweetbreads. By the end of the day, the table in my house looked like something straight out of a slaughterhouse.

The butcher was on his way to show the Germans where to take the meat, and from there he would smoke it then cure it so that it could be taken to the front line. It was probably for this reason that the butcher had not been told to pick up a gun and join the Wermacht near Mt. Cassino.

A jeep pulled up in front of the house and the men who were back from the front, either because of injury or for a brief rest, helped load the carcasses into the waiting vehicle. They waited while a few stragglers arrived at the house, one woman with some chickens slung over her shoulder, another with a shank of beef. The butcher, Mr. Pipitone, sat next to the driver of the Jeep and they pulled out in the direction of his shop. Even with the carcasses removed, their scent lingered, and I started to feel my stomach turn.

Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore.

Becher, Wolff’s second-in-command, approached me. Colonel Wolff was at the front now, and in his absence, Becher had taken over the job of putting together food for soldiers. When he had gathered it, he would go to the front and Wolff would come back. He spoke sharply to everyone, and it was no wonder that his men obeyed him quickly. Now, he turned his eyes to me.

“Benedetta. You have two pigs, no?”

I nodded.

“Bring them out front.”

My heart sunk, even though I had known this time would come. Becher’s words were an order, not meant to be questioned, simply comprehended then obeyed.

I walked outside, past the bread oven, then around back to the barn, which sat about a hundred yards from the house. A low stone wall circled the entire area, leading up to the edge of the forest.

A chicken coop ran off the back of the barn, and a pen for the pigs jutted out from the main entrance. The chicken coop had been in disrepair for some years, but the pigs had done well.

A lean-to provided shade for the pigs now standing along the fence. The wind generally blew the other way, so the smell was not bad. They squealed when they saw me, expecting a treat of garbage from the kitchen.

As I got closer I heard a strange sound. It seemed to be coming from the pen, but farther back. When I got to the fence, I stood up, and saw the piglet cowering behind his mother. We had thought that she was pregnant, but sometimes it was hard to tell. Papa would be very happy, under other circumstances, to have a new member of the family. But the little piglet’s short life was about to come to an abrupt end.

I looked back toward the house. This was going to be harder than I thought.

I walked through the main doors and entered the pen through the small trap door beneath the lean-to. I had a stick in my hand and used it to push the adult pigs toward the other side of the pen. I then scooped up the piglet and held him in my arms. He was heavy for being only a day or two old. He squirmed in my hands.

A thought came to my mind and I quickly stepped back into the shed. Becher had asked for two pigs.

The barn had really become a catch-all. It was now a workshop, tackroom, and storage shed all rolled into one. Along one wall were the animal stalls, now empty. The other wall held a primitive workbench with a few rusted tools hanging from the wall in front of it. There were odd scraps of leather, nails and piles of junk. In the barn’s far corner, farthest from the house, was another trap door leading to the chicken pen.

My eye was drawn to the space between the workbench and the trap door leading to the chicken coop. At one point, my father had built a small indoor chicken coop. The door to the inside coop was long and rectangular, the kind that you lifted up and the door itself had a hook in the center. When you lifted the door up, you slid the hook through an eye screw that was screwed into the wall above it. When the door was hooked, it hung open while the chickens were to be fed. At one time, it had always remained open and there had been a narrow path bordered by chicken wire that allowed the chickens to go back and forth.

It hadn’t been used in years, as we gave up raising chickens a long time ago. Since my mother’s death, in fact. It had always been her job. The only one left was our rooster, and he was getting very old.

I raised the door to the inside chicken coop and looked inside. It was empty for the most part, just some more scrap tools and a bucket with a hole in it. I placed the piglet inside, then closed the door. I went back to the pig pen where the piglet’s mother snorted indignantly and questioned me with her eyes. I couldn’t meet her gaze and scooped up some ears of corn as well as some hay. There was also a bucket of mixed grain. I put the bucket and corn inside the coop with the piglet. Not knowing when I would be able to come back, I thought it better to give it the whole thing than risk having it die from starvation. I put a bucket of water in there with him and then closed the door, locking it closed with the crude latch my father had probably fashioned by hand.

I slid a giant, cracked washtub and an old handplow harness in front of the door. Pressing my ear against the wooden door, I struggled to hear any sound, but there was nothing. I knew it would be complete darkness inside. What I didn’t know was what it would do to the piglet, if he survived at all. But then, I thought, wasn’t that true for all of us?

I walked back through the shed, shutting the main door tightly. Snapping the pigs on their bottoms with my stick, I eventually herded them to the front of the house. Becher was nowhere to be seen.

Schlemmer emerged from the house with another German soldier. They each had a piece of bread in their hand. Schlemmer looked at me but his face showed no emotion, just a cold, blank stare.

The other soldier said something in German and Schlemmer’s eyes fell toward the pigs now shuffling around the yard in confusion, grunting their displeasure with the whole situation.

Becher came from the house. He barked orders to Schlemmer and the other soldier who promptly pulled long knives from their belts. I moved toward the house, then stood next to Becher, watching.

Schlemmer and the other soldier each got a hold of a pig and slid their knives under the animals’ throats. I wanted to close my eyes but I couldn’t, I wanted to see the Germans kill the pigs that my father and I had raised. I wanted to see these men spill blood on the ground not more than twenty yards from my house.

The two soldiers moved as one, cutting upward quickly and smoothly. They stepped back as each pig took several tentative steps, swaying as the blood spurted from their severed jugular veins. The pigs sank to their knees and dropped in the dirt, blood pooling around them. As I raised my eyes from the pigs, I looked directly into Schlemmer’s grinning face. His teeth were yellow and his face was flushed.

“We will eat these, Benedetta,” said Becher. I nodded numbly and went inside the house.