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