Mémé slid her chair aside, and the captain found the bottle. “Oho,” he cried out. “What have we here?”
Immediately he removed the cork with his teeth, spitting it out on the floor. He sniffed the mouth of the bottle, then used the nearer of the glasses to pour for himself. When Thalheim put the bottle down and raised his tumbler, Mémé filled hers as well.
“Is that so?” he asked, then threw the drink back. Mémé responded by doing the same. When she brought her glass down on the table with a hearty whack, the captain took it to mean that he should refill both glasses, though it actually signaled to Emma to put aside her washboard and make further preparations.
Normally the captain was not one for alcohol. Odette knew this about him, because the other officers often teased. He sent his pay home to his mama, they said, keeping enough for razors and sundries but not for gambling or drink. Still, this Calvados was free, and he poured himself another tumbler. So did Mémé.
When he’d downed the second shot, Thalheim started for the stairs again. But Mémé banged her glass and he hesitated. Then she poured into both glasses and put the bottle down.
“Well, aren’t you the souse?” he said, ambling back to the table. He picked up his glass, but before he drank Mémé used her foot under the table to push the other chair backward, and without thought or dispute, the captain sat.
It took a full hour and more to intoxicate him sufficiently. Mémé matched him glass for glass, sometimes rushing him.
“Why are you in a hurry?” he slurred.
“Death,” she said, throwing back her drink.
“Not anytime soon,” he protested, but he emptied his glass.
Mémé growled at him, and slapped herself in the face, both sides. Then she poured again.
Eventually Thalheim’s head began to sway, his words to make less sense to Emma eavesdropping outside. He spent some time with his chin on his chest, Mémé knocking on the table beside his full glass though he was slow to respond. After one last shot, he crossed his arms on the table and lowered his head into that cradle.
Mémé pushed his shoulder, but the eyes did not open. She thwacked his skull. No response. Though there was half a drink left in her glass, she slid it away and rose. With slow dignity she opened the front door, marched past her granddaughter, and threw up in the flowers.
“Oh, Mémé,” Emma said, placing a hand on her back.
“There,” the old woman answered. “There—”
But another wave of nausea interrupted, and she vomited on the bushes again. So it continued until her belly was empty, and beyond. By the time Emma had given her water to drink, a bit of bread to absorb, and led her to the couch—a mixing bowl nearby in case Mémé needed it later, Pirate meanwhile closed in the baking shed to keep him quiet—a group of neighbors had clustered in the barnyard with torches, Odette at their head sharpening her butchery knives over the pink carcass.
Yves had built a crossbar of rough lumber, tied the hooves in pairs, and hoisted the pig till it hung upside down. Odette brought her blade up to the sow’s throat.
“Wait,” Emma said. “If you gut it here, we will have to explain blood and innards in the dirt tomorrow morning. Not to mention the crows that will assemble to pick at the mess.”
The people murmured, but no one offered a solution. Then a voice called from the barnyard wall. “I have something that will work.”
They turned as one, and saw the Goat standing with a knapsack on his back. “Give me a minute,” he said.
No one had seen the Goat in weeks. He looked thinner, a waif struggling with the weight of his pack as he staggered into the hog shed. They heard him drop his load on the floor.
“I don’t know how he can stand the smell of it,” Odette said to no one in particular.
“Or how we can stand the smell of him,” Emma replied.
The people laughed. The Goat heard it all, too, standing in the stench and gloom. But it did not merit a reply. With the two boxes in his knapsack that night, his task was at long last complete. Not once had the occupying army come near this shed. Why would they bother to investigate now?
He pulled away a large canvas tarp, revealing two hundred of those wooden boxes. The Goat had not seen them all revealed together, and he was struck by the magnitude of his feat. Twenty stacks, each ten boxes high, a cache the Resistance would be proud to see, and eager to use, when the proper day came. He half folded the tarp, dragging it behind him into the barnyard.
“Perfect,” Odette said, helping others spread the green canvas under the hanging pig. Then she brought the tip of a blade to the animal’s jugular, and with a hand as swift as a finch, made a deep, perpendicular slice. The pig’s blood poured out in a gush.
By midnight the villagers were lined up, everyone who could be trusted. In recent weeks people had seen DuFour wheeling around the village on Guillaume’s blue bicycle, which offended everyone’s sensibility because the man whose outcry had condemned the veterinarian deserved least to benefit by that betrayal. Yet he rode the blue bicycle everywhere, and on days with clear weather he parked it right in front of town hall. By common assent, no one told DuFour about the pig.
Likewise the priest was omitted, because the dictates of his conscience were so mercurial. No one knew with certainty where his sympathies lay. He slept undisturbed, therefore, while everyone else made a queue that stretched across Emma’s dirt yard, out the door in the barnyard wall, and halfway past it to the eastern well. Pirate hid in the baking shed, overwhelmed by the number of threats, and pacing like an expectant father. The villagers brought buckets or pans, cloth sacks or wooden boxes, into which Emma portioned pork that Odette had butchered and divided with the care of a surgeon.
“Remember, boiling only,” Emma instructed. “If the army smells even one ham baking or rib roasting, they will come salivating, and we will be revealed.”