The people waited without a murmur, and passed not with their eyes lowered in shame as when receiving rations, but upright, and solemn nonetheless. Only Monkey Boy made mischief, blowing into one of the pig’s lungs to inflate it like a balloon, though the moment his mother yanked it away from his mouth, the organ went flat again. Otherwise the villagers took their bundles of meat in silence, saying perhaps a word of thanks or perhaps not, then sidled away, risking a curfew violation in order to receive more meat that night than in a month of rations. When everyone’s portion was gone, Odette collected the remains for sausage. The cleanup took hours, concluding close enough to the time Emma normally rose to make the Kommandant’s bread that she did not bother lying down at all. The wheelbarrow, which Fleur had given a thorough rinse, Emma returned to the rectory during morning Mass.
Mémé rose in unexpectedly fair humor, much of the alcohol purged from her system before Emma put her to bed. A pair of swallows had nested in the barn eaves, and the old woman stationed herself nearby to watch their comings and goings.
By contrast, the baguettes were browned on top and turned once in the oven before Thalheim presented himself at the baking-shed door. As ever, he had shaved as smooth as the back of a spoon, but his eyes were red and his face pale.
“You people are barbaric,” he announced.
Immediately Emma thought they had been discovered. He must have stirred during the night. He had seen, all was lost.
“Whatever do you mean?” she replied, still as a statue in front of the dough she was mixing.
“Drinking such filth. Any liquid that leaves a man feeling this ill in the morning is a poison.”
She could not help smiling to herself. “I’m told it takes practice.”
“Well,” he began, but then stopped, and wandered away.
Emma watched him shuffle across the barnyard, holding himself like something breakable, until Pirate burst out from behind the old hog shed in full disaster, a long night’s frustration fueling his passion, crowing for all he was worth. Thalheim winced, hands to his ears, kicking in the bird’s direction, but the rooster darted out of reach without pausing the fierce defense of his territory. To Emma, seeing the captain in retreat from that noisy annoyance tasted better than bacon.
The villagers obeyed her cooking instructions, neither smoking, roasting, nor frying the pork, enticing though the flavor would have been. For a culinary people, who in another time could have made a two-day village feast out of that pig, boiling was a masterpiece of restraint. Any regret at making that compromise, however, was overcome by the unfamiliar pleasure of a belly temporarily full of meat.
Toward midday, Monkey Boy reached the special sycamore at the edge of the bluff above the beach, its trunk wider than the full stretch of his arms. He had already taken his daily drink from all three of the town’s water supplies: the eastern well just outside Emma’s barnyard door; the central well, which fed the village fountain as well as homes and shops along the square; and the western well, which offered the most dramatic views but could turn salty after especially fierce storms at sea.
The special sycamore was not inviting to a climber, having no branches for the first three meters of its trunk. One limb spread wide over the bluff, however, sculpted by unrelenting ocean winds, and if Monkey Boy leaped his highest, the tree’s extremity hung just within his fingers’ grasp. He wrapped his hands above that limb, hooking his heels as well to hang beneath like a sloth, then shimmying arms and legs up that branch to the trunk. From there it was a scamper, laddering into the highest boughs. The perch he chose leaned this way and that, like the crow’s nest atop a sailing ship. He held the trunk with one arm, and observed.
Here a crew on the beach below measured the height of the previous night’s tides. There the occupying army was driving steel beams into the sand, their jagged edges pointed out to sea, fitting mines to the tips. He counted two hundred and two. The evenness of the number pleased him. To Monkey Boy’s left, a gunnery officer instructed his men in something, pointing and pantomiming. To his right, villagers under armed guard built wooden forms and set steel rods for a future concrete pouring to serve as an antitank wall. This barrier stretched serpentine along the base of the bluff like a physical expression of the word “no.” Above it all stood a group of officers—nine of them, he tallied; Monkey Boy loved to count—overseeing the work, all of them shielded from the weather by a makeshift canvas canopy.
In the distance the village rooftops showed through gaps in the trees, slate or tile or cedar shingles and a chimney, all organized around the spire of St. Agnes by the Sea. Monkey Boy tore off a handful of leaves and threw them in the village’s direction. They did not go far, though. Floating this way and that, they parachuted down through the branches. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful.
But in the next moment, Monkey Boy realized that he had forgotten his body business again. It was exactly like whenever he’d found a hiding place as a little boy, and his mother was looking for him: the moment he had settled into his perfect secret spot, an urge to empty himself would arise, with no regard for the quality of his invisibility. Now it had happened again, and the ground below looked so far away. Not to mention the effort of climbing back again.
Oh, it was urgent. All that drinking water, plus the gorging he had done on pig all night, his body unaccustomed to so much meat. Now it growled in his gut. There was no alternative. He undid the drawstring of his pants, opening the buttons in front. He slid the trousers down.
A half-track of the occupying army motored under the huge tree, stopping directly beneath his bare bum. The vehicle idled there while two soldiers conferred before choosing the direction in which one of them had pointed, the engine rattling as the half-track clattered away. Gripping the trunk with one arm, Monkey Boy hung his backside over a limb above where the machine had paused. He began to giggle, smothering his mouth with a forearm. The mirth of his naughty idea erupted out of him, a guffaw in spite of himself, and he spoke to the branches surrounding him. “Bombs away.”
A week later, Emma asked the Goat where he buried the tarp soaked with pig’s blood.
“Where crows may go sometimes, but the occupying army never,” he replied. “Dog Hill.”
In her café Odette deflected all praise of her butchering, instead spreading the legend that Emma had wrestled the pig to death. A success so great deserved a story as unlikely. From that night forward, everyone treated Emma with respect. Her age and gender no longer mattered; they had eaten well because of her.
The priest stopped her on a lane in the village to remark upon it. “It would appear, Emmanuelle, that your sinful influence has prevailed among the weaker-willed of your neighbors. Fewer of them come to St. Agnes to confess.”
Emma paused in pulling her wagon the opposite direction. “Maybe that’s because I’m not saying prayers with the enemy.”
“The occupying soldiers, like us, are children of God.”
“Then some children of God are murderers.” She began wheeling the wagon past. “Besides, I give our villagers something more nourishing than faith.”
“There is no such thing,” he answered, limping alongside, trying to keep up. “Life without faith makes a hell on earth.”