“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 there 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.