Stones for Bread (19 page)

We manage. We exist in a home without the spoken word, except for television and the occasional request from him, or the occasional question from me. Mostly we pass one another as we wander around the cold, wood rooms we once believed were warm. My mother was the warmth, our sun, but she left us and we can no longer find the thermostat without her, even though we walk by it every day, in the hallway, on our way out the door.

I make dinner, tonight a frozen skillet meal, just pour, heat, and serve. This one has the chicken included. My father used to buy the ones where the meat was purchased and prepared separately, but I sliced my finger open cutting up strips of steak for one of them. I waited for him to come home, staring at
Jeopardy!
while squeezing a
dishrag around my pinky. He saw the blood and shouted at me for not calling him sooner. I had to get eleven stiches. I was relieved to be excused from gym class for two weeks.

My father won’t be home to eat with me. He works as late as possible, and on the days he doesn’t work—the weekends, like tomorrow—he lives in the basement with his toasters and gears, and I bring him plates of food if I have the inclination to take a load of laundry down to the washing machine. I don’t sort the clothes, and our underwear is dingy gray-blue because I toss them in with our jeans.

After my cheesy rotini primavera, I spoon the remaining pasta onto a plate, cover it with wax paper, and stick it in the microwave. Then I rinse the pan and jam it into the overly full dishwasher. It needs to be run but we’re out of detergent. I add it to the list on the freezer door and hang my report card next to it, with a clay magnet shaped like a loaf of braided bread.

Everything is
her
in this house.

I think that’s why he does it, because we’re suffocating in the fullness of her. He will never—can never—get rid of her tables or bowls or chairs. But the sofa is safe, he must believe. My mother never liked it, great mint green cushions with embroidered peach tulips, given to us by the people across the street when they moved and in better condition than the old couch my parents bought when they married. I emerge from my bedroom well past noon Saturday and see the new sofa, a plush brown leather sectional with built-in recliners on each end. I scream.

My father is there. I don’t know where he came from.
What’s wrong?

The sofa
.

I bought another
.

How could you?

He doesn’t know that all I used to be bled into that middle cushion the day she died, that I have a plan to recover myself, to soak me
back in. I can’t do it yet, though, can’t bring myself to sit on a center cushion on any couch, let alone our own. Now it’s impossible because my essence has been hauled away to some secondhand store or garbage dumpster. My body clenches.
You don’t love her
, I say.

He slaps me across the cheek.

We both recoil. It’s the first time I’ve been struck by either parent. I stare at him, the poltergeist of his hand throbbing in my skin. His anger melts, jowls and lips sagging. I turn and run upstairs.

Liesl
, he calls.

I slam the bathroom door behind me. None of the other rooms upstairs lock, old doors in an old house with brass keyholes and skeleton keys long gone missing. The bathroom has a hook and eye for privacy. I expect a knock, or another shout of my name, but neither comes. My cheek burns. It feels good, a tangible, physical pain understudying for my broken heart. I don’t want it to stop.

I’m not able to hit myself in the face, but I remember the lotion, my legs, and I shimmy my jeans over my hips and down to the floor, sit on the closed toilet, and slam my fists into my thighs. It’s not enough; the heaviness in my chest remains. Next to me, on the vanity, is my hairbrush. I grab it and smack my legs until they flame, prickled with broken vessels, until they go numb and I turn the brush, pointed handle end down, and stab, stab, stab. The blue welts grow, and I stop because I’m crying. It hurts too much.

I lie on the floor, on a moldy-smelling towel I left sitting wet in the machine too long but didn’t rewash. Cover myself with another one, this one still damp from my father’s morning shower, and clamp an arm over my eyes. My legs throb and I focus on them, content. It’s the only thing I feel.

I keep drifting up from sleep, so buoyant it cannot keep me captive. I don’t wake completely, but enough to be aware of a car alarm, a stray
feather from my pillow, my sheets twisted around my feet. It’s disorienting, and finally I give up and open my eyes. Six thirty.

Something stirs in my brain, wanting attention. For weeks after my mother died, I would swing my legs over the side of the bed each morning with dread in my belly, knowing I had a reason to be sad but not quite conscious enough to fully realize why. The cold wood against my feet, the sunlight in my face, and suddenly I’d remember. She was gone.

It’s the same now, but instead of sadness there’s joy. I rub my face, feeling how puffed it is with the previous night. I yawn. And it’s there.

I won.

What is this—this happiness? I cannot remember feeling such delight, ever. Perhaps as a child, before the rust and moth chewed it away, leaving gaping holes where reality began seeping in. And maybe something very close to it when I opened the bakery, a few hours of excitement and anticipation of the journey, but quashed not long after by all the work needing to be done. That’s how my life has been, always walking, completing tasks, moving on to the next, a constant focus on the
to do
. Drive, some call it, praise it, even. And it will come again, this evening, when the dough must be prepared for tomorrow and the weekly invoices paid and the flour ordered. But for this morning, I choose to enjoy it.

I may sleep, shower, and occasionally flop on the couch here in the apartment, but I dwell in the Wild Rise kitchen. The apostle John writes the Word became flesh and dwells among us. Tabernacles. He makes his home with us, lives in the tent with us. It’s where he breathes, with us.
It’s Sunday
. I shake my head. I promised Cecelia, but not today.

I dress and twist my hair into an elastic band. Downstairs, I unlock Wild Rise and hear a thud. Then another. The noise is continuous, rhythmic. The light shines beneath the kitchen door. I tiptoe close and open it enough to peek in. Jude. He stands at the table, his
back to me, sinewy arms lifting a ball of dough over his head, slamming it to the table. A silent moment as the muscles in his back flex. He’s folding and turning, I know. The dough comes up again. Then down. A French knead.

“Jude?”

He turns, startled. “I woke you.”

“No, I couldn’t sleep.” Pink moisture rims his nose and eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I shouldn’t be here, but I needed a place, you know?”

“I didn’t think you could drive.”

“I thumbed it.” He drops the dough into a willow banneton. “A twenty-minute pounding is enough.”

“More than enough.”

I think he’ll leave now, but he continues to stand, gripping the edge of the table, leaning over it slightly, his eyes closed. Then he stretches his arms forward, his hands flat and open, slowly spreading the flour residue over the wood, drawing patterns as a child will. A tear falls into it and almost immediately disappears as his hands continue to move. “I don’t get it,” he says finally. “What is it about this stuff? All of it. The flour, the dough, the loaves. It’s like there are magnets in it, and in me. I have to touch it.”

I know. When my hands are in dough, something deep and primordial can hear the voice of God, calling me forth from the earth.
It is very good
. Grain from the ground, made dust. Man from the dust. The kneading reconnects both, bringing me back to Eden in a way I’ve never encountered at any church service.

“It’s like it’s—”

“Spiritual,” I say.

He’s forgotten I am there. But the word penetrates, and he looks at me. “Yeah.”

“What’s wrong, Jude?”

He nods to his left, to the counter, where a rumpled newspaper
hides his canvas bag. The front page has a story about me and Wild Rise and
Bake-Off
. The reporter also wrote a sidebar about Jude and his art bread.

“Yesterday’s
Gazette
?”

“My dad, he doesn’t care about the bread. None of them do. Pops gave the bakeries to them, you know? My dad, Uncle Ray, and Aunt Jilly. She makes cupcakes now, mostly. My dad and uncle bought out her part of the business, she changed the name of the place and wears a poodle skirt and covers everything in pink frosting. Dad and Uncle Ray partnered up and everything is made in a factory now. Conveyor belts and all that. I think that kills Pops more than anything. He don’t say it, but it’s obvious.

“Charlie—my brother—already works there with Dad. He’s vice president of something and something else. My other brother Pete graduates next year with his MBA and has some other vice-president-whatever-else waiting with his name on it. You know what good ol’ dad told me? There’ll always be a job for me on the line, if I want it. Yeah, the assembly line. That’s all I’m good for.” He brushes flour from the table; it curls around the room, like smoke, and settles on our feet, both of us in running shoes.

“I don’t—”

“I’m dyslexic,” he says. “I can hardly read, and forget it if it’s above a second-grade level. So I sucked in school. My brothers were both valedictorians. Dad only gives a care about success. His boys, his business. Whatever. I’ve always been an embarrassment to his perfect family. His perfect little screw-up.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “But, Jude, what you can do with bread, it’s amazing. Even more so knowing it hasn’t come from books or research. It’s all you.”

“Yeah? Well, Dad’s amazed too. He saw the article. Some customer around here sent him a link to it online. He called me last night, wants me to come home. Said he had no idea. Said he wants to
find a place for me in the family business. He stressed the word
family
. He talked about responsibility. Said he’d get me whatever tutors or help or whatever I needed to get through high school and graduate. He told me he was proud of me. Proud. Of me. Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear those words?

“And I hung up on him. Because it’s all crap. He only wants me now that I can do something for him. Not before. Never before.”

He cries like the child he is, loud, bubbling sobs, and I think,
I can be solid for him
. Like Seamus had been for me a few days ago. So I go and tighten my arms around his thin body, and he wets my neck with mucous and spit and tear film, and when he’s finished, I toss him a towel and wipe my own skin dry. Then I pile the table with flour and bowls and measuring spoons and yeast and jars of sourdough starter and salt. “Go ahead,” I say, and we create together.

What is so mystical about bread that superstitions follow from the moment man conceived it to this very day? The wheat, from the ground. The yeast, from the air. The dough, alive, breathing, growing, giving itself up for the people. The gods find it acceptable, the priests use it in their rituals, the magicians want to harness its power. And yet what goes into bread is common, vulgar even, available to anyone who will pick and grind and create fire to bake.

Sacred
and
profane.

What people go through to appease the earth and, in turn, urge the forces of nature to cooperate in the cycle of bread. They carry these rituals with them well into the Middle Ages. Eggs are placed before the plow at the first groundbreaking of the season. If the egg breaks, the soil has accepted the offering. Postpartum women, people with coughs and other respiratory disease, and the dead may not—must not—come near a field. Spirits live in the grain; it quivers and sways with their presence. But the too-quiet, too-still stalks are also
feared. This is the
noontide ghost
, the air hot and golden and unmoving above the tips of wheat.

In some cultures, the last harvested sheaf is dressed in clothes and mocked by women prancing around it. In others, it’s honored, left unthreshed and spread over the fallow field in reverence. And during the blustery, violent winter nights, farmers praying to be saved from the storm empty sacks of flour onto the wind.