Stones for Bread (37 page)

In the tsunami of events recently—Jonathan Scott’s offer, Xavier’s death, everything defined and undefined with Seamus—I’ve been able to sidestep most of the emotional turmoil of the adoption revelation.
Most
. It’s been difficult not having the long hours at the bakehouse to keep focused elsewhere. Years of avoidance, however, have given me an arsenal of techniques to stuff feelings, so if one fails me, I try another.

This week I tried reading the Bible.

Sleeping kept the memories from snapping at my heels, so I didn’t get out of bed until close to noon. However, those hours after dinner, when tiredness won’t come because I’ve dozed the better part of the day, those are the difficult hours to fill. I moved to another of my most trusted approaches: organizing something. This time it was my closet. I stripped the hangers of my clothes and sorted them into items I would keep and items I’d donate. I swept storm clouds of dust from the floor, piles thick enough to be spun to yarn, like the roving on the fiber tour my first time out with Seamus and Cecelia. I restacked the items on my topmost shelves. And, in doing all this, I found the Bible I stuffed up there because I couldn’t stand it accusing me of unfaithfulness when it was somewhere I saw it every day.

I remember my father, when he first began attending church with a coworker, spending so much time with the Word flopped open on his lap, scrutinizing and underlining, the message a salve for the gaping chasm left by my mother’s suicide. One flesh torn asunder, like a man who’s lost half of himself in battle. I was jealous of his spiritual attentions. I wanted him to continue hurting as I hurt, for us to be fused in our grief. I never expected him to begin healing, and despite knowing even today that my father isn’t whole again, he’s much closer to it than I am.

So I opened the book, hardly larger than my hand with an olive faux-leather cover embossed with a swirly cross. The ribbon marker rested somewhere in Romans. I scanned the first passage my eyes fell on.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

I’ve heard this passage before, used to spur those in the pews to adopt children. If God adopts us, the argument goes, should we not emulate him and do the same? Not to mention all the other times we’re told to care for orphans. It doesn’t help me think more positively of my own circumstances. I’m confused, disoriented, and in some ways, I question my entire existence.

There is anger too, and it’s directed, unexpectedly, at my mother.

It’s been there since the hours after I found her, simmering, a pot of linguini on the back burner, heat turned up too high. The water foams and threatens to overflow, but I always snatch the pot away in time, moving it to a cool place until the torrents subside.
She was ill. She didn’t know what she was doing
. I can’t allow myself to be mad at her, though. It means—

No. I won’t consider this today.

Jude sits hunched in the corner, Tee standing over him, a diminutive sentinel in black slacks and turtleneck and turban of silk around her bald head. He wears his everyday jeans but his newly dyed hair shimmers black like crow feathers. He stares at his scuffed boots. She presses an embroidered handkerchief to her nose, moving it left or right to absorb her tears before they travel all the way down her face.

“You’re crying,” I say.

She must hear disbelief in my voice. “It is my sadness. I am able to have it.”

“I know, but—” I stop myself from the rest of it, the
you never liked him anyway
, because it’s a repulsive thing to say. Death is here, she weeps for it. It doesn’t matter if Xavier was her least favorite person in the world.

Tee is no fool. She reaches for my hand, holds it open, palm up, and bunches her handkerchief into it. Then she curls my fingers around it. “You take. The compassion I have, maybe you wipe it on you. Maybe you see something not your bread,” she says, and she walks briskly toward the ladies’ restroom.

“Tee is Tee,” I mumble, as if her behavior excuses my own, and cram the hankie in my sweater pocket. To Jude, I say, “You’re really staying with her?”

“Pops would want me to. She acts all tough and whatever, but when she’s home you can see how sick and tired all those cancer drugs make her.” He sticks his finger through a shredded patch of denim, close to his knee. “Nan was like that.”

Nan. His grandmother. Xavier’s Annie.

I start to ask how he is managing, but a man approaches, one of the dark suit brigade, his silver shirt and tie the same color. His stomach hangs over his belt and the skin of his face seeps downward, toward his neck, pooling in a fleshy wattle beneath his chin. He reaches us and holds out one fat hand. “Bill Potter.”

“Liesl McNamara,” I say, shaking it. Now it’s my turn to guard Jude, and I push in closer to him, resting my arm across his shoulders. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Yes, of course. But my father led a full life. That’s the way to go, in your sleep, isn’t it?”

“I imagine so.”

“We should all be so fortunate.” He adjusts his pants, tugging
them up at the waist. “Well, we’re starting soon. But I wanted to introduce myself.”

“It’s good to meet you.”

“That it is. And I do understand how you might be somewhat . . . shorthanded now. In the bakery. If that changes how you feel about possible business decisions, please feel free to get in touch with me. I’m still very interested in potentially working with you.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I say. “But I’m sure Jude will be able to step in and handle things just fine.”

The man nods. “Jude.”

“Dad.”

And he limps off to the front, where a similar-looking man, slightly thinner, slightly taller, his shirt and tie navy blue, talks with the rent-a-chaplain. Jude half-whispers something I think I hear, a string of words found in rated-R movies. I drag the closest unoccupied chair next to him and sit. “Are you okay?”

“How can Pops and I be related to that?”

“I hear chronic imbecility usually skips a generation.”

Jude allows himself the tiniest grin. “What does that say for my kids?”

“Two generations, then.”

I hold Jude’s hand between both of mine as the memorial begins. I wish Seamus had been able to come; Cecelia took ill with a stomach virus this afternoon. He called after picking her up from the school nurse’s office to say he would be home serving ginger ale and saltines to his little girl, and most likely cleaning vomit from the bathroom floor. Had he been here, he could be a citadel for Jude and me. I need something between us and the rest of this place.

Xavier’s sons and daughter speak. Some of the grandchildren too—both of Jude’s brothers and two younger girls. Then the chaplain blabs his regular script about the frailty of life, appreciating everyday blessings, and how Xavier has moved on to that elusive-sounding
better place
.

His words crush me, their weight heavier than the wood on the back of Simon the Cyrene.

Never once did I speak of faith with Xavier.

I begin to cry.

“Liesl?” Jude asks.

I wave him off and leave for the restroom, jiggle the handle. Locked. A woman waiting beside the door says, “There’s a line.” I push outside instead, sucking lungfuls of late October air, steam pouring from my nose and mouth. I shiver, legs bare, soul fractured, and the door opens again. It’s Jude. He stands frozen for a second, and then shakes out of his hooded sweatshirt and wraps it around me.

“I didn’t tell him. About God,” I say, voice rough with mucus.

“I did.”

I wait for more, but instead he removes a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his front jeans pocket and shakes one into his hand, closes the end between his lips as he lights it with a Bic he fishes from another pocket. Inhales until the tobacco burns brimstone red.

His smoke joins my breath, whorling into the evening sky.

As much as the bakers of the Middle Ages are mistrusted, the bakers of ancient Rome are revered. But they must have something with which to make bread. When the empire begins, Italy does have grain, more than it needs to feed its people. As the years turn to decades and the decades to centuries, the wealthy landholders find it more lucrative to raise sheep and cattle. The poor farmers—formerly soldiers given small parcels in payment for battles well fought—can no longer afford to grow wheat and move to the cities for their families’ survival. The grain must come from somewhere because the people demand their bread. So Rome takes it from the
bread lands
it conquers: Egypt, Spain, North Africa, Sardinia, England.

As cities grow in Italy, so do populations. Many of these people
are unemployed and receive free grain by order of the emperor. The provisions stave off revolts and civil unrest. Eventually bread is given instead of wheat, each person receiving two loaves each day, and at times more than three hundred thousand people flood the streets of Rome for their share. When the right to receive the dole is declared hereditary, the urban poor begin having more and more children.

While Italy feasts, other countries throughout the empire are stripped of their wheat and forced to send it far away for those who did not toil for it to fill their bellies. The people of the bread lands go to sleep at night without bread. And it’s into this hungry world Jesus is born.

It’s my father’s turn to show up unexpectedly, sitting on the top step leading to the apartment when I arrive home from the funeral. His arms are across his knees, head kinked in the crook of his elbow, wheezing in that light, uncomfortable sleep way. As soon as I climb the first stair he opens his eyes and finds his glasses between his feet, slips them on.

“You said you weren’t coming for the service,” I say. I don’t want him here—he’s intruding in my mourning. “And anyway, you missed it.”

“I’m here for you,” Alistair says.

I unlock the door. “You could have just called me.”

He peers over the top of his lenses, his face contorting into some expression more at home on the face of a teenaged girl, one who can’t believe her best friend forever is dating the class clown. And we both chuckle in that family way because neither of our telephone habits lend themselves to communication. I unlock the door and he follows me inside, removing his coat but not his scarf, a camel-and-red wool plaid he’s had for as long as I can remember. My mother bought it for him, I’m certain. Another trait we share, being unable to rid ourselves of anything related to her. He keeps her clothes in the attic. Her teas, now more than twenty years old, still stacked in a kitchen cabinet. Her
cosmetics in the bottom vanity drawer. I have her bread, of course. I’d say it’s a family thing, a genetic propensity, but I know better now. Nature. Nurture. None of it makes sense to me any longer.

I offer him coffee. He declines. I sit on the loveseat and he takes the wing chair across from me, crosses his legs, slips his finger inside his loafer, and itches the underside of his foot. I wait; my silence tortures him. Finally, he says, “I did call and leave a message.”

“I know.”

“How was the funeral?”

Shrugging, I say, “Like any other, I guess.”

“You were close to him. I’m sorry.”

“These things happen.”

I don’t want this harshness between us. It oozes from one of those lesions I try to keep undisturbed, but in my despair over Xavier and the confusion of my adoption I’m unable to control it. My father shuts his eyes and lets the barbed words slice over him. “I deserve your anger.”

“I’m not angry—”

“You are. It’s allowed. We keep too many things shut up inside, Liesl.” He shakes his head. “Not this too.”

“All right. I am mad. I understand why you and Mom didn’t tell me about . . . things. All of it. But I can’t stop feeling like, I don’t know. Not that my life has been a lie, exactly. You both weren’t a lie. Your love for me. I suppose I feel displaced. I thought I fit somewhere. Now I don’t. It really, really hurts.”