Stones for Bread (5 page)

I’m there too.

I tell myself it’s because it’s the bakehouse, and no one but Xavier and I are allowed in there alone. Half-truths are easy, but they’re always only half. Eventually the other side bobs to the surface and demands attention.

The room fills quickly. I nod to Ryan as he shakes hands and
welcomes each person who comes through the door. He smiles and waves me over, but I hover near the counter, watching plates fill with fruit salad and triangles of turkey and ham sandwiches, today’s offerings. In the center of each table a loaf of my bread—extra from yesterday—has been placed.

I lean into the kitchen door; it opens for me, accepting me into the solitude of the back room. More self-imposed isolation. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve; after twenty-one years it’s my body’s natural response, those neural pathways firmly established, and I tell myself I can’t expect to act differently.

I’ve only been navigating this faith thing slightly longer than I’ve been running Wild Rise, and I’m much, much better at bread. But these Sundays make me hungry for more.

Monday through Saturday I have no time to be empty. From the moment I wake in the still-dark early hours to the moment I fall asleep each night, my hands stay busy, my mind churns with business and baking, and if a wisp of loneliness somehow manages to invade my day, I brush it away with a wave, like smoke. Like flour dust. The first three Sundays of the month are not much more difficult. I usually set my alarm with every intention of making it to church. Sometimes I do, but mostly I toss restlessly between sleep and excuses until noon. I get up, eat, run errands, and catch a sermon or two on the radio while I prep the next day’s dough. It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. But I can’t seem to do differently. And during
Sanctus dies Solis
, that still-undernourished part of me cries out, unable to be ignored. I promise myself I’ll get to services or open my Bible. The conviction never lasts past Monday morning, though, once the hustle becomes bustle and I can feed that emptiness with tasks galore.

For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do
.

Thirsty, I drink a glass of cool water in long, loud gulps, counting how many it takes to finish. Six swallows, or seven, if I count the residual moisture my throat instinctively pulls from my mouth at the
end. Then I nab one of Tee’s tomatoes and eat it like an apple. I’ll have to replace it before tomorrow, and even then, she’ll somehow know it’s not the same one she bought, even if I bury it under the nineteen other ones in the bag. Seeds drip over my fingers; as I rinse them, I hear Ryan’s voice. I stand by the door, shoulder propping it open enough for me to understand his words. He speaks on community, on the inherent need humans have because we are created in the image of the Godhead to be in close fellowship with one another. Without it, we shrivel. Without it, we deny who He made us to be. “And even if you think you don’t need it,” he says, “you do. Sorry, folks. No one can go it alone and experience the fullness He has for them.”

I wriggle quietly through the door as the message ends. Several weekday customers gesture, so I weave through the tables and make small talk with them and others. “Liesl. Liesl,” a small voice calls, and I look around until I see a bobbing blond girl at the back, waving her arm in the air.

Cecelia.

She sits next to her father, that sloppy lug of a truck driver. What was his name? Something odd and Irish, I think. Ryan stands behind them; he motions to me too.

“Liesl, I take it you’ve already met Seamus Tate and his daughter, Cecelia?”

“I have, yes.”

“The Tates moved here not too long ago and have been attending Green Mountain Community for the past month,” Ryan says. He notices a young family making their way to the front door. “Excuse me, would you?”

Seamus takes a quiet bite from the corner of his sandwich. Cecelia plucks a purple grape from the fruit salad and begins tearing the skin from it. “Do you like green grapes or purple ones better, Liesl?”

“Green, I think. Are you peeling that?”

“I don’t like the skin. And once it’s off, it feels like an eyeball.”

“Oh. Have you felt many eyeballs?”

“No, but once in preschool there was a Halloween party and we had to stick our hands into boxes but we couldn’t see what we were touching. One box was s’posed to be eyeballs, but they were just grapes without the skin on. I peeked.”

“Oh.”

Cecelia stood up on the chair then, tall enough to whisper loudly at the side of my face, “Daddy doesn’t like Halloween and we don’t go trick-or-treating, but he let me go to the party anyway.”

“Honey, sit. And stop talking Liesl’s ear off,” Seamus says. He looks at her, not me.

“Sorry.” She jumps to the floor. “What are you doing today? Do you have to bake more bread?”

“Not today,” I tell the girl. “But later I’ll prepare some dough.”

“How much later?”

I shrug. “Probably close to your bedtime.”

“Oh, good,” she says, clapping twice. “Then you can come with us.”

Seamus glances up now. A crumb clings to his beard. Not my bread. The packaged kind used by whoever made the sandwiches. “Cecelia, don’t bother Liesl. I’m sure she’s plenty busy today.”

“Oh, please, please, let her go. Please, Liesl.”

“Um, go where?”

“To the farm. For the fiber tour.”

“The what?”

“It’s this thing where people involved in the artisan fiber industry open their farms and businesses to the public to learn more about it,” Seamus says. “I’m sure it wouldn’t interest you. I’m sorry for Cecelia’s exuberance.”

“She’d like it, Daddy. We get to pet sheep and see alpacas and sometimes there’s cotton candy too. If she wants to go, can she? Please, please, please?”

He narrowed his eyes at the girl in that way parents do when their
children force them into an awkward corner and they can’t escape without either looking like a fool or breaking their little ones’ hearts. As soon as the expression comes, however, it softens. He itches his beard and the crumb falls away. “Of course she can. If she wants to, she can.”

Cecelia turns her face to me. It shines with hopefulness, and that part of me that I don’t want to exist, the one that needs people, the one that comes awake on these Sundays, drinks in her light. And it says to me,
More
.

“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

Yeast
. The word comes to us through Old English, from the Indo-European root
yes—
meaning boil, foam, bubble. It does all those things, and more. And would it not be the Egyptians, who construct the largest, most sophisticated buildings in the land, to also harness the tiniest microbe?

Of course, they know nothing of yeast. To them, it is magic.

They are called the
bread eaters
. “Dough they knead with their feet, but clay with their hands,” Herodotus wrote with derision. The Egyptians do not care. They understand their bread is from the gods, for king and peasant alike. They invent ovens to bake this new, breath-filled dough because it cannot be cooked like the flat breads they know first. They construct clay vessels to hold it. They watch it rise in the heat. They add butter and eggs and honey and coriander, and save soured dough from one batch to add to the next. They eat.

They live.

It becomes a symbol of morality; a beggar is never to be denied bread. It becomes the cornerstone of their society, their currency. The poor are paid three loaves a day, the temple priests nine hundred fine wheat breads a year. Pharaohs have an abundance for this life and the next.

But the ancient bakers are not only magicians. They are artists, creating shapes limited only by imagination. Spirals and cones and shells. Fish and birds and pyramids. Does each shape have significance, each flavor its own power? Perhaps. Or perhaps even the ancients created only to create, celebrating beauty for beauty’s sake.

And what is lovelier than warm bread?

Seamus insists on taking his truck, so I struggle into the front seat after Cecelia. She wriggles into the center, sticks her hand deep into the cushion to fish out the belt. “Here’s one. And here’s two,” she says, metal fasteners clanging. She clicks the seat belt into place and pulls the end.

“Not tight enough,” Seamus says. He gives the strap another tug.

“I can’t breathe.”

“Any looser and you’ll slip out.”

She squirms and tugs at her waist. “Daddy.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, “just a little.” He unlatches the belt, pretends to lengthen it, and buckles her in again. “Better?”

She fills her belly with a deep gulp of air. Exhales. Nods. “Much.”

Seamus meets my eye, the thinnest smile at one corner of his mouth. He starts the truck; it wheezes like an old man, emphysema in the exhaust. Cecelia drapes her legs on my side of the gearshift; they don’t stop moving, her sandaled feet constantly scraping up against my leg. Dirt smudges my pants. I try not to reach down and rub it away.

They’re my favorite pair.

The truck rattles around us. Conversing is an effort, the words vibrating into pieces difficult to hear. Seamus and I try to exchange a few polite sentences, but after a few minutes we fall into a concentrated silence—him staring out the windshield, me counting trees on the side of the road. Cecelia talks enough for all of us, about anything and everything. Kindergarten. Her rabbit she gave away when they
moved from Massachusetts. All the things she wants to do this summer. And then, her mother.

“She left us.” Her legs jiggle faster.

Seamus tightens his grip on the shifter, skin thinning over his knuckles until I worry the bones will burst through.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Daddy says she doesn’t know how to love us ’cause she never learned it.” The girl’s cheeks tremble. “I didn’t know loving was something you hafta get taught.”

“My mother died when I was young,” I tell her. “It still hurts not to have her around.”

“Did she love you and your dad?”

“Very much.”

Cecelia chews the end of her ponytail. She pokes the buttons on the cassette player without turning the radio on. Fiddles with the tuning knob and opens the vents, blowing her bangs back with stale, barely cool air. “Have you been married before? I know you’re not now.”

“Oh really?” I give her a little pinch in the side. She giggles. “How, may I ask, do you know that?”

“Because you don’t have a ring on. Daddy says you always hafta look for the ring.”

“Okay,” Seamus says, his fleshy ears glowing pink. “We don’t have to tell Liesl all our secrets at once.”

We turn, and turn, and turn again, each time my elbow banging against the metal door, on farm roads now where the pavement has been all but driven away. The truck bounces us through ruts and potholes, churning loose stone up beneath it.

Cecelia continues her chattering, now about the small garden she planted all by herself, stressing those words.
All. By. My. Self
. She has snap peas and two bean bushes, a couple of cucumber vines, and one tomato plant. Leaning close to me, she holds her hand up to her
mouth and whispers, “I didn’t grow the tomato from a seed. Daddy bought it for me from the market. Does that still count?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay, everybody,” Seamus says, coming to a stop on the shoulder, a steep embankment on my side of the truck. “You might want to get out over here.”

“I’m good,” I say, pushing open the door. It swings wide, handle out of reach, so I cling to the seat belt and lower myself into the tangle of grass below. Cecelia scrambles out backward on her father’s side and he catches her. With them out of sight, I take a moment to brush at the scuff mark on my pants. It doesn’t come off.

Outside the cab of the truck, silence grows over Cecelia, thick as ivy on the walls of a manor house, and she melts into her father’s thick body, behind it the stone wall surrounding the home. The sparkling, talkative girl from the previous hour is gone, replaced with this nearly invisible one.

We wander around the farm for a little while. Cecelia feeds the goats, cranking quarters into the red machines and catching handfuls of pellets for the billies to nibble from her fingers. Then we move on to the sheep, who seem bored with all the attention they’re receiving, the petting and baby talk animals inevitably bring. They chew and stare in calm, ordered lines against the fence. “Aren’t you a pretty girl? Yes, you are. So pretty,” coos the woman next to me.