Stones for Bread (6 page)

“Gross,” a boy with her says. He’s about twelve. “They smell like sh—”

“Gregory.” The mother grabs the skin of his upper arm and twists. “Watch your mouth.”

The boy pulls away. “Ow, geez, Mom. Don’t be so psycho.”

Quietly, Cecelia lifts her hand from the ewe’s back and creeps it up toward her face. Wrinkles her nose. Her father pumps liquid sanitizer into her palm. She rubs and then flaps her hands in the air.

“What next, pumpkin?” Seamus asks. “Thirsty?”

“Not yet.”

We pass a gray-haired woman at a spinning wheel. Its compact style and blond wood look nothing like the wheel next to it, one of those tall, thin antique ones. The woman pumps both feet against the pedals and smiles at Cecelia. “Want to try?”

She shakes her head.

“How about you?”

“Me? I don’t think so,” I say.

“Yes, Liesl, you try,” Cecelia says.

It did look soothing, the subtle swaying motion of the woman’s head, the rhythmic up-and-down of her naked feet against cool wood. I think of the home I grew up in, the sheen of pine and oak and maple all around us because my mother loved it so much.

“Okay. Sure.”

I sit. The woman points at the wheel and throws out terms—maiden, flyer, staple length, double treadle—then gives me the wad of gray wool. It’s coarser than I expect, slightly greasy. My hands rebel at the unfamiliar texture, fingers curling too tightly into it. I push my chest forward, arching my back, settling my tailbone into the stool. “Now,” she says, “you want to stretch and feed the roving onto the bobbin in one smooth motion.” She turns the wheel manually; my feet move with the treadle, and I try to draft the wool but I only understand dough. My hands are too clumsy for spinning. The yarn is so fat in some places it won’t fit through the eye, so thin in other places it simply falls away like cotton candy. “You need to breathe,” the woman instructs. “And be gentle. Don’t strangle the fiber.”

Cecelia is giggling behind her hair, which she’s wrapped over her mouth. “You’re making faces, Liesl. Like this.” She shakes her ponytail away and crosses her eyes, brows and nose scrunching together. Even Seamus tries not to laugh.

I hold on to the roving too long and it spirals around itself until it snaps.

“That’s it. I give up.”

“It takes practice,” the woman says, “sometimes.”

“I think Daddy should try,” Cecelia says.

“That’s a great idea,” I say. “Let’s see how you do, Mr. Delivery Man.”

My words hurt him. His shoulder twitches and he slides his eyes away from mine. But he nods and says, “Sure,” and waits for me to stand. Then he takes my place, his booted feet as large as the treadles. The woman stutters a few words of warning, clearly worried this bull of a man will crush her precious wheel.

Gently, he begins spinning. One perfectly drafted ply of yarn twists from his giant hands, as if he is Arachne’s son, human or spider it doesn’t matter, it comes away from him lovelier than even the demonstrator herself can make.

“You’ve done this before,” the woman says.

“A few times.” Seamus unseats himself, pulling the legs of the stool out from the ground, having sunk under his weight.

Cecelia, so pleased her father has surprised his audience, wraps her arms around his waist and hugs her face into his stomach. He presses her head deeper into him.

“Did you know he could do that?” I ask her.

Her eyes crinkle in impish delight. “Uh-huh.”

“Okay, missy, I see how you are.”

She simply laughs, her shyness freed a little in the shared victory with her father. “Can I feed the goats again?” Seamus fishes a handful of quarters from his pocket and she takes them, palms cupped together, before walking down the dirt path toward the animal enclosure.

I look at him. “Well.”

“Sorry,” he says, and he smiles so I know he’s beyond his annoyance. “But you were asking for it, kind of.”

“I suppose I was.”

He motions toward Cecelia, who keeps glancing back at us. “We
should head down there. She’s getting better, but she’s still worried she’ll lose me.”

We walk, and Seamus waves at the girl. She waves back and plunks another coin into the machine. Even from here, I can see more feed falls to the weeds below than into her hand. I find an elastic hair band in one of the cargo pockets of my pants and gather my hair into it; it feels dry, tangled from the farm dust and the wind.

“So, you’re not going to tell me?” I say finally.

“You mean the spinning? It’s no big deal. My parents were hippies in the seventies and eighties. We lived on a commune with a bunch of other back-to-self-sufficiency types and one of the men taught me.”

“Were hippies? I take it they’re not anymore.”

Seamus buzzes his lips in amusement. “Heck no. My folks divorced right after I graduated high school. Dad left my mother for some actress-slash-model-slash-waitress and went to LA. I hear from him once a year at Christmas. I stayed in New England, bumped around for college and work. Mom moved just outside Nashville and opened a dog grooming parlor. She lives in a condo and votes Republican now. Whoever would’ve thunk it.”

“People change.”

“That they do.”

Sometimes right in front of your eyes
.

We meet Cecelia and she says, “Someone gave me a bag to use,” holding up a small Ziploc she’s filled with pellets. “Take some too, Liesl.”

I do, offering the mound to the goat on its back legs right there next to me. I feel its tongue, rough and slick. But my eyes are on Seamus, kneeling behind his daughter, their heads so close they’re touching as he holds his hand beneath hers to catch any wayward feed. She pulls her arm back as soon as she’s nuzzled, wiping the saliva on her shorts. He kisses her cheek, and she wipes it away before patting his unruly beard. Their silent ritual. Seamus raises his
equally wild brows and then tilts his chin into her neck, rubbing it back and forth as she laughs with her entire six-year-old body. And the goat at the fence continues to lick between my fingers, cleaning away every crumb of the old Seamus, the inconsiderate, sloppy, truck-driving oaf who tracked dirt through my bakehouse, leaving only the Seamus who spins wool better than Athena herself and who loves his little girl with abandon.

Four

I’m older, ten, old enough to sense sadness the way only a woman can, though it takes me longer than one who has been through all the things yet to come to me—cramps and discharge, nine months of swelling, birth, forever good-byes, the casual, careless words of a lover slicing all the way through to tendon. My intuition isn’t sharp yet. That sensitivity comes with years, sprouting like the first tiny hairs under a young girl’s arms, the ones she only notices when some boy teases her about it while she dangles from a tree branch, and immediately she knows she’s passed into some new realm.

The kingdom of Womanhood.

It’s in the air when I walk in, but before I notice it, I see the bread. It covers the counters, the top of the refrigerator, the table. My mother stands in the center of the floor, facing me. I open my mouth to make a joke, something clever about exploding loaves, but the smell of mourning overpowers the crustiness in the air and I stop.
What’s wrong?

Your grandmother is dead
.

I’ve never heard my mother speak in this tone. It’s utterly flat,
like paper, and so blank I almost miss it as the words float past me. The corner of the hard
d
hooks my ear, though, and the rest of the sentence stops with it as my brain does the deciphering, winding each letter in.

I snap.

I grab one loaf after another from the counter and smash them against the floor, grind them beneath my feet.
No
, I scream, and the words are not flat or blank. They blaze with a pain I have never experienced before.

My mother takes me against her. I still hold a boule, and as she squeezes me I dig my fingers into the soft bread and imagine it’s my own face I’m tearing apart.
No, no, no
, I repeat until the bread disintegrates between us and my voice runs out. Mother finally unwraps me and wipes my face with her apron. I drop the remaining loaf, my body swaying with weakness as my emotions drain away.

She leaves the room, only for a moment, and I hear the closet in the hallway open, shut. She returns with the broom and dustpan. I reach for her, but my hand closes around the broom handle and I accept that instead, lean into it, and it holds my body upright.

It’s grief
, my mother says.
All of it
.

Placing the dustpan on the floor, she comes behind me and begins moving the broom, rocking me and sweeping broken bread all at the same time. I lean back against her. She hums and we sweep, and she tells me,
It will come again, Liesl. Grief always does. And in the face of it, you’ll need to decide if you’ll step over the pieces and leave them to be trampled, or if you’ll gather them up for salvage
.

I don’t know what salvage means, but understand the crumbs cannot stay on the floor. We finish cleaning, the mess emptied into a bentwood basket given to my mother by Oma; it carried some of their belongings from Germany to their new home here in America. Mother hands it to me and I open the lid of the trash pail, but she stops me.
Take it outside for the animals
.

I do, sowing the pieces like seeds beneath the Rose of Sharon where the hummingbirds come for nectar. Before I finish, a chipmunk scampers over from its hiding place in the drain spout, pads its cheeks full of bread with disconcertingly human-like hands, and runs away toward the greenhouse, carrying my grief with it.

Cecelia blows bubbles into her chocolate milk through a straw, the sticky sacs of air mounding at the top of her glass and then popping, one by one, splattering tiny droplets onto the table. It annoys me, the
glub-glub-glub
sound, but she takes such delight in her frothy accomplishments I can’t bring myself to stop her. I have Gretchen swing through with a damp rag and wipe the mess every few minutes.

Tee gives her the milk so dark it looks like the Mississippi flooded into the cup. I can’t imagine Tee using any sort of bottled Hershey’s or Nesquik, and I’m right. She makes her own syrup, whisking Dutch-process cocoa and home-brewed vanilla extract with sugar and salt and water. And her secret ingredient, which she pulls from her pocket in a little fabric pouch and sprinkles over the boiling pot, scowling at me when I peek at her a few seconds too long. That’s the other reason I won’t tell Cecelia to stop slurping and splashing, because Tee doesn’t leave for another twenty minutes. She’s taken what my father would call “a shine” to the girl, and heaven help anyone who crosses Tee and the things she loves. I see how she protects her skillet and the apples for tomorrow’s soup. This is her
zayka
, her little bunny.

Gretchen and I bag the leftover bread; I leave two loaves of white sandwich aside for Seamus to take with him when he picks up Cecelia, which could be in ten minutes or two hours. I don’t mind. I’m here and the girl is no trouble. And I suppose it was my idea.

Two Fridays ago Seamus arrived with my flour delivery, late as usual but yet to make the same mistake as he did the first time, dragging a mess through the bakehouse. He brought in the bags
and handed me a clipboard to sign, his manner much more brisk and unfriendly than usual. Then Cecelia’s face appeared between our elbows.

“I told you to wait in the truck,” Seamus said.

“I know, but I wanted to see Liesl.” She shifted from one leg to another. “And I hafta, you know.”

“Can she use your restroom?”

“Sure, of course,” I said. “Gretchen can take you.”

“I know where it is,” Cecelia said, glancing around the kitchen. She wrinkled her nose. “Once I get out of here.”

“Come on, honey. Through this door,” Gretchen said, leading with a hand gently pressed on her shoulder blade.

“Thanks,” Seamus said. “And sorry. She had someone watching her after school, but I just can’t manage that anymore. Not with all the money I just put into this stinkin’ clunker.” He jabbed his thumb at the truck.

“So she rides around with you?”

“I try to finish up by five so she won’t have to sit too long. But, yeah. I pick her up at two thirty and, well, that’s that.”

Seamus looked smaller. His size hadn’t changed, but the layer of pride we all have beneath our skin, the one reminding us how well we care for our own, that had lost some of its girth. I’d seen it in my own father, as one business venture after another failed. In my mother, as dishes piled up and cocoons of dust huddled in corners and her
dark moments
overcame her. No one should have to shrink this way. “I guess you could bring her here.”

“What?”

“After school. She can stay here.”

“You’re serious?”

“Gretchen leaves at five, and I’m always in the kitchen until at least seven. She can do her homework or whatever.”

“She’s in kindergarten.”

“Then she can do whatever she does while she’s driving around in the truck with you.”

Seamus laughed. “Talk, mostly.”

“I believe it.”

“Liesl, thank you.” And then he crowed. Literally lifted his fists into the air and
cock-a-doodle-doo
ed like a fat, fortyish Peter Pan. When he brought his arms down, he closed them around me, the briefest squeeze, but long enough for me to breathe in Mennen and the workday soured on his shirt. He went, holding his daughter’s hand, some of his plumpness returned.