Stones for Bread (2 page)

The sauce is next. “You only need a little,” I tell them as they splash spoonfuls onto the raw crusts, their shredded mozzarella cheese floating in a puddle of red. Most of the children add pepperoni in a smiley-face pattern, and then my apprentice, Gretchen, gathers the peels for baking.

“How long before it’s done?” they want to know.

“About ten minutes,” I say. “Until then, who can tell me something about bread? It can be something you learned today, or even something you already had tucked in your brain.” I tap my index finger against my temple as I say those last four words, one word for
each beat. The children laugh and waggle their hands in the air, above their heads. I begin by motioning to a petite, flame-haired girl.

“Bread can be made from beans and nuts,” she says.

“I’m allergic to nuts,” the girl next to her whines, her flat face pink and indignant.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh, pick me,” the dark-eyed boy at the end of the table calls out. He’s bigger than the other children, and his thick brows meet in the middle.

“Yes . . . Kalel,” I say, reading his hat.

He clears his throat and stands. “Yeasts go into bread at the start. The more they eat, the more they—”

“Thank you, Kalel,” the teacher says, but the other children have already filled in the missing word. They giggle and whisper to one another.

I give the teacher a sideways look. “He’s six?”

“Seven. He started school a year later,” she says, voice puckering with familiar exasperation.

I gather the remaining answers, calling each child by name. The last girl to respond—Cecelia—says, “Jesus fed lots of people with only five loaves of bread.”

More nudging and tittering. Cecelia melts into her chair, reaches behind her shoulder to find the end of her long, blond braid, and sticks it in her mouth.

“Who wants to eat?” Gretchen asks, returning from the kitchen with seven plates. She remembers who belongs to which pizza and warns them to wait for their food to cool. “There’s nothing worse than burning your tongue on hot cheese.”

The children drink fresh-squeezed lemonade, slurping the last drops from the bottom of the cups and scooping out the ice to eat, some with their fingers, some with their straws. Kalel uses a fork. Gretchen and I slice their pizza into wedges. The two boys sit at one end of the table. Four of the girls huddle together in the center,
so close their elbows keep tangling. And Cecelia at the other end, alone.

“I liked your answer,” I tell her, taking the chair between her and the gaggle of girls, my body a fortification between her and the others.

Her hazel eyes shine. “Really?”

“Really, really.”

“I learned that in Sunday school last time I went.”

A customer comes into the bakehouse. Elise Braden, devoted librarian and Thursday regular, because she loves the Anadama sandwich loaves sold only one day each week. I make twelve and she buys three. “I don’t know why you can’t have them all the time, Liesl,” she says as she hands me eleven dollars.

“Because I’m only one person,” I say, giving her two quarters change.

Elise Braden grins. “You could hire better help.”

“Hey, I heard that,” Gretchen calls from the back of the shop. She’s soaking up spilled lemonade from beneath Kalel’s pendulous sneakers. “I’m wounded. I thought I was your favorite library patron.”

“Convince Liesl to have this bread every day and you will be. And,” the slightly stooped woman says, “I’ll cancel your overdue fines.”

“You don’t need it every day,” I say. “You buy plenty of it to last all week.”

“Ah, yes. But it tastes much better fresh.”

A few more patrons come for lunch. I wait on them, though it’s usually Gretchen’s job. She relates better with the students, no matter the ages, stepping into their worlds, drawing them out, connecting. Perhaps it’s her college coursework in anthropology. Perhaps it’s who she is, relaxed and round and fizzy. I have too many angles for people to get close.

It’s one thirty when the kindergarten class finishes eating. I thank them for coming on the field trip and give them each a loaf of chocolate sourdough to take home with them. I pack the bread in paper
bags. Six of them are printed with the shop’s name in the center. The seventh has the words
I am the Bread of Life
stamped in front of a simple line drawing of two umber ears of wheat. I give that bag to Cecelia.

Until the most recent of human history, bread came with a price. Touted as simple wholesomeness, it is deceptive in its humility, requiring more painstaking labor than any other basic food. Fruit and vegetables are planted and harvested, and some indigenous types require only to be picked off the vine before eating. And while it’s true meat animals must be raised and fed and cared for before slaughter, the option of wild game exists. Milk flows and is consumed, pasteurization a relatively newfangled innovation good for increasing shelf life but not required for drinking. But bread has no raw form. It begins as seed sown, the grasses then reaped, the grains threshed, winnowed, ground, sifted, kneaded, fermented, formed, and baked. Modern home cooks think nothing of tearing open a bag of silken flour and a package of active dry yeast, and pouring the dry ingredients into a machine with a couple measures of water and a two-hour wait for a fresh loaf. Bread’s dark history is unknown to them.

And the sacrifice.

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken
.

What can man do but toil under Eden’s ruin? Those who work the fields know of the stinging sun, the dust in their nostrils, the ripping of soil to create a warm, dark cradle for each seed. And when the wheat grows tall and gold, the reaping comes, sheaves cut and tied. Early wheat is hulled, the grains imprisoned in toughened glumes requiring extra pounding to free them. Threshers beat the wheat with a flail, or oxen walk round and round over it, loosening the husks.
This chaff must be blown away during winnowing, by fan or fork, leaving behind the heavier grains.

The first millers, almost exclusively women, kneel on the ground, scrubbing one stone against another, the naked wheat between them crushed into meal.
The marrow of men
. And the woman who grinds it stretches her body long, ankles deformed by her work, her belly in the dirt like the cursed serpent who began her misery so long ago.

Wild Rise closes at three. I lock the door and flip the sign. Gretchen cashes out the register and we pack the unsold bread—fourteen loaves today—into paper sacks bearing the Bread of Life ministry logo. Those go into a large plastic trash bag. Someone from First Baptist will pick them up early tomorrow and distribute them to those in need.

We both go to the kitchen. Tee is there, simmering tomorrow’s soups. She always makes them a day ahead because, according to her, the flavors need at least twenty-four hours to marry.

I hadn’t wanted food served at
my
bakery. To me, bread is bread. There’s a purity to it, a dense completeness that nourishes all on its own. A food that began as an accident. Perhaps a bowl of ground barley and water left too long in the afternoon sun, baked flat and chewy. A portable food, and with the domestication of grain, a convenience food, made at home, without the effort required of hunting game or gathering fruits. Bread built the first cities, established cultures, drew people into community. It was buried with Pharaohs and dug from the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, perfectly petrified loaves, gray and hard as stone. It survives.

Those credentials don’t need a side dish.

But three weeks after I opened, Tee showed up with her tiny John Lennon spectacles and short cropped hair and declared in her Ukrainian accent, “You need soup.”

“Pardon me?”

“I have some. You try.” She opened the basket she carried and gave me a warm container. “Try. Try.”

I uncovered the paper carton and blew on the steaming liquid. Then I took a sip. The subtle sting of cumin and mellowness of sweet potato coated my throat as it slid to my stomach. I closed my eyes and exhaled an involuntary sigh.

“Ah, good. You see. We serve it in a little baby
boule
.” She indicated the size with her cupped hands. “Everyone will love, eh?”

So I hired her.

“What’s on the menu for tomorrow?” I ask.

“Celery root soup with bacon and green apple. And bean and Swiss chard.”

“Why don’t you ever do something normal, like chicken noodle?” Gretchen asks.

“If you want that, buy a can,” Tee says, stirring the creamy goodness in her speckled enamelware pot.

Gretchen begins preparing for the morning. I hover, watching, though by now she knows what to do. She’ll make the dough for the soup boules, challah, sticky buns, and Friday’s featured sandwich loaf, cinnamon raisin. I start the
poolish
—a pre-fermented dough—for my own seven-grain Rustica as she weighs the flour and fills the stand mixer. The machine wheezes, rocking a little too much, as it spins the ingredients together. It’s old and will need to be replaced soon. Vintage, Gretchen calls it. My early morning bakery help, Xavier, calls it a piece of junk.

I can feel when the dough has been kneaded enough. But Gretchen, still unsure, stops the mixer and pulls out a small piece. She stretches it, holding it toward the light, and a perfect thin membrane appears. The gluten window. It’s beautiful, milky, the late afternoon light caught in the elastic strands of protein.

“Looks good,” I say.

“Thanks.”

We work without speaking, only the sounds of the machines, the pot lid, the cooler door opening and closing. Some days one of us remembers to switch on the radio, but not today. At four Tee goes home. Gretchen’s shift lasts another hour and her day is finished as well. But she stays longer, as she sometimes does, telling me about the graduate class she’s taking online, about what a total bummer it is to still be living with her parents at twenty-four, and about her plans to go to the movies with friends tomorrow night. Then she says, “You’ve seen that
Bake-Off
show, right? The one with Jonathan Scott?”

“Yeah, a few minutes here and there.” I’m distracted, reading my notes, following a checklist even after three years in business. I still fear forgetting a step, or an entire bread. Each tick of the box is a pinprick in my billowing anxiety, releasing it so I won’t explode. Baguette dough next. Flour, salt, and yeast first.

“Do you like it?”

I shrug, thermometer in a bowl of water. Perfect at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. I add it to the flour mixture. “It’s fine, I guess.”

“Have you ever thought about being on it?”

“No,” I say with a snort. “Why would I?”

“I don’t know,” Gretchen says, and then runs her hand over her mouth while continuing to speak, mashing her words back against her lips.

I stop. “What?”

“I said, promise not to fire me.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“Gretchen, what in the world were you thinking?”

She throws her hands up. “I don’t know. I was watching a few weeks ago and there was this lady on, baking these rather anemic bagels, all pale and puffy and misshapen, and I was like, ‘Liesl could do so much better than that!’ So I checked out the website, and all I had to do was
fill out a form and attach a couple photos and, well . . . tell me you’re not too angry.”

“Don’t worry. Do you know how many bakeries probably apply to be on that show? There’s little to no chance they’ll pick us. So you’re safe.” I smirk. “But if Jonathan Scott does come calling, then I’ll fire you.”

Gretchen laughs with me. “I’d gladly be fired for a chance to meet him. Even you can’t help but notice how stinking good looking he is.”

“Get out of here. I don’t pay overtime.”

Quiet now, alone, I add wood to the oven, a blend of oak and cherry. It will burn all night, until Xavier comes at three a.m. to extinguish it, enough heat held in the bricks to bake all morning. On the proofing table, four troughs of dough wait for me. They’re for my wild yeast breads—sourdoughs—and I let no one work with them but me. The starter I use is more than eighty years old, cultured by my grandmother and brought from Germany when she came here, widowed, her nine-year-old daughter in tow. Even when I wasn’t baking—running from the memory of bread, of my mother, of the warm, brown scent I associated with everything I’d lost in my life—I still kept that starter in a jar in the back of my refrigerator and fed it. Sometimes not as often as I should; once half a year passed before I unscrewed the lid and mixed fresh flour in with the pungent, yeasty slime it had become. And there was a time when I needed to leave it in foster care for an extended period. But I always came back to it, and it always resurrected, those not-quite-animal, not-quite-plant organisms waking to feed again. So I covet this part of the bread making, each loaf imprinted with a bit of my mother’s soul.