Stones for Bread

by Parrish, Christa

  I knew it was true. Some old man on a fixed income who adores olives but couldn’t afford them would feast on them in his senior apartment, picking them straight out of the jar with his fingers and squeezing the cheese onto his tongue before squishing the olive in his mouth. He’d drink the packing oil and watch The Amazing Race, and go to bed full and happy.

  Perhaps the person who donated the olives thought this, or for her, the donation was her widow’s mite. I imagined she thought nothing, though. Simply saw the jar hiding at the back of their pantry, some Secret Santa gift from the office holiday party two, oh wait, three years ago, and dropped the olives into the bag with the extra package of bread stuffing from Thanksgiving, the four-for-a-dollar can of creamed corn, and a box of Rice-A-Roni that has yet to be eaten because she accidentally grabbed the wrong flavor.

  Do everything as if unto the Lord. Offer up everything as if for the Lord, including jars of olives to the food pantry. Or leftover loaves of bread. Years later, that’s finally how I make sense of it, where it settles out for me. If Jesus knocks on my door today, will I rummage through my home and give him the food I don’t like, the outgrown jacket with stains and a broken zipper, the dirty Crock-Pot in the basement, the one with the chipped lid and the mice nesting inside I’ve yet to find time to toss into the Salvation Army’s dumpster?

  Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

  So I pack the bread in bags, like I will for any paying customer. I don’t send burnt loaves or stale loaves, or any kitchen experiment I don’t believe is quality enough to sell. I will not give to the least of these anything I will not offer to my Lord, should he walk into Wild Rise one afternoon and ask for a little something to eat.

  Thirteen

  I’m in bed and my father shakes me, his hand warm and gritty on my bare shoulder. I wear a lace-strapped camisole to bed, satiny and sheer and something I never would dare put on if I thought he’d come into my room to rouse me. Or for any reason at all. He hasn’t been in here in months.

  I bought the camisole two weeks ago, when Jennie’s mother took her and Amanda Craft and me to the mall. She let us wander around freely while she shopped for new shoes, and we took advantage of the freedom by eating Taco Bell in the food court and squeezing into the photo machine and buying clearance lingerie at T.J. Maxx. Jennie and I bought it, at least. Amanda hid hers in the leg of a pair of jeans she took into the dressing room and then slipped the cami on beneath her shirt before returning the jeans and the little yellow plastic “1” tag to the attendant. She truth-or-dared us to do the same, but Jennie and I paid for ours. Mine had a red sticker on the tag, marked down to seven dollars. It’s midnight blue, or at least I’d call it that—I remember midnight blue being my favorite color in the Crayola box, the child of aqua and navy, worn down well below the tips of all the others—with silver filaments woven through it. The lace at the bottom hem was torn away in two places, easily mended if I wanted to take the time or thread to do it. I didn’t, expecting no one to see me in it except me, in the bedroom mirror, turning this way and that, and lamenting how little my almost-an-A breasts filled out the gathered cups.

  Before we met her mother to go home, Jennie and I folded the camisoles into bundles the size of an egg and zipped them into the innermost pockets of our winter coats.

  Now, aware of my father’s clean-shaven scent hovering above, I tug the blanket to my neck and hold it tight around me. What?

  I’m going to mass. Come with me.

  I won’t roll over, fearing the blanket will somehow come loose. Saint Andrew’s or Annunciation? Lutheran or Catholic?

  No. Ken invited me with him.

  Ken Burl. A coworker of my father’s whom he’s complained about more than once, because he doesn’t drink or cuss and is too nice to everyone. He’s some sort of Baptist.

  I know.

  Forget it.

  He goes, shutting the door, trapping his Old Spice in the room with me. The smell, one I only ever associate with my father, and the sensation of the camisole’s silky polyester against my skin—childhood and adulthood, public and private, safety and budding sensuality—they collide so violently I’m almost ill. I reach down to the floor where my laundry is strewn—dirty, clean, doesn’t matter—and in one motion the cami is off and the T-shirt is on, and I’m burrowed under the blankets so far I’m breathing the hot, stale air of sheets that haven’t been changed in months.

  I finally get up hours later, spurred from bed by an over-full bladder and some clattering in the kitchen. I tie a bathrobe over my flannel pants and T-shirt and wander downstairs to find my father frying smelts in a pan on the stove.

  He’s whistling.

  What’s going on?

  I’m making lunch.

  Why?

  I thought it would be nice for us to eat together. We haven’t had smelts in forever. I know you like them.

  I like Mom’s.

  He continues to transfer the crispy fish onto a paper towel–lined plate, one after the other, heads still on, bodies curling like breaded fossils. I followed the cookbook. He turns off the burner, moves the iron skillet to the back of the stovetop, and, without looking at me, says, Maybe it’s time we tried to let go of some things.

  She’s not a thing.

  Liesl—

  This is because you went to that church? I yank open the refrigerator, bottles rattling on the door shelves, reach into the crisper for an apple, and take a huge, noisy bite. You can keep your Jesus freak crap. I’ll keep her. I throw a loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter on the counter, make a show of digging around the flatware drawer for a knife. Unscrew the lid and plop a mound of Jif in the center of a slice of honey wheat.

  My father turns away from me, dish of smelts in hand, shakes the fish into the trash pail, and then, as an afterthought, drops the plate in as well. Without speaking, he descends the basement stairs. I do the same with my food, gathering the peanut butter jar and hastily half-made sandwich and apple and all the bread into my arms, and push them down into the garbage, smothering the fish. Then I go in the opposite direction, upstairs, to lock myself in the bathroom with my hairbrush.

  They want to learn wild yeast, these women, though I suspect of the nine of them, maybe one will still have a viable starter in her refrigerator by year’s end. Caring for yeast is like nurturing a beloved family pet, a puppy needing to be fed, watered, housebroken, one that whimpers all night and is lonely even though its owner wraps a ticking clock in a blanket in its kennel, hoping it will be comforted by a sound reminiscent of its mother’s heart. It never works, and I tell them so. They laugh, not believing me, though several of them have tried to culture sourdough and failed. They think it’s bad flour, or chlorine in their tap water, or the fact they stirred the mixture with a metal spoon. They’re here to learn the trick. How much work can flour and water and a billion microorganisms truly be? Most of life is unforgiving, and there are no shortcuts when it comes to wild yeast.

  “There are plenty of bread myths,” I say. “A metal spoon will not react with the culture. You can use all the metal spoons you want, even in the dough. I just happen to prefer wooden ones because my mother and grandmother used them.”

  The women take notes. I compartmentalize them; after three years of teaching these classes, I can read their reasons for being here. Two are here because they believe commercial yeast destroys the gut and causes a multitude of health problems. Three are friends, housewives, mothers, looking for a life-enriching class while the kids are in school. Two are skilled home bakers who haven’t yet conquered sourdough; one will be self-satisfied with the success in her own kitchen, the other wants to sell her bread at medieval Renaissance fairs. Of the remaining students, one is addicted to learning, to trying new things, to the excitement of accomplishment. By next month her starter will be forgotten, the expensive bannetons and proofing box stored in the closet, waiting to be sold at her summer garage sale, and she’ll have mov
ed on to cake decorating or stained glass. The last woman doesn’t know why she’s here, except she saw an advertisement in the newspaper and felt called. She’s never made a loaf of yeasted bread in her life. People like her are wild cards, the seeds in the parable of the sower. She may come to love baking and, even more so, excel at it, or her culture may die on the counter as she forgets it, concerned more with her sick father and credit card debt and her son’s behavior problems at Boy Scouts. She may decide even a once-a-week feeding is too much effort, or at class end, she may think, Why on earth did I figure I’d enjoy this?

  Isn’t it that way in all things, though? The birds, the thorns, the lack of soil—all reasons to give up, to fade out of life and find the easiest way to deal with all those disappointing things people, as children, never expect will come to them.

  “Another myth is that sourdough is always sour. Yes, some breads made with wild yeast have that sharp taste people associate with San Francisco–style loaves, but many do not. I, honestly, don’t like a strong sour taste in my bread. I sell one true sourdough, and let me tell you, it will make you pucker. But my other wild yeast breads range from very mild to just the slightest tang.”

  “What makes the yeast get more sour?” one woman asks. “Isn’t it how long you leave the dough out to ferment?”

  “That’s one reason,” I tell her, “but it’s not the yeast that sours the dough, it’s the bacteria.”

  All but two of the women—the two, I imagine, who have tried making a starter before—look utterly disgusted. Bacteria is bad, they think. All their bathrooms have lovely pump bottles of berry-scented bacteria-killing soap, and they wash all those nasty little critters down the drain more times a day than they can count.

  I explain the symbiosis between the yeast and lactobacilli. “The wild yeast live on the grain as it grows in the field, and when the wheat is harvested they’re still there, invading our kitchens whether we purchase the berries from the bulk bins at a natural food store to grind at home or pick up a paper brick of the all-purpose stuff at Hannaford. So does the bacteria. The yeast eat the simple sugars in the flour, producing gasses that make the dough rise. The bacteria, on the other hand, give off lactic acid, which is what gives the bread its sour flavor. Actually, the lactobacilli is what keeps the culture healthy. Only the yeast strains good for bread can survive in the mixture’s acidity, and it destroys stray, unhealthy bacteria and other yeasts. The lactobacilli also eat dead yeasts.

  “The way to keep a starter from becoming too sour, however your own palate defines it, is to feed it more often. The bacteria eat more slowly than the yeast. The yeast die off faster without food, but the bacteria can just keep on consuming the dead yeast and their waste, making more lactic acid and thus a more sour starter. Regular feedings keep the system in balance, so the yeast don’t run out of simple sugars and the bacteria never overwhelm the starter. I find it’s best, once the starter is well established, to feed every twelve to twenty-four hours. That’s if you’re keeping it at room temperature, of course, which is best to do if you’re baking daily or almost that much. Refrigeration slows the whole process down, but even then, you should feed your starter at least once a week.”

  “I thought you had to capture wild yeast from the air,” the Renaissance fair woman says, disappointed.

  “I’m afraid that’s probably another myth,” I tell her, and her frown deepens. “There are yeast in the air, but not necessarily the ones needed for sourdough. It’s like the idea of adding grapes to a culture; that white film on the skin is yeast, but it’s grape yeast—excellent for wine but completely ineffective for bread. Eventually that strain will be killed off in the culture because it can’t survive in that particular environment. However,” I add in the hopes of cheering her, though I doubt I will—her romantic notions have been burned away by too much knowledge, “it may be true that the more you bake with sourdough, the more wild yeast will be floating around your kitchen. Some of those very well may become part of your bread.”

  She persists. “But is it true that the flavor and even the strain of bread yeast will change when you move from, say, California to Vermont?”

  “Well, yes, that is the case. I think most likely that’s still due to the flour, since grains are regionally produced. If you have a starter from Vermont and continue to buy your flour from Vermont and have it shipped to you in California to do your baking, your starter probably won’t change all that much.”

  “Other famous bakers still think yeast is collected from the environment around us. I always leave my bowl outside, covered in cheesecloth, of course, and let mother nature blow them into my starter.”

  “I suppose it’s possible.” I don’t mention she hasn’t managed to culture a stable starter, or studies in which sterilized flour will not establish colonies of yeast. I leave it alone. I was one of those hopeful wild yeast hunters—a lifetime ago, it seems. It’s the Santa Claus of bread baking, something people want to believe even though they’re too old to sit on his lap, even when faced with the realization the From Santa tags are written in their mothers’ handwriting, and they’ve accidentally discovered their Christmas lists tucked in the secret pockets of their fathers’ briefcases.

  I share several more old wives’ tales, and the final one, that sourdough made in a home with women would taste different from one made around men only—due to, it was believed, the natural yeast of the female body—draws more chuckles and pulls the XX-chromosome group together in a sort of gendered solidarity. Of course some stupid man would come up with an idea like that. I don’t use the example if the class isn’t all female.

  Together we make the beginnings of a sourdough culture—two parts water, one part rye flour, one part wheat flour—stirring it together in a glass Ball jar. I also give each woman half a cup of one of my established starters, encouraging them to report back to me their successes and failures, to take a picture of their first loaves and come post them on the baker’s bulletin board hanging just over there on the wall, and then I send them out the door before the lunch crowd begins. Then I sneak into the kitchen before any of the customers can lure me into a conversation and find Tee complaining about Jude’s knife skills. He cuts celery for her, not thin or even enough, and she covers his hands with hers and directs him, counting each downward slice in Ukrainian. “See it is good like this? You do now.”

  “I’m trying,” Jude says.

  “And he’s supposed to be working with Zave,” I say. “I told you if you needed more help, I’d hire someone.”

  “I no need help,” Tee says. “I have the boy.”

  “Hello? Did you hear me? I’m paying Jude to help with the bread, not the soup.” Yes, he has a salary now, though he’s embarrassed by it. I’d pay him double if I could afford it.

  “Is not for soup. We make quiche.”

  “Tee, come on. Your job is safe. I’m only trying to make life easier for you.”

  My words puncture her and she droops without all her brashness to keep her puffed up. “When it is easy you forget how it is to fight.” And then she smacks her spoon on the counter, inches from Jude’s arm. “Enough with vegetable. See eggs in that bowl? Crack and beat. And no shells. None.”

  I step outside, onto the concrete loading platform, the area cool and shaded. Not quite September yet, but the scent of it is beginning, the one reminding me of digging in the backyard for earthworms until my fingers bend painfully backward in the packed, slightly damp ground and the tips of my nails turn blue with dirt. An uncovering smell, one of endings, soon to overwhelm the air as all the leaves offer their fallen bodies to this yearly rite of passage.

  The screen door squeaks and bounces behind me, and Xavier appears in the corner of my vision.

  “That woman,” I say.

  “You should be used to it by now.”

  “You’d think.”

  “The new girl is working out well.”

  “Rebekah, yeah. She’s a godsend.”

  “Any inqui
ries for the baker’s position?”

  “A few,” I say. I’d received five résumés. All seem qualified and eager, but I’m in no mood to schedule interviews yet. “But I’m wondering if maybe we’re not doing fine without the extra hands.”

  “Just trying to make things a little easier for you,” Xavier says, voice gilded in irony.

  I don’t need him to point out my similarities with Tee, or remind me of my inability to relinquish control of things I’ve decided are more important than breathing—my personal principles of bread, the bakery and the way I feel it should run; all things of temporal value and yet I cling to them as I should only hold on to the One who is eternal. Idols. And more exhausting each day as the business expands, explodes, and I go without sleep and food and sunlight in my lungs. I can’t lay them down, though. They are glued to my palms, and I shake and shake and shake but they don’t come off.

  I stare down the street. Two boys, somewhere in their teens but I can’t tell from this distance, smoke on the public bench, skateboards standing on end and clamped between their knees. “I haven’t seen Jude smoking lately.”

  “He’s quitting, I think,” Xavier says. “Sometimes I see the ash glowing red from my window at night. But I don’t smell it on him anymore, or see him with them any other time. Just in the dark.”

  The door swings open again. Rebekah. She holds the cordless phone. “Excuse me, Liesl? I’m sorry to bother you, but you have a call. Patrice Olsen from the Good Food Channel?”

  “Thanks,” I say, taking the receiver. “Hello, Ms. Olsen.”

  “Ms. McNamara, lovely to speak to you. I sent an e-mail, but I understand you don’t always receive them, so I wanted to call as well and tell you the air date has been chosen for your Bake-Off episode.”

  “Okay, when?”

  “Three weeks from this Thursday. The season premiere.”