by Tom McNeal
On the siding, freight cars stood empty in the low, sloping sun. Birds began to sing, insects to buzz. And then, beyond all that, the faint thrum of an engine could be heard, and presently the gleaming Green Oven delivery van came into view. The baker’s smile beamed out from his full white beard as he turned off the highway.
“Hallå!” he said, after lowering his window. “Is it not a great day to be alive?”
“A little too early to say, if you want to know the truth,” Ginger said, but it truly was a beautiful day, and they all seemed to feel it.
Stacked and bound in the rear of the van was a selection of wooden posts and planks to be used for construction of the wood crib, so as they rolled along the highway, Jeremy sat in the front seat with Ginger in his lap.
“An adventure!” the baker said, beaming. “That’s what this feels like. A most pleasant adventure!”
“Yeah,” Ginger said, smiling, too, “it does, kind of.”
The highway split fields of corn and wheat, and symphonic music played within the van, quite beautiful to my ancient ear, though when the baker asked Jeremy and Ginger if they liked it, Jeremy said, “It’s okay, I guess,” and Ginger said, “It’s kind of an audio sleeping pill.”
A laugh rumbled up from the baker’s belly, and he guided the van onto a dirt road leading north. The van bounced over ruts, and pebbles tinked against its underside.
“Okay,” Jeremy said, “I think it’s time for me to give up my seat.”
“Really?” Ginger said. “ ’Cause I’m comfy as can be.”
The van jounced again and Jeremy said, “That’s because you’re the sitter and I’m the seat.”
He folded a red blanket into a cushion and took a position on the bundled lengths of wood.
Ginger turned to the baker. “So how far is this cabin, anyhow?”
“A ways yet. It’s a beautiful spot, close to a small lake, deep in the woods.”
The baker’s voice was as kindly as ever, but at the mention of deep woods, a dim note of alarm sounded within me. Wald, Forst, and most especially, im tiefen Wald—in deep forests—were the words that wrapped black tendrils around a story and foretold ghastly creatures lying in wait or children losing their way. But those were the forests of fairy tales, I told myself, not the ordinary pines of everyday life.
The music played, the baker guided his delivery van along the dirt roads, and Ginger and Jeremy stared complacently out. The farms here were large, unirrigated, and widely spaced, and soon the land was given to the grazing of animals rather than the growing of grains. When the van approached a crossroads, the baker turned toward a range of dense, up-reaching conifers, and soon we were among them, the pines so thick that they eclipsed the sun. The road grew darker, narrower, rockier, more intricate in its twistings. There were no other mortals here, no fences, no gates, no visible boundaries.
“Wow,” Jeremy said staring out from his seat in the back. “I didn’t know there was anything like this around here. Where are we?”
“A world all its own,” the baker said, his round face beaming. He turned onto a lane so narrow and overgrown it seemed the forest’s own secret.
Ginger laughed with delight. “What was that? Did the directions just say, ‘Take a hard left straight into the forest’?”
The passage was almost a tunnel, and when the baker approached the end of it, he slowed the van. “And now the ceremonial clearing away of the bears!” he said, and honked the car horn three long times.
“You have bears?” Ginger asked, looking slightly alarmed, and the baker, laughing, said, “Not anymore.”
In another moment, he was gesturing toward a clearing before us. “There,” he said, his round cheeks radiant with pride. “There is the cabin.”
A Hütte, Wilhelm and I would have called it in a tale—a simple, single-story structure made of logs, its roof composed of earth from which grass grew.
“Zounds,” Ginger said as she and Jeremy walked around the encampment, “it must be twenty degrees cooler up here.” The wind through the tree limbs made a low, hollow whistle. She grinned at Jeremy. “Pretty fabulous, no?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, “it really is,” and, behind them, the baker smiled with pleasure.
I will be truthful. I, too, partook of the preternatural beauty. But it went beyond even that. I felt myself pleasantly transported back to the woods of Germany, and of my childhood. And so I was carried away … when I should have stood fast and remained vigilant.
Jeremy and Ginger hauled the wooden posts and planks from the car while the baker busied himself at the hut, folding back window shutters and setting out chairs.
“I haven’t been here for a few weeks,” he said. “Not since Frank Bailey left.”
Ginger seemed surprised. “Frank Bailey came up here?”
“Oh, yes. He’s a good boy. He helped me put down the new wood floor.”
Ginger and Jeremy carried the last loads of lumber, then looked around. “Everything here in Blixville looks so just-raked and tidy,” Ginger said to the baker. “How do you do it?”
“A caretaker,” the baker said. “Once a week, a gentleman hikes over from his cabin a mile or so from here and takes care of this and that.” The baker’s blue eyes twinkled. “Then when he comes into town, I pay him in pastries.”
After all the wood planks had been laid out, the baker directed Ginger and Jeremy to a large stack of pine logs, handed each of them a sharpened ax, and showed them how to split the round lengths into smaller sections. It was a funny sight, this plump, cherubic man swinging an ax and issuing a little Oof! each time he brought the force of it to the wood, but he was surprisingly adept at his work.
As Ginger stepped up to try her hand, she asked, “Is the grunting absolutely required?”
“Absolutely,” the baker said with a Santa-like wink.
The baker left them alone with their sharpened axes. Jeremy and Ginger enjoyed the work and began racing to see whose pile of split wood grew largest.
The wood chips spewed here and there, and the minutes flew past. Jeremy and Ginger swung the axes with gusto, drawing closer to each other as the pile of logs diminished and the piles of split wood grew. They hurried and cajoled and huffed and puffed until the arcs of each ax fell perilously close to that of the other and I began to shout into Jeremy’s ear … but he was too caught up in his race to hear.
“Careful!” a voice rang out. “Careful now!”
It was, to my relief, the baker, hurrying toward them, wiping his hands in a towel. “Hallå! Hallå!” he sang out. “Oh, my dear young friends, you scare me with your wild axes!” He took several deep drafts of air to regain his breath, then looked with satisfaction at their work. “But what woodpiles you have made!”
Jeremy and Ginger—shirts damp, faces slippery with perspiration—stood catching their breath. I did, too, in my own manner, for I felt the danger had passed. The baker’s twinkling eyes moved from the split wood to Ginger and Jeremy. “You two put me to shame. It would take me a day to do what you’ve done here.”
It was a pleasant moment, a compliment hanging in the air along with the scent of split wood, the soft murmur of the breeze through the trees, and, somewhere farther off, the dim, watery sounds of an unseen creek.
“Yes, yes,” the baker said, smiling and eyeing the woodpiles. “Very impressive.”
“Actually,” Ginger said, “if you look closely, you’ll see that my pile’s slightly more impressive than his.”
“You had the sharper ax,” Jeremy said, laughing, and Ginger said, “You had the softer wood.”
The baker laughed heartily. “All we need now is a wood crib, which we will soon build. But, first, did you build up an appetite? Yes? Then you are in luck.”
He led them into the hut, which was clean and welcoming, with plain, hand-hewn furnishings—a table, two chairs, a bed—and a simple kitchen arranged around a circular stone fireplace.
“Zoundsapoppin’,” Ginger said, a new term for her
and, I was sure, for linguists everywhere. Her eyes flew around the room. “A guy could live here.” She grinned. “Also a girl.”
“Yes, yes,” the baker said. “I’ve often thought that I would retire here someday, when the bakery is finally behind me.” He followed Jeremy’s gaze to the enormous oven at the center of the room. “It burns wood,” he said, “which some people find difficult, but not a Swedish baker.” He gave a modest shrug. “The ovens and I have always understood each other.”
The rear door of the hut gave on to a shaded clearing with a beamed table on which the baker had spread rolls, fruits, meats, and cheeses. One tin pitcher was filled with stalks of lavender, another was filled with thick nectar.
As the baker’s eyes moved from the sumptuous table to Jeremy and then to Ginger, one could almost see a prideful pleasure coursing through him. “Does it please you?” he asked.
“And then some,” Ginger said at once, and Jeremy was smiling, too.
The baker nodded. “You know, our days too often pass one like the other. I hoped to make this a day that you would not forget.” He gave a broad, beaming smile, and seemed in that moment like a real-life Saint Nicholas, one whose presents came in the form of food in all of its aspects—the baking, the staging, and finally the tasting. It looked so tantalizing that I had to avert my eyes as Jeremy and Ginger sampled one delicacy after another.
The baker, too, partook of the offerings.
“What’s that?” Ginger said, suddenly stilling herself and cocking her head.
I had heard it, too: the distant cracking of a limb.
The baker stared off alertly in the direction of the sound but soon relaxed. “Probably just a falling branch,” he said. “The dead limbs grow brittle and when the wind blows …” He broke off a bit of roll and applied a liberal coating of butter, then mentioned idly that he had seen bears here several times and, once, a mountain lion.
“They aren’t supposed to be here,” he said, “but they are. The foresters call them ‘long-distance dispersals.’ ” He gave a slow-rolling laugh. “Of course, I am a bit of a long-distance dispersal myself.”
“So why did you come here?” Jeremy asked. He was layering the most delicious-looking meat and cheese onto a butter-browned roll.
The baker considered the question. “It is a strange thing, but as a boy in Malmö I always dreamed of owning my own bakery and living in America.”
Ginger dipped a strawberry into heavy cream and asked where Malmö was.
“In Sweden,” the baker said. “Toward the very south. It was such a bustling town! We built ships, we caught herring, we had our own railway station—a wonderful place. But then I grew up, and had a … romantic disappointment.” He smiled. “It is probably hard for you to imagine, but I was younger then.” He sipped from his cup of nectar. “So I decided the time had come for my departure.”
“Do you miss it?” Ginger said. “Sweden, I mean.”
“Sometimes, my dear girl. But less and less.” He glanced toward the cabin and the forest. “It is good here.” And then, rather suddenly, his expression stiffened. “But I will tell you, there are times when the customs here disappoint me. The lost young people that the police cannot find and explain always as runaways. In Sweden, the authorities will not rest in cases like these, but here …” He waved his arm in a gesture of weary dismissal, then drank from his nectar. “And then there is the way the people in town have treated you.” He smiled suddenly and winked. “And how they would treat me if they knew I was hiring you.”
“No problem on that account,” Jeremy offered. “No one saw me this morning, and all I told my dad was that I was doing something with Ginger, but I wasn’t sure what. Which was true.”
Ginger rolled a small slice of meat over a piece of cheese. “That’s more than I told my granddad—or anyone else, for that matter.”
“Thank you.” The baker shook his head. “It’s a shame we have to take these precautions, but that is how things are in the village in which we live.”
“Yeah, well,” Ginger said, “someday I’m going to live somewhere else.” She smiled and passed a quick glance toward Jeremy. “Someplace far, far away.”
It was quiet again, except for the birdsong and the hollow wind through the trees.
After a last bite of food, Jeremy sat back and said, “That was delicious.”
“And we’re not done yet!” the baker announced. He went into the cabin and returned with a pot of coffee, tin cups, and raspberry and lemon cuts, which they enjoyed in a leisurely way that put me pleasantly in mind of life with Wilhelm and Dortchen before the death of my nephew. I understood the happiness in Jeremy’s and Ginger’s eyes. I, too, was as happy as a ghost might be.
Ginger, sipping her coffee, noticed several sheets of paper, a pencil, and a pen lying on the food tray. “What’s up with that?” she asked. “You writing a letter?”
The baker smiled. “When you talked about wanting to go far, far away, I thought of something I did as a child that made me feel better,” and he went on to explain that when he was young and he was angry at his parents or his school friends and wished he were far away in America, he would sometimes sit down and write a letter to his parents as if he were already gone. “Sometimes I would write as if I were stowed away on a ship crossing the Atlantic, sometimes I would write as if I were already in America selling newspapers in New York City. I would sign the letter, fold it carefully, and address the envelope, and then, when it lay there sealed and ready to go, I always felt better. It was as if writing of my leave-taking foretold it, and made it my destiny.”
Jeremy asked what he did with the letters.
“Oh, put them aside, into drawers, under books. My mother found one—it made her very sad.” He winked. “After that, I hid them better.”
Ginger eyed the writing paper. “Could I try one?”
The baker shrugged agreeably. “Of course, if you like. But there’s no need. It’s just a little trick I found useful, and I thought …”
Ginger and Jeremy each selected a piece of paper and an envelope, hers a square one that she addressed to her grandfather, Jeremy’s long and rectangular, which he addressed to his father. While the baker cleared the table, Ginger and Jeremy composed their notes. Ginger was quickly done. Jeremy was more hesitant and, when finished, folded his note into its envelope.
“Well, then,” the baker said. “Did that help? What did we write?”
Ginger held up her sheet of paper and read: “Hi, Grandpa. We took a train out of town. I’m not sure where we are exactly, but it’s far away and I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.” Her amber eyes shone as she read this, and when she was finished, she looked genially from Jeremy to Sten Blix. “You’re right. It really does make you feel like you’ve already got one foot out the door.”
She turned to Jeremy. “So what did you write?”
He shrugged. “Not much.”
“C’mon, Jeremy Jeremy! No fair! Cough it up.”
He looked down as if abashed. “I just wrote my dad that I didn’t miss a lot of people in town but I missed some of them and I missed him most of all.”
“Ahh, you’re such a sweetheart, Jeremy,” she said. “Did you say where you were?”
“Arizona.”
Ginger issued an abrupt laugh. “Arizona! Why Arizona?”
Jeremy shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”
At this pleasant moment, we heard another cracking sound some distance away, and again everyone stared into the shadowy woods and waited. But we heard nothing more.
“As long as it’s not a bear,” Ginger said.
The baker’s laugh was jovial. “Even the bears leave humans alone unless you come between a mother and her cub.”
Ginger grinned. “That’s a hard-and-fast rule of mine: Never come between a bear and her cub.”
Jeremy said, “My rule is: Never come between a Ginger and her cheeseburger.” He laughed and turned to the baker. “You should see h
er eat a cheeseburger. It’s not what you’d call routinely carnivorous.”
Well, I will tell you, it was a charming sight: a girl, a boy, and a Saint Nicholas–like baker, all in radiant good humor.
After dining, they set to work on the wood crib, a job that moved smoothly because the baker had already cut and drilled the boards according to a prescribed plan. “I like this,” Jeremy said. “It’s like assembling a kit.”
“Seventy percent of success is planning,” the baker said. “Twenty-five is execution. And”—he chuckled—“the last five percent is alignment of the stars.”
By midafternoon they had finished the wood crib, and soon they had it filled with the wood Jeremy and Ginger had split earlier. Jeremy leaned against it and took in a deep breath of the piney air.
“Thanks,” he said to the baker. “That was fun.”
Ginger, standing nearby with skin damp from sweat, said, “Yeah, it was, kind of, considering that it was actually work.” She turned to the baker. “What’s next?”
“No more work. Now it is time to rest and enjoy yourselves.” He pointed off. “Do you see the lightning-split pine at the crest of the hill? Beyond it is a pond that is perfect for swimming. You go ahead, and I’ll follow along.” He gave an apologetic shrug. “I don’t swim myself.”
“Don’t like to or can’t?” Ginger asked.
“Can’t. But you both can swim, yes?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ginger said. “We can swim like the fishes.”
The pond, when they came to it, was as placid and picturesque as everything else in the baker’s domain. An enormous boulder reached toward the sky and overhung the water, and Jeremy and Ginger changed into their bathing costumes on either side of it. Ginger ducked into the pond first, bobbed quickly up, and said, “Okay, then. Not that warm.”
But soon they were splashing and kicking and reporting where they could and could not touch bottom. The breeze filtered through the trees and my mind wandered. A short time later, I noticed Jeremy regarding Ginger, who was staring up intently at the massive boulder that leaned out over the deepest portion of the pond.
