When she feels herself securely back in her own skin, she waits a moment longer, knowing that what is to be done next will come to her, her body will tell her. Ridiculous, she says to herself, there’s diapers to be changed, hoeing to be done, and the men will be wanting dinner. She almost heaves herself up out of her chair, but the very silence of the place settles into her and she knows she is alone and time has passed. Years, she thinks, years.
Gradually the feeling she has been waiting for steals through her. She is alert now, all her senses attuned to it, straining to read its message. A hollow feeling, yes, it flows upward, engulfing her, a wanting.
Bread. Bread! That’s it. She can smell the yeast already, feel the cool moist dough, its texture like the silken flesh of infants under her palms. She heaves herself up and scurries to the kitchen.
She takes her bread-making bowl from the nail where it hangs on the wall. It is a large blue granite basin with sloping sides and many nicks along the rim where the shiny, blue-speckled surface is missing and the black undercoat shows through. She tests the curved inner surface of the bowl with the flat of her hand, running her palm around it while she surveys the kitchen busily, planning her next move. Sometimes she finds she has hung the pan without cleaning it first. She’s forgetful, she knows it, but this time it’s clean. There is not a knot or a grain of dried dough on the smooth, inner surface.
She sets the bowl on her kitchen table and begins to gather her ingredients and set them on the table: lard, yeast, salt, sugar. She fills the kettle and sets it on the electric stove, then rolls her flour barrel over to stand beside the table. She is still strong, stronger than either Selena or Diane, and she’s glad of it. A good life well-lived, she thinks smugly.
She will have to chop wood for the baking, but there’s plenty of time for that. To this day she hasn’t baked bread in her electric oven. Well, once, for an experiment, but the bread seemed tasteless to her and the colour wasn’t right. So she continues to use her cookstove, which stands across one corner of the room, raised on a brick platform which her son Harold insisted on building for her, it had taken four men to move the stove onto it, over her protests and muttered imprecations—it’s safer, Mother, these things are real fire hazards, now you’ll be glad when we’re done. She keeps the stove polished so that its nickel-plated trim gleams, its black surface shines dully. The children all stare and stare at it when they come to visit. She reaches out a hand to touch its coolness. A beautiful thing.
The kettle has begun to sing. She has let the water get too hot, and forgotten to set the yeast. Annoyed with herself, she stands for a moment, then shuts off the burner under the kettle and goes to the kitchen door, where she stands looking out over her garden through the screen. After a moment she pushes the door open and steps outside, letting the door slam shut behind her. She bends and pulls a dead blossom off the pink and yellow snapdragons at the door, and then off a mauve and purple pansy. A ladybug crawls onto her hand, and she flicks her wrist to shake it off. It flies away to land in the raspberries.
It is mid-morning, the sun is high, spreading its heat over the land. She never could stand the heat. She has to laugh at this, and a couple of wrens leap, startled, out of the lilacs in the corner of the garden. Five children to feed and care for, a husband, two, often three hired men, the house to run—ironing, baking, meal preparation—all in the blazing summer heat—she who couldn’t stand the heat. Well, I stood it well enough, she tells herself grimly. That blessed sun! She shades her eyes from it, thinking how the gardens will be burning up.
Red-winged blackbirds, sparrows, a robin or two, finches, swallows, all sing in her oasis. She wonders idly, listening to them, if it was right for her to build this garden in the middle of the prairie, or if she should have left it the way it was. It’ll go back soon enough, she reminds herself somberly, when I’m gone. Go-back land, she says, remembering the phrase the people used to say. Go-back land. The corn whispers to her, far off the prairie runs in the heat, and she can’t help but laugh again. She shakes her head, as though someone who ought to know better has just said something ridiculous, and goes back inside.
This time she sets the yeast, puts the lard and some salt and sugar into the warm water she has poured into the basin and stands, one hand on her hip, while the yeast slowly rises in its dish beside the basin. She is reminded of when she was a girl and the threshing crew was at her father’s place, she used to rise with her mother at four every morning to set the buns for breakfast. Once they got the first batch of buns or bread started, they never used yeast again, just saved a small piece of dough from the previous morning and mixed it into the fresh dough. It was enough to leaven the whole batch. Then around seven the crew had fresh, hot buns for breakfast. She and her mother and the hired girl sweating in the kitchen for weeks on end.
Then later, a grown woman in her own kitchen, baking twenty loaves of bread at a time to sell to the bachelors of the district—old Appleby, Jake Johns, Shorty Small, old Rhyhorchuck, and that blessed Loewen who never would pay her, till she wouldn’t give him any more bread. And every week baking another twelve loaves for her own family. Oh, I’ve made enough bread in my day, she thinks.
The yeast is ready and she stirs it carefully, then tests the temperature of the mixture in the big basin by dropping it onto her wrist. Just right. And Selena wanting a recipe. A recipe! You do it till you get it right, and then that’s the way you do it from then on, she had told her. She pours the yeast slowly into the big basin, then stirs carefully. She made Selena and Diane do it over and over again in her kitchen, when they were still girls, after Maude died. Selena never did get it quite right, but good enough, she supposed, Diane never could do it at all. She shakes her head. Buying her bread. Women don’t know anymore, she thinks, don’t know what bread-making is for, what it means to make your own bread.
She lifts the lid off the flour barrel and sets it carefully against the table leg. She puts her cup in and lifts out the first cup of flour. Its smell fills her nostrils, faint, not describable, but real. When she dumps the cupful into the bowl of yeasty liquid, a fine white powder rises and settles on her wrists and fat forearms. She works more briskly now, dipping, shaking, pouring flour into the big bowl. When she judges the amount to be right, she begins to mix it in, first using a big wooden spoon, then wiping the sticky dough off it and setting it in the sink. She begins to use her hands. The wet dough rises up between her fingers, sticking to them.
When all the flour is mixed in to her satisfaction, she cleans her hands off and adds several more cups of flour. Then she shoves the basin back from her, sprinkles flour by hand over the oilcloth surface of her table, turns the basin upside down over the sprinkled area, so that the dough falls out, rights the basin, and cleans out the dough left sticking to the inside of the basin.
She begins to knead, standing back a bit from the table, her legs set apart, knees locked, and pushes hard, but slowly, from the shoulder, not the elbows, so that she leans into the dough with her weight and the strength of her back: a quarter-turn, knead, flip; a quarter-turn, knead, flip; a quarter-turn, knead, flip. The dough feels heavy, stiff. She isn’t worried, it will come.
Diane had sat across from her, watching her while she kneaded, holding the little one, what was her name? Some foolish modern name, no, Catherine. It was the other one with the silly name. Got it out of a movie, I suppose. Fold, quarter-turn, knead. The dough is beginning to respond, no longer warm, the flour working in well now.
Crying. I can’t stand it, Auntie Rhea. Diane sitting at her table, crying. I’m going crazy.
Crazy! Hah! She doesn’t know what crazy is. Old Mary Andras, now, there was crazy. Six sons, no daughters, all hard-working, which meant she had to work twice as hard as they did, twice as fast, to keep them all fed and clothed. And old Miklos, so strong he could lift a bull, but too stupid to see she was losing her mind. Carrying water to her dried-up garden day after day, the grasshoppers eating what the drought hadn’t taken.
What are you going crazy about? she had asked Diane, trying not to laugh, or was it cry? I’ve had my own crazy days, she thinks, and as she remembers, she stops kneading, she is so surprised.
I started to pay attention to each living thing growing on the prairie: the plants, the lichen, the rocks … I wandered out on the prairie at night, it was the only time I had … I studied the rocks, one especially, I remember … a handsome rock, flat-topped, almost the size of my table. It was flesh-coloured … I thought it was my lover … under the moon … I knew it was madness. I didn’t care. Out there things spoke to me … not with voices, but deep inside me, they drew me to them, or they pushed me away. And the wind blew, hot or cold, was silent or raged at me, told me where to go, where not to go, where to stay and wait. I knew then that I was first of all a woman, one that no man could satisfy … I wanted more, or was it less? Why should I have wanted anything at all … the rocks, hard, ancient, flushed with colour, cracked, shat upon by small birds, used as altars for the sacrifices of hawks and eagles. Many times I found the perfect, minute paws of gophers on them, and their bloody bowels … I sat in the centre of the tipi rings, silent, facing north, east, south, west. In that time I learned to listen to what welled up inside me….
So what are you going crazy about, Diane?
I want … Diane said, and Rhea had felt herself nodding.
Don’t we all, she had said, don’t we all.
Not Selena, Diane had said, her voice full of anger. Rhea gives the bread a final turn and pat and leaves it to rest, going back to the door again to stare out, listening to the songbirds perched in the bushes.
You think Selena doesn’t want? she had asked.
She’s satisfied, Diane said, running after Kent and the boys, watching Phoebe grow up into the same thing.
So you’re leaving.
I suppose you think that’s wrong.
Hah! Rhea had snorted. What’s wrong, what’s right.
Well, if you don’t know, you’re the only one in the whole world who doesn’t think she does, Diane said.
What do you think you’ll find in the blessed city?
Life! Diane had shouted, so loud that the baby on her lap had wakened and cried.
What’s that you’re holding? Rhea had said, and remembering now, she has to chuckle. Tsk, tsk, her tongue goes. She goes back and pokes gently at her bread with her finger. A long enough rest.
Oh, Rhea, don’t you see? I’m not stuck here like you were. I’ve got a choice. I can leave, I can get a job. Tony doesn’t own me the way it was in your day. I’m a free person.
Free, Rhea had said and laughed again.
I bake cookies, I make the beds, I hoe the garden, I look after the kids, I sleep with Tony. And when everything’s done, when the beds are all made, the floors swept, the dishes washed, the clothes ironed and the kids are asleep I look around and I think, is this it? Is this all there is? Her dark eyes had fastened on Rhea, a deep, black light shining in them.
Electricity, refrigeration, running water, vacuum cleaners, Rhea had recited.
Happiness. Happiness, Diane echoed softly, after a minute. Something in me insists that there is more, there has to be more.
Happiness, freedom, Rhea said the words back to Diane, or perhaps to herself.
In the same soft voice Rhea had just used, Diane asked, do you know what I want?
I see the energy churning in you, Rhea said. It comes out your eyes and the tips of your fingers.
She begins to knead the dough again, falling into the rhythm. She feels it growing lighter at last under the palms and heels of her hands. The muscles in her lower back and her shoulders begin to ache.
Diane had dropped her eyes abruptly and Rhea had known she was thinking, Rhea’s madness has crept up on her again, she’s not sane now. So Rhea hadn’t said, you make me think of a young goddess—your slenderness and grace, your beauty, your long, glossy hair—a huntress, a priestess, a … She kneads her bread.
All the young women, she muses as she kneads, are sweet and slender at thirteen, their young breasts round and light, their skins fine-grained and easily flushed, their eyes have that quick sparkle. At sixteen their bodies have grown heavier, lost their buoyancy, their breasts have weight, their thighs and hips have thickened, their eyes have deepened and already that glow is fading from their complexions. At eighteen …
Well, right or wrong, I have to go, Diane said.
It’s not wrong, Rhea had replied, hearing her own voice deepen and grow strong. You go.
Now her shoulders are aching. The dough has developed the smooth elasticity she has been waiting for, she can feel its lightness under her fingers and in the heels, the palms, the fingers of her hands. She puts her face close to it to smell it, she draws in a long breath of it, so cool, so sweet. Yet the wonder of it is how it rises and doubles itself and grows light as air itself. I wonder who invented bread? she thinks. God, maybe, but no, it had to be a woman. A goddess.
As she cleans the basin she remembers how she protested when Eli insisted she have water pumped into the house. I don’t need it, she said. I’ve pumped water at the well for over fifty years and I can do it till I die. I like the sound of it, she said. I like how cold it is straight from the well. Now, Mother, Eli said. It’s too hard for you now that you’re older.
Then they were digging trenches to lay the pipe, and fiddling on her step with a pump. It’s a jet pump, Eli said to her. What do I care? she replied. A well-witcher witched that well, she told them. It’s the same well, Mother, Eli said. It’s the same water. If you won’t move to town …
And they were in her kitchen, tearing things out, sawdust everywhere, noise from morning till night, men lying on their backs on her floor with their heads vanished inside the cupboards. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Martin had come home, too, with his wife and kids in a camper, parked outside on the prairie for two weeks while he built a bathroom onto the side of the house. It was pointless to protest, none of her sons paid any attention to her.
When the basin is clean she polishes it dry, then sets it back on the table beside the round of dough. She takes a wad of butter in the palm of her hand and slaps it back and forth till both hands are amply buttered, then butters the inside of the bowl with long streaks of yellow butter. She lifts the dough and sets it in the bottom of the basin, turning it a few times to round the edges. She butters the top delicately with a thin, shining coating of grease. Next she takes a clean cloth and drapes it over the bowl, moves the bowl to the centre of the table and stands back.
Her hands tingle from the flow of blood stimulated by the kneading. They feel large, swollen, and very warm. Sometimes she thinks she makes bread just to feel that heat and power in her hands. But her shoulders and back ache, reminding her that she has been making bread for more than sixty years. It is a thing of pride, she thinks to herself, to have sixty years of bread-making behind you.
She washes her hands in the warm running water her sons have given her, thinking, men dig wells and run pumps, and women make bread. Then she goes outside to the old woodpile near the back of the yard.
The sun is so hot it strikes her like a blow. I never could stand the heat, she observes again, and shades her eyes with her hand while she scurries back into the kitchen, takes her big straw sunhat from the hook by the door, ties it under her chin, and goes back outside.
She finds some kindling, a few sticks of wood left from her last bread-making. The axe waits in the chopping block. Jasper always kept the wood chopped, she has to give him that. After supper every evening, the familiar thud and crack, rhythmic, the silence, the thud-crack, the silence between the blows. She especially liked the sound of the dried sticks cracking as he twisted them on the axe. She rarely watched him, but could see with her mind’s eye how his shirt wrinkled over his shoulders and stretched tight over his biceps, when he raised the axe, and how, when the axe began its long fall, the muscles in his back would swell and move. He was a strong man, Jasper w
as, she tells herself. But I’m stronger.
She lifts the axe and lets it fall. A flock of horned larks swoops past on the other side of the pole fence and then they are gone. I always liked horned larks, she says to herself, letting the axe fall again. They don’t bother nobody, and they’re pretty little birds.
She wonders if Diane is gone. She thinks Selena told her, but she can’t remember. Oh, she went all right, I knew she would the moment she was born. Maude holding her up for me to see. Another girl, Maude said. A girl, and Archie so wanted a boy. Let him have the next one then, I told her, but poor Maude only burst into tears. This one’s a seeker, I said, when I saw how she squirmed, her eyes already looking all around.
Suddenly Rhea’s energy deserts her and she sets the axe heavily into the chopping block, turns, goes around the house and back inside. She is grateful for the cool, dim interior of her house and she takes off her hat and hangs it wearily back on its hook. She sits down again in her armchair at the end of the room and lets her head fall back against its padding. Jasper sat here. For years it was Jasper’s chair. Now it’s mine. She closes her eyes.
Darkness. Only pitch darkness behind her eyelids. She relaxes, sinks deeper into it. Slowly it begins to lighten, and she finds herself back in her own kitchen, many years before.
Blood. Blood everywhere. On the kitchen floor, the table leg. Sprayed out across the washstand, a trail from the door. All over his hands and face and his belly, too, soaking the clean shirt she had finished making only the day before. I’ll never get it all out, she thought, flustered.
Jasper was white. The hired man supporting him by holding one arm at the elbow. There was blood all over his clothes, too. Jasper took his hand away from his calf, raising his head to look beseechingly at her. Do something, his look said, and she pressed her hands against her thighs, bending to see better.
Luna Page 9
