Chapter 15: The Fold

February was the fold. The month that bent the winter back on itself, the first half a continuation of January's unrelenting cold and the second half a turning, not a warming — warming was months away — but a turning, a change in the quality of the light that was imperceptible unless you were looking for it, which Marguerite was, because she had been looking for it since December, since the solstice, since the shortest day, watching the light the way she watched the starter, checking daily for signs of change, for the first indication that the process was underway, that the transformation had begun.

The light came back in minutes. Two minutes more per day, roughly, the Earth tilting on its axis, the northern hemisphere angling toward the sun by increments so small they were theoretical, and yet by mid-February the sun was rising at six-forty-five instead of seven-fifteen and setting at five instead of four, and the difference was visible, was felt, the bakery brighter in the morning, the grey replaced by something that was not colour exactly but was the promise of colour, the way the first bubbles on the surface of the starter were not bread exactly but were the promise of bread.

She was baking twenty-four loaves a week now. Eight per baking day, three days a week. The demand had grown steadily since Christmas, the back-door customers multiplying, the news of Marguerite's bread spreading through the parish and beyond — to Saint-Denis, to Sainte-Anne, to La Pocatière, where a woman from the natural food store had tasted the rye at a friend's house and had called and asked if Marguerite could supply six loaves a week, and Marguerite had said yes without thinking and then had stood in the bakery and thought about what she had said and realized that she had just taken an order, that she had just committed to a schedule and a quantity and a delivery, that she was running a business.

The shop was still closed. The FERMÉ sign was still in the window. The customers still came to the back door. But the volume was increasing and the back door was becoming inadequate — the customers arriving at unpredictable times, sometimes three at once, sometimes none for an hour, the logistics of a back-door bakery revealing themselves to be the logistics of inefficiency, of lost time, of Marguerite standing at the door with flour on her hands making change from a cigar box while the dough on the bench waited and the fold schedule drifted and the timing of the whole bake was disrupted by the interruption of commerce.

She needed to reopen the shop.

The thought arrived the way her thoughts arrived now — not as a decision but as a rising, developing in the background while her hands did other things. One morning she woke and the thought was there, fully formed.

She told Jean-François at breakfast.

"Je vais rouvrir la boutique."

He looked at her over his coffee. The deep eyes. The carpenter's patience. He did not ask if she was sure. He did not ask about the logistics or the hours or the money or the insurance. He said:

"Quand?"

"Mars."

He nodded. He drank his coffee. The conversation was over. Twenty-four years of marriage had taught them both that some conversations were short because they needed to be short, because the decision was already made and the discussion was a formality, and they were both people who preferred formality to be brief.

She went to the bakery. She fed the starter. She mixed the dough. She folded. And while she folded she planned — the reopening, the schedule, the production, the hours. She would open Tuesday through Saturday, six in the morning to noon, the old hours, Thérèse's hours. She would bake the country bread and the rye, and she would add a third bread — a baguette, the French baguette, the long thin loaf that required a different shaping technique and a different scoring pattern and a different bake time but that used the same culture and the same oven and the same flour, and the baguette was the bread that the tourists wanted when they came in summer and that the locals wanted for their dinner tables, the bread that went with soup and cheese and wine, the bread of everyday, and she had not baked baguettes before — Thérèse had, but Marguerite had always deferred the baguette to her mother, the shaping too demanding, the long thin form unforgiving of error, the baguette requiring a precision that the boule and the bâtard did not, the margin for error smaller, the shape more dramatic, more exposed.

She practiced. Every day for the last two weeks of February she shaped baguettes, the dough divided into pieces of three hundred and fifty grams, the pieces pre-shaped into logs, the logs rested, and then the final shaping — the letter fold, the sealing, the rolling, the gradual elongation of the log into the long thin form, the hands working from the centre outward, the dough tapering at the ends, the shape symmetrical, the tension even, the surface smooth, and the shape was wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, the baguettes too fat or too thin or uneven or split or bulging in the middle, the litany of errors that accompanied any new technique, the hands learning by failing, the failures necessary, each one a data point in the database, each one bringing her closer to the shape she was after, the platonic baguette, the ideal form that existed in her mind and that her hands were slowly, painfully, clumsily approaching.

By the end of February the baguettes were acceptable. Not beautiful. Acceptable. The shape was more or less correct, the scoring more or less even — five diagonal cuts for a standard baguette, each cut overlapping the previous one by a third, the angle forty-five degrees, the blade moving fast — and the bake was more or less right, the baguette requiring a hotter oven and a shorter time than the boule, twenty-two minutes instead of thirty-eight, the crust thinner, the crumb more uniform, the overall effect lighter, more delicate, more French, and she was not French, she was Québécoise, and her baguettes were Québécois baguettes, slightly thicker, slightly chewier, slightly more rustic than a Parisian baguette, and this was fine, this was right, this was the bread adapting to the place the way the starter had adapted to the place, the bread reflecting its terroir, the geography and the climate and the water and the flour and the hands of the baker all expressed in the final product, the bread a portrait of its maker and its place.

She called the insurance company. She called the health inspector. She called the woman at the natural food store in La Pocatière. She called Père André and told him and he said "Grâce à Dieu" and she said nothing because she was not sure about God but she was sure about bread and for now bread was enough. She called Sophie and Sophie said "C'est le temps" and Marguerite agreed, it was time.

She did not call Bergeron.

The decision had been forming for weeks, slow and steady, and now it could hold shape. She would not sell. She would keep the bakery. She would bake bread. She would feed the starter. She would fire the oven. She would do these things because they needed to be done and because she wanted to do them, and the months of solitary baking had taught her that her hands were equal to the task. Her bread was good. The culture was healthy. The oven answered her fire. The village wanted what she made.

She would tell Bergeron. Not yet. Soon. First the reopening: the OUVERT sign in the window, the bread on the shelves, the bell above the door ringing when the customers came in. They would come because the bread was here and the baker was here and the oven was here and the culture was here. A developer with leather shoes and a smooth voice could not replicate that, could not buy it, could not build it.

The fold. The repeated action that built strength. The stretch and the return. February bending winter back on itself. Marguerite bending grief back toward work. The dough yielding and returning under her hands, structure developing, strength building, bread becoming bread, baker becoming baker.

March was coming. The light was coming. The reopening was coming.

She fed the starter. She went to bed. She rose at four-thirty. She folded.