Chapter 18: May

The river broke on the third of April. It did not break gradually, not this year — the ice held and held and held and then it broke, the sheet fracturing in a single afternoon, the cracks propagating at speed, the sound enormous, a booming that echoed off the hills on both sides of the valley and that the village heard and came out to watch, the people standing on the road above the shore, the way they stood every year, every spring, the annual spectacle of the river freeing itself, the ice pans tilting and grinding and moving east with the current, the dark water appearing between the floes, the water that had been hidden for months now visible, now moving, now alive, and the breaking of the ice was not gentle, was not the quiet thaw of a pond — it was violent, the forces enormous, the ice thick enough to have supported trucks and the current strong enough to move it anyway, the river asserting itself over the freeze the way spring asserted itself over winter, not by negotiation but by force, and the force was time, was the accumulated warmth of weeks of lengthening days, the thermal energy building in the water and the air and the stone until the ice could not hold, until the crystal lattice shattered, until the river was river again.

Marguerite watched from the bakery window. She was at the bench, shaping the morning's loaves — forty-eight per baking day now, the production having doubled since the reopening, the demand steady, the customers loyal, the bread moving from the shelves to the village and beyond, to La Pocatière and Rivière-du-Loup and as far as Rimouski, where a restaurant had begun ordering six loaves a week — and she paused in her shaping to watch the ice move, the white pans drifting east on the dark water, and she felt the loosening, the release, the same release that the river felt, the long compression of winter giving way, the held breath exhaled.

May came.

May in Kamouraska was a different country from November. The same geography — the same river, the same road, the same stone buildings and cedar hedges and church steeples — but the light had changed everything, the way a change in oven temperature changed everything, the same dough producing a different bread in a different heat, and the heat of May was gentle, tentative, the temperature rising to ten degrees, then twelve, then fifteen, the warmth arriving in increments, each increment noticed and appreciated and celebrated in the small ways that villages celebrated — a door left open, a jacket unzipped, a chair placed on a porch, the body turning its face to the sun for the first time in months, the skin remembering warmth.

The bakery was warm. Not oven-warm, not the brutal dry heat of the firing, but warm in the way that a living room was warm, the temperature comfortable, the stone walls that had held the cold all winter now holding the warmth, the same thermal mass serving the opposite purpose, the building adapting to the season the way the baker adapted to the flour, the same material responding differently to different conditions, and the bakery in May smelled different from the bakery in November — the same bread, the same culture, the same oven, but the warmer air carried the scent differently, distributed it further, the smell of baking bread reaching the street through the open windows and drawing people in, the smell a kind of advertising, a kind of prayer, a broadcast of presence.

She was baking five days a week now. Tuesday through Saturday. Forty-eight loaves on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thirty-six on Thursday. Sixty on Saturday. Two hundred and sixteen loaves per week. The production was more than Thérèse had managed alone — Thérèse had baked sixty per day, three days a week, one hundred and eighty per week — and the excess was not ambition but demand, the demand growing as the word spread, as the bread proved itself, as the village and the region came to understand that Le Four was not merely open but was thriving, that the bread was good, that the baker — the new baker, the daughter — was capable, was more than capable, was a baker in her own right, with her own bread and her own technique and her own relationship to the culture and the oven and the flour.

The rye was popular. It had become the bakery's second bread, the daily alternative, the choice for those who wanted something darker, deeper, more complex, and Marguerite had developed a variation — a rye with caraway seeds, the seeds toasted and folded into the dough during the final fold, the flavour earthy and aromatic, the crumb studded with small dark seeds that cracked between the teeth and released a burst of flavour that was warm and faintly sweet — and the caraway rye had become a Saturday specialty, baked only on Saturdays, the limited availability creating a demand that exceeded the supply, the customers arriving early, the caraway rye selling out by eight, and Marguerite felt in this a lesson about scarcity and value and the importance of not giving people everything they wanted all the time, a lesson that the starter had been teaching her from the beginning — the daily discard, the removal of half the culture, the necessary waste that kept the organism vital, the less-is-more that was the fundamental principle of sourdough, of baking, of a life well managed.

She had also developed a fougasse. Her mother's fougasse — the flat leaf-shaped bread made with olive oil and herbs, the dough stretched thin and cut with a series of slashes that opened during baking into a decorative pattern of holes, the bread crisp and oily and fragrant — had been a Saturday staple, and Marguerite had revived it, using her mother's technique but with her own additions: rosemary from the jars on the shelf, fleur de sel from the tin, and sometimes — on warm Saturdays, in the spirit of experiment — sun-dried tomatoes or olives or both, the additions changing the character of the bread, expanding its range, the fougasse becoming a canvas, a platform for variation, the one bread in the bakery that was different each week, and the customers came on Saturdays not knowing what the fougasse would be and the not-knowing was part of the pleasure, the anticipation, the small weekly surprise.

The oven was healthy. She had developed an understanding of it that she could not have described in words but that she possessed in her body, in her hands, in the part of her brain that processed heat and time and the particular behaviour of this particular oven with its particular soapstone floor and its particular firebrick dome and its particular chimney and flue. She knew how much wood to burn for how long to reach a given temperature. She knew the hot spots — the left rear of the floor ran twenty degrees higher than the right front, a quirk of the dome's geometry — and she rotated the loaves during baking to compensate. She knew the sound of a well-fired oven — the tick of expanding stone, the whisper of the chimney — and the sound of an under-fired one — the silence that meant the thermal mass was not fully charged and that the bake would suffer.

She knew the oven's moods. This was not mysticism. This was the accumulated data of five months of daily observation processed by a brain that was optimized for pattern recognition, and the patterns were real — the oven behaved differently in cold weather and warm weather, in dry air and humid air, in wind and calm, the variables affecting the combustion and the heat retention and the moisture content of the baking environment, and Marguerite could feel these variables the way her mother had felt them, the hand inside the dome counting seconds, the body integrating the data into a single judgment: ready, or not ready, the binary that governed the bake.

She still used the thermometer. She would always use the thermometer. But she also used her hand, and her hand was getting closer to her mother's hand, the calibration improving, the count more accurate, the agreement between the thermometer's number and her hand's judgment narrowing, and she understood now that the two methods were not in competition but were complementary, the thermometer providing the specific, the hand providing the general, and the baker needed both, the specific and the general, the number and the feeling, the science and the art.

The starter was seventy years old and four months. Marguerite had been feeding it daily since the fourteenth of November, one hundred and sixty-eight consecutive feedings, and the culture had never been healthier — the rise time consistent at four hours, the peak height a full doubling, the smell balanced, the acidity moderate, the bread it produced complex and nuanced and consistently excellent. She had begun to understand the culture as her mother had understood it — not as a tool or an ingredient but as a partner, a collaborator, an organism with its own rhythms and preferences and moods, the moods real, the culture responding to changes in temperature and flour and hydration and even, Marguerite suspected, to the baker's own state, the culture and the baker in a relationship that was symbiotic, each sustaining the other, each requiring the other, the baker feeding the culture and the culture feeding the baker and the bread feeding the village and the village feeding the baker, the circle complete, the ecosystem closed, the economy of bread.

She fed it from love now. Not from obligation. Not from duty. Not from the desperate determination of a woman trying to keep a living thing alive while everything else fell apart. She fed it because she loved it, because the daily feeding was not a burden but was a gift, was the fifteen minutes each morning when she stood at the shelf and lifted the cloth and leaned into the smell and stirred in the flour and the water and felt the connection — to the culture, to the bakery, to her mother, to the woman in the photograph, to Alphonse, to the hundred and thirty years of bread that this building had produced, the connection a living thing itself, maintained by repetition, strengthened by practice, alive as long as she was alive and feeding.

Thérèse came home on the twenty-first of May. Not to the bakery — to the house in Saint-Denis that had been adapted for a wheelchair, the doors widened, the bathroom rebuilt, the bedroom moved to the ground floor, the work done by Jean-François over the winter, evenings and weekends, the carpentry careful and precise and offered without discussion because this was what he did, he built things for people who needed them built, and his mother-in-law needed a house she could live in with half a body, and so he built it.

Marguerite drove her from the hospital. The road was the same road — the villages, the saints, the highway between the river and the fields — but the fields were green now, the hay growing, the earth alive, and the river was blue, actually blue, the colour that Marguerite had forgotten existed during the months of grey and white, the blue of the St. Lawrence in May, wide and deep and bright, the far shore clear, the church steeples of the north shore visible against the sky, and the sky itself blue, a pale spring blue that held nothing, no cloud, no weight, the sky offering itself the way the river offered itself, generously, without condition.

Thérèse sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window and her left hand gripped the armrest and her face — the left side — showed something that was not a smile but was the muscle memory of a smile, the face reaching for an expression it could not fully form, the intention present, the execution impaired, the gap between what the face wanted to say and what it could say the same gap that existed in her speech, the meaning clear, the mechanism broken, and Marguerite saw it and understood it and did not look away from it because looking away was not something she did anymore, was not something a baker did, a baker looked at the bread and read its story and accepted what it said.

She drove Thérèse to the bakery first. This had not been the plan — the plan was to go directly to the house in Saint-Denis, to settle Thérèse in, to arrange the medications and the schedule and the visiting nurse — but Marguerite turned the truck and drove to the bakery instead, because the bakery was the plan, had always been the plan, the plan that predated all other plans, the plan that was not a plan but was a fact, a truth, a gravitational constant.

She parked. She got the wheelchair from the truck bed. She helped Thérèse into it, the transfer awkward, the right side dead weight, the left side doing the work, and she wheeled her to the back door and through the production room and Thérèse's left eye took in everything — the oven, the bench, the bannetons, the scale, the rack, the woodstove, the walls, the stones, the light from the windows, the shelf with the crock and the log and the photograph — and the eye was wet, the left eye, and the wetness was not the hooch of an unfed starter but was something else, something that Marguerite recognized because she had felt it herself, in the truck on the highway in December, the involuntary release that the body produced when the container of grief was full and could hold no more.

She wheeled Thérèse to the shelf. She lifted the cloth from the crock. The starter was there — active, alive, the surface domed and bubbly, the smell of green apple and yeast and the faint mushroom note of lactic acid, the culture thriving, the culture that Thérèse had started from flour and water fifty years ago and that her mother had maintained before that and that the woman in the photograph had perhaps maintained before that, the culture that was seventy years old and that would be seventy-one and seventy-two and a hundred if someone kept feeding it, if someone kept honouring the contract, if someone kept doing the daily work that the daily work required.

Thérèse reached out. The left hand, trembling slightly, the fingers extending toward the crock, and Marguerite moved the crock closer and Thérèse's hand entered the mouth of the crock and her fingers touched the surface of the culture and the culture was cool and smooth and alive, the texture of it familiar to these fingers, intimately familiar, the texture that these fingers had felt ten thousand times, and the fingers remembered what the brain could not fully express, the tactile memory intact, the body's knowledge surviving what the brain's knowledge had not.

Thérèse stirred the culture with her finger. One slow revolution. The finger moving through the paste, the motion deliberate and slow but recognizable — it was the feeding gesture, the stirring, the incorporation of the new into the old — and the gesture was not complete, was not the vigorous stirring that the feeding required, but it was the gesture, it was the hand in the culture, it was the baker touching the starter, and the touching was a homecoming more complete than any house could provide.

"Mère," Thérèse said.

"Oui, maman. Mère."

Thérèse withdrew her hand. She looked at her finger, coated with the culture, the pale beige paste on the tip, and she brought the finger to her mouth — the left side — and she tasted it. She tasted the culture that she had maintained for fifty years and that her daughter had maintained for five months and that her granddaughter had declared must not die, and the culture tasted of green apple and yeast and the mineral tang of lactic acid and something else, something that could not be named but that was there, present in the flavour the way it was present in the bread and in the oven and in the stone and in the river and in the light. The accumulated flavour of a hundred and thirty years of bread, of seventy years of culture, of fifty-three years of one baker's hands and five months of another's. The flavour was complex and nuanced and utterly itself, the flavour of this place and no other, the flavour of Le Four.

"Bon," said Thérèse.

Marguerite covered the crock. She wheeled her mother through the bakery, past the oven that Alphonse had built and that Thérèse's husband had rebuilt and that Marguerite now fired three times a week, past the bench where four generations of hands had shaped bread, past the shelf where the feeding log recorded the daily data of the culture's life, past the photograph of the woman in the dark dress who might have been Alphonse's wife or his daughter and who would remain unknown because the knowledge of her name had been lost, had died with the people who held it, and the loss was real but the photograph remained and the bakery remained and the bread remained and the culture in the crock remained, alive, fed, maintained by hands that loved the maintaining.

She wheeled Thérèse to the shop. The shelves were full — she had baked that morning, sixty loaves for Saturday, the shelves stacked with boules and bâtards and baguettes and rye and the caraway rye that sold out by eight and the fougasse with rosemary and fleur de sel — and Thérèse looked at the bread and the bread looked back, the golden crusts glowing in the May light, the ears open, the grignes clean, the loaves arranged in their rows the way Thérèse had arranged them for fifty-three years, the same order, the same shelves, the same building, the same bread and not the same bread, the same baker and not the same baker, everything the same and everything different, the continuity and the change held in the same space, in the same stone walls, in the same crock, in the same oven, and the holding was the thing, the holding was the achievement, the living culture maintained, the fire kept burning, the bread continuing to be made.

Thérèse looked at the bread for a long time. Then she looked at Marguerite. The left eye. The working eye. The eye that saw everything.

She did not speak. She reached out and took Marguerite's hand — the left hand taking the right, the working taking the working — and she squeezed, and the squeeze said what the mouth could not say fluently and what the bread had been saying all along and what the culture in the crock said every morning when Marguerite lifted the cloth and leaned in and breathed: I am here. I continue. I am alive because you kept me alive.

The bell above the door rang. The first customer of the day. Marie-Claire Pelletier from Saint-Denis, the harbinger, the herald, the woman who had been the first through the door in March and who was the first through the door now, and she walked in and saw Thérèse in the wheelchair and stopped and put her hand to her mouth and then she came forward and bent down and kissed Thérèse on both cheeks and said "Tu nous as manqué" — we missed you — and Thérèse said "Mmmmm" and Marie-Claire bought two boules and a baguette and the caraway rye and the fougasse and she left and the door closed and the bell stopped ringing and the shop was quiet.

Marguerite looked at her mother. Thérèse looked at the bread. The light came through the window and fell on the loaves and on the woman in the wheelchair and on the shelves and on the stone walls and on the floor and on everything.

The river was blue. The ice was gone. The fields were green. The village was alive. The oven was hot. The bread was good.

She turned to the shelf behind the counter where she kept the feeding log, the notebook that had been her mother's and was now hers, and she opened it to the last entry — this morning's, her handwriting, the data clean and functional — and she read it back to Thérèse:

21 mai. 4h45. 16°C. Farine S-P mélange. Eau 27°C. Bonne activité. Doublé en 4h. Odeur: pomme.

Apple. The smell of a balanced culture. The same notation Thérèse had written on the twelfth of November, the day before the stroke, the last entry in her hand. The culture had come full circle. The smell had returned. The balance had been restored.

Marguerite closed the notebook. She went to the crock and lifted the cloth and the smell of green apple and yeast filled the bakery and Thérèse breathed it in and Marguerite breathed it in and the culture sat in its crock on the shelf in the stone building that Alphonse Deschênes had built in 1887, and the culture was alive, and the baker was alive, and the bread was on the shelves, and the morning was young, and the customers were coming, and the bell would ring.

She covered the crock.

She opened the door.