The Devil's Larder

59

EASTER DAY. The village custom was for everyone — even those who would not go to church — to spread a handful of flour on a stone as an offering. You could expect the flour to be gone within the hour. Rats and birds would have it. Or else the wind or rain.

We have a misplaced stone next to the gate into the orchard. It’s a vagrant, not a local stone — the local stone is silver-grey — but whoever brought it there did so more than eighty years ago. My grandmother remembers it from when she was young. She used to sit her dolls on the flat top and let them watch her stretch out in the grass and read. They were her guardians. The colour of the stone, she says, was like material — velvet, mauve. She had a matching dress and she made matching dresses for her dolls.

That flat top was, of course, the perfect place to put our offering, a gram or so of bleached self-raising flour on a tonne or so of blood-red stone.

It was only because the weather was good and my spirits unusually low that I spent so much time, that Easter, out of doors. Otherwise I might not have witnessed what occurred beneath the canopy of fruit trees. I have to tell you what I saw with my own eyes, something defying science and good sense, in order to convince myself, not you, that sometimes simple things — like flour, sunlight, stone — can break the rules.

I knew that there were rats around. There always are in orchards. I could hear the fretful, constant scurrying of rodent feet. And there were nesting birds for whom the flour ought to provide easy foraging. But, possibly because I was settled in the grass a metre from the stone, engrossed by the music on my Walkman and by a soothing glass or two of beer, the wildlife kept away on that first day. And when I got up in the afternoon to go back to my parents’ house, greatly rested and tranquillized by my half-sleep, I noticed the flour was untouched. Indeed, it seemed to me the volume of the flour had increased, as if it had drawn from the air or from the sun a fortifying trace of heat and moisture.

I do not know what made me turn my empty glass upside down and place it over the flour. I can’t imagine that I wanted to protect it from the dew or deny the birds and rats their easy meal. I cannot claim I had an inkling of what might happen overnight. I was just curious to see how long our offering would last if I protected it.

Again, I was not sure when I returned next day if the actual amount of flour had increased as it appeared to have done. The volume had, of course. The offering had swollen by a centimetre. Anyone could see it had. The risen flour pressed against the sides of the glass. And when I lifted up the glass, its contents were as rubbery as dough, and round. You might say it most resembled a communion wafer.

That second day, encouraged by the unseasonal heat, we both — the offering and I — baked in the sun. Each time I looked, the dough suggested that it had proved itself a little more. Certainly, by lunchtime, the wafer had thickened and enlarged. By late afternoon, when the shadow of our roof and chimney pots was stretched across the chilling grass, the wafer had become a ball of dough. The flour must have located airborne yeast, I thought. What other explanation could there be?

I brought my mother’s glass salad cover from the pantry and put it on our mauve stone to cover the ball of dough and save it once again from animals. I dropped a pinch of table salt onto the mix. A blessing of sorts. A petition for good luck. A prayer to end the cruel disruptions of my family life. My parents walked down to the orchard, arm in arm, and laughed at me, my pinch of salt, my simple faith in signs. I’d had too many beers, they said. I was too stressed, too fanciful, I was upset. They’d seen mushrooms, bigger than my dough, spring up in half an hour. Nothing to get excited about. ‘Nature’s odder than you think. Things grow.’

That night, of course, I had the oddest dreams. Who wouldn’t dream at times like these, my marriage on the rocks and me, a refugee from home, reduced to staying in the same bedroom where I had slept when I was small? Who wouldn’t dream?

The earth was baking in my dream. It proved to be the hottest day of all, sub-tropical. You had to wear a hat. I was walking down to the orchard gate, fearful, doubting, full of hope. The stone, flattered by the warmth, trembled like a heated coal. It glistened like volcanic jewels. The smell was not volcano, though, not sulphur and not ash. The smell was bread, fresh baked. I lifted up the glass protector from the flat top of the stone and touched the crust, the split, chestnut turban of a finished loaf, fresh bread baked out of nothing on the hotplate of the stone, our risen offering, my answered prayer. Beyond the odour of the bread there was a hint of aloe and of myrrh. In my dream I covered up the bread with linen. And then I ran down to the village for the priest to come and witness what I took to be a miracle. That risen loaf’s a sign, he said, that everything is well. Our blighted pasts are taken from the cross and rubbed with spices and with oils. Our futures are uncrucified. Things grow.

On the third day, I woke exhausted by my night of dreams and went a little sheepishly down to the long grass by the orchard gate to read and think about the battles and the custodies ahead. My mother’s glass salad cover had somehow fallen to the ground and smashed. A disappointment and a shock. The stone itself had shifted too, I thought. A touch displaced.

The day was chilly, damp, not tropical at all. Any trace of resurrected dough had disappeared, of course. My dreams had been misleading, mischievous. There was no evidence. The rats and birds had come and knocked the salad cover to the ground. The rats and birds had dined.

My little daughter, five years old, has come today to rescue me. She puts her dolls up on the flat mauve stone and they guard over us while we stretch out a metre from the orchard gate and stare into the pages of our open books. And if I turn and sniff the air, as country dwellers always do when weather’s on the move, I fancy I can smell a bakery — though, let’s be honest, an orchard always smells of bakeries. There’s yeast in rotting fruit. There’s dough in mulching leaves. Tree bark and fungi stink of bread.