She rode into town on a dusty old mountain bike.
Through the window, I watched as she got off the bike, piled higher with packs and tied-down parcels than I’d ever seen, and leaned it carefully against the sign pole across the street. Somehow, I knew she’d be coming into the shop.
“Better not leave it there,” I said as she came through the door. “Kids in this town, they’d nick the gold out of your molars, give ’em half the chance.”
She smiled. “It’s fine, thanks,” she said in so soft a voice. “It’s protected.”
I checked back outside, thinking maybe she’d been riding with a friend I hadn’t seen. But no, the bike stood by itself under the sixty minute parking sign. This was before I knew her, of course. I mean, what else was I to think?
I eyed her as she walked around the shop, taking in the available goods. Little thing, she was. On the stumpy side. Hair dark and short, crystals of sweat dotted her forehead. She wore a T-shirt and those black lycra shorts your touring cyclists wear. Not pretty, but…
I glanced over at Jenny, my shop assistant. Now there, with all that powder and lip paint and tight slacks, there was a piece of pastry! This one was nothing like that. But something. It was the smile, I reckon. That and the eyes, dark and sparkly. I admit I took to her right off.
“Would you have a job?” she then asked. “I’m a good baker.”
Now, here’s a funny thing: just that morning I’d decided to sack one of the assistants. Hadn’t told a soul. But it was almost like she’d known, the way she asked.
Normally, I don’t do this. Normally, I take my time, weigh things. But before I could even think, I heard myself say yes. Jenny, eyeing her up and down, did a double-take over at me.
Jude, she said her name was, did not begin baking straight away. I figured to see how sincere a young person she was. (So few are, nowadays.) I mean, what could she be – twenty? Twenty-one? Comes into town on a dusty old bicycle, walks right into the shop and tells you she’ll hang around six months or a year and work hard. Uh-huh. I figured she’d maybe last the week, so loaded her down with all sorts of menial chores. But whatever I asked she did, and with a calm, quiet zeal, an eye toward perfection. And never a word of complaint: never.
The others took to her straight away. Kevin, the school leaver I had driving the van, oh my, did he fall on his face over her. Jude was very cordial with him, very kind, like a big sister. And that seemed to satisfy the young buck. Matter of fact, the whole time she was here, she didn’t have so much as a single fling. And this town, gossip capital of the galaxy, believe you me I’d’ve heard.
I let her room in the shed behind the bakery. At first, I charged her a day’s wage, which would’ve made anyone else balk. Not Jude. She just smiled.
She immediately tidied the place up, made it livable. Livable? Listen, I want to tell you. I could never stand going into that shed, it was so dark and dingy. But once she shifted in, what she did to the space, the feel she gave it, every time I’d set foot in there I felt like a babe being stroked by its mum, swear.
Anyway, when she began baking, I dropped the rental. She didn’t say a word. I don’t know was she appreciative or not. (I never did. She was the same no matter what you said or did, or didn’t say or do. I spent a lot of time around her sighing and shrugging, let me tell you.)
When she watched me bake – and she was always watching, except when she had work that kept her away from the ovens – she never said a word. I could feel her eyes on me, could sense that pleasant smile, but I never knew what was going on behind those sparkle-eyes. I’d explain something, then ask, “Did you get that, Jude?” The smile might grow a fraction, perhaps a vaguely perceptible nod, but always I had the feeling she was somewhere else, seeing something other eyes didn’t.
One morning I asked would she care to have a go on some bread. It was as though she’d been expecting it. She moved to the bench and began sprinkling flour and kneading the dough like she’d been born into it. I was watching her hands – they were good hands, the fingers long, the wrists powerful, which surprised me plenty – when, for a reason I can’t give you, I glanced up to her face. If there’s a word to describe what I saw there, what I felt from her, I suppose euphoria is as close as I can come.
Jude baked six loaves that morning. Were they good? Look, I’ve been baking thirty years. I have a reputation as a master baker that goes beyond the town. I know my craft, all right. Jude’s bread. It was good bread, yes; perhaps very good bread. But there was something else. I cannot begin to tell you what it was, none of us can -- still. But something, uh, happened to you when you ate it.
Now look here: I don’t mean to tell you that with the very first bite you had a religious experience. You had, as a matter of fact, a somewhat difficult time deciding whether you actually liked it or not, at first. This I find very odd indeed. Normally you know, right off: you like it, you don’t like it. Not Jude’s bread.
What did happen, you felt compelled to eat more, just to let yourself know. And more. And more. Before you knew it, you’d gone through half a loaf. And still you weren’t sure. You just had to have another slice. Or, as almost everybody did after a while, another chunk ripped out by hand.
That was one thing. The other was what happened after you ate the bread. In fact, it was what happened after that made me start going into her room more and more – when she wasn’t there.
Right here, I wish to say this: I am not some old fart lost half a century back. I read the papers, I watch TV, I surf the web. I have a smartphone chocka with apps (downloaded by my grandson; be darned if I know how to use more than a few of them.) I bloody well know what’s going on in the world. I know, even if I’ve never tried any, all about the drugs your kids do nowadays. When it became sort of evident what was happening as a result of Jude’s bread, I watched that girl like a hawk. And started going into her room.
Jude’s room. I soon realized why all those packs and parcels on her bike. She carried her living space with her. First time I ventured in there on my own, I felt like I’d stepped through some time-space warp and come out somewhere near Kublai Khan. All kinds of Indian and Tibetan and Oriental tapestries on the walls, on the windows, hanging from the ceiling. Not gaudy. Not showy. Just right. And so soft and comforting. On the walls too were posters and prints that also came from those places, and others. One was a picture of a man, blue from head to feet, playing a wooden flute. Another of a woman with six arms. (What a baker, she’d make, eh!) The fat bald dude who’s always grinning. And the Dalai Lama, of course.
First I reckoned she was into some weird cult thing. That had me worried. One shows up, they all begin coming round. But no, there was old JC, and then there was this Jewish star carved out of kauri…I mean, she truly played the field.
The place smelled so nice, too. Half a minute that first time in there, I was another person; for sure a far calmer one. Jude had made that ratty old shed a very lovely possy.
One time I went in there, I got the shock of my life. I knocked on the door like I always did. “You there, Jude?” I called out quietly. Nothing. So I opened the door (which she never locked) and took a step in. And stopped dead in my tracks. She was sitting on the floor, her back ramrod straight and legs twisted up funny in front of her. There was a candle lit next to her on the floor and one of those incense sticks made the place smell so good. All of which was, em, normal. What wasn’t normal were her eyes. They were closed; well, almost. Open just a bit, they were. And nothing showed but the whites. And they didn’t flicker, not even when I made what I guess was somewhere between a snort and a gasp. Not a flicker; like, the motor’s running, but nobody’s at the wheel.
I stayed out of there for a time, but still I had to know, and began going in again when I was sure she was off walking along the river or cycling over the hill to the beach, as she often did. And I snooped everywhere. Nothing, nil, nada. No powders, no potions, no pills. But I had to be certain. And did what I now consider a very, oh, not a very nice thing. See, I sent a loaf of her bread up to the City, to a lab there to be analyzed. And do you know what they found? Flour. Yeast. Salt. Water. Sometimes molasses. (Jude never used sugar.) I hate to tell you what that bit of folly set me back.
So what, exactly, was happening to people who ate this strange young lady’s bread? Well, the first sign came some minutes after you’d begun eating. You started to feel, ah, good. Not great, not kick-your-heels and whoop-de-do. Good.
Then you began to feel like giggling. That’s the most honest way of putting it. You just wanted to giggle. (And mostly you did.) Why? Because it seemed as though somebody, somehow, had come along and very gently lifted from atop your head a blanket of gloom you didn’t even know was there. It was very, very subtle, mind, and none of us associated it with the bread during those first few weeks of Jude’s baking. And yet (we all agreed later), we did know. Inside, each and every one of us, we knew.
After a while, people began coming into the shop and right there, or on their way out, pulling off great gobs and shoving them into their mouths. Not in all my years had I ever seen that. Cake, yeah, sure. Bread, never.
And they could tell the difference, whether it was her bread or not. They didn’t know it was her bread, of course; they didn’t know anything about her, or that someone other than myself or my apprentices were doing the baking. Yet they knew it was Jude’s bread and when it wasn’t.
“Hey, Miss, this doesn’t taste the same as the bread I got here day before yesterday. You don’t have anymore of that stuff, eh?” Poor Jenny the shop assistant, she didn’t know what to do.
I did a load of wrestling with my ego those first weeks. For there was never a shade of doubt my bread was better. It was made better, it had better body, a more distinct, yet delicate, flavor. But it sure as hell didn’t make you want to giggle!
I’ll tell you what made me stuff my ego in a drawer. I have a pretty good notion of this business. I can – or could before, and again now – tell you practically to the loaf how much bread we’re going to sell on any given day. This began to change, radically.
“Jude, what in the world are you doing?” I’d ask. Well, I wouldn’t ask, exactly. More I’d bellow at her. Her reply? Yep: that damn smile.
Look, it wasn’t just the giggling, all right? People began feeling better. Becoming healthier. Getting along with one another. Good Holy Jesus, the crime rate in this burg fell practically to nothing!
Yeah, yeah, I know precisely what you’re thinking. How can that blathering idiot stand there and tell me all this came from bread made by a five-foot-nothing girl barely out of her teens? And you’re absolutely right-on to think it preposterous. Except for one thing. I’m right.
When she told me she was leaving, I thought I’d cry. Oh, it wasn’t the money. It wasn’t almost putting out of business those upstart Cambodians who’d opened up three doors down and undercharged me sometimes by twenty-five percent (though I do admit to an extremely satisfying glee over that one!) Nor was it the remarkable, eh, coincidence that saw the town become a healthier, safer, more pleasant place to live, all on account of her bread. There was just something very special about this young woman.
Did I plead with her? Hell, yes! Offered her more money, even a share in the bakery, if you can believe that. I knew before I did, though, it would all be for naught.
Where will you go? I asked her. Another town? Another bakery?
“No,” she replied. “I think I’ve done all the baking I care to do this lifetime.”
She rode out of town on a dusty mountain bike.
It didn’t take long for business to return to normal. Practically as soon as she left, they stopped even asking. It was as though, without knowing, they knew. People began getting sick again, they walk right by you on the street without so much as a glance, the hoods and thugs are back into doing the dirty.
The local bread? It’s bread. You toast it, put butter on, or margarine or peanut butter or jam. Stuff ham between two slices, or chicken, or tuna, or cheese or eggs. Gets a little hard, you toss it out for the blackbirds and sparrows.
It does not make you giggle anymore.