Baker's Apprentice

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  Mac reaches for the coffeepot. “Who’s Emmett’s father?”

  “You keeping track of how many cups you’re drinking? I’m not running a soup kitchen here.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am. But I wish you’d get some milk. If I have to pay these ridiculous prices for coffee, I’d at least like to have some milk in it.” He props his right foot up on his left knee.

  “Ridiculous prices? My Aunt Fanny. This is real chicory coffee from New Orleans. Imported!” She takes a breath. “Emmett’s father. Well, only God and Bernice know the answer to that.”

  For the first time since he’s met Rhiannon, he has a sense that she’s hedging.

  “She’s a piece of work, that girl. Prickly as a damn porcupine. Treats Pearl May like dirt. Only thing she cares about is Emmett. He’s such a sweetie, too.” She gives him a pointed look. “But Bernice. That girl is trouble comin’ downhill on roller skates. Don’t mess with her.”

  July nineteenth is Pearl May’s eighty-fifth birthday party. Announcements appear suddenly all over town, placards in windows, bills posted on light poles and bulletin boards. A full-page ad runs in the Beaver Tales.

  When Mac asks if he and Nora are going, Chris laughs. “Attendance is not optional,” he says. “Everything in town shuts down that day anyway.”

  At three o’clock he closes his notebook and wanders down to the big meadow overlooking the river, where festivities have been under way since noon. Flagpoles fly the Canadian flag, the Yukon flag, and the Beaverton flag, and what looks like the entire population of the valley is milling around eating, drinking, playing games, and listening to music.

  He gets a beer from one of the bars set up at strategic intervals and works his way down the edge of the field past the tents of two caterers, brought in from Whitehorse, the tables where the townswomen proudly offer their breads and vegetables and cakes and preserves. Huge haunches of moose meat and several whole pigs roast slowly over a pit lined with glowing coals.

  Down by the river kids are shrieking their way through three-legged races while parents cheer them on. The sun is surprisingly hot, and several of the men have divested themselves of their shirts, displaying shockingly pale torsos.

  From a wooden stage draped with garlands and pennants, sounds of another band tuning up float over the crowd. He passes Rhiannon, resplendent in a long white dress, flowers in her hair, at a folding table reading the tarot for seekers who are lined up, waiting.

  He fills a plate with food, and then spots Chris and Nora on a blanket over by a makeshift volleyball court where a few teenagers are batting a ball back and forth, and he makes his way over to them.

  “This is pretty impressive,” he says, sitting down.

  “It’s only the beginning,” Chris says. His hair is newly trimmed for the occasion, revealing half circles of white skin behind his ears.

  “Just wait.” Nora laughs. “By about six P.M., everybody’s pissed as a fart and then the fun begins.”

  “Like what?”

  “She means they’re all drunk,” Chris translates.

  “Oh…fights, dancing, singing. People sneaking off into the bushes.”

  Mac grins. “Pearl May knows how to throw a party. Where is she?”

  “She won’t show up till tonight,” Nora says. “In time for cake and fireworks.”

  “Fireworks?”

  They nod in unison. “Just wait.”

  He eats slowly, amazed by how good everything is—or maybe it’s true that everything tastes better outdoors. Nora nibbles delicately on a piece of brown bread.

  Foster trails past in a beaver costume. The wide tail floats behind him like a fallen wind sock, and he carries the head under his arm.

  “Hi, Foster.” Nora smiles at him.

  He waves at her and wanders on, muttering to himself about harmonic convergence.

  Chris mops up the last of the sauce with a piece of bread, pushes his plate aside, and lies back drowsily. His eyelids flutter.

  “Hey, none of that.” It’s the guy from the post office—Dirk something—grinning his snaggletoothed grin. “Volleyball tournament’s starting. Our team plays first.”

  Chris groans, rolling into a sit.

  “Mac? We could use another tall guy at the net.”

  “Maybe later. I did something to my shoulder taking down the shutters on Pearl’s house. I’ll pass for now.”

  “Okay, but if we blow our winning streak, it’s on your head.” He grunts to his feet and lumbers off with Dirk.

  Nora smiles. “God, that was so sensible.”

  “Ouch. That’s the kiss of death.”

  “Being sensible? Hardly. I quite admire it.” She lifts her hair off her neck. “Too many of these guys feel as if it’s not just a volleyball game, it’s a test of manhood. Chris included, of course.” She looks at him. “On the other hand, maybe you’re just too young for a midlife crisis.”

  The volleyball match begins in a welter of swaggering boasts on both sides, but it’s soon apparent that Chris’s team—the Graylings, Nora says—didn’t really need anyone else at all. They could probably beat their opponents playing one-handed. The game turns into a romp, with the Graylings doing lots of silly tricks in between points. Emmett wanders over to stand on the sidelines and cheer for both teams. Mac looks around for Bernice, but doesn’t see her.

  Chris dives for a spiked return and Nora winces. “I can’t watch. He’s bound to break his damned neck one of these times.”

  He misses the return, picks himself up, laughing, and tosses the ball gently to Emmett to give back to the server. There’s a freeze-frame in the glare of the summer afternoon—the man and the boy, the turn of a head, the tenderness of a lopsided grin. Mac blinks and tries to hold the image, but it’s already gone. He must be imagining things. Then he looks at Nora.

  She faces straight ahead, but her eyes slide over to him, too brilliant. She pulls a few pieces of grass, tosses them away. “Hard to believe some people in this town still think I don’t know. You’d have to be blind, wouldn’t you?”

  He swallows the beer in his mouth.

  “It’s not—” she begins, then falters.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She bites her lip. “Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone who’s not one of us. You know what I mean? Someone who’s not in my hip pocket all the time, and I’m not in theirs. Who doesn’t already have an opinion, eh?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not that I don’t care, you know? It’s not that it didn’t just about kill me when he told me. It’s just that it’s been nearly seven years now. I mean, when he first told me, I thought I would leave him.” She swallows hard. “But then, where would I go?” She puts her hands behind her and lowers herself till she’s resting on her elbows. “I can see how it happened. I don’t hate her. She’s about as miserable as a person can get. I can’t even really blame Chris. Much as I’ve tried. I’ve seen how it happens to men. There’s so much ego shit going on with you lads that women don’t—”

  A tear rolls down her face and she jabs at it quickly. He gets to his feet. “Come on, let’s walk off some of that food.” He reaches down, lifting her gently from behind and they head for one of the bars. He opens a Coke for each of them, and they drift toward the river.

  They stop on a high, mossy shelf crowded with violets and the looping canes of wild roses. It’s cooler here. Across the water, an owl glides into the shadowed woods. The warm breeze dries the tears from her eyes, but the one that fell has left a nearly invisible, silvered track on her face.

  “Who’s your girl, Mac? I know there is one.”

  He smiles. “How do you know that?”

  “I just do. Did you break up?”

  “Her name’s Wyn. Wynter.”

  “What a lovely name. She’s in Seattle?”

  He nods. “She’s a bread baker.”

  “Why did you leave her?”

  “I didn’t leave her. I just left.”

 
“I see.”

  “It’s hard to explain. In some ways it was just that guy shit that all you women are so understandably sick of. She called it the Babe-I-gotta-leave-you-the-highway’s-callin’-bullshit-blues.”

  Nora’s laughter peals out across the river. She throws her head back, and her long, dark hair reaches nearly to her waist. “Oh, I like that woman.”

  He smiles. “You would. She’d like you, too.”

  “So in some ways it was the guy shit, and in other ways it was what?”

  “Some things I was working on didn’t pan out. A book. I felt so…useless, I guess. I just needed to get off by myself and think.”

  She laughs again. “Instead you end up in Beaverton, the biggest little town in the Yukon Territory, where everybody knows everybody’s business. So much for the hermetic life.”

  “So why didn’t you leave him?”

  She looks up sharply. “I was a coward.”

  “Seems like it took a lot more guts to stay.”

  “Well, it was mostly because I love Chris Moody more than the whole goddamned world. I told you how we met. At that awful party. But the truth is, my life up to that point was at least as awful as that party. I left Ireland and got to Toronto when I was seventeen. I was already pregnant, but I didn’t know it. The job I was supposed to have in Toronto fell through, and one thing led to another, and pretty soon I was living in a cold-water flat with a bunch of hippies, panhandlers, thieves—oh, it was straight out of Oliver, only not so cute.

  “It was a brutal winter. I lost the baby, nearly died myself. There were days when I wished I had. Losing the child was a terrible thing, but it turned me right around. I got help. Got a job. Got into school and got my degree. Of course I fell in love with one of my professors. He went back to his wife. I was thinking I’d go home to Dublin, not that there was anything for me there, but I just didn’t know what else to do. Then I met Chris.”

  She looks down at the river, wiping the little beads of sweat that stand up from the fair skin on her forehead. “He made me feel as if none of those other things mattered. As if all my bad times were no more than a frumpy dress that I could just take off and throw out.” She hugs herself. “So when this happened, and I thought about leaving, I thought, fine, Nora, but where will you go? You’ve been running your whole life.” She tilts her face up and catches his eye. “You think you’ve put things behind you, but the problem is, you’ve put nothing in front of you.”

  A sudden explosion of shouting and laughter signals the end of the volleyball game. Wordlessly they start back down to the meadow.

  “Want your cards read?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “No, I’ve got my hands full dealing with the present. I don’t care to know what’s in the future.”

  “Okay. I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

  She puts up a hand to shade her eyes. “Thanks, Mac.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “More than you think.”

  He watches her disappear into the crowd before he drifts down toward Rhiannon.

  Several teenage girls cluster at a table piled with pelts of wolf and marten and lynx, but they seem more interested in the trapper, a tall, well-muscled guy with a luxuriant brown beard. Oblivious to the girls, he stands, arms folded across his broad chest, talking to the woman in the next booth. She’s listening to him, and explaining the fine points of a cable-knit afghan to another woman, while her hands continue to knit as if directed by a separate intelligence.

  Rhiannon’s taking a break, and she waves him over. Jester, who’s been lying as immobile as a fur rug at her feet, gets up and immediately starts sniffing his crotch.

  He gently moves the dog’s head away. “Lady, I think your dog’s gay.”

  “Nah.” She winks broadly. “He swings both ways. Sometimes it’s a necessity around here.”

  “Oh, come on.” Mac looks out at the crowd spread over the meadow. “There’s got to be at least four men for every woman here.”

  Rhiannon crushes her empty drink can and flashes a smile. “Yeah, well, up here we say the odds are good, but the goods are decidedly odd.” She slaps his arm. “Which reminds me, it’s time for your reading. Don’t even think about runnin’ away now. Come on over here and sit down.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Just sit.” It’s the same tone of voice she uses on Jester, and they both obey.

  He shifts himself on the rickety camp stool while she covers the table with a piece of blue velvet and hands him the well-worn deck.

  “Do you have a specific question to ask?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okeydokey, then—”

  “I don’t think fortune-tellers are supposed to say okeydokey.”

  She ignores him. “I want you to hold the cards in both hands, shuffle them, cut the deck, and then lay it facedown on the table.”

  When he’s finished, she picks up the deck and lays out the first three cards in a triangle, and the next four in a square around them. She turns them over one at a time, beginning with the apex of the triangle.

  “This one”—she points to the top of the triangle—“symbolizes your essence, who you are. Yours happens to be the magician. A very powerful card.”

  He looks up, and her serious expression surprises him.

  “Its meaning is creativity, imagination. It’s about strong will and self-reliance, self-control. But it also can indicate deception.” She taps a purple fingernail on the card. “Including self-deception.

  “These two cards symbolize your relationship with the outer world.” She puts her index fingers on the other two points of the triangle. “This one on the left, the priestess. It can mean wisdom, objectivity. But it can also mean hidden emotion, avoidance of emotional entanglements. This one on the right is the hermit. He stands for knowledge and inner strength. But also secrecy and a denial of the truth.”

  He smiles. “So far, everything you’ve said can apply to me or just about anyone at this party.”

  “That’s right, sweet cheeks. The tarot’s not going to tell you things you don’t know. Its original and true purpose is to help you face the truths you already know subconsciously and figure out how to deal with them.”

  “So what we’re doing here is medieval therapy.”

  She gives him an irritated look. “You call it whatever you want. Now keep quiet and listen up. These two cards, above your essence, are in opposition to each other. This one, the six of cups, stands for the past, memories of things that have disappeared, regrets. Of which we all have some,” she says, preempting his comment. “This one, the seven of wands, is a great card. It points to success, not just money, but you know, fulfillment of dreams, contentment. Now these down here…” A frown troubles her forehead.

  “The five of wands means unresolved conflict. A struggle. It can be a struggle inside you, or a struggle between you and”—she looks at the last card—“the page of swords. A man. Young. Strong.”

  She looks up at him, hesitating. “Do you have a brother?”

  The hair rises on his scalp. “No.”

  She looks at him for a long time. “Then maybe it’s your father. But he seems to be young. There’s some really bad stuff here, this unresolved shit. Until you take care of that, make peace with him”—her eyes narrow—“whoever he is…you won’t be at peace with yourself.”

  He reaches for his wallet.

  “Honest to God, would you cut it out? I’m not through.”

  “Okay. What now? I toss three coins over my shoulder?”

  “Just back off, bubba. I don’t make fun of your writing. Don’t you make fun of my cards.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, then. Now, not that you deserve it, but just because I like you, I’m going to give you a bonus card.” She puts the deck in front of him. “Cut it.”

  After he cuts the cards, she takes the top one and flips it over at the bottom of the triangle. And she gasps. A grinning skeleton dances on a field of
blue, holding a scythe made from a human spine. The landscape is strewn with human heads, hands, and feet, and a raven lurks in the background. The death card.

  “And I didn’t think you were the type to hold a grudge,” he says.

  “Hush. Mac, this is great! This is a wonderful card. It doesn’t mean anybody’s going to die. I mean, it can, of course, but it’s really the card of complete transformation. It’s the clearing away of the old to make room for the new, you throw off the old ways, the old things that have been holding you back and you undergo a radical change. Oh, my Lordy! This is one of the best readings I’ve ever done. I’ve got goose bumps.”

  “Thank you, Madame Blue.”

  She grins. “My friends call me Rhiannon.”

  He hands her a twenty, and she fishes in her change purse. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Just tell me one thing. What’s your real name?”

  She leans forward. “Betty Pattle. Ain’t that a hell of a name for a tarot reader?”

  He told Nora he’d come find them, but he doesn’t feel much like talking at the moment, so he just starts walking, skirting the edge of the meadow till somehow he ends up back at the bunkhouse.

  He drags the duffle out from under the bed, blows the dust balls off, takes out the heavy package in the bottom. He sets it on the desk, unwrapping it slowly, folding the envelope, twisting the rubber bands together, stacking it neatly, gathering pens, notebook. Finally there’s nothing left to do but read the pages. He hasn’t looked at it since the day it landed with a thud in front of his apartment door nearly five months ago.

  Steve Devine’s letter is sitting on top. Just a note, actually, in a long, angular hand, canted hard to the right, like a man walking into a strong head wind.

  This has real potential, but there are several issues that need to be addressed. First of all, is this a novel or a memoir? If there’s any indication, I missed it. Doesn’t really matter, since the line between the two keeps getting fuzzier, but either way, I found your omniscient narrator too aloof and objective. He feels cold, possibly even dishonest. There’s too much distance between him and the story, and consequently between the story and the reader. You might try rewriting in close third or even in first person. For a good discussion of POV, see Oakley Hall’s The Art & Craft of Novel Writing. See a few additional questions/suggestions on ms. I recommend reading them, then reading your ms., then putting them both away for a month or two. When you come back to them, your perspective will be fresher. Give me a call if you need clarification or want to discuss any of the points I’ve made. Look forward to hearing from you.