A Long Line of Cakes

by Deborah Wiles

  The only thing on the menu was cake, and the mystery held in a handwritten note:

  “We should be on our way,” said Leo Cake to his wife. His voice was subdued and gentle. They stood in the wide hallway of Norwood Boyd’s home. House had left the blinds pulled up the day before and the sun sparkled like diamonds on this luminous summer morning. The hallway furniture and photographs were bathed in its radiance.

  “I know I’ve been here before,” Leo said softly. “In this house, in that kitchen we just walked through. In this hallway. It was a long time ago.” He thought a moment more and said, “A lifetime ago.”

  Arlouin watched her husband as he took small side steps down the hallway, stopping with every step to push up his glasses and peer at the pictures on the walls. None of them looked familiar to him, not even the picture of young Pip in Norwood Boyd’s uniform. Of course that picture would have been taken before Leo Cake was born.

  “Cakes never go anywhere twice,” murmured Arlouin, remembering Archibald Cake’s old adage.

  Leo rubbed the bottom of his chin with the backs of his fingers. “That’s why I couldn’t believe I’d been here before.”

  The back door opened and here came Pip and Miss Eula and Ruby, Emma, and Ben. Miss Mattie was close behind them. She left the back door open and the house filled with fresh air.

  “Then why were you here?” asked Arlouin. “Did Archie bake here?”

  “Yes,” said Leo. “No. I don’t remember.”

  “I do,” said Pip. “And you will remember, too, if you allow it.”

  Leo shook his head ever so slightly. Was that a no, or was that a question?

  “I’ll help you,” said Pip. “Norwood was in the merchant marines for many years. He was chief cook on the SS Joshua Hendy during World War II. The chief cook prepares the menus and meals and makes sure the kitchen has everything it needs, from meat to fruit and vegetables to desserts. Your dad, Archibald, was his baker.”

  “He was?” Leo’s face changed. He looked twelve years old again.

  “He was. And he was only nineteen. It was his first baking job, but he had been baking with his family for years, just like your children do … and like you did growing up with your dad, right?”

  “Right,” said Leo in a hesitant voice. “But we never baked on a ship.”

  “What about the Mayflower, Daddy?” Emma remembered her father’s stories of the long lineage of Cakes.

  “A ship needs bakers!” said Pip. “It’s an itinerant job. The baker bakes all the bread and desserts, makes the salads, and the night lunches for the night crew. And your daddy, Archibald Cake, learned to make soup. He loved to make soup more than he loved to bake.”

  Leo’s eyes flashed on Emma, and Emma took her father’s hand. She held it tight.

  Pip continued. “As you know, bakers aren’t soup ­makers, but Archie was. When Norwood got sick in the Philippines, it was Archibald’s soup that saved his life.”

  “Was it chicken soup?” asked Ruby. She was clearly not buying this story.

  “Possibly,” said Pip.

  “Great,” said Ruby.

  But Emma was thrilled. “My grandfather was a soup maker!” she whispered. “Why didn’t I know this?”

  Pip had a ready answer. “Because he left that job after his time as a mariner was over, and he went to the next job, and he quit making soup. But he and Norwood had a bond. Archie had saved Norwood’s life, and Norwood would never forget it.”

  “Norwood never told me this story,” said Miss Mattie in a wondering voice. “I knew he was a mariner, I knew he had traveled the world, but I didn’t know about Archibald, and I didn’t know about …” She looked at Leo. “… you.”

  Leo watched Miss Mattie tear up as she shook her head.

  “And we were so close.” She sounded lost. “So close. We talked all the time, especially in his last years. We were … close.”

  Miss Eula cleared her throat and said tenderly to her sister-in-law, “You weren’t the only one who loved Norwood, Mattie.”

  Miss Mattie sniffed and wiped away a tear.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “It’s hot in here.”

  Pip took over. “That’s right. Archie loved Norwood, too, and came to visit him when Leo here was twelve years old.”

  “My age,” said Ben.

  “That’s right,” said Leo. His face broke into an astonished smile. “I remember. I remember!”

  “And do you remember playing ball here? With me and Norwood?”

  Leo let go of Emma’s hand and stuck his fingers under his glasses and over his eyes for a long moment. Then he removed them and said, “Yes. Yes. I remember. I remember it all.”

  Leo paced the hall. Arlouin gently pinched her lips with the fingers of her right hand and watched him.

  “I didn’t want to leave here,” Leo said, still pacing, ­memory flooding him like a sun that had been too long eclipsed by the moon. “I loved it here. I knew my father did, too. We loved it. We were here for a long time.”

  Leo swallowed the tears in his throat. “I begged to stay,” he said, the words coming in a rush. “Begged. This house spoke to me. This place was the one where we would stay forever. I hated moving. Hated it.”

  Emma’s heart began to pound hard in her chest. She had trouble breathing. She dared not speak.

  “But my father said no, we needed to move on. There was a bakery waiting for us; there were people to help. This was just a visit … and that’s when I stopped hoping.”

  Ben had been listening intently, his own hope climbing despite himself. “If your father loved Norwood Boyd, why did he leave?” he asked.

  “Because it’s what we do,” said Leo.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” said Miss Eula.

  “Who wrote the note?” asked Arlouin.

  “Archie did,” said Pip.

  “Archie?” asked Leo. “How can that be? He’s been gone twelve years. He died soon after Ben was born.”

  “We never knew him,” said Emma.

  “Archie wrote the note when you and he were here, Leo,” said Pip, “when you were twelve. He couldn’t stop traveling, he said—it was in his blood and circumstances were what they were then—but maybe you could, he said.

  “The letter was to be sent to you when you had a twelve-year-old child, if you ever did, to help remind you of what it felt like to want to stay. Sometimes I think Norwood stayed alive long enough to send it to you, Leo. You and Archie meant that much to him.”

  “But how did he know about my family?” asked Leo.

  “Archie and Norwood wrote letters to each other for decades,” explained Pip. “Archie wrote Norwood when his first grandson, Ben, was born.”

  “That’s me,” said Ben.

  “That’s you,” said Miss Eula.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Arlouin.

  “And now,” said Miss Mattie, having recovered herself, “we’re going to give your father some air. We’re going to give me some air. I did not know this part of the story any more than you did,” she told Emma and Ruby and Ben.

  To Miss Eula she said, “I’m not a bitter person, Eula. And when I’m wrong, I say so. You could have told me why you were renting to the Cakes instead of giving me the storage space.”

  “What would have been the fun in that?” asked Miss Eula. Her eyes twinkled. “Pip still picks up Norwood’s mail. He told me Leo had answered the note, so I wrote to say I had space for rent, and we went from there.”

  “You could have told me,” complained Miss Mattie.

  “It wasn’t my story to tell,” said Miss Eula. “Take these children outside, Mattie.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Emma protested.

  “Go, honey,” said her father. “We’ll be there directly.”

  “Come on, little sister,” said Ben, suddenly so much older. He held out his hand and Emma took it. They exchanged a look of solidarity. Then Emma held out her other hand for Ruby. Ruby eyeballed it for a long moment and then shook it
.

  Miss Mattie harrumphed and led Emma, Ben, and Ruby through the kitchen and out the back door.

  “Think I’ll go, too,” said Pip. “There’s a party outside, and I hear there’s cake—your cake.”

  “There is?” Arlouin stepped into the living room and saw the life teeming outside the grand front window. How could they not have heard it? The sounds of the world began to filter back to them. “Look, Leo! They’ve come to see us off!”

  “They’ve come to ask you to stay,” said Pip. “The house is yours if you want it. It’s been arranged.”

  Leo’s heart beat a steady thump-thump-thump in his ears. He didn’t know what to say.

  “You’ll find yourself in this house, if you look,” said Pip.

  He stepped smartly to the back door and called to the Aurora County All-Stars, “Play ball!” and the air filled with wild cheering.

  “You can imagine a man like me settling down … it’s a frightful thought,” said Leo Cake. He sat on a settee in the hallway. Arlouin sat next to him.

  “I can imagine,” she said.

  Miss Eula stood in the middle of the hallway looking at photos. “There I am as a young bride,” she said. “And there’s Mattie with Norwood—she never could get him to fall in love with her the way she was with him. She tried, poor soul. It broke her heart. But they were fast friends to the end.”

  “I have friends everywhere,” said Leo in a soft voice.

  “Are you leaving?” asked Miss Eula.

  “I don’t know what to do now,” said Leo, honestly.

  “You can’t run away from your heart by going somewhere else,” said Miss Eula. “I found that out the hard way, too. You suit up and you show up right here, every day. With those who love you.”

  “But we’re itinerant bakers!” said Leo. “A noble and proud profession. Citizens of the World!”

  “The itinerant world will come to you,” said Miss Eula.

  “There is so much need in the world, after all,” mumbled Leo, remembering his father’s words, “and cake is one simple way to soothe it.”

  “Sometimes we are needed right where we are,” said Arlouin.

  “Staying put is an art,” affirmed Miss Eula. “And speaking of staying put, I have some chickens to attend to.” She left Leo and Arlouin alone in the long hallway of Norwood Boyd’s house.

  “I remember,” said Leo. “He wanted a family.”

  “Who?”

  “Norwood Boyd. And he created one. All those letters, all those people who loved him.” Leo wiped a tear from his cheek. “Did I love him?”

  “Let’s get some air, Leo,” said Arlouin.

  They stood on the back porch watching the exuberance around them:

  Ruby borrowed Cleebo’s catcher’s mitt. Ben and House reorganized everyone into teams. Cleebo’s father, Woodrow “Pete” Wilson, joined in, as did Lamar Lackey and even House’s father, Leonard Jackson.

  “Want to play, Mattie?” called Pip.

  “I’d sooner chew broken glass,” said Miss Mattie.

  “Wait for me!” called Ferrell Ishee, Halleluia School’s fourth-grade teacher. His daughter, Spud, danced with Gordon and Honey on the third-base line.

  Finesse tapped Ben on the arm. “I leave in three weeks for the Lanyard School and it would be untoward of me to lead you on in a romance. Quel dommage.”

  “Okay,” said Ben. His face went beet red. Cleebo cackled from his pile of pokeweed at first base.

  “He’s a blockhead!” shouted Emma from home plate.

  “Très bien,” said Finesse. She sashayed away, looking back now and then, to make sure Ben was watching.

  The chickens made a racket, clucking contentedly in the garden. Ruby’s mother, Evelyn Lavender, county extension agent, had arrived to watch their progress so far. “You don’t need much to garden,” she was saying to a clutch of folks eating cake near the garden gate. “Just some seeds and some sweat.”

  “And some chickens!” Miss Eula chimed in. She fanned herself with her straw hat. The day was heating up, and it wasn’t yet eight o’clock.

  Emma stood next to Ruby near the pokeweed home plate.

  “Maybe you won’t need that present I gave you after all,” Ruby said.

  Emma shook her head. “We always move.” She was resigned to it now. She couldn’t risk hope. After all, Archibald Cake had moved, anyway.

  “Keep it,” Ruby said, “and be sure to sign all your drawings, so I can sell them when you get famous!”

  Emma smiled. “You’ll be famous before I am.”

  Ruby hooted. “I’m already famous! Everybody in this town knows who I am!”

  “I think you mean infamous,” said Emma.

  Now it was Ruby’s turn to laugh.

  Spiffy, Alice, Bo-Bo, and Hale-Bopp came ­bounding—or trotting, in Spiffy’s case—back from the woods covered in leaves and burrs and pine straw and mud and spiderwebs and happiness. They insinuated themselves into the makeshift game.

  On the porch, Arlouin Cake, who understood a thing or two about the importance of traditions, kissed her sweet husband on the cheek and said, “I’m going to go slice cake. We have never left the cake-slicing duties to others! I’m not going to start now. And someone has to make sure those dogs don’t create chaos.”

  Leo gave his wife a startled look. Tears crowded Arlouin’s eyes. “No matter what comes,” she said to her Leo, “we are in this together.”

  She held her head high and walked briskly down the back-porch steps and away to the front yard where the cake was already half gone. Jerome Fountainbleu was so glad to see her he almost collapsed.

  A car radio began to blast “Act Naturally,” and a host of cake eaters laughed and sang along. Finesse had assembled them and now she directed them, her hips and arms waving wildly and her blue-tipped hair bobbing in time to the music.

  “Glory be,” said Dot Land as she thought about the mail every one of her neighbors treasured, and the mail delivered to Norwood Boyd over the years, and the years he had chosen to live alone. “I renew my commitment to correspondence,” she whispered.

  “Good thing,” said Carl Fontana, next to her.

  And Phoebe “Scoop” Tolbert? Phoebe was at home, with her phone off the hook, with her bobby-pinned hair in its TP tent, fast asleep.

  * * *

  As the happy clangor captured the day, Ruby squatted at home plate and caught Cleebo’s pitches. Emma stood a few feet away and studied her father standing on the back porch by himself.

  She tried to imagine him here at her age—Ben’s age, really—and she wondered how it must feel to be all grown-up and back in a place you loved when you were a child, back in the place that spoke to you and called you back, even when you hadn’t known it.

  What was it like to push that longing out of your memory, to a place where it no longer existed? She had been ready to do that herself. She shuddered to think of it now.

  Leo Cake stood very still and soaked it all in. The smells of the sweat and tears and triumphs of these people, and the sights and sounds of their awkwardness and willingness, their friendliness, their fighting. All the things that make up a family.

  A million years had passed since he had wanted to belong here. He didn’t know if he could stay, even if he wanted to. If Archibald hadn’t been able to stay, how could he change that?

  The temperate breeze fluttered the leaves of the majestic silver maples that surrounded Norwood Boyd’s house. Then it found Leo on the porch and cradled him in its sweet embrace. It felt so much like Archie’s arms around him, so long ago, that Leo trembled in recognition.

  Then he closed his eyes and opened his heart.

  Emma felt the familiar sweet breeze, too. She crossed the yard to where her father stood.

  “Please,” Leo whispered, the same way he had uttered it when he was twelve years old, on this same back porch. The breeze danced, the leaves fluttered, the chickens squawked. The radio played and the revelers feasted and frolicked.


  Then Leo Cake slowly opened his eyes.

  Emma smiled at her father.

  Leo smiled at Emma Lane Cake, his daughter.

  Yes.

  They would find it the next day in the hallway of the old house.

  An older man with a look of delight on his face, standing next to a beaming younger man who is holding a birthday cake with twelve candles on it. A high-spirited young boy—twelve years old, to be exact—stands with the two men, a wide grin traveling across his face, a baseball glove under his arm, his glasses slipping down his nose.

  Their smiles are incandescent. Effervescent. They are so happy to be in this moment, all three of them together, a family.

  At the bottom of the photograph is written in a flowing blue script,

  And under that, a line from a poem by Walt Whitman, Norwood Boyd’s favorite poet:

  Emma’s room was in the turret.

  The populated world has always been filled with itinerant merchants who have traveled from place to place to sell their goods and skills. For centuries, all across the globe, these peddlers tramped dusty, rutted roads and forest paths, paddled wooden boats down rivers, trekked through mountain passes, cameled across vast deserts, or rumbled over grassy prairies, moving from settlement to hamlet to village, sometimes alone, sometimes in caravans or wagon trains, as they came to trade in the next town and the next.

  They brought with them faraway, hard-to-come-by items: oranges, nuts, spices, thread, fabric, sugar, coffee, elixirs, tools … and crusty, yeasty bread baked in an oven built on the spot with available clay and straw or stones and earth, or a cauldron covered with coals from the fire, with the temperature and recipe precisely gauged and controlled by an expert baker.

  Many of these goods are easily found in Miss Mattie’s Mercantile today, or in your neighborhood stores, but years ago, towns depended on their itinerant merchants in much the same way stores wait for delivery trucks now.

  These peddlers were warmly welcomed for not only the goods they carried but for the news of the outside world they brought with them. Often there were itinerant jesters or storytellers or song singers, or whole theater troupes moving from place to place, sleeping in makeshift shelters until it was time to move on.