The Summer Bakery

The plane came down the fiord sideways.

That was how it felt, anyway. Elias had been told about the landing. Everybody in Iqaluit had said, cheerfully, don't worry when it banks. Elias had held on to the little cardboard box on his lap a bit tighter.

It banked.

Out of the window, the mountains went past close enough to count the stones. Below, the fiord, long and narrow and astonishingly blue, with a few small boats on it drawing white lines. And ahead, on a shelf of land at the foot of the mountains, where a river came out into the sea, the hamlet. Houses in red and blue and yellow and green, set on posts above the rocky ground in neat rows. A gravel runway running right through the middle of everything, like a parting in hair.

Then the wheels hit, and they were down. Inside the box, wrapped in three tea towels and a sweater, were the only things Elias had brought from the old bakery that really mattered. Everything else, the mixer, the trays, the sign with the little painted loaf on it, had been sold in April, when the bakery on Corydon Avenue closed, after four years, two floods and one very bad landlord.

On the noticeboard, in the middle of the flyers for a craft sale and a fishing derby and a lost dog called Biscuit, there was a poster. Bright yellow, with a drawing of a fiddle and a guitar crossed like swords.

PANGNIRTUNG SUMMER SOUNDS. FIVE DAYS OF MUSIC. JULY 22–26. EVERYONE WELCOME.

And underneath, in smaller letters, somebody had added with a marker: Fresh bread at the hall!!! (new baker)

Elias looked at the three exclamation marks for a long time.

"Are you the baker?"

Elias turned. A man was standing there, in his forties, tall and broad, with a fiddle case slung on his back and a phone in each hand. He was talking into one of the phones while he looked at Elias, and the other one was buzzing.

"Yes," said Elias. "Hi. I'm..."

"Pauloosie," said the man, and shook Elias's hand with the one that was holding the buzzing phone, so that the phone buzzed against both their palms. "Festival committee. Chair, treasurer, fiddler, everything else." Into the other phone: "No. Not you. The baker's here. Yes. The baker." Back to Elias: "Sorry. The sound system's in Iqaluit and the band from Igloolik is in Iqaluit and half my microphones are in Iqaluit, and I'm here." He grinned, suddenly, a wide tired grin that made him look ten years younger. "You're the first thing that's arrived on time all week. Come on. I'll show you the hall."

They drove through the hamlet slowly, waving at everybody. "It's July," said Pauloosie, as if that explained it. "Nobody sleeps in July. Why would you? It's light all night." He nodded out at the fiord, glittering under the mountains. "The ice went out early this year. Everybody's out on the water. Fishing, camping, going to the cabins." He swerved round a dog. "Which means half my volunteers are at their cabins. Which means you'll have to manage the kitchen mostly by yourself. Is that all right? The ad said you'd run your own place."

"I did," said Elias. "I ran it for four years."

"And then?"

"And then the river came into the basement," said Elias. "Twice."

Pauloosie looked at Elias sideways for a moment.

"Well," he said, "the hall's on posts. The river can't get you here." He pulled up in front of a long low building, painted blue, with a ramp up to a double door and a sign that said COMMUNITY HALL. "But she might."

"She?"

"The oven," said Pauloosie.

Inside, past a stage and stacks of folding chairs, behind a long counter with a hatch, there was a kitchen. And in the kitchen there was an oven.

It was enormous. It was older than Elias. It was a great square iron thing, painted a colour that might once have been white and was now the colour of milky tea, with four doors, two dials, a long brass handle along the front polished bright by years of hands, and a little window in the top door so clouded with age that it was like looking through a fogged-up pair of glasses. It sat against the back wall with the air of something that had been there before the hall was built, and that the hall had been built around.

"She came up on the sealift in the seventies," said Pauloosie. He patted her top, carefully, the way you might pat a horse you did not completely trust. "She bakes beautifully. When she wants to."

"And when she doesn't?"

Pauloosie did not answer. He was looking at one of his phones. "Simeonie knows her," he said. "The caretaker. He'll be in the day after tomorrow. Don't touch the left dial until he's shown you." He looked up. "Your room's above the arts centre. It's a two-minute walk. The festival starts in ten days. We need bread every morning, buns for the barbecue, something sweet for the evenings, and..." He hesitated. "And Leah Akavak wants to talk to you."

"Who's Leah Akavak?"

But both of Pauloosie's phones were buzzing at once now, and he was already walking backwards towards the door, saying sorry, sorry, the microphones, and then he was gone, and the truck was coughing away down the gravel road, and Elias was alone in the bright empty hall with the oven.

Elias stood and looked at her for a long time.

There was a sack of flour on the counter. Somebody had left it there, a small one, with a note: For testing! Welcome! E. (Co-op). And a bag of sugar, and salt, and a block of butter in the fridge, and yeast.

It was four in the afternoon. The sun was high. It would still be light at midnight.