The Summer Bakery

The plane came down the fiord sideways.

That was how it felt, anyway. Mara had been told about the landing. Everybody in Iqaluit had said, cheerfully, don't worry when it banks. Mara had held on to the little cardboard box on her 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 Mara 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)

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

"Are you the baker?"

Mara 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 Mara, and the other one was buzzing.

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

"Pauloosie," said the man, and shook Mara'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 Mara: "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 Mara. "I ran it for four years."

"And then?"

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

Pauloosie looked at Mara 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 Mara. 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 Mara was alone in the bright empty hall with the oven.

Mara 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.

Mara turned her on.

The right dial first. It clicked, and somewhere deep inside the oven something went whump, and a smell of hot dust came out of her, and the clouded window began, very faintly, to glow. Then the left dial, the one Mara was not supposed to touch, to the temperature she wanted for rolls.

Nothing happened.

Mara mixed a small batch of dough while she waited. Flour from the Co-op sack, yeast, warm water, salt, a little butter. Kneaded it on the steel counter, the old familiar push and fold and turn, and felt her shoulders come down for the first time since Winnipeg. Left it to rise in a bowl under a tea towel, in the warm patch of sunlight from the window. Shaped twelve little rolls, and put them on a dented tray, and opened the oven door.

The heat that came out nearly took Mara's eyebrows off.

Mara shut the door again, fast. Looked at the left dial. It said one temperature. The oven, very clearly, had decided on another, much higher. Mara turned the dial down. The oven went whump again, sulkily, and did nothing else.

In the end Mara baked the rolls by waiting for her to cool, and opening the door every two minutes, and turning the tray, and talking to her, which Mara would never have admitted to anybody. Six of the rolls came out golden and perfect. Three came out black on the bottom. Three, for no reason at all, came out pale and raw, as if they had been in a different oven entirely.

Mara lined them up on the counter and looked at them for a long time.

"She likes you."

Mara jumped. There was a girl standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Eleven or twelve, small and straight-backed, with her hair in a long braid and a clipboard held against her chest like a shield. She wore a hoodie that said PANG HAWKS VOLLEYBALL and rubber boots, and she was looking at Mara, and at the oven, and at the counter, with an expression of deep professional interest.

"Sorry," said the girl. "The door was open. I'm Jeela." She came in, and looked at the oven again. "She likes you. If she didn't like you, she'd have made a noise by now. A big one. She did it to the man from the government last year and he dropped a whole tray of muffins." She said this with great satisfaction. "Are you the baker?"

"I'm the baker," said Mara.

Jeela looked Mara up and down. Then she looked down at the board, and wrote something on it.

"My great-grandmother sent me," she said. "Leah Akavak. She wants to see you. Tomorrow. At her house. Eleven o'clock." She looked up. "Don't bring anything. She'll know if you bought it at the store." She hesitated, and the businesslike look slipped for a moment, and underneath it was a twelve-year-old who was very curious indeed. "Also, I'm going to be your assistant. If you want one. I already asked Pauloosie. He said ask you."

"I can't pay much," said Mara. "The festival's budget is..."

"I know what the budget is," said Jeela. "I've seen it. It's on the fridge at the Co-op." She shrugged. "I don't want money. I want to learn how a business works. I'm going to have one. A café. With real coffee, and a bakery, and a place for tourists to buy art, and wifi that works." She said it the way other children might say a pony. "But nobody here's ever run a bakery before. Not a real one. So I need to watch."

Mara looked at her. At the clipboard, and the braid, and the rubber boots, and the face that was trying very hard not to look as if it cared about the answer.

"You're hired," said Mara.

Jeela did not smile. She wrote something else on the board. Then she looked at the counter, at Mara's rolls, and at the things from the old bakery lying beside them, and finally at the oven, glowing faintly behind her clouded window in the long gold afternoon.

"Okay," she said. "Then tomorrow you meet my anaanatsiaq. And the day after, you meet Simeonie. And then you start." She turned to go, and turned back. "And you should know. About the flour."

"What about the flour?"

Jeela looked at Mara with great seriousness.

"It's on the ship," she said. "The sealift. All of it. For the whole summer." She paused. "The ship was supposed to come last week."

And she went out, with the board, into the endless afternoon, leaving Mara alone with an old oven and a very small sack of flour.