No Darn Yeast

A frost-bitten New England hamlet, its piety as brittle as the ice crusting the river, receives a comet in calico: Elsie Davenport’s itinerant baker, pockets barren of yeast yet swollen with scandal, galloping ahead of a thundercloud of rumor that she kneaded a bun before the wedding bell tolled. The village elders—stiff as starched collars—usher her into a draughty attic, a purgatory of whispers where every creaking board pronounces her guilt. Salvation arrives in the rakish guise of a reclusive miller whose grist-streaked hands belie a tenderness he reserves for injured sparrows and, now, for her. Together they bolt across cracked millponds and moon-bleached fields while a posse of self-anointed saints pursues with kerosene eyes, Bibles brandished like torches. The chase crescendos on a thawing river whose floes grind like tectonic plates; innocence and appetite collide, and the bread that refused to rise becomes the bread that will not break, leaving the town to choke on its own crumbling crust of righteousness.