Summary
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.
Synopsis
A burlesque of Way Down East.
