By Bread Alone

An essay by

Kathleen Blackburn

It didn’t sound as extreme at the time as it does now or as desperate. But Dad's cancer was so aggressive we blamed the devil; that level of desperation does things to one's perspective. Joan Didion called it magical thinking. Mom called it faith. I call it West Texas. 

The two people I call my parents had a wildcatter faith that could rival a wildcatter. The body, they said, could heal itself with a little touch from God and a whole lot of healthy eating. One week after Dad’s diagnosis – stage 4 colon cancer, terminal – Mom returned from Well Body, Lubbock’s de facto health food store, with paper bags full of lentils and carrots, basmati rice, and beans. Food that could heal. The kitchen transformed in a day, or so it seemed. My memory condenses to montage the porcelain canisters emptied of their powdered sugar and flour, shelves of tomato sauce and pasta cleared for white gallon buckets of organic honey. An industrial juicer hefted onto the counter next to the refrigerator brimming with greens. Mom read literature suggesting salt was fodder for cancer. Our diet flattened to bland.

The pastor dropped by for a visit and scratched his bulb of a forehead as he surveyed our pantry.

“How you going to get your kids to eat like this?”

“Hunger,” Dad said, as much to himself as anybody, “is a powerful motivation.” 

I viewed the contents of our pantry like a to-do list I could manage. Under different circumstances, lentils three nights a week might tire a pallet raised on Betty Crocker. But if food could be a form of prayer, I held legumes holy. I could have lifted each spoonful and said “for Dad!” and not think twice. Like Mom, I solaced in an actionable faith. Something to do. You couldn’t have paid me to eat an Oreo. 

The changes in the kitchen spread into the living room, where stood the bookshelf Dad built: eight-feet tall, crafted of oak, replete with thirty shelves. He was a carpenter by obsession, and bookshelves were his specialty, not only for their scale but also for his love of reading. Thrillers enchanted dad. He had often spun yarns from their plots in G-rated versions that left me, at twelve years old, breathless. I returned the favor, offering up synopses of Rebecca of Sunnybrook that could test the patience of a guardian angel. When I committed to reading The Count of Monte Cristo, Dad pre-empted my gabble by offering to read it too.

Meanwhile, I counted down the years till I could sink into Robert Ludlum’s novels. The brazen titles of Dad’s books lined the top shelves like the liquor cabinet of literature. Dean Koontz was Jim Beam; Clancy, Beefeater. Not that I thought of them this way. If asked, I probably would have said they were simply the best books of all time. On one of the top shelves was a worn and rippled copy of Lonesome Dove, Dad’s favorite novel. On the lower shelves, Mom’s medical textbooks from her years in veterinarian school. Ditto the yearbooks 1979, ‘80, ‘81, and ‘82 from my parents’ time at Texas A&M.

Space along the bookshelves was cleared—why not write it in the passive voice? A force seemed to move in our house beyond human agency, though surely it was the hands of my father who moved the books, just as it was those of my mother who cleared the pantry for sacks of wheat berries. Evangelical texts about supernatural healing appeared in a row with books on the merits of raw juice and bone broth. Next to Benny Hinn’s Miracle of Healing was Susan Baxter’s Immune Power. A.B. Simpson’s The Gospel of Healing sat beside a book whose title comes back to me in startling clarity—Why Sharks Don’t Get Cancer, a text that led Dad to drink ground shark cartilage diluted in water dutifully.  

Anyone surveying the bookshelf during Dad’s illness could see our family's arc and perhaps white evangelicals more broadly. There are many ways to put it. From church-curious to extreme. Observing the suspense thrillers braced next to books by James Dobson, Mom said, “From mainstream to wise.” The bookshelf held a timeline that began when my parents met in college, passed through the making of a family, and ended when Dad got cancer.

In the mornings, Mom juiced carrots with the industrial-grade juicer. It weighed about twenty pounds and excreted pulp through a centrical that looked like an industrial-grade anus, an observation I kept to myself. Dad drank down the liquid and said that it was the kind of taste you get used to, praise God.

Breathes there a person of rough country whose soul was not shaped by wind? I wearied in the final minutes between waking and sleep when gales shuttered the length of the house. I felt I could hear wind cross the broken plains, roaring through Oklahoma and New Mexico. The wind whipped the panhandle into the sky in one day. April 14th, 1935, Black Sunday, dust filled the lungs of livestock and people in a pandemic called dust pneumonia. “The simplest thing in life, taking a breath,” writes journalist Timothy Egan, “was a threat.” Though in 1997, dust pneumonia was a thing of the past, my breath tightened in my chest. In the quiet between gusts, a silence terrifying above ruined dirt. There in the still dark, my greatest secret: my fear for Dad’s life. At dawn, dread winked in the swirls of dust on windowsills.

A box of loose-leaf red tea arrived. “Itzhak tea,” Mom said, boiling water. After the tea steeped for twenty minutes, she poured herself a cup and took a sip. Her mouth pressed into the same grimace made whenever she tasted just about anything but water. “All righty,” she said, inhaling sharply. “That’s going to take some getting used to.” I asked if she intended to drink the tea too. She said that she did. “He shouldn’t have to do this by himself.”

In those days, I believed Dad’s illness was a test of our faith, suffering with purpose. My immaterial conviction would manifest the material wonder of Dad’s restored health. When God healed him, we would give up the spare diet and throw a pizza party. But a different materiality emerged, filling me physically with dread as though my faith were cleaved from my body. In denying the signs of decay in my father’s body, I dismissed the warnings in my own. I stiffened like I’d been caught off-guard, and the spook wouldn’t slacken. I couldn’t relax. I woke up tired and jumpy. The sound of voices made me flinch. My muscles, bones, flesh, and nerves were bound not to belief but a truth before my eyes: Dad was withering. 

One afternoon, I collapsed in my room. My younger sister, Kristen, found me. 

“You hyperventilating?” she asked, a question Mom usually asked whenever one of us cried right before she said to stop hyperventilating. 

“I don’t know,” I said. I felt Kristen sink into the bed next to me.

“You need 7 Up? If it’s your stomach, I can bring you a trashcan.”

“I don’t know.”

Kristen exhaled loudly and lay on her back. I rolled over and worked to slow my breathing. Above us, a series of blue bars bolstered the top bunk. 

“So you don’t know what’s wrong?” Kristen said. I shook my head. “Sometimes 7 Up can help,” she said. 

“I doubt that,” I said, “we are going to be drinking any 7 Up for a long time.” 

The next step was bread. Mom determined to grind the wheat herself. She stuffed bright orange earplugs into the sides of her head and flipped the switch to her new wheat grinder. The screed was loud as a broken fan belt, and we kids went flying from the noise. Wheat berries swiveled down a vortex in the grinder’s open dome, disappearing in a steady ear-bleeding scream, where they popped and powdered against the blade. Then there was the sound of a chain choking, and the grinder stuttered to a halt. 

“Darn it!” Mom said. She unplugged the machine and dug the snagged berries out with a butter knife. “This was supposed to be the best,” she muttered. I assume she was talking about the mill's brand, not the process of grinding flour to make bread. 

Baking bread was an act of faith. The important parts were the unprocessed ingredients, authentic in their heartiness and nutritional value. The world’s evils came through additives. Preservatives were cancer feeders. While awaiting healing, my parents researched ways to purify Dad’s body of anything that might hinder God’s work, embarking on a diet transformation that made paleo-heads look indulgent. We were called to abandon red meat, white rice, white sugar, white flour, corn syrup, corn-anything. Mom romanticized the change as though we were harnessing some purer time when people lived off the land and never cussed. However, she insisted on an electric wheat grinder over a hand-mill. 

“Let’s not get carried away,” she said. 

She settled on the WonderMill Electric Grain Grinder, a bona fide staple for bread makers. Still, there was an inherent flaw in the design. The funnel for the wheat berries swallowed more berries than the grinder could grind. Too many berries jammed the blade. And even when Mom managed the wheat berries' rate, the ground flour built up unevenly in its conduit. One had to find a way to level it out as the grinder ran; otherwise, the pulverized grain spewed all over the counter—a massive fresh-ground-flour explosion.

It happened all the time. 

Mom’s solution was to post Kristen or me next to the grinder. The key was to shake the bucket enough to level the incoming wheat, but not so much as to rend the container from the hose, causing the same carnage we were trying to prevent. Once, I swiveled the bucket too far to the right, and the hose blew off. Flour covered me before I could flip the switch. Another time, I miscalculated how long the mill had been running, and the lid popped. A film of white powder covered the counter and floor. 

“What were you thinking?” Mom said. The broom tracked lines across the tile as I swept, and Mom listed off what I already knew. She was going to have to start all over. Now she would have to rush. Didn’t I understand how important the bread was? I had the litany memorized but no amount of apologizing convinced Mom I understood her grievance or that I comprehended the larger purpose of the bread. How the bread was central to Dad’s recovery. How it was an act of obedience. Each time I screwed up the wheat berry to grind ratio, it was a personal affront, a spiritual failure. As though I wasn’t committed fully to making Dad well. I needed to do more. 

Though Mom was from Houston, she might as well have descended from the German-blood settlers who, in the 1930s Dust Bowl, refused to evict West Texas. The Comanche followed their hunt across the plains to live. But when the land didn’t shine green, settlers dug houses deep into the sod, and the infantry slaughtered the Comanche’s horses. Drought had always been a season in the high plains, but settlers named it plague. When rain didn’t fall, there was water underground to make of grass sand, of sand wheat, of curse miracle. Call that which is not as though it were. What choice did they have, the settlers asked themselves. Money in the bank stretched no further than the three-hundred acres they’d bought for next to nothing, their life’s savings.  Besides, the land was theirs. Too, the well underneath it. Made available for sale by a canyon turned Indian graveyard.

Settlers landmarked stakes to the ground lest they lose their way. Llano Estacado, they called it. The staked plains. Everything they owned staked to dreams of prosperity in a desert of the country’s making. Nothing to do about the cloudless sky except fill it with belief. 

But belief takes a sign. Mom taught me that. 

There was a time when the air holding up the sky was so pure it healed people. Sanatoriums blossomed throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, beckoning to men and women of means whose lungs blackened in the industrial air of urban Britain. Breathe in the clean air, pamphlets advertised—the dry heat in the shade a balm, cool as a hand. But clear skies didn’t dump rain, didn’t turnover wheat bushels. The windmill was a fine invention when the wind cooperated. But wind was a fantasy, a hooker. All talent, no discipline. When the wind wouldn’t budge, the settlers cast their eyes back to the sky. 

In drought, our white ancestors made their own thunder. We shot dynamite into the sky, believing that the explosions would draw rain. Faith took the shape of cannon flame splintering into sparks of fire. Smoke held the promise of pilfered clouds that drifted into lines at the horizon—the high-pitched ringing in everyone’s ears, a prophecy. 

The Llano Estacado plateau rises from the Gulf at a slope so subtle only water knows it. The sediment crests at just over three-thousand feet and far enough away from the sea to have forgotten it. Mom doesn’t like the ocean, not since she was a kid and got caught in an undertow at Galveston that threatened to fill her lungs with salt water and sand. Didn’t have to tell her twice. She came to know how Lubbock’s altitude determined the length of time bread dough takes to double. Our house filled with the earthy smell of wheat, the fragrance of mom’s resolve, a force that fit well in the 100th meridian west, the line where desperation and backbone meet. When I think of bursts in the sky above West Texas, I think of my mother. A strong will recast as willingness. A demand for blessing. See? Here I am. Making bread. Lighting the sky on fire.  

When does faith turn into grief? Perhaps the most panhandle part of me is that I don’t know the difference between the two. A year after his diagnosis, Dad died on a scalding day in June, lying in an electric bed in our living room, our house turned hospital. The bookshelf reared behind him. Let it be known that no text there offered grace. Fifteen years passed before I read these lines about the Llano in Lonesome Dove: “It struck him that he had forgotten emptiness such as existed in the country that stretched around him . . . here there was no sound, not any. The coyotes were silent, the crickets, the locusts, the owls. From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.”

After Dad died, Mom continued to bake bread, having perfected it. Over time, the bread became the stuff of legend. Neighbors requested it. Relatives held her a little tighter when Mom appeared with a loaf in her hands. The bread was a regular Christmas and Easter, and birthday gift to friends who wrote in thank you notes that filled one kitchen drawer, “There is nothing like your bread, Mary.” The bread was a fitting signature for Mom. Ten cups of fresh ground wheat berries sweetened the air as she poured six cups of lukewarm water into two tablespoons of yeast and let the mixture ferment. Then came ¾  cups of honey, two teaspoons of salt. The bread hook's two steel arms whipped the dough to belly soft, inhaling for a double-rise. She divided the dough into five steel bread pans. The loaves, once baked, had a shelf life of less than a week. 

To say the fresh-ground wheat bread my mother made was best on the first day would be an understatement. To begin, this is true of all bread. But Mom’s bread was unlike any other. It rose to a stiff dome, filled with the sweetest air. I burned the pads of my fingers turning the not-yet-cooled pan with one hand and, with the other, sliding the loaf out. The bread tore like fine cloth, but more porous, more alive. A serrated knife caused the loaf to fold on itself before the bread cooled. My three younger sisters and little brother pressed behind me as I prepared a slice for each of them. Even the youngest rolled her plastic baby walker into my calf and smacked her lips. One loaf disappeared before the other four cooled, dissolving into honey in our mouths, exhaling yeast when we swallowed. 

But what made Mom’s bread distinct was our longing, which rose in steel pans. This was the bread that would rescue Dad. Even now, when I go home to Lubbock and the baked yeast melts on my tongue, I taste the salt of a life it couldn’t save.

Kathleen Blackburn’s essays have received Pushcart Prize nominations and been listed as notable in Best American Essays. Her work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, Guernica, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction workshops at the University of Chicago and is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is completing a memoir.