Read Online Wild Indigo by Sandi Ault - Free Book Online Page B

themselves with loading their trucks and cars, Momma Anna headed behind the house to the edge of the field with a determined look on her face. I followed her and watched her reach into her pocket and unfold a cotton hankie. Her fingers drew up a pinch of the mixture inside—it looked like chile seeds, salt, and something yellow. She circled her head with her clamped fingers, then sprinkled the offering onto the slight nighttime breeze. She looked at me with her lips pinched together tightly. “That for Lupé,” she said. “That kind sadness, she cry over lose her son, that need healing, or we all get sick, wedding go bad.”
    She was quiet a moment, then barked at me, “You come three in morning. Don’t be late. You be fire bringer,” she said.
    I asked her what this meant but she pressed her lips together tightly.
    â€œAnything I need to bring?” I tried.
    â€œPull back hair,” she said.

    I barely slept that night, and when I arrived at three a.m., I could see fires already burning in the back of the two large hornos that had been built especially to handle the tremendous volume of baking needed for this three-week event. I found Momma Anna among the women, all of them busy chopping off hunks of dough from the full mounds swelling out the tops of the trash cans.
    â€œYou’re so la-ate!” Momma Anna whined. She handed me a can of shortening, a giant stack of aluminum pie plates, and a piece of cotton. She made a little circular motion with the cotton, demonstrating how to grease the pans. “Get pan ready,” she said.
    â€œYah,” another elder joked. “White Girl maybe can do that!” All the women laughed.
    As fast as I could grease the pie plates, the women slapped and punched and formed the dough into perfect rounds to put into them. When we had well over two hundred of them lined up on two outdoor picnic tables, Yohe deemed it time to start baking.
    She dipped an old, blackened deerskin in a big bucket of water, then fetched a long aspen pole and tied the wet hide onto one end with some sinew that had already been soaked. Yohe used this implement to swab out the ashes and pull live embers left in the hornos out and onto the packed dirt in front of the ovens, removing all the live fire and ash. Then she reached in her pocket and removed a stem of straw. She held this in one horno, and I watched it burst into flame after only a few seconds. Yohe nodded—the temperature was perfect.
    Serena fetched a long paddle and headed for the door of one of the hornos. She laid the peel flat and the women began bringing the pans of bread dough, lining them up six at a time on the blade of it, and while Serena shoved these into the hornos, the dough brigade shuffled back and forth from the picnic table to the paddle with more pans. They loaded the peel again and again. We managed to fit over 125 pans in each oven.
    Frank lifted large, flat chunks of sandstone into place, using them as doors to close up the hornos. There was a tiny glimmer of green light along the edge of the horizon, against a deep indigo sky full of stars. It would be dawn within the next hour or so.
    The women hurried back inside to take the bits of remaining dough and shape them into cookies, making intricate ropes and forming them into flat panels that looked like Celtic knot-work, each cookie as large as a man’s hand. They sprinkled these with colored sugar, taking great care to create as beautiful a masterpiece each time as they could.
    Momma Anna had me fry sausage and scramble two dozen eggs while the artisans prepared their work. When the women had designed several hundred cookies, they came in the kitchen and got breakfast and ate it hurriedly from foam plates, slurping more coffee as they ate.
    They rose from the table at some unheard signal and filed outside. It was time to remove the loaves of bread.
    After the stones were rolled back from the openings, Yohe manned the paddle