The Bread We Eat in Dreams by Catherynne M. Valente Read Free Book Online Page A

Agnes’s garden. Not a soul in Sauve-Majeure did not burn to know the secret of the seemingly inexhaustible earth upon which their local hermit made her little house. How she made her pumpkins swell and her potatoes glow with red health, how her peas came up almost before the snow could melt, how her blueberry bushes groaned by June with the weight of their dark fruit. Let Annabelle and Elisabeth and Jeanne and Martha go straight away and study her methods, and if a seed or two of those hardy crops should find its way into the pockets of the girls’ aprons, well, such was God’s Will.
    Thus did the demon find herself with a little coven of village girls, all bright and skinny and eager to grow up, more eager still to learn everything Sister Agnes could teach. The demon might have wept with relief and the peculiar joy of devils. She took them in, poor and rich, Papist and Puritan, gathered them round her black hearth like a wreath of still-closed flowers—and she opened them up. The clever girls spun wool that became silk in their hands. They baked bread so sweet the body lost all taste for humble mother’s loaf. They read their Scriptures, though Sister Agnes’s Bible seemed rather larger and heavier than either Father Audrien’s or Pastor Pole’s, full of books the girls had never head of—the Gospel of St. Thomas, of Mary Magdalen, the Apocryphon of James, the Pistis Sophia, the Trimortic Protennoia, the Descent of Mary, and stranger ones still: the Book of the Two Thieves, the Book of Glass, the Book of the Evening Star. When they had tired of these, they read decadent and thrilling novels that Sister Agnes just happened to have on hand.
    You might say the demon got careless. You could say that—but a demon has no large measure of care to begin with. The girls seated around her table like Grand Dukes, like seals on a frozen beach, made her feel like her old self again, and who among us can resist a feeling like that? Not many, and a demon hasn’t even got a human’s meager talent for resisting temptation.
    Sébastienne Sazarin did not like Sister Agnes one bit. Oh, she sent her daughter Basile to learn lace from her, because she’d be damned if Marguerite le Clerq’s brats would outshine a Sazarin at anything, and if Reformation Dryland’s plain, sow-faced grand-daughter made a better marriage than her own girl, she’d just have to lie down dead in the street from the shame of it. But she didn’t like it. Basile came home smiling in a secretive sort of way, her cheeks flushed, her breath quick and delighted. She did her work so quickly and well that there was hardly anything left of the household industries for Sébastienne to do. She conceived her fourth child, she would always say, out of sheer boredom.
    “Well, isn’t that what you sent her for?” her husband Hierosme said. “Be glad for ease, for it comes but seldom.”
    “It’s unwholesome, a woman living alone out there. I wish Father Audrien would put a stop to it.”
    But Father Simon had confided to his successor before he passed into a peaceful death that he felt Sauve-Majeure harbored a saint. When she died, and the inevitable writ of veneration arrived from Rome, the Cathedral of St. Geraud and Adelard might finally have the funds it needed—and if perhaps St. Geraud, who didn’t have much to recommend him and wasn’t patron of anything in particular, had to be replaced with St Agnes in order to secure financing from Paris, such was the Will of God. Hubert Sazarin’s long dream would come to pass, and Sauve-Majeure would become the Avignon of the New World. A cathedral required more in the way of coin and time than even the Sazarins could manage on their own, and charged with this celestial municipal destiny, Father Audrien could not bring himself to censure the hermit woman on which it all depended.
    Pastor Pole had no such hesitation. Though the left side of Schism Street thought it unsavory to hold the pastorship in one family,