I stopped trusting men two months after my nineteenth birthday. I woke up in the middle of the night, cold linoleum tile prickling my palms. The stale air of a quiet, humid night filtered through me. My thighs stuck to the floor with sweat. I could hear echoes of murmurs, hushed voices from hours before. I ran my tongue across my teeth and chapped lips, hoping to find remnants of red wine, but tasting metal.
I looked down at my hands; they were no longer mine. Blood caked beneath my fingernails. I had been trying to stop biting them for months, and, for just a moment, admired their length. Warm drips of blood ran down my legs as I attempted to stand. A red I will never forget. When a flash of that deep, stinging red surges through my memory, I can’t help but think of a particular flower. It’s strange what our brain decides to keep and what it chooses to forget. My body only remembers.
It took me one year before I muttered a word. It took me two years to look a man in the eyes. Even now, I trust only one pair of hands. Two years after, nestled on a ranch in northern Wyoming, my hands began to feel more like my own.
Though it’s illegal to pick, the Indian Paintbrush vanishes every summer. It dapples the Wyoming hills with rouge and recedes, as though the land has suckled it back into the ground, unable to resist. The flower stands tall and wispy, diamond-shaped and blooming only at the peak, spreading like fire over vast stretches of mountain. And, like paint, the flower seems itching to grace a canvas.
The paintbrush, a parasitic organism, seeks its livelihood from dry Wyoming grass. Also called Castilleja and prairie-fire, this flower marvels at the land. The whispering petals were originally used for their love charm qualities and toxicity; a cosmic force dipped in red pigment.
The painted land, stroked by its floral paintbrush, was the first thing I noticed when I finally reached the ranch. I itched, like the prairie-fire, to stretch out and stand on solid ground. The air was infested with gnats, but it somehow felt easier to breathe and the droning buzz enveloped me with a desire to tuck my feet into wet grass. I had come to Wyoming to get out of Kentucky--where the summer humidity sticks to throats and clings to bare feet. I had come seeking dryness, dust, and the smell of mothballs and manure.
I didn’t know a soul on the ranch. When I applied for a job as the Head Baker, it seemed like a good idea to submerge into new land with new faces. I wanted so desperately to escape my mind, to stand up straight, to wash my hands for any reason other than to scrub away the blood-crusted memory. I wanted to feel like the rosy, big-eyed, wanderlust girl I had been two years prior.
My small, fragile hands shook as I was introduced to the kitchen crew and shown to the baker’s corner. I had never thought much about ovens until that summer. I was given two industrial kitchen ovens to claim as my own. They were, perhaps, too old to be in use. Stacked on one another, the top oven was always hotter than the temperature it was set to, and the bottom never quite baked bread all the way through. I fumbled with the knobs and ran my finger across the bread bench, indefinitely dusty with flour. Entranced in this new playground of mine, I forgot eyes were watching me.
I peered up at the round-faced, seemingly hulking boys leering at me. Their aprons were spotted with yellows and browns. They seemed so tall, clenching their fists and looking at me with both intrigue and disdain. I tried to smile, inching back into the corner, contorting my body into the smallest version possible. I was the only girl in the kitchen. I realized in that instant, as they nudged elbows and exchanged feigned smiles, that I had to prove my worth rather quickly. I felt like a calf grazing wildflowers, suddenly circled by wolves.
Every morning the sun reached up, stretching its balmy arms over dappled mountains. I silently slunk into the kitchen. Without a word to anyone, I baked seventy cookies, eleven breakfast breads, and at least two desserts, enough for around one hundred guests. The boys surrounded me with drabby aprons and calloused hands. They were relatively quiet at first, not knowing how to interact with a young woman attempting to take up space. After a several days of pleading looks and silent smiles, I finally responded to a quip with a whisper just loud enough to hear, fuck you, and at once was part of their world.
It wasn’t until Gray showed up, though, that I felt strong enough, loud enough, to claim the bakery as my own.
Gray was squat, unkempt, and had the drawl of a true Mississippian. He wasn’t handsome in the least, but I fell immediately in love with him when he asked gently, “how you finding yourself this mornin, peanut butter?” He would squeeze my shoulder every morning, handing me an apron, and drink gin with me on the splintered back porch of the kitchen in the evenings.
At eleven o’clock, after a morning of splattered dough and powdered sugar lips, Gray looked at me with a wink to signal our smoke break. We snuck out of the back door, around an old shed, and sat on two milk crates tucked away from sight but nestled in the red blossoms rising out from the creek bed.
He told me about his white buffalo, the girl he loved and lost, and I told him about my mother and how she made boiling water taste like the sea.
I didn’t love him romantically, but rather I loved him the way I love lying in dewed grass, safe and glimmering. He made me feel connected to my body; he watched the way I moved through the bakery, the way my fingers gently kneaded shortbread. He made me consider, for the first time in two years, that my hands were my own. Gray pulled me out of my head and back to life like the mauve hills reached up and yanked back at their flowers, craving more.
On my days off, the head chef, Captain Morgan as we called him, would scold me when I entered the kitchen. I would wake up, read in the sun, walk across the mountain trails, lope through brush on horseback. After finding my footing in my baking corner, though, feeling my chest rise and fall with the rising loaves of bread, it was nearly impossible to stay away. Nothing I did outside of the kitchen grounded me the same way. Nothing else alleviated my ache. For two years, I had never wanted a man to watch me move, touch, clamor, until I entered this kitchen.
The boys would send messages when I was absent, saying, it’s like we’re in an army platoon and Cassie just got blown up. I couldn’t stand being away. I crept into the kitchen to mess around with the guys and watch them blunder pot pies and burn themselves on pans. Morgan would glare, ushering me away from the heat radiated by my ovens and back out into the sunlight.
I didn’t want days off.
I’d stand in the walk-in freezer and familiarize myself with its contents: crates of raw beef, dinner rolls that would go untouched, a secret stash of Pedialyte popsicles for mornings after the Thursday night swing dance.
I kept falling in love.
Everything about the kitchen and its occupants, I loved. The spoon holder in the shape of a tiny chef that someone had written on, wanna spoon? The smell of vinegar and of simmering sugar. Rotting lemons—dotted with blues and fluffy whites atop acid yellow—burrowed in the bottom of cardboard boxes. Resting my head on the cold steal countertop. Making omelets in secret.
Everything about Wyoming, I loved. The dingy dirt roads, the sounds of hooves meeting gravel, the twinge of pipe tobacco lingering in stale air near the barn.
I fell back in love with myself, with my hands, the same way the mountains fell head over heels for the taste of prairie-fire and rain.
My jeans, still sticky with pumpkin puree and nutmeg, made me dance in the garden while harvesting rhubarb for Tuesday’s dessert. I always saved extra to make small, candied treats for the wranglers and cabin girls. The baking corner held the only sugar source on the ranch, so every other day hands would appear, asking for a cup of sweet granules to make hummingbird feed. Sugar and water filled birdhouses drumming with that soft buzz; the bird that pollinates the flower so its curious unfurling of red hues would never disappear completely.
Every so often a hummingbird would land on the window between my hefty mixer and rack of trays. It watched my hands flitting like its wings, grabbing wooden rolling pins and dull knives, fingers pressed against my chest, feeling the beat that I’d lost and found. Once, a hummingbird flew up to my face, circling my head. In flight, it was quick and anxious, but in a glimpse, I could see a smear of red powder resting on a wing.
Some old guy in Marco Island approved of the grammar and the style.