Dark Honey Mountain Man (Autumn Harvest in Silver Ridge #2)

1. Anaya

one

Anaya

The market opens at nine. I get there at nine twenty, which is twenty minutes too late, which I know before I've finished parking.

The town square is already full. Two long rows of stalls under canvas, a field with more beyond them, and the whole thing smelling like woodsmoke and wet grass and apples in crates.

My breath shows. Frost still holds in the shade along the north side of the hardware store, a white seam that hasn't given up even though the sun's been on the rest of the street for an hour.

Ten hours of driving for this, and a motel room with a rattling baseboard heater, and now I'm walking fast past a man selling smoked trout because I can see the sign at the end of the row.

MCGREGOR HONEY. Hand-painted, black letters on a plank repainted at least twice. I can see the ghost of the old lettering where the sun got at it.

There are three jars left.

They're at the back of the table, set apart from the wildflower and the goldenrod, and even from four feet away they read wrong for honey. Not gold. Not amber. Almost black, and where the sun comes through at the edge, a red so dark it's nearly brown, like a bottle of stout held up to a window.

Forest honeydew. I've been trying to buy this for seven months. Three specialty importers, two of whom laughed at me. A distributor in Richmond who offered me Greek fir honey instead, as though I'd asked for a lemon and he'd handed me a lime.

"How much for all three?"

The man behind the table doesn't answer right away.

He's on an overturned crate with his forearms on his knees, watching a wasp work the rim of a sample jar with an attention that suggests the wasp is the more interesting party in this transaction.

Barn jacket the colour of wet bark. Dark hair long enough to be pushed back and not much longer.

A week of beard going grey along the jaw, less an accident than a schedule he's decided not to keep.

He looks up. He's got a stillness to him that makes the market feel loud.

"Eighteen each," he says.

"All three."

Now he looks at me properly. Not up and down. At my face, like he's checking something.

"You know what it is?"

"Forest honeydew. Your bees worked aphid secretions off the conifers instead of flowers.

" I put my hand on the nearest jar; the glass is cold enough to sting.

"Which makes it honey from a bee standpoint and not a botanical one.

It'll taste like malt and pine resin and something almost savoury, and it won't be sweet the way people expect sweet. "

He blinks, as if not expecting such a precise response. "Fifty-four dollars," he says after a beat.

I pay him in cash. He stands to wrap them, and standing is the problem.

He's tall in a way that reorganizes the space behind the table.

And his hands — he wraps each jar in newspaper the way you'd wrap something breakable and something valuable, twice over, and I watch him do it three times because I can't make myself do anything else.

Big hands, scarred across the knuckles, something brown-red worked into the creases that isn't dirt and isn't rust. The paper turns under them like it's being handled by a man who's never once been in a hurry.

The last jar, he holds a second longer than he needs to.

"Don't put it in tea," he says.

His voice is low and unbothered, and it arrives about three inches lower in me than a stranger's voice has any business arriving.

"I wasn't going to put it in tea."

"People do."

"People are wrong."

He hands it over. My fingers go over the top of his and stay there for the length of the handoff, which is longer than a handoff, and neither of us hurries it along.

I should walk away. I have three jars, which is more than I had this morning, and my recipe test list, and a cookbook proposal sitting in my editor's inbox with a hole in chapter four shaped exactly like this.

Instead I say, "Can I see the hives?"

"No."

Flat. No apology tacked on the end, no sorry, no not this time — the word arrives complete and doesn't ask me for anything back.

I've been told no by a lot of people. Chefs who wouldn't give up a technique, a fisherman in Tofino who didn't want his cove named, a seaweed harvester who told me to come back when I'd learned to shut up and watch. I know the shape of a no you can talk around. This isn't one.

So I don't argue. I put the jars in my tote and shift my weight and ask, because I actually want to know, "The melezitose — how do you get it out of the comb? It sets like cement in the cells. I've read you can't spin it."

"Can't spin most of it," he says. "You lose some. I heat the room and I go slow and I take the frames I know are only part honeydew first. Rest of it I press."

"By hand?"

"By hand."

"That's why there's only ever a few dozen jars."

"That's why."

Two vendors down, somebody's dropped a crate and a woman is laughing about it. He doesn't turn his head.

"Second question," I say. "Do you leave any of it on the hive for winter?"

"No." First thing he's said without a beat before it. "It's hard on them. High ash. They can't cleanse in the cold, and it makes them sick. They get the flower honey. I take the dark."

"So the rarest thing you make is the thing your bees can't keep."

He looks at me.

The market carries on doing what a market does. Somebody's generator kicks in. A dog under the next table thumps its tail against a table leg twice and stops. And this man sits on his crate in the middle of all of it with his forearms on his knees and looks at me like the noise has stopped.

"Third one," I say. My voice comes out steadier than the rest of me, which is a small mercy, because the rest of me has spent the last four minutes cataloguing the width of his shoulders under that jacket and the exact grey in his beard and what his mouth does right before he decides not to smile.

"What are they working? Spruce? Fir? Because I've had honeydew from Europe and it was mostly fir and it tasted like the inside of a violin case, and yours doesn't smell like that.

Yours smells like—" I lift the jar in my hand, though it's wrapped and sealed and I can't smell a thing through the paper.

"Like the underside of a log. In the good way. "

He doesn't answer.

He looks at the wasp. He looks at the field beyond the stalls. Somewhere behind us, a kid is arguing hard for a caramel apple and losing.

"No more questions today.” He looks exhausted. His eyes meet mine, and he must catch the curious expression on my face. “Come back tomorrow," he says, resigned, "if you want the rest of the answer."

That's it. That's the whole thing. He picks up a rag and starts wiping down the sample spoons like the conversation was a task on a list, and it's finished now.

"What time do you open?"

"Nine."

Back at the motel, I unwrap one jar and open it, standing at the little laminate counter next to a kettle I don't trust to not start a fire if I keep it plugged in.

The smell comes up dark. Molasses, pine pitch, wet bark, something like the bottom of a coffee cup and something like a barn. Zero flowers. Nothing in it apologizing for itself.

I take a quarter teaspoon, and put it on my tongue and hold still.

It isn't sweet first. That's the thing nobody writes down. It's deep first — malt and smoke and mineral — and the sweetness comes in underneath at the end and stays a long time, finishing almost bitter, like good chocolate, like the crust on something roasted.

I stand in a motel room in a logging town in the Rockies with my eyes shut and a spoon in my mouth, and I think: I want to know what tree made this.

And immediately after that, in the same breath, without asking my permission:

I want him to be the one who tells me.