Chapter 3 #2
Breakfast paid for, I go looking for the next thing before he can tell me there isn’t one.
I find a broom leaned in the corner and put it to the sawdust he will only sweep into a tidy pile again tomorrow without thinking twice about it.
I carry water out to the seasoning wood in the yard, a precaution against the dry spell cracking it, though he tells me flat that oak doesn’t need coddling.
“It needs coddling from me,” I say. “That’s different.”
I coddle it anyway. By the third small thing he catches me doing uninvited, he’s stopped arguing with me about it. He’s started only sighing, which I’ve decided to take as a full and complete surrender.
By the time the sun clears the treeline proper, I’ve got the horse hitched and the mended box loaded steady in the wagon bed. The spare box rides beside it, my bees still grumbling inside, and Bramble sits installed on the seat in a posture of profound personal offense at the entire morning.
“I’ll be back before dark,” I tell Madoc, who has come round to check the wheel he didn’t build and doesn’t trust regardless. “Meadow work. Setting hives out for the bloom while the fair runs, then coming back to sell what’s already made.”
“South road forks twice past the mill. Take the left both times.”
“I know the way.” I don’t, if I’m honest, but I have found that saying so with confidence gets me further than admitting the truth ever has.
“Mm,” he says, in the tone of a man who has already met my sense of direction and doesn’t believe a word of it.
He is, as it turns out, right not to. I take the left fork both times, as told.
I somehow arrive not at bloom country but at a ford so shallow the horse looks at me like I’ve insulted her intelligence on purpose.
I turn us around, apologize to nobody in particular, and try the right fork of the second instead.
It opens onto the kind of country I have been chasing my whole road-worn life, low green hills gone gold and purple with clover and vetch.
A long slow hum rises off it, one I can feel in my back teeth before I’m close enough to see a single flower.
“There you are,” I tell the meadow, out loud, because I have never once in my life kept a good feeling to myself.
The rest of the morning is the part of the work nobody at the fair ever thinks to ask about.
That suits me fine. It’s the part I’m good at.
I walk the field edge first, nose up, sorting what is blooming from what is only pretending.
Clover thick and gold across the whole low stretch.
A run of wild thyme along the drier rise.
Somewhere off past a stand of hazel, faint but real, sits the first bruised sweetness of early heather, starting before its season.
Any keeper worth her jars knows that means a longer, richer bloom than usual this year, if the weather holds.
I set the hives where the morning sun will find them first and the afternoon heat won’t cook them.
Backs to the prevailing wind, a clear flight line out over the clover, nothing standing in the bees’ way home.
I’ve done this so many times in so many fields that my hands know the spacing before I do.
Boxes squared, entrances angled just so, water set within an easy flight for a hot day.
It’s the one thing in this whole wide world I’ve never once gotten lost doing.
Other keepers I have met work slower than I do.
They fuss over every frame like they are afraid of missing something, second-guessing a placement long after it has stopped doing any good.
I’ve never needed the fussing. My nose finds a good stand of clover before my eyes do.
I know how far a hive will fly for water before the flying costs more than the water is worth.
I know which queens are worth keeping and which ones a keeper is only being sentimental about.
I’ve sold honey to men who kept bees three times as long as I’ve been alive.
I’ve watched them go quiet reading my jars, turning them in the light as if the answer to something was written on the glass.
The mended box goes down last, in the best spot of the row, because it has earned it.
I open the spare box and lift the frames one at a time, comb whole and heavy and dark with clover honey already.
I set them across into the good home built for them overnight, by a man who didn’t think it worth mentioning.
The bees know the difference before the lid’s half down.
The hum comes up steadier, rounder, a note I know as well as my own name.
“There,” I tell them, low, palm flat against the new wood, warm already from the morning sun. “Better roof. Same girls. I told you we’d sort it.”
They settle under my hand, steady, believing me again.
I move on down the row, doing what I came to do, checking each hive in turn, palm to the mesh, ear near enough to catch the pitch of it.
Good bees this morning, every one, busy and a little smug about the clover, as they should be on the first proper bloom of the fair fortnight.
The last hive in the row isn’t.