Chapter 5 #2
“That is a coincidence of staggering proportions, and if you tell anyone I said otherwise I’ll deny it under oath.
” I set the cloth back over the crock, careful now that I know whose it is and what it’s for.
“You never told me you did this. Any of this.” I nod at the shelf, the cradle, the small carved bird with its half-lifted wings.
“I thought you built cart wheels and fair benches and thresholds nobody thanks you for.”
“I do.”
“You also do this.”
He looks at the shelf like it’s a stranger’s work he’s only just been introduced to himself. “Somebody needs a cradle. Somebody’s daughter needs a naming-day gift. It’s still just wood and a blade. Same as the thresholds.”
“It is not the same as the thresholds,” I say. “A threshold doesn’t look like it grew there on purpose. I have never in my life seen a spoon that made me want to cry a little, and now I have, and I blame you, and only you, for it.”
“It’s a spoon.”
“It’s a beautiful spoon, made by a man who finishes it in my honey’s own wax, and won’t tell anybody he does either of those two things, and I would like to know why.”
He doesn’t answer that one straight off, which I’ve learned by now means he’s actually thinking about it rather than just being quiet at me for the fun of it. He picks the crock up himself, turns it once in his big scarred hand, sets it down again exactly where it was.
“Oil finishes faster,” he says at last. “Wax finishes better. Takes longer, wants more hands on it while it dries. Most men round here don’t think it’s worth the extra day.”
“But you do.”
“Wood outlives the man who cuts it, if he does it right. Might as well finish it in something that’ll still smell like something when I’m not here to smell it.”
I don’t have a smart answer ready for that one.
It sits in the quiet shop a second longer than either of us seems to want it to, and I find myself looking at his hands instead of his face, the same nicks and old white scars from that first night, except now I can see what all that scarring built.
A cradle a child will be rocked to sleep in for years he’ll never see.
A spoon somebody’s grandchild will eat porridge with long after the wax has gone dark from a hundred hands holding it.
“You’re a menace,” I tell him, “hiding all this behind sills nobody thanks you for.”
“Nobody needs thanking for a threshold that holds.”
“I’d thank you for it. I thank the box you fixed every single morning I set it in the sun and it doesn’t fall apart under me.”
“That’s different.”
“It absolutely is not.” I cross my arms and look up at the whole considerable height of him, same as I did that first night in his yard, no more bothered by the size of him now than I was then.
“You built me somewhere to put my bees so they don’t die on the road.
That’s the same as building somebody’s daughter a cradle so she doesn’t fall out of the world before she’s had a proper look at it.
You just don’t let yourself call it that. ”
Something happens in his face I don’t have a clean word for, something between the almost-smile and the still, careful look he gives a beam before he trusts his weight to it.
For one long breath neither of us says anything at all, and the shop goes very quiet, and the crock of wax sits between us smelling of both our trades at once, and I go still, aware all at once how little space is left between us in this room.
“You’ve got sawdust in your hair,” he says.
“I have had sawdust in my hair since the day I met you. It’s practically part of the outfit now.”
He reaches, one big hand, and picks a curl of pale shaving out from just above my ear, slow, like he’s handling something that might come apart if he isn’t careful with it.
His knuckles brush my temple for about half a second, warm and rough, and every single thing in me goes very quiet and very interested all at once.
He holds the shaving up between two fingers like evidence.
“There,” he says. “Proof.”
“Proof of what.”
“That you were here.”
I don’t have an answer for that either, not one I trust myself to say out loud in a room this small with a man this large standing this close to me. So instead I do the thing I always do when a silence gets too big to just sit inside.
I change the subject, loud and bright, and ask him if he’s eaten, and whether there’s bread that isn’t fighting-stale today, and by the time we’re done arguing about whether cheese counts as a meal on its own it’s well past noon and the whole strange charged moment has settled back down into something easier to carry, though not gone, not all the way.
It sits under the rest of the afternoon like a held note under a song, quiet, waiting to be picked back up.
Bramble spends the whole afternoon curled by the cold forge instead of following me anywhere, which I take as him finally admitting defeat about the man’s presence in his life.
I leave him there when the light starts going gold and long, since somebody has to check on three good hives and one sour one before full dark closes the meadow up for the night, and a goose who’s decided the hearth is his now isn’t going to argue about being left behind.
“I’ll be back before dark,” I tell Madoc, who’s bent back over his bench with the cradle rail in one hand.
“Mm,” he says, which by now I know means he heard me, and is choosing not to make a fuss of it.
The meadow’s gone gold by the time I reach it, that long low light that turns every stalk of clover into something worth a second look.
The three new hives sit steady and quiet in their row, good bees settling for the night, content and unbothered.
I check each one, palm to the mesh, the same three good hums I left this morning, and tell them the same true thing.
“There. See. Nothing to fret over.”
Then I reach the last hive, and the light does something I’ve never once seen light do before.
Dusk doesn’t come down in its ordinary order, orange sliding to grey sliding to blue.
It thickens instead, gold folding into green folding into something that isn’t quite either, a color I don’t have a name for and have never needed one for before now.
It pools low over the last skep like honey poured slow from a jar, and it doesn’t touch the other hives at all, only this one, only this stretch of clover running up to the old trees at the field’s edge.
The ordinary sound of the evening goes with it.
No birds arguing over roosts. No wind through the clover.
Just my own breath, loud in my ears, and under it, the same sick uneven hum I’ve been listening to for three days running, except now there’s something else laced through it, low and old and patient, the stand of trees at the field’s edge holding its watch since the morning I first walked this ground.
My skin goes tight all over, every hair on my arms lifting, the old warning that comes right before a storm breaks.
I should turn around. My body already knows it, the same instant certainty I get off a bad hive against a good one, before my head’s caught up with a reason for it. My feet don’t turn around. They never have been any good at the sensible thing.
I lift my hand and lay it flat against the wood, same as I have a hundred hives before this one, and the sourness under my palm isn’t sourness at all anymore. It’s grief. Plain, old, patient grief, the kind that’s been sitting in one place so long it’s stopped expecting anyone to notice it.
“Hey,” I say, soft and certain, the same low greeting I give every hive that’s hurting. “Hey now. I see you. What happened to you.”