Chapter 9 #2
The hum in the box beside me climbs one bright terrible note and then it’s gone.
Not sour. Not angry. Gone. Ten thousand small good lives that were working honest work in good light one breath ago, spent all at once as the price of hauling something too big through too small a door, because I was frightened, because I panicked, because she told me and I didn’t understand in time.
The silence where that hive was is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
I’m screaming, I think. I’m on my knees in the clover with my hands over a box gone silent, and something’s coming out of me that isn’t words, and then Madoc’s got me, both arms, hauling me back off the dead hive and around into him, my face against the wall of his chest, his hand cupped over the back of my head holding me there while I come apart.
“I killed them,” I get out, into his shirt.
“I killed my whole hive, they didn’t do anything, they were just, they were working, they were fine this morning, and I dragged the whole world through them because I got scared, I killed them, Madoc, ten thousand of them, and they trusted me, they always trust me, it’s the one thing I know how to do right and I killed them doing it wrong. ”
He doesn’t tell me it’s all right. He never does. That’s the mercy of him, again, that he won’t hand me the lie even now, even to stop me hurting.
“You did,” he says, low, into my hair. His arms don’t loosen.
“You did. It’s true and it’s yours and I won’t pretend it isn’t.
You reached wrong and it cost a hive, and it’s a real thing, and you’ll carry it.
” His hand moves slow on the back of my head.
“And you’ll carry it and go back and learn to reach right, because the next thing it’ll cost if you don’t isn’t a hive.
It’s a child. Or it’s you. You already know that.
That’s why you’re not going to let this be the thing that stops you, though God knows it’s earned the right to be. ”
I cry into him for a long time. He lets me.
He doesn’t shush me or rock me or make it small.
He just holds, steady, an enormous warm patient wall a frightened thing can fall against and not go through, and somewhere in the middle of the worst of it, I get it at last, what he meant, this exact thing, that first morning in his yard with the goose.
This is his whole language. I built you a place to fall that holds.
He can’t say the soft words. He never could.
So he became the soft thing instead, the whole size of him, a place a small terrified creature can come apart against and trust the walls.
When I’ve got myself back down to something that can breathe, I pull away enough to look up at him.
His face is wet too. He doesn’t hide it or wipe it.
The grumpiest man in three valleys knelt in a meadow holding a stranger while she screamed over dead bees, and cried with her, and won’t pretend he didn’t.
“You’re a menace,” I tell him, wrecked, which is the only love word I’ve got that won’t undo me completely to say.
“You said the true awful thing. Nobody says the true awful thing. Everybody says it’ll be all right.
You said I killed them and I’ll carry it and I’ll go back anyway, and it’s the only thing anybody could have said that I’d have believed, and now I have to marry you, those are the rules, you said the true thing to me while I was screaming, that’s a binding contract where I come from. ”
“You come from a wagon,” he says. “There’s no laws in a wagon.”
“There’s one now.”
He almost smiles. His thumb comes up and wipes under my eye, rough and careful, and mine’s not the only face he wipes, because I reach up on my knees and get the wet off his cheekbone with my sleeve, and he lets me, and for a breath we’re just two people kneeling in a meadow over a dead hive with our hands on each other’s wet faces and a god in the trees and nothing at all decided and everything already true.
We bury the hive.
That’s not a thing I’ve ever done, or heard of anybody doing.
You render a dead-out colony down for the wax, or you leave the box for the moths and start fresh.
You don’t dig a grave for ten thousand bees.
But I can’t. I can’t scrape the hive I just saved and all its bees out into a wax-pot like a bad batch of comb, and I can’t leave them to sour in a box on a bench, and when I say so, cracked and unreasonable, expecting him to tell me it’s daft, Madoc just nods and goes and finds a spade.
He can’t use it in the end. The meadow-edge ground is laced through with old root and he’d be an hour fighting it with a blade, so he sets the spade down and digs with his hands instead, his big scarred hands going into the dark earth and pulling it back in armfuls, patient, unhurried, making a clean deep hole at the foot of the tree-line while I bring the frames over one at a time.
I lift them out of the box myself. I won’t let him do that part.
Each frame comes up heavy and still, the comb perfect, capped and gold, the honey they died in the middle of making, and the bees themselves fallen down into the bottom corners in drifts, thousands of small still bodies that were flight and hum and work an hour ago.
I lay them in the hole he’s made, frame on frame, gentle, like you’d lay down anything you loved and broke.
He doesn’t rush me. He kneels across the little grave from me with dirt to his elbows and lets me take as long as I take.
When they’re all in, I sit back on my heels and I do the only thing I’ve ever known how to do for bees, which is talk to them. Out loud. Plain, like I’ve talked to every hive I’ve ever kept, like my old keeper talked to hers before me.
“I’m sorry,” I tell them. My voice doesn’t hold and I let it not hold.
“It was my fault. Not the green’s and not the cold thing’s.
Mine. I got frightened and I reached the wrong way and I pulled it home through you, and you never did a thing but trust me, which is all you ever do.
I know. I know it’s the worst thing I could’ve done with a trust like that.
” I put my hand flat on the cool earth over them one last time.
“I’ll do better by the next ones. I swear it to you.
I’ll learn to reach so it never costs a life again, and every good season I ever get after this I’ll owe to you, and I’ll carry you the whole way.
Rest, loves. You did honest work. It wasn’t you that failed. ”
Then I can’t say any more, and Madoc reaches across and covers my hand with his over the grave, dirt and all, and together we push the dark earth back over my good gentle bees, and pat it down, and it’s done, and it’s the first funeral I’ve ever held and the first grave I’ve ever dug down roots beside instead of driving away from.
Then Madoc gets up, and goes to the pile of good seasoning wood I know he keeps at the meadow’s edge for the fair’s stalls, and comes back with a short offcut of oak and his knife.
He doesn’t say anything. He just squares one end of it clean, and cuts a shallow notch across the top so it reads as made and not just dropped, and drives it into the soft earth at the head of the little grave, firm, a marker, a small true joined thing standing over ten thousand bees at the foot of a haunted wood.
“So you can find it,” he says, gruff, when he catches me looking. “When you want to come back and tell them how the next lot are doing.” He wipes his knife on his thigh and puts it away. “You’ll want to come back. You’re that sort. I built it to stay in the ground a long time.”
And that undoes me worse than the burying did, because it’s the truest thing he could have handed me and he handed it to me in wood, like he hands me everything: not I’m sorry, not it’ll pass, but here is a thing I made so that this loss has a place you can return to, and I already know you’re the sort who comes back, which nobody has ever once assumed about me in my whole leaving life.
The Keeper’s gone. She left when the pulling started. I don’t blame her. She warned me and I didn’t hear it in time, and that’s not her sin to answer for.
Walking home in the failing light with dirt under my nails and a man’s hand wrapped whole around mine, the shape of the road I’m on comes clear, and it’s not a road I’d have chosen.
I’m the only one who can hear the green.
Learning to answer it right is going to cost me, over and over, and this was the smallest of what it’ll ask.
And I can’t run from it, because it followed me here, into the first place I ever wanted to stay, and it’s got its grief-hooks in the exact people I’ve been foolish enough to start loving.
I don’t say any of that. I just hold his hand the whole dark way home, and let him be the wall, and try to learn how to be a woman who stays and pays for it, instead of a woman who leaves before the bill comes.