Chapter 2
Chapter Two
SAM
Iasked her six questions and I had written down eleven, which means I forgot five, and I have spent the whole drive home in the dark trying to reconstruct which five, because if I can remember the questions I forgot to ask I can ask them on Saturday, and if I cannot remember them they will sit in me all week like five small stones in a shoe.
This is, I am aware, not a normal way to ride home from a school event.
Beau is driving. Beau drives the way Beau does everything, with one wrist on the wheel and the radio low and a running commentary nobody requested, and he is saying something about the cider, about how a teacher who springs for a cider machine is a teacher who understands children, and Asa is in the passenger seat saying nothing, which is what Asa says, and Jonah is in the middle row with his head back and his eyes closed, not asleep, Jonah does not sleep so much as power down when the day is finally done holding him hostage, and Cooper is next to me in the back, small in the dark, his too-new backpack on his knees, and I am counting stones.
Question seven was going to be about whether Cooper raises his hand.
He does not raise his hand at home, which is to say he does not ask for things, he has not asked for a single thing since June, and I wanted to know if he asks for things at school, with a stranger, in a room that is his and not ours, because if he asks Miss Tate for things then he is going to be all right, eventually, and if he does not then I need to know that too so I can watch for it, so I can be ready, so that whatever is coming I will at least have seen it coming, which is the only kind of safe I know how to build.
“You’re doing the thing,” Cooper says.
I look over. He is watching me in the dashboard light, which is the only light, his face turned up, and I have no idea how long he has been watching.
“What thing,” I say.
“The worry thing. You do it with your mouth.” He pokes the air near his own jaw. “It moves.”
And Beau laughs from the front, delighted, traitor that he is, and says, “He’s got your number, Sammy,” and I want to be embarrassed but the larger truth crowding it out is that Cooper Mercer said a whole entire unprompted sentence to me in the dark of the truck and then made a small joke, and he has not made a joke since we lost her, not one, I would have logged it, and I have to look out my window at the black trees going by so that nobody in this vehicle gets to watch what my own face is doing.
“My mouth does not move,” I tell the window.
“It’s moving right now,” Cooper says, and there is something in his voice, a little lightness riding on top of the careful, and I file it the way I file everything, in the part of me that keeps the count, and I think: she did that.
Whatever happened in that classroom tonight, the cider and the bees on the wall and the woman who crouched down to his level before she said one word to any of us, that did that, and the door in me that I keep shut and braced opens half an inch on a thing I have no business letting in, which is hope, and I get my shoulder against it fast, the way you would against weather, and I lean.
Because I know how this goes. I am the one who knows how this goes.
Cooper opens up to a person, a bright kind person who crouches to his level, and Cooper attaches, the way he attaches, completely and all at once, and then the person is gone, the way people are gone, school years end and assignments end and lives end, and Cooper has now lost his mother and his second mother and I am not going to stand here and arrange the third.
I am not. I will be polite to Miss Tate.
I will be grateful to Miss Tate. I have a folder for Miss Tate.
But I am not going to let that half inch of door swing wide, because I am the one who watches the road for what is coming, and what is coming, always, eventually, is the leaving.
We turn off the county road onto our gravel and the headlights swing across the farm and there it is, the way it is every night, Mémé’s house that is our house now, white and tired and too big for the five of us, the porch sagging on the left where it has sagged since before any of us were born, the great dark field running back behind it to the tree line, and out in that field, in the cold, the hives.
Forty of them in their long rows. You cannot see them in the dark but I know exactly where every one of them is, the way Asa knows, the way Mémé knew, and I know that out there in the October cold they are clustered tight in their boxes doing the slow patient math of survival, the bees on the outside of the cluster shivering their wings to make heat for the bees on the inside, rotating in, rotating out, nobody freezing as long as everybody works, and I think about that more than is probably healthy.
The cluster. How the whole point of the cluster is that you cannot do it alone.
One bee in the cold is a dead bee by morning.
It takes the whole knot of them, all winter, every night, just to make it to spring.
Mémé’s hive is the worst off. The old one, the first one, the gray weathered box closest to the house that she started forty years ago and that has thrown swarms into half the hollow, that hive is light when I hoist it, too light, the cluster in there gone small.
I work the other forty with my hands, the way I do everything I cannot put into words, down the long rows in the cold morning dark, hefting each box to read the winter stores by weight, laying an ear to the wood to hear whether a cluster still hums in there, tucking the mouse guards, banking the leaves against the wind.
The tending is the only prayer I know, and my hands know these hives the way they know nothing else on this earth.
But Mémé’s I only lift and set back down, because there is nothing to do for the gray one in October but wait, and I have not said so to Asa because Asa already knows, and the waiting and the worrying are mine, I am good at them, they are the only two skills I have ever fully mastered.
Cooper is out of the truck before it stops rolling, which I have told him eleven times not to do, and he is gone around the side of the house at a dead run, and I do not have to ask where, because there is only one place Cooper runs to.
I find him in the lean-to off the barn, on his knees in the straw, and Pickles is already up and hollering at him in that broken little voice, the most undignified animal God ever made, a goat the color of a dirty dishrag with one ear that stands and one that flops and a way of screaming like he is being murdered when in fact he has merely noticed that someone he loves has entered the room.
Cooper has the bottle ready. He warmed it before we left for the school, set it in the pan to be ready for when we got back, eight years old and he runs a feeding schedule tighter than I run the harvest, and Pickles slams into the bottle and drinks like it is the last bottle on earth, his stubby tail going like a metronome, and Cooper holds it for him with both hands and his whole face has gone soft and unguarded in the dim, the way it does for the goat and the bees and nothing else, not yet, not for people, and I lean on the doorframe and watch a boy who lost everything keep a small thing alive with his own two hands because somebody has to, and I do not let myself think the obvious thing, which is that the goat is an orphan we are bottle-feeding too, because if I think it all the way through I will have to go sit in the truck for a while.
“He has to have the whole bottle or his stomach gets upset,” Cooper informs me, which is true, and which he has told me every single night for two months, and I say, “I know, bud, you’re doing it right,” and I mean it the way I never mean anything except when I am talking to this child, all the way down.
Inside, the kitchen is warm and the windows are fogged and Jonah has put something on, of course he has, it is nine at night and Jonah has a pot going, because Jonah holds this family together with food the way the bees hold the cluster together with their wings, by working, by not stopping, by making heat so the rest of us do not freeze, and he does not say much when we come in, he just nods at the table where two bowls are already set, one for me and one for Cooper, and he goes back to the stove.
Della’s brother. He has her hands. I cannot look at his hands for too long.
Beau is being bright. Beau has been bright since June, relentlessly, exhaustingly bright, and he is bright now, leaning against the counter telling Jonah about the teacher, doing her voice a little, doing Asa’s voice when Asa said we’d be grateful, and Jonah’s mouth tips up because Jonah loves him, and it is a good performance, Beau is the best of us at this, at making the kitchen sound like a kitchen used to sound, and not one of us has the heart to tell him we can all see straight through it, because the performance is the only thing keeping the worst of the quiet off the room and we need it, we are not too proud to need it.
Asa does not come in. Asa’s boots go past the kitchen window and out toward the field, toward the hives, toward Mémé’s light gray box that neither of us can save, and I know exactly what he is doing out there in the cold, which is nothing, which is standing in the dark near a thing he cannot fix being the kind of tired that does not have a bottom, and I let him, because there is no version of going out there that helps, I have tried all of them.
Here is the thing about the house. It is full of her.
Not in a sad-movie way, not cobwebs and shrines; Jonah keeps it too clean for that and Asa would not allow it.
It is full of her in the small operational ways, the ways you do not get to choose.
Her handwriting is still on the chalkboard by the back door where she kept the week’s chores, gone faint now, nobody able to wipe it and nobody able to add to it, so it has stayed there since June saying Sam: fix the gate latch in her quick slanting hand, and I have not fixed the gate latch, I cannot fix the gate latch, the gate latch is the last thing she will ever ask me to do and I am keeping it broken on purpose like the coward I am.
Her chair is at the table. Nobody sits in it.
We did not decide that, we just don’t. There are five of us and six chairs and the math of it sits at every meal like a sixth person, which I suppose is the point.
She half-raised me. People do not know that, looking at us, they see four grown brothers and they do an age and they assume, but Della came into this family when I was eleven and she was the one who taught me to drive and the one who sat up with me the night before the SATs and the one who told me, flat out, with her hand on the back of my neck, that the worry was not a flaw in me, it was a love that had not found its right size yet, and that one day I would worry about exactly the right things in exactly the right amount and it would look like devotion.
And then she got sick, and I worried about the right thing, finally, the rightest thing there has ever been, and it did not save her, and I have not known what to do with the worry since, where to point it, so I point it everywhere.
At the hive. At the gate latch. At five forgotten questions in a folder. At a half inch of door.
Cooper comes in smelling like goat and straw and warmed milk, and he eats his soup, and he tells Jonah, unprompted, “My picture is on the wall. The bees one. Miss Tate said it was the finest swarm she saw all year.” And he says it plain, the way he used to say things before, no care in it, and Jonah goes still at the stove for one second, and Beau stops mid-performance, and the kitchen holds its breath around this ordinary boy reporting an ordinary good thing from his ordinary day, because it is the first ordinary good thing he has brought home in four months, and none of us moves, in case moving breaks it.
“That’s because it was,” Jonah says finally, easy, like it is nothing, and serves him more bread.
Later, when Cooper is asleep and the dishes are done and Beau has run out of bright and gone quiet at last and Asa has come in from the cold and gone up without a word, I sit at the table by myself with the chalkboard catching the last of the light, fix the gate latch, and I do the thing I do, I make the list for tomorrow, and at the bottom of the list, after the hives and the feed order and the call to the bank I keep not making, the one about the note that does not come due until the honey sells in June, if the honey sells in June, which is the kind of if I have learned to lie awake inside of, I write Saturday: be careful, and I look at it.
Because the boy made a joke in the truck tonight.
Because he said her name plain. Because some bright woman with an open door and a cider machine got nine words out of him at a kitchen table that I have been trying and failing to get out of him since the funeral, and the half inch of door in me wants, it wants so badly it scares me, it wants to fling itself wide and let her come on into this cold house and warm it up the way she warmed up that boy.
And that is exactly why I write be careful.
Because I am the one who watches the road.
Because the cluster only works if nobody gets left out in the cold, and I have already watched the center of ours go, and I am not built to survive watching it happen to that boy.
I will be grateful. I will be polite. I will hand her my folder.
I will not, I tell the empty kitchen and the broken gate latch and her fading handwriting, let myself hope.
I am still sitting there an hour later, hoping, when the house finally goes all the way quiet, and I give up and go to bed.