Chapter 3
Chapter Three
WILLA
Ihave said it out loud in the car twice now, at the stop sign by the Pruetts’ and again where the county road turns to gravel: this is a professional home visit.
I am a professional, conducting a visit, to a home.
There is a child involved who reads at grade level but goes quiet about it, and the research is clear that an unfamiliar adult on a child’s own ground gets further than the same adult behind a school desk, and I have done exactly this for other children, the Hutchins twins after their granddad passed, little Marisol the year her family was sleeping in the church annex, and nobody held a Senate hearing about my motives then. So.
The gravel goes on longer than I expect, the way farm roads do, hedged on both sides with that high October goldenrod gone to seed, and then the trees open and the Mercer place is just there, all at once, the way a thing you have been driving toward forever finally arrives and then behaves as though it was always going to.
It is a beautiful tired old house. White clapboard gone soft and gray at the seams, a deep porch running the whole front, sagging a little on the left side like a person favoring a hip, and behind it the land rolls back green and gold to a dark line of trees, and along the near edge of the field, in long patient rows, the boxes.
The hives. Dozens of them, white and weathered gray and one ancient one near the house the color of an old nickel, and the air over them is doing nothing right now in the cold but I know what that air does in June, I have lived in this county my whole life, and I sit in my car for a second with the engine ticking and I think, helplessly, oh, what a place to be a child.
What a place to be a sad child who needs somewhere big and green to put it.
Cooper is on the porch before I have my door open.
He has been waiting. He is wearing what is plainly his good shirt, and he comes down the steps two at a time and stops a polite four feet from me and says, “You came,” in a voice trying so hard to be casual that it cracks down the middle, and I have to take a beat and admire the goldenrod so the boy does not see what his two words do to me.
“I said I would,” I tell him. “I keep my appointments. Now. I was promised famous hives and I see famous hives, but nobody mentioned,” and I do not get to finish, because something rounds the corner of the house at a dead run, screaming, and Cooper’s whole face detonates with joy.
“That’s PICKLES,” he hollers, over the screaming, “he’s mine, he’s a GOAT, his mama wouldn’t take him so I’m his mama now,” and the most ridiculous animal I have witnessed in my adult life arrives at Cooper’s knees and headbutts him with total devotion and then turns and gives me a long yellow-eyed evaluation, one ear up and one ear flopped, and screams again, directly at me, a personal accusation, and I lose it, I laugh until I have to put a hand on my car, and Cooper is laughing too, a real laugh, an eight-year-old laugh with his head back, and I think, I am going to remember this exact minute for a long time, the goat and the goldenrod and this child laughing, I am going to keep it.
“He likes you,” Cooper decides, on no evidence, and takes my hand, which a careful child does not do, takes my actual hand in his and tows me toward the barn to conduct the tour, and I go.
Pickles is an orphan, it turns out, hand-raised on a bottle, on a schedule Cooper recites to me with the gravity of a flight surgeon.
The hives are dormant, clustered up for winter, and Cooper knows the word cluster and how it works, the bees on the outside shivering to keep the inside warm, and he tells me about it crouched down by the old gray box closest to the house with his nose nearly on the wood, and I crouch with him in my good slacks and do not care, and somewhere in the middle of the bee lecture a shadow falls over us and I look up and the big one, Asa, is standing there.
He has come up without a sound, which is a trick I would like to learn, and he is holding a coffee he does not offer me and watching his nephew explain bees, and for one second, before he gets his face back, I see it, the thing I could not name in my classroom under all the noise.
He is looking at Cooper crouched there happy in the cold, and he is looking at the spot of grass next to Cooper where there is nobody, and his whole still face goes to a place that has no door in this field, the exact look from the gymnasium, the one that goes around an ordinary scene hunting for a person who is not in it.
“He talks more about bees than anything,” Asa says, to me, but really to the empty grass. “She taught him. The hives were hers.”
And there it is. Not a speech. Four words doing the work of a winter.
The hives were hers. I am very good at this, at the listening that lets a person hand you the thing sideways so they do not have to carry it across the room, it is the one talent I have that is worth anything, and I do not reach for it, I do not say I’m so sorry or ask a single question, I just hold still and let him have set it down, and after a moment he nods, like I passed something, and says, “Cooper. Show Miss Tate the inside before your uncle Sam reorganizes the whole house again,” and goes.
And here is the thing I notice, walking back toward that beautiful tired porch with a goat screaming behind me and a child’s hand in mine: I can read every one of these men but him.
I read Sam in the doorway before we reach it, hovering, a dish towel over his shoulder he is not using, having clearly cleaned a house that did not need it and made a list and triple-checked the list, anxious as a man waiting on a verdict, and my heart goes out the door to meet him.
I read Beau at the stove with Jonah, being bright, doing a bit about the goat’s screaming for an audience of one tired beta, the charm switched on the second I cross the threshold, the seam right there where it always is.
I read Jonah at the counter, who does not perform for me at all, who hands me coffee in a mug that has a chip on the handle worn smooth from a thumb, his sister’s thumb I would put money on it, and says only, “You take it black? I made it strong,” and reads me right back, easy and quiet, two people who do the same job in a room recognizing each other across it.
But Asa I cannot read. Asa is a closed door in a house full of open ones, and I stand in the warm kitchen that smells of coffee and woodsmoke and something with butter in it, and it bothers me more than it has any business bothering me, that one locked door, and I do not look at why.
The reading goes the way I hoped. We do it on the porch, because Cooper wants to, in the cold with a quilt, the goat tied where he can see us and screaming editorial commentary, and Cooper reads to me, out loud, a whole chapter, stumbling and recovering and stumbling, and he does not go quiet, not once, because he is on his own boards on his own porch with his own goat and his own uncles clinking dishes behind the screen door, and a boy who is held that completely can afford to read badly in front of you, that is the whole secret, that is the only secret there has ever been, and I make a note to never again try to do this kind of work in a fluorescent room with a clock on the wall.
I do not mean to stay for supper. I want that on the record, for Roz, who has texted me twice and who I am ignoring.
I mean to leave at four. But Jonah says, around five, not looking up from the stove, “There’s plenty.
She set this table for eight her whole life, it doesn’t know how to make a small amount,” and the she lands in the room the way it does, and Beau’s bit falters for half a second, and Sam goes still, and I understand that Jonah has done something brave and casual on purpose, has said her out loud in front of a stranger to see if the room can hold it, and the room can, barely, and I am not going to be the one who makes it harder by refusing a bowl of soup. So I stay.
There are six chairs and five of us and me, and nobody sits in one of them, and nobody says why, and I do not ask, and I sit where Sam steers me, which is not that chair, and we eat, and it is good, it is so good, the soup and the bread and the warmth and the ridiculous goat audible through the wall, and at one point Cooper laughs so hard at something Beau does that milk comes out of his nose, and the whole table laughs, and for one suspended second this is just a loud happy farmhouse kitchen full of people, and then it passes, the way it does, you can watch it pass over each of them, the remembering, the small private flinch of a family catching itself being happy and not yet sure it is allowed.
I clock other things, the way I do. The chalkboard by the back door with a chore list gone faint, in a fast slanting woman’s hand, not added to in months.
The way all four of them track Cooper without seeming to, a constant low triangulation, where is he, is he all right, the way you’d watch a candle in a draft.
The fact that there is no second income anywhere in this kitchen, no easy money, that the honey is not a hobby, that I overhear the market and we have to be selling by June and the bank in the spaces between other words, and that Sam’s jaw does the thing when the bank comes up.
“You’ll be wanting the Saturday market on the Square, then,” I say, because I cannot help myself, I never can, and four heads come up. “For the honey.”
“That’s the plan,” Beau says. “Why’s that face?”
“What face.”
“You made a face.”
I had not meant to make a face. “It’s only,” I say, “that the honey stall on the Square belongs, in a manner of speaking, to a man named Earl Tubb, and has belonged to Earl Tubb since the Carter administration, and Earl Tubb regards honey the way some men regard a daughter, and Earl Tubb is going to take one look at four large strangers setting up forty hives’ worth of competition and he is going to lose what is left of his entire mind.
” I sip my coffee. “I am not saying don’t. I’m saying wear long sleeves.”
And Beau laughs, a real one this time, the seam gone for a second, and even Asa’s mouth moves, almost, the locked door creaking the smallest amount on its hinge, and Sam says, hopeful and anxious at once, “Is he, would he, do you think he’d actually make trouble,” and I say, “Sam, honey, I will run interference with Earl Tubb personally, I have known that man my whole life, he taught my Sunday school, leave Earl Tubb to me,” and I watch Sam set down one of his stones, I watch it happen, the relief of handing a worry to somebody who says leave it to me, and I think, careful, Willa.
That is not yours to carry. That is a family, intact in its own grief, and you are the reading teacher.
But I have already said leave it to me. I always have already said it. That is the whole trouble with me and it is too late in my life to fix.
It is full dark when I finally go, and they all come out onto the porch to see me off, the whole constellation, Cooper and the four of them and the goat winding around everyone’s ankles, and the cold has come down sharp and clean and the field behind the house is black and the old gray hive nearest the steps sits there in the dark holding its small struggling warmth, and Cooper says, “Will you come back,” not casual at all this time, no armor on it, and before I can answer Sam says, fast, “You don’t have to,” and Asa says nothing, Asa stands at the dark end of the porch with his arms crossed being a door I cannot open, and I look at all of them lit up in the kitchen light, and I do the thing I am going to do, the thing I was always going to do from the second I saw a sad child draw a field full of bees.
“I’ll come back,” I say.
I drive home with the heat on and the radio off and Roz’s texts unanswered glowing on the seat beside me, and I leave the porch light on when I get there, the way I do, and I sit in my own kitchen for a while in my coat, and I do not finish the thought, the one about the locked door at the dark end of that porch, the one I have decided, for tonight, is professional curiosity.
It is not professional curiosity. But that is tomorrow’s problem. I am very good at making things tomorrow’s problem.