Chapter 6
Chapter Six
JONAH
The bread does not care that she is gone.
That is the thing I have come to love about the bread.
You mix it and you wait and you fold it and you wait, and the waiting is the same waiting it was in June, before, and the same it will be in June after, and the yeast does its slow blind work whether or not the woman who taught me to make it is in the next room or in the ground out past the Calloway place under a stone I cannot yet make myself go and read.
The bread needs flour and water and time and warmth and a pair of hands.
It does not need the hands to be all right.
I find I can do almost anything in this life, at present, that does not require me to be all right, and the bread is the chief of those things, so I make a great deal of bread.
It is half past four in the morning. This is when I do the books, because the house is quiet and nobody is awake to watch me do the part of the math that does not come out, and the part of the math that does not come out is most of it.
We bought this dream on a tight rope. Mémé’s farm came to the boys free and clear, which sounds like a gift until you learn what forty hives and a hundred and ten acres cost a year to keep from dying, and the honey will not sell until June, and June is a long cold way off, and there is a number on the second page of this ledger that I have stopped showing Asa because showing Asa does nothing but move the worry from my chest to his, and his is full.
So I carry the number. I am good at carrying. It is the one thing I have always been for.
People look at the four of us and they do a quick sum and they get it wrong, the way Willa Tate did not.
She came into this kitchen the first Saturday and I handed her the coffee in the chipped mug, Della’s mug, the handle worn smooth from a thumb, and she wrapped her hand around the exact thumb-worn place without looking, the way you hold a thing you can tell has been loved.
Then she looked at me. Not at the alphas.
At me, the one at the counter, and I had the unwelcome thought that here at last was somebody who knew what it costs to be the one who keeps the cups filled.
You can spot your own kind across a room.
It is not a comfort. It is nearer to being caught.
Three big brothers and a beta, the rest of them think, the little one married in, the helper.
And that is true, that is all true, I will not pretend the math is wrong.
I am not an alpha. I did not grow up on this farm.
I came into this family eleven years ago the way a stream comes into a river, which is to say I came in behind my sister, because where Della went I went, she was four years older and she raised me after our mother could not, and when she found these three and they found her and the whole impossible scent-struck thing of it happened, there was never a question of me going anywhere but with her.
They took me in because she came with me attached.
I have always known that. It is not a wound.
It is only a fact, the way the number on the second page is a fact.
You can love a fact and still know it is a fact.
The question I do not let myself ask, at half past four, with the ledger open and the bread proofing and the whole sleeping house breathing around me, is the one underneath that fact. Which is: she was the river. I was the stream that came in behind her. And the river is gone now.
So what am I.
I close the ledger before the question can finish, the way I always do. There is a thing I do instead of finishing it, which is I get up and I check on the boy.
Cooper sleeps hard most nights now, which he did not in the summer, and I credit the goat and I credit the bees and lately, though I have not said so, I credit a woman in a red coat who has somehow taught him that a person can leave at the end of a Tuesday and still come back on the Saturday, that a door closing is not always a door closing for good.
He is a heap under his quilt with one foot out the way she used to sleep, his aunt, exactly the way Della slept, one foot always out from under as if ready to run or to be the first one up to help, and I stand in his doorway in the dark and I look at my sister’s foot sticking out from under my nephew’s quilt and I let that be true for a minute, which is as close to praying as I get anymore.
He is Della’s, by blood, not the boys’, though you would never make them admit there is a difference and there is not, not anymore, not in any way that counts.
His mama was our little sister. When she and her husband went off the bridge in the rain six years back, it was Della who said we take him, before the rest of the sentence was even out of the trooper’s mouth, Della who turned a pack of three courting alphas and one underfoot brother into a family with a baby in it overnight, Della who never once treated that boy as anything but the great central fact of all our lives.
She made this kitchen the loudest room in the county.
That is the part I keep losing and finding again at half past four, not the wedding-quilt things but the racket of her.
She sang badly on purpose to make Cooper laugh.
She danced Asa around this table on his birthday until the big stone man of him gave it up and smiled.
She kept a recipe box on the windowsill, our grandmother’s box and now mine, and half the cards in it are real recipes in her quick slanting hand and half are jokes filed like recipes, Jonah’s coffee, do not drink, under C, and I have not made myself read past the first few cards since June.
The box is still on the sill. I cook from memory now so I will not have to open it.
And then the sickness came for her, fast, the kind that does not negotiate, and she spent a great deal of her last good strength making sure that boy would be held by all of us and not just dropped back into the cold.
She was thinking about Cooper at the end.
Of course she was. She was thinking about all of us.
That was the entire trouble with her, she could not stop thinking about everybody, even dying she would not lie still and be tended, she kept tending.
And here is the thing she said to me. I have not told the others. I cannot tell the others, not yet, maybe not ever, I have turned it over so many times in the dark that the edges have gone smooth.
It was near the end and it was just the two of us, because I was the one who could sit with it without falling apart on her, that was my job even then, and she took my hand, my big sister, and she said, Jonah, listen, you have to hear me, I need you to not let this house go quiet.
And I said it will not go quiet, Dell, I promise.
And she said, no, you do not understand me, you will all decide that being sad is the same as being loyal, I know you, I know every one of you, you will turn this place into a church and call it grief, and Asa will lead the service.
And I could not say anything, because she was right, she was always right, she could see around corners.
And she said, that boy needs a mother who is alive.
Not the memory of one. A live one, with a pulse, who burns the toast. You find your way back to happy, all of you, you hear me, you find it and you let it in the door when it comes, because if you sit in here being faithful to me until you die you will have wasted the one thing I actually wanted, which was for the people I love to be all right.
And then she made me promise. Not to grieve well.
To be happy. She made me promise to be happy, which is the cruelest thing anyone has ever asked of me, and I promised, because you do not refuse a dying woman, and I have been failing that promise every single day since, all of us have, we have built her the exact church she did not want and Asa preaches in it morning and night and I let him, because I do not know how to do the other thing, I do not know how to keep a promise to be happy when the happy keeps tasting like betrayal.
That is where I am, at half past four, when I hear it.
The bread, proofing on the counter. And under the cedar and the yeast and the cold of the dark kitchen, faint, on a coat somebody hung by the back door and forgot, a smell that is not ours.
Honeysuckle. Warm sugar. The first day it is hot enough to go without a jacket.
She left a scarf, the teacher, on Saturday, and Jonah Boone is standing in his dead sister’s kitchen at half past four in the morning getting a lungful of a borrowed scarf like a man, and I put it down, and I step back from it, and I have a word with myself.
Because I am not a fool. I have watched it happen for a month.
I have watched the house get warmer every Tuesday and every Saturday.
I have watched Sam set down his stones one at a time at her say-so, and I have watched Beau, my Beau who has not cried since the funeral, get close to it twice in her kitchen-warm presence and bolt.
I have watched Asa go to the hives more and stay longer, which is Asa for something is happening that I cannot allow.
And I am not a fool, I know what is coming, I can read a scent-match assembling itself across a season the way I can read the number on the second page.
She is for them. Whatever this is, whatever she is doing to this cold house, it is the three of them she will match, if she matches, because that is how it goes, that is the biology of the thing, the alphas and the omega, the great fated machinery, and I am the brother who came in behind the river.
I keep telling myself it is not a wound, only a fact, and I am good at carrying facts, it is the one thing I have always been for.
I take the scarf off the hook and I fold it, neat, the way you fold a thing you are going to give back, and I set it on the bench by the door where she will see it Saturday, and I do not hold it again, I do not, I am a grown man and a brother and I have books to close and bread to bake and a boy to get to school, and there is no version of this morning, or any morning, in which the warmth that is coming back into this house was ever going to be coming back for me.
I get the bread in the oven. The sun comes up over the hives.
Cooper’s foot is still sticking out from under the quilt, his aunt’s foot, ready to run or to help, and the house starts, slow, to smell like bread, like a morning, like a place where people live and not only a place where one of them died.
She wanted that. She wanted exactly that.
I just wish she had told me how a man is supposed to make a house happy from outside the warm part of it, looking in.