Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
WILLA
The thing about being the person everyone tells things to is that it does not, as a rule, run the other direction.
I have spent my whole life as the town’s confessional, the warm booth everybody slides into to unload a worry or a rumor or the real story behind the Hutchins divorce, and the arrangement has always suited me, because a person sitting in the confessional is a person nobody thinks to look at too closely.
You are furniture. Holy furniture, but furniture.
So it is a genuine novelty, and not a pleasant one, when Hettie Dubois corners me outside the post office on Saturday morning and says, with the elaborate casualness of a woman who has rehearsed it, “You been out to the bee place a good bit, I hear,” and looks at me, and waits.
“Cooper Mercer’s in my class,” I say. “He’s having a hard year. I do extra reading with him.”
“Mm,” says Hettie, in a register I have deployed myself approximately four thousand times, the register that means I have heard the official version and filed it next to the true one.
“Earl Tubb says you squared the honey thing for them with him at the market. Says you were real invested.” She lets invested sit there.
“Four of ‘em out there, aren’t there. And the little boy.”
“Three uncles and a beta and the little boy and a goat named Pickles,” I say, brightly, because brightly is the fastest exit, “and I will tell Cooper you asked after him, Hettie, he’ll be tickled,” and I am in my car before she can reload, and I sit at the stop sign by the Baptist church longer than the stop sign strictly requires, because Hettie Dubois has just held a small mirror up to me on the courthouse lawn and I do not entirely care for the woman in it.
Because here is the truth, the one I would tell if I were the sort of person who got to sit in the confessional instead of being it: I am not driving out to the Mercer farm this morning to do extra reading.
Cooper is at the feed store with Beau, a fact I know because Beau texted me a photograph of Cooper solemnly evaluating a wheelbarrow with the caption consultant arrived, billing us by the hour.
I know Cooper is not home. I am driving out anyway.
I have a casserole on the passenger seat that nobody asked for.
I have, God help me, become a woman who turns up.
When I get there the yard is quiet. Sam’s truck is gone, Jonah’s car is gone, and the only sign of life is out in the field, where one large man is working his way down the long row of hives in the cold doing something I cannot make out from the drive, and I should leave the casserole on the porch and go.
I know I should leave the casserole on the porch and go.
I take the casserole out to the field instead.
Asa is wrapping hives. He has a roll of black tar paper and a box of roofing nails and he is fitting dark jackets around each box against the wind, and it is slow and cold and exacting and plainly a two-person job he is doing alone, and I set the casserole on an overturned crate and say, “Put me to work.”
He looks at me. He looks at the casserole.
He looks at my coat, which is a good coat and the wrong coat, and for a second I am sure he is going to send me home, and then something in him decides not to spend the energy it would take, and he hands me the end of the tar paper and says, “Hold this. Pull it taut. Don’t let it bag at the corner. ”
So I hold the tar paper taut and I do not let it bag at the corner, and we work down the row, and it turns out that Asa Mercer, who will not give me a sentence at a dinner table, will give me a great many of them about bees.
The wrap is not for warmth, he tells me, bees make their own warmth, the wrap is for wind, wind is the killer, wind steals the heat the cluster makes faster than they can make it.
You want them dry and out of the wind and left the entire rest of the time alone.
The worst thing you can do to a struggling hive in winter, he says, is keep opening it up to check on it.
Every time you open the lid you let the heat out.
Sometimes the kindest thing is to close the box and walk away and trust them to do the part you cannot do for them.
“That sounds hard,” I say. “The walking away and trusting part.”
“It’s the whole job,” he says.
We work. He is easier out here, I notice, the way Cooper is easier on his own porch, the way I am easier with my hands busy, and I begin to understand that this man is not actually a closed door, he is a door that only opens onto a field, that the house with the empty chair is the place he cannot speak in and the cold row of boxes is the place he can, and I file that, I cannot help it, I file everyone.
The beeswax and the woodsmoke come off him strong in the cold air and I have stopped pretending to myself that I am cataloguing it for professional reasons.
I am not. I gave that up somewhere around the third hive.
I talk while we work, because I always talk while I work, it is involuntary, I narrate the world at it.
I tell him about Cooper’s hand going up in class, which I have already told the others, but I want to watch him get it, and I do, I watch the news land somewhere behind his face and shift the set of his shoulders by a degree, and he says, “He raised his hand,” the way you would repeat a number you needed to be sure you heard right, and I say, “He did,” and Asa nails the next jacket on with two strokes of the hammer instead of three, and does not say anything else, but the two-instead-of-three is its own whole sentence, and I can read that one.
“You don’t talk much,” I observe, three hives later, because somebody in this field has to say it out loud and it is plainly not going to be him.
“No,” he agrees.
“Is that a grief thing or a you thing? You can tell me. I’m a professional. I have a degree.”
He is quiet long enough that I decide I have stepped wrong, and then he says, not looking up from the box, “Beau talks enough for the whole farm. Somebody’s got to be the field the noise lands in.
” And it is so nearly a joke, a joke wearing a stone coat, that I laugh out loud, startled, and his mouth does the thing, the almost, and for one second the cold bright morning is two people wrapping boxes and one of them just about smiled, and I have to look hard at the tar paper.
Here is the trouble I keep arriving at, out there, hands busy, breath showing white.
I do not know which Willa I am being. There is a Willa who fixes people, who found the most broken man in three counties and rolled her sleeves up, and I know that Willa, I have been her my whole life, she is safe, she gets to leave at four and be useful and never once be on the hook for anything.
And there is a newer Willa, the one Hettie smelled on the courthouse lawn, who is not out here to fix one single soul, who is out here because the woodsmoke does a thing to the back of her neck and because a man who calls himself the field the noise lands in is the most unexpectedly lovely thing she has heard said all year.
And the awful part, the part I keep turning away from, is that I cannot tell the two of them apart.
I have always been able to tell them apart before.
Telling them apart in other people is the entire job.
We reach the old gray one last. The one by the house, the first one, the one Cooper crouches at.
Asa slows when we get to it, and his hands change, gentler, and he does not reach for the tar paper right away.
He sets his palm flat on the lid for a second, the way you would on a forehead, checking, and his face does the thing I have only seen in flashes, the going-somewhere, and I keep still and hold my end of the paper and wait.
“This one’s hers,” he says, finally. “Della’s.
She kept this one herself. Mémé started it and Della kept it on, and now.
” He stops. He hefts the box a little from the side, testing the weight the way Sam does, and whatever the weight tells him settles into his jaw.
“It’s light. It’s too light. The cluster’s gone small.
They might not have the numbers to keep each other warm through a hard one.
” He puts the tar paper to it anyway, careful, wrapping the dying thing against a wind that is probably going to take it regardless, and he says, not to me, barely out loud, “Some things you can’t keep alive by wanting to. ”
And there it is. The crack. The door swings open onto the field for one second and I see all the way down it, I see a man who has decided, somewhere underneath the stone, that he is the kind of person who stands watch over things he cannot keep, who wraps the dying hive because the work is the only prayer he has left, who has learned the hard way that wanting a thing to live is not the same as it living, and who has built his whole grief into a creed out of that one terrible lesson.
I read him, finally, all the way, the locked door standing open, and it costs me something to look at, it is the loneliest thing I have ever read off a person and I have read some lonely people.
And he knows I saw it. He looks up from the hive and catches me looking, catches me having read him to the bottom, and there is a charged half-second where the beeswax and the woodsmoke are everywhere and our hands are a few inches apart on a dying box that belonged to a dead woman and neither of us moves, and I am aware, in a way I have refused to be aware of for a month, that whatever this is, it has never once been professional curiosity.
And because reading a person and then leaving them alone with it is the one thing I have never once in my life managed to do, I reach.
I run the move. The only move I have, the warm true thing said plain, the thing that has set the heavy weight down off every soul in this county for thirty-three years.
“Asa. Wanting it to live is not what kills it. You’re allowed to want the hive to make it.
You’re allowed to want a whole lot of things to make it.
The wanting was never the danger you decided it was. ”
And I watch it not land.
I watch it hit the wall and slide off the way the cold slides off that tar paper, and I understand, crouched in the dirt with my warm true thing lying there between us unwanted, that I have run the move that always works, the move that has never once in three decades failed me, and that it has just missed clean.
Asa Mercer does not set the weight down.
He picks it up higher. He stands, fast, and the field-door swings shut so hard I about hear the latch, and he says, flat, in the closed dinner-table voice I have not heard out here until right now, “You read people for a living. Cooper told me. Says you’re the best one he ever had.
” And it ought to be a kindness, and it is the coldest thing anybody has handed me in a year, because of where he sets it down, because what he means is these are not your bees.
What he means is stay on your own end of the tar paper.
What he means is you are the teacher, and the child is on the far side of that door, and you do not get to crouch in my dead grandmother’s bee yard and tidy my grief the way you tidy a reading group.
“I’ve got the rest,” he says, gentler, which is somehow worse. “Thank you for the casserole. Cooper’ll be back by four if you wanted to wait for him.” A dismissal dressed as hospitality, and I recognize the cut of it, because I have dressed a thousand dismissals in that exact coat myself.
“I’ll come back at four,” I say, and I gather myself up off the cold ground, and I leave him there alone with the dying hive and his creed, and I drive back toward town with my heart doing something complicated and my hands not quite steady on the wheel.
And here is the part I cannot drive away from, the part with my hands unsteady on the wheel, and it is not the wanting, or not only the wanting.
I missed him. I read that man true, all the way down, and then I reached, and I missed clean.
The move did not work. It always works. It worked on a furious Earl Tubb in ninety seconds and it has been working on hard cases since I was twenty-two and green in a classroom, and it slid off Asa Mercer like I had said nothing at all.
And if the one thing I have ever been sure I was for, the reading and the reaching, does not work on him, then I do not know what I am to that family but the teacher after all.
The casserole woman. I have been that my whole life, and I let myself think, out in that cold field with the woodsmoke doing its work on the back of my neck, that this time I might get to be something else, and the bounce of my own best move off that man’s wall has just told me, plain, stay on your own end of the tar paper, Willa Tate.
You fix the ones who want fixing. This one does not.
I draw the line on the drive home. I am good at lines, I draw them for a living, twenty-some of them sitting in little chairs every weekday.
The line is this: nothing happens. Cooper is in my class until June, and as long as that is true, I keep it neighborly, I keep it bright, I keep my hands on my own end of the tar paper, because that child has lost enough certainty for one lifetime and the one certainty I can guarantee him is a teacher who does not complicate his whole fragile new world by getting tangled up with the people holding him together.
That is the line. It is a good line. It is the right line, drawn by the responsible adult I genuinely am.
And I almost believe I will hold it, all the way to the edge of town, where I have to stop at the Baptist church stop sign again, and sit there a second too long again, because the truth, the one that lives where Hettie Dubois cannot get at it and Roz almost can, is that I have already, this morning, crouched in a cold field and read all the way to the bottom of a man I had no business reading, and you cannot unread a person, that is the cruelty of the only gift I have, and I am going back at four, and not, if I am being honest, only for the boy.