Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
ASA
Ifinish the row alone. That is how it should have gone from the start. A man wraps his own hives. He does not need a teacher in a good coat holding the other end of the paper, talking the whole time, looking at him like she has found the back wall of him and is reading what is written there.
I let her hold the paper. That was the mistake. I have spent my life keeping a clean ledger of my mistakes so I will not repeat them, and I am writing this one down now, in the cold, with my hands still working: do not let her hold the paper again.
The last box is Della’s. I wrap it last because I cannot rush it.
The cluster in there is too small. I have known since October.
There is a weight a strong hive has in your hands when you tip it, a settled heavy fullness, and this one does not have it, this one comes up light as a thing already half gone, and I wrap it anyway, snug, out of the wind, because the work is the only thing I have left to give it and a man gives what he has.
I do not think the words she made me almost say out loud an hour ago.
I set them down. I am good at setting things down. I have set down heavier than that.
It is going to die, most likely, this hive.
I will do everything correct and it will most likely die anyway, because I have learned the one thing there is to learn, which is that doing everything correct does not save what you are trying to save.
You can want a thing to live with the whole of yourself, every hour, on your knees, and it will die on its own schedule and not consult you.
I learned that in a hospital room in June. The bees only confirmed it.
She was sick eleven weeks. I will say that part plain, because nobody in that house will say it plain and somebody has to hold the true shape of it.
Eleven weeks from the word to the end. I ran that farm and I ran the appointments and I ran the insurance and I held Sam up and I kept Beau’s bright thing from cracking in front of the boy and I made sure Jonah ate, and I did all of it correctly, every piece, I did not drop one single thing, and at the end of doing everything correctly my brother’s wife, the woman who was the roof over all of us, was gone, and the doing-everything-correctly had not bought her one extra morning.
That is the lesson. I keep it where I can reach it. It is the most expensive thing I own.
She used to get me to smile. Nobody would believe that now, looking at me, and I would not correct them, but it is true.
She had a way. On my birthday she put on the bad radio and pulled me up out of my chair by both hands and danced me around the kitchen table whether I would go or not, and I held out as long as a man can hold out, stone-faced, dignified, and she would not quit, she never once quit, until the thing broke loose in me and I laughed, and she pointed at my face like she had won money off it.
There he is, she would say. There’s the one I married into.
I have not done that since June. I have not had it in me and I have not gone hunting for it.
A smile is a thing a man can afford when the roof is on.
We have no roof. I am the roof now, and the roof does not dance.
Which is why it sat so wrong, this morning, in the cold, when a teacher in a good coat made a joke about the field the noise lands in and the thing nearly broke loose in me before I caught it.
The almost-laugh. The first one since June.
It came up at the wrong woman’s word, over the wrong woman’s hive, and I shut my jaw on it like a trap.
Della made me promise. People think she made her speeches to the others, the soft ones, the be-happy ones, and maybe she did, she had a word for everybody, she was thorough about love the way I am thorough about the books.
But what she said to me, near the end, with her hand cold in mine, was not soft.
She knew which of us I was. She said, Asa, you keep them together.
You keep that boy from coming apart. You are the oldest and you are the steady one and when I am gone they are going to want to fly off in four directions and you cannot let them, you keep this family in one piece if it is the last thing, promise me.
And I promised. I would have promised her the moon and the deed to it. I promised her I would keep us whole.
So that is the job now. Keep us whole. Keep the boy from coming apart.
And here is what I have worked out, alone, on my knees in the cold, doing the math nobody else will do: you cannot keep a thing whole by adding to it the one piece that can break it.
Cooper has lost his mother and his father off a bridge before he was old enough to spell either word. He has lost the aunt who became his mother. He is eight years old and he has buried more people than I had at thirty.
I found him the second week we were in this house, standing at the front window at two in the morning.
Not crying. Standing, watching the dark drive, and when I asked him what he was doing he said, in that careful voice he uses, I’m checking.
He would not say checking for what. He did not have to.
A boy does not stand at a black window at two in the morning checking on the people who are still inside the house.
He was checking the road for the ones who are not coming back, the way you check a sore tooth with your tongue, to learn whether it still goes all the way down.
It still goes all the way down. I stood there with him until he would go back to bed, and I did not tell him it gets better, because I do not lie to that boy.
I lie to Sam about the bank. I will lie to anyone in that house about anything to keep the floor under them.
I do not lie to Cooper. He has had enough lied to him by the world.
And he is, right now, finally, starting to come back, because of a goat and a row of bees and a Tuesday-and-Saturday certainty in a red coat, and every soul in my house has seen it and every soul in my house has begun, quietly, to lean.
Sam leans. He came to me at five this morning with the bank on his face, the number Jonah believes I have not seen, and I told him it would hold, because that is what I am for, to stand in the kitchen and tell Sam it will hold, whether or not it will.
Beau leans, the fool, he has not cried since June and he is half a kind word from going to pieces in that woman’s lap.
Jonah watches her the way Jonah watches everything, which is to say he has already decided something and will tell me in his own time.
They are all leaning on a thing that is not load-bearing, and I am the one who has to know the difference, because I am the one who promised.
Because here is what they are not thinking about, in the warm part of the kitchen, while she fills it up.
School ends in June. And teachers are kind to a sad child for a season and then the season ends and a new class of sad children arrives and they are kind to those, that is the work, that is a good and honorable work and I do not fault it.
But a boy who has decided a person is permanent, a boy who has wrapped his whole coming-back around a person, and then watches that person become a thing that was always temporary, the way every warm thing in his life has turned out to be temporary, that boy does not get a second coming-back.
You get the one. I will not spend Cooper’s one on a maybe.
I will not let him learn, again, at my table, on my watch, that the warm thing leaves.
That is the danger. The danger is enough by itself.
But I will be honest in my own ledger, where no one reads, because a man who lies in his own books is finished.
There is the other thing too. The thing in the cold field this morning, when she looked up from Della’s hive and caught me, and the space between us went tight, and there was beeswax and there was her, under the wool, something bright, something that has no business reaching me through the gray that everything has tasted like since June.
For one second this morning the gray cracked.
I got a breath of color. And every instinct I have spent forty years building stood straight up and said, there it is, that is the thing, take it, and I have not wanted anything in five months and I wanted that, I wanted to put my hand over hers on my dead family’s hive and keep it there, and that is precisely why I stood up so fast, because a man who has just buried the proof that wanting does not save anyone has no business letting a wanting that size back into his chest.
It is not a betrayal. I have turned that word over and set it aside; it is too small and too clean for what it is.
Della would not begrudge me a warm kitchen.
She was not that kind. But Della is not the one who would pay for it.
Cooper is. And the wanting and the danger come from the same door, which makes the door simple, and I have always been better with simple.
You shut the door. You stand in front of it.
You wrap the box and you walk away and you trust the small cluster inside to do the part you cannot do, and you do not open the lid again no matter how cold it gets, because every time you open the lid to check, you let the heat out.
I drive the last nail. The row is done. The light is going.
She comes back at four, for the boy, because she said she would and she is a woman who keeps her word, I will give her that, I will give her all of it, the keeping of words and the bright kitchen and the nine words she got out of Cooper that I could not.
And when she comes I am ready. I have the door shut.
She comes up the steps with her face still open from the drive, still carrying the warm morning in it, and she says, “I brought him that book I was telling you about, the one with the dog,” holding it up, offering it across the space the way she offers everything, and I take it from her and I say, “He’ll like that.
Thank you. Sam’ll see you out when you’re done,” and I turn and I go inside, and that is all, that is the whole of it, four sentences and a closed door, and it is enough.
I watch it land through the kitchen window.
I am the man I was at the school gymnasium, the flat one, the closed one, gracious and brief and a wall, and I watch the bright thing in her face go careful.
I watch her recalibrate on the porch with the book in her hands.
I watch her sort the warm morning man from the cold evening man and come up short on the arithmetic, the way she comes up short on me and only me, and something in her dims, and it costs me to have done it, it costs me more than wrapping the dead hive cost me, and I did it anyway, and I will do it again tomorrow, and the day after, for as many days as it takes.
Because that is the job. Keep them whole. Keep the boy from coming apart. Be the field the noise lands in and let nothing land on him.
Cooper reads to her on the porch in the cold with the goat hollering, and I stand at the dark end of the boards where I stood before, where I will keep standing, the man at the latch, and I do not go toward the warm.
I made a promise to a dying woman that I would hold this family together, and I am going to hold it together if it takes every ounce of want I own and burns it for fuel, and the want, at least, I have plenty of now.
She brought me that. The one thing I did not need.
A full tank of the exact thing I cannot spend.