Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
BEAU
There is a right way to put up a fall harvest, and I learned it from a woman who is dead now, so I do it her way: on the cold side of the barn where the jars keep, the dead flat Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s, when the rest of the house is sleeping off the holiday and nobody is around to watch me work.
I sort the honey the way I sort everything. For other people.
This pile is the church raffle, because you give the church the good clover and they pray for your bees; Mémé made that deal in 1970 and I am not the man to break it.
This pile is debts: a jar for Dottie Pruett, who keeps feeding Cooper; a jar for the vet who did not charge us for the goat; two jars for Earl Tubb, because you butter the oracle before market season, not after.
This pile is customers, labeled and counted, the spring money sitting there in glass, the only money this farm is going to see before June, and all of us know it.
And this last short row, six jars, dark as a church window, is Mémé’s sourwood, the line we cannot make anymore, the six jars left in the world, and I stand over them a while, because standing over them is the nearest I have come to driving out past the Calloway place to the stone I still cannot make myself go and read.
Four piles. I count them twice, the way Sam would.
Four piles, and not one of them is mine.
It has never once occurred to me, in thirty-four years, that there ought to be a jar in this barn with my name on it.
And the only reason it occurs to me today, this flat cold Tuesday, is that yesterday I tasted coffee for the first time since June and nearly came apart over it like a fool, and a man who has only just got his tongue back starts noticing every single thing he never once let himself taste.
I should explain about the tongue.
The world went out in June. Not the color.
The taste. The day after we put her in the ground the whole world came through a wall, food turned to texture and coffee to hot brown nothing, and I told no one, because announcing that the world has gone flavorless is not a thing the funny one does.
The funny one keeps the kitchen sounding like a kitchen.
So I kept it. I made the noise. I carried the casseroles.
I did the one good story about Della and the dog that lets a room laugh instead of the other thing.
Six months of it. And the whole six months I told myself the gray was grief and would lift when the grief lifted, and it did not lift, because I would not let it, because letting it lift meant going into the room where she actually was, and my hands were full of the door.
And then a woman in a red coat put her hand flat on my back on Christmas Eve, in front of God and my whole family and a goat, and said sit down and miss her, we’ll hold the room, and I went down the dam and over the falls and came out the bottom soaked and stupid and alive.
And the world afterward was not worse. The world afterward, against every prediction I have ever made, was better.
What was in the room, when I finally went in, was her.
Not the casseroles and the brave face and the one good story I tell at parties.
Her. The way she called me Beauregard only when she was about to ask me for something outrageous and already knew I would say yes.
The way she laughed at her own jokes one beat ahead of the punchline because she could never wait for it.
The fact that she was the first person in my whole life who saw the seam in the charm and never once pulled at it, only let me be funny and loved me underneath it, the way you love a person and not a performance.
I had been so busy holding the door I forgot she was the thing on the far side of it.
I went in, and I got to miss her, the real her, finally, and it was the worst hour I have lived through and I would not trade it back for anything on this earth.
Three days later the coffee came back. Slow, like a radio finding a station. I stood in the kitchen and tasted a whole cup of it and had to grip the counter.
So that is where I am, out here with my four piles, running my tongue over a world I can taste again, and finding, in among all the things I lost in June, a thing I did not lose in June. A thing I appear to have been missing a great deal longer than that.
I open one of the customer jars. I am not supposed to; it is counted; it is spring money.
I open it anyway, which is the first selfish thing I have done in a barn in my life, and I put my finger in and I taste our own wildflower, the everyday stuff, and it is good, it is so good, bright and grassy with the long warm finish Mémé’s bees were famous for, and I stand there with my finger in my mouth like a child and I cannot, for the life of me, remember the last time I tasted it.
Not sold it. Not jarred it. Not talked a county-fair judge into a ribbon for it. Tasted it. For me. Because I wanted to.
I cannot remember, because there is no memory to find, because it never happened.
I have spent my whole life with my hands in honey and given every drop of it away and kept none, and I called that generosity, the job, being the one who makes sure everybody else gets fed.
Standing in the cold barn with my tongue working again, I understand it was not generosity.
It was that the wanting muscle never came in.
Everybody else’s want, I can read across a market square at fifty yards; I have built a whole life out of handing people the thing they want before they know they want it.
My own, I would not recognize if it walked up and bought a jar.
I thought the gray was grief. Some of it was grief. But some of it, I am finding out here with my finger in a jar I had no business opening, is a good deal older than June.
And then she comes by. Of course she does. I am at the barn having the largest realization of my adult life over a finger of honey, and a car comes up the gravel, and it is her, because the universe has a sense of humor and her name was Della.
Willa. Two days after Christmas, with a sack of new readers because Cooper went through the Christmas ones in a day, and she comes across the cold yard stamping her boots and unwinding that scarf, and the warm comes off her into the December air and crosses ten feet of frozen ground and lands on me like a hand to the chest.
Honeysuckle. Warm sugar. Cut grass and the first hot day of the year, when you are sixteen and the whole summer is still out in front of you and you have not yet learned to want carefully.
I had this in October, on the Square, one second of it, and I filed it under gratitude, because a man is grateful to the woman who saves him from the honey raptor.
I was lying. I lie to myself with great skill; it is, you could say, professional work.
That was not gratitude in October and it is not gratitude now.
It is the other thing, the one I have spent my whole life handing to other people and never once held myself, and now that I have a tongue again there is no wall left to file it behind.
And there is the cruelest joke of the season, laid out plain in a freezing barnyard: the first thing I have ever wanted for myself, the very first, after thirty-four years of wanting precisely nothing, is the one thing in the state of Georgia I am not allowed to reach for.
Because she is the teacher. Because the boy.
Because the name belongs to the three of us, and it is the most dangerous word in that house, and it just climbed out of a Honda stamping snow off its boots to ask whether Cooper liked the dog book.
I do not say a word. I am the funny one.
I make a joke about the goat eating the Christmas wrapping, and she laughs, and Cooper drags her off to the lean-to, and I stand in the cold with the whole bright impossible smell of her hanging in the air where she was, and I think, with a clarity I have not owned since spring: oh, Della.
Look what you set up. You sly woman. You did this on purpose, didn’t you. Even from in there.
That night, after the boy is down, I do the bravest thing I have done since the funeral, which is I say it out loud.
We are at the table, the four of us, in the low light, and Cooper’s drawing is up on the refrigerator where Sam taped it, MY PACK AND MISS TATE AND AUNT DELLA WATCHING, and it has been sitting there three days being a question nobody will pick up. I pick it up.
“We have to talk about her,” I say. “Not Della. Willa.”
And the table goes careful, the way it does. Sam’s hand finds his coffee. Jonah goes still in the way that means he is already three steps down the road I am only starting to walk. And Asa sets down his fork, slow, like a man preparing to be reasonable about a thing he has already decided.
“I’m going to say the thing nobody’s saying,” I tell them, “because saying the thing nobody’s saying is the one useful skill I’ve got.
That boy put her in the family picture. He didn’t put her off in the corner where he keeps Della.
He put her in the middle, holding his hand.
He’s eight. He’s not confused. He’s not scared yet, which makes him the only honest one of us.
” I look at the drawing. “And I’m done being scared too.
I cried my guts out on her shoulder on Christmas Eve, and you know what she did?
She held the room so I could go in it. She’s been doing it for all of us for two months.
Sam, she got in the car at three in the morning.
Jonah, she read the boxes so you wouldn’t have to.
And I think Della would take one look at this kitchen and that drawing and lose her whole entire mind with happiness, because the one thing that woman wanted, the whole time, start to finish, was for us to be all right.
And we are getting all right. And the reason has a name, and it is not a coincidence, and I am not going to sit at this table and pretend I can’t smell it. ”
That last part comes out before I can stop it.
I did not mean to get that close to the true thing.
Jonah’s eyes come up to mine, fast, and there is a flash in them, recognition, and I understand in one look that Jonah knows, has known longer than me, figured the whole shape of it out weeks ago and carried it in silence the way he carries everything, and he gives me the smallest nod, brother to brother, the nod that says yes, and also says careful, and also says I am with you, and I am so glad in that second not to be the only one holding it.
And Asa stands up.
He does not raise his voice. Asa never raises his voice; that is the terrible thing about him.
He stands up at the head of the table and he says, quiet and final, “She is Cooper’s teacher.
She has been kind to a family that needed kindness.
That is what is happening here, and that is all that is happening here, and the rest of it, every word of the rest of it, ends now, because that boy cannot lose one more person, and a schoolteacher is on a schoolyear, and I will not have him taught one more time that the warm thing leaves.
We don’t chase this. We’re grateful, and we keep our distance, and we get through to June.
” He looks at each of us. “I promised her I’d keep us whole.
Whole means not breaking that child on a thing that can’t last. I’m not asking. ”
And he goes out the back, to the hives, in the dark, the way he goes.
And the three of us sit there under Cooper’s drawing, and Sam looks like he might cry or be sick, torn straight down the middle, and Jonah looks at the door Asa went out of for a long moment, and then he looks at me, and he says, so quiet I almost miss it, the most words I have heard Jonah string together in a week, “He’s the only one of us who hasn’t cried.
Not at the funeral, not Christmas, not once.
” He turns his coffee cup a slow half-circle on the table.
“He can’t smell her, either. You watch. He won’t smell a thing until he lets himself grieve, and he is never going to let himself grieve, because the day he does, the wall comes down, and our brother is more afraid of what’s behind his wall than any of us. ”
Jonah stands and gathers the cups, my quiet brother-in-law who sees everything and says one percent of it.
“We’re not going to talk him out of it, Beau.
He’s going to have to be loved out of it.
And I don’t know if she’s got it in her, because she thinks she’s the help.
They’ve both decided that very thing.” He sets the cups in the sink.
“Two people who decided they’re the help, and a boy who drew them both into the middle of the picture anyway.
God.” He shakes his head. “She’d have had this fixed by New Year’s. ”
He goes up. Sam goes up after him, wrecked.
And I sit alone under the drawing in the kitchen that smells, faintly, three days on, of honeysuckle and warm sugar, the most dangerous smell in Georgia, and I look at the back door my big brother walked out of into a frozen field rather than let in the one thing that could save him, and I think: I have got to get that man to cry.
It is the whole game now. Everything good that is coming, the boy, the farm, the bright impossible future I can suddenly taste, sits on the far side of Asa Mercer letting himself break, and Asa would sooner die wrapped tight against the wind, a cold cluster of one, doing everything correct, to the last.
Della would have known how to crack him. I have to learn it without her.
But here is the new thing, the thing I have no words for and would not say if I did.
I am not only doing it for them this time.
Somewhere out past the county line and the church and the hard number on Jonah’s second page is a whole loud warm life that I have started, against all my training, to want.
For myself. The first jar I ever set aside with my own name on it.
And a man who finds out at thirty-four that he is allowed to want a thing for himself does not put it back on the shelf and walk off whistling.
He keeps it.
So I will get my brother to crack, and I will court that woman honest, and I will learn, at long last, in the back half of my own life, how to reach for a thing because I want it and not because somebody else does. The boy. The farm. The both of them. The whole shivering lot of us.
I rinse the last cup. I do not make one single joke about any of it, alone in the dark kitchen, and that, more than the coffee, more than the crying, is how I know the wall is finally down.