Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
JONAH
The bees know before the radio does. That is the thing about keeping them, you stop needing the weatherman, the hive tells you.
I went out at first light Thursday to check the wrap and the old gray box near the house was loud in a way it should not be in January, a low working hum coming up through the lid, the cluster stirred up and uneasy, and the air had that green underwater weight to it that means the Gulf is sending something north, and I came back in and told Asa we had until afternoon, maybe, and we should spend it like men who believe me.
We spend it like men who believe me. There is a particular peace in a storm coming, which is that it tells you exactly what to do.
No deciding. You secure the loose tin on the long shed, you move the feed up off the floor in case the creek comes over, you get the animals close, you double the straps on the hive lids because wind is the killer, wind always, it does not freeze the bees, it steals the heat they make and they cannot make it back fast enough.
Asa and Sam take the far rows. Beau takes the sheds and the truck.
And I take the house and the close work and the old hive by the porch, because the old hive is the one I will not say out loud I am afraid for, and neither will Asa, which is why he gave it to me without a word and went to the far rows where he does not have to watch.
Willa is here.
She came out at noon, before the worst of it, in her car, on a day any sensible person would have stayed in town, and she said it was a reading day and we both let that stand, but she came out into a Gulf storm to be here, and she has been different since she got out of the car, lit from somewhere I cannot place, braver around the eyes, like a person who has set something down or picked something up, and she took one look at four men running a storm drill and she did not ask permission, she put her bag inside and rolled her sleeves and said, “Put me to work,” the way she said it to Asa in the field in November, and Cooper attached to her hip, and she has been moving through the prep all afternoon like she was born to it, like she has always been one of the hands on this farm.
She ends up with me. The others go to the far weather and the big jobs and the two of us are left with the close ones, the porch and the animals and the old hive, and the light goes from gray to green to a kind of dark that is not the right dark for two in the afternoon, and the first of the rain comes sideways, and we work.
She is good in a storm. I will give her that and more.
She does not chatter when the work is real, which surprised me, the sunshine drops off her and underneath it is a person who knows how to be useful with her mouth shut, and we get the goat and the chickens into the lean-to and we haul the porch furniture in against the wall and we stand over the old gray hive in the driving wet, the two of us, checking the strap, and I put my hand on the lid the way Asa does, the way you put a hand on a forehead, and it is too cold and the hum has gone thin, and Willa watches me do it and says, quiet, under the rising wind, “That’s her hive. Della’s. Asa told me.”
“It is,” I say.
“And you’re the one out here with it,” she says. “In the worst of it. Not him.”
“He can’t,” I say, before I have decided to say it.
“He can’t stand over it when it might go.
So I do.” And I have not said that to a living soul, not even to myself in those words, and the rain comes down and Willa Tate looks at me across a dying hive in a storm and she does the thing she does, the thing I watched her do to Beau on Christmas Eve, the thing nobody has ever once done to me, which is she sees the whole of it in a single look and she does not flinch from it.
“Jonah,” she says. “Can I say a thing, and you can put it back in the box after if you want. Everybody in this family is grieving the omega. The wife, the heart, the one who held the pack. And that’s right, that’s true, she was all of that.
” The rain is loud now and she steps in closer so I can hear her and the closeness is its own weather.
“But she was your sister. Before she was ever theirs, she was your big sister. She raised you. And I have watched you for two months hold every single one of these men up through losing the love of their life, and I have not once, not one time, seen a soul in this house turn around and hold you through losing yours. They lost their omega. You lost your Della. And you’ve been so busy being the one who feeds everybody that nobody’s fed you, and I don’t think you’d let them if they tried, and I think you’ve decided that’s just your lot, and Jonah, sugar, it is not your lot.
Somebody should have been holding you this whole time. I’m sorry nobody was.”
And the storm comes down on the old gray hive and on the two of us standing over it, and I cannot speak, because she has reached straight past the wall I do not even know I have and put her hand flat on the one place in me no one has ever found, the place where I am not the help, not the brother who came in behind the river, not the keystone or the cook or the books, the place where I am a man who lost his sister and has not been allowed to so much as set the casserole down and weep, and I stand in the rain with my hand on Della’s dying hive and Willa Tate’s eyes on me, seeing me, the actual whole hidden me, and something opens in my chest that has been welded shut since June, and it is not grief, it is worse, it is hope, it is the worst and the most dangerous thing, and I want, all at once, with a force that staggers me, I want her, I want to be a man she keeps looking at like that for the rest of my life.
And the terror comes up right behind it, fast, the way it does, because I know exactly what I am and exactly what I am not.
I am not an alpha. Whatever is happening to this family, whatever she is, whatever the three of them are already half-mad with and too grief-locked to name, the great fated machinery of it, the scent and the bond and the biology, that is theirs, that belongs to the alphas and the omega, that is the load-bearing thing the world is built on, and I am the beta, the brother-in-law, the one outside the wiring, and a woman like this, a woman scent-struck to a pack, does not end up choosing the help.
There is no version of the story where the river chooses the stream that came in behind it.
I have read enough to know the shape of these things.
The omega finds her alphas. The beta carries the casseroles to the wedding.
So I do what I am for. I step back. I take my hand off the hive and I take the wanting and I fold it small and I put it where I put the number on the second page, the things you carry so the others do not have to, and I say, rough, “Thank you. For seeing it. You should get inside, this is fixing to get bad,” and I see her register the step back, see her clock me close the thing I just opened, and she is too good not to see it and too kind to push, and she lets me have it, the way she let me not be looked at over the gumbo, and the rain comes down like the sky has given up holding it.
It gets bad fast. By four the creek is over the low road and Beau comes in soaked to say the bridge on the county road is running a foot of water and nobody is driving anywhere tonight, and Willa stands in the kitchen with her phone and no signal and the lights flickering, and the decision makes itself, the way storm decisions do.
She is staying. There is no road. She calls Roz from the landline that still works and I hear her say I’m fine, I’m safe, I’m stuck out at the farm, don’t worry, and something in how she says the farm, not the Mercers’, not the bee place, the farm, like it is a place she belongs to, lands in me where I have no business letting it land.
The house fills up with the storm. The power goes around five, all at once, the whole farm dropping into dark, and Beau finds Mémé’s hurricane lamps in the pantry where she always kept them, of course he does, and the kitchen goes gold and close and small.
The men come in one by one, soaked, peeling off wet coats, Asa last, grim, water running off him, having done everything correct for the far rows and the strong hives and walked the whole field one more time in the dark to be sure, because that is who he is, and the old gray one by the porch is the one nobody can save in this and everybody in the lamplight knows it and no one says it.
And the kitchen is hot and close and full of wet men and a boy thrilled out of his mind and a woman who belongs here, and I watch the three of them around her in the gold light, I cannot help it, watching is the half of me that never shuts off.
Beau cannot stop finding reasons to be where she is, refilling her cup, doing the goat, the want all over him now that the charm is down to cover it.
Sam keeps her in the corner of his eye like a man checking that a thing is still there, his whole anxious heart hung on her without his leave.
And Asa stands at the edge of the lamplight with his arms crossed, soaked and silent, doing the one thing he swore he would not do, which is stay in the room she is in, unable to make himself leave it, the wall up and the man behind it leaning on the wall with his whole weight.
Willa in the middle of the three of them, lit gold, not knowing yet what she is, or knowing and not saying.
The air in the house is doing something.
Building. The way the air over the hives builds before they swarm, a pressure, a charge that has nothing to do with the storm outside and everything to do with the one gathering in here, and I can read it the way I read the bees, and I know, the way I know weather, that something is going to break open in this house tonight that has been building since a gymnasium in October.
And I know it is not mine to break open.
So I do the last useful thing. I take Cooper up.
I tell the boy a storm is the best night for a long story, which is true, and I get him out of the charged kitchen and up the stairs to his room where the wanting in that house cannot reach him, and I read to him by flashlight while the wind takes the county apart, and I do not go back down.
I leave the porch and the storm and the woman who belongs here to the three of them, to the fated thing, to the great machinery I am outside of, and I sit on the floor by my nephew’s bed in the dark with my sister’s grief finally loose in my chest where Willa Tate set it free, and I let myself, for one night, behind a closed door where no one can see me do it, finally, quietly, grieve.
Downstairs, the storm finds the porch.
I do not have to be there to know it. I read it coming all afternoon.
I just made sure I would not be in the room when it arrived, because a man can only stand to be left out of so much at one time, and tonight I have chosen the boy and the grief, and the rest of it, the part with my name nowhere in it, belongs to them.