Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
ASA
Ihad it. That is the part I keep coming back to, all night, pacing a floor I cannot stop pacing.
For five months I had it. The whole of it, locked down, every door, every window, the want and the grief and the fear all wrapped and strapped and stored where they could not get loose and hurt anybody, and I held the line for five straight months, and a wind came around the corner of my own grandmother’s house and took the whole thing from me in one breath.
That is what a scent-match is, for those who have never had the misfortune.
It is not a thing you can argue with. I am a man who has argued his way out of every want he ever had, it is the one skill I have honed past all others, and the match does not care, the match is not in the part of you that argues, it is underneath there, in the floor, in the blood, and when that wind brought her up off the rail and into my lungs there was no argument to be had, there was only my own body sitting up in the dark and roaring a word at me that I have spent five months not letting myself so much as think, and the word was hers, and the word was mine, and the word was now, and I have never in my life been so afraid of anything as I was of the thing my own chest did on that porch.
Because here is what they do not understand, the others, the ones already half-gone over the falls, Beau with his face wide open and Sam shaking and even Jonah, who knows better, who I can tell has decided something. They think the match is the good news. They think the wind brought us a gift.
The match is the trap closing. That is what it is. I knew it the second it had me.
A scent-match does not fade. Ask anyone.
It is not a crush you outgrow or a season that turns.
It is permanent, it is the most permanent thing there is, it is the body deciding once and for all and never taking it back, and that means everything that hangs off it is permanent too.
It means Cooper does not get to attach to a nice teacher for a school year and wave goodbye in June.
It means the boy attaches to a permanent thing, a scent-bonded thing, the kind of bond they write into law, and a boy who has already buried every permanent thing he ever had wraps his whole healing heart around one more, and then if it breaks, and things break, I am the living proof that things break no matter how correct you are, it does not break for a season.
It breaks forever. The match raised the stakes to the top of the board in one breath and every fool on that porch but me was too busy being happy to do the arithmetic.
I did the arithmetic. I am always the one who does the arithmetic. It is the loneliest job on this farm and nobody has ever once offered to spell me.
So I ran for the wall. I said the word complication, which was true and which was a knife, and I watched it go into her, I watched the brightest person I have ever met take the knife standing up, and I went inside and up the stairs and I have been pacing this floor ever since, because here is the new thing, the thing I did not know about until tonight, the thing that is going to be the death of whatever is left of me: the wall does not work anymore.
It worked for five months. I could want her in the field and wall it off by suppertime.
But the match is not a want. The match is in the floor now, under the wall, and all night I have been able to do nothing, nothing, but know exactly where she is.
One floor down. On the couch. Under the quilt that has all of us in it.
I can find her in this house with my eyes shut the way you can find a lit window in the dark, and there is no wall in the world you can build between two floors of your own chest, and I have spent the whole night learning that a man can lose a war he is still technically winning, can hold every position and still be overrun, because the enemy was never outside the wall.
It was always the thing the wall was built around.
And there is a thing under even that, a thing I will say one time, here, in the dark, where no man has to hear another man say it.
It is not only fear for the boy. If it were only fear I could carry it; I am built to carry fear for that child, it is the load I was made for.
It is that my body wants her, my own traitor body, in the night, across two floors, and I was Della’s.
I am still Della’s. You do not stop being a woman’s the day she goes into the ground; her ring is in the drawer and her hive is in the field and her hand is still on the chalkboard by the door, and a man whose chest is roaring another woman’s name at three in the morning is a man betraying the one who is not here to argue it.
There is no one I can lay that down in front of.
Beau would tell me she would want me happy.
Maybe she would. But Beau did not make her the promise I made her, and Beau does not have to live the rest of his life inside this exact arithmetic, where wanting the cure weighs the same in the hand as committing the crime.
I do not sleep. I do everything correct and I do not sleep, which is the story of my whole year.
The storm wears itself out before dawn and by first light the rain has quit and the creek is dropping and the sun comes up hard and clean over a county that looks beaten half to death, branches down everywhere, the low road a sheet of mud, and I go out and walk the hives before anyone is up, because I cannot be in the house with her one floor up and the match in my chest and nothing to do with my hands.
The far rows held. The strong hives held.
And the old gray one by the porch, Della’s, Mémé’s, the one I gave to Jonah because I cannot stand over it, that one is silent this morning.
Not the thin working hum it has had all winter.
Silent. I crouch and put my ear to the wood and put my hand flat on the lid the way you put a hand on a forehead, and there is nothing coming up through the wood, no warmth, no sound, and I am as sure as a man can be that the cold finally got into a cluster that was always too small to hold it.
I cannot open it to know for certain. You do not open a hive in January; opening it is the one sure way to kill what the cold has not.
So I will not know until spring. But I have wrapped enough dying things to know the particular quiet of one that did not make it, and this is that quiet, and I crouch there in the wrecked bright morning with my hand on my dead wife’s dead hive, after all the wrapping, after every correct thing, and there it is again, laid out plain in the cold: you cannot keep a thing alive by wanting to.
I wanted that hive to live with everything I had.
I wrapped it twice. I gave it the best of my attention all winter.
And it died anyway, the way she died anyway, the way they all die anyway no matter how correct the man standing over them is, and I do not let myself do the thing my chest is trying to do, because if I start I will not stop, and a man with my responsibilities cannot afford to start.
I stand up. I take my hand off the lid. There is work to do, and grieving has never once been on the list.
I go back in to do the thing I have to do, which is end it before it can get any worse for the boy.
They are in the kitchen, Beau and Sam, low voices over coffee, and I do not know she is awake.
I want that on whatever record there is.
I did not know she was awake. The couch is around the corner from the kitchen and quiet and I thought she was sleeping, and I came in cold and grim with my dead hive still on my hands and I said it plain, the way somebody has to, I said, “It ends. Whatever happened on that porch. We were grateful to her and now we ease her back out, clean, before that boy gets in any deeper, because a match is not a reason, a match is just one more thing that can be taken, and I will not hand Cooper a permanent person and then watch him learn she was temporary after all. She is the teacher. June was always coming. We move June up. It’s kinder. ”
And Beau’s face changes, looking at something past my shoulder, and I turn around.
She is standing at the end of the hall in yesterday’s clothes with the quilt still around her shoulders and her hair down and her face open, the way her face always is, the most readable face in the county, and I watch every word I just said land in it, one after another, ease her back out, kinder, one more thing that can be taken, the teacher, temporary after all.
I watch the brightness go out of her like a hand passing over a lamp.
And the worst of it, the thing I will carry, is that I can read her now, finally, after two months of her being the one who reads everyone, I can read her plain as print, and what is written there is not surprise.
That is the part that takes the floor out from under me.
She is not surprised. Some old terrible thing in her was waiting to hear exactly that, has been waiting its whole life to hear exactly that, and I said it, I walked in with a dead hive on my hands and confirmed the worst thing she believes about herself, that she is the one who does not get kept, and I did it to protect a child, and it is the cruelest thing I have ever done to a living soul, and I know it, and I cannot take it back, because taking it back means opening the door, and opening the door means the boy, and round and round it goes, the arithmetic, the loneliest arithmetic in the world.
“The road’s open,” she says. Quiet. Steady.
She has gathered herself the way I gather myself, fast, behind a wall, and I recognize the move because it is mine, we are the same animal, I knew it on the porch and I know it now.
“I should get home. Thank you for the couch.” She folds the quilt, neat, the way you fold a thing you are giving back, and she sets it on the arm, and she gets her bag and her coat, and she stops by the kitchen door, and she does not look at me, she looks at Sam and Beau, and she says, “Tell Cooper I’ll see him Tuesday.
I’m still his teacher. That doesn’t stop.
” And there is something in the way she says still his teacher, holding onto the one piece of us she is allowed to keep, that is worse than if she had thrown the coffee pot at my head.
And she goes. The screen door bangs the way it banged behind me last night. The truck starts. The tires find the mud and pull out of it and the sound of her goes off down the wet road and away.
The kitchen is silent. Sam is staring at the table.
And Beau, my charming brother, who has not raised his voice to me in our entire lives, stands up slow and says, in a voice I have never heard him use, flat, nothing performed in it at all, “That might be the worst thing I have ever watched a person do. And you did it to the one woman in the world who’d have loved this whole sorry family back to life.
” He sets his cup in the sink, careful, like he does not trust his hands.
“She lost her mother’s house and her own.
She’s been keeping a porch light on for nobody for years, Asa, Roz told me.
And you just stood in our kitchen and taught her she was right to.
” He goes to the door. “I’m going to go feed the boy’s goat, because somebody has to do a kind thing in this house this morning, and it’s plainly not going to be the one in charge. ”
And he goes, and Sam goes after him without a word, which from Sam is its own verdict, and I am left alone in the kitchen with a dead hive on my hands and a match in my chest I cannot wall off and the smell of her still in the quilt on the arm of the couch, honeysuckle and warm sugar, the smell of the only thing my body has wanted in five months, fading now, walking out the door, getting in a truck, driving away, because I sent it away, on purpose, correctly, to keep a promise to a woman in the ground.
I did the right thing. I keep telling the empty kitchen I did the right thing.
The empty kitchen does not believe me either.