Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
BEAU
Here is what I know about courting that the rest of my family does not, having spent my whole life selling things to people who did not arrive intending to buy: you do not win somebody by accident.
You court them. On purpose. With a plan.
And so when Willa Tate drove out to this farm on the Tuesday after the storm, the Tuesday after my brother stood in our kitchen and tried to send her away for her own protection, and she got out of her car with a stamped piece of paper from Sheriff Pickett in her bag and a look on her face like a woman who has made a decision, and she walked past all of us and went straight to Cooper for their reading like nothing on God’s earth had changed, I understood two things at once.
One, that we had been given a second chance we did not deserve.
And two, that somebody in this grief-stupid household had better start courting that woman properly before she comes to her senses, and that the somebody was going to be me, because I am the only one of us who has ever closed a sale.
I appoint myself, in the privacy of my own head, Director of Courtship. It is the first job I have wanted since June.
The trouble, the delicious impossible trouble, is that I cannot run a single one of my plays on her.
Every technique I own, every charming little move I have used on every customer and county-fair judge and reluctant bank officer of my entire career, she sees coming from the next county, because she invented half of them and teaches the other half to her second-graders.
I try a line on her the first week and she looks at me, fond and unimpressed, and says, “Beau, honey, you’re doing the thing where you make the joke instead of the sentence.
I like the sentence better. I’ve always liked the sentence better.
” And there it is. I cannot sell this woman anything.
I have to do the one thing I have never once done in a courtship or a sale, which is tell her the plain true thing with no music under it and let it stand there naked and see if she takes it.
So that is how a pack of grieving beekeepers courts the sunshine. Honest, and clumsy, and in the only language we have left, which is bees.
We court her with honey. Not as a line, as a fact: Sam, who has researched, who has made a folder, presents her one cold afternoon with a flight of our honeys in little jars, wildflower and clover and the last of Mémé’s sourwood, lined up dark to light, and walks her through them like a sommelier having a nervous breakdown, this one’s the spring, this one’s the bottomland, this one Mémé made and we can’t make anymore and there’s six jars left in the world and we wanted you to have one, and Willa holds the jar of the honey that cannot be made anymore and gets quiet, and I watch my anxious brother give a woman six-jars-left of his grandmother and his grief and his hope all at once, and I think, that is better courting than I have done in my life, the boy did it without one technique, just by handing over the true thing.
Jonah courts her the way Jonah does everything, with food, except now there is intention in it, now the plate he sets in front of her at supper is a sentence too, and she knows it, the two of them have a whole conversation across a casserole that nobody else can hear.
Cooper courts her by simply behaving as though the courtship concluded successfully months ago and we are all just catching up to the paperwork, dragging her by the hand to see the new lambs at the Pruetts’ and saving her the chair by the window and informing the entire second grade that Miss Tate is “basically ours now,” which gets back to me through three different parents and which I do not correct.
And I court her by being, for the first time in my life, with one single person, completely without a net.
I tell her true things. I tell her about Della.
I tell her about the bank, which Asa would skin me for, the number on Jonah’s second page, and the part Jonah says least loud of all, which is that the number has a date on it now: the note carries us to the first summer markets and not one Saturday past, so the honey has to move in June or the farm does not make its first year, and that is not a worry anymore, that is a clock.
Because she is going to be ours and ours includes the hard parts, and a woman does not get to court only the good news of a family.
She takes the hard number and the harder date the way she takes everything, square, unflinching, and says, “Then we’d better have a good market,” we, she said we, and I have to go check on something in another room.
She finds me in the other room. Of course she does.
That is the trouble with courting a woman who reads people for a living; you cannot have a single private minute of being undone by her without her turning up to witness it, and she leans in the doorway and lets the quiet sit a second, and then she says, “You know you’re allowed to want it for yourself.
Not just for them.” And I say, “Want what,” which is a deflection, a small one, the last one I have left, and she lets it lie there until it dies of its own embarrassment.
“This,” she says. “Us. A whole life. You court me like you’re the wingman for your own family, Beau.
Like you’re closing the sale on everybody’s behalf but your own.
You did it on the Square the first day, you’ve done it every day since, you make the match and you step back.
And I see you. I have seen you since the honey raptor.
You’re allowed to be in the picture too.
You don’t have to just hold the camera.”
And I have spent my whole life being the one who holds the door so the rest of them can walk into the room, the wingman, the closer, the funny one who makes the thing happen for everybody and slips out the side, and a woman I am trying to court has looked straight through the entire operation and told me I am allowed to want the thing I have spent my life selling other people, and I do not have one single joke for it.
Not one. She watches me come up empty, and she smiles, not unkind, the gentlest I have been handled in years, and she says, “There he is. The sentence. I told you I liked it better.” And she goes back to the kitchen and leaves me standing in the dark of the other room, thirty-four years old, rearranging my entire understanding of myself around the fact that the omega we are courting just courted me right back, into my own life, which nobody, not once, has ever thought to do.
And I think of the four piles in the cold barn at Christmas, and the one I never set apart, the jar with no name on it that I have still not made. I am closer to it than I have ever stood. I am not there yet. But for the first time in my whole life I can see the shelf where it would go.
The market is the other half of it, and the market is where Earl Tubb comes back into my life and changes the entire complexion of my spring.
Because Earl Tubb, who six months ago looked at me like a hawk looks at a slow rabbit, who guarded the Square’s honey trade like the gold in Fort Knox, Earl Tubb has decided, somewhere between October and now, to adopt us.
I do not know precisely when the raptor became the mentor.
I think it was the sourwood. I brought him a jar of Mémé’s sourwood to ask, humble, hat in hand, what we were doing wrong with our line, and the old man tasted it and went still and got a look on his face like a man hearing a song from his youth, and he said, “Who taught you this,” and I said our grandmother, and he said, quiet, “I knew a woman made sourwood like this in nineteen and seventy-one,” and that was the end of the rivalry and the beginning of my apprenticeship.
Now Earl Tubb comes out to the farm. Earl Tubb walks our rows with his hands behind his back telling us everything we are doing wrong, which is most things, and everything Mémé did right, which he can taste in the comb, and he is getting us ready for the spring market the way a trainer gets a fighter ready, and he has, naturally, reopened the pool.
There is a pool. Of course there is a pool.
Earl Tubb has run a book on every romance to cross the Hollow Square for forty years; he cleaned up on the florist and her smokejumpers last fall and he has been waiting for fresh meat, and we are it.
The line, as Earl explains it to me with the gravity of a man reading the Word, is not on whether Willa and the pack get bonded, that is considered, in his phrase, “a lock, son, even money’s an insult.
” The line is on Asa. The whole pool is on Asa.
On whether the big one comes around, and if so, by when, and Earl has the dates chalked on a slate behind his honey jars like a tote board, and he informs me, lowering his voice, that he himself has money down on spring, on the equinox specifically, because, he says, tapping his nose, “Things break loose in this county at the equinox. Always have. You watch.”
I do not tell Earl Tubb that I have private money down on the same square, in the only currency I have, which is hope.
Because spring is coming. You can smell it.
The bees know it first, the way they always do, and on the first warm afternoon of February the old hives wake up and the air over the rows fills with the small drunk reeling of bees taking their first cleansing flights of the year, and the whole farm comes up out of winter like a held breath letting go, and Willa stands in the middle of it in a coat she does not need anymore with her face turned up to the sun and the bees looping around her like she is the first flower, and I watch Sam watch her, and I watch Jonah watch her, and I watch Cooper not watch her at all because Cooper has stopped checking whether she is still there, he has graduated, he assumes her now, and that is the whole healing of a child in one detail, that he has quit guarding the door.
And there is the other thing in the warm air, the thing I have not said to anyone because I do not have the standing to say it, the thing I caught on Christmas and again in the storm and now, faint, under the first spring warmth, changing.
Her scent is changing. Honeysuckle and warm sugar going warmer, deeper, turning toward the thing it turns toward, and I am a grown alpha who has been around omegas my whole life and I know what a turning scent means, I know what the lengthening days and the warming ground do to a body on a cycle, and I know that somewhere down the spring, not yet, but coming, the way you know a swarm is coming by the temper of the hive, there is going to be a heat in this story, and the whole sweet domestic courtship of jars and casseroles and lambs is the long slow front edge of a storm with a great deal more weather in it than any of us are saying out loud over supper.
But that is spring’s business, and spring is not here yet.
Here is what is here. A farm coming back to life.
A woman who chose us, who files her paperwork and squares the hard number and lets a careful boy drag her to see the lambs.
Three of us courting her honest in the only language we have, and an old man on the Square keeping the book, and a whole town leaning over the fence rooting for the bee family to get their happy ending.
And one man standing at the edge of all of it.
Always at the edge. Asa works the far rows when she is here and comes in after she has gone and says nothing about any of it, and lets the rest of us court the woman he wants worse than any of us, because the wanting and the fear come out of the same door for him and he has nailed the door shut, and the pool says spring, the pool says the equinox, and I look at my brother across a waking farm and I think, I have got to get that man to cry before the bees swarm, because everything good that is coming is going to come at once, the heat and the harvest and the whole bright future, and if Asa is still standing at the edge of the field with the door nailed shut when it does, it is going to break the only thing in this world that ever scared me worse than losing Della.
It is going to break the family she died asking me to keep happy.
Spring is coming. The bees know it. I had better get to work.