Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
WILLA
The farm comes back the way grace does, which is to say slowly, and then all at once, and mostly when you have stopped watching for it.
It is the last week of February and the cold breaks for three days running, the way it does in Georgia, a false spring that everybody knows is false and nobody can help believing, and the whole place wakes up.
The bees come out of the hives in drunk looping spirals to take the first flights of the year.
The hard ground softens. The Pruetts’ lambs go bandy-legged across the next field over.
And I am out at the farm nearly every day now, not for reading anymore, or not only, because the paperwork is filed and the line is drawn clean and I am allowed, at last, to simply be a woman who is courting a family back, and the strangest most wonderful thing has happened, which is that the farm has become a place my hands already know.
I notice it first in small things. I know which drawer the good knives are in.
I know that the third porch step has the give to it and you put your weight on the outside edge.
I have started, without deciding to, fixing things, not the way I fix people, frantic and useful and gone by four, but slow, the way you fix a thing you intend to keep being near, and one afternoon I catch myself rearranging the whole pantry, Della’s pantry, putting the things where they go, where they would want to go, lining the jars by kind and the cans by date, and I stand there with my hands full of somebody else’s lentils and I go still, because I know what this is.
I am an omega. I know exactly what this is.
This is nesting. This is the oldest instinct I own waking up under the false-spring warmth and starting, quietly, to build, and I put the lentils down and I press my hand flat to my own sternum and I think, oh.
It’s coming. Spring is coming and my body knows it and the thing that comes with spring is coming too, and I am standing in the middle of my own pantry, in a manner of speaking, building the nest before the heat I have not let myself say out loud is on its way.
I do not say it out loud. But I start, that day, leaving a sweater at the farm. On purpose. The way you leave a flag.
And the days take on a shape, which is the other half of nesting, the part that is not jars and lentils but hours.
I have a place in the day at that farm now, a slot I go to.
I learn to pull comb with Jonah in the cool of the morning, the two of us not talking, the kitchen radio low under the hum of the warming hives, and there is a thing that happens working quiet beside a person for an hour that no conversation on earth can manage, a knowing that comes in through the hands.
I learn the small true grammar of them: that Sam takes his coffee with a criminal amount of sugar, that Beau will wash a dish badly on purpose so somebody relieves him of drying, that Cooper needs his crusts cut off and will deny it to his grave.
I learn the evening shape of the house, the hour the lamps come on and Jonah starts supper and the boy spreads his reading at the table and Beau makes the whole kitchen loud, and how even Asa, down at the far end, behind the wall, is somehow present in the warm of it, a part of the room even while he holds himself out of the room.
And I sit most evenings now in the chair Cooper saves me, in a house that is not mine, in the middle of a grieving family courting me slow with recipes and held-on bees, and underneath all of it my body keeps building, quiet and certain, leaving sweaters like flags, getting ready the way the bees are getting ready, for the warm thing that is coming up the road toward all of us.
And then there is Mémé’s hive.
Asa thinks it died. I know he thinks it died because Sam told me, careful, that Asa came in the morning after the storm gray in the face and said the old gray one by the porch was gone, silent, cold, and that he has not gone near it since, that he works the far rows and routes himself the long way around so he does not have to pass it, the way you route yourself around a grave.
And on the second warm afternoon Cooper grabs my hand and hauls me out to the lean-to to check on something and we pass the old gray box, and Cooper stops dead, and points, and says, “Miss Tate. Look.”
There are bees at the front of it. Not many.
A handful, slow, half-frozen, hauling themselves out into the sun and back, but bees, alive, working, at the front of the hive that Asa Mercer wrote off for dead in January and could not bear to look at since.
A small cluster held on. Too small to keep itself warm, by every law of the thing, and it held on anyway, all through the worst winter the county has had in years, the way a small held-on thing sometimes does for no reason the arithmetic can explain, and Cooper crouches down with his nose nearly on the wood and breathes, “They’re not dead.
Uncle Asa said they were dead and they’re not dead,” in a voice full of something I have not heard in him before, which is the particular outrage of a child discovering that a grown-up was wrong about a sad thing, and that the sad thing was, all along, secretly all right.
“No, baby,” I say, and I have to crouch down too, because my legs have gone strange.
“They’re not dead. They were just real quiet for a while so the cold wouldn’t find them.
Sometimes the thing that looks like dying is just a small alive thing holding on where you can’t see it, waiting for it to be safe to come out. ”
And I am not, I want to be clear, talking about the bees. And Cooper, who is eight, who misses nothing that matters, looks up at me, and I watch him not be talking about the bees either.
I do not tell Asa. I want to. I want to march out to the far rows and grab the front of his coat and say it died and then it didn’t, you wrote it off and it held on anyway, you were wrong about the dying, what else are you wrong about, but it is not mine to tell, it is his to find, and a thing a person finds is worth a hundred of a thing a person is told, I have known that since my first year in a classroom.
So I leave the bees for Asa to find. I leave a great many things, that spring, for Asa to find.
What I do instead is fix Sam.
It happens by accident, the way the real ones do.
I find him at the kitchen table at the wrong end of an afternoon with the bank papers spread out and his jaw doing the thing and his pencil going down a column of numbers that are not going to add up no matter how many times he runs them, and I sit down across from him, and I do not offer to help with the math, because the math is not the problem, the math is where he keeps the problem so he does not have to keep it anywhere worse.
“You’re doing the worry thing,” I say. “Cooper says your mouth moves.”
“My mouth does not move.”
“It’s moving right now.” He stops. He puts the pencil down.
And I say, gentle, because I have been waiting for the right afternoon to say it, “Sam. Can I tell you a thing I figured out about you? You worry like it’s a tax.
Like if you pay enough of it up front, in advance, every night, on every single thing you love, then the loss won’t be able to charge you full price when it comes.
You’ve been paying the tax on me since the night you called me at three in the morning.
Pre-grieving me. Bracing for the June that isn’t coming, because the paperwork’s filed and I’m not going anywhere, but your body doesn’t believe the paperwork, your body learned a different lesson and it’s still paying the tax. ”
Sam’s eyes have gone bright. “She used to say,” he starts, and stops, and starts again, “Della used to tell me the worry wasn’t a flaw. That it was a love that hadn’t found its right size yet.”
“She was right,” I say, and my own throat does something, because I am coming to love a woman I never met, I am being courted by her whole family and her recipes and her labeled boxes and her held-on hive.
“She was exactly right. And I think the right size, Sam, the size she meant, is this: you get to love the thing without paying for it in advance. You’re allowed to just have it.
The good thing. Me, and that boy getting better, and the bees that didn’t die.
You don’t have to brace. Nobody’s going to repossess the spring because you let yourself enjoy it.
That’s not how the tax works. That’s not how anything works. You can put the pencil down.”
And Sam Mercer puts his face in his hands at his sister-in-law’s kitchen table, and his shoulders go, and I come around and I hold him the way I held Beau on Christmas Eve, and he says into my shoulder, muffled, wrecked, grateful, “I don’t know how to not brace,” and I say, “I know, honey. I’ll teach you.
I’m a teacher. It’s the whole thing I’m good at,” and he laughs, wet, and something in him that has been clenched since June lets go an inch, and I am holding him as it lets go, and I add him to the count, the small running count I am keeping that spring of the Mercer men I have gotten to set something down.
Three of them now. Three of the four have set the heavy thing down in my arms and let me hold it.
The fourth one routes himself the long way around the dead hive that is not dead, and works the far rows, and comes in after I have gone.
It is Cooper who says it out loud, finally, the thing the whole spring has been circling.
We are at supper, all of us, even Asa, who eats fast and silent at the end of the table, and Cooper is telling some enormous story about the lambs, and in the middle of it, with no warning, apropos of nothing, the way the most important things always arrive, he says, “When Miss Tate lives here, can she have the room with the slanty window? Because she likes the morning light, she said, and that room gets it.”
The table stops.
When Miss Tate lives here. Not if. When.
A careful boy who spent his whole short life learning that the warm thing leaves has just announced, over the lamb stew, as a settled fact requiring only logistics, that I live here, that it is coming, that he has already given me the good room with the morning light, and the kitchen goes so quiet I can hear the bees Cooper saved working at the window glass, and Beau’s face splits into something he cannot control, and Sam makes a sound, and Jonah goes still with his fork halfway, and every one of them looks, helplessly, all at once, at the head of the table.
At Asa.
Who has put down his own fork. Who is looking at his nephew with an expression I have finally, after a whole season, learned to read, because it is the same one from the gymnasium and the field and the storm, the terror, the plain animal terror of a man watching the exact thing he has braced his whole grief against arrive at his own supper table in the voice of an eight-year-old who has stopped being afraid.
The boy has attached. It is done. It is said out loud over the stew.
The stakes are exactly as total as Asa always knew they would become, and there is no putting it back, and I watch him understand that, and I watch him not be able to say one word, and then he gets up, quiet, and he carries his plate to the sink, and he goes out the back door into the false-spring dark, toward the field, toward the long way around, and the screen door taps shut behind him.
And Cooper, who watched his uncle leave, looks at me across the table, and he does not look worried. That is the thing that undoes me. He used to watch that door like a sentry. Now he looks at me, calm as Sunday, and he says, “He’ll come around. Pickles didn’t like me at first either.”
And the whole table laughs, even me, even with my eyes stinging, because the boy is right, the boy is the only one of us telling the plain truth at this table, and somewhere out in the dark a man I am scent-matched to is standing over a hive he thinks is dead, that is not dead, and the bees are holding on where he cannot see them, waiting for it to be safe to come out, and spring is coming whether he is ready or not, and so, I am beginning to understand, is the rest of it.