Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
SAM
Icount things. I have always counted things.
It is how I hold the world still long enough to be sure of it.
Frames in a hive: ten. Brothers: three, and a fourth who is a brother in everything but the word.
Months since June: nine. Days, some seasons, some weeks.
I count because if I have the number then I know the size of the thing, and if I know the size of the thing I can brace for the exact amount of losing it that is coming, and I have spent my whole life so braced for the losing that I forgot you could do anything else with a thing you love except prepare to have it taken.
And then a schoolteacher sat down at our kitchen table and called it a tax.
That is the word that breaks me open, in the end.
Not heat, not match, not any of the big roaring words the others use.
Tax. She said I pay the worry like a tax, up front, in advance, on everything I love, so the loss can’t charge me full price.
And I have been turning it over for a week now, out at the hives, in the dark, the way I turn everything over, and the awful wonderful thing I keep arriving at is that she is right, and that the tax does not work.
It never worked. I paid it on Della every single day for years, paid it in full, braced for her my whole life, and when she went it did not cost me one cent less.
The bracing bought me nothing. It only meant I spent all the good years she was alive already half-grieving her, already standing at the funeral in my head, and I will not get those years back, I paid for them twice and got to keep them never.
So I do the math one more time, the most important sum of my life, sitting on an upturned bucket at the edge of the rows in the cold March dark, and the math comes out like this: the loss is coming either way.
It always comes either way. The only thing the worry decides is whether I also lose the part before the loss. The good part. The having.
And I decide, on the bucket, in the dark, like flipping a single switch in a house I have lived in scared my whole life, that I am done paying for the spring before it gets here.
It is the bravest thing I have ever done and nobody sees me do it.
I take over Mémé’s hive the next morning.
The one Asa says is dead. The one he routes himself around.
I go straight to it in the first light and I crouch down and I watch the handful of survivors hauling themselves out into the cold to work, this doomed impossible cluster too small to have made it that made it anyway, and I do for them what you do, I get them a little sugar syrup up where they can reach it without spending themselves, I clear the dead from the entrance, I do the small quiet tending of a thing you have decided to believe in, and I do not tell myself it might still die.
It might still die. I know it might still die.
I tend it anyway, full out, no tax, and that is the whole of what Willa taught me, right there, on my knees in front of my grandmother’s bees: you are allowed to love the thing without paying in advance, even when it might still die, especially when it might still die, because the loving is the part you actually get.
By the end of the week the cluster is bigger. By the end of the week I have stopped counting whether it will live and started just keeping it alive, which I am learning are two completely different jobs done with the same hands.
I go out to them every morning before the others are up.
I talk to them, a little, which I would deny to my grave.
I tell them about the spring that is coming, about the nectar that is almost here, about how all they have to do is hold on a few more weeks and the whole world goes green and easy and there is more sweetness coming up the road than they can carry.
And somewhere in the second week of this I understand that I am, of course, talking to myself.
I am out at first light every day coaching a doomed little cluster of bees through the last hard stretch before the good part, no tax, full out, because I cannot yet say those exact words to my own chest in plain daylight.
But I can say them to Mémé’s bees. And the bees, holding on, getting stronger every cold morning, do not seem to mind being the practice run for my entire heart.
And somewhere in there I become, of all the unlikely things for the youngest and the most afraid, the one pushing hardest to let her all the way in.
I am the one who tells Beau to quit being clever and ask her to stay for good.
I am the one who shows Jonah where Della kept the deed papers, because if Willa is going to be ours then she should be on the things that say ours, all of them, and the beta should be the one to know that, the beta should be on them too, a thing I have started to understand about Jonah that I am not ready to say out loud yet but have begun, quietly, to count him into the family math in the place he has always actually been.
I am the one who saves Willa the good honey and walks her the long way so she can see the lambs and tells Cooper yes, the room with the slanty window, yes, of course, when she lives here, and means the when as hard as he does.
I, who could not commit to hoping for a sunny Tuesday, have become the household’s loudest believer in the future.
It turns out the same engine that runs the worry runs the hope, once you finally turn it around to face the right direction.
It was love the whole time. She was right about that too.
It was just love that hadn’t found which way to point.
And I find I can do for Cooper now what I never could before, because you cannot hand a child a calm you do not own yourself.
He comes to me one evening, careful, the way he comes at anything that matters, and asks will the gray bees really make it.
The old Sam would have said we’ll see, baby, no promises, would have taught the boy the tax right there at eight years old, would have passed it down the way it got passed down to me.
The new Sam crouches to his level and says, they have got a real good chance, and you and me are going to give them every single thing we have got, and either way we did right by them, and that part is ours to keep no matter what.
And Cooper turns it over with his whole serious face and nods, slow, and I watch a boy file away a different lesson than the one I would have handed him a month back, and I think, that.
That is what she is worth. A house where the boy gets taught the having instead of the bracing.
We have to keep her. I will burn this whole farm to the ground before I let us be the family that lost her.
Which is how I come to be the one who says the thing to Asa.
I find him at the far end of the far row, end of the day, doing work that does not need doing, which is what he does now instead of coming in to supper while she is still there.
And I do not lead up to it, because I have spent my life leading up to things and never arriving, and I am done with that too.
“Mémé’s hive’s alive,” I say. “The gray one. You said it died. It didn’t.
There’s a cluster pulling through and I’ve been feeding them up and by May they’ll be strong, and you were wrong, Asa.
You stood over it in January and you were dead sure, and you were wrong, and the only reason you didn’t have to find out you were wrong is you couldn’t stand to go look. ”
He goes still. He does not turn around.
“I’m not telling you about the bees,” I say, and my voice is shaking, because this is Asa, because Asa raised me as much as Daddy did, because the youngest does not say this to the oldest, it is against every law in me, and I say it anyway, no tax, full out.
“You keep saying you’re protecting us. Protecting Cooper.
You keep saying you promised Della you’d keep this family whole.
But whole’s not the word for what you’re doing, Asa.
You’ve got us safe. You’ve got us frozen.
You sit at the end of the table and you come in after she’s gone and you work out here in the dark so you don’t have to be in the warm with the rest of us, and you call it keeping us whole, and Asa, look at us.
Look what’s standing out here in the cold by itself, doing work that doesn’t need doing, so it doesn’t have to risk the thing in the kitchen.
It’s not the family that’s breaking. It’s not Willa.
It’s not Cooper. The thing that’s about to break this family is you, out here, alone, deciding for all of us that we’re not allowed the only good thing that’s walked up this road since we buried her. ”
His hands have stopped on the frame. I can see his back, the set of his shoulders, the whole wall of him.
“You were wrong about the hive,” I say, quieter now, everything spent.
“You were so sure, and you were wrong, and it cost you nothing but the looking. I’m asking you to consider that you might be wrong about the rest of it too.
That the thing you’re sure will kill us is the thing that came to save us.
That’s all. That’s the whole sermon. I’m going in to supper.
She made cornbread. There’s a place set for you.
There’s always a place set for you, Asa, that’s the thing you can’t seem to hear.
Nobody out here is trying to take your seat.
We just want you to come sit in it before the good part’s over. ”
He does not turn around. He does not say one word.
But I have known this man my whole life, I have read the back of him across a thousand suppers, and the set of those shoulders is not the set of a man who heard nothing.
It is the set of a man holding himself rigid so a thing cannot get all the way in.
And I can see, plain, from where I stand in the falling dark, that it is already in.
It went in the moment I said the hive was alive.
The rest was just me saying out loud what his own hands already knew the second they stopped on that frame.
And I leave him there. I leave him at the end of the row with his hands stopped and the dark coming down, and I walk back toward the lit windows of the house, toward the warm, toward the woman who taught me that the having is the part you get, and I do not look back to see if he follows, because looking back to check is its own kind of tax, and I am done paying it.
I count the lit windows instead. Four of them, gold in the blue dark. And a fifth, upstairs, the room with the slanty window, the one we are keeping for her, dark now but not for long.
Five. I count five. And for the first time in my life the number does not make me afraid.