Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ASA
Willa walks across the gravel to my window and I am braced for the thing I deserve, which is for her to claim me or to leave me, and she does neither, because she is smarter than my whole grief put together.
She crouches down so we are level, the way she got down level with Cooper, I would learn later, and she looks at me with that terrible readable face, no armor on it, all the way open, the bravest face in the county, and she says, “I’m not going to do the part you want me to do.
I can see you wanting it. You want me to say it’s all right and pull you home and put your head down and let the bond close and make all of this stop hurting tonight.
And I’m not going to. Because if I do, you’ll have skipped her.
You’ll come home to me carrying Della frozen solid in your chest, and you’ll spend the next forty years being a good husband to me with a dead wife in the room nobody’s allowed to mention, and I won’t have it.
I won’t be the thing you used to get out of grieving her.
” She puts one hand flat on the truck door, not on me.
“Go see her, Asa. Properly. For real, for the first time. Let her all the way go. And then, when your arms are empty, come and get me, and I’ll be standing on a porch with the light on, and we’ll do the rest. But you have to put her down first. I am not marrying a shrine. ”
I have never been loved like that in my life. Loved enough to be sent away. Loved enough to be told no.
A lesser love would have taken me home tonight.
A lesser love would have been so frightened of losing me a second time that it grabbed whatever it could get and called the grabbing devotion.
That is the love I understand, the clutching kind, the keep-it-still-and-safe kind.
It is the only shape of love I have managed to make for a year.
And Willa Tate crouched at my truck window with her whole heart hanging out in the open and did the exact opposite of clutching.
She opened her hand. She let me walk away from her, toward a grave, on the gamble that a man worth keeping would put the dead woman down right and come back lighter.
She loved me enough to risk me. I did not know, until that moment in the gravel, that there was a braver kind of love than holding on.
There is. It is letting go on purpose, and trusting the thing to come back.
So I go to her. To Della.
I have not been to the grave since the stone went in.
I told everyone I visited; I did not; I could not make my legs walk me up that hill because walking up it meant she was at the top of it, under it, finished, and a man cannot keep a family still and frozen and safe if he admits the cold went all the way to the center already and took the warmest one first. I kept her alive by refusing to stand over her body.
That was the whole architecture. That was the wall.
I walk up the hill.
And I sit down in the grass next to my wife, the real fact of her, the date cut in stone, a year, more than a year, and I put my hand flat on the dirt the way Willa put her hand flat on the truck door, near me, not on me, and the thing I have been holding underwater for thirteen months comes up at last, and it is not dignified, and there is no one to see it but a granite stone and a sky, and I let it.
I cry for my wife. Finally. Like a man who only now believes she is gone.
I tell her I am sorry. I tell her I heard her, late, so late, through her brother, at a gas station, from her boy.
I tell her I got it wrong, I got all of it wrong, I took the one thing she asked and turned it inside out and built a year-long winter out of it and called it loving her, and I made our family into the church she begged me not to make, and I nearly lost the woman she sent, the woman, Della, you sent her, you described her to Jonah and you let her in before I ever smelled the honeysuckle, you picked her out for us from your own deathbed, and I almost drove her off because I was too much of a coward to be happy in a world you weren’t in.
I tell her things I have not let myself think in a year.
The morning she taught Cooper to candle an egg and got wax in her hair and laughed about it for a week.
The way she ran the loudest kitchen in the county on purpose, banging pots, hollering up the stairs, because she said a quiet house was a house where somebody was being left out.
I tell her I took that house and I hushed it.
I took the loudest, warmest, most singing house in three counties and I hushed it like a man quieting a crying child, and the whole time, Della, the house was never crying.
The house was singing your song and I could not tell the two apart anymore, because I had stopped letting myself hear either one.
I tell her the recipe box sat on the windowsill for a year and I walked past it every single day and never lifted the lid, because the lid meant her handwriting, and her handwriting meant her hand, and I could not.
I tell her her brother kept the real her safe for me the whole time I was carving a fake one out of stone.
I empty a year out onto the grass. I tell her everything, and the granite takes it, and the sky holds.
And I sit there a long time, and the sky does not fall, and that is the lesson, that is the whole lesson, the sky does not fall when you finally set her down.
It does not betray her to put her body to rest in the ground where it is and let the rest of her live on in a house that is loud and warm and full.
The betrayal was the freezing. The betrayal was the wall.
Holding her by stopping the family’s heart was not keeping her; it was burying her twice.
The only way to keep Della Mercer is to let her go and let her stay the way she actually was, which was the warmest engine this family ever ran on, and you do not honor an engine by parking the car forever in the cold.
You honor it by driving. By going somewhere.
By living so hard it would have made her laugh.
I let her go. Right there in the grass. And in the letting go I keep her, finally, properly, for good, the way you cannot keep a thing you are strangling.
On the way down the hill, Sam is waiting for me at the bottom by the old gray hive, the one I wrote off, the one I was sure the storm killed in the night, Mémé’s hive, the dead box I had not had the heart to break down and haul off.
Except Sam is standing over it with his hands in his pockets and a look on his face, and the box is not dead.
The box is humming. There are bees at the entrance, working, coming and going in the spring light, an old colony I buried in my own mind in January carrying on its small alive business the whole time I mourned it.
“It made it,” Sam says. “Through all of it. Cooper found it back in the winter. Said it wasn’t dead, it was just a small alive thing holding on.
I’ve been keeping it since. I didn’t tell you because, well.
” He shrugs, my anxious brother, not anxious now.
“You’d decided it was dead. You decide things are dead, Asa.
It’s kind of your whole way. And I figured one of these days you’d need to see one of them wasn’t. ”
I get down on my knees in the grass for the second time that day, this time in front of a hive, and I watch the bees come and go, the impossible living traffic of them, a colony I held a private funeral for in January carrying on in the spring sun like the funeral was my problem and not theirs.
I put my hand near the warm wood the way I put it near Willa’s truck door, near her stone, near everything I have been too frightened to touch for a year, and I let the heat of all that small stubborn life come up off the box, and the last brick of the wall comes out, and the creed I have run this family on for a year, the one that says what is gone is gone and you keep the rest safe by holding it still, dies right there at the entrance board of Mémé’s impossible surviving hive.
Things you are sure are dead are sometimes only holding on.
The hive. The family. The warmest part of me, the part Willa kept calling not-cold while I called it duty.
All of it, holding on, the whole time, waiting for me to quit standing guard over a grave and come back and tend the living thing.
I clap Sam on the shoulder, and I keep my hand there a second, and he lets me, and neither of us says the thing, and both of us hear it.
Then I go and get cleaned up, because I am not going to her looking like three days at a gas station.
I shave. I put on a clean shirt. I find, in the bottom of a drawer, the thing I have been not-looking at for a year, and I put it in my pocket, because some promises you do get to keep, the right ones, the living ones.
And I drive home across the county line that would not let me pass three days ago, and it lets me now, easy, because I am not running from the bond anymore, I am running toward it, and the hook behind my sternum that tore me to pieces for refusing her sings the whole way like a struck string for finally, finally going the right direction.
I have not driven this road light in a year.
That is the thing I notice, the truck somehow easier on the same gravel, the spring coming up green and loud on both sides of me, the dogwoods gone off like quiet fireworks while I was busy being a wall, a whole season arriving without my permission the way seasons do.
I spent a year certain that if I let go of the rope for one second the whole family would fall.
And I let go of it today, twice, at a grave and at a hive, both hands, and nobody fell.
They are all back at the house. Loud, I would bet money.
Cooper and his goat and my brothers and a woman who loved me enough to send me off to grieve and trust me to come back.
Nobody fell. The rope was never holding them up.
The rope was just strangling me, and I was calling the marks it left on my hands by the name of love.
There is a porch up ahead with the light on.
She told me she’d be standing on it.
I am going to go and be happy now, Della. Watch. It’s going to be so loud. You’re going to love it.