Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
JONAH
The first Saturday of June, before the sun is up and before anybody else in the house is moving, I sit at the kitchen table with the ledger open to the second page and I do the math one more time, the way I have done it at half past four nearly every morning since we bought this dream on a tightrope.
And for the first time in a year, the number does not look like a thing that is going to kill us.
It looks like a thing we might, if the day goes right, finally pay.
Today the honey goes to market. The first real one, the one the whole year has been bending toward without any of us saying so out loud over supper, because saying it out loud would have made it real, and a family that has already buried the realest thing it owned does not go looking for more reality than it has to carry.
We have sold a jar here and a jar there since the bond closed, to Hettie Dubois and the church and the merely curious, but that is not selling.
That is the town being kind. Today is selling.
Today the Mercer honey goes onto the Hollow Square on a Saturday in June with the whole county out in the warm, and either it moves or it does not, and the number on the second page either comes down or it does not, and I have carried that number folded small and kept out of Asa’s sight for so long that I am not entirely sure who I will be if I get to put it down.
I close the ledger. I make the bread. The yeast does its slow blind work the way it always has, the way it did in June when I could not be all right, and I notice, this morning, that I am all right, which is a thing I keep discovering and keep being caught off guard by, like a man patting his pockets and turning up money he forgot he had.
We are set up in the corner spot by seven, which is Earl Tubb’s doing.
The corner of the Hollow Square is the best ground at the market, the spot the morning sun finds and the foot traffic rounds, and it has belonged to Earl Tubb’s own honey table since before I was born.
Three weeks ago the old man walked our rows one last time before the season, tasted the spring sourwood off the comb, got the look on his face he gets, and told Beau, gruff, like it pained him, “You’ll take the corner this year.
I’m moving back to the shade. A man my age has sold enough honey.
” Which is the largest act of love I have ever watched one beekeeper do for another, handing over forty years of the best spot on the Square to the family that came to town to compete with him, and Beau understood it for exactly what it was and did not make a joke about it, which is how I knew he understood.
So we are in the corner, in the sun, the honey lined up dark to light the way Sam insists, the way Mémé did it, the little cards in Cooper’s careful print because Willa had him letter them for handwriting practice and they came out better than any of us could have managed, BEE FAMILY HONEY, MAGNOLIA HOLLOW, and under it, in smaller letters, the boy’s own addition that nobody had the heart to correct: ASK US ANYTHING ABOUT BEES WE KNOW EVERYTHING.
And then the county comes shopping, and I watch my family work.
Beau works the front of the table the way he was born to, except it is different now, and I am maybe the only one who can see how different, because I am the one who watches.
The old Beau sold by disappearing into the sale, by being whoever the customer needed, the charm arriving a half second early and staying a half second late.
This Beau sells by being himself, which turns out to sell better, because the thing he is telling people about the honey is true and he wants them to have it, and a man who actually wants you to taste the thing he loves is worth ten of a man performing that he does.
He hands out the little wooden spoons. He tells the story of Mémé’s sourwood, the line we cannot make anymore, six jars left and these are not them, but here, taste the wildflower, taste what her bees still make.
People buy. People buy and come back and buy more and tell their neighbors, and the neighbors come.
Sam keeps the count, restocking from the truck before a gap can show on the table, a man who has finally found the right use for the part of him that needs to know the number of everything.
Asa does the heavy work and the careful work, hauls the cases, fixes the leg of the table that has wobbled since the Reagan administration, and when a man with acreage up past Tubb’s place asks him a real question about overwintering, Asa talks to him about it for twenty minutes, easy, sleeves rolled, a thing the man at the county line in October could not have done, because back then every conversation that ran longer than a minute was a door somebody might get through.
And Willa is behind the table.
I want to mark that, because noticing the small true things is the one thing I have always been for.
Willa Tate is behind the table. Not out front of it with her arms full of somebody else’s casserole, running interference on her way to an errand of her own, the way I watched her work this Square the first fall we were here.
Behind it. With us. Making change and wrapping jars in newspaper and calling half the county by name, because she knows everybody, she has taught half their children and hugged the other half at one funeral or another, and she stands in the Mercer corner like she grew there, the schoolteacher who became a beekeeper, the woman who walked up into the middle of somebody else’s story and stayed.
Every soul who stops at our table can see plain that she is one of us, filed and witnessed and kept, and not one of them finds it strange, because in Magnolia Hollow a thing that is on the record is simply true.
I keep the cashbox. Of course I keep the cashbox; I keep all the things with numbers in them.
And somewhere around eleven o’clock, with the sun high and the Square full and the honey going off the table faster than Sam can replace it, I do the running math in my head, the way I cannot help doing, the way I have done at half past four every morning for a year, and the figure I come to stops me where I stand.
We have crossed it.
Not the whole year. Not the farm paid free and clear; that is seasons away, that is a long patient haul of Saturdays.
But the rope. The tightrope we bought this dream on, the thin terrible line between making it through the first year and losing Mémé’s hundred and ten acres in our own hands, the line I have walked alone in the dark with the ledger for twelve months.
We have crossed it. The market works. The honey sells.
The farm is going to live. I stand in the corner spot in the June sun with a cashbox full of the county’s small bills, and I do the sum that says we made it, and the thing I have been carrying since before she died, the number, the weight, the one I folded small so it would not travel from my chest to Asa’s, the thing I was certain I would carry alone forever because carrying is the one thing I have always been for, comes loose all at once, and I have to set the cashbox down on the table and put both hands flat on the wood and breathe.
Willa is beside me before I know she has crossed behind the table.
Of course she is. She reads people for a living, and she has been reading me since the first Saturday I handed her the coffee in Della’s chipped mug.
She does not make a production of it. She puts her hand on my arm, light, and she says, low, under the noise of the market, “Did we make it?”
We. She said we. She has known the number since February, the hard one on the second page, and she has carried it with us every day since, which is the thing I did not understand a beta was permitted to be given, the thing I came into this family eleven years ago certain was never going to be for me.
The sharing of the weight. I have been the one who carries so nobody else has to.
I never once knew you were allowed to be carried back.
“We made it,” I tell her. My voice does a thing I do not plan. “We’re going to make it.”
And Willa Tate, who I once stood in a dark kitchen calling the river, while I named myself the stream that only got to come in behind her, looks at me with her whole sunny face gone soft and fierce at the same time and says, “Good. Then put it down, Jonah. You’ve carried it long enough.
We’ve got it now, all of us. You don’t have to keep the books of this family alone in the dark anymore.
” And she squeezes my arm, and she goes back to making change, and she leaves me standing in the corner of the Hollow Square with a year of weight set down on a folding table in the sun.
It is Beau, in the end, who shows me the other thing, the thing that finishes the day.
Late, when the crowd has thinned and the table is more empty than full and we are most of the way to sold out, I watch my brother take a jar off the table, the good wildflower, and instead of handing it to a customer or boxing it for the church, he uncaps a marker and writes something on the lid and sets it apart, on the truck’s tailgate, behind everything, where it will not get sold.
And I drift over, because I am the one who notices, and I read what he has put on the lid, in his big looping hand.
BEAU’S.