Page 1 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

one

Anaya

The market opens at nine. I get there at nine twenty, which is twenty minutes too late, which I know before I've finished parking.

The town square is already full. Two long rows of stalls under canvas, a field with more beyond them, and the whole thing smelling like woodsmoke and wet grass and apples in crates. My breath shows. Frost still holds in the shade along the north side of the hardware store, a white seam that hasn't given up even though the sun's been on the rest of the street for an hour.

Ten hours of driving for this, and a motel room with a rattling baseboard heater, and now I'm walking fast past a man selling smoked trout because I can see the sign at the end of the row.

MCGREGOR HONEY. Hand-painted, black letters on a plank repainted at least twice. I can see the ghost of the old lettering where the sun got at it.

There are three jars left.

They're at the back of the table, set apart from the wildflower and the goldenrod, and even from four feet away they read wrong for honey. Not gold. Not amber. Almost black, and where the sun comes through at the edge, a red so dark it's nearly brown, like a bottle of stout held up to a window.

Forest honeydew. I've been trying to buy this for seven months. Three specialty importers, two of whom laughed at me. A distributor in Richmond who offered me Greek fir honey instead, as though I'd asked for a lemon and he'd handed me a lime.

"How much for all three?"

The man behind the table doesn't answer right away.

He's on an overturned crate with his forearms on his knees, watching a wasp work the rim of a sample jar with an attention that suggests the wasp is the more interesting party in this transaction. Barn jacket the colour of wet bark. Dark hair long enough to be pushed back and not much longer. A week of beard going grey along the jaw, less an accident than a schedule he's decided not to keep.

He looks up. He's got a stillness to him that makes the market feel loud.

"Eighteen each," he says.

"All three."

Now he looks at me properly. Not up and down. At my face, like he's checking something.

"You know what it is?"

"Forest honeydew. Your bees worked aphid secretions off the conifers instead of flowers." I put my hand on the nearest jar; the glass is cold enough to sting. "Which makes it honey from a bee standpoint and not a botanical one. It'll taste like malt and pine resin and something almost savoury, and it won't be sweet the way people expect sweet."

He blinks, as if not expecting such a precise response. "Fifty-four dollars," he says after a beat.

I pay him in cash. He stands to wrap them, and standing is the problem.

He's tall in a way that reorganizes the space behind the table. And his hands — he wraps each jar in newspaper the way you'd wrap something breakable and something valuable, twice over, and I watch him do it three times because I can't make myself do anything else. Big hands, scarred across the knuckles, something brown-red worked into the creases that isn't dirt and isn't rust. The paper turns under them like it's being handled by a man who's never once been in a hurry.

The last jar, he holds a second longer than he needs to.

"Don't put it in tea," he says.

His voice is low and unbothered, and it arrives about three inches lower in me than a stranger's voice has any business arriving.

"I wasn't going to put it in tea."

"People do."

"People are wrong."

He hands it over. My fingers go over the top of his and stay there for the length of the handoff, which is longer than a handoff, and neither of us hurries it along.

I should walk away. I have three jars, which is more than I had this morning, and my recipe test list, and a cookbook proposal sitting in my editor's inbox with a hole in chapter four shaped exactly like this.

Instead I say, "Can I see the hives?"