Page 15 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

Closing weekend. The last market of the year, forty years running, and the field's fuller than I've seen it — the whole valley out in wool hats, kids with pumpkins, the smell of woodsmoke and fry oil and cold mud.

I'm behind the table.

Not helping. Behind it, on the second overturned crate, which Heath brought up from the shed on Thursday without saying anything about why, and which fits beside his on the tailgate side like it's always been there.

We set up at eight. The frost hasn't gone off the grass by nine and the wildflower jars are so cold they fog when I handle them.

The dark honey goes on the back of the table. Thirty-one jars. The last of the year.

"Thirty-one," I say.

"Yep, and next year I get whatever September gives me." He straightens the last row. "That's the arrangement."

At nine, the market opens.

They come for it the way they come for it every year, and this year I get to watch from the other side. Two young guys from a restaurant in Kelowna who ask if he'd wholesale and take the no with reasonable grace.

I hand jars across. I take cash. I say the words forest honeydew about forty times and watch people's faces do the thing my face did.

We sell the last one in under and hour.

Heath moves the empty crate off the table and puts his hands on his hips and looks at the space where it was, same as every year.

Around eleven there's a lull and he goes for coffee, and I sit on the crate with my hands around the cup he brings back and look at the field.

My editor has the new scope. I sent it Monday night from the motel with the heater rattling and my heart going like a bird.

The proposal had eight chapters. It has nine now.

Chapter four was supposed to be Wild Sweeteners: Birch, Maple, Bigleaf — a competent chapter, a chapter I could have written from a desk in Vancouver with two phone calls and a supplier list. It's still there. It's better now, because I know things I didn't.

Chapter nine didn't exist until I met Heath.

Dark Honey. Eleven days in September. An insect on a spruce tree in a draw too broken for machinery. A man who heats a room and presses comb by hand because the sugar in it won't spin. Ten recipes that use it as the bottom of a dish and not the top — the rasam, the duck glaze, the burnt-butter payasam, the charred cabbage that started it.

My editor's reply came back in forty minutes, which for her is a scream of enthusiasm. This is the chapter. This is the whole book's argument in one chapter. Can you get us studio-ready shots of the source?

The draft is due soon, but right now I focus on the market.

The field carries on. Somebody's testing a microphone badly. Two kids go past at a break-neck run with a pumpkin between them.

I put my hand in his jacket and my face against his chest, and he holds on to the back of my head with one hand, and the truck's cold under us and his coat smells like smoke and propolis and the inside of a woodshed.

"My flight's tomorrow," I say into his shirt.

"I know."

"I'll be back on the ninth."

“And I’ll be waiting.”

Heath

One Year Later...

It’s October and the hives are going quiet, as usual.

I do the rounds like every year. Combine the two weak ones on the north bench, check the weight of the boxes with a hand under the back edge, mouse guards on, entrances reduced to a slot. Sound before smoke. Most of them are rolling low and content and one of them's up sharp, so I'll open that one tomorrow when it's warm and find out what she's telling me.