Page 2 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

"No."

Flat. No apology tacked on the end, no sorry, no not this time — the word arrives complete and doesn't ask me for anything back.

I've been told no by a lot of people. Chefs who wouldn't give up a technique, a fisherman in Tofino who didn't want his cove named, a seaweed harvester who told me to come back when I'd learned to shut up and watch. I know the shape of a no you can talk around. This isn't one.

So I don't argue. I put the jars in my tote and shift my weight and ask, because I actually want to know, "The melezitose — how do you get it out of the comb? It sets like cement in the cells. I've read you can't spin it."

"Can't spin most of it," he says. "You lose some. I heat the room and I go slow and I take the frames I know are only part honeydew first. Rest of it I press."

"By hand?"

"By hand."

"That's why there's only ever a few dozen jars."

"That's why."

Two vendors down, somebody's dropped a crate and a woman is laughing about it. He doesn't turn his head.

"Second question," I say. "Do you leave any of it on the hive for winter?"

"No." First thing he's said without a beat before it. "It's hard on them. High ash. They can't cleanse in the cold, and it makes them sick. They get the flower honey. I take the dark."

"So the rarest thing you make is the thing your bees can't keep."

He looks at me.

The market carries on doing what a market does. Somebody's generator kicks in. A dog under the next table thumps its tail against a table leg twice and stops. And this man sits on his crate in the middle of all of it with his forearms on his knees and looks at me like the noise has stopped.

"Third one," I say. My voice comes out steadier than the rest of me, which is a small mercy, because the rest of me has spent the last four minutes cataloguing the width of his shoulders under that jacket and the exact grey in his beard and what his mouth does right before he decides not to smile. "What are they working? Spruce? Fir? Because I've had honeydew from Europe and it was mostly fir and it tasted like the inside of a violin case, and yours doesn't smell like that. Yours smells like—" I lift the jar in my hand, though it's wrapped and sealed and I can't smell a thing through the paper. "Like the underside of a log. In the good way."

He doesn't answer.

He looks at the wasp. He looks at the field beyond the stalls. Somewhere behind us, a kid is arguing hard for a caramel apple and losing.

"No more questions today.” He looks exhausted. His eyes meet mine, and he must catch the curious expression on my face. “Come back tomorrow," he says, resigned, "if you want the rest of the answer."

That's it. That's the whole thing. He picks up a rag and starts wiping down the sample spoons like the conversation was a task on a list, and it's finished now.

"What time do you open?"

"Nine."

Back at the motel, I unwrap one jar and open it, standing at the little laminate counter next to a kettle I don't trust to not start a fire if I keep it plugged in.

The smell comes up dark. Molasses, pine pitch, wet bark, something like the bottom of a coffee cup and something like a barn. Zero flowers. Nothing in it apologizing for itself.

I take a quarter teaspoon, and put it on my tongue and hold still.

It isn't sweet first. That's the thing nobody writes down. It's deep first — malt and smoke and mineral — and the sweetness comes in underneath at the end and stays a long time, finishing almost bitter, like good chocolate, like the crust on something roasted.

I stand in a motel room in a logging town in the Rockies with my eyes shut and a spoon in my mouth, and I think: I want to know what tree made this.

And immediately after that, in the same breath, without asking my permission:

I want him to be the one who tells me.

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