Page 4 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

Twenty-two years I've been keeping bees. Fourteen of those I've been pressing honeydew out of comb by hand in a hot room in October, and I've had it on bread and in a mug when I was sick and once on venison because somebody told me to, and nobody has ever, not once, used it as the bottom of something instead of the top.

I finish it. All of it. It takes a while and neither of us talks.

The market's waking up around us. Somebody's tuning a fiddle badly. The orchard people at the end of the row are stacking apples in a pyramid that'll be knocked down by a toddler before eleven, same as every year.

I set the container down on the table and put the fork across it.

She's got her chin up and she's holding still — genuinely holding still, not performing patience — and that's the thing that does it, I think. That she can wait.

"Come Saturday," I say.

She blinks once. "Saturday."

"Fire road past the church, five kilometres, take the left fork at the culvert. Gate's not locked. Don't come in a car with low clearance."

"I have a Subaru."

"That'll do."

"What time?"

I think about it. "When it's warm. Ten. Not before. The bees are mean when it's cold, and they'll take it out on you."

"Noted." She picks up her coffee. She's trying not to smile too wide and losing. "Was it right? The dish."

I could tell her what I thought. I could tell her that I stood here and ate a stranger's cooking off a plastic fork in the cold and felt something move in my chest that I'd have to go a long way back to find a match for.

"You used it right," I say.

She takes that like it's a lot.

Which it was. I don't say that either.

She buys wildflower honey from me at full price and puts it in her bag, and then she stands off to the side out of the way of the table, and when people come she watches them.

A woman buys goldenrod and asks if it's local. A man in a good jacket asks if I ship. A kid asks if bees die when they sting you and I tell her yes, and that they know that, and that they'll still do it if you scare them badly enough, and the kid thinks about that for longer than her father does.

Around ten I sell the last of the dark. Three jars to a man from Kamloops who's been buying it off me since 2019 and who never asks me a single question about it, which I used to think was politeness. Then two to a couple who overhear the price and buy them anyway. Then it's gone, same as always, and the empty space at the back of the table looks the way it always looks.

"Fifty-one minutes," Anaya says.

"What?"

"From when the market opened. Fifty-one minutes and the dark honey is gone." She's got her phone in her hand, and then, like she's caught herself at something, she puts it back in her pocket. City girl, even still.

She holds my eyes when she says it. Doesn't get defensive. Doesn't explain more than that.

I load the crates in the truck at noon, and I drive the fire road home with the windows cracked because the cab holds smoker smoke all season, and the whole way up I don't think about the yard or the wintering or the four hives on the north bench I'm not happy with.

Moss, my dog, meets me at the gate the way he does, slower every year, tail going. I let him ride the last hundred metres on the bench seat with his head on my leg.

"Somebody's coming Saturday," I tell him.

He doesn't have much to say about it.

I stand on the porch after I've unloaded and I look at the yard — the hives in their rows down the slope, boxes going grey, the light coming low through the spruce the way it does after the equinox, gold on everything, everything backlit.

I built all of this on purpose.