Page 7 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

I just shrug.

He picks up the smoker. "That's not a complaint."

We do the last row. He hands me the hive tool and lets me crack the lid myself, and I do it slow, and the sound stays low and rolling. I do it right.

Heath steps back and lets me do the next one alone.

four

Heath

It gets dark at six thirty, but neither of us mentions it.

We come off the slope at five with the light going copper, and she carries the empty supers into the shed without being asked, and she's washing her hands at the outside tap and saying something about the cabbage — less tamarind, more pepper.

I make soup while she sits at my table.

The stove gets the one room up to warm. She takes off her sweater. There's a thin shirt under it and a line of collarbone, and I look at the pot.

"Can I ask you something?” she asks.

"You can ask. Doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer."

"Why bees?"

I stir, and think about how much of it to say, and then find I'm saying most of it, which hasn't happened in a long time.

"My grandmother had four hives behind her house in the valley. I got sent to her every summer from when I was six." I turn the heat down. "Wasn't a warm woman. Didn't talk much, didn't hug, told you when you were wrong. But she'd take me out to those hives and sit me on a stump ten feet back and say now be still."

"And you were good at it."

"I was terrible at it. I was six." That gets a short breath out of her, close to a laugh. "Took two summers. Then one day I was still, and she didn't say anything about it, but she moved me up to five feet the next time."

"That's the whole reward? Five feet closer?"

"That's the whole reward."

I ladle it out. She takes the bowl in both hands like she's cold, though she isn't.

"She died when I was nineteen. Hives got sold. I fell timber a while; planted trees a while. Thirty when this parcel came up cheap." I sit. "Two years to build the cabin. Started with six hives."

"And now two hundred."

"About that. Some years less."

She eats, quietly, in a way I've decided I like.

"It's the first thing that's fully mine," I say. "Everything before it, I was working somebody's ground or somebody's schedule. Nobody signs off on this. If it's good, it's because I did it, and if it's bad, that's mine too."

"And that's enough?"

"That's been enough."

Rain starts on the metal roof and Moss groans and rearranges himself across both our feet.

She says, "I should think about driving down."

"You should."