The Honey and the Smoke

Telling the Bees

There is a right way to tell the bees a thing, and I have had to learn it five times in my life, and this morning I came out to teach it to them for the last.

It is the second week of October, by the calendar they keep down in Lurac. I keep no such thing. I keep the heather, which is going over now on the high ground, the purple gone to rust along the dry-stone walls, and the bees working it thin and slow in the cold, and the rain coming. By the heather I am an old man at the end of the year, and that is calendar enough. Seventy-eight. Four years a widower. Short of breath on a path I have walked, I should think, ten thousand times — from the back door of the stone house, past the woodpile and the dead pump, to the bee-yard under the chestnut, sixty paces, no more — and this morning I had to stop twice and stand with my hand on the wall and let the air come back into me as if it were doing me a favour. There is a thing in my chest now that closes like a hand and opens when it pleases. The doctor in the valley has a long word for it. I have a shorter one. I have buried better men with stronger chests.

My name is Aubin Combes. I keep bees. That is the whole of it, and it has been the whole of it since I was fourteen, and there is no one on this plateau to keep them after me, which is why I have come out in the wet with a folded square of black cloth under my arm and the brass smoker swinging from my hand, to do for myself the thing the old people did for the dead.

To drape the hives. To tell the bees.

You will not have heard of it, or you will have heard of it the way you hear of a charm — a quaint thing, a thing for a postcard. When there is a death in the keeper's house you go out to the hives and you knock, gently, on each one, and you drape them in black, and you say the name of the one who has gone, and you tell them plainly: he is dead, you must stay, you must work on for the new master. If you do not, the old folk say, the bees will sulk. They will sicken. They will rise up some grey morning and abscond, the whole colony of them gone over the wall and into the woods, and you will be left with an empty box that smells of wax and abandonment, and it will serve you right, for they were never your bees. You only ever kept faith with them.

I have done it for five deaths. I will not list them yet. That is the kind of thing I'd say to a man from the newspaper — five times, and each one cut a year off me — and it is half a lie, because grief does not subtract, it accumulates, like propolis in the corners of a hive, until the whole place is sealed and dark and brown with it. But five it has been. And the cloth under my arm this morning is for a sixth, and the strangeness of it, the thing I have not been able to say even to the cat, is that the sixth death has not happened yet.

It is mine.

I have decided, you see, to tell them in advance. To get it done while I still have the breath to climb the sixty paces. Because there will be no one to do it after — no son, no neighbour, no boy taken in off the snow — and a colony that is not told goes wrong, and I will not have my last hive go wrong out of nobody's fault but my own absence. So I have come to tell them I am dying, which is true enough, and that there will be no new master, which is the part that has kept me awake, and that they may as well stop. That the line stops. That after sixty-some years it comes down to this, and this is where it ends, and I am sorry, and they were the best of it, and goodbye.

─

There is one hive left worth the name.

Stand where I am standing and you would not believe there was ever more. Eleven stands under the chestnut, eleven flat grey slabs of stone with the grass grown up around them, and on the stands the boxes — and only one of the boxes alive. The rest I have stacked empty, supers off, entrances stuffed, the dead wood of an old man's failure. Time was I ran forty. Time was Émile ran sixty and moved them by night, acacia to chestnut to lavender to the heather, the whole plateau a clock and the bees the hands of it. Now there is the one. A single colony, the brood nest no bigger than a loaf, the cluster of them you could close in your two hands, going into winter light as a paper bag.

But she is the Mother line.

I will tell you what that means and then I will set my boot on it, because it deserves both. It means that the queen in that box was raised by a queen who was raised by a queen, back and back, daughter from mother, an unbroken thread of one blood through sixty-odd springs — caught wild as a great swarm the same spring I came here, hived by the old man's own hands, and never once since let to fail or be replaced from outside. Sixty years of one family of bees, kept alive through mite-winters and bad heather and the deaths of every human being who tended them, so that the queen working that frail comb this morning is, in the only way bees can be said to be anything, the great-great-great-and-so-on-granddaughter of the queen the old man and I stood under in 1962 with the swarm hanging in the chestnut like a black heart.

That is the beautiful way to say it. The plain way is that it is a box of insects who will all be dead by Christmas and replaced by their own children, as they are every six weeks of their lives, and that the line is a thing I carry in my head and in the old book in the house and nowhere else on God's earth, and when I stop carrying it, it stops. A queen-line is not a monument. It is a rumour you keep retelling with living bees, and I am the last one who knows the story.

So. The cloth.

I set the smoker on the end stand and crouch — slow, the knee, the chest — and I unfold the black square on my thigh to shake the creases out of it. It is the same cloth. Reine cut it. There were four such squares once, in a drawer in the kitchen wrapped in paper, cut from an old coat, kept for the purpose, because on this plateau you did not wait to be surprised by death; you kept the black cloth folded and ready the way you kept salt. Three of them I have used. This is the last, and I cut none to replace it, and I notice that now, kneeling in the wet grass with my breath going short — that I have been planning this longer than I admitted, that a man who does not cut a new black cloth is a man who has decided he will not need one.

The heather is on the air, and the cold, and under them the smell that is the whole of my life — warm wax and smoke and the green-bitter resin the bees gum the seams with. Somewhere in the box there is the low even note of a colony that is well, a sound like a held breath, like a word said under the ground, and I have spent sixty years learning to hear in that note the difference between a hive that is content and a hive that is afraid, and the worst sound there is, the rising broken wail of a hive that has lost its queen — but I will not speak of that this morning. I came to do a quiet thing.

─

Vaussac is empty around me while I do it.

You should know that, for the cloth to mean what it means. There are eleven houses in this hamlet and I am the breath in one of them. The Fau brothers had the two below the wash-house — Marc, who gave it up and went down to the valley and the factory before he was fifty and lived another thirty years a stranger to me, and Sylvain, who did the worse thing, who stayed a beekeeper in name and became something else, pallets and a lorry and sugar-water and the calendar telling him when to treat instead of the bees, and stopped listening, which is its own kind of leaving. Both gone now. The schoolhouse shut the year Théo would have been ten. The road up is the only road, and in a hard winter it closes, and there is no one any more whom it matters to close it on but me.

And Reine.

Reine is in the churchyard at Lurac, four years this autumn, under the wall where the first sun comes. I told the bees of her myself, with this same cloth, and I did it right, knocked on every hive and said her whole name, Reine Combes, née Vayre, and they stayed, every one, and worked on, and within two years they had begun to fail anyway, not from grief but from age and mites and the heather thinning year on year — but I have caught myself thinking it was grief. That they were only being polite. That a hive can no more lose the woman who could walk into a hanging swarm with her bare arms and feel nothing but the warmth of it than I can, and go on as before.

That is sentiment, and Émile would have set his boot on it harder than I do. The hive doesn't mourn the bee, he used to say. It mourns the queen. Learn which loss you're keeping. I have spent a lifetime learning it, and I am still not sure I have it by heart.

So this is the ground, all of it, the thing I came out to put under the black cloth: a dying man, a dying line, a dead hamlet, a wife four years in the churchyard, and a decision made in the long nights of last winter and not unmade since — that I will not look for an heir, will not take in another stranger off the snow as I was taken, will not nurse this last colony through one more cold to no purpose, will not begin again at seventy-eight what was begun in me at fourteen. That the kindest thing, the only honest thing, is to tell them straight and let them and me go out together, quietly, in the year's own dying, the way you let a low fire be.

I lift the cloth. I reach for the first hive — the live one, the Mother — to knock.

─

And a car comes up the road.

I hear it before I see it, the engine working against the grade in the rain, a town engine, not one I know — Dorian's van I would know, and the doctor's, and the gas man's, and this is none of them. It comes up out of the chestnut woods where the road bends and labours the last stretch onto the plateau and slows at my gate and stops, and the engine cuts, and the rain takes over the quiet.

I stay where I am, on one knee in the wet, the black cloth in my two hands.

A door. A woman gets out. She is thirty, or near it — slight, in a coat made for a milder country than this one, no hat, the rain already in her dark hair, and she stands a moment by the car with one hand on the roof of it and looks up at the house and the yard and at me kneeling among the boxes like something she has driven a long way to see and now is not sure of. She has one bag. A soft bag, the kind you bring when you mean to stay one night and no more.

I know her and I do not know her. That is the thing that goes through me, kneeling there — not knowing, exactly, but the body knowing, the way you feel a change in weather in an old break before the sky shows it. There is something in how she stands. There is something in the set of her, prickly and ready to leave even as she arrives, that I have seen before, that I have buried before, and my chest does the thing it does, closes its hand, and I have to put my own hand flat on the cold stone of the stand to keep myself level.

And Dorian's voice comes back to me. Yesterday, on the telephone, the line bad with the rain, the boy from the market who is half a son to me now in the empty years saying a thing I heard and put away because I did not have a place to put it.

Sabine's gone, Aubin. A breath. There's a girl. Another. I gave her the road up. I didn't know what else — Aubin, are you there? I gave her the road up.

Sabine. Théo's girl from the valley, who carried his child the spring he died and would not come up the hill to us after, and whom we let go, God forgive the lot of us, into her grief and her youth and her own people, because the hill was unbearable and we were unbearable and there was a baby coming and no boy to come with it. Sabine, gone now too. And a girl.

Born after. Born after her father was already in the ground beside the wall. Raised down in the valley and then away in the city by a mother who could not climb back to where the grief was, so that the child of my child has been a fact at the bottom of the plateau for thirty-four years and never once up the road, and I told myself that was her mother's doing and Sabine's right and none of mine, and let it be, the way you let a fire be.

She comes to the gate. She does not open it. She stands with her hand on the wet top bar of it and looks at me, and I get myself up off my knee, slow, both hands going to my knees first, the smoker forgotten on the stand, the black cloth still hanging from my fist, and we stand there in the rain the width of the yard apart, two strangers made of the same dead people.

Sixty-four years fold shut like the bellows of the smoker, all the air going out of them at once. Émile in the chestnut. The swarm. Reine with her bare arms in the bees. Théo at four years old not afraid of anything, Théo at eighteen on the night road. The whole of it, here, at the gate, in the shape of a woman who is afraid of the bees — I can see it, the way she keeps her eyes off the boxes — and who has driven up out of the valley with one bag because she has run out of every other place to go.

"Monsieur Combes?" she says. My own name, said up to me like a question, like a thing she is not sure she is allowed to ask. The rain in her hair. The bag in her hand. "I'm —" and she stops, and starts again, and there is the catch in it, the leaving and the staying at war in her the way they were always at war in her father. "I think I'm Théo's."

I have come out this morning to tell the bees an ending. I have the cloth in my hand for it. I have the smoker lit and the decision made and the year going down around me into the dark, and I had meant, in an hour, to be a man with nothing left to do but wait.

I look at the cloth in my fist. I look at her.

And I set it down — folded, uncut, unused, the black square laid back over the end of the empty stand where it can keep till it is wanted — and I do not knock on the hive, and I do not tell the bees my ending. Some old thing in me, older than the decision, older even than the grief, turns over and chooses against all my planning to begin instead at the beginning. Because she is afraid, and she is soaked, and she is the only blood I have left in the world, and she has asked me a question with her father's voice, and a man cannot answer a thing like that with goodbye.

"Come in out of the rain," I say. "I'll put the kettle on. And I'll tell you — " the breath going short again, the hand of it closing and opening in my chest, the bees humming low and even in the one live box behind me, the heather going over on the high ground — "I'll tell you how it started. The winter the snow took my father, the spring the line and I both came to the old man."

The Old Man's Gate

My father went into the snow for an armful of wood and the plateau kept him; we never found more of him than his billhook, and I have hated and loved white weather ever since.

He burned charcoal in the chestnut woods below the Combe and cut cordwood for the valley people who would not climb up themselves to cut it, and between the two he kept us alive on the plateau the way a man keeps a fire alive in the wind — by never once letting it out of his sight. My mother was three years dead by then and I do not have much of her, only a way she had of singing under her breath when she did not want you to know she was tired, and a smell of warm milk I have looked for in every kitchen since and never found. We had one cow, a brown thing with a white face and a temper, and a house of two rooms with a roof that sagged at the north end where the snow sat longest, and a debt at the cooperative store in Lurac that my father carried the way other men carry a stone in the boot — limping, saying nothing, going on.

I was fourteen. I knew how to swing a billhook and bank a charcoal kiln and milk a bad-tempered cow in the dark, and I knew nothing else, and I thought that was a great deal.

He went out the third week of January, in a whiteout that came up the valley like smoke poured uphill. We were low on wood — we were always low on wood, that is the joke of a man who sells it — and he said he would walk to the near stand and be back before the light failed, and he took the billhook and not the saw because he meant to be quick, and he was not unkind about it, he was never unkind, he only pulled his collar up and said, keep the stove in, I'll want it. That is the last thing my father said to me. Keep the stove in. I kept it in three days. I fed it everything that would burn that was not the table, and I went out twice into the white and came back because I could not see my own hand past the wrist, and on the fourth morning the weather lifted clean and blue and cruel and the men came up from Lurac with poles and a dog, and by afternoon they had found the billhook in a drift below the Roque boundary wall, the haft standing up out of the snow like a marker someone had set there on purpose.

That is all the plateau gave back of him. A tool. They dug where it stood and found nothing, and they dug along the wall and found nothing, and the priest said what priests say, and Hélène's mother — Hélène was a child herself then — brought me a pot of soup I could not eat, and somewhere in there it came to me, standing in our two cold rooms with a debt and a cow and no trade, that grief is a thing you are expected to do sitting down, weeping, with your hands in your lap, and that if I sat down I would not get up again.

So I did not sit down. I have not, I think, properly sat down since.

It was Hélène's mother, or it was the priest, or it was the cooperative man counting what we owed — I have told it different ways and I no longer know which is true, and it does not matter — somebody said: go and ask Roque. The old beekeeper. Up past the boundary wall where the billhook had stood, in the last house before the heather took the road entirely. He's got no one. He might want a pair of hands. They said it the way you say a thing you do not believe, to a boy you do not know what else to do with.

I went the next morning because there was nowhere else to go. I remember I was angry the whole way up, a flat black anger with no bottom to it, angry at the wood and the snow and the billhook and at my father for being a man who would walk into weather like that for an armful of sticks, which is to say angry at him for being exactly the man who had kept me alive for fourteen years. You cannot make sense of grief at fourteen. You cannot make sense of it at seventy-eight either. You only get faster at carrying it.

─

Émile Roque's yard sat on the south fall of the hill behind a wall of dry stone laid so close you could not have slid a knife between the courses. The hives stood in two crooked rows on stone feet, wooden boxes greyed to the colour of the wall, and at the end of the row, up on a shelf in the lee of the house, an old straw skep the shape of a beehive in a child's picture, the kind they had kept in before the boxes came. Snow lay in the lee of everything. The hives had little drifts on their north sides like white shoulders. It was very cold and very still and there was a sound I could not place, low, that I took at first for the wind in the wall.

The old man was standing at the third hive with his bare hand flat on the wood.

He did not look round at me. I had come up loud, boots breaking the crust, breathing hard from the climb and from the anger, and he did not so much as turn his head. He was old even then — he must have been past sixty, though I could not have guessed it, to me he was simply old, a category, like cold or uphill — and he had a face like the wall, grey and close-laid and giving nothing away, and big still hands, and he stood with one of them flat against the hive as a man stands with his hand on the flank of a horse he trusts.

I said my piece. I said it badly. I said my father was dead and I had no trade and they had sent me to ask was there work, and I heard my own voice go up at the end like a child's and hated it.

He did not look up from the hive.

"Stand still," he said.

I thought I had not heard him. I had walked up a hill in the cold to be told my fortune and the man said stand still.

"Stand still," he said again, "and say nothing, and tell me what you hear."

I want to tell you I understood, that something in me went quiet and wise and listened. That is the kind of thing I'd say to a man from the newspaper. The plain truth is I stood there shaking with cold and fury and grief and I heard nothing, nothing but my own blood in my ears and the wind, and I was about to say so, to say something hard, to turn and go back down to my cow and my debt — and then I heard it. The low sound. The one I'd taken for the wind.

It was coming from the hive under his hand. A note. Not a buzz — I knew the summer buzz, every plateau child does — but lower and steadier and somehow up, a rising thing, a wail held so long and so level it did not seem to need breath, the way a wire sings in a gale. It went on. It went up. It got into the back of my neck and stayed there.

"That," I said, when I could. "That sound."

For the first time he turned and looked at me. Pale eyes, very direct, not unkind and not kind, the eyes of a man taking the weight of a frame to see how full it is.

"That hive's lost its queen," he said. "In the cold, in the cluster, and they can't raise another till the spring, and they know it. That's the sound they make. There's no other sound like it and once you've heard it you'll hear it the rest of your life whether you want to or not." He took his hand off the wood. "You came up that hill making the same noise," he said. "I heard you from the road."

I did not understand him. I half understood him, the way you half understand a thing that is going to take you forty years to finish understanding.

"You and that hive," he said, "are the same animal this winter. You've both lost the one that held the middle of you. Neither of you can fix it by spring or by wanting. The only question worth asking is whether you sour where you stand or whether somebody gives you something to do with your hands until the weather turns." He looked at my hands. They were good hands; my father had made them good. "Can you keep your mouth shut and your hands moving?"

"Yes," I said.

"We'll see," he said.

─

He took me on. Not, I learned later, out of softness — he had no softness in him that he would let you see, and the little he had he spent on the bees and on his dead, of whom he never spoke. He took me on for my keep, a roof and what came out of the one pot, and I think because he had decided something about me on the strength of a noise I had made coming up a hill. He told me his reasoning exactly once, that first day, standing in the snow with the queenless hive wailing behind him, and I have carried the words around for sixty-odd years and they have changed their colour about nine times in the carrying.

"A hive and a boy are the same in this," he said. "Give them something to do with their hands, or the grief turns to honeydew and sours the whole comb." I did not know then what honeydew was — it is the sticky stuff the bees gather off the leaves in a bad year when there are no flowers, dark and bitter, that they will store and try to winter on and that will not keep, that goes wrong in the comb and can kill them in the cold. He meant: grief you cannot work is grief that poisons the store you have to live on. He meant: I am not going to let you sit down in those two cold rooms and go bad. He did not say any of the rest of it. He said honeydew and turned back to his hives, and that was Émile telling a boy he would not let him die, in the only language he had.

I moved my things up that week. There was not much to move — a blanket, a knife, my father's other shirt, the cow, who went down to the Faus in the end because Émile would not have her in the yard near the bees, a cow's a fool and a fool upsets them. He gave me the lean-to against the south wall of the house, a low stone shed that had held wood and tools, with a board floor he helped me lay and a stove no bigger than a bucket, and it smelled of cut pine and old wax and, faintly, all year round, of smoke. I have slept warm in better rooms since and never slept better than I slept in that lean-to with the hives ten steps off through the wall, breathing in the dark, four hundred thousand of them, the whole hill alive and ticking over like a banked fire. The lean-to was my home for nine years, until Reine came up the hill and we made the house ours; and a man's first true home, I have found, is wherever somebody first decided not to let him go bad.

The long winter went by like that. He set me to work that a child could do and watched how I did it, which is the only thing the work was for. I rendered old comb in a pot till my arms ached and the kitchen ran with the smell of warm wax. I cleaned and waxed frames. I learned the weights — a deep frame full is two kilos and more, and you learn to know the gram of it in your wrist, full or robbed or empty, before ever you lift the lid. He told me almost nothing and showed me everything twice and never a third time. I won't say it again, he'd say, the bees won't either. And every few days he would set his bare hand on a hive and make me stand and say what I heard, until I could tell the contented hum from the fretful one, the small sound of a hive too weak from the round sound of a strong one — and, at the far hive, the one whose queen had died in the cold, that long rising wail going on and on, getting thinner as the cluster shrank, until one still morning in February it stopped, and he lifted the lid, and there was a cup of dead bees in the bottom, frost on them, and he said only, "There. Now you've heard the whole of it," and we cleaned the box for the spring.

I will tell you a thing I did not understand for a long time. He did not let me grieve my father in words. Not once in that whole winter did he sit me down and ask me about him or let me weep, and I held it against him for years, the hardness of it. It was the opposite of hardness. He had buried more than I will ever bury — sons, I learned much later, a wife — and he had found the one thing that holds a man up over a grave, which is a frame in the hands and a job that cannot wait for your feelings. Do it standing up, he might as well have said. With your hands busy. He never said it. He just made it the only way there was, and it has been my way ever since, and I am doing it now, telling you all this, an old man with his hands busy at the last hive, grieving standing up because I never learned any other posture for it.

─

The snow broke at the end of March, all at once, the way it does up here — three days of dripping eaves and the road a brown river and then a morning so clean it hurt. The bees came out. The first warm noon, off the strong hives, they poured out the entrances in a loose gold cloud and flew their cleansing flight, the first flight of the year, looping and turning in front of the boxes, and I stood and watched, and Émile came and stood by me and watched too, and for once he let the silence be a good one.

It was that same week he gave me the smoker.

He came out of the house with it in both hands — the brass body dented deep on one side where it had been dropped or struck before I was born, the bellows cracked and mended with waxed thread, the whole of it black at the spout with sixty years of use even then. He had a dozen smokers; he gave me that one, the one his own hands knew. He set it in my hands and folded my fingers round the bellows and held them there a moment with his big cold hand, and looked at me with those pale weighing eyes.

"You carry the calm," he said. "Light it, and keep it lit, and keep it close, because the bees can smell which of us is afraid, and a frightened man teaches them to be frightened. You're not done being frightened. That's all right. The smoke does the lying for you till the truth catches up." He let go of my hands. The brass was warm where his palm had been. "Be at the yard before light tomorrow," he said, and turned to go in, and stopped at the door without looking back, the way he said all the things that mattered, half over his shoulder, as if they were nothing.

"Because tomorrow," he said, "a swarm is coming. I can smell the year on it. And you and I are going to catch the rest of your life."