THE FOLLOWING DAY they find a couple of fugitives croaking around the drainpipes, but after that there are no more.
And after all that, nobody can bear to talk about the frogs, not just because of their amphibian hop and slime but because they are forever linked with the idea of Monique leaving, and they all loved Monique in their own way.
Each mourns her loss, privately.
XLI
LIKE PLANTS, hair grows faster in the summer, and everyone’s is getting wild as weeds. Nobody really noticed at first. There aren’t many mirrors about the place, and besides, their hair is always sweaty, or capped, or tied back, or hidden underneath a protective beekeeper’s hat. In general, nobody spends very much time on personal hygiene: the men let their beards grow, the women leave their eyebrows unplucked and their legs unshaved.
Ibrahim’s hair, long and soft with curls even at the beginning, can now, to Silvia’s amusement, be pulled into a full topknot. Her own grown-out toadstool, on the other hand, just gets prettier as it burgeons around her face.
The Frenchies are unaffected, JB being bald and MJ with such slow-growing hair that after all this time only about half an inch of her natural brown colour appears at her roots, like a trunk beneath autumn leaves.
It’s the twins who make the communal haircut necessary. Their hair, birchwood blond, is growing over their ears, and as it’s straight as a tree, it’s sticking out over their earlobes. The effect is one of children who’ve been forgotten by their parents.
Silvia once mentioned that she worked at a hair salon when she was in high school. She didn’t say as a hairdresser, though. She’d been the weekend receptionist and had worked her way up to shampoos. For this reason, she is given the kitchen scissors and full responsibility. The scissors have that silver/slither/scythe sound as they slice, and she snips them in the air. “Who’s first?”
“Let’s go to the bathroom,” says MJ, inadvertently volunteering. “It’ll be easier to clean up.”
The bathroom is by the front door. Grimy green tiles, walls a colour some people might call cream, a ceramic claw-foot tub, a thermometer, and the six remaining toothbrushes. A dead yellow jacket is stuck in the soap dish.
They collectively decide that each client—funny, Silvia thinks, how certain situations can change a person’s title: daughter, student, tourist, resident, girlfriend, hairdresser—will sit in the bathtub, at Silvia’s feet.
With MJ sitting cross-legged in the tub, Silvia tries to create an image of professionalism: she pulls the hair up and straight, as she saw it done at the salon, measuring two chunks against each other. She starts small, cutting diagonals into the bottom. Then she pulls both sides of the hair again. They are the same length. Confidence growing, she makes larger, sharper cuts. She feels competent, omnipotent. Then a little foolish: no need to get overexcited. She doesn’t touch the bangs.
“Finished,” she says after a few minutes longer than necessary—she’d been cutting invisible hair for a while.
MJ gets up quickly to examine her reflection in the dirty mirror above the sink. She preens herself, fluffing her hair up, making a mirror face she never makes in public: half pertness, half pout.
“It’s fine,” she says, surprised. “Perfect.”
Truth is, it doesn’t look any different.
Easing into things with her second client, Silvia starts hairdresser chat with Ben. Their questions and answers overlap; it’s not like listening, it’s like killing time.
The hair starts to become something other than hair, it seems. As she cuts it, trunk-straight strands of it, they fall in clumps like pick-up sticks. She sees herself as that size, the size where an inch of hair could be a foot-sized stick. She sometimes places herself in the perspective of other people, things. She doesn’t really think about doing it or know exactly when she started it—it’s more of a distraction, to get her out of her own head. To become a stick: to have no desires. To become a flower: to desire something new.
After a while Ben resumes the chatter. “How are things with Ibrahim?”
She blushes all the way down to her shoulders. Then she smiles. It comes unwillingly, in spite of herself. “Good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good.”
When she’s finished, Ben looks exactly like he did when he first arrived but with a duff cowlick (he doesn’t care so doesn’t mention it) and a long-hair tan line, skin paler around his ears and the downy nape of his neck.
When both brothers are finished, with oppositely ruined bangs, they leave Silvia and Ibrahim to it.
“How’s it going?” Ibrahim touches her shoulder.
“Good.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What is it?” He pulls her face up so he can look at her eyes.
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re being weird.”
“I’m not.” She pauses. “Am I?”
He looks at her, his eyes saying yes.
“It’s just—do you think Cynthia knows? About us?”
“Does it matter?”
She accepts his kisses. “Okay, fine, sit down,” she says. She climbs into the tub first. “You should take off your shirt too,” she says, trying to be professional, not flirty.
“Did you make everyone do that?”
“No,” she says, rinsing the kitchen scissors under the tap, “I used towels for them. But yours is longer. It would stick all over your clothes.”
“Just my top, then?” he says, his head already inside his black T-shirt.
“That’ll be fine for now.” She’s coy again.
As he sits at her feet she feels this hunger coming from within her bones. The feeling is satisfied only when he leans his naked back against her legs and she can feel his warmth.
She starts by touching his head all over, examining this part of him which is usually so far above her. His hair is thick, and what with the curls, snippets of it will make not sticks but grapevines, maybe, or clematis. Something twisted, still living.
“Cut it all off,” he says. “I’m sick of it, so hot. Make me look like a real man.” He tilts his head up to look at her, his eyes sparkling.
“You sure?”
He reaches behind him and wraps his arms round her legs. Something about this position makes him look like he’s a swimmer, frozen before the dive. “Positive.”
“But I like it like this. And you are a real man.”
“If it’s terrible, it’ll always grow back.”
Curls fall around her bare feet. She cuts it off in clumps, carelessly at first, just to get rid of the bulk. Fistfuls of it fall around her until she’s up to her ankles in hair.
She feels sad. He feels light.
“I feel like I’m Delilah,” she says, “and you’re Samson.”
“Who?”
“You know, Samson and Delilah?”
He tips his head up to look at her. “If I did, why would I ask?”
“They’re from the Bible.”
“Then no, I don’t know.”
“He was a strong man,” she says, touching the newly revealed skin behind Ibrahim’s ears, “an impossibly strong man, and she cut his hair because she knew that’s where his strength came from.”
“That’s not where my strength comes from.”
“She betrayed him.” Silvia puts the scissors down.
“I asked you to do it.”
“I know, I know, it’s just a thing I thought of.”
He kisses the palm of her hand and leans his head against her knees. “Try not to worry about it,” he says, sympathetic but also, she feels, somewhat uncaring.
She looks at the sink, dirty with so many people’s spits of toothpaste. She looks in the mirror, crooked above the sink, and wonders whether her parents would recognize her anymore.
Afterwards they throw all the hair out the windows so the birds can make nests. But they find it later, clumped where Toby sleeps.
&nbs
p; XLII
Delilah was a pretty girl, but she was not the first to break Samson’s heart. Samson was known throughout the land for his strength, but nobody yet knew its source.
Samson is on his way to ask his first love, a Philistine from Timnah, for her hand in marriage when a lion jumps out of the bushes on the side of the dirt road. Samson grabs its front legs and simply rips the lion apart. The roaring, the ripping of fur, of bones; the sudden rush of blood.
The girl—well, her father on her behalf—says yes. Samson is overcome.
A few weeks later, on his way to the rehearsal dinner, Samson takes the same trail and finds the lion is still there, splayed in two, its carcass hollowed but filled with something.
Getting closer, he hears a sound.
Bees. Honeycomb. Honey.
The bees are buzzing, the roar almost equal to the lion’s, and honey is dripping from the rotting, drying flesh. Samson scoops out a handful, comb and all, and eats the lot of it: wax, bees, blood. It tastes perfect.
Something about the experience with the lion so moves Samson that he vows never to tell anyone about it.
At the feast, though, buoyed on pride, Samson proposes a riddle:
Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.
Nobody gets it, and they start to get angry, so he tells them. He’s surprised by how readily he gives in. After that, the night feels not quite right.
The next day he finds that his beloved’s father has married her off to another man. There are no hows, no whys, no wherefores. His heart, suddenly cold and huge, feels like it will kill him.
It turns out that heartbreak makes Samson even stronger than anger. He burns three hundred foxes and scorches all the town’s crops.
Later the Philistines propose Samson a riddle of their own:
What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?
Tortured, he can’t find the answer.
He never will.
Years later, Delilah betrayed him. But he was already only half a man.
XLIII
IT’S A MILKY-TEA afternoon and Silvia is watering flowers in the garden, trying to think of cool things. As she goes down the row for the herbs, nearing the beehives, the buzz gets disproportionately loud. A cloud of bees lifts from one of the hives and a few fly towards her.
“Hey,” she says reflexively. Two bees land on her outstretched hand. “What are you two doing?” Then there are two more, and two more; her arm is filling up. They feel like small beaded earrings, just as finely constructed, just as fragile. Silvia is amazed by how they come to her, but for the moment she is too curious to be afraid. The sound is all around her; she is within the sound.
What is sweeter than honey?
What is stronger than a lion?
“Come here,” she says, testing, and the bees respond as one by slowly climbing up her arm, towards her bare shoulder. It’s only when one flies ahead and lands on her cheek that she starts to freak out and tries to shake them off. With her empty arm she tries to brush them off without touching them, scared of being stung; her instinct takes over her rational mind and she doesn’t think to move them gently away, as she had brought them to her, but instead panic-swipes the bewildered insects until they are all gone.
“Go,” she whispers. “Go home.”
The bees fly back towards their hive. Silvia turns to watch them and thinks she sees, in her peripheral vision, Cynthia standing on the back step, watching her. But when she looks properly, Cynthia isn’t there at all. It must have been just a trick of the light.
XLIV
THE TREES are starting to crisp around the edges. Burnt-brown, not fire-red. This isn’t from any premonition of autumn but rather from the scorching summer heat. Many of the plants in the garden are surrendering their fruits earlier than usual. Silvia wonders whether the farm is in some kind of microclimate or whether the drought is affecting the whole province. By the end of June, the fuzzy-headed clover will have finished its season. The bees will have sucked the purple straws dry. The buckwheat—flowers the colour of a baby girl’s room—will be ready to harvest as well. Goldenrod has bloomed early this year too, so its peppery nectar will bleed into the rest.
“It’s baking out,” says Ibrahim as the group walks towards the back lot for the next harvest. “We’ll all turn to banana bread.”
Once they’ve got their suits on and Silvia and Ibrahim are preparing the tools, Ben starts singing “Tupelo Honey” through his veil. “You can’t stop us on the road to freedom, you can’t keep us ’cause our eyes can see . . .”
His voice is nice; he doesn’t sound like himself when he sings.
Silvia does the smoking while Ibrahim extracts the frames. They move in rhythm, not touching, swiftly swooping around each other. Ben stands to the side, observing. When the frames are out he’ll uncap the wax cells and drain the honey, but until then he just watches everything, singing and feeling pretty productive.
ONCE THE HONEY has been drained from the combs they can see that the buckwheat honey is much darker than the “flower of the honey” they first harvested, darker even than the yellow-gold they were expecting. It’s the colour of molasses and smells of beer and farm. The goldenrod adds a certain bitterness.
Silvia dips a finger into the bowl as the uncapped comb drains. “Ugh,” she says, her face crumpling. “It tastes of cow.”
Ben, at first offended, as if the taste were a result of his draining, dips a finger in too. “That’s gross, man,” he says, shaking his head. “Who would actually eat that?”
Ibrahim takes some, licking his finger like a lollipop. “Different strokes.”
Cynthia has said that this one is a bestseller at the farmers’ market. The three of them decide this is because when things don’t taste good, people think it must be better for them.
They work through the peak heat of the day, finishing off twenty hives in five hours, ten frames per hive, two hundred frames in total, nineteen huge plastic buckets of honey extracted, which Hartford will later bottle. After the two-hour mark, everyone stopped talking, focused intently on the tasks at hand. Silvia’s T-shirt is soaked through with sweat, and when it reaches the point where it begins to cool her off, she marvels silently at the natural workings of the body.
When they’ve finished, Ibrahim and Silvia go back to his room and fall asleep among the wet canvases, like children, body-tired from the heat and the hard work.
XLV
SILVIA HAS NEVER thought about whether Cynthia is rich or poor. It’s as if the farm is entirely outside a world where those two categories apply and is instead governed by weather, capricious as moods, and time, which also seems to operate on its own schedule here. The capital Cynthia owns is greater than money: she has land, she has life.
It’s morning. The group is in the kitchen, quietly eating their breakfast before their chores for the day, when Cynthia enters and catches Silvia’s eye.
“The kittens,” Cynthia says to her.
“Kittens?” Ben asks, turning to the others.
Silvia stands up. Nobody else knew about the kittens—thinking about it now, she actually doesn’t even remember mentioning it to Ibrahim. Cynthia looks tender with tiredness, eyes small and neck sloping forward like a tulip on its stem. It’s clear she’s been up all night.
“Is Toby a girl?” Dan asks, but nobody answers.
Cynthia walks out the front door. Silvia follows her, and the rest of the group follows Silvia. A low fog hangs around the grass as the dew evaporates in the hot July sun. The smell of tomato leaves as they walk down the driveway makes no sense to Silvia; it’s more intense than she’s ever known.
“Did you know about this?” Ibrahim catches up to Silvia.
“Cynthia told me that there would be kittens soon, yeah. I guess I forgot, though,” she says.
They arrive at the barn, and Cynthia stops in the doorway. “They were born in the night. Seven of them. They’re sleeping.” She turns and looks into
the barn. “Or some of them are. You must be quiet.” She stands aside, arm stretched to hold the slatted wooden door open on its hinges, and the group slowly, tentatively, enters.
The mother cat is stretched out long, lying on her side on the bed of cashmere sweaters. Judy looks put-upon but proud; in fact, so does Cynthia. She’s looking at the scene with bliss spread across her face.
“It’s Toby’s mother,” Silvia whispers to Ibrahim. “They call her Judy.”
“Toby has a mother?” Ibrahim says instinctively.
The kittens line up along the mother’s belly, a few sleeping but most scrabbling with their tiny paws and mouths to find something, they don’t even know what, but instinct is pushing them towards their mother’s milk. One of the babies is blindly climbing over the body of its mother, hoping for a nipple on her back.
“He’s an explorer,” Cynthia says.
Judy reaches back, clasps him by the neck between her jaws, and places him within range of the milk source.
The kittens sound like tiny sirens when they mewl, and their tails, narrow and nearly hairless like rats’, move with the same random jiggling as their legs. Three are tabby; two are black with white patches on their feet and faces; one is calico—orange, black, and white; and one is all-over grey.
“Hey,” MJ says, “there are seven kittens, and seven of us!”
“Plus ’artford is eight,” JB corrects. “Where’s ’artford?”
“Errands,” Cynthia says, “in town.”
The kittens’ eyes are still sealed shut, their noses neon-pink, and they’re smaller than butter sticks with legs, toes still clawless and spread apart like outstretched hands, their fur damped down from the newness. They’re so adorable and fragile it’s like a cartoon. Ibrahim crouches down to look at them closely and thinks his heart might actually explode.
“Should we name them after ourselves?” Ben asks, looking around at the others, their reverent faces raptly looking upon the scene. “One each?”
The Honey Farm Page 14