The Honey Farm

by Harriet Alida Lye

  LVI

  IBRAHIM COMES TO HER in what seems like the middle of the night. She’s asleep, having yet another dream suffused with vague doom.

  “Hey,” he says, curling up to her from behind, pressing his knees into the backs of hers, feeling the heat of her body. He presses his cheek to her spine and his lips find unkissed parts of her. Back of the neck, triceps, between the shoulder blades.

  She turns around quickly. “Hi,” she says, still soft. Then, harder: “Where were you?”

  “I was painting.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  The moon is bright and its silvery light falls into the room. She can see the news travel from his forehead to his mouth, the smile freezing as the eyes melt. “Is this—are you—serious?”

  Silvia nods in the dark. “I did the test in town.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I can’t kill it.” She pauses, takes a deep breath down into her belly. “I don’t expect anything from you. If you don’t want to do this, I’ll do it alone. I’ve decided.”

  “I’m not asking, I don’t want you to, I mean—how do you feel?”

  Silvia is quiet for a moment. “I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

  “It’s not your fault. Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” Silvia is still avoiding his eyes.

  Ibrahim is quiet for a moment, thoughts running through his mind at the speed of light. “Well, I guess this is a sign or something.”

  “A sign?”

  “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do this.”

  “Really? But how would we . . . where would we . . . for work, and living, and—”

  “Hey, hey, one thing at a time. I think, well, let’s stay here for now. We can take our time to plan what’s next, but at least here we have a home. Together. And it’s free. Yeah?” There is silence. “Weirdly good timing with Cynthia’s offer, right?”

  Silvia says nothing.

  “Silvia? What do you think?”

  She falls into a hug, then pulls away to look at him. “Why weren’t we infested like the others?”

  “What?”

  “We didn’t get the lice. I don’t understand why not.”

  “We were lucky, I guess. Don’t worry about that, it’s only a good thing. Everything is good things.” He kisses her forehead.

  FUCKING IS JUST LIKE IT WAS BEFORE, each hungry for the other, trying to make their love something they can hold on to, knowing that in some sense it soon will be. A baby, an actual product of their love, is becoming alive. Ibrahim pins Silvia down and tastes every part of her, confusing calf with biceps and shoulder with knee, leaving a line of salty kisses all along her belly. Then he reaches the heart of her. At any rate, it feels like a heart. Hot as, wet as, vital and pulsing. This poor girl, he thinks: her heart inside out.

  They are breathing at the same time until the moment when neither of them is breathing at all.

  “I love you, you know?” he says, feeling his love for her swell inside his chest and his heartbeat in his ears.

  “I love you too,” she says, feeling it in her lower belly, and she closes her eyes in a vestigial sign of prayer.

  LVII

  HARVEST DAY. A morning sharp and gold. Already the leaves are like embers in a fire, flickering softly between orange, red, and yellow. The world is ablaze. During the days the sun heats up the world like a greenhouse, but at night the cold falls hard as glass.

  This is the last full day that all six of them will be together. MJ, JB, Ben, and Dan are leaving the following morning, sharing the bus to Timmins and then catching their respective trains. The brothers will go west, the Frenchies east. But for the moment things feel normal. Well, normal but accentuated. The golden sharpness of it all made somehow more acute.

  Silvia and MJ are sitting off to the side, under the birches, letting the boys do all the work. They’re close enough to be a part of it, though, and between the six of them there is all the warmth of a group of friends who’ve known each other for years but haven’t seen each other in ages.

  Quietly MJ asks, “How are you doing?” Her hair is even redder than the leaves, and the light from behind makes it look like flames.

  “I’m fine!” Silvia says, disproportionately exuberant. “So fine.” Then: “Well. You know. Sad you’re all leaving.” She knits her fingers together.

  “So you’re going to stay for a little while longer? With Ibrahim?”

  “Yeah. We’ve decided that we will stay here for a bit. It’ll be nice here when everything is quiet.”

  “Don’t your parents want you to come home?” MJ asks.

  “I haven’t spoken to them.” Silvia shakes her head. “I can’t.”

  A bee lands on Silvia’s left thigh, and with her right hand she gestures, without touching, for it to fly off. MJ doesn’t notice any of this. The small hum of the bee’s wings carries with it a certain sadness that doesn’t leave when it coasts back to its home.

  The autumn honey draws from a wide mixture of wildflowers, all of them darker than the clover and fruit blossoms of the earlier, milkier harvest. There’s still some dark, earthy buckwheat flowering, and this tints the honey amber; there’s also goldenrod this time around, complicating the flavour with its particular spice; and there are grapevines nearby too, from which local farmers make a bright red wine. The bees have collected nectar from all these flowers, and the resulting flavour—blackcurrant, maple sugar, peaches both plump and gauzy—would have a sommelier in tongue-map raptures.

  This particular harvest normally happens in the beginning of October, but this year’s heat and drought mean the honey is ready earlier than usual. Silvia has long stopped questioning the ways in which time and nature here follow different rules from the ones she used to know. Despite the desiccation, they find that the harvest yields nearly twice Cynthia and Hartford’s expectations. The hives are full, sticky, flowing.

  Ben and Dan raise a comb high, each grasping one side of the frame, and hold it up to the sun. It’s kaleidoscopic, mathematical perfection. Golden honey trickles from the cells before the men have even unsealed the caps. A couple of bees hover around the honeycomb, still possessively, lazily, clinging to their wealth.

  Ibrahim and JB uncap the cells and Ben and Dan drain the honey. They fill 174 jars. It’s the colour of healthy urine, just as it should be.

  Everyone has done their best to keep the flowers healthy and the bees provided for, and this time their best was enough.

  The success is duly celebrated over dinner. Hartford has made roast goose, its legs tied up in string, its skin, with its plucked pores, crispy and golden with honey.

  “I killed it myself,” Cynthia says. “Every year Hartford says he’ll do it, and every year I have to do it for him. You have to wring their necks, and he just can’t bear to do it.” She smiles at him.

  Hartford, blushing, carves the bird tenderly, each pink slice falling light as a sheet of paper.

  Cynthia serves them, adding mounds of buttery potatoes, sprinkling them with chopped chives from the garden. There is Niagara wine too, and mead and wheat beer brewed locally.

  “A toast,” she says, holding up a glass of red. “To all of you, to thank you for your help this season. We couldn’t have done it without you.” She pushes her glass forward into the air; everyone cheers without clinking.

  Hartford clears his throat; it sounds like a horse braying. “I second that.” He swallows. “Thank you, all of you.”

  “Cheers to Hartford,” Ben interrupts. “To the goose!”

  Glasses up again; laughter on the air.

  Cynthia nods at Hartford, then goes on. “We hope you all got what you wanted and wish you luck in your future endeavours, right, Hartford?”

  “Right. That’s it, yes.”

  “So this is farewell, but not to . . . all of you. Hartford and I are . . . delighted that Silvia and Ibrahim”—her speech is full of pauses, but she doesn’t seem out of breath—“w
ill be staying on for a little while. And we hope that the rest of you might . . . come back and visit sometimes.”

  It’s hard to say exactly how, but something about Cynthia is different. She seems happier, pink-cheeked. Girlish. Eager.

  Everyone toasts, clinking properly, looking each other in the eyes.

  THE EVENING PASSES, full of laughter and idle chatter. The food is delicious and copious; there’s much too much for them to handle, though they all go back for seconds and thirds.

  Ben and Dan tell stories of epic injuries, canyoning in Central America and caving in Hungary. They laughingly explain that they don’t have that twin connection of empathetic pain. “Thank God,” says Dan, “else we’d feel it all twice.” MJ and JB talk about the nightmarish client commissions they’ve had, vowing—“Again, we are always making this promise”—only to work on their own terms, ever.

  Throughout the meal Silvia is quiet, observing. She has her bell jar back on, Ibrahim notes. She takes a glass of wine so as not to be conspicuous, but she doesn’t drink it.

  “Would you like some milk, Silvia?” Cynthia asks. “Hartford, get her some milk.”

  When the glass of milk appears, Silvia thanks him, nodding, looking at Cynthia as if to ask why she is doing this. She doesn’t drink the milk—the idea of another animal’s milk repulses her right now.

  THE CANDLES on the table shrink from finger-length to thumb stumps. The pale yellow beeswax pools on the uncovered tables.

  Everyone talks about the past months, remembering only the best moments, swapping stories that have become either fables or inside jokes. There is no mention of goodbyes or the future, but everyone knows, for the most part, that they will never see each other again.

  As the evening closes with the velvety depth of focus that alcohol and closeness bring, Silvia feels she’s on the outside, looking in with a clarity unusual to her. Despite her sober lucidity, though, the pattern of it all escapes her still. The lines blur.

  Next there will be more solitude, this much she knows. She understands and fears the power that can come from that. There will be too a parallel of freedom and intimacy, but she does not yet appreciate this balance, and so she cannot fear it.

  PART II

  God heard their groaning.

  —EXODUS 2:24

  I

  SILVIA STANDS in the back doorway, looking out at the lot. Toppling boxes of hives, the shaggy vegetable garden, spindly birch trees turning every shade of flame. She takes a deep breath of the autumn air. Crisp and peppery, fulvous and sweet, she feels it crackle down to the bottom of her lungs. Fall has always been her favourite season. In the fall, time is transitioning to silent hibernation instead of the mad rush of life that comes in springtime. There is a relief as the world starts to settle in on its heels.

  The sky is cloudless, but a few airplanes have made tracks. The sun is warm on her bare arms, but the heat is laced with something hostile: the beginnings of what she can already tell will be a bitter winter. A wind whips up, setting all the leaves and flowers dancing. Silvia exhales, feeling as if the gust comes from her own lungs.

  Though there has still been no rain, Cynthia has impressed upon them how proud she is of how they’ve been handling things. The well is essentially empty—the stone test is now up to six and a half alligators—but they’ve made it work with bottled water, recycled water, grey water, any water but normal water. They would have collected rainwater had there been any rain; there are buckets at the ready under the eaves.

  She slips on a pair of Cynthia’s Birkenstocks and walks into the vegetable patch. Rutabagas, parsnips, onions, potatoes. Carrots, cauliflowers, Brussels sprouts. There’s a hardiness to the autumn vegetables that she respects. The leaves of the zucchini and tomatoes have furled inwards, the first stage of their annual death.

  Ibrahim is upstairs working on a new series inspired by their baby. This time, instead of Moroccan religious symbolism, the images he’s implanted in the work are dream-catchers, full moons, and weaving strands of DNA. He was inspired when he learned that the farm was so close to the Abitibi Indian Reserve, and though he’s never actually gone out to visit it, every day he thinks about making the trip. Silvia features in many of them too: the profile of her face filled in with strings, like veins or textiles—she’s not exactly sure, and she doesn’t like to look too closely.

  As she walks deeper into the garden she sees several bees fumbling about a hive, their movement so quick and aimless they seem to just float there. They come to her, and when she parts her hands—like Moses, she thinks—they leave. The effect is getting stronger. When they’re gone, she’s left with a longing, a craving she can’t specify.

  Before the first frost, Cynthia and Hartford will wrap the hives with fibreglass and tarpaper with a final twine binding. Cynthia explained that they’ll cut a small entrance through all these layers so the bees can go in and out—worker bees leave the hive daily to get rid of personal and collective discharge; they are the cleanest of creatures. But every winter a few bees will embark on a suicide mission. There is no preventing this. It’s programmed in their genetic code, and one cannot mourn their loss.

  Once wrapped up, the colony of bees will slumber all winter long. Bees don’t hibernate, though—they huddle. Placing the queen in the centre, the others cluster to keep her warm. They shiver—so human—to increase temperature through friction. The workers and drones move around the cluster, from the inside to the outside, so no bee gets too cold in the outer layers.

  Silvia wonders what will happen for her this winter. Can the huddling bees be an allegory for her situation? If so, is she the queen, or is the baby the queen? If it’s a boy, as Ibrahim wants, can it still be considered a queen, for the sake of this analogy at least?

  It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

  She tries to dislodge the thought from her mind, but it clings. She’s given up so much of the big stuff, she finds it’s sometimes harder to let go of the smaller things. There’s so much more emptiness now that whatever comes is more reluctant to leave.

  It’s been months since she’s spoken to her parents. She’s been sending them regular, generic letters to keep them from hounding her, but she knows that will keep them away for only so long. She still hasn’t been able to face opening their letters. She has no idea what they’ll do when they find out. Not true: she has many ideas, but can’t bear to entertain them. Her imagination ignites too quickly.

  WITHIN DAYS the temperature drops an octave. The sun seems to have been turned off, and the world closes in on itself. The sudden shift in temperature—from oven-hot to a cold so strong they can feel it in their nostrils—will be temporary, Cynthia and Hartford say.

  “It always happens like this in late September, doesn’t it, Hartford?”

  But the heat does not return.

  In no time at all, rime beards the grass and remaining flowers every morning. The sun burns it away in the day, but it beats back every night.

  The thing about change is that it can sometimes blind you to the things that stay the same. Focused on their baby-to-be and on the cold, like a vice round their heads, and on the loss of their friends, their allies, Silvia and Ibrahim don’t see, don’t think to look at, the constants in their lives. Cynthia. Hartford. The farm itself. And how those constants may or may not have changed amid the rest of it.

  This will creep up on them, like footsteps with no source.

  They have yet to share their news.

  II

  THERE IS LITTLE WORK to do on the farm other than maintain survival. The bees don’t need them until spring, and so Silvia and Ibrahim have more time to themselves. To each other.

  Silvia’s stomach is still flat; the baby is just a little apple seed.

  Ibrahim thinks about this little seed—his, theirs—all the time.

  It’s night and the sky is black. The kind of black you can’t get in cities. The kind of black so dense it would look exaggerated if he were to paint it.

&nbs
p; Ibrahim prefers to paint without any artificial lighting, so he flicks a match and cups the flame to some white emergency candles. He’s siphoned a stash of candles from the cupboard by the front door, where Cynthia and Hartford keep flashlights, wool blankets, nails, and rubber sealant, and lights them one by one, gradually lighting enough for either an attic shrine or a raging fire.

  One candle and he can see her, smoke-lit on the tartan. The second cuts shadows in her cheekbones and arches her eyebrows—look, she’s a painting already. Three and the light pools in her navel, in the dip above her upper lip.

  He lights all seventeen of them, until the room is liquid gold.

  Then he pulls a fresh piece of paper onto his easel and tapes it in place. “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. She closes her eyes.

  Ibrahim holds the piece of charcoal between his right thumb and index finger and keeps an HB pencil between his teeth, sideways, as if it were a rose and he a tango dancer. He uses this nib for fine details, and he prefers these erasers for their fineness too. He pulls the charcoal through the air, looking simultaneously at the page and his subject, following the line of Silvia’s profile. Her small nose, her big mouth, her hard chin. Already preparing for nursing, her nipples are growing long like the eraser on his pencil. (He can’t focus on the detail of them for several reasons, but mostly because the charcoal draws too wide a line and not because of the impossible distraction of them, those perfect pink nipples.) Her pronged hipbones, her belly button like a drain, all the flesh elegantly, casually, sloping towards it.

  “I can’t do this,” he says suddenly, putting everything down.