The Honey Farm They Signed Away

The Record, Straight

I will not pretend the part that came after was clean or quick. It was neither.

The county attorney charged my mother with felony theft from a vulnerable adult, forgery, and attempting to file a false instrument. She pleaded, in the end, rather than sit through a trial where every one of my grandfather’s letters would be read aloud into the record. She was ordered to pay restitution, all of it, a hundred and ninety-one thousand dollars, secured against her house in town, and she was given probation and house arrest. She lost her job at the county clerk’s office the week she was charged. Kayla was not charged, but the condo and the boat and the rest of it were pulled into the restitution, and the videos stopped, and I have not spoken to my sister since.

My mother has written to me twice. I did not open the letters. I did not throw them away either. I put them in a box, labeled with the year, in the back of my closet, because that is what I do. Maybe someday I will read them. The record does not require me to answer. It only requires me to keep it straight.

The farm is mine, free and clear. The roof is fixed. I moved out of the duplex on Sumner Street and into the downstairs bedroom where my grandfather died, and I wake up every morning to the field.

The hives came back. It took two seasons, but the clover along the south fence hums again in June the way it hummed when I was a girl, loud enough to hear from the porch, a sound like the ground is thinking. I extract the honey myself now in the old honey house, and I bottle it, and I label every single jar with a strip of masking tape and the date, the way I have since I was seven, and I sell it off a little table at the end of the drive on Saturdays with a coffee can for the money and a sign that says DYER HONEY, HONOR SYSTEM.

An old man from town asked me once whether I worried, running an honor system, whether I worried somebody would take the honey and not leave the money.

I told him no. I told him that in my experience people who take what is not theirs almost always leave a record, and that if a person only keeps track, only writes it down, only refuses to throw things away, the truth has a way of sitting there patient as a field in April, soaking in instead of running off, waiting for the right day to come up.

He laughed and put two dollars in the can and took a jar.

I sat down on my grandfather’s porch that evening and tipped the kitchen chair back against the clapboard and looked up. Cassiopeia was there, and the wide milky smear of the summer sky, the same stars that stood over that ground when it was buffalo grass and no fence at all, the same stars that will stand over it long after I am gone.

This place knows me. I never did let anybody talk me into believing it didn’t.

My little bookkeeper, he called me. He knew exactly what he was doing.

He kept something alive that could get along without him.

So do I.