The Honey Farm They Signed Away

The Man Who Kept Bees

Let me tell you about Grandpa Walt, because you cannot understand any of the rest of it if you do not understand him.

He was born in 1938 on the same section of ground where the farm still sits, three miles north of Callaway, and except for two years in the Army he lived his whole life within sight of the water tower. He drove a grain truck in the fall and worked at the co-op scale house in the winter, and in the summers, for as long as I was alive, he kept bees.

He did not do it for the money. There is no real money in forty hives. He did it because his own grandfather had done it, and because he said a man should keep something alive that could get along without him. In June the clover would come up along the south fence and the whole field would hum so loud you could hear it from the porch, a sound like the ground itself was thinking, and he would sit out there in the evening with a glass of iced tea and just listen.

He taught me the constellations from that porch. He would tip his kitchen chair back against the clapboard and point up with one thick finger and name them, Cassiopeia and the Dippers and the wide milky smear of the summer sky, and he would tell me that the same stars had stood over that field when it was buffalo grass and no fence at all, and that they would stand over it long after the two of us were gone, so there was no sense being in a hurry about anything.

I cried on that porch the night my father left. I was eleven. My mother had locked herself in the bathroom of our house in town, and Kayla was a baby asleep in her crib, and I had ridden my bike three miles in the dark to the only place where somebody would be glad to see me. Grandpa Walt did not ask me a single question. He made me cocoa on the stove and sat with me until the stars came out and I stopped shaking. He put his hand on the back of my head, one time, and said, “This place knows you, Ruthie. Don’t ever let anybody talk you into believing it doesn’t.”

I helped him extract honey the last August of his life. He was eighty-five and his hands were not sure anymore, and we went slow, and we ran the frames through the old extractor and the whole building filled up with that warm gold smell, and we bottled forty-one jars and I labeled every one with a strip of masking tape and the date, the way I had since I was seven. He watched me do it and he laughed, a dry little laugh, and he said, “My little bookkeeper. You’ll keep the record straight when I’m not here to keep it myself.”

I did not know he meant it the way he meant it. I did not know he had already been to see a lawyer in Broken Bow, that he already understood exactly what my mother would try to do, and that he had decided, quietly, to make sure the record was straight before he went.

He died in his sleep in February, in the downstairs bedroom of that house, with the field asleep under snow.