The Honey House

Chapter One: What the House Held

The cotton stood knee-high, and the heat came up off the rows like something with a pulse.

Lottie Rudd worked the middles with a hoe worn down to a gray tongue of steel, chopping the crabgrass out from between the plants, moving the way her mother had taught her: don't fight the row, walk it. The sun sat on the back of her neck. Sweat ran down the insides of her arms and dried white by the time it reached her wrists. Somewhere off past the fence line, a mockingbird went through its whole catalog of borrowed songs, and Lottie listened without stopping her hands, because listening was free.

Forty acres. Not hers, not her father's. The land belonged to Mr. Alton Rife, who owned a good deal of that part of Troup County, and Virgil Rudd sharecropped it the way he did everything—hard for three weeks and then not at all.

By noon the shade under the chinaberry tree looked like water. Lottie let herself have four minutes of it, counting them out in her head the way she counted most things, and then she went back into the sun.

She was fourteen that June. She was tall for it and thin in the way that comes from a house where the flour ran out before the month did. Her hair was the color of straw left in the rain, and her eyes were her mother's—that was what people used to say, before they stopped saying things to her at all.

The house sat at the top of the rise, leaning slightly east, the way a person leans when they've been carrying a bucket in one hand for years. Clapboard gone silver. A tin roof that sang under rain and roared under hail. A porch with three good boards and one bad one, and a bottom step that had been broken since the winter before last.

That step was the thing Lottie could not look at straight.

Her mother had died on that step. Or at the foot of it, in the packed dirt of the yard, on a March night in 1959 that had smelled like wet pine. Rosie Rudd, thirty-three years old, a fall from the porch, a blow to the back of the head. Dr. Chalmers came out from town with his hat in his hand and used the word accidental, and the county wrote it down, and that was the whole of it. Ruled and filed. Two lines of ink.

Lottie had been twelve. She had been lying in the back room with the quilt pulled over her head, and she had heard everything that came before.

She had heard her father's voice climb the way it did, from low and reasonable to a sound like a door being dragged over gravel. She had heard her mother say, very clearly, in the flat tone she used when she had decided something, *I am taking her with me.* She had heard three heavy steps, and a scuffle, and a sound she had never been able to describe to herself since, a sound like a sack of feed dropped off a wagon. Then nothing. Then her father hollering for help in a voice gone high and strange, hollering for a neighbor a half mile off who could not possibly hear.

When Lottie came out on the porch in her nightgown, her father was kneeling in the yard with her mother's head in his lap, and he was crying, and he said, *She fell, Lottie. Lord God, she fell.*

He had said it again the next day, and at the funeral, and a hundred times since, until saying it had worn a groove and the groove had become the road. Sometimes Lottie thought he believed it. That was the part that made her stomach turn over. Sometimes she thought he had told it to himself so many times that the true thing had been buried under the telling, like a fence post swallowed by a tree.

She never said otherwise out loud. She was twelve, and then thirteen, and then fourteen, and she was not a fool. There was no one in the county who would take the word of Virgil Rudd's girl over the word of the coroner, and there was no place for her to go if she said it and was not believed.

So she kept it. She kept it the way she kept the other thing.

The other thing lived under the floor of the back room, in the corner where the boards had never been nailed right, inside a Prince Albert tobacco tin with a rusted hinge. Lottie went to it that evening after she had put the hoe in the crib and washed her face at the pump.

Inside the tin were four items: a hair comb of her mother's, tortoiseshell, missing two teeth; a wren's egg, blown empty, that she had found the summer she was nine; a folded page of newsprint with a picture of the ocean on it, which she had never seen; and the photograph.

The photograph was small, with a white deckled edge, and creased down the middle from being carried. It showed a girl standing at the end of a long row of beehives. The hives were painted white and set up on cinder blocks, and they went off into the distance in a line, past where the picture could hold them. The girl was maybe sixteen. She wore a man's shirt with the sleeves rolled, and her hair was tied up in a scarf, and she was laughing—not posing, laughing—at someone standing outside the frame to the left. There was a veil hat in her hand, hanging down by her leg like she'd just snatched it off.

The girl was Rosie.

Lottie had seen her mother smile plenty. She had never once seen her mother look like that. Loose. Unguarded. Like a person with nothing behind her she needed to watch.

On the back, in Rosie's careful, schooled cursive—the hand of a woman who had been proud of her penmanship and had kept it up all her life, writing out grocery lists nobody needed in a script fit for a wedding invitation—were seven words.

*Pearl will know what to do.*

That was all. No last name. No town. No date.

Lottie had found the tin three weeks after the funeral, when she was pulling up the loose board to hide a nickel. She had understood at once that the tin was her mother's and that her mother had kept it hidden from Virgil, and she had understood, in the wordless way children understand such things, that whatever it meant, it was not for him.

What did Lottie know about Pearl?

She knew almost nothing, and she had turned that almost-nothing over so many times it had gone smooth as a creek stone.

She knew that her mother, before she married, had lived down south somewhere, in the flat country. She knew that once, when Lottie was small and sick with a sore throat, Rosie had come in with a spoon of honey so dark it was nearly black and said, *This is the good kind, from down at Oxbow. Nothing up here tastes like this.* And Lottie had said, *Where's Oxbow?* and Rosie had said, *A long way,* and looked at the window for a while.

She knew that her mother had kept bees once. Not on their place—Virgil said bees were a nuisance and a waste of a man's time—but somewhere, sometime, because Rosie could stand in a clover field with her eyes shut and tell you whether the hum was a good year or a bad one, and because she had a way of putting her hand flat on a wasp nest board and saying, *Hush now,* like it was a thing she'd learned from someone.

And she knew, because she had watched it happen at the mailbox two or three times a year, that her mother wrote letters she did not talk about, and walked them to the crossroads herself instead of leaving them for the carrier.

That was the sum of it. A word, a taste, a photograph, and seven lines of cursive.

Lottie put the picture back in the tin and the tin back under the board, and she went and started supper, because the truck was coming.

She heard it before she saw it, the way she always did. Her father's Ford had a hole in the muffler and a knock in the second cylinder, and the sound of it coming up the road went into Lottie's body before it reached her ears—a tightening in the belly, a lightness in the hands. She had come to understand that she could tell a great deal from that sound. If he took the curve slow, he was tired and would eat and sleep. If he took it fast, he had money in his pocket and had spent some of it, and the evening would be a long one.

He took it fast.

Lottie set the skillet on the eye of the stove and put the cornmeal in the bowl and did not let her hands shake, because that was a thing she had trained out of herself, the way you train a dog. She looked once at the back room, where the floorboard was, and then she looked at the door.

Outside, the light went from gold to bronze. The mockingbird quit. Down in the bottom, the first whip-poor-will of the evening started up its three sad notes, over and over, like it had forgotten the rest of the song.