As Sweet as Honey

8




Meterling picked up the phone. It was an old-fashioned one, black, with a heft that, if it was hurled, could hurt someone. The cradle was heavy, too. She put the receiver back. She hesitated but did not pick up the phone again. The slip of paper was in her hand with the cousin’s number written in scrawled letters, haphazardly spaced, in black fountain-pen ink. She gazed out the window and saw that the goat was no longer in the garden. The sun lit up the coral jasmine tree, making the orange tongues of its flowers fire points. Momentarily dazzled by the sight, she looked away. She smoothed down her light cardigan. It was too large for her, and a thread was fraying near one of the buttons. She absently pulled at it, and then bent down her neck in an odd angle to bite it off with her teeth. She became ashamed of her own ferocity, and smoothed the sweater down again. She got up and walked to the door, but changed her mind. She began to pace. There was something on the floor. It was one of our marbles. She picked it up and held it up to the light. It had a pale green tint, with a brown cat’s eye inside. Meterling wiped the marble in the paloo of her sari, and placed it in her mouth. She let it roll around against her teeth, bit down softly, and then spat it out again.

“I must be going crazy,” she thought. She looked out the window once again and began to cry. She placed her hands on her ever-bigger belly and shuddered with tears.

I saw her from the doorway and ran to her to hug her. My arms couldn’t reach around, but I had forgotten that. I wanted to take away her pain, moor her somehow, make it better.



Gin is made with juniper berries and a careful blend of other herbs. If Meterling was to inherit any of Archer’s wealth, she hoped it would be a field of coriander, a field of cardamom, and a field of turmeric. This was all she could handle, she thought, wanting no part of the great monstrosity of a house his father owned in England, with its dark, damp walls and sweep of staircase, its foyer so crowded with photographs of unsmiling relatives and white nawabs, a house that Archer said suffered from a lack of breath. There was no money, except in gin, but Archer’s family was going to see to it she got very little. Certainly there was no will; there had been no time for a will. But if there had been a will, she might have gotten three fields. That’s what she had wanted, after all. For Archer did talk of his death once, a night they took a boat around the lake as the sun burnt the water with crimson. He worried aloud that he might very likely go before her, leaving her a widow. She had laughed her twinkly laugh then and told him, looking straight into his eyes, “Then leave me three fields. One of rye, two of spice.”

“You are like Isak Dinesen,” he said, taking her into his arms.

“Who?”

“A woman who was brave beyond her times.”

And then he began to kiss her, and there really was no further talk on the subject.


Meterling found the story from Isak Dinesen that Archer had mentioned. A woman pleads for the life of her son, who is accused of arson, and the overlord asks her to plow a field of rye in one day to spare his life. She plows with the village and the overlord and his guest watching, until she finishes, her son walking beside her all along, and collapses in his arms to her death. For the freedom of one, the death of another. Sorrow-Acre. An inheritance of sorrow. A haunting tale. Isak Dinesen, who had had a philanderer for a husband, whom she still loved, some say, after their divorce. And now Archer was gone, and she had no wish for rye.

And here was his cousin, wanting her to phone, leaving a message hurriedly scribbled by Pa. She had no wish to phone. She wanted Archer.



Archer had told her about the seasons in Surrey, his old home. In March, everything became mud, as the weather shifted from ice to less ice. Then a brief, pale-lemony sun that melted the ice and softened the soil, painting the backs of rubber boots with squishy dirt.

“Once I was walking and came across violets, half-hidden in all that mud,” he told her. “The trees hadn’t greened yet—everything was still bare branches and gray. But the burst of violet was sudden, a gift.

“Finding you, Meterling, is like coming across those violets—a gift.”

And Meterling blushed. For even though the idea of an absence of flowers was alien to her, she knew what he meant from the emotion in his voice. And again, there was nothing else to do but fall swiftly into his arms.

Later, they wondered about children.

“Yes, a good idea,” she murmured, her face pressed to his neck.

“Yes,” he replied, “a wonderful idea.”