The Honey Pot at Dawn

I want to tell you about the honey pot, but first you need to know about the seaweed. They're connected, sort of. Everything in my life connects back to quiet mornings on the river, and I don't fully understand why myself.

I started harvesting seaweed when I was thirty-four. That was ten years ago now, and I can tell you the exact reason: my mother died that spring, and I discovered that I could not sleep past four in the morning anymore. Grief does that, apparently. It rewires your clock. So instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling, I started driving down to the Niger River before dawn and wading in with a rake and a sack.

Was it sensible? No! It was strange and lonely and my neighbor Lyn told me repeatedly that I had lost my mind. "You're a swim coach, Jillian. You teach teenagers to do flip turns. Why are you pulling weeds out of a river at four a.m.?"

"It's not weeds, it's seaweed," I said. "And it's quiet."

"Your pool is quiet."

"The pool has chlorine and parents," I told her. "The river has herons."

She gave up on that argument, the way she gives up on most of my arguments, with a sigh and a promise to pray for me. She's been my neighbor for twelve years and she still prays for me, which is either sweet or insulting. I've decided it's sweet.

I have never said this out loud: I liked being alone. I told myself I was fine alone for so long that it became a kind of fact, like gravity or the price of diesel. My one serious relationship ended when I was twenty-four. He wanted to move abroad. I wanted to stay. We both cried and then we both got on with it, and that was the end of it. Twenty years of sensible decisions followed. Sensible job. Sensible house in a sensible cul-de-sac where every garage door is painted a different cheerful color, because the homeowners association is run by a woman named Denise who believes in morale.

Sensible, sensible, sensible. But then every morning I stood knee-deep in the river with the sky going pink, and I sold my seaweed to a health food shop in town that pays me almost nothing for it, and I felt, for about an hour a day, like someone who had chosen her own life. Even if the choice looked insane from the outside.

* * *

The threshing festival comes around every year in the autumn, and I volunteer for it the way some people volunteer for church committees. Badly, with complaints, but reliably. I've done it for six years now. Herbert runs the whole thing. He's sixty-seven, a retired mechanic, and he has the energy of a man half his age and the organizational style of a man twice it.

"Jillian! You're on nights this year!" he bellowed at me when I signed in, in front of about forty people.

"I'm on what?"

"Nights! The inspection station. Three a.m. shift."

Herbert assigns shifts like a king assigns land. You don't argue, you just take the land and hope it's not on fire. So that's how I, a forty-four-year-old woman whose only nighttime experience is worrying about tomorrow's swim practice, ended up assigned to the roadside truck inspection station for the three a.m. stretch of the festival.

The inspection station stays open all night during festival week. Trucks come through hauling grain and equipment and occasionally livestock, and somebody has to wave them through or check their papers. It's not complicated work. It's mostly sitting on a bench under a lamp with a clipboard, feeling sorry for yourself.

The first night, I got there at two forty-five and found a man already sitting on my bench.

Well. Not my bench. But still.

He was lanky, the kind of tall that folds, with forearms like rope and hands that looked like they'd been used hard for forty years. He was maybe forty-one. He had a thermos and a book, and when he saw me he stood up like standing up for people was still a habit he believed in.

"You must be Jillian," he said. "Herbert said someone was coming. I'm Rory. I drive nights."

"You drive nights on purpose?"

"On purpose, yes." He smiled. "Someone has to."

We shook hands. His palm was a landscape of calluses. Mine are swimmers' palms, which is a different landscape entirely, and I found myself wondering what he'd think of that, and then I wondered why I was wondering that.

Here's what you need to know about the three a.m. stretch at an inspection station: almost nothing happens. A truck came through at three ten. Another at three fifty. Between them, we sat on the bench and talked, and I learned that Rory had been driving trucks for nineteen years, that he used to work a different route with a different company, and that he volunteers at the festival because "it's the only week of the year I know where I'll be sleeping."

"That's bleak," I said.

"It's honest," he said. "Is your bleakness more cheerful?"

I laughed. Nobody had asked me that before. "My bleakness is very cheerful. I'm told I'm fine alone."

"By whom?"

"By me. Constantly. I'm very persuasive."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and then he went quiet, and then I felt him looking at the space between us on the bench, which is where I had set down my honey pot.

Now, the honey pot. You've been waiting for it and here it is. It's hand-blown glass, amber colored, with a little wooden dipper, and I have carried it everywhere for years. To festival meetings. To swim practice. To the river, once, which was a mistake. People notice it, because you don't see a glass honey pot on a bench at an inspection station every day.

"That's a good pot," Rory said, leaning forward to look. "Glass, huh? That's old, isn't it? The base is worn."

"My grandmother's," I said. "She left it to me. I fill it every year at the festival."

"With honey?"

"With river honey. There are wild hives along the banks near where I harvest. Every autumn during festival week, I take a little, just a little, and I fill the pot, and it lasts the whole year."

He turned to look at me properly then. "You harvest seaweed at dawn and keep honey in your grandmother's pot. Are you a folk tale? Did Herbert send you here as a test?"

"I'm a swim coach."

"That doesn't answer my question."

"It's the only answer I have that doesn't sound made up," I said. "Trust me, the honey pot is the least strange thing about me."

"I'd like to hear the strangest thing, then."

"Absolutely not. We've known each other for forty minutes."

"Forty-five," he said, checking his watch, and I caught myself smiling at a lanky truck driver under a lamp at three in the morning and thought, well. This is either nothing or it's something, and I have been nothing for a long time.

The next truck came through at four fifteen and broke the spell. Rory did the inspection, quick and thorough, and the driver waved and rumbled off into the dark, and we sat back down.

"Does the honey taste different?" he asked. "From year to year?"

"Every year tastes different. This year was smoky, because of the dry season fires. Last year was almost floral."

"You remember that?"

"Of course I remember that. You spend ten years filling the same pot, you remember what's in it."

He was quiet for a moment. "Ten years," he said. "That's a long thing to keep doing."

"It's a small thing."

"No," he said. "Small things you keep doing are the biggest things there are. That's what's left at the end. The small things you kept."

I didn't have anything to say to that, which almost never happens to me. I sat there holding the pot in my lap, feeling the weight of the glass, warm from my hands.

The shift ended at five, when the sky started going gray and Herbert's day crew came stomping up the road with coffee. Rory gathered his thermos and his book, and he stood there a moment, folding and unfolding himself, like a man deciding something.

"Same bench tomorrow?" he asked.

"I think it's my bench," I said.

"It's everyone's bench. It's a festival bench."

"Then I'll see you at the bench, three a.m."

He grinned and walked off toward his truck, and I stood there in the gray dawn with a pot of smoky honey and the sudden, terrifying feeling that I had just agreed to something. I texted Lyn from the car.

"Who is he?" she wrote back immediately, because Lyn texts back immediately, it's her defining trait.

"Nobody. A truck driver. We're on the same shift."

"Jillian. You never text me at five a.m. unless something happened."

"Nothing happened. We talked about honey."

"About WHAT?"

I put the phone away and drove home past the cheerful garage doors, and I told myself, the way I always do, that I was fine alone. Sensible. That's me. But the pot sat on my passenger seat all the way home, catching the early light, and I caught myself wondering whether river honey would keep for two years instead of one, if a person had a reason to fill it twice.

* * *

We kept the bench. Every night of festival week, three a.m., Rory's truck rattled in and I pretended I hadn't been watching the road for twenty minutes. On the fourth night he produced a dented thermos and two plastic bowls and said, "I brought breakfast. Before you argue, it's millet porridge and it's already made, so arguing would waste it."

"You brought me porridge at three in the morning?"

"I brought us porridge. There's a difference and it matters."

Well. What do you say to that? I said thank you, that's what, and took the bowl. It was good, milky and sweet with a little crunch of sugar on top that hadn't fully dissolved, and I told him so with my mouth full, which is not my most dignified moment.

"My mother's recipe," he said. "Sort of. I stole half of it and guessed the other half."

"You've been making it long?"

"Nineteen years of truck stops, you learn to cook in a cab. It's that or eat gas station pies until your heart files for divorce." He blew on his spoon. "Can I ask you something? And you can tell me it's nosy."

"Everyone tells me things are nosy. Go ahead."

"How does a swim coach end up on the three a.m. shift at a truck inspection station? Nobody volunteers for three a.m. Nobody even loses a bet for three a.m."

I stirred my porridge, buying time. "I can't sleep past four. Haven't been able to for ten years. My mother died that spring and my body just, I don't know, reset itself. Four a.m., eyes open, every day. So I figured if I'm going to be awake, I might as well be useful. Herbert gives me the shift nobody wants and I harvest seaweed after, down at the river, before the sun comes up. It works out."

"Seaweed. From the Niger."

"You've heard stranger."

"From you? Not yet." He ate a few spoonfuls, quiet. Then he said the thing that surprised me more than anything he'd said all week. "I've been driving through Birni N'Konni for ten years. Ten. Same route, twice a month, sometimes more. And I never once stopped to see the festival. Not once. I've watched it from the cab window, all the tents and the lights and the threshing floors, and I always thought, next year. And then next year, and then next year."

"Ten years of next year?"

"Ten years of next year." He looked at his bowl like it had asked him a question. "That's the trouble with my job. You're always passing through. Everywhere is a place you're leaving. You start to think that's what life is, a long line of places you're leaving." He laughed, a little embarrassed. "Listen to me. This is what happens when you feed a man porridge and let him talk at three a.m."

"It's good talk," I said. "Keep going."

"No, no, your turn. Tell me the strangest thing about you. You promised it existed."

"I promised no such thing."

"You implied it. Strongly. Under a lamp. I have witnesses." He gestured at the empty road, which, fair enough, contained no witnesses. I laughed and gave him a small one anyway, that I talk to my honey pot when I fill it, every year, a little report on the year, and he didn't laugh at me at all, which was somehow worse. Better. Worse-better.

"Does the pot answer?" he asked, dead serious.

"Never. It just listens. Very discreet, my grandmother's pot."

"That's the strangest thing? Talking to honey?"

"That's all you're getting this week."

"Then I'll have to come back next week." And there it was, sitting between us on the bench, bigger than the pot. He picked up the bowls like it was effortless and washed them at the station tap, and I watched him and thought about next year, and how many of mine I'd spent saying it.

* * *

The first week of the festival ended. Half the tents stayed up for the quieter second week, Herbert shook every hand at least twice, and I went back to sensible: swim practice, the health food shop, seaweed before dawn. Rory and I texted. Not constantly! Just sometimes. A photo of a sunset he'd caught outside Maradi. A complaint about a broken tailgate. I reported that the smoky honey was excellent on porridge, and he replied with three exclamation points, which I interpreted, possibly too generously, as meaningful.

Then, on a Thursday, I came home from practice and heard music from the shared grill area at the end of the cul-de-sac. That's a neighborhood thing here, somebody starts the grill and gradually everyone drifts over with a chair and something to burn. Lyn was already there, of course, Lyn is always already there, and I was carrying my tofu skewers like a good neighbor when I saw him.

Rory. At our grill. Standing next to Lyn's husband, holding a paper plate.

I want you to understand that I stopped walking. Fully stopped, mid-cul-de-sac, as a cartoon character who has run off a cliff and is considering the situation.

Lyn spotted me and waved with her whole arm, the way she does. "Jillian. Come meet our new friend. He inspected my cousin's truck at the festival, can you believe it, small world."

"Small world," Rory agreed, and he had the decency to look about as surprised as I felt, which helped. Somewhat. "Your neighbor tells me you coach flips."

"Flip turns. Yes," I handed my skewers to whoever was nearest and tried to be a person instead of a filing cabinet of facts about myself. Lyn, meanwhile, was doing