10.16

Her hands were crossed and folded, which pulled her otherwise-broad shoulders in. She held her shoes. A curl or two fell, unruly, across her forehead. A loose bun wasn't tenacious enough to hold her hair. The stained concrete floor of the massive tool house was cool beneath her feet. She could see a tall man walking in from across the field, passing other workers in the narrow rows. The air danced and shimmered around his shoulders, but even squinting, she couldn't make out his eyes.
Was he kind? He had to be.
He took off his hat and waved it at her, not cutting his stride. She broke out of the pavilion's shade and walked, near-stiff, to meet him. The air hit her again like a physical object.
"Ho there," he called, from earshot.
"Hello!" She was forced to yell. "I said, hello!"
She could now make out his feet's soft crunch in the old leaf litter between the rows. His toes were splayed out wide, raw, and red. His shoulders and chest were nut-brown. He looked up at her. "Sorry about that. I was on the other field. Mike said you wanted a job?"
"That's right."
"But I'm not hiring."
"You haven't seen me work."
"Fair. But am I supposed to replace one of my guys for you? They're hungry too. We all are."
She paused and said with maybe a touch more dirt in it, "You haven't seen me work." Her nostrils flared once, twice, and she struggled with a self-righteous anger that flashed across her face and evaporated in the sun.
He swept a beet-red hand across his beet-red face and flicked the sweat down into the dirt. He narrowed his eyes at her with that look. She had already shifted her weight to turn and go when he said "Alright. Let's see this." She rocked back on her heels, near-tipping over. Her mouth was suddenly very dry.
He led her down a long row through the terrible bake of the sun to where a man waited in a screaming-white truck. From the back, he plucked a fat linen bag the size of her palm and tossed it to her. "There's your gold. Where's your painter?"
She held up a broad brown hand.
"I'll believe it when I see it," he said, hopping down from the truck. "Come on. There's a fresh row just down here." He fell silent while they walked, and she could feel the thin vibration of her pulse in her neck, hear the crisp sound of the dirt beneath their toes. He turned to her without speaking and cleared his throat.
"Here?"
"Yeah."
She unclipped the top of the cloth bag and held its neck pinched in the fingers of her left hand, rolling the cloth down over them to hang the bag just so in her palm, opened between her two longest digits. Softly tapping her right fingers into the dusty-gold powder in the bag, she picked up a paltry amount with her hand. Her left hand snapped closed again on the small bag and she straightened, reaching up to the top of the plant with her right hand where a stem abruptly truncated in a small confusion of spidery tips. She flicked the pad of one finger across, finding another right behind, flick, another, flick, flick, flick. Tap the dust again–pollen, was it? They called it something she had never bothered to learn about–and again into the plant to find a feather. Flick, flick, flick, flick, and paint the plant. Quickly, efficiently. She was buried into the depth of the vine each time she stepped forward, her skin complaining at the tiny bristles on the top of each leaf. Flick flick flick. She worked the whole plant and stepped back.
He nodded. "Where'd you learn that? 's a new style."
"Up somewhere near Edmonton. I don't remember the name of the town."
"Growing?"
"Grapes."
He nodded and rocked forward and back in the softened dirt of the row. He seemed to settle. "I don't normally hire women, you know. Not often tall enough to reach the tops of the plants." There passed the space of one breath between them, during which he flicked his eyes up to hers. "Not your problem, though. If you want a job, I think I have an idea for you, if you're up to it. Grapes, you said?"
"In Alberta."
"You get snow up there?"
"Once."
He shivered. She opened the bag on her fingers and flicked the last of the powdery gold from her right hand, loosed the bag again, and clipped it shut. She looked calm, but the movements of her hands were too deliberate, too careful. He was lost in a reverie and she watched him carefully, dark eyes unmoving, breath slow. As she breathed, her shirt pulled in small ripples at the dark, wet patches down her back and sides.
He jumped a little as though realizing, wiped his brow again. "Alright, then. I liked what I saw. You wanna follow me, then?" He turned on his heel and strode off, light and fast. She reached out one last touch to the plant she had worked. Without turning, he started talking fast. "I don't think your talent is useful out here in the tomatoes." Her head turned to the plants as she walked, brows furrowed. "They're expensive, but they don't require much skill, much care. They're sturdy, you know. I mean, we've got 'em out here in the sun. Obviously. Nothing to it: Most of the guys use old horse hair brushes and we get good results. But that finger trick, now that's something else."
The two closed in on a massive building with closed up walls. An enormous hum vibrated through the soles of her feet and the building's edges seemed to vibrate with the sun. The whole surface was painted a sun-sharp white and her eyes watered as she looked ahead.
"You're something else and we have something else. Come on inside." A key in a lock. And the door, three feet thick of steel. She stooped as she stepped over the mantle into the dark beyond and then: she jumped back out. A roiling cloud of fog was hissing over the steel around her, the face of which dripped heavily on the floor. He saw her face and said "We have a state license for the cold house. Don't worry. We're all legal here. You said you had worked in Edmonton, so I thought . . ."
She looked at him through a hot face.
"Alright. Let's go."
She stepped through, and he swung the door closed behind her. Its clang made a tumbledown echo that rolled through the long corridor. His light, slapping footfalls proceeded them to the lockers lining the last ten feet before a nearly opaque glass door. The light beyond was golden-green.
He tossed her a neat bundle of grey cloth. "Can't take anything in there," he said. He sounded embarrassed. She only nodded.
The pair scrubbed their feet and hands. He stood facing away from her while she rinsed off the rest of her. He put on his own silly-looking smock over his sunburnt shoulders, and flicked one eyebrow up when she hesitated. "Yeah?"
"I'm ready. You can open the door."
The door swung into the next room, and a wall, three layers thick of thin cotton strips hung down beyond. He pushed through and disappeared. She pushed through the wall and nearly lost her direction, nearly tripped, nearly floated away, but came through the far side blinking at the sudden return of light. Her skin prickled up. The last of the shower water felt like it was freezing. Her chest hurt. She looked up.
The refrigerated room stretched out half a kilometer or more across, an enormous distance for such a low ceiling. Golden light tore through the thick plants from a hundred skylights, bouncing around the small space left for it until all light was swallowed up at the floor and ceiling by vines, stalks, and bushes, each one a dense green body with firework bursts of colors. The dust of a multitude of colored plant-explosions settled soft on the black earth between her dark toes and fought with the plants to cloud away the cutting sunlight. Tearing all throughout were the small sounds of a living place, a cutting buzz, a whining, two million small toes tapping a blind path through the verdant maze. A continuous thunderstorm of rain left the bass clef with no space for the sound of a heartbeat.
She didn't move herself, but she moved, eyes too full, breath caught up. She fell back into the dead passageway. Cotton cloth cut off the overwhelming life from view.
He ducked his head between strips and coughed a laugh. "You ain't never seen no cold house, have you? Well, I'm glad to know you can still be surprised. The way you told yourself is like you've seen everything ever to see."
"What is it?"
"What, the cold house?"
"Am I a joke to you? I'm just a duster, a drifter, a nobody. You can kick me out as soon as show me this. Why torture me?"
He didn't respond to that but stepped away, and the cloth door fell down in soft flaps. A wet smear of air crawled along the floor in his wake. She heard him sigh beyond.
She stood up, but didn't pass through. "Hey," she said. "Why'd you bring me here?'
But there was only green noise from beyond.
She sighed.
Pushing again through the cotton blindness, she emerged again to the vast noise beyond. He was gone. She stood in his footprints, and could just make more out in the black earth, leading in. Leaves rippled everywhere her eye landed. The noise trembled, and she shook at how it vibrated the chill in her bones. Her answers were in.
There were plants that she had never seen now pulling at her smock and scraping down her limbs. All the leaves were impossibly broad and troublingly wet. She felt their indescribable fragility as stems broke and twitched at her passing. She pulled one flat, smooth leaf up and grimaced at it with an alien unfamiliarity on her face. She stooped and touched the baby-thin roots in the softest ground. And then he was beside her again, sudden. He was a ripple of leaves and then a man. The hint of shock ran through her spine, twisting her up a twitch, and then she slowly rose to her height.
"Well?" He looked back at where she had been.
"Why am I here?'
"I think everyone should see it once, what we had. Now, God stands at the gates of the old world with a flaming sword to cut the sky in two, and the sea licks at the toes of the mountains. The world doesn't have much left of what it once was. I think everyone should see this once, if only to feel their old bones—"
"My bones?"
"The ones your grandmother gave you. Do you feel the strength come back to your limbs? Do you see with new eyes? Can you look beyond your size? What do you see?" He was practically whispering, now.
Something moved behind him, and her eyes flickered to it. He laughed at the shape her face twisted into."
Her tongue was hard pressed to the roof of her mouth and every inch of her long legs was trembling from the both the cold and the exertion of holding her to the earth. She stared deep into the leaf litter she saw beyond his grinning and saw there a thing. It moved impossibly and didn't seem to see the two of them. It nosed around through the dirt, chasing the detritus of dreams too small to see.
"What—"
"I don't know what it's called. Don't ask me that. It's from the old world, before. They all are."
"All . . ."
And like that, her eyes tripped on a countless constellation of frustrated motes of life. The undersides of leaves, the point of each colored confusion on a plant stalk, the dirt between and around the roots, the air, the air, the vibrant and tintinnambulous air—all were full and moving. Not just the dusting of plants nor the waving of leaves, but life too small to be conceived was on the move.
His voice was warmer than she remembered. The room was warmer than she remembered. His words creaked with long-forgotten pain reborn, croaked with the ages she had stood unblinking. He held his hand up for her to see a monstrous spiky little shame crawling swift between his fingers, black as the inside of an eyelid on a moonless night. "They're the last gift to be taken from us. My grandfather's grandfather saved what he could and brought them here."
"Here where?"
"Eden."

Loss.
[I'll miss the bees when they're gone.]