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It’s three weeks before Christmas when Mrs. Vanderhoek from up the road dies.
She’s barely cold in her grave when her piece of shit son sells up. Dickfuck’s moving to the city, Izzy tells him, and Ed doesn’t bother to ask whether he means Grand Rapids or The City, which even here means New York. Ed wonders how far you’d have to go before The City doesn’t mean New York. Nebraska? Saskatchewan?
Ed thinks for about thirty seconds about buying the place. Mrs. Vanderhoek had let them use her back forty for overflow parking during peak season, which had solved a lot of problems, but it seems a waste to buy the front forty and the ramshackle house with its overgrown garden and weedy drainage pond just to keep the parking. And anyway, the new owner might want to keep the deal going.
#
The new owner doesn’t want to keep the deal going.
Izzy’s about as pissed as Ed’s ever seen him, literally quivering with rage like a Chihuahua trying to get out of the purse it’s trapped in. He’s stomping around the office muttering something about blond twats and eggs in hell, tracking mud all over the nice little rug Ed had put down the week prior, something that’d caught his eye at the craft market in town one Saturday. Stupid idea, really, with the mud and the slush and Archie’s penchant for sharpening her claws on anything and everything she wants. Ed tunes Izzy out, lets him work it out of his system. He jots his New Year’s resolutions on a Post-It, pretending to take notes as Izzy rants.
1.
2.
3. Get out
That evening, Ed finds the Post-It in his coat pocket and sets off along the western end of the orchards, where the old stump fences still mark the property line. It’s bitter cold, and he should have worn thermals, but the burn of the air in his lungs eases the ache in his chest. It’s a clear night, and the stars are brilliant, and maybe this year, something will change.
#
Winter used to be a fallow time, a time for rest and contemplation, a time to plan and dream and tinker. But Izzy’s got plans: a licensing agreement, a cider collaboration with one of the bigger breweries in town, a booth for their newest cultivar at a farm show out west. Ed goes to the collab launch, even though he doesn’t want to. He drinks the cider and shakes hands and hates himself because he hates the people who are here and eager to meet him. He drinks the cider and hates how good it is. He drinks the cider and lets women in quilted vests and riding boots flirt with him, lets Izzy pour him into the back of a cab and into the next bar. He wakes the next morning with a headache and seven business cards in his jeans pocket. He throws them in the fire and shoulders on his coat and steps out into the yard. There’s a cardinal at the feeder, obscenely red against the house-sparrow palette of the yard. The clouds are heavy. Ed’s head is heavy.
He doesn’t go to the trade show. He lies in bed under four quilts and lets the whisper of snow on the tin roof lull him to sleep. Iz texts a photo from Tacoma, where things are still green. Ed has forgotten what green is.
He walks the orchard’s perimeter six days a week. His boots are heavy and there’s a crust of ice formed overnight that’s like breaking the top of a creme brulee with the back of a spoon every step he takes. He eyes the cluster of maples along the creek, thinks about tapping the trees come February. Iz would surely find a way to monetize that, too. One afternoon, as he’s making his way through the pines along Six Mile Road, there’s a screech and a thunk and he’s running toward the road before he’s conscious of deciding to do so.
There’s a brand new car in the ditch. Violently turquoise, temporary licence plate flapping from its holder in the wind kicked up by passing trucks. A blond man in a lilac wool coat unfurls himself from the driver’s seat as Ed skids to a halt.
“You all right, mate?”
“What? Oh! Hello. Yes, yes, no, I’m fine, just –” and he waves a hand at the car. “This is awfully embarrassing.”
“You’re not hurt?”
“No, no. No, thank you, I’m fine,” and his face crumples up like the front of his car should by all rights have done and he bursts into tears.
It’s a face not suited to crying – too malleable, too pink – and Ed’s stepping in with a hand outstretched like this guy is some sort of lilac-coated horse. He means to just go for a shoulder pat but as soon as he’s in range, the guy sort of flings himself at him and he ends up in Ed’s arms, rubbing his broad back with one mittened hand and hushing him like he used to hush Fang’s nieces when they were small. He smells like springtime, and Ed murmurs into his sunshine hair until his sobs quieten and he takes a hiccupping step back.
“Ready to try to push her out of the ditch?” Ed asks before the guy can apologize, and he ducks his head, smiles.
It takes some doing and Ed’s probably going to have to go back to PT next week about the twinge in his knee, but they get the car back on the shoulder. Ed goes to the window.
“Seriously, man, you good to drive?”
“I am. Thank – I really can’t thank you enough.”
“Drive carefully.”
“I will.”
It’s not until he crests the hill and the taillights disappear in a swirl of snow that Ed thinks to ask the guy his name, and by then, of course, it’s way too late.
He trudges back into the pines. He’s still a mile from home.
#
Spring arrives slowly. The days inch along a little brighter all the time. The orchards glisten with silvering tips that will soon be green buds. Ed loses a boot on a walk one morning, fully steps out of it, one sock foot shocked as the boot wallows in the mud. Izzy goes to another trade show someplace – Ed wants to say New York – and comes back buzzing about Chinese interest in the Queen Anne cultivar. Ed fixes the hinges on the screen door to the porch, and tears down the light pole past the old stable that hasn’t worked in fifteen years.
Spring arrives slowly, and then all at once in a cataclysm of apple blossoms. He wakes one morning to fields that look like a blizzard hit, but he walks in his shirtsleeves with his coffee to the nearest orchard, and the warm wind from the southwest stirs the hair on the back of his neck. The petals flurry down around him. It was a hard winter, and they lost half a dozen trees to a nasty March windstorm, but the world is pink and white and green, and Ed takes a breath for the first time in months.
Late April, and he’s in the north orchards checking on a leaking sprinkler when he spots a flash of color in the field beyond the fence. There’s a man in yellow attacking Mrs. Vanderhoek’s field with an old hoe, and when Ed draws closer, he thinks he recognizes that broad back, that Goldendoodle hair.
“Hey,” he calls, but not before he climbs up to perch on the top fence rail and scoops most of his hair up into a topknot.
The guy nearly falls over, saved from a total mudbath by the hoe and some very fancy footwork. When he’s got his balance back, he waves and starts over, quickening his steps as he draws nearer.
“But you’re my ditch rescuer!” the guy exclaims. “I hadn’t – What? How–?”
“Ed Teach,” Ed says, wiping his hand on his trousers and holding it out. “Didn’t realize we were neighbors.”
“You’re Blackbeard Farms?” the guy – seriously, he could introduce himself any day now – squeaks. “But – wow!”
The handshake is firm and lingers. The guy’s palm is moist and soft, and Ed can smell him from here – clean sweat and damp earth and citrus.
“Stede Bonnet,” is the name that finally comes, along with, “Ow, fuck, sorry” because the moisture on Ed’s palm is apparently from Stede’s burst blister, which should be grosser than it is, and then it’s several more minutes of Ed defusing increasingly desperate apologies until Ed finally says,
“You have an extra hoe? Or I could go and grab the rototiller and –”
“No! No, no, no, no, it’s — I said I was going to do this the old-fashioned way.”
“Think the old-fashioned way is making you bleed, mate.”
“Be that as it may.”
Stede does have an extra hoe – “I wasn’t sure, to be honest, whether this old girl wouldn’t fly to bits the moment I swung her” – and they get into a rhythm. Ed’s got sweat pouring down his back and his knee is on fire and his hair is in his mouth, and he can’t remember the last time he’s felt better. They don’t finish – there’s no fucking way they can finish today, the field is massive – but they make some serious headway, and when the sun begins to dip behind the spruce grove, they both linger for a little longer, enjoying the company.
That night, Ed falls asleep to gentle rain on the roof.
#
It becomes something of a habit, swinging by the back orchard in the afternoons to linger at the fence. Stede’s not always there, but when he is it’s fucking brilliant. Ed laughs more in a month than he has in twenty years. Stede is apple-blossom pink with sun and exertion more than he’s not, and for all Ed thought he was immune to those colors after all these years… well. Apparently not. Stede won’t tell him what he’s planning, strictly forbids him from visiting his field while he plants it the second week in May, but he does invite him to lunch in town to make up for it. Ed has a beer, Stede has two ciders, and Ed wonders whether the blush goes all the way down. They walk around for a while after, past the bowling alley and the hot dog stand and the stupid little boutiques Ed’s never bothered to visit. Stede drags him into a place that sells nothing but oil and vinegar, and Ed tastes a bunch of different stuff on teensy slices of baguette and spends $85 on two olive oils from Spain. Ed drags him to the shoe barn in retaliation, and Stede walks out with a serviceable pair of work boots and some truly bewildering sandals with too many straps in a rainbow pattern. The sight of Stede’s pale toes, his instep, the hair on his ankle sends Ed into a tailspin worthy of any Victorian. He has to excuse himself and have a cigarette outside about it. He hasn’t smoked in months. Ah well. Back to square one.
#
Stede can’t keep it a secret forever – Ed actually does have work to do back there, since the fucking irrigation system in the Pink Lady section keeps fucking springing new leaks – but it’s long enough for the sunflowers to be waist-high before he learns of them. Stede’s not there, but Ed climbs the fence anyway, wades through the stalks and brushes his fingers over the first buds.
“When I was a boy, I liked to pick flowers,” Stede had admitted one evening as they sat on the screened-in porch with the lights off to watch the fireflies, and Ed hadn’t kissed him, but he’d strongly considered it. He doesn’t want to rush it. Doesn’t want to ruin it. He thinks maybe it’s inevitable – the romance, yeah, but also the ruination, probably, because he’s lived with himself long enough to know he’s a piece of shit – Stop it. Stop. Enough.
Ed wades through the field of flowers and allows himself, just for today, to hope.
#
The equinox brings a week of thunderstorms, and Ed’s so stir-crazy that one Thursday he walks over to Stede’s and bangs on the door. He’s never been in the house, never seen it, even, and when Stede opens the door and smiles at him like the sun coming up, Ed nearly turns on his heel to flee. But it’s pissing down outside, and Stede’s kitchen is warm and the precise peach-gold of his summer tan, and before he really understands what’s happening, Ed finds himself sitting at the table with a cup of sweet hot tea and a slice of pie. The rain drums down, and Stede putters easily around the low-ceilinged room, and Ed’s put in mind of bees or salmon or pigeons or whatever it is that has the unerring instinct for home.
The Fourth, and Stede’s at his doorstep with a cold six-pack and some sparklers, even though it’s neither of their holiday. They walk to the farthest outbuilding, and Ed minds the wasp’s nest on the east corner as he hoists himself up on the low roof, puts a hand down for Stede to scramble up the half-assed cinderblock stepstool he’d erected three years ago. They can, by scooching up to the top of the roof’s slant, see over the treeline and the bigger fireworks from the show in town. And then, off to the north, there are more, and to the east, even more distant, maybe even as far as Ravenna. They drink the beers, let the bottles roll down the roof into the tall grass, and when Ed finally musters up the courage to take Stede’s hand in his, the stars are high and bright. The moon has set by the time Stede wanders off home, and Ed doesn’t sleep at all, just makes himself a pot of coffee and waits for dawn to come.
#
When Stede’s on his doorstep a couple weeks later, his offer of a walk so translucent you could read newspaper through it, Ed goes willingly, just grabs a hat against the horseflies and the late afternoon sun.
The sight, even though he knows what’s coming, leaves him poleaxed, agog. The field is awash in yellow, and when they climb the fence together and step under the towering flowers, it feels like walking into church. It’s cooler in the rows between the blooms, and everything is golden and thick with pollen. There are goldfinches chittering above them, and Stede takes his hand to lead him farther in, and suddenly the dam Ed had built around his heart gives way, just completely fucking disappears. There are cities in California, he remembers, whole towns under four hundred feet of water after the waterworks were built, and the realization he’s in love with Stede is like the opposite of those towns, is Atlantis being rediscovered. He stops, tugs Stede closer. They don’t kiss at first, just press their foreheads together and breathe the same honeyed air, and it’s so sweet that Ed has to close his eyes against it. They breathe, and then Stede moves his head just a fraction, drags his nose down Ed’s, and Ed?
Ed blossoms.
#
Fall comes, and Ed brings Stede the first ripe Queen Anne, then chases the juice out of his mouth with his tongue. It’s the usual madhouse for a couple months, with U-pick families in August and September and white people taking fall photos in September and October and people doing the fucking pumpkin patch and corn maze thing in October, and there’s like three weddings a weekend and this time Ed doesn’t hate any of it. Stede brings his kids one weekend and they build a pumpkin catapult, and Louis gets lost in the corn maze for twenty minutes until Ed finds him, perfectly happy observing an anthill in a dead end near the entrance. He brings Stede to a brewery thing at Thanksgiving, raises his glass to him when they tap the first keg of a winter warmer collab he hadn’t known he’d agreed to, and doesn’t hate that, either. The brewery’s already done up for Christmas and later, when Stede catches him under the mistletoe, they kiss so long that Izzy flicks them with cider from his glass, like they’re cats behind the barn. That night, they spill out drunk and shameless onto the sidewalk, and Ed catches snowflakes on his tongue. He can’t stop grinning. Stede will be in his bed, warm and solid, throughout the winter, and spring will come again.