The Line Came Down in Ice
The ice storm came over the ridge in the night and broke everything it touched.
Keziah Vollmer heard it happen. She lay awake in her father’s old bed and listened to the orchard crack. Branches snapped like rifle shots. Something heavy groaned in the dark and then went down with a long, splintering roar that shook the window glass. The lamp beside her flickered once, twice, and died. The refrigerator in the kitchen went silent. After that there was only the tick of ice against the house and the wind pushing at the door like a man who wanted in.
She did not light a candle. Candles were for prayer, and she was not praying. She was counting hives.
Four living. One empty. Five white boxes at the bottom of her mother’s orchard, and the bees inside them could not run from a falling tree.
At first light she dressed in the cold, pinned her braid up under her wool scarf, and pulled on her father’s barn coat over her Sunday dress because it was the warmest thing she owned. The Hollow had rules about what a woman wore. It had no rules about what a woman wore at dawn when no one was looking. That was the only kind of freedom Saint’s Hollow allowed, and at thirty years old Keziah had learned to live inside it.
The world outside her door was made of glass. Every twig wore a sleeve of ice. Every fence wire sagged under its own shine. The apple trees her mother had planted long before Keziah was born bowed to the ground as if they were kneeling in church. The sun had not cleared the peaks yet, but the light it threw ahead of itself turned the whole valley pink and silver and cruel.
Above the orchard, the big pine at the edge of the line road had come down. It lay across the slope like a dead giant, and it had taken the power pole with it. The pole leaned at a drunk angle. The black line that brought electricity over the ridge into Saint’s Hollow ran from its top, through the branches of the fallen tree, and down into the snow between her apple rows.
Keziah barely looked at it. She was looking past it, at the white boxes.
The first hive stood. The second stood. The third had a branch across its lid but it stood. She let out a breath that smoked in the air and started down the row, her boots punching through the crust.
“Stop!”
The shout came from above her, from the line road. A man’s voice. Not a Hollow voice. It had the flat, open sound of the valley in it.
She did not stop. Men in Saint’s Hollow shouted at women all the time, and most of it was noise.
“Ma’am! Stop right there. Don’t take another step.”
Something in the voice made her turn her head. A man was running down the slope toward her, sliding on the ice, a yellow hard hat in one hand. He wore a heavy canvas coat with a patch on the shoulder and leather boots laced to the shin. He was big, and he was not slowing down.
Keziah opened her mouth to tell him to go back to the road, that outsiders did not set foot on Hollow land without a deacon. She took one more step to put the hive between them.
He hit her at the waist.
They went down together into the snow. The breath left her body in a single shocked gasp. He twisted as they fell so that he took the ground and she landed on him, and then he rolled again and she was on her back in the cold with his weight across her and his gloved hand flat on her shoulder.
“Don’t move,” he said. “Please. Just don’t move.”
She had never been this close to a man who was not her father. She could see the frost in his short beard. She could see that his eyes were gray, the color of rain on stone, and that they were not looking at her. They were looking past her head.
Keziah turned her face.
The black line lay in the snow less than an arm’s length from her cheek. Where it touched the ground, the snow had melted into a small, steaming hole. As she watched, a thin blue spark jumped from the wire to the wet earth with a sound like someone snapping their fingers.
“That line is live,” the man said quietly. “Your lights are out because the circuit broke up the hill. But this piece is still fed from the other side. It’s carrying seven thousand volts. One more step and you would have walked into it.”
She stared at the spark. It jumped again.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered.
“Nobody ever does.” He let out a long breath, and some of the tension went out of his body. He did not let her up yet. “My name’s Thane Lowry. I’m with Tenmile Electric, down in Fennimore. We came up at four this morning to fix your power. I’m going to stand up now, and then I’m going to help you stand up, and we’re going to walk straight back the way you came. Your footprints. Nowhere else. All right?”
“All right,” she said.
He stood. He held out his hand. Keziah looked at it, a big hand in a scuffed leather glove, and understood that taking it was the first forbidden thing she had ever done in daylight.
She took it.
“Get away from her.”
Gideon Wright came down the line road on foot with his heavy boots crunching ice and his blunt face red with cold and anger. Behind him, a white utility truck with a long boom sat idling at the top of the slope, orange lights turning. A gray-haired woman in a hard hat leaned out of its window.
Keziah dropped Thane Lowry’s hand as if it had burned her.
“Deacon,” she said.
Gideon did not look at her. A woman was not addressed in a matter like this. He looked at the outsider, and his scowl deepened into something uglier.
“Your crew was told the rules at the gate,” Gideon said. “You stay on the right-of-way. You speak to no one. You do not touch a woman of this parish.”
“She was about to walk into a live line,” Thane said.
“Then the Lord would have taken her or spared her.”
The lineman went very still. Keziah watched his jaw move under the beard. For a moment she thought he would say something that would get him thrown off the mountain, and some wild, unholy part of her wanted him to.
“Seven thousand volts doesn’t wait for the Lord,” he said instead, evenly. “I’ll stay on the right-of-way. Your power will be back by dark.”
He turned and walked back up the slope in his own tracks. He did not look back at her. Keziah found she was angry about that, and then she was ashamed of being angry, and then she was simply cold.
“Go inside, Keziah,” Gideon said. “Stay inside until the outsiders are gone.”
“My hives—”
“Your hives are boxes of insects. Go inside.”
She went. She stood at her kitchen window in her father’s barn coat and watched the crew work. The gray-haired woman ran the truck and shouted orders and swore so loudly that Keziah could hear the words through the glass. Two younger men cut the fallen pine into rounds with chainsaws. And Thane Lowry climbed.
He went up the leaning pole with spikes on his boots and a belt around the wood, and he made it look like walking. At the top he worked with his arms raised, the wind pulling at his coat, ice falling from the wire in glittering showers. Keziah had watched men work all her life. Hollow men worked as a kind of argument with God, grim and proud. This man worked as if he loved it.
Gideon stood by the truck for an hour, stamping his feet. Then he got into the cab of his own pickup with the heater running and did not get out again.
At noon, the lineman came down the pole with blood on his sleeve.
Keziah told herself she went out for the bees.
She did go to the bees first. She walked the cleared path to the row and laid her palm flat against each box in turn. The wood was cold. Through it, if she held her breath, she could feel the low living hum of the cluster inside, thousands of bodies wrapped around their queen, shivering to keep her warm.
“There was a storm,” she told them softly. “The big pine is down. The power is out. But you are safe, and I am here.”
Her mother had taught her that. In the old country, Tove Vollmer used to say, you told the bees everything. Births and deaths and weddings. If you kept news from them, they would think they were not part of the family, and they would leave. Keziah had told the bees when her mother died four years ago. She had told them again last winter, when her father’s heart stopped while he was shoveling the barn roof. One colony had died in the cold anyway, the week after the funeral. The fifth box stood empty now, at the end of the row, and she had never had the heart to take it away.
Mercy Cole said telling the bees was pagan. Mercy Cole said a great many things.
“You talk to them.”
Keziah turned. Thane Lowry stood at the edge of the bee shed, a few steps off the right-of-way, holding his left hand in his right. His glove was off. Blood ran from his palm in a steady line and dripped onto the snow.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Broken insulator. It’s not bad.” He looked at the hives, then back at her. “Why do you talk to them?”
“So they won’t leave.” She glanced up the slope. Gideon’s truck sat with its windows fogged. The gray-haired woman was arguing with him through the glass about the pine trees. Neither of them was looking down the hill. “Come into the shed. You can’t climb with your hand open like that.”
“I’m not supposed to—”
“I know what you’re not supposed to do,” Keziah said. “Come anyway.”
The bee shed was small and dark and smelled of wax and smoke and old wood. Her mother’s tools hung on the wall: the hive tools, the smoker, the veils like gray ghosts. Keziah took a clean linen cloth from the shelf and the small crock of honey she kept for wounds. She pulled the stool under the window and pointed at it.
He sat. Even sitting, he filled the shed.
She took his hand. It was heavy and warm and scarred across the knuckles. A thin, shiny burn ran up the inside of his left forearm from the wrist and disappeared under his sleeve. The cut on his palm was deep but clean. She washed it with water from the jug, and he did not flinch.
“Honey,” he said, when she opened the crock. “My grandmother used to do that.”
“It keeps a wound clean. The bees make it so it never spoils.”
She spread the honey into the cut with her fingertip. His hand lay open in hers. The shed was so quiet she could hear him breathing, slow and careful, the way a man breathes when he does not want to frighten a deer. She wrapped the linen around his palm, twice, and tied it.
“There,” she said. She did not let go.
He did not pull away.
“You never told me your name,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“Because of the deacon?”
“Because of all of them.” Keziah looked down at their hands. “In Saint’s Hollow a woman does not speak to an outsider. If someone saw me now, I would be on my knees in front of the women’s circle by Sunday.”
“Then I’ll go.” He did not move.
“Keziah,” she said. “My name is Keziah.”
He said it back to her, slowly, as if he were tasting it. Nobody had ever said her name like that. In the Hollow, her name was a thing people called across the churchyard to make her come or go.
“Thank you, Keziah,” he said. “For the hand.”
“Thank you for the volts.”
He laughed, low and surprised, and the sound went through her like the first spring sun on her back.
Up on the road, a truck door slammed.
They both froze. Keziah let go of his hand. Thane stood and ducked under the low lintel of the shed, and then he stopped in the doorway with the gray light behind him.
“If a man wanted to write to you,” he said quietly, “where would he send it?”
“The post comes up the mountain through the clerk’s office,” she said. “Elias opens everything. Then the elders read what he opens.”
“So nowhere.”
Keziah looked past him at the row of white boxes. Her eyes went, without her permission, to the last one. The empty one. Its lid had a little drift of ice on it. Nobody touched it. Nobody wanted to look at a hive where something had died.
“Nobody opens that one,” she said. “Not even me.”
He followed her gaze. He looked at the empty hive for a long moment. Then he looked at her, and something passed between them that she had no word for. In church they would have called it temptation. It did not feel like the devil. It felt like the first true thing anyone had said to her in a year.
He put his hard hat on and walked back up the hill.
The power came back on at twenty past four, just as the sun dropped behind the western peaks.
Thane felt it before he saw it. A hum in the line under his gloves, then lights blinking awake down the valley, one farmhouse at a time, a long gold string of them reaching all the way to the dark spire of the church. Saint’s Hollow came back to life below him, and it looked, from the top of a pole, almost beautiful.
He climbed down. His left hand throbbed inside the linen she had tied. He had not taken it off.
“You’re a damn fool,” Dot Albrecht said beside the truck, coiling a rope. She had run crews for twenty-two years and had never once lowered her voice. “I saw you go into that shed.”
“I was bleeding,” Thane said. “She fixed it.”
“Uh huh.” Dot looked up the road, where the deacon was finally climbing out of his warm pickup to watch them leave. “These people have a contract with the co-op that lets us cross their land. You know what happens if they cancel it? Every house in this valley goes dark next winter, and it’s my name on the report.”
“I know.”
“So stay out of sheds.”
“I know, Dot.”
She studied him. Then she made a disgusted sound and climbed into the cab.
Thane walked to the back of the truck to stow his climbing gear. The deacon’s eyes followed him. From the bed of the truck he could see down the slope to the orchard, the bowed apple trees, the five white boxes in a row. No light showed in the farmhouse window. But he thought he saw a shape behind the glass, standing still.
He took a pencil from his coat and a blank work order from the clipboard on the tailgate. He wrote fast, leaning on the tool box, his bandaged hand clumsy. He did not let himself think about what he was writing, or what it might cost her if anyone found it. He folded it twice.
“I’m going to check the guy wire on the new pole,” he called to Dot.
“Make it fast.”
The new pole stood forty feet from the end of the hive row. Thane walked to it and tugged the steel guy wire and looked at it with great seriousness. Then he took four long steps through the snow, lifted the iced lid of the empty hive two inches, and slid the folded paper inside.
When he turned around, Gideon Wright was watching him from the road.
Thane’s heart slammed once against his ribs. He made himself walk back slowly. He made himself nod to the deacon as he passed. Gideon did not nod back. His small eyes went from Thane’s face to the white boxes and back again, and stayed there, heavy and suspicious, until the Tenmile truck pulled out through the right-of-way gate and the chain clanked shut behind it.
All the way down the dark switchbacks of the pass, Thane watched the mirror for headlights.
None came. But he could not shake the feeling that something in Saint’s Hollow had turned its head and was listening.
Letters in the Empty Hive
She waited until dawn to look, because looking at night would have meant she wanted it too much.
The paper was there. Folded twice, a little damp at one corner, lying on the dead comb inside the empty hive like an egg left in an abandoned nest. Keziah took it into the bee shed and closed the door and read it standing up, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
Keziah,
I am not good with words. I am good with poles and wire and weather. So I will just say it plain. I have never seen anyone look at a row of boxes the way you looked at yours. Like they were the only things in the world that belonged to you.
If this is wrong, burn it and leave the hive empty, and I will never write again. If it is not wrong, tell me one true thing about yourself. Anything. I will tell you one back.
Your hand is healing. Mine too.
Thane
She read it four times. Then she stood very still in the cold shed while the light came up gray through the small window, and she understood that she was going to answer it.
That was the moment, she thought later. Not the snow. Not his hand in hers. The moment she picked up her mother’s pencil from the shelf and turned the honey ledger to a blank page at the back. In Saint’s Hollow, sin was not a thing you fell into. It was a thing you chose, one small step at a time, and every step felt like freedom until the floor was gone.
Thane,
One true thing. I am thirty years old and I have never been past the lower bend of the pass. Not once. The elders say the world below is a furnace and we are the last cool place.
Your turn.
K.
She tore the page out, folded it twice, and put it under the lid.
The letters came all winter.
A Tenmile patrolman walked the line every second Thursday when the pass was open, checking for ice on the wire. Gideon Wright was supposed to walk beside him. But Gideon hated the cold, and the line road ran a long mile through the lower farms, and after the first two patrols he met the outsider at the gate and then sat in his pickup with the heater running until the man came back. Thane had made sure the patrol was always his.
One true thing. I am thirty-six. My father was a lineman too. He died on a pole in an ice storm when I was nineteen. That is why I yelled at you. I am sorry I knocked you into the snow. I am not sorry you are alive.
One true thing. I tell the bees things I cannot tell anyone else. I told them about you. I did not tell them your name. They know it anyway, I think.
I live over the feed store in Fennimore. It smells like oats and diesel. There is a diner across the street that makes pie on Fridays and a woman named Loretta who will not let you leave without a second slice. I would like to buy you a slice of pie, Keziah. That’s all. That is the biggest thing I can think of.
Nobody has ever bought me anything. Women here do not go into places like that. I would not know where to put my hands.
On the table. Around the cup. Wherever you want. That’s the whole point.
She kept his letters in a flat tin that had held her mother’s sewing needles, and she kept the tin inside the empty hive, under the dead comb, because nowhere in her house was safe. Mercy Cole came by every week with soup she did not need and eyes that opened every cupboard. Mercy’s own house stood on the rise above the orchard, and her front window looked down on the Vollmer land like a lamp on a table.
One true thing. When I am on top of a pole I can see your orchard. I don’t look for you. I look at the five white boxes and I think, she is somewhere near them. It is enough.
It is not enough. I am sorry. I should not have written that. I am leaving it because it is true.
At Mass in December, Father Cross caught her smiling.
She had not known she was doing it. She was kneeling in the fourth pew with the other unmarried women, and the stone was cold through her dress, and the church smelled of beeswax and old polish and the dark sweetness of incense. Father Cross stood at the altar in his black vestments with the white collar sharp at his throat. He was the tallest man in Saint’s Hollow and the most silent. He had come from outside eight years ago, and the elders still spoke of him with a mixture of pride and fear, as if he were a wolf someone had trained to guard sheep.
He lifted the chalice. He spoke the Latin in that deep, rough voice that seemed to come up out of the floor. And Keziah thought of a slice of pie on a diner table, and of where she might put her hands, and the smile came before she could stop it.
When she looked up, Father Cross was looking at her.
His eyes were very dark. They did not judge. That was the terrible thing. They simply took her in, the way a man reads a page, and then moved on down the pew. She felt as if he had opened her chest and written something inside it in a hand she could not read.
After Mass, Mercy found her in the vestibule. Mercy was a thin woman with a sharp face like a bird’s and thin spectacles and a wool shawl she wrapped around herself as if the whole world were a draft.
“You smile in church now, Keziah,” Mercy said in her nasal voice. “You never used to.”
“It was a good homily.”
“It was the same homily as last year.” Mercy’s eyes moved over her face, slow and careful. “Grief does strange things to a woman alone. Your father would want you watched over. I will look in on you more often.”
“There’s no need.”
“There is always need,” said Mercy, and smiled, and went out into the snow.
At the bottom of the church steps, Cyrus Miller was waiting with his hat in his hands. He was a gaunt man with silver hair combed flat and a voice like dry paper. He was the first of the elders, and he never spoke to Keziah unless he wanted something.
“Your father’s land,” he said, “is a heavy burden for a woman alone. The council would keep it for you. Lease the orchard to us. You would have a small income and no cares.”
“My mother planted that orchard.”
“And the council gave your mother the ground to plant it in.” Cyrus put his hat on. “Think on it, child. A woman alone is a door left open. Doors left open let in the cold.”
In January, between storms, Thane walked the line, and Keziah was waiting in the bee shed.
They had not planned it. Or they had, in every letter, without writing it down. She heard his boots crunch past on the line road and stop. She heard them leave the road. Then the shed door opened and he ducked in out of the white glare, and the small dark room was suddenly full of cold air and him.
Neither of them spoke.
He was bigger than she remembered. Or she had made him smaller in her mind so that she could bear it. There was frost on his beard again. The cut on his palm had healed into a thin pink line. He stood with his back against the door as if he were afraid of what his hands would do if he let them go.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “Gideon’s at the gate.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t come to—” He stopped. “I just wanted to see your face. Your real face. Not the one I make up at night.”
“Is it different?”
“Yes.” His voice went rough. “It’s better.”
She stepped toward him. One step. The shed was so small that one step was everything. She could smell the cold on his coat and something under it, soap and woodsmoke and man. She lifted her hand and laid it flat on his chest, the way she laid it on the hives, and through the heavy canvas she felt his heart going hard and fast.
“You’re humming,” she whispered.
He covered her hand with his. He lowered his head. His mouth was an inch from hers, and his breath was warm, and every bell in Saint’s Hollow could have rung in that moment and she would not have heard one.
She turned her face away.
“I can’t,” she said. “If you kiss me, I won’t be able to pretend in church anymore. I’ll walk in with your mouth on mine and they’ll see it. Mercy will see it. Father Cross will see it.”
“Then don’t pretend.” He did not move closer. He did not move away. “Come down the mountain with me. Today.”
“And go where? I have nothing down there. I have no one. I don’t know how to buy pie.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“Not yet,” Keziah said. “Please. Not yet.”
He let out a long breath against her hair. Then he took her hand from his chest and pressed his lips to the center of her palm, where his own scar would be, and held them there for one long, burning second.
“Not yet,” he agreed.
He was gone before she could breathe again. She stood alone in the shed with her palm closed tight, as if she could keep the kiss inside it.
That night she found his letter in the hive. Two lines, pressed hard into the paper.
If the line comes down again, I am coming up with it.
And Kez, I will not be able to stay away.
A Knock After Midnight
The line came down on the twelfth of February, in the worst storm of the winter, and Thane came up with it.
The wind had snapped a crossarm on the ridge above the lower farms. By the time the Tenmile truck crawled up the last switchback behind the snowplow, the whole Hollow was dark, and the sky was a single gray wall pressing down on the peaks. Dot ran the job like a war. Thane spent four hours at the top of a pole in a wind that wanted to peel him off it, his fingers dead inside his gloves, ice building on his eyelashes faster than he could blink it away. When the lights finally came back on below them, there was no going home. The plow had turned around at the summit. The pass was closed.
“Outsiders do not wander the Hollow at night,” Gideon Wright said. “You will sleep in the parish hall.”
The parish hall was a long stone room beside the church, with a woodstove at one end, folding chairs stacked against the walls, and a smell of floor wax and old hymnals. Somebody had left four army blankets on a table. Somebody else had left a pot of bean soup on the stove, gone cold.
At nine o’clock, Father Cross came to the door.
He did not come in. He stood on the threshold with snow blowing past him into the dark, enormous in a black wool coat, and he looked at the four of them one by one. Thane had seen men like that before, in the oil fields and at the county jail where his cousin used to work. Men who did not need to raise their voices because the room raised itself around them.
“The Hollow sleeps behind locked doors, Mr. Lowry,” the priest said. His voice was deep and very calm. “Tonight, so do you.”
He lifted a heavy ring of iron keys from his belt. The door closed. The key turned in the lock with a slow, grinding sound that Thane felt in his back teeth.
“Well,” said Dot, into the silence. “That’s not creepy at all.”
The two younger men laughed. Dot pulled a blanket over her shoulders, put her boots up on a chair, and was snoring inside ten minutes. The others followed. Thane lay on the floor by the stove with his eyes open and listened to the storm.
Midnight came. He thought about the mile of line road between this room and her door. He thought about what Dot had said: every house in this valley dark next winter, and her name on the report. He thought about the deacon’s small, heavy eyes. He thought about Keziah’s hand on his chest, and the way she had turned her face away, and the way she had said not yet as if it hurt her.
If the line comes down again, I am coming up with it.
He had not written that he would stay in a locked room.
The washroom at the back of the hall had a window high in the wall, painted shut and too small for most men. Thane had spent fifteen years climbing into places that were too small. He stood on the toilet tank, worked his knife along the frame until the old paint cracked, and pushed the glass up into the storm. Snow blew into his face. He went through it shoulders first and dropped into a drift up to his thighs.
The world was white and black and roaring. He could not see the church ten feet away. He could not see his own hand.
But he could hear the line.
He had grown up hearing it. A high, thin singing in the wind, a sound most people never noticed. He found the first pole by touch, the wood rough and frozen under his glove. Then the next. Then the next. He had trusted poles all his life. He trusted them now, one after another down the long slope, through snow that came to his knees and then his waist, while the wind tried to turn him around and lay him down and cover him over.
Pole twenty-two. Pole twenty-three. The new pole he had set in November, still pale under its coat of ice.
Then a small yellow square of light, low on the hillside. A lamp in a kitchen window.
Keziah was awake. She was always awake now.
She sat at the kitchen table in her nightgown and her father’s barn coat with the tin of letters open in front of her, because tonight the storm was so loud that no one in the world could see a lamp in her window. She had taken the tin from the hive before dark. She told herself she only wanted to read them by the stove. She did not tell herself that the line had come down, and the crew had come up, and the pass had closed behind them.
She was reading the one about the pie when someone knocked on the door.
Three knocks. Heavy. Slow.
Her whole body went cold. Gideon, she thought. Mercy. The elders, come in the storm because they had seen everything all along. She swept the letters into the tin and pushed it under her father’s chair cushion and stood up, and her legs were shaking so badly that she had to hold the table.
The knock came again.
Keziah walked to the door. She put her hand on the bolt. She thought of every sermon she had ever heard about the devil, how he knocked, how he waited, how he always came in the shape of the thing you wanted most.
She opened the door.
Thane Lowry stood on her step, white from head to foot. Snow in his beard. Snow on his shoulders. Snow crusted on his eyebrows and in the creases of his coat, as if the storm had tried to make a statue of him and given up halfway. His chest was heaving. His gray eyes found hers and held.
“Tell me to go back,” he said.
