The Truest Pleasure by Robert Morgan

the horse was wore out too. But Tom didn’t even want to stop for dinner. He brushed away yellow jackets on the trough and when one fell in the sap he flicked it away.
    The worst job by far was standing over the steaming pan, skimming and stirring. Tom had piled a heap of stovewood by the furnace and he kept the fire roaring. With the dipper he scooped bits of trash and yellow jackets that had got in the syrup.
    Yellow jackets was worse that year than ever before. People said it was because of the drought. Their holes in the ground had not been flooded and all the young ones had hatched and gone looking for sweet things. Apples that fell in the orchard was tunneled and eat out by yellow jackets. Wherever you peeled apples and peaches there was jackets buzzing in your face. I got stung twice canning peaches. “Jassackets,” Pa called them and laughed. They buzzed around your lips and hands, and around your eyes. Maybe they liked the taste of tears. I didn’t see how we could make molasses, there was such swarms of them fogging around.
    Tom dug a hole to put the skimmings in. It was soon filled by dipperfuls of foam and trash scooped off the boiling pan. It’s hard to describe the color of molasses skimmings. They are like scum and slime, and sometimes kind of green and sometimes brown and almost pink. Yellow jackets crusted the hole and swarmed a yard high every time Tom come near it.
    â€œYou watch out for jackets,” I said.
    But he didn’t answer. He was too busy skimming and stirring. The pan bubbled its sweet steam into the sky, and the steam mixed with the smoke of the furnace.
    â€œAnd don’t go and fall in,” I said as he leaned way over the middle of the long pan. What comes to the surface of boiling sorghum is partly dirt and flecks of crushed stalk. If the syrup is to be clear you’ve got to skim them off. A kind of shiny suds foams at the top and has to be dipped off.
    â€œGood molasses have the color of fresh coffee when you hold them up to the light,” Tom said.
    I scraped yellow jackets off the edge of the pan and throwed them in the hole with gobs of foam. Pa was feeding the mill and I helped at the furnace. Every time I scraped off a dozen jackets a hundred more appeared. I don’t know where they all come from. There was jackets everywhere. I got stung again, and the horse got stung. Pa got stung at the mill. The long sweetening was calling every yellow jacket for miles. Honeybees joined the feast too, and where you see one bee you’ll soon see a hundred.
    But so far Tom hadn’t been stung, even though he stood right over the pan. “Don’t fall in,” I said again.
    Tom was stirring the pan so the syrup would be evenly cooked. Juice run in the upper end and I figured the syrup inthe middle, where the pan was hottest, cooked first. Tom reached the dipper into the middle and only got more foam. He reached in again.
    You know how it is when you go off balance and hardly know it until you hit something. I saw Tom’s feet start to slip on the gravel and his stand give way. He tried to brace hisself but overreached with the dipper. Maybe the skimmer full of syrup was too heavy, or maybe he was dizzy from the steam.
    I saw Tom falling, face down, right into the boiling molasses. The steam coming off the pan was thick as grease and he was pitching right through it toward the sap dark as licorice and root extracts. I don’t know if I screamed or not as he fell. It was his neck and face I thought about, how the hot syrup would scald them. He must have squeezed his eyes shut. What I don’t understand is how he got his elbows down in time to break the fall. I didn’t even have time to reach out and catch him.
    His elbows went into the boiling pan, and then his chest and armpits. It looked like he was drowning. This is what it is like to see a death, I thought. I will be a widow no sooner than I am married. His strong body will be burned