When We Were Wolves (15 page)

You already know about our Utah honey. We use high-quality European champagne yeast and yeast nutrient that we dissolve in hot water. I splash cold Hams Fork River water against the sides of the fifty-five-gallon honey drums to oxygenate the honeywort. The city has come around asking why we use so much water. “Could there be a leak?” they ask.

“I water my lawn and flush the toilet a lot,” Wayne tells them, this in December, Wayne not having much of a yard in June anyway.

Then I pitch the dissolved yeast and yeast nutrient into the honeywort, add a blow-off tube to each drum lid, and wait. We don’t boil our honey. The alcohol content is high enough to kill any contaminants. Kerr Mead is aged nine months, and when it is finished it tastes like sweet honey wine.

Everything, fermentation especially, and love too, I suppose, amounts to time. Sometimes the fermentation sticks. Just stops. The hydrometers indicate that the sugar isn’t finished fermenting throughout the anaerobic cycle.

This is when we use yeast skeletons. Normally throwaways, these yeast hulls are the cell walls left behind during the yeast extraction process. The yeast skeletons absorb fermentation-inhibiting poisons produced by yeast when too much alcohol gets to them too soon. Unsticking fermentation is a little like magic.

Time in Utah is an odd concept. Utah is like another country, another culture altogether, less like Canada than Mexico with its odd rituals and ancient customs. They still have real live firing squads in Utah. I guess that it’s the noble way to go if you’re on Point of the Mountain’s death row, say, for intent to deliver high-octane mead to Honeyville, or stabbing your girlfriend’s lover in the throes of passion, and the final grain of sand just slipped through your hourglass. The last cigarette probably isn’t allowed. They pin a paper target over your heart and buckle you into a chair. Take it like a man, good night, lights out. No last cigarette, no last belt of whiskey. So much in Utah is lost to time.

You have to be wary of the wild yeasts. They can live and propagate themselves in mead wort if your champagne yeast doesn’t get the jump on them and kill them with the alcohol. There are thousands of types of wild yeasts in Wyoming. Let them get at your mead and what they make of it isn’t fit for Utah or anywhere else.

Wild yeasts infected a dozen barrels of our mead once. It was like discovering your girlfriend or wife has been cheating on you—we felt violated. We’re not sure how it happened—an infected syphon hose maybe. We loaded up the barrels one midnight over much cursing and drove to a river access above town. “Kinda like the
goddamned Boston Tea Party,” Wayne said as we pried the bungs off the barrels and dumped the mead into the Hams Fork River. The river under our flashlights turned blond as the bad mead caught the current and flowed through town.

Harriet was baptized in Utah, a baptism of sorts, anyway. She let the Mormon missionaries—white shirts, black ties and slacks— into her drafty East London flat one afternoon. They refused tea and told her stories about Zion: the brilliant deserts that smell of cactus bloom, the blue mountains that hold wild elk and summertime snow. Milk and honey. They described the contradictions for her without telling her in plain English that that’s what they are, contradictions. They told Harriet about the brave British immigrants of almost two hundred years ago. They told her the miracle of Elizabeth Ann Walmsey Palmer.

E.A.W.P. had been one of the first Mormon converts in England. She immigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois, then whipped an ox team to Utah Territory and settled here in the 1860s, She was an invalid, and the legend—Mormon history—says she was carried into the lukewarm water of the Great Salt Lake and walked out unaided.

Harriet had been working in a department store in London. She packed a steamer trunk and worked her way here shoveling cow shit on an Argentine cattle ship. She came ashore in New York and rode the Greyhound to Zion.

She can’t swim. Harriet waded into the briny water off Antelope Island last summer and had to be carried out by a photographer from Mona who was disappointed she didn’t require mouth-to-mouth, but he had the powers of a bishop and proclaimed her officially baptized. She hitchhiked eastward and got as far as Hams Fork, where she met Robin in the IGA. Robin is the one who
introduced us. Harriet’s visa will run out in the spring. Legally, she cannot work at Habaneros, but the Mexican owner is cutting her a break. I could marry Harriet and make her legal, but it’s something we talk over and around. Robin is the only one who is completely convinced that Harriet and I should get married.

Wayne bought a video:
Basic Sailing Made Simple.
Harriet is excited about going sailing with Wayne when he finishes the
Cuba Libre
and trailers it to the Great Salt Lake for test runs, as if the brine of that lake still holds another miracle, and sailing over it in a ketch with Admiral Kerr might produce some effect of love total immersion didn’t. Who here wouldn’t want to sail a desert ocean with Wayne Kerr when every day, everywhere you look is a sea of sagebrush. I know that, though beautiful, the lake is sterile and holds only the lowly brine shrimp.

We make love and drink hot cocoa. She’s never said so, but the chocolate part is her favorite—the chocolate part is
not
my favorite. Even in winter Harriet plays her saxophone on the rusty second-story fire escape. She leans over the railing, hair wild over her face, and blows love into the unappreciative wind. “Isn’t there an ordinance against that?” I’ve heard Mormons walking below say.

When it snows sideways down her alley she plays in the glow the streetlights make through the leaded glass of her apartment window. Now and then a big, slow winter fly, stunned by geography and cold, drones heavily around her apartment. Killing it seems too easy, so I slide the heavy window open and shoo the fly outside, where it has to face Wyoming on its own or die. I’m sure they crash-land in the snow and freeze to death almost immediately. Harriet has a sensual overbite, an elegant neck, sculpted British
nose, sea-green eyes, pale skin, and she loves Billie Holliday. I’ve never had such a beautiful woman before. It makes me anxious, as if one day I will come back from Utah and it will all be gone. I don’t know if she loves me or not. It is not a word we use between us.

Mead lasts. It gets better with age and can last for years; unlike so many things, my mead gets better as I get older.

Viking tradition had it that if mead was imbibed heavily for one moon—one month—after the wedding, then in nine months another celebration would ensue at the birth of a son. Having many sons was especially important in the days of constant war.

Wayne says mead was the drink of orgies. “Look at that honey moon.”

Today we are on our way to Honeyville. The return trip. Full of mead. I’m not hungry, but I force down a piece of toast. It settles my stomach. Wayne is out of bed at high noon. He splashes water on his face, puts on his Rockies cap, ready for business. We check the oil, brake fluid, and antifreeze. We check headlights, taillights, running lights, turning signals, and brake lights. Tire pressure. Fuel. Horn. The trip to Honeyville, loaded down with contraband alcohol, is a bit more tense. Wayne drives, lapsing into song as we sail by the Wyoming Port of Entry at the edge of town.
Livin’ on pancakes … watchin’ my dog bake
… My back is sore from loading the drums myself.