Henkin’s Mellified Honey

According to Wikipedia, for at least 2,700 years honey has been used by humans to treat a variety of ailments through topical application. The contents of the mellification process however would turn the honey into ‘sort of a confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs and other ailments. This confection would then be sold in street markets as a hard to find item with a hefty price’. 

“Do you think he’s ready?” The only care remaining in Ann Henkins was for her son, John Jr., who everyone called Little John. She wanted to protect him but the fear in her was so great of her husband she was locked down, frozen. And this day especially, if she had any strength left, was the day she needed to step in. This was the day Little John turned fourteen and would lose his childhood, his innocence, and possibly his soul.

John Henkins, Sr. couldn’t care less about what his wife thought, but he did think his son was of a different temperament than himself, more gentle, like his mother. “I was fourteen the day my daddy took me in,” John Sr. declared to Ann, like it was final, and anything he said was final as far as he was concerned.

Ann sat at their farm table, which they’d bought together the first year they were married fifteen years before. She sipped her morning orange juice, but her husband knew it was mostly Grey Goose vodka, the bottle nearly gone from what he’d seen the day before. She’s ungovernable again, he thought, also noting her cracked hands, fingers bleeding around the cuticles. I need to straighten her up. But not today. Today is Little John’s fourteenth birthday.

Seeing her husband’s disgust Ann moved her hands under the table. “You’re leading him into hell,” she mumbled.

John Sr. gave her a sharp look and she glanced downcast to the side. He then left for work without a thought, leaving Ann to her orange juice and empty day.

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There is nothing like the farmers market at Henkinston. Any thinking person knows it’s not true, but every Wednesday morning, three seasons a year, it seems impossible to rain or even reach any less or more than comfortable sunny temperatures. More than a hundred family owned stands have long lines filled with knowing locals and smart tourists. The early morning air holds fresh produce of all sort—the butterhead lettuce being famous accorded by the Henkinston Times. Farmers sell everything from apples to zucchini, pork to fresh pies, (strawberry, rhubarb, and blueberry being the most sought after). Trout with clear eyes, caught that morning from the Neponset River, almost jump in the ice on display. Pure red tomatoes the size of a fist and just plucked from the vine grace baskets that weep with love. 

But the most popular stand in the market, having the longest lines, the most talked about and steeped in history, the most sought after product of renown in three counties, the most cherished corner at the Butler County Farmers market—sells honey. But not just any honey, a honey harvested from Henkin’s New England Family Farm for centuries, ever since the very first John Henkins set foot in the New World, the patriarch of the Henkins family name. He brought the honey process over on the St. George, a vessel which landed in the Bay of Boston in sixteen thirty-four with eighty-four souls on board, mostly escaping persecution from the old world, in this instance Ipswich north west of London. The backbone of the economy of the thirteen colonies held firm and straight in the agrarian new world but things have changed of course in nearly four-hundred years. Boston is now multifaceted, a tech center of the US, the Boston miracle; but things have not changed for the Henkins with respect to honey. 

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Little John Henkins, at fourteen, works the stand today, as his daddy did, and his daddy, and on up the ladder of daddies with as much pride in the honey process, the purity of it, the sanctity even, then ever. To violate the careful process and recipes of John Henkins, Sr., his ninth ascendant great grandfather, would be sacrilegious. And why would Little John’s father, John Sr., the current living patriarch, vary even one line of the process? The honey business had brought the Henkins family a veritable fortune by any measure with the extended family, cousins, nephews, and what not, all owning no less than the local pharmacy, Ford dealership, mortuary, and largest lumber mill in the state—all bought with honey.

“Morning Little John. I’ll take two pint-jars,” Martha Wilkins would no more miss a Wednesday farmer’s market than her own funeral. And in forty-two years she never had, or at least no citizen dared make claim she had.

“Certainly, Miss Wilkins,” Little John calls out. “These are jarred just yesterday.”

Abe Cloister is next in line. “What is it about your bees?” he asks. It was suspected he and Martha had a thing.

“A spoon a day, you’ll live forever!” Little John liked to jest with the regulars.

“It mended my broken leg,” chips in Sally Rose across the way in her pink dress riding her blue electric bike, although today her corgi, Oscar, wasn’t in the basket.

“You know what Dad says?” Little John calls out to Sally, but everyone knows exactly what he’s going to say. Little John puffs up, grabs his suspenders with his thumbs, and hollers out. “I won’t say it will, and I won’t say it won’t, but I will say if I had a broken leg, wild horses or witches couldn’t keep me away from Henkin’s Mellified Honey.”

Everyone laughs and gives each other side glances with wide winking eyes; they’ve heard it all before, but it’s never old it seems.

Just for fun, county clerk Abe Connors, next in line, adds, “It cured my diabetes!” His eyes light up in his doughy face.

“I won’t say it will, and I won’t say it won’t, but I will say if I had diabetes, wild horses or witches couldn’t keep me away from Henkin’s Mellified Honey.” And that starts the howling all over again.

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“Little John, you’re here because it’s time you were brought in to the fold so to speak.” And with that statement from his dad, Little John’s face turns red with pride knowing he would finally get to help in the back room of the warehouse, a place he had never been and only heard about in rumors and whispers.

They both step from the black Chevy four by four in front of the massive warehouse with the words Henkin’s Mellified Honey in ten foot golden letters across the front with a smiling bright yellow neon bee gracing the sign. John Sr. touches the remote in his hand and an eighteen foot high garage door in front of them moans with the weight. John and his dad enter the warehouse doors. Inside are fork lifts and cranes parked neatly against one wall underneath the thirty-foot ceiling, black steel chains hanging down ceiling to floor. On the other wall are at least fifty wooden pallets with cases of shrink-wrapped plastic honey jars of all sizes: pints and quarts and gallons; ready for shipping. Henkin’s Mellified Honey is on a yellow label on each jar. Little John has seen all this many times. He has stacked countless pallets as his dad felt he should. His dad had always said, ‘learn the business and the work ethic to go along with it’. 

But today Little John’s dad pushes another button on a smaller remote and the rear wall of the warehouse creaks and squeals, opening up like a barn door to a deeper bright lit interior that Little John had known was there but was never allowed into or permitted to talk about. John, Sr. leads his son through the archway and inside are more than a hundred gray shiny containers jammed into a storage room, stacked from ground to ceiling, row after row, one on one. All of them look like the size of a casket Little John is ashamed to think, but he feels better right away noticing they aren’t caskets but simply shaped that way, made from some kind of metal, each sealed.

John Sr puts his hand on a container. “These are honey containers son. You need to know we could never, ever, produce enough honey to fill the demand so we bring in honey from all over, even the world.”

“You mean it’s not our honey?” Now Little John is confused as he had been to the fields where the boxes kept the bees acre on acre. He had seen the honey harvesters bringing in the honey and he had learned how to do just that. He knew his deep boxes and he knew his brood boxes from his medium boxes. He had been trained with the hats and veils and smoke and beekeeper suits his whole short life.

“The recipe is ours.” John Sr. then opens a double door into the bee honey processing plant. On the floor are a dozen workers dressed in white smocks and hair nets. Ten containers like Little John had seen in the front storage warehouse are open. The workers are busy draining off the honey in each container from a spigot protruding from the front of each, much like draining off wine from a barrel. Golden honey flows out the spigot and into the jars, a slow process.

“These containers are one-hundred years old,” says John Sr., his voice louder than it needs to be. “This is an age-old recipe going back to fifteenth century old England and who knows how far before that.”

John Sr. looks close at his son’s face as he motions to Little John to take a look in an open container. Now is the moment John Sr. remembers so well when his father had motioned to him also on that fateful day thirty-one years before when he was a boy of fourteen himself.

Little John looks in the open container full of honey. Within the honey he sees an image of a shriveled skull-like head with black eyes, the mouth open with rotten teeth. An entire dissolved gray-white human being, a full-on corpse can be made out, barely but enough, through the copper yellow honey.

“Something about the preservation process,” John Sr. says. And just like his daddy, he needs to see if his son understands the legacy he is bringing him. Later he would explain why cremation was important at the mortuary and how one box of rocks was as good as another for the town-folks who mourned their loved ones—and how they never needed to know the box was light, or who was in it. “Once the honey is drained off we break the honey brine into confectionery and mix it with the honey. It’s a delicacy John. A delicacy. A cure for what ails you.”

Little John retches onto the concrete floor and falls to his knees. 

Maybe he’s not ready, thinks John Sr. He’s weak, like his mother. “Get off your knees son. Don’t let these people see you like that. You’re a Henkins! Stand up boy!”

Brown bile pools on the floor in front of Little John’s face. A sour acrid smell makes him gag. He crawls back on his knees, then stands unsteady next to John Sr., his eyes down in disgrace. But from somewhere, deep within him, he can sense the history of the Henkins family and it feels like long dead ghosts hold him up. He reaches into the honey with one hand, pushes down to his wrist, and then deeper to his elbow. He scoops and digs with his fingers from the black eyes in the muck, draws out the clump that he finds, and holds his dripping hand above his head getting ready to slurp it into his mouth. “I’m a Henkins,” he says proud or maybe spiteful.

He’s my boy, thinks John Sr. Blood is thicker than water and but for the dilution from my wife’s line the Henkins’ family name lives on. And with that final thought, John Sr’s mind turns hot white and gone as his head explodes clean off his shoulders.

Ann Henkins stands in the double doorway; a Browning twenty-eight gauge shotgun with a thirty-inch barrel smoking in her hands.