The Secret Life of Bees (16 page)

“I was only—”

“I'll tell you what you were. You were a goddamn fool who went looking for trouble and found it. Because of you I can't walk down the street in Sylvan without people staring at me. I've had to stop everything and search for you all over creation, and meanwhile the peaches have gone to hell.”

“Well, quit yelling, all right? I said I was sorry.”

“Your sorry ain't worth a shitload of peaches, Lily. I swear to God—”

“I called because I was just wondering something.”

“Where are you? Answer me.”

I squeezed the arm of the chair till my knuckles hurt. “I was wondering, do you know what my favorite color is?”

“Jesus Christ. What are you talking about? You tell me where you are.”

“I said, do you know what my favorite color is?”

“I know one thing, and that's I'm gonna find you, Lily, and when I do, I'm gonna tear your behind to pieces—”

I lowered the receiver back to the cradle and sat on the sofa again. I sat in the brightness of the afternoon and watched the hem of light under the venetian blinds. I told myself,
Don't you cry. Don't you dare cry. So what if he doesn't know the color you love best? So what?

 

Zach returned holding a big brown book that looked half moldy with age. “Look what Mr. Clayton gave me,” he said, and honestly, you would have thought it was a six-pound baby he'd birthed by the proud look of him.

He turned it over so I could read the binding.
South Carolina Legal Reports 1889.
Zach rubbed his hand across the front, and little flecks of it fell off onto the floor. “I'm starting my law library.”

“That's nice,” I said.

Mr. Forrest stepped closer, staring at me with such intensity I thought I must need to wipe my nose.

“Zach says you're from Spartanburg County, that your parents both died?”

“Yes, sir.” One thing I didn't want was to get on the witness stand right here in his office and have him fire lawyer questions at me. An hour from now Rosaleen and I could be packing for prison.

“What brings you—”

“I really do need to get back.” I put my hand low on my stomach. “I'm having a little female trouble.” I tried to look very female and mysterious, slightly troubled by internal things they could not imagine and did not want to. It had been my experience for nearly a year that uttering the words “female trouble” could get me into places I wanted to go and out of places I didn't.

“Oh,” said Zach. “Well, let's go.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Forrest,” I said. Clutching my abdomen. A small wince. Walking slowly to the door.

“Believe me, Lily,” he said, calling after me, “the pleasure was all mine.”

 

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway? Back in my room at the honey house, I wrote a letter to T. Ray, during which I broke the points off three pencils, and the words…well, they looked like they'd been laid on the paper with branding irons.

I read the letter back, then tore it into tiny pieces. I felt relief to get all that out of my system, but I had lied about it bringing me joy. I almost wanted to write another letter that I would not send and say I'm sorry.

 

That night, when the pink house was sound asleep, I came creeping in, needing the bathroom. I never worried about finding my way through the house, as August left a trail of night-lights on from the kitchen to the bathroom.

I had come barefoot, collecting dew on the soles of my feet. Sitting on the toilet, trying to pee very quietly, I could see crepe myrtle petals stuck to my toes. Over my head, Rosaleen's snores sifted through the ceiling. It is always a relief to empty your bladder. Better than sex, that's what Rosaleen said. As good as it felt, though, I sincerely hoped she was wrong.

I headed toward the kitchen, but then something made me turn around; your guess is as good as mine. I walked in the opposite direction to the parlor. Stepping inside, I heard a sigh so deep and satisfying that for a moment I didn't realize it had come from my own lungs.

The candle in the red glass beside the Mary statue still burned, looking like a tiny red heart in a cave of darkness, pulsing out light to the world. August kept it going night and day. It reminded me of the eternal flame they'd put on John F. Kennedy's grave that will never go out no matter what.

Our Lady of Chains looked so different late at night, her face older and darker, her fist bigger than I remembered. I wondered about all the places she'd traveled out there on the waters of the world, all the sad things that had been whispered to her, the things she'd endured.

Sometimes, after we'd done our prayers with the beads, I could not remember how to cross myself right, getting it mixed up like you would expect any Baptist-raised person to do. Whenever that happened, I just put my hand over my heart like we did in school for the Pledge of Allegiance. I felt one was as good as another, and that's what happened now—my hand just went automatically to my heart and stayed there.

I told her,
Fix me, please fix me. Help me know what to do. Forgive me. Is my mother all right up there with God? Don't let them find us. If they find us, don't let them take me back. If they find us, keep Rosaleen from being killed. Let June love me. Let T. Ray love me. Help me stop lying. Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people's hearts.

I moved closer, so now I could see the heart on her chest. In my mind I heard the bees fanning their wings down in the dark music box. I saw August and me with our ears against the hive. I remembered her voice the first time she told the story of Our Lady of Chains.
Send them rescue, send them consolation, send them freedom.

I reached out and traced black Mary's heart with my finger. I stood with the petals on my toes and pressed my palm flat and hard against her heart.

I live in a hive of darkness, and you are my mother,
I told her.
You are the mother of thousands.

J
uly 28 was a day for the record books. I look back on it and what comes to me are people going over Niagara Falls in barrels. Ever since I'd heard about that, I'd tried to imagine people crouched inside, bobbing along peacefully like a rubber duck in a child's bathtub, and suddenly the water turning choppy and the barrel starting to thrash around while a roar grows in the distance. I knew they were in there saying,
Shitbucket,
what
was I thinking?

At eight o'clock in the morning it hit 94, with the ambitious plan of reaching 103 before noon. I woke up with August shaking my shoulder, saying it was gonna be a scorcher, get up, we had to water the bees.

I climbed into the honey wagon with my hair uncombed, with May handing me buttered toast and orange juice through the window and Rosaleen sticking in thermoses of water, both of them practically running alongside the truck while August rolled out of the driveway. I felt like the Red Cross springing to action to save the bee queendom.

In the back of the truck August had gallons of sugar water already made up. “When it gets over a hundred,” she said, “the flowers dry up and there's no food for the bees. They stay in the hives fanning themselves. Sometimes they just roast.”

I felt like we might roast alive ourselves. You could not touch the door handle for fear of a third-degree burn. Sweat ran between my breasts and sopped my underwear band. August turned on the radio for the weather, but what we heard was how
Ranger 7
had finally been launched to the moon in a place called the Sea of Clouds, how police were looking for the bodies of those three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and the terrible things happening in Vietnam. It ended with a story about what was happening “closer to home,” how black people from Tiburon, Florence, and Orangeburg were marching today all the way to Columbia asking the governor to enforce the Civil Rights Act.

August turned it off. Enough was enough. You cannot fix the whole world.

“I've already watered the hives around the house,” she said. “Zach is taking care of the hives on the east side of the county. So you and I've got the west side.”

Rescuing bees took us the entire morning. Driving back into remote corners of the woods where there were barely roads, we would come upon twenty-five beehives up on slats like a little lost city tucked back in there. We lifted the covers and filled the feeders with sugar water. Earlier we'd spooned dry sugar into our pockets, and now, just as a bonus, we sprinkled it on the feeding rims.

I managed to get stung on my wrist while replacing a lid onto a hive box. August scraped out the stinger.

“I was sending them love,” I said, feeling betrayed.

August said, “Hot weather makes the bees out of sorts, I don't care how much love you send them.” She pulled a small bottle of olive oil and bee pollen from her free pocket and rubbed my skin—her patented remedy. It was something I'd hoped never to test out.

“Count yourself initiated,” she said. “You can't be a true beekeeper without getting stung.”

A true beekeeper.
The words caused a fullness in me, and right at that moment an explosion of blackbirds lifted off the ground in a clearing a short distance away and filled up the whole sky. I said to myself,
Will wonders never cease?
I would add that to my list of careers. A writer, an English teacher,
and
a beekeeper.

“Do you think I could keep bees one day?” I asked.

August said, “Didn't you tell me this past week one of the things you loved was bees and honey? Now, if that's so, you'll be a fine beekeeper. Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.”

The sting shot pain all the way to my elbow, causing me to marvel at how much punishment a minuscule creature can inflict. I'm prideful enough to say I didn't complain. After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it. I just dived back into the riptide of saving bees.

When we had watered all the hives of Tiburon and sprinkled enough sugar to cause a human being to gain fifty pounds, we drove home hot, hungry, and nearly drowned in our own sweat.

 

Pulling into the driveway, we found Rosaleen and May sipping sweet tea on the back porch. May said she'd left our lunches in the refrigerator, cold pork-chop sandwiches and slaw. While we ate, we heard June upstairs in her room playing the cello like something had died.

We scarfed down every morsel without talking, then pushed back from the table. We were wondering how to get our tired selves to a standing position when we heard squealing and laughing, the kind you're apt to hear at a school recess. August and I dragged ourselves to the porch to see. And there were May and Rosaleen running through the water sprinkler, barefoot and fully clothed. They had gone berserk.

Rosaleen's muumuu was sopped and plastered to her body, and May was catching water in the bowl of her dress skirt and tossing it up across her face. Sunlight hit the hair sheen on her braids and lit them up.

“Well, isn't this the living end?” August said.

When we got out there, Rosaleen picked up the sprinkler and aimed it at us. “You come over here and you gonna get wet,” she said, and
splat!
we were hit full in the chest with ice-cold water.

Rosaleen turned the sprinkler head down and filled May's dress. “You come over here and you gonna get wet,” May said, echoing Rosaleen, and she came after us, pitching the contents of her skirt across our backs.

I can tell you this much: neither one of us protested that loudly. In the end we stood there and let ourselves be drenched by two crazy black women.

All four of us turned into water nymphs and danced around the cool spray, just the way it must have been when Indians danced circles around blazing fires. Squirrels and Carolina wrens hopped as close as they dared and drank from the puddles, and you could almost see the blades of brown grass lift themselves up and turn green.

Then the porch door banged, and here came June with her dander up. I must have been drunk with water and air and dancing, because I picked up the sprinkler and said, “You come over here and you're gonna get wet.” Then I hosed her.

She began to holler. “Damn it to hell!” I knew this was going down the wrong path, but I couldn't stop. I was seeing myself as the fire department and June as the raging inferno.

She yanked the sprinkler out of my hands and turned the spray on me. Some of the water rushed up my nose and burned. I yanked at the sprinkler, and each of us held on to one side of it while it blasted away at our stomachs and chins. We went to our knees, wrestling for it, the geyser weaving between us, her eyes staring at me, close and bright with beads of water on her eyelashes. I heard May start to hum “Oh! Susanna.” I laughed to let her know it was all right, but I wouldn't let go. I would not let June Boatwright win.

Rosaleen said, “They say if you aim the hose on two locked dogs, they'll turn loose, but I guess that ain't always so.”

August laughed, and I saw the softening come around June's eyes, how she was trying not to laugh, but it was like the Dutch boy pulling his finger out of the dike—the minute she softened her eyes, the whole thing collapsed. I could almost see her smack her forehead, thinking,
I am wrestling with a fourteen-year-old girl over a garden sprinkler. This is ridiculous.

She let go and sprawled back on the grass in convulsions of laughter. I plopped down next to her and laughed, too. We could not stop. I wasn't exactly sure of everything we were laughing about—I was just glad we were doing it together.

When we got up, June said, “Lord, I feel woozy, like somebody has pulled the plugs in my feet and drained me out.”

Rosaleen, May, and August had returned to the business of being water nymphs. I looked back down at the ground where our bodies had lain side by side, the wet grasses pressed down, perfect depressions in the earth. I stepped over them with the utmost care, and, seeing how careful I was, June stepped over them, too, and then, to my shock, she hugged me. June Boatwright hugged me while our clothes made sweet, squishy sounds up and down our bodies.

 

If the heat goes over 104 degrees in South Carolina, you have to go to bed. It is practically the law. Some people might see it as shiftless behavior, but really, when we're lying down from the heat, we're giving our minds time to browse around for new ideas, wondering at the true aim of life, and generally letting things pop into our heads that need to. In the sixth grade there was a boy in my class who had a steel plate in his skull and was always complaining how test answers could never get through to him. Our teacher would say, “Give me a break.”

In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that's just my opinion.

August, May, June, and Rosaleen were supposedly over in the pink house in their rooms lying under the fans with the lights out. In the honey house I reclined on my cot and told myself I could think about anything I wanted, except my mother, so naturally she was the only thing that wanted on the elevator.

I could feel things unraveling around me. All the fraying edges of the dream world. Pull one wrong thread and I would be standing in wreckage to my elbows. Ever since I'd called T. Ray, I'd wanted so badly to tell Rosaleen about it. To say,
If you've been wondering whether my leaving has caused T. Ray to examine his heart, or change his ways, don't waste your time
. But I couldn't bring myself to admit to her that I'd cared enough to call him.

What was wrong with me that I was living here as if I had nothing to hide? I lay on the cot and stared at the glaring square of window, exhausted. It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.
Let me on,
my mother was saying.
Let me on the damn elevator.

Well, fine. I pulled out my bag and examined my mother's picture. I wondered what it had been like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in her darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.

The wanting-her was still in me, but it wasn't nearly so fierce and raging as before. Pulling on her gloves, I noticed how tight they fit all of a sudden. By the time I was sixteen, they would feel like baby gloves on my hands. I would be Alice in Wonderland after she ate the cake and grew twice her size. My palms would split the seams of the gloves, and I would never wear them again.

I peeled the gloves from my sweaty hands and felt a wave of jitteriness, the old saw-edged guilt, the necklace of lies I could not stop wearing, the fear of being cast out of the pink house.

“No,” I breathed. The word took a long time to work its way to my throat. A scared whisper. No, I will not think about this. I will not feel this. I will not let this ruin the way things are.
No.

I decided that lying down from the heat was a hick idea. I gave up and walked to the pink house for something cold to drink. If I ever managed to get to heaven after everything I'd done, I hoped I would get just a few minutes for a private conference with God. I wanted to say,
Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise?
People's lives were a mess.

When I came into the kitchen, May was sitting on the floor with her legs straight out and a box of graham crackers in her lap. That would be about right—me and May the only two who couldn't lie peaceful on the bed for five minutes.

“I saw a roach,” she said, reaching into a bag of marshmallows that I hadn't noticed was there. She pulled one out and pinched off little pieces of it. Crazy May.

I opened the refrigerator and stood there staring at the contents like I was waiting for the grape-juice bottle to jump in my hand and say,
Here, drink me.
I could not seem to register what May was doing. Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness. Say you break your ankle and don't feel it hurting till you've walked another block.

I had nearly finished a glass of juice before I let myself look at the little highway of broken graham crackers and marshmallow bits that May was constructing across the floor, how it started at the sink and angled toward the door, thick with golden crumbs and smudges of sticky white.

“The roaches will follow this out the door,” May said. “It works every time.”

I don't know how long I stared at the line on the floor, at May's face turned toward mine, eager for me to say something, but I couldn't think what to say. The room filled with the steady whir of the refrigerator motor. I felt a strange, thick feeling inside. A memory. I stood there waiting, letting it come….
Your mother was a lunatic when it came to bugs,
T. Ray had said.
She used to make trails of graham cracker crumbs and marshmallows to lure roaches outside.

I looked again at May.
My mother couldn't have learned the roach trick from May
, I thought.
Could she?

Ever since I'd set foot in the pink house, some part of me had kept believing that my mother had been here. No, not believing it so much as daydreaming it and running it through a maze of wishful thinking. But now that the actual possibility seemed to be right in front of me, it seemed so far-fetched, crazy.
It couldn't be,
I thought again.

I walked over and sat down at the table. Shadows from late afternoon pushed into the room. They were peach tinted, fading in and out, and the kitchen was completely silent. Even the refrigerator hum had died away. May had turned back to her work. She seemed oblivious to me sitting there.