The Secret Life of Bees (17 page)

My mother could have learned it from a book, maybe from her mother. How did I know that households everywhere didn't use this particular roach-ridding method? I stood up and walked over to May. I felt a trembly feeling at the back of my knees. I put my hand on her shoulder.
Okay,
I thought,
here goes.
I said, “May, did you ever know a Deborah? Deborah Fontanel? A white woman from Virginia? It would have been a long time ago.”

There wasn't a trace of cunning in May, and you could depend on her not to overthink her answers. She didn't look up, didn't pause, just said, “Oh, yes, Deborah Fontanel. She stayed out there in the honey house. She was the sweetest thing.”

And there it was. There it all was.

For a moment I felt light-headed. I had to reach for the countertop to steady myself. Down on the floor the trail of crumbs and marshmallows looked half alive.

I had a million more questions, but May had started humming “Oh! Susanna.” She set down the box of crackers and got up slowly, starting to sniffle. Something about Deborah Fontanel had set her off.

“I think I'll go out to the wall for a little while,” she said. And that's how she left me, standing in the kitchen, hot and breathless, the world tilted under me.

Walking to the honey house, I concentrated on my feet touching down on the hard-caked dirt in the driveway, the exposed tree roots, fresh-watered grass, how the earth felt beneath me, solid, alive, ancient, right there every time my foot came down. There and there and there, always there. The things a mother should be.

Oh, yes, Deborah Fontanel. She stayed out there in the honey house. She was the sweetest thing.

In the honey house I sat on the cot with my knees drawn up, hugging them with my arms and making a shelf for the side of my face to rest on. I looked at the floor and the walls with brand-new eyes. My mother had walked about in this room. A real person. Not somebody I made up but a living, breathing person.

The last thing I expected was to fall asleep, but when there's a blow to the system, all the body wants to do is go to sleep and dream on it.

I woke an hour or so later in the velvety space where you don't yet remember what you've dreamed. Then suddenly the whole thing washed back to me.

I am constructing a spiraling trail of honey across a room that seems to be in the honey house one minute and the next in my bedroom back in Sylvan. I start it at a door I've never seen before and end it at the foot of my bed. Then I sit on the mattress and wait. The door opens. In walks my mother. She follows the honey, making twists and turns across the room until she gets to my bed. She is smiling, so pretty, but then I see she is not a normal person. She has roach legs protruding through her clothes, sticking through the cage of her ribs, down her torso, six of them, three on each side.

I couldn't imagine who sat in my head making this stuff up. The air was now dusky rose and cool enough for a sheet. I pulled it around my legs. My stomach felt icky, like I might throw up.

If I told you right now that I never wondered about that dream, never closed my eyes and pictured her with roach legs, never wondered why she came to me like that, with her worst nature exposed, I would be up to my old habit of lying. A roach is a creature no one can love, but you cannot kill it. It will go on and on and on. Just try to get rid of it.

 

The next few days I was a case of nerves. I jumped out of my skin if somebody so much as dropped a nickel on the floor. At the dinner table I poked at my food and stared into space like I was in a trance. Sometimes the picture of my mother with roach legs would leap into my head, and I would have to swallow a spoonful of honey for my stomach. I was so antsy I couldn't sit through five minutes of
American Bandstand
on television, when ordinarily I was glued to Dick Clark's every word.

I walked around and around the house, pausing here and there to picture my mother in the various rooms. Sitting with her skirt spread over the piano bench. Kneeling beside Our Lady. Studying the recipe collection that May clipped from magazines and kept taped on the refrigerator. I would stare at these visions with my eyes glazed over, only to look up and see August, or June, or Rosaleen watching me. They clucked their tongues and felt my face for fever.

They said, “What's wrong? What's got into you?”

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I lied. “Nothing.”

In truth I felt as if my life was stranded out on the high dive, about to leap into unknown waters.
Dangerous
waters. I only wanted to postpone the plunge awhile, to feel my mother's closeness in the house, to pretend I wasn't afraid of the story that had brought her here or that she might go and surprise me the way she had in the dream, turning up six-legged and ugly.

I wanted to march up to August and ask why my mother had been here, but fear stopped me. I wanted to know, and I didn't want to know. I was all hung up in limbo.

 

Late Friday afternoon, after we had finished cleaning the last of the supers and storing them away, Zach went out to take a look under the hood of the honey wagon. It was still acting funny and overheating, in spite of Neil having worked on it.

I wandered back to my room and sat on my cot. Heat radiated from the window. I considered getting up to turn on the fan but only sat there staring through the panes at the milky-blue sky, a sad, ragged feeling catching hold inside. I could hear music coming from the truck radio, Sam Cooke singing “Another Saturday Night,” then May calling across the yard to Rosaleen, something about getting the sheets off the clothesline. And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it. I couldn't go on biding time like there was no end of it, no end to this summer. I felt tears spring up. I would have to come clean. Whatever happened…well, it would just happen.

I went over to the sink and washed my face.

Taking a deep breath, I stuffed my mother's black Mary picture and her photograph into my pocket and started toward the pink house to find August.

I thought we would sit down on the end of her bed, or out in the lawn chairs if the mosquitoes weren't bad. I imagined August would say,
What's on your mind, Lily? Are we finally gonna have our talk?
I would pull out the wooden picture and tell her every last thing, and then she would explain about my mother.

If only that had happened, instead of what did.

 

As I strode toward the house, Zach called to me from the truck. “Wanna ride to town with me? I've gotta get a new radiator hose before the store closes.”

“I'm going to talk to August,” I said.

He slammed down the hood and smeared his hands front and back on his pants. “August is with Sugar-Girl in the parlor. She showed up crying. Something about Otis using their life savings to buy a secondhand fishing boat.”

“But I've got something really important to talk to her about.”

“You'll have to get in line,” he said. “Come on, we'll be back before Sugar-Girl leaves.”

I hesitated, then gave in. “All right.”

The auto-parts store sat two doors down from the movie theater. As Zach pulled into a parking space in front, I saw them—five or six white men standing by the ticket booth. They milled around, casting quick glances up and down the sidewalk, like they were waiting for someone, all of them so nicely dressed, wearing ties with clips on them like store clerks and bank tellers. One man held what looked like the handle from a shovel.

Zach turned off the honey wagon and stared at them through the windshield. A dog, an old beagle with an age-white face, wandered out of the auto-parts store and began to sniff at something on the sidewalk. Zach drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and sighed. And I suddenly realized: it was Friday, and they were out here waiting for Jack Palance and the colored woman.

We sat there a minute not speaking, the sounds in the truck magnified. The squeak in a spring under the seat. The tapping of Zach's fingers. The sharp way I was breathing.

Then one of the men yelled, causing me to jump and bang my knee against the glove compartment. He gazed across the street and shouted, “What are you staring at over there?”

Zach and I both turned and looked through the back window. Three teenaged colored boys stood on the sidewalk, drinking R.C. Colas out of the bottle and glaring over at the men.

“Let's come back another time,” I said.

“It'll be okay,” Zach said. “You wait here.”

No, it won't be okay,
I thought.

As he slid out of the honey wagon, I heard the boys call Zach's name. They crossed the street and came over to the honey wagon. Glancing through the window at me, they gave Zach a few playful shoves. One of them waved his hand in front of his face like he'd bitten into a Mexican pepper. “Who you got in there?” he said.

I looked at them, tried to smile, but my mind was on the men, who I could see were watching us.

The boys saw it, too, and one of them—who I would later find out was named Jackson—said real loud, “You gotta be dumb as dirt to believe Jack Palance is coming to Tiburon,” and all of them laughed. Even Zach.

The man holding the shovel handle walked right up to the truck bumper and stared at the boys with that same half smile, half sneer I had seen on T. Ray's face a thousand times, the sort of look conjured from power without benefit of love, and he yelled, “What did you say, boy?”

The murmuring noise on the street fell away. The beagle dropped his ears and slunk off under a parked car. I saw Jackson bite down, causing a tiny ripple across his jaw. I saw him raise his R.C. Cola bottle over his head. And throw it.

I closed my eyes as it flew out of his hand. When I opened them again, there was glass sprayed across the sidewalk. The man with the shovel handle had dropped it and had his hand over his nose. Blood seeped through his fingers.

He turned back to the other men. “That nigger busted open my nose,” he said, sounding more surprised than anything. He looked around, confused for a moment, then headed into a nearby store, dripping blood all the way.

Zach and the boys stood by the truck door in a little knot, stuck to the pavement, while the rest of the men walked over and formed a half circle around them, hemming them in against the truck. “Which one of you threw that bottle?” one man said.

The boys didn't open their mouths.

“Bunch of cowards,” another man said. This one had picked up the shovel handle from the sidewalk and was jabbing it in the air in the boys' direction every time they moved. “Just tell us which one of you it was, and you other three can go,” he said.

Nothing.

People had started coming out of the stores, gathering in clumps. I stared at the back of Zach's head. I felt like my heart had a little ledge on it and I was standing there leaning as far out as I could, waiting to see what Zach would do. I knew that being a snitch was considered the lowest sort of person, but I wanted him to point his finger and say,
The one over there. He did it.
That way he could climb back into the honey truck and we would be on our way.

Come on, Zach.

He turned his head and looked at me from the corner of his eye. Then he shrugged his shoulder slightly, and I knew it was over and done. He would never open his mouth. He was trying to say to me,
I'm sorry, but these are my friends.

He chose to stand there and be one of them.

 

I watched the policeman put Zach and the other three boys in his car. Driving away, he turned on his siren and red light, which seemed unnecessary, but I guess he didn't want to disappoint the audience on the sidewalk.

I sat in the truck like I had frozen and the world had frozen around me. The crowd faded away, and all the cars downtown went home one by one. People closed up their stores. I stared through the windshield as if I was watching the test pattern that came on television at midnight.

After the shock wore off some, I tried to think what to do, how to get home. Zach had taken the keys, or I might've tried driving myself, even though I didn't know gears from brakes. There wasn't a store open now to ask to use a phone, and when I spotted a pay phone down the street, I realized I didn't have a dime. I got out of the truck and walked.

When I got to the pink house a half hour later, I saw August, June, Rosaleen, Neil, and Clayton Forrest gathered in the long shadows near the hydrangeas. The murmur of their voices floated up into the dying light. I heard Zach's name. I heard Mr. Forrest say the word “jail.” I guessed that Zach had called him with his one phone call, and here he was, breaking the news.

Neil stood next to June, which told me they hadn't really meant all that
don't you come back
and
you selfish bitch
that they'd hurled at each other. I walked toward them, unnoticed. Someone down the road was burning grass clippings. The whole sky smelled sour green, and stray pieces of ash flicked over my head.

Coming up behind them, I said, “August?”

She pulled me to her. “Thank goodness. Here you are. I was about to come looking for you.”

I told them what had happened as we walked back to the house. August's arm was around my waist like she was afraid I'd keel over again in a blind faint, but really, I had never been more present. The blue in the shadows, the shape of them against the house, how they looked like certain unkind animals—a crocodile, a grizzly bear—the smell of Alka-Seltzer circulating over Clayton Forrest's head, the white part in his hair, the weight of our caring strapped around our ankles. We could hardly walk for it.

We sat in the ladder-back chairs around the kitchen table, except for Rosaleen, who poured glasses of tea and set a plate of pimiento-cheese sandwiches on the table, as if anybody could eat. Rosaleen's hair was done up in perfect cornrow plaits, which I guessed May had done for her after supper.