The Secret Life of Bees (21 page)

Rosaleen said, “Well, don't just stand there with your mouth open, June. Say something.”

June stared at Neil, and I could see the struggle in her face. The surrender she had to make inside. Not just to Neil but to life. Finally she let out a long, sighing breath. “All right,” she said. “Let's get married.”

Rosaleen slapped her thigh and burst out with a whoop, while August broke into the biggest smile I believe I'd ever seen on her face. Me, I just looked from one person to another, trying to take it in.

Neil walked over and kissed June right on the mouth. I didn't think they were ever going to come up for air.

When they did, Neil said, “We're going to the jewelry store this minute and pick out a ring before you change your mind.”

June cast a look back at August. “Well, I hate to leave them with all this work,” she said, but I could tell she didn't mind a bit.

“Go on,” August said.

When they'd left, August, Rosaleen, and I sat down and ate honey cake while it was still hot, talking over what had just happened. We had all these chores facing us, but some things you have to sit and mull over before you can go on. We said, “Did you see the look on Neil's face?”…“Can you believe that kiss?” Mostly we just stared at each other, saying “June's getting
married
!”

 

Getting ready for Mary Day was nonstop work. First August got me started on the streamers. I cut packages of thick blue-and-white crepe paper into strips till I had rubbed blisters on both thumbs. I formed little twists in the edges with my fingers to give them a curled effect, then dragged the stepladder into the yard and hung them from the myrtle trees.

I clear-cut the gladiolus bed and made a six-foot garland by wiring the blossoms to a piece of string, which I thought I never would get right. When I asked August what I was supposed to do with it, she said, “Drape it around the wagon.” Well, of course. Why didn't I think of that?

Next I rummaged around in the hall closet for the Christmas lights, which she had me wind around the bushes by the back-porch steps, not to mention all the extension cords I had to rig.

As I worked, Zach pushed the lawn mower, shirtless. I set up the card tables beside the myrtle trees so the streamers would drift over and tickle our faces while we ate. I tried not to look at him, his tight skin sparkling with sweat, his dogtag hanging from the chain around his neck, his shorts slung low on his hips, the little tuft of hair starting under his navel.

He hoed up a big infestation of cabbage weeds, without even being asked to. He swung the hoe with a blaze of angry grunts, while I sat on the steps and dug candle wax out of two dozen glass holders. I refilled them with fresh candles and set them all around on the grass, under the trees, mostly in the little holes of earth where the cabbage weeds had grown.

Up on the back porch August cranked the ice cream churn. Beside her feet sat a coil of chains. I stared at it. “What's that for?”

“You'll see,” she said.

 

At 6:00
P.M.
I was exhausted from Mary Day goings-on, and the real part hadn't even started. I got the last thing on my list done and was headed to the honey house to get dressed, when June and Neil pulled into the driveway.

June waltzed up with her hand stuck out so I could admire her ring. I looked it over, and I have to say Neil had outdone himself. It wasn't that big, really, it was just so pretty. The diamond was tucked inside a scalloped silver setting.

“That's the most beautiful ring I've ever seen,” I said.

She kept her hand stretched out, turning it this way and that, letting the diamond catch the light. “I think May would have loved it, too,” she said.

The first carload of the Daughters drove up then, and June sauntered toward them with her hand outstretched.

Inside the honey house I lifted up my pillow to be sure my mother's photograph and her black Mary picture were still underneath like I'd left them. Feast Day or not, tonight
had
to be the night I got the truth from August. The thought set off a nervous quiver through me. I sat down on the cot and felt things building inside—pushing against my chest.

Heading back to the pink house, wearing clean shorts and a top, my hair all combed, I stopped to behold everything. August, June, Rosaleen, Zach, Neil, Otis, and all the Daughters of Mary stood around on the mowed grass beside the card tables, their laughter low and vibrating. Piles of food. Blue-and-white streamers rippling in the breezes. The Christmas lights glowed in spirals of color around the porch, and all the candles were lit, even though the sun was still working its way down. Every molecule of air gave off red fire.

I said to myself,
I love this place with my whole heart.

The Daughters fussed over me—how good I smelled, how exceptional my hair was when it was combed. Lunelle said, “Would you like me to make you a hat, Lily?”

“Really? You'd make me a hat?” Where I would wear a Lunelle-created hat was a mystery, but I wanted one all the same. At the least, I could get buried in it one day.

“Of course I'll make you a hat. I'll make you a hat you won't believe. What color would you like?”

August, who was listening in, said, “Blue,” and winked at me.

First we ate. By now I'd learned eating was a high priority with the Daughters. When we finished, the redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue-black. Rosaleen brought out the platter of honey cakes and set them on one of the tables.

August motioned us to stand around the table in a circle. The Mary Day program was under way.

“These are Mary's honey cakes. Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,” August said.

She took one of them in her hand and, pinching off a piece, held it before Mabelee, who stood next to her in the circle. August said, “This is the body of the Blessed Mother.” Mabelee closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and August laid the cake on her tongue.

After Mabelee had swallowed, she did the same thing August had done—snipped off a piece and gave it to the next person in the circle, who happened to be Neil. Mabelee, who could not have measured five feet tall in spike heels, practically needed a stepladder to get up to his mouth. Neil crouched down and opened wide. “This is the body of the Mother,” Mabelee said, and popped it in.

I did not know one thing, really, about the Catholic Church, but somehow I felt sure the pope would have keeled over if he'd seen this. Not Brother Gerald, though. He wouldn't have wasted time fainting, just gotten busy arranging the exorcism.

Me, I had never seen grown-ups feed each other, and I watched with the feeling I might burst out crying. I don't know what got to me about it, but for some reason that circle of feeding made me feel better about the world.

As life would have it, the one who fed me turned out to be June. Opening my mouth, closing my eyes, and waiting for the body of the Mother, I heard June's whisper brush my ear—“I'm sorry for being hard on you when you first got here”—and then the sweetness of honey cake spread through my mouth.

I wished it could have been Zach standing next to me so I could lay the cake on his tongue. I would have said,
I hope this softens you toward the world. I hope it brings you a tender feeling.
Instead I got to give the pinch of cake to Cressie, who ate it with her eyes closed.

After we were all fed, Zach and Neil went to the parlor and returned carrying Our Lady of Chains. Otis followed after them, lugging the pile of chain. They stood her upright in the red wagon. August leaned over to me. “We're going to reenact the story of Our Lady of Chains. We're taking her over to the honey house and chaining her in there for the night.”

I thought,
Our Lady is spending the night in the honey house. With me.

As August pulled the wagon slowly across the yard, Zach and Neil braced Our Lady with their hands. If I do say so, the flower garland around the wagon set the whole thing off.

June carried her cello, while the Daughters trailed the wagon single file, carrying burning candles. They sang, “Mary, star of the sea, Mary, brightest moon, Mary, comb of honey.”

Rosaleen and I brought up the rear, toting candles, too, trying to hum along, since we didn't know the words. I cupped one hand around the flame of my candle to be sure it didn't blow out.

At the door of the honey house, Neil and Zach lifted the statue out of the wagon and carried her inside. Sugar-Girl nudged Otis with her elbow, and he stepped up and helped them get her situated between the extractor and the baffle tank.

“All right,” August said. “Now we'll start the last part of our service. Why don't you stand in a semicircle right here around Our Lady.”

June played us a gloomy-sounding song on the cello while August retold black Mary's story start to finish. When she got to the part about the slaves touching Our Lady's heart and how she filled them with fearlessness and plans of escape, June turned up the volume.

“Our Lady became so powerful,” said August, “that the master was forced to put her under house arrest, to chain her in the carriage house. She was cast down and bound up.”

“The blessed, blessed Mother,” mumbled Violet.

Neil and Otis took the chains and started wrapping them around Our Lady. The way Otis tossed the chain around in the candlelight, I was sure it would be a miracle if he didn't kill somebody.

August went on. “But each time the master chained Mary in the carriage house, she would break the chains and return to her people.”

August paused. She went around the circle and looked at us one by one, letting her eyes settle on each face like she wasn't in any kind of rush.

Then she lifted her voice. “What is bound will be unbound. What is cast down will be lifted up. This is the promise of Our Lady.”

“Amen,” said Otis.

June began to play again, this time a more joyful tune, thank goodness. I gazed at Mary, wrapped head to toe in rusted chain. Outside, heat lightning pulsed across the sky.

They all seemed to be sunk in their meditating, or whatever it was they were doing. Everyone's eyes were closed, except Zach's. He stared right at me.

I glanced at poor, shackled Mary. I couldn't bear seeing her like that. “It is only a reenactment,” August had said. “To help us remember. Remembering is everything.” Still, the whole idea wrapped me in sadness. I hated remembering.

I turned and walked out of the honey house, into the warm hush of night.

 

Zach caught up with me as I reached the tomato garden. He took my hand, and we kept walking, stepping over May's wall, walking into the woods without speaking. The cicadas were going crazy, filling the air with their strange brand of singing. Twice I walked into a spider's web, feeling the fine, transparent threads across my face, and I liked them there. A veil spun from the night.

I wanted the river. Its wildness. I wanted to strip naked and let the water lick my skin. Suck river stones the way I'd done that night Rosaleen and I'd slept by the creek. Even May's death had not ruined the river for me. The river had done its best, I was sure, to give her a peaceful ride out of this life. You could die in a river, but maybe you could get reborn in it, too, like the beehive tombs August had told me about.

Beneath the trees, moonlight trailed down. I steered us toward the water.

Water can be so shiny in the dark. We stood on the bank and watched the moving pockets of light, letting the water sounds swell up around us. We were still holding hands, and I felt his fingers tighten around mine.

“There was a pond near where I used to live,” I said. “Sometimes I would go there to wade in the water. One day the boys from the next farm were there fishing. They had all these little fish they'd caught fastened onto a stringer. They held me down on the bank and hooked it around my neck, making it too small to pull over my head. I was shouting, ‘Let me up, get that off me,' but they laughed and said, ‘What's the matter, don't you like your fish necklace?'”

“Goddamn boys,” Zach said.

“A few of the fish were already dead, but most of them flapped around with their eyes staring at me, looking scared. I realized if I swam out into the water up to my neck, they could breathe. I got as far as my knees, but then I turned back. I was too afraid to go any further. I think that was the worst part. I could've helped them, but I didn't.”

“You couldn't have stayed out there in the pond forever,” Zach said.

“But I could've stayed a long time. All I did was beg them to undo the stringer.
Begged.
They said to shut up, I was their fish holder, so I sat there till all the fish died against my chest. I dreamed about them for a year. Sometimes I would be hooked on the chain along with them.”

“I know that feeling,” he said.

I looked as far into his eyes as I could see. “Getting arrested—” I didn't know how to put it.

“What about it?” he said.

“It changed you, didn't it?”

He stared at the water. “Sometimes, Lily, I'm so angry I wanna kill something.”

“Those boys who made me wear the fish—they were angry like that, too. Angry at the world, and it made them mean. You have to promise me, Zach, you won't be like them.”

“I don't want to,” he said.

“Me either.”

He bent his face close to mine and kissed me. At first it was like moth wings brushing my lips, then his mouth opening on mine. I gave way against him. He kissed me gently, but at the same time hungrily, and I liked how he tasted, the scent of his skin, the way his lips opened and closed, opened and closed. I was floating on a river of light. Escorted by fish. Jeweled with fish. And even with so much beautiful aching inside my body, with life throbbing beneath my skin and the rushing ways of love taking over, even with all of that, I could feel the fish dying against my heart.