The Secret Life of Bees (7 page)

We walked past Worth Insurance Agency, Tiburon County Rural Electric office, and the Amen Dollar Store, which had Hula Hoops, swim goggles, and boxes of sparklers in the window with
SUMMER FUN
spray-painted across the glass. A few places, like the Farmers Trust Bank, had
GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT
signs in their windows, sometimes with a bumper sticker across the bottom saying
AFFIRMATION VIETNAM.

At the Tiburon post office I left Rosaleen on the sidewalk and stepped inside to where the post office boxes and the Sunday newspapers were kept. As far as I could tell, there were no wanted posters in there of me and Rosaleen, and the front-page headline in the Columbia paper was about Castro's sister spying for the CIA and not a word about a white girl breaking a Negro woman out of jail in Sylvan.

I dropped a dime into the slot and took one of the papers, wondering if the story was inside somewhere. Rosaleen and I squatted on the ground in an alley and spread out the paper, opening every page. It was full of Malcolm X, Saigon, the Beatles, tennis at Wimbledon, and a motel in Jackson, Mississippi, that closed down rather than accept Negro guests, but nothing about me and Rosaleen.

Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.

T
he woman moved along a row of white boxes that bordered the woods beside the pink house, a house so pink it remained a scorched shock on the back of my eyelids after I looked away. She was tall, dressed in white, wearing a pith helmet with veils that floated across her face, settled around her shoulders, and trailed down her back. She looked like an African bride.

Lifting the tops off the boxes, she peered inside, swinging a tin bucket of smoke back and forth. Clouds of bees rose up and flew wreaths around her head. Twice she disappeared in the fogged billows, then gradually reemerged like a dream rising up from the bottom of the night.

We stood across the road, Rosaleen and I, temporarily mute. Me out of awe for the mystery playing out and Rosaleen because her lips were sealed with Red Rose snuff.

“She's the woman who makes the Black Madonna Honey,” I said. I was unable to take my eyes off her, the Mistress of Bees, the portal into my mother's life.
August.

Rosaleen, wilting, spit a stream of black juice, then wiped away the mustache of perspiration above her lip. “I hope she makes honey better than she picks out paint.”

“I like it,” I announced.

We waited till she went inside, then crossed the highway and opened the gate in the picket fence that was about to topple over from the weight of Carolina jasmine. Add that to all the chive, dillweed, and lemon balm growing around the porch and the smell could knock you over.

We stood on the porch in the pink light shining off the house. June bugs flickered all around, and music notes floated from inside, sounding like a violin, only a lot sadder.

My heart kicked in. I asked Rosaleen if she could hear it beating, it was that loud.

“I don't hear nothing but the Good Lord asking me what I'm doing here.” She spit what I hoped was the last of her snuff.

I knocked on the door while she muttered a slew of words under her breath:
Give me strength…Baby Jesus…Lost our feeble minds.

The music stopped. In the corner of my eye I caught a slight movement at the window, a venetian blind slit open, then closed.

When the door opened, it was not the woman in white but another one wearing red, her hair cut so short it resembled a little gray, curlicue swim cap pulled tight over her scalp. Her face stared at us, suspicious and stern. I noticed she carried a musical bow tucked under her arm like a riding whip. It crossed my mind she might use it on us.

“Yes?”

“Are you August Boatwright?”

“No, I'm June Boatwright,” she said, her eyes sweeping over the stitches on Rosaleen's forehead. “August Boatwright is my sister. You came to see her?”

I nodded, and simultaneously another woman appeared, with bare feet. She wore a green-and-white sleeveless gingham dress and short braids that stuck straight out all over her head.

“I'm May Boatwright,” she said. “I'm August's sister, too.” She smiled at us, one of those odd grins that let you know she was not an altogether normal person.

I wished June with her whip would grin, too, but she only looked annoyed.

“Is August expecting you?” she said, directing her words to Rosaleen.

Of course Rosaleen jumped in ready to spill the whole story. “No, see, Lily has this picture—”

I broke in. “I saw a honey jar back at the store, and the man said…”

“Oh, you've come for honey. Well, why didn't you say so? Come on in the front parlor. I'll get August.”

I shot a look at Rosaleen that said,
Are you crazy? Don't tell them about the picture.
We were going to have to get our stories straight, that was for sure.

Some people have a sixth sense, and some are duds at it. I believe I must have it, because the moment I stepped into the house I felt a trembling along my skin, a traveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.

I smelled furniture wax everywhere. Somebody had gone over the entire parlor with it, a big room with fringed throw rugs, an old piano with a lace runner, and cane-bottom rockers draped with afghans. Each chair had its own little velvet stool sitting before it.
Velvet.
I went over and rubbed my hand across one of them.

Next I walked over to a drop-leaf table and sniffed a beeswax candle that smelled precisely like the furniture wax. It sat in a star-shaped holder next to a jigsaw puzzle in progress, though I couldn't tell what picture it would make. A wide-mouthed milk bottle filled with gladiolus was perched on another table under the window. The curtains were organdy, not your average white organdy but silver-gray, so the air came through with a slightly smoky shimmer.

Imagine walls with nothing on them but mirrors. I counted five of them, each one with a big brass frame around it.

Then I turned around and looked back toward the door where I'd come in. Over in the corner was a carving of a woman nearly three feet tall. She was one of those figures that had leaned out from the front of a ship in olden times, so old she could have been on the
Santa María
with Columbus for all I knew.

She was black as she could be, twisted like driftwood from being out in the weather, her face a map of all the storms and journeys she'd been through. Her right arm was raised, as if she was pointing the way, except her fingers were closed in a fist. It gave her a serious look, like she could straighten you out if necessary.

Even though she wasn't dressed up like Mary and didn't resemble the picture on the honey jar, I knew that's who she was. She had a faded red heart painted on her breast and a yellow crescent moon, worn down and crooked, painted where her body would have blended into the ship's wood. A candle inside a tall red glass threw glints and glimmers across her body. She was a mix of mighty and humble all in one. I didn't know what to think, but what I
felt
was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up.

The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked back from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest had ached then, too, this very same way.

The lips on the statue had a beautiful, bossy half smile, the sight of which caused me to move both my hands up to my throat. Everything about that smile said,
Lily Owens, I know you down to the core.

I felt she knew what a lying, murdering, hating person I really was. How I hated T. Ray, and the girls at school, but mostly myself for taking away my mother.

I wanted to cry, but then, in the next instant, I wanted to laugh, because the statue also made me feel like Lily the Smiled-Upon, like there was goodness and beauty in me, too. Like I really had all that fine potential Mrs. Henry said I did.

Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That's what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.

I stepped closer to her and caught the faint scent of honey coming from the wood. May walked over and stood beside me, and I could smell nothing then but the pomade on her hair, onions on her hands, vanilla on her breath. Her palms were pink like the bottoms of her feet, her elbows darker than the rest of her, and for some reason the sight of them filled me with tenderness.

August Boatwright entered, wearing a pair of rimless glasses and a lime green chiffon scarf tied onto her belt. “Who've we got here?” she said, and the sound of her voice snapped me back to my ordinary senses.

She was almond-buttery with sweat and sun, her face corrugated with a thousand caramel wrinkles and her hair looking flour dusted, but the rest of her seemed decades younger.

“I'm Lily, and that's Rosaleen,” I said, hesitating as June appeared in the doorway behind her. I opened my mouth without any sense of what I would say next. What came out couldn't have surprised me more. “We ran away from home and don't have any place to go,” I told her.

Any other day of my life I could have won a fibbing contest hands down, and that,
that
is what I came up with: the pathetic truth. I watched their faces, especially August's. She took off her glasses and rubbed the depressions on each side of her nose. It was so quiet I could hear a clock ticking in another room.

August replaced her glasses, walked to Rosaleen, and examined the stitches on her forehead, the cut under her eye, the bruises along her temple and arms. “You look like you've been beaten.”

“She fell down the front steps when we were leaving,” I offered, returning to my natural fibbing habit.

August and June traded looks while Rosaleen narrowed her eyes, letting me know I'd done it again, speaking for her like she wasn't even there.

“Well, you can stay here till you figure out what to do. We can't have you living on the side of the road,” said August.

The intake of June's breath nearly sucked the air from the room. “But, August—”

“They'll stay here,” she repeated in a way that let me know who the big sister was and who the little sister was. “It'll be all right. We've got the cots in the honey house.”

June flounced out, her red skirt flashing around the door.

“Thank you,” I said to August.

“You're welcome. Now, sit down. I'll get some orangeade.”

We got situated in the cane-bottom rockers while May stood guard, grinning her crazy-woman grin. She had great big muscles in her arms, I noticed.

“How come y'all have names from a calendar?” Rosaleen asked her.

“Our mother loved spring and summer,” May said. “We had an April, too, but…she died when she was little.” May's grin dissolved, and out of nowhere she started humming “Oh! Susanna” like her life depended on it.

Rosaleen and I stared at her as her humming turned into hard crying. She cried like April's death had happened only this second.

Finally August returned with a tray of four jelly glasses, orange slices stuck real pretty on the rims. “Oh, May, honey, you go on out to the wall and finish your cry,” she said, pointing her to the door and giving her a nudge.

August acted like this was the sort of normal behavior happening in every household in South Carolina. “Here you go—orangeade.”

I sipped. Rosaleen, however, downed hers so fast she let out a belch that the boys in my old junior high would have envied. It was unbelievable.

August pretended she didn't hear it while I stared at the velvet footstool and wished Rosaleen could be more
cultured.

“So you're Lily and Rosaleen,” August said. “Do you have last names?”

“Rosaleen…Smith, and Lily…Williams,” I lied and then launched in. “See, my mother died when I was little, and then my father died in a tractor accident last month on our farm in Spartanburg County. I don't have any other kin around here, so they were going to send me to a home.”

August shook her head. Rosaleen shook hers, too, but for a different reason.

“Rosaleen was our housekeeper,” I went on. “She doesn't have any family but me, so we decided to go up to Virginia to find my aunt. Except we don't have any money, so if you have any work for us to do while we're here, maybe we could earn a little before heading on. We aren't really in a hurry to get to Virginia.”

Rosaleen glared at me. For a minute there was nothing but ice clinking in our glasses. I hadn't realized how sweltering the room was, how stimulated my sweat glands had gotten. I could actually smell myself. I cut my eyes over to the black Mary in the corner and back to August.

She put down her glass. I had never seen eyes that color, eyes the purest shade of ginger.

“I'm from Virginia myself,” she said, and for some reason this stirred up the current that had moved in my limbs when I'd first entered the room. “All right, then. Rosaleen can help May in the house, and you can help me and Zach with the bees. Zach is my main helper, so I can't pay you anything, but at least you'll have a room and some food till we call your aunt and see about her sending some bus money.”

“I don't exactly know her whole name,” I said. “My father just called her Aunt Bernie; I never met her.”

“Well, what were you planning to do, child, go door to door in Virginia?”

“No, ma'am, just Richmond.”

“I see,” said August. And the thing was, she did. She saw right through it.

 

That afternoon, heat built up in the skies over Tiburon; finally it gave way to a thunderstorm. August, Rosaleen, and I stood on the screen porch that jutted off the back of the kitchen and watched the clouds bruise dark purple over the treetops and the wind whip the branches. We were waiting for a let-up so August could show us our new quarters in the honey house, a converted garage in the back corner of the yard painted the same hot-flamingo shade as the rest of the house.

Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention.

August went back into the kitchen and returned with three aluminum pie pans and handed them out. “Come on. Let's make a run for it. These will keep our heads dry, at least.”

August and I dashed into the downpour, holding the pans over our heads. Glancing back, I saw Rosaleen holding the pie pan in her hand, missing the whole point.

When August and I reached the honey house, we had to huddle in the door and wait on her. Rosaleen glided along, gathering rain in the pan and flinging it out like a child would do. She walked on puddles like they were Persian carpets, and when a clap of thunder boomed around us, she looked up at the drowned sky, opened her mouth, and let the rain fall in. Ever since those men had beaten her, her face had been so pinched and tired, her eyes dull like they'd had the light knocked out of them. Now I could see she was returning to herself, looking like an all-weather queen out there, like nothing could touch her.