The Secret Life of Bees (7 page)

‘Well, who wouldn’t be sad living with T. Ray?’ I said. I saw the lightbulb snap on in Rosaleen’s face then, the flash of recognition.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘I get it. You ran off ‘cause of what your daddy said about your mother. It didn’t have nothing to do with me in jail. And here you got me worrying myself sick about you running away and getting in trouble over me, and you would’ve run off anyway. Well, ain’t it nice of you to fill me in.’

She poked out her lip and looked up toward the road, making me wonder if she was about to walk back the way we came.

‘So what are you planning to do?’ she said.

‘Go from town to town asking people about your mother? Is that your bright idea?’

‘If I needed somebody to criticize me around the clock, I could’ve brought T. Ray along!’ I shouted.

‘And for your information, I don’t exactly have a plan.’

‘Well, you sure had one back at the hospital, coming in there saying we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that, and I’m supposed to follow you like a pet dog. You act like you’re my keeper. Like I’m some dumb nigger you gonna save.’

Her eyes were hard and narrow. I rose to my feet.

‘That’s not fair!’ Anger sucked the air from my lungs.

‘You meant well enough, and I’m glad to be away from there, but did you think once to ask me?’ she said.

‘Well, you are dumb!’ I yelled.

‘You have to be dumb to pour your snuff juice on those men’s shoes like that. And then dumber not to say you’re sorry, if saying it will save your life. They were gonna come back and kill you, or worse. I got you out of there, and this is how you thank me. Well, fine.’

I stripped off my Keds, grabbed my bag, and waded into the creek. The coldness cut sharp circles around my calves. I didn’t want to be on the same planet with her, much less the same side of the creek.

‘You find your own way from now on!’ I yelled over my shoulder. On the opposite side I plopped onto the mossy dirt. We stared across the water at each other. In the dark she looked like a boulder shaped by five hundred years of storms. I lay back and closed my eyes. In my dream I was back on the peach farm, sitting out behind the tractor shed, and even though it was broad daylight, I could see a huge, round moon in the sky. It looked so perfect up there. I gazed at it awhile, then leaned against the shed and closed my eyes. Next I heard a sound like ice breaking, and, looking up, I saw the moon crack apart and start to fall. I had to run for my life. I woke with my chest hurting. I searched for the moon and found it all in one piece, still spilling light over the creek. I looked across the water for Rosaleen. She was gone. My heart did flip-flops. Please, God. I didn’t mean to treat her like a pet dog. I was trying to save her. That’s all. Fumbling to get my shoes on, I felt the same old grief I’d known in church every single Mother’s Day. Mother, forgive. Rosaleen, where are you? I gathered up my bag and ran along the creek toward the bridge, hardly aware I was crying. Tripping over a dead limb, I sprawled through the darkness and didn’t bother to get up. I could picture Rosaleen miles from here, tearing down the highway, mumbling, Shitbucket, damnfoolgirl. Looking up, I noticed that the tree I’d fallen beneath was practically bald. Only little bits of green here and there, and lots of gray moss dangling to the ground. Even in the dark I could see that it was dying, and doing it alone in the middle of all these unconcerned pines. That was the absolute way of things. Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it. Humming drifted out of the night. It wasn’t a gospel tune exactly, but it carried all the personality of one. I followed the sound and found Rosaleen in the middle of the creek, not a stitch of clothes on her body. Water beaded across her shoulders, shining like drops of milk, and her breasts swayed in the currents. It was the kind of vision you never really get over. I couldn’t help it, I wanted to go and lick the milk beads from her shoulders. I opened my mouth. I wanted something. Something, I didn’t know what. Mother, forgive. That’s all I could feel. That old longing spread under me like a great lap, holding me tight. Off came my shoes, my shorts, my top. I hesitated with my underpants, then worked them off, too. The water felt like a glacier melting against my legs. I must have gasped at the iciness, because Rosaleen looked up and seeing me come naked through the water, started to laugh.

‘Look at you strutting out here. Jiggle-tit and all.’

I eased down beside her, suspending my breath at the water’s sting.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Me, too.’

She reached over and patted the roundness of my knee like it was biscuit dough. Thanks to the moon, I could see clear down to the creek bottom, all the way to a carpet of pebbles. I picked one up—reddish, round, a smooth water heart. I popped it into my mouth, sucking for whatever marrow was inside it. Leaning back on my elbows, I slid down till the water sealed over my head. I held my breath and listened to the scratch of river against my ears, sinking as far as I could into that shimmering, dark world. But I was thinking about a suitcase on the floor, about a face I could never quite see, about the sweet smell of cold cream.

Chapter Three

New beekeepers are told that the way to find the elusive queen is by first locating her circle of attendants.

—The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men

I
love Thoreau best. Mrs. Henry made us read portions of Walden Pond, and afterward I’d had fantasies of going to a private garden where T. Ray would never find me. I started appreciating Mother Nature, what she’d done with the world. In my mind she looked like Eleanor Roo- sevelt. I thought about her the next morning when I woke beside the creek in a bed of kudzu vines. A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones, darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air. It was such a pretty sight for a second I forgot the heavy feeling I’d carried since T. Ray had told me about my mother. Instead I was at Walden Pond. Day one of my new life, I said to myself. That’s what this is. Rosaleen slept with her mouth open and a long piece of drool hanging from her bottom lip. I could tell by the way her eyes rolled under her lids she was watching the silver screen where dreams come and go. Her swollen face looked better, but in the bright of day I noticed purple bruises on her arms and legs as well. Neither one of us had a watch on, but going by the sun we had slept more than half the morning away. I hated to wake Rosaleen, so I pulled the wooden picture of Mary out of my bag and propped it against a tree trunk in order to study it properly. A ladybug had crawled up and sat on the Holy Mother’s cheek, making the most perfect beauty mark on her. I wondered if Mary had been an outdoor type who preferred trees and insects over the churchy halo she had on. I lay back and tried to invent a story about why my mother had owned a black Mary picture. I drew a big blank, probably due to my ignorance about Mary, who never got much attention at our church. According to Brother Gerald, hell was nothing but a bonfire for Catholics. We didn’t have any in Sylvan—only Baptists and Methodists—but we got instructions in case we met them in our travels. We were to offer them the five-part plan of salvation, which they could accept or not. The church gave us a plastic glove with each step written on a different finger. You started with the pinkie and worked over to the thumb. Some ladies carried their salvation gloves in their purse in case they ran into a Catholic unexpectedly. The only Mary story we talked about was the wedding story—the time she persuaded her son, practically against his will, to manufacture wine in the kitchen out of plain water. This had been a shock to me, since our church didn’t believe in wine or, for that matter, in women having a lot of say about things. All I could really figure was my mother had been mixed up with the Catholics somehow, and—I have to say—this secretly thrilled me. I stuffed the picture into my pocket while Rosaleen slept on, blowing puffs of air that vibrated her lips. I decided she might sleep into tomorrow, so I shook her arm till her eyes slit open.

‘Lord, I’m stiff,’ she said.

‘I feel like I’ve been beaten with a stick.’

‘You have been beaten, remember?’

‘But not with a stick,’ she said. I waited till she got to her feet, a long, unbelievable process of grunts and moans and limbs coming to life.

‘What did you dream?’ I asked when she was upright. She gazed at the treetops, rubbing her elbows.

‘Well, let’s see. I dreamed the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., knelt down and painted my toenails with the spit from his mouth, and every nail was red like he’d been sucking on red hots.’

I considered this as we set off for Tiburon, Rosaleen walking like she was on anointed feet, like her ruby toes owned the whole countryside. We drifted by gray barns, cornfields in need of irrigation, and clumps of Hereford cows, chewing in slow motion, looking very content with their lives. Squinting into the distance, I could see farmhouses with wide porches and tractor-tire swings suspended from ropes on nearby tree branches; windmills sprouted up beside them, their giant silver petals creaking a little when the breezes rose. The sun had baked everything to perfection; even the gooseberries on the fence had fried to raisins. The asphalt ran out, turned to gravel. I listened to the sound it made scraping under our shoes. Perspiration puddled in the notch where Rosaleen’s collarbones came together. I didn’t know whose stomach was carrying on more about needing food, mine or hers, and since we’d started walking, I’d realized it was Sunday, when the stores were closed up. I was afraid we’d end up eat- ing dandelions, digging wild turnips and grubs out of the ground to stay alive. The smell of fresh manure floated out from the fields and took care of my appetite then and there, but Rosaleen said, ‘I could eat a mule.’

‘If we can find some place open when we get to town, I’ll go in and get us some food,’ I told her.

‘And what’re we gonna do for beds?’ she said.

‘If they don’t have a motel, we’ll have to rent a room.’

She smiled at me then.

‘Lily, child, there ain’t gonna be any place that will take a colored woman. I don’t care if she’s the Virgin Mary, nobody’s letting her stay if she’s colored.’

‘Well, what was the point of the Civil Rights Act?’ I said, coming to a full stop in the middle of the road.

‘Doesn’t that mean people have to let you stay in their motels and eat in their restaurants if you want to?’

‘That’s what it means, but you gonna have to drag people kicking and screaming to do it.’

I spent the next mile in deep worry. I had no plan, no prospects of a plan. Until now I’d mostly believed we would stumble upon a window somewhere and climb through it into a brand-new life. Rosaleen, on the other hand, was out here biding time till we got caught. Counting it as summer vacation from jail. What I needed was a sign. I needed a voice speaking to me like I’d heard yesterday in my room saying, Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open. I’ll take nine steps and look up. Whatever my eyes light on, that’s my sign. When I looked up, I saw a crop duster plunging his little plane over a field of growing things, behind him a cloud of pesticides parachuting out. I couldn’t decide what part of this scene I represented: the plants about to be rescued from the bugs or the bugs about to be murdered by the spray. There was an off chance I was really the airplane zipping over the earth creating rescue and doom everywhere I went. I felt miserable. The heat had been gathering as we walked, and it now dripped down Rosaleen’s face.

‘Too bad there’s not a church around here where we could steal some fans,’ she said. From far away the store on the edge of town looked about a hundred years old, but when we got up to it, I saw it was actually older. A sign over the door said FROGMORE STEW GENERAL STORE AND RESTAURANT. SINCE 1854. General Sherman had probably ridden by here and decided to spare it on the basis of its name, because I’m sure it hadn’t been on looks. The whole front of it was a forgotten bulletin board: Studebaker Service, Live Bait, Buddy’s Fishing Tournament, Rayford Brothers’ Ice Plant, Deer Rifles $45, and a picture of a girl wearing a Coca-Cola bottle cap on her head. A sign announced a gospel sing at the Mount Zion Baptist Church that took place back in 1957, if anyone wanted to know. My favorite thing was the fine display of car tags nailed up from different states. I would like to have read every single one, if I’d had the time. In the side yard a colored man lifted the top of a barbecue pit made from an oil drum, and the smell of pork lathered in vinegar and pepper drew so much saliva from beneath my tongue I actually drooled onto my blouse. A few cars and trucks were parked out front, probably belonging to people who cut church and came here straight from Sunday school.

‘I’ll go in and see if I can buy some food,’ I said.

‘And snuff. I need some snuff,’ said Rosaleen. While she slumped on a bench near the barbecue drum, I stepped through the screen door into the mingled smells of pickled eggs and sawdust, beneath dozens of sugar-cured hams dangling from the ceiling. The restaurant was situated in a section at the back while the front of the store was reserved for selling everything from sugarcane stalks to turpentine.

‘May I help you, young lady?’

A small man wearing a bow tie stood on the other side of a wooden counter, nearly lost behind a barricade of scuppernong jelly and Sweet Fire pickles. His voice was high-pitched, and he had a soft, delicate look to him. I could not imagine him selling deer rifles.

‘I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,’ he said.

‘I’m not from here. I’m visiting my grandmother.’

‘I like it when children spend time with their grandparents,’ he said.

‘You can learn a lot from older folks.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘I learned more from my grandmother than I did the whole eighth grade.’

He laughed like this was the most comical thing he’d heard in years.

‘Are you here for lunch? We have a Sunday-plate special—barbecue pork.’