Bee Happy (11 page)

  Calli leaned back on the trunk of the willow tree, feeling the wind gently sway the branches.  She closed her eyes and let her thoughts go, all the thoughts about her grandfather and his encounter with a ghost and all the thoughts about his going senile.  Peace and quiet was what she was hoping to have this afternoon, and definitely peace of mind.  The birds sang to her, she knew that the most melodious one was the cat bird.  The call definitely sounded like a cat and several other birds, she wondered if the bird was related to the mocking bird.  Without realizing it, she drifted off to sleep.  The sounds of nature had given her a rest from all the crazy thoughts that were
overtaking her today.  It was a dreamless sleep, and very restful.  When she awoke, she stretched and noticed that the sun was low in the sky; it was probably later than she realized.  Knowing it would take awhile for the tomatoes to cook, she got up quickly ready to get supper started.  Suddenly she heard something faint, it almost sounded like a far away buzz.  No, it couldn’t be.  She started walking and the sound got a little louder.  Stopping to listen, she turned her head in the direction of the sound.  It really did sound like a buzz, maybe even the buzz of a bee.  Oh, that would be absolutely too weird – even impossible.  But there it was again, this time she turned and started walking towards where she thought the sound was coming from.  And there on the far side of the pond stood a very ancient looking tree, one that she’d never paid much attention to.  And the buzz was almost starting to sound like bees, and not just a couple bees but many bees.  This was starting to feel like she had stepped into the past, because that’s exactly what her grandfather had told her.  When he was a boy, he found a swarm of bees inside the hollow of a dead tree near the pond.  How could that tree still be here and how crazy would it be if there were actually a swarm of bees still living here?  Before she could get any closer, there were two bees that started buzzing around her.  Oh, my God!  Was it the two that kept annoying her in the garden, the ones who had led her to the hives in the machine shed?  Yep, twilight zone, the crazy place.  She had stepped into a parallel dimension and was reliving her grandfather’s experience.  Wanting to run away as fast as she could, Calli knew that she had to look and see if there was a swarm inside the tree.  She found a stump and rolled it over so she could peek inside the hollow.  And the closer she got, the louder the buzz.  Being careful not to get stung, she peeked inside for just a half a second, and that was long enough to know that it really was the bees making the noise.  Climbing down off the stump, she walked away noticing that the two pesky bees had disappeared.  Guess they had accomplished their mission, got me to find the bees.  And just how did grandfather know that I’d find these bees?  Had he already found them and wanted me to be the one to discover them? 
Making this like a rerun of his own experience with his grandfather?  So many questions and not a single answer.  Calli didn’t know what she thought or what she wanted to believe.  Her very simple, normal life was beginning to turn into a mystery with characters from times past appearing.  Too much, all of this was too much. 

  When Calli reached the kitchen, she smelled tomatoes, Roger had already put them in the pot to stew and they smelled delicious.  There was another pan set out to boil the macaroni in and the bag of macaroni was sitting right beside it on the counter.  She looked at the clock and realized that she too had taken quite a long nap. Roger was nowhere to be found.  Not in the living room, not in his room not on the porch.  She decided to go look in the machine shed, not knowing exactly why because most of the stuff in there had long out lived its usefulness, other than being in a museum of old farm equipment. 
And that’s exactly where she found him, sitting on a metal seat to some old piece of equipment.  He looked up and grinned at her, “I remember watching my grandfather sit on this while the horses pulled the plow.  It took a very long
time to get a field plowed with a one bottom plow.”  He looked in the distance, like the memory was playing across a screen in his mind.  “Those were the best
horses;
remember that Bob saved my life?” 
Yes, that story was etched in her mind forever.  “Yes, I remember Grandfather.  What are you doing out here?”  He seemed to come back from his memories, “I came looking for the smoker that we used to use to quiet the bees.  I thought for sure it was out here by the hives, but then I saw the old plow and wanted to sit on it myself.  I was never allowed to drive the team, they were too big for me to handle.  So I was just doing it in my own mind.  Never did spot the smoker.  Would you help me look for it?”  Together they climbed over all the pieces of equipment that were of another era and as they moved around the shed, Roger explained how each one was used on the farm.  Calli was amazed at how much was involved in farming with horses.  Her generation had no clue how to use any of this equipment. 
Riding inside an air conditioned
cab on top of a huge diesel tractor seemed light years away from sitting on a metal seat of a plow being pulled by a team of horses.  In the very last corner of the shed, Roger shouted, “Here it is!”  He sounded like he’d struck gold.  Calli knew that they could order
a
new one from the internet and it would be here in a couple of days, but this one seemed to have
the more character than a brand new shiny one.  “This is what kept me from going into the hospital again.  I’ll show you how it works when we find some bees for our hives.”  Calli had almost forgotten, she had gotten caught up in her grandfather’s memories and stories.  “Oh, Grandfather!  You aren’t going to believe what I found down by the old o
ak tree at the back of the pond!
”  He turned his head quickly, “Did you say the old oak tree?  That’s the tree where I first found the swarm of bees.  Don’t tell me they are still there after all these years?”  His face was both hopeful and doubtful all at the same time. “The old oak tree, the one with the hollow about half way up.  I had to get a stump rolled over so I could look inside.  I had heard what I thought was the buzz of bees, but didn’t believe it was possible.  I thought you were teasing me when you told me to wait for the bees to arrive.  Well, actually two did start buzzing my head.  Just like in the garden, when they led me to the hives here in the shed.  And when I looked in it was just like you had told me.  The biggest swarm of bees I’ve ever seen, actually the only swarm of bees I’ve ever seen.”  Roger just laughed and laughed and laughed.  He seemed to think this was the funniest thing ever, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.  They are living e
xactly where I found them more than
70 years ago.  That beats all.”  They talked about the bees and how they were going to entice them into the hive and how the smoker worked and then began to plan their next phase of the bee keeping.  Both of them were pulled into the dream of bees and having honey and bee pollen and propolis.  That night sitting at the supper table eating stewed tomatoes from their garden along with the macaroni seemed like a heavenly experience, one that no one else would understand, but they both were content living in the dreams of yesteryear.  The way things
were
the simple life of a one bottom plow, a swarm of bees and simple food grown in their own garden, nourishing them better than any modern vitamin supplement ever could.

  With the dishes put away and the left over
s
stored in the refrigerator, Calli was ready to head over to Sally’s for her evening of what she’d labeled ‘ghost stories’.  She had no idea what lay ahead but she was definitely hoping to have a better understanding of what had happened to her grandfather and maybe find a way to relate this into her own belief system, the one that involved everything she could see or touch, not the invisible imaginary world of spirits and ghosts.  Jim’s van was already at Sally’s when she arrived.  As she
was
stepping up to the
front door, she could hear them
laughing and carrying on, sounded like they were having fun, and there was almost a streak of jealousy rising up her back.  After all, she was the one dating Jim, not Sally.  Checking her emotional state, Calli wondered if she was developing feelings for Jim, why els
e would she be feeling this way?
  Sally was her best friend, granted Sally didn’t have the best ‘picker’ in the world.  All of the guys she had dated were not suited for her and ultimately always broke her heart and ran off with her cash and her dignity.  Knocking
first, she let
herself i
n, she’d always done that at Sally’s
house, Calli found them sitting very close to each other on the couch and looking at the high school year book.  “Oh, my God!  You aren’t showing him my yearbook pictures are you?  My hair was the most awful style I could have ever had.”  Sally, laughed, “Everyone’s hair style was awful.  That’s why we are laughing.  And we thought we were hot stuff back then.”  Sally seemed relaxed and Jim patted the cushion beside him, “Come sit beside me and have a few laughs with us.  I’ve never seen
such a great looking group of girls, even if their hair was teased to the heavens.” 

  After looking at all four years of high school, the year books were put away and Sally went to the kitchen to get them some lemonade and cookies.  Jim gave Calli a quick kiss on the cheek, hoping she’d relax a bit.  He could tell that she wasn’t at all comfortable this evening.  “What’s up with you tonight?  I know that last night was late and very stressful for you.  How is Roger
today?”  “He’s absolutely fine,” Calli replied.
“
It seems like nothing ever happened.  We pulled the bee hives out of the machine shed, cleaned them up, painted them and he moved them to the
pond,  p
lacing them exactly where they’d been when he was a boy.  And then the strangest thing happened.  He went back to the house to take a nap, I stretched out beneath the willow tree, fell asleep, and…”  Sally returned with the food.  “Wait, you have to catch me up with the rest of your day.”  Calli recapped her experiences and told both of them about discovering the bees.  Sally munched on a cookie and wondered out loud, “Do you suppose there’s some kind of time warp happening down by that pond?  Or maybe a vortex of energy that brings in things from another dimension?”  Jim looked at Sally with an affirming look and Calli felt her head spin.  There wasn’t anything she understood about anything that Sally had just said.  “Wait a minute. You have to back up and give me a chance to understand what you two just decided happened.  I don’t know anything about
a
vortex or dimensions or ….”  Sally sighed, and grabbed another cookie waiting for Jim to take the lead with this conversation.
  Jim took the hint and scooted
to the other end of the couch so he could look at Calli face to face.
  Sally was sitting in her favorite rocking chair, ready for the evening story time, just like a kid at the library, cookies, lemonade and a great story.  Let the tales begin.

  Jim cleared his throat, and began.  “I guess it’s my turn to share my experiences with the other side.  Most people know me as the guy with the funny painted van who showed up here about ten years ago, looking for a place to call home.  Everyone thinks I’m an old hippie because of my multicolored van but actually I’m a scientist who’s lost his way in
the world of quantum physics.”  Scientist, now Calli could get behind that notion.  Someone grounded in science surely didn’t believe in ghosts.  She felt a sense of relief pour over her, settling back into the pillows on the couch; Calli was all ears waiting to hear more.  “I worked in an experimental lab, where we were working on a language of code that was intended to communicate with beings on other planets in the far away galaxies.  It was like a code of light, that had sequences, and we were sending this code hoping to have it returned or something similar so we would know that we’d made contact.  Now, I know everyone’s seen the movie, but this was real life for me.  I was at the lab one evening when our satellites received the indication that there was a response from another star.”  Calli’s eyes were about to pop out of her head, they had gotten so big listening to his story, messages from stars, codes of light.  Oh, this really was like Star Trek, and she was not a Trekky.  “I know all of this seems like it’s from some television fantasy series, but most people don’t know what happens in our labs.  We are always looking for confirmation that we aren’t alone in the universe and hopefully those we contact are more intelligent than we are.  At first I thought it was a fluke, and a mistake, but the sequence just kept repeating itself and finally I found a pattern that seemed to make sense to me.  I programmed out transmitter to repeat what we were receiving.  And then the sequence changed.  So I reprogrammed the message to match the change.  This went on for several hours.  All the time I’m thinking that I’ve truly made what everyone labels ‘first contact’.”  Sally now was sitting on the edge of her chair, riveted to Jim’s tale.  Calli was still in non-believer land wondering if she should stay or run screaming into the night. 

  “Please, don’t be frightened or run away.”  Calli’s eyes bugged out further, how did he know that was what I was thinking? 
Jim continued,
“I’ve told this story before and have lost some very dear friends because they didn’t believe me
, t
hat’s why no one here knows who I am and where I came from.  I wanted to start over with a clean slate and do something totally different, something that p
eople would understand and I could be part of a community again.  The rest of the story gets more bizarre.  Suffice it to say, no one believed me and my superiors were sure it was just a fluke in the programming and basically told me I could look for another job.  I was almost frantic in trying to get people to believe me, I went to research lab after lab and university after university trying to get some grant money to continue with these codes that I’d found.  No one believed me and I basically was lost.”  Now, Calli started to feel a little sorry for him, but still didn’t believe much of what he was telling them.