The Secret Life of Bees (10 page)

Chapter Five

Let’s imagine for a moment that we are tiny enough to follow a bee into a hive. Usually the first thing we would have to get used to is the darkness…

—Exploring the World of Social Insects

T
he first week at August’s was a consolation. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life. All that week no one brought up my father, supposedly dead in a tractor accident, or my long-lost aunt Bernie in Virginia. The calendar sisters just took us in. The first thing they did was take care of Rosaleen’s clothes. August got into her truck and went straight to the Amen Dollar Store, where she bought Rosaleen four pairs of panties, a pale blue cotton nightgown, three waistless, Hawaiian-looking dresses, and a bra that could have slung boulders.

‘This ain’t charity,’ said Rosaleen when August spread this, across the kitchen table.

‘I’ll pay it all back.’

‘You can work it off,’ said August. May came in with witch hazel and cotton balls and began to clean up Rosaleen’s stitches.

‘Somebody knocked the daylights out of you,’ she said, and a moment later she was humming ‘Oh! Susanna’ at that same frantic speed she’d hummed it before. June jerked her head up from the table, where she was inspecting the purchases.

‘You’re humming the song again,’ she said to May.

‘Why don’t you excuse yourself?’

May dropped her cotton ball on the table and left the room. I looked at Rosaleen, and she shrugged. June finished cleaning the stitches herself; it was distasteful to her, I could tell by the way she held her mouth, how it drew into a tight buttonhole. I slipped out to find May. I was going to say, I’ll sing ‘Oh! Susanna’ with you start to finish, but I couldn’t find her. It was May who taught me the honey song: Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through. When I’m dead and gone, that’s what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, but I’ll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through. I loved the silliness of it. Singing made me feel like a regular person again. May sang the song in the kitchen when she rolled dough or sliced tomatoes, and August hummed it when she pasted labels on the honey jars. It said everything about living here. We lived for honey. We swallowed a spoonful in the morning to wake us up and one at night to put us to sleep. We took it with every meal to calm the mind, give us stamina, and prevent fatal disease. We swabbed ourselves in it to disinfect cuts or heal chapped lips. It went in our baths, our skin cream, our raspberry tea and biscuits. Nothing was safe from honey. In one week my skinny arms and legs began to plump out and the frizz in my hair turned to silken waves. August said honey was the ambrosia of the gods and the shampoo of the goddesses. I spent my time in the honey house with August while Rosaleen helped May around the house. I learned how to run a steam heated knife along the super, slicing the wax cap off the combs, how to load them just so into the spinner. I adjusted the flame under the steam generator and changed the nylon stockings August used to filter the honey in the settling tank. I caught on so fast she said I was a marvel. Those were her very words: Lily, you are marvel. My favorite thing was pouring beeswax into the candle molds. August used a pound of wax per candle and pressed tiny violets into them, which I collected in the woods. She had a mail-order business to stores in places as far away as Maine and Vermont. People up there bought so many of her candles and jars of honey she couldn’t keep up with it, and there were tins of Black Madonna All-Purpose Beeswax for her special customers. August said it could make your fishing line float, your button thread stronger, your furniture shinier, your stuck window glide, and your irritated skin glow like a baby’s bottom. Beeswax was a miracle cure for everything. May and Rosaleen hit it off right away. May was simpleminded. I don’t mean retarded, because she was smart in some ways and read cookbooks nonstop. I mean she was naive and unassuming, a grown-up and a child at the same time, plus she was a touch crazy. Rosaleen liked to say May was a bona ride candidate for the nuthouse, but she still took to her. I would come into the kitchen and they would be standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink, holding ears of corn they couldn’t get shucked for talking. Or they’d be dabbing pinecones with peanut butter for the birds. It was Rosaleen who figured out the mystery of ‘Oh! Susanna.’

She said if you kept things on a happy note, May did fine, but bring up an unpleasant subject—like Rosaleen’s head full of stitches or the tomatoes having rot-bottom—and May would start humming ‘Oh! Susanna.’

It seemed to be her personal way of warding off crying. It worked for things like tomato rot, but not for much else. A few times she cried so bad, ranting and tearing her hair, that Rosaleen had to come get August from the honey house. August would calmly send May out back to the stone wall. Going out there was about the only thing that could bring her around. May didn’t allow rat traps in the house, as she couldn’t even bear the thought of a suffering rat. But what really drove Rosa- leen crazy was May catching spiders and carrying them out of the house in the dustpan. I liked this about May, since it reminded me of my bug-loving mother. I went around helping May catch granddaddy longlegs, not just because a smashed bug could send her over the edge but because I felt I was being loyal to my mother’s wishes. May had to have a banana every morning, and this banana absolutely could not have a bruise on it. One morning I watched her peel seven bananas in a row before she found one without a bad place. She kept tons of bananas around the kitchen, stoneware bowls chock-full; next to honey, they were the most plentiful thing in the house. May could go through five or more every morning looking for the ideal, flawless banana, the one that hadn’t gotten banged up by the grocery world. Rosaleen made banana pudding, banana cream pie, banana Jell-O, and banana slices on lettuce leaf till August told her it was all right, just throw the blooming things away. The one it was hard to get a fix on was June. She taught history and English at the colored high school, but what she really loved was music. If I got finished early in the honey house, I went to the kitchen and watched May and Rosaleen cook, but really I was there to listen to June play the cello. She played music for dying people, going to their homes and even to the hospital to serenade them into the next life. I had never heard of such a thing, and I would sit at the table drinking sweet iced tea, wondering if this was the reason June smiled so little. Maybe she was around death too much. I could tell she was still bristled at the idea of me and Rosaleen staying; it was the one sore point about our being here. I overheard her talking to August one night on the back porch as I was coming across the yard to go to the bathroom in the pink house. Their voices stopped me beside the hydrangea bush.

‘You know she’s lying,’ said June.

‘I know,’ August told her.

‘But they’re in some kind of trouble and need a place to stay. Who’s gonna take them in if we don’t—a white girl and a Negro woman? Nobody around here.’

For a second neither spoke. I heard the moths landing against the porch lightbulb. June said, ‘We can’t keep a runaway girl here without letting somebody know.’

August turned toward the screen and looked out, causing me to step deeper into the shadows and press my back against the house.

‘Let who know?’ she said.

‘The police? They would only haul her off someplace. Maybe her father really did die. If so, who better is she gonna stay withforthe time being than us?’

‘What about this aunt she mentioned?’

‘There’s no aunt and you know it,’ said August. June’s voice sounded exasperated.

‘What if her father didn’t die in this so-called tractor accident? Won’t he be looking for her?’

A pause followed. I crept closer to the edge of the porch.

‘I just have a feeling about this, June. Something tells me not to send her back to some place she doesn’t want to be. Not yet, at least. She has some reason for leaving. Maybe he mistreated her. I believe we can help her.’

‘Why don’t you just ask her point-blank what kind of trouble she’s in?’

‘Everything in time,’ August said.

‘The last thing I want is to scare her off with a lot of questions. She’ll tell us when she’s ready. Let’s be patient.’

‘But she’s white, August.’

This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want me here because of my skin color. I hadn’t known this was possible—to reject people for being white. A hot wave passed through my body.

‘Righteous indignation’ is what Brother Gerald called it. Jesus had righteous indignation when he turned over the tables in the temple and drove out the thieving moneychangers. I wanted to march up there, flip a couple of tables over, and say, Excuse me, June Boatwright, but you don’t even know met.

‘Let’s see if we can help her,’ August said as June disappeared from my line of sight.

‘We owe her that.’

‘I don’t see that we owe her anything,’ June said. A door slammed. August flipped off the light and let out a sigh that floated into the darkness. I walked back toward the honey house, feeling ashamed that August had seen through my hoax but relieved, too, that she wasn’t planning on calling the police or sending me back—yet. Yet, she’d said. Mostly I felt resentment at June’s attitude. As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched it puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss and June’s. That’s what I thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss was piss. Every evening after supper we sat in their tiny den around the television set with the ceramic bee planter on top. You could hardly see the screen for the philodendron vines that dangled around the news pictures. I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was not, shape it into a person, and you would get Walter Cronkite. He filled us in on an integration parade in St. Augustine that got attacked by a mob of white people, about white vigilante groups, fire hoses, and teargas. We got all the totals. Three civil rights workers killed. Two bomb blasts. Three Negro students chased with ax handles. Since Mr. Johnson signed that law, it was like somebody had ripped the side seams out of American life. We watched the lineup of governors coming on the TV screen asking for ‘calm and reason.’

August said she was afraid it was only a matter of time before we saw things like that happen right here in Tiburon. I felt white and self-conscious sitting there, especially with June in the room. Self-conscious and ashamed. Usually May didn’t watch, but one night she joined us, and midway through she started to hum ‘Oh! Susanna.’

She was upset over a Negro man named Mr. Raines, who was killed by a shotgun from a passing car in Georgia. They showed a picture of his widow, holding her children, and suddenly May started to sob. Of course everybody jumped up like she was an unpinned grenade and tried to quiet her, but it was too late. May rocked back and forth, slapping her arms and scratching at her face. She tore open her blouse so the pale yellow buttons went flying like popped corn. I had never seen her like this, and it frightened me. August and June each took one of May’s elbows and guided her through the door in a movement so smooth it was plain they’d done it before. A few moments later I heard water filling the claw footed tub where twice I’d bathed in honey water. One of the sisters had put a pair of red socks on two of the tub’s feet—who knows why. I supposed it was May, who didn’t need a reason. Rosaleen and I crept to the door of the bathroom. It was cracked open enough for us to see May sitting in the tub in a little cloud of steam, hugging her knees. June scooped up handfuls of water and drizzled them slowly across May’s back. Her crying had eased off now into sniffling. August’s voice came from behind the door.

‘That’s right, May. Let all that misery slide right off you. Just let it go.’

Each night after the news, we all knelt down on the rug in the parlor before black Mary and said prayers to her, or rather the three sisters and I knelt and Rosaleen sat on a chair. August, June, and May called the statue ‘Our Lady of Chains,’ for no reason that I could see. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women…The sisters held strands of wooden beads and moved them in their fingers. In the beginning Rosaleen refused to join in, but soon she was going right along with the rest of us. I had the words memorized after the first evening. That’s because we said the same thing over and over till it went on repeating itself in my head long after I stopped mouthing it. It was some kind of Catholic saying, but when I asked August if they were Catholic, she said, ‘Well, yes and no. My mother was a good Catholic—she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary’s in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.’

I had no idea what sort of denomination Orthodox Eclectic was, but I nodded like we had a big group of them back in Sylvan. She said, ‘May and June and I take our mother’s Catholicism and mix in our own ingredients. I’m not sure what you call it, but it suits us.’

When we finished saying Hail Mary about three hundred times, we said our personal prayers silently, which was kept to a minimum, since our knees would be killing us by then. I shouldn’t complain, since it was nothing compared to kneeling on the Martha Whites. Finally the sisters would cross themselves from their foreheads to their navels, and it would be over. One evening, after they had crossed themselves and everyone had left the room but me and August, she said, ‘Lily, if you ask Mary’s help, she’ll give it.’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I shrugged. She motioned me to sit next to her in the rocking chair.

‘I want to tell you a story,’ she said.