The Secret Life of Bees (11 page)

‘It’s a story our mother used to tell us when we got tired of our chores or out of sorts with our lives.’

‘I’m not tired of my chores,’ I said.

‘I know, but it’s a good story. Just listen.’

I situated myself in the chair and rocked back and forth, listening to the creaking sounds that rocking chairs are famous for.

‘A long time ago, across the world in Germany, there was a young nun named Beatrix who loved Mary. She got sick and tired of being a nun, though, what with all the chores she had to do and the rules she had to go by. So one night when it got too much for her, she took off her nun outfit, folded it up, and laid it on her bed. Then she crawled out the convent window and ran away.’

Okay, I could see where we were headed.

‘She thought she was in for a wonderful time,’ August said.

‘But life wasn’t what she thought it’d be for a runaway nun. She roamed around feeling lost, begging in the streets. After a while she wished she could return to the convent, but she knew they’d never take her back.’

We weren’t talking about Beatrix the nun, that was plain as day. We were talking about me.

‘What happened to her?’ I asked, trying to sound interested.

‘Well, one day, after years of wandering and suffering, she disguised herself and went back to her old convent, wanting to visit one last time. She went into the chapel and asked one of her old sisters, ‘Do you remember the nun Beatrix, who ran away?’

’

‘What do you mean?’

‘the sister said.

‘The nun Beatrix didn’t run away. Why, there she is over near the altar, sweeping.’

Well, you can imagine how this floored the real Beatrix. She marched over to the sweeping woman to get a look at her and discovered it was none other than Mary. Mary smiled at Beatrix, then led her back to her room and gave her back her nun outfit. You see, Lily, all that time Mary had been standing in for her.’

The creaking in my rocker died away as I slowed to a stop. Just what was August trying to say? That Mary would stand in for me back home in Sylvan so T. Ray wouldn’t notice I was gone? That was too outlandish even for the Catholics. I think she was telling me, I know you’ve run away—comeverybody gets the urge to do that some time—but sooner or later you’ll want to go home. Just ask Mary for help. I excused myself, glad to be out of the spotlight. After that I started asking Mary for her special help—not to take me home, though, like the poor nun Beatrix. No, I asked her to see to it that I never went back. I asked her to draw a curtain around the pink house so no one would ever find us. I asked this daily, and I sure couldn’t get over that it seemed to be working. No one knocked on the door and dragged us off to jail. Mary had made us a curtain of protection. On our first Friday evening there, after prayers were finished and orange and pink swirls still hung in the sky from sunset, I went with August to the bee yard. I hadn’t been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called ‘bee yard etiquette.’

She reminded me that the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places: Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and long pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates, while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved. August had been stung so many times she had immunity. They barely hurt her. In fact, she said, stings helped her arthritis, but since I didn’t have arthritis, I should cover up. She made me put on one of her long-sleeved white shirts, then placed one of the white helmets on my head and adjusted the netting. If this was a man’s world, a veil took the rough beard right off it. Everything appeared softer, nicer. When I walked behind August in my bee veil, I felt like a moon floating behind a night cloud. She kept 48 hives strewn through the woods around the pink house, and another 280 were parceled out on various farms, in river yards and upland swamps. The farmers loved her bees, thanks to all the pollinating they did, how they made the watermelons redder and the cucumbers bigger. They would have welcomed her bees for free, but August paid every one of them with five gallons of honey. She was constantly checking on her hives, driving her old flatbed truck from one end of the county to the other. The ‘honey wagon’ was what she called it. Bee patrol was what she did in it. I watched her load the red wagon, the one I’d seen in the back yard, with brood frames, those little slats that slip down in the hives for the bees to deposit honey on.

‘We have to make sure the queen has plenty of room to lay her eggs, or else we’ll get a swarm,’ she said.

‘What does that mean, a swarm?’

‘Well, if you have a queen and a group of independent minded bees that split off from the rest of the hive and look for another place to live, then you’ve got a swarm. They usually cluster on a limb somewhere.’

It was clear she didn’t like swarms.

‘So,’ she said, getting down to business, ‘what we have to do is take out the frames filled with honey and put in empty ones.’

August pulled the wagon while I walked behind it carrying the smoker stuffed with pine straw and tobacco leaves. Zach had placed a brick on top of each hive telling August what to do. If the brick was at the front, it meant the colony had nearly filled the combs and needed another super. If the brick was at the back, there were problems like wax moths or ailing queens. Turned on its side, the brick announced a happy bee family, no Ozzie, just Harriet and her ten thousand daughters. August struck a match and lit the grass in the smoker. I watched her face flare with light, then recede into the dimness. She waved the bucket, sending smoke into the hive. The smoke, she said, worked better than a sedative. Still, when August removed the lids, the bees poured out in thick black ropes, breaking into strands, a flurry of tiny wings moving around our faces. The air rained bees, and I sent them love, just like August said. She pulled out a brood frame, a canvas of whirling blacks and grays, with rubbings of silver.

‘There she is, Lily, see her?’ said August.

‘That’s the queen, the large one.’

I made a curtsy like people do for the queen of England, which made August laugh. I wanted to make her love me so she would keep me forever. If I could make her love me, maybe she would forget about Beatrix the nun going home and let me stay. When we walked back to the house, darkness had settled in and fireflies sparked around our shoulders. I could see Rosaleen and May through the kitchen window finishing the dishes. August and I sat in collapsible lawn chairs beside a crepe myrtle that kept dropping blossoms all over the ground. Cello music swelled out from the house, rising higher and higher until it lifted off the earth, sailing toward Venus. I could see how such music drew the ghosts out of dying people, giving them a ride to the next life. I wished June’s music could’ve seen my mother out. I gazed at the stone wall that edged the backyard.

‘There are pieces of paper in the wall out there,’ I said, as if August didn’t know this.

‘Yes, I know. It’s May’s wall. She made it herself.’

‘May did?’

I tried to picture her mixing cement, carrying rocks around in her apron.

‘She gets a lot of the stones from the river that runs through the woods back there. She’s been working on it ten years or more.’

So that’s where she got her big muscles—rock lifting.

‘What are all those scraps of paper stuck in it?’

‘Oh, it’s a long story,’ August said.

‘I guess you’ve noticed—May is special.’

‘She sure does get upset easy,’ I said.

‘That’s because May takes in things differently than the rest of us do.’

August reached over and laid her hand on my arm.

‘See, Lily, when you and I hear about some misery out there, it might make us feel bad for a while, but it doesn’t wreck our whole world. It’s like we have a built-in protection around our hearts that keeps the pain from overwhelming us. But May—she doesn’t have that. Everything just comes into her—all the suffering out there—and she feels as if it’s happening to her. She can’t tell the difference.’

Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray’s mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother—that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone’s joy seemed to double it? Rosaleen’s voice drifted from the kitchen window, followed by May’s laughter. May sounded so normal and happy right then, I couldn’t imagine how she’d gotten the way she was—one minute laughing and the next overrun with everybody’s misery. The last thing I wanted was to be like that, but I didn’t want to be like T. Ray either, immune to everything but his own selfish life. I didn’t know which was worse.

‘Was she born like that?’ I asked.

‘No, she was a happy child at first.’

‘Then what happened to her?’

August focused her eyes on the stone wall.

‘May had a twin. Our sister April. The two of them were like one soul sharing two bodies. I never saw anything like it. If April got a toothache, May’s gum would plump up red and swollen just like April’s. Only one time did our father use a belt strap on April, and I swear to you, the welts rose on May’s legs, too. Those two had no separation between them.’

‘The first day we were here May told us that April died.’

‘And that’s when it all started with May,’ she said, then looked at me like she was trying to decide whether to go on.

‘It’s not a pretty story.’

‘My story’s not pretty either,’ I said, and she smiled.

‘Well, when April and May were eleven, they walked to the market with a nickel each to buy an ice cream. They’d seen the white children in there licking their cones and looking at cartoon books. The man who owned the market gave them the cones but said they had to go outside to eat them. April was headstrong and told him she wanted to look at the cartoon books. She argued with the man for her own way, like she used to do with Father, and finally the man took her arm and pulled her to the door, and her ice cream dropped to the floor. She came home screaming that it wasn’t fair. Our father was the only colored dentist in Richmond, and he’d seen more than his share of unfairness. He told April, ‘Nothing’s fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now.’

‘I was thinking how I myself had gotten that straight long before I was eleven. I blew a puff of air across my face, bending my neck to behold the Big Dipper. June’s music poured out, serenading us.

‘I think most children might have let that roll on by, but it did something to April,’ August said.

‘She got deflated about life, I suppose you’d say. It opened her eyes to things she might not have noticed, being so young. She started having stretches when she didn’t want to go to school or do anything. By the time she was thirteen, she was having terrible depressions, and of course the whole time, whatever she was feeling, May was feeling. And then, when April was fifteen, she took our father’s shotgun and killed herself.’

I hadn’t expected that. I sucked in my breath, then felt my hand go up and cover my mouth.

‘I know,’ said August.

‘It’s terrible to hear something like that.’

She paused a moment.

‘When April died, something in May died, too. She never was normal after that. It seemed like the world itself became May’s twin sister.’

August’s face was blending into the tree shadows. I slid up in my chair so I could still see her.

‘Our mother said she was like Mary, with her heart on the outside of her chest. Mother was good about taking care of her, but when she died, it fell to me and June. We tried for years to get May some help. She saw doctors, but they didn’t have any idea what to do with her except put her away. So June and I came up with this idea of a wailing wall.’

‘A what kind of wall?’

‘Wailing wall,’ she said again.

‘Like they have in Jerusalem. The Jewish people go there to mourn. It’s a way for them to deal with their suffering. See, they write their prayers on scraps of paper and tuck them in the wall.’

‘And that’s what May does?’ August nodded.

‘All those bits of paper you see out there stuck between the stones are things May has written down—all the heavy feelings she carries around. It seems like the only thing that helps her.’

I looked in the direction of the wall, invisible now in the darkness. Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead.

‘Poor May,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said August.

‘Poor May.’

And we sat in the sorrow for a while, until the mosquitoes collected around us and chased us indoors. In the honey house Rosaleen was on her cot with the lights out and the fan going full blast. I stripped down to my panties and sleeveless top, but it was still too hot to move. My chest hurt from feeling things. I wondered if T. Ray was pacing the floors feeling as injured as I hoped he did. Maybe he was telling himself what a rotten excuse for a father he was for not treating me better, but I doubted it. Thinking up ways to kill me was more like it. I turned my pillow over and over for the coolness, thinking about May and her wall and what the world had come to that a person needed something like that. It gave me the willies to think what might be stuffed in among those rocks. The wall brought to my mind the bleeding slabs of meat Rosaleen used to cook, the gashes she made up and down them, stuffing them with pieces of wild, bitter garlic. The worst thing was lying there wanting my mother. That’s how it had always been; my longing for her nearly always came late at night when my guard was down. I tossed on the sheets, wishing I could crawl into bed with her and smell her skin. I wondered: Had she worn thin nylon gowns to bed? Did she bobby-pin her hair? I could just see her, propped in bed. My mouth twisted as I pictured myself climbing in beside her and putting my head against her breast. I would put it right over her beating heart and listen. Mama, I would say. And she would look down at me and say, Baby, I’m right here. I could hear Rosaleen trying to turn over on her cot.