The Secret Life of Bees (16 page)

I couldn’t restrain myself from touching his face, the place where his dimple caved into his skin.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Me, too,’ he said. For days I carried the notebook everywhere. I wrote constantly. A made-up story about Rosaleen losing eighty-five pounds, looking so sleek nobody could pick her out of a police lineup. One about August driving a honeymobile around, similar to the bookmobile, only she had jars of honey to dispense instead of books. My favorite, though, was one about Zach becoming the ass-busting lawyer and getting his own television show like Perry Mason. I read it to him during lunch one day, and he listened better than a child at story hour.

‘Move over, Willifred Marchant’ was all he said.

Chapter Eight

Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require its social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die.

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

A
ugust tore the July page from the wall calendar that hung by her desk in the honey house. I wanted to tell her that technically it was still July for five more days, but I figured she knew already. It was a simple case of her wanting July over with so she could start into August, her special month. Just like June was June’s month and May belonged to May. August had explained to me how when they were children and their special month came around, their mother excused them from house chores and let them eat all their favorite foods even if it wrecked their teeth and stay up a full hour later at night doing whatever their heart desired. August said her heart had desired to read books, so the whole month she got to prop on the sofa in the quiet of the living room reading after her sisters went to bed. To listen to August talk, it had been the highlight of her youth. After hearing this, I’d spent a good amount of time trying to think up which month I would have liked to have been named for. I picked October, as it is a golden month with better-than- average weather, and my initials would be O.O. for October Owens, which would make an interesting monogram. I pictured myself eating three-tiered chocolate cake for breakfast throughout the entire month, staying up an hour after bedtime writing high-caliber stories and poems. I looked over at August, who stood by her desk with the July calendar page in her hand. She wore her white dress with the lime green scarf tied on her belt, just like she was wearing the first day I showed up. The scarf had no purpose hanging there other than adding a touch of flair. She hummed their song: Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through. I was thinking what a good, fine mother she must’ve had.

‘Come on, Lily,’ she said.

‘We’ve got all these jars of honey to paste labels on, and it’s just me and you.’

Zach was spending the day delivering honey to her selling places all over town and picking up money from the previous month’s sales.

‘Honey money’ was what Zach called it. Even though the big honey flow was over, the bees were still out there sucking nectar, going about their business. (you could not stop a bee from working if you tried.) Zach said August’s honey brought fifty cents a pound. I figured she must be dripping in honey money. I didn’t see why she wasn’t living in a hot pink mansion somewhere. Waiting on August to open a box containing the new shipment of Black Madonna labels, I studied a piece of honeycomb. People don’t realize how smart bees are, even smarter than dolphins. Bees know enough geometry to make row after row of perfect hexagons, angles so accurate you’d think they used rulers. They take plain flower juice and turn it into something everyone in the world loves to pour on biscuits. And I have personally witnessed how it took a whole fifteen minutes for about fifty thousand bees to find those empty supers August had left out for them to clean up, passing along the discovery in some kind of advanced bee language. But the main thing is they are hardworking to the point of killing themselves. Sometimes you want to say to them, Relax, take some time off, you deserve it. As August reached down inside the box for the labels, I studied the return address: Holy Virgin Monastery Gift Shop, Post Office Box 45, St. Paul, Minnesota. Next she pulled a fat envelope from her desk drawer and poured out dozens of a different, smaller label with printed letters: BLACK MADONNA HONEY—Tiburon, South Carolina. I was supposed to swipe the backs of both labels with a wet sponge and hand them off to August to position on the jars, but I paused a minute to take in the Black Madonna’s picture, which I’d studied so many times glued onto my mother’s little block of wood. I admired the fancy gold scarf draped over her head, how it was decorated with red stars. Her eyes were mysterious and kind and her skin dark brown with a glow, darker than toast and looking a little like it had been buttered. It always caused a tiny jump start in my chest, me thinking that my own mother had stared at this same picture. I hated to imagine where I might have ended up if I hadn’t seen the Black Madonna’s picture that day in the Frogmore Stew General Store and Restaurant. Probably sleeping on creek banks all over South Carolina. Drinking pond water with the cows. Peeing behind chinaberry bushes and wishing for the joy of toilet paper.

‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,’

I said.

‘But I never thought of the Virgin Mary being colored till I saw this picture.’

‘A dark-faced Mary is not as unusual as you think,’ August said.

‘There are hundreds of them over in Europe, places like France and Spain. The one we put on our honey is old as the hills. She’s the Black Madonna of Breznichar in Bohemia.’

‘How did you learn about all that?’ I asked. She rested her hands and smiled, like this had dredged up a sweet, long-lost memory.

‘I guess I would have to say it started with my mother’s prayer cards. She used to collect them, the way good Catholics did back then—you know, those cards with pictures of saints on them. She’d trade for them like little boys traded baseball cards.’

August let out a big laugh at that.

‘I bet she had a dozen Black Madonna cards. I used to love to play with her cards, especially the Black Madonnas. Then, when I went off to school, I read everything I could about them. That’s how I found out about the Black Madonna of Breznichar in Bohemia.’

I tried to say Breznichar, but it didn’t come out right.

‘Well, I can’t say her name, but I love her picture.’

I swiped the back of the label and watched August fix it on the jar, then fasten the sec and label beneath it, as if she’d done this ten thousand times.

‘What else do you love, Lily?’

No one had ever asked me this before. What did I love? Right off the bat I wanted to say I loved the picture of my mother, how she was leaning against the car with her hair looking just like mine, plus her gloves and her picture of the black Mary with the unpronounceable name, but I had to swallow that back.

I said, ‘Well, I love Rosaleen, and I love writing stories and poems—just give me something to write and I will love it.’

After that, I really had to think. I said, ‘This may be silly, but after school I love Coca-Cola with salted peanuts poured in the bottle. And when I’m finished with it, I love turning up the bottle to see where it came from.’

Once I’d gotten a bottle from Massachusetts, which I kept as a tribute to how far something can go in life.

‘And I love the color blue—the real bright blue like the hat May had on at the Daughters of Mary meeting. And since coming here, I’ve learned to love bees and honey.’

I wanted to add, And you, I love you, but I felt too awkward.

‘Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?’ August said.

‘And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving a Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have more ways to say it?’

I nodded, wondering where was the limit of her knowing things. Probably one of those books she’d read after bedtime during the month of August had been about Eskimos.

‘I guess we’ll just have to invent more ways to say it,’ she said. Then she smiled.

‘Do you know I love peanuts in my Coke, too? And blue is my favorite color?’

You know that saying, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’? That’s how I felt. We were working on the jars of tupelo tree honey, which Zach and I had gathered out there on Clayton Forrest’s land, plus a few jars of purple honey from the hive where the bees had struck it rich on elderberries. It was a nice color coordination the way the Bohemian Madonna’s skin was set off by the golds in the honey. Unfortunately, the purple honey didn’t do a whole lot for her.

‘How come you put the Black Madonna on your honey?’ I asked. I’d been curious about this from day one. Usually people got in a rut putting honey bears on them. August grew still, holding a jar in her hand and looking into the distance like she’d gone in search of the answer and that finding it had been the bonus of the day.

‘I wish you could’ve seen the Daughters of Mary the first time they laid eyes on this label. You know why? Because when they looked at her, it occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what’s divine can come in dark skin. You see, everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily.’

I only wished I’d been there when the Daughters of Mary had made this big discovery. I pictured them whooping it up in their glorious hats. Feathers flying. Sometimes I would catch myself jiggling my foot till I thought it might fall off my leg bone—‘jimmy-leg,’ Rosaleen called it—and looking down now, I noticed it was going at high speed. Usually it happened in the evenings when we did our prayers before Our Lady of Chains. Like my feet wanted to get up and march around the room in a conga line.

‘So how did you get the black Mary statue in the parlor?’ I asked.

‘I can’t say, exactly. I only know she came into the family at some point. You remember the story about Obadiah taking the statue to the praise house, and how the slaves believed it was Mary who had come to be among them?’ I nodded. I remembered every detail. I’d seen it a hundred times in my mind since she’d first told it. Obadiah down on his knees in the mud, bent over the washed-up statue. The statue standing proud in the praise house, Our Lady’s fist in the air and all the people coming up one at a time to touch her heart, hoping to find a little strength to go on.

‘Well,’ August said, going right on with her pasting, ‘you know, she’s really just the figurehead off an old ship, but the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over. Really, her spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way.’

I had never thought of it like that, and it gave me a shocked feeling, like maybe I had no idea what kind of world I was actually living in, and maybe the teachers at my school didn’t know either, the way they talked about everything being nothing but carbon and oxygen and mineral, the dullest stuff you can imagine. I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised Marys sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about that people could rub and touch, only we didn’t rec- ognize them. August arranged the jars she’d labeled so far in a cardboard box and set it on the floor, then dragged out more jars.

‘I’m just trying to explain to you why the people took such care with Our Lady of Chains, passing her one generation to the next. The best we can figure, sometime after the Civil War she came into the possession of my grandmother’s people.

‘When I was younger than you, me and June and May—and April, too, because she was still alive then—all of us would visit our grandmother for the whole summer. We’d sit on the rug in the parlor, and Big Mama—that’s what we called her—would tell us the story. Every time, when she finished, May would say, ‘Big Mama, tell it again,’ and off she’d go, repeating the whole thing. I swear, if you listen to my chest with a stethoscope, what you’d hear is that story going on and on in my Big Mama’s voice.’

I was so caught up in what August was saying I had stopped wetting labels. I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope, and not the story I did have about ending my mother’s life and sort of ending my own at the same time.

‘You can wet the labels and listen,’ August said, and smiled.

‘So, after Big Mama died, Our Lady of Chains was passed to my mother. She stayed in Mother’s bedroom. My father hated her being in there. He wanted to get rid of the statue, but Mother said, ‘If she goes, I go.’

I think the statue was the reason Mother be- came a Catholic, so she could kneel down before her and not feel like she was doing anything peculiar. We would find her in there talking to Our Lady like they were two neighbors having sweet iced tea. Mother would tease Our Lady; she’d say, ‘You know what? You should’ve had a girl instead.’

‘August set down the jar she was working on, and there was a mix of sorrow and amusement and longing across her face, and I thought, She is missing her mother. I stopped wetting the labels, not wanting to get ahead of her. When she picked up the jar again, I said, ‘Did you grow up in this house?’

I wanted to know everything there was about her. She shook her head.

‘No, but my mother did. This is where I spent my summers,’ she said.

‘You see, the house belonged to my grandparents, and all this property around it. Big Mama kept bees, too, right out there in the same spot they’re in today. Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, ‘cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.

‘It comes from years of loving children and husbands,’ she’d say.’

August laughed, and so did I.

‘Was your Big Mama the one who taught you to keep bees?’