The Secret Life of Bees (6 page)

‘What do you mean, she fell and hit her head?’

Mr. Gaston looked over at Brother Gerald, that all-knowing look men give each other when a female acts the least bit hysterical.

‘Settle down, now,’ he said to me.

‘I can’t settle down till I know if she’s all right,’ I said, my voice calmer but still shaking a little.

‘She’s fine. It’s only a little concussion. I expect she’ll be back here later this evening. The doctor wanted her watched for a few hours.’

While Brother Gerald was explaining how he couldn’t sign the warrant papers seeing as how Rosaleen was nearly deaf, I started for the door. Mr. Gaston shot me a warning look.

‘We got a guard on her at the hospital, and he’s not letting anybody see her, so you go on back home. You understand?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m going home.’

‘You do that,’ he said. ’

‘Cause if I hear you’ve been anywhere near that hospital, I’m calling your daddy again.’

Sylvan Memorial Hospital was a low brick building with one wing for whites and one for blacks. I stepped into a deserted corridor clogged with too many smells. Carnations, old people, rubbing alcohol, bathroom deodorizer, red Jell-O. Air conditioners poked out from the windows in the white section, but back here there was nothing but electric fans moving the hot air from one place to another. At the nurses’ station a policeman leaned on the desk. He looked like somebody just out of high school, who’d flunked PE and hung out with the shop boys smoking at recess. He was talking to a girl in white. A nurse, I guess, but she didn’t look much older than I was.

‘I get off at six o’clock,’ I heard him say. She stood there smiling, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. At the opposite end of the hall an empty chair sat outside one of the rooms. It had a policeman’s hat underneath it. I hurried down there to find a sign on the door.

‘NO VISITORS. I went right in. There were six beds, all empty, except the farthest one over by the window. The sheets rose up, trying hard to accommodate the occupant. I plopped my bag on the floor.

‘Rosaleen?’

A gauze bandage the size of a baby’s diaper was wrapped around her head, and her wrists were tied to the bed railing. When she saw me standing there, she started to cry. In all the years she’d looked after me, I’d never seen a tear cross her face. Now the levee broke wide open. I patted her arm, her leg, her cheek, her hand. When her tear glands were finally exhausted, I said, ‘What happened to you?’

‘After you left, that policeman called Shoe let those men come in for their apology.’

‘They hit you again?’

‘Two of them held me by the arms while the other one hit me—the one with the flashlight. He said, ‘Nigger, you say you’re sorry.’

When I didn’t, he came at me. He hit me till the policeman said that was enough. They didn’t get no apology, though.’

I wanted those men to die in hell begging for ice water, but I felt mad at Rosaleen, too. Why couldn’t you just apologize? Then maybe Franklin Posey would let you off with just a beating. All she’d done was guarantee they’d come back.

‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ I said, untying her wrists.

‘I can’t just leave,’ she said.

‘I’m still in jail.’

‘If you stay here, those men are gonna come back and kill you I’m serious. They’re gonna kill you, like those colored people in Mississippi got killed. Even T. Ray said so.’

When she sat up, the hospital gown rode up her thighs. She tugged it toward her knees, but it slid right back like a piece of elastic. I found her dress in the closet and handed it to her.

‘This is crazy—‘ she said.

‘Put on the dress. Just do it, all right?’

She pulled it over her head and stood there with the bandage sloped over her forehead.

‘That bandage has got to go,’ I said. I eased it off to find two rows of catgut stitches. Then, signaling her to be quiet, I cracked the door to see if the policeman was back at his chair. He was. Naturally it was too much to hope he’d stay off flirting long enough for us to float out of here. I stood there a couple of minutes, trying to think up some kind of scheme, then opened my bag, dug into my peach money, and took out a couple of dimes.

‘I’m gonna try and get rid of him. Get in the bed, in case he looks in here.’

She stared at me, her eyes shrunk to mere dots.

‘Baby Jesus,’ she said. When I stepped out into the hall, he jumped up.

‘You weren’t supposed to be in there!’

‘Don’t I know it,’ I said.

‘I’m looking for my aunt. I could have sworn they told me Room One-oh-two, but there’s a colored woman in there.’

I shook my head, trying to look confused.

‘You’re lost, all right. You need to go to the other side of the building. You’re in the colored section.’

I smiled at him.

‘Oh.’

Over on the white side of the hospital I found a pay phone next to a waiting area. I got the hospital number from Information and dialed it up, asking for the nurses’ station in the colored wing. I cleared my throat.

‘This is the jailer’s wife over at the police station,’ I said to the girl who answered.

‘Mr. Gaston wants you to send the policeman that we’ve got over there back to the station. Tell him the preacher is on his way in to sign some papers, and Mr. Gaston can’t be here ‘cause he had to leave just now. So if you could tell him to get over here right away…’ Part of me was saying these actual words, and part of me was listening to myself say them, thinking how I belonged in a reform school or a juvenile delinquent home for girls, and would probably soon be in one. She repeated it all back to me, making sure she had it straight. Her sigh passed over the receiver.

‘I’ll tell him.’

She’ll tell him. I couldn’t believe it. I crept back to the colored side and hunched over the water fountain as the girl in white relayed all this to him, using a lot of hand gestures. I watched as the policeman put on his hat and walked down the corridor and out the door. When Rosaleen and I stepped from her room, I looked left, then right. We had to go past the nurses’ desk to get to the door, but the girl in white seemed preoccupied, sitting with her head down, writing something.

‘Walk like a visitor,’ I told Rosaleen. Halfway to the desk, the girl stopped writing and stood up.

‘Shitbucket,’ I said. I grabbed Rosaleen’s arm and pulled her into a patient’s room. A tiny woman was perched in the bed, old and birdlike, with a blackberry face. Her mouth opened when she saw us, and her tongue curled out like a misplaced comma.

‘I need a little water,’ she said. Rosaleen went over and poured some from a pitcher and gave the woman the glass, while I held my duffel bag at my chest and peeped out the door. I watched the girl disappear into a room a few doors down car- rying some sort of glass bottle.

‘Come on,’ I said to Rosaleen.

‘Y’all leaving already?’ said the tiny woman.

‘Yeah, but I’ll probably be back before the day’s out,’ said Rosa- leen, more for my benefit than the woman’s. This time we didn’t walk like visitors, we tore out of there. Outside, I took Rosaleen’s hand and tugged her down the sidewalk.

‘Since you got everything else figured out, I guess you know where we’re going,’ she said, and there was a tone in her voice.

‘We’re going to Highway Forty and thumb a ride to Tiburon, South Carolina. At least we’re gonna try.’

I took us the back way, cutting through the city park, down a little alley to Lancaster Street, then three blocks over to May Pond Road, where we slipped into the vacant lot behind Glenn’s Grocery. We waded through Queen Anne’s lace and thick-stalked purple flowers, into dragonflies and the smell of Carolina jasmine so thick I could almost see it circling in the air like golden smoke. She didn’t ask me why we were going to Tiburon, and I didn’t tell her. What she did ask was ‘When did you start saying ‘shit bucket’?’

I’d never resorted to bad language, though I’d heard my share of it from T. Ray or else read it in public restrooms.

‘I’m fourteen now. I guess I can say it if I want to.’

And I wanted to, right that minute.

‘Shitbucket,’ I said.

‘Shitbucket, hellfire, damnation, and son of a mother bitch,’ said Rosaleen, laying into each word like it was sweet potatoes on her tongue. We stood on the side of Highway 4[-] in a patch of shade provided by a faded billboard for Lucky Strike cigarettes. I stuck out my thumb while every car on the highway sped up the second they saw us. A colored man driving a beat-up Chevy truck full of cantaloupes had mercy on us. I climbed in first and kept having to scoot over as Rosaleen settled herself by the window. The man said he was on his way to visit his sister in Columbia, that he was taking the cantaloupes to the state farmers’ market. I told him I was going to Tiburon to visit my aunt and Rosaleen was coming to do housework for her. It sounded lame, but he accepted it.

‘I can drop you three miles from Tiburon,’ he said. Sunset is the saddest light there is. We rode a long time in the glow of it, everything silent except for the crickets and the frogs who were revving up for twilight. I stared through the windshield as the burned lights took over the sky. The farmer flicked on the radio and the Supremes blared through the truck cab with ‘Baby, baby, where did our love go?’

There’s nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you’ve hung it so careful. I laid my head against Rosaleen’s arm. I wanted her to pat life back into place, but her hands lay still in her lap. Ninety miles after we’d climbed in his truck, the farmer pulled off the road beside a sign that read TIBURON 3 MILES. It pointed left, toward a road curving away into silvery darkness. Climbing out of the truck, Rosaleen asked if we could have one of his cantaloupes for our supper.

‘Take yourself two,’ he said. We waited till his taillights turned to specks no bigger than lightning bugs before we spoke or even moved. I was trying not to think how sad and lost we really were. I was not so sure it was an improvement over living with T. Ray, or even life in prison. There wasn’t a soul anywhere to help us. But still, I felt painfully alive, like every cell in my body had a little flame inside it, burning so brightly it hurt.

‘At least we got a full moon,’ I told Rosaleen. We started walking. If you think the country is quiet, you’ve never lived in it. Tree frogs alone make you wish for earplugs. We walked along, pretending it was a regular day. Rosaleen said it looked like that farmer who’d driven us here had had a good crop of cantaloupes. I said it was amazing the mosquitoes weren’t out. When we came to a bridge with water running beneath, we decided we would pick our way down to the creek bed and rest for the night. It was a different universe down there, the water shining with flecks of moving light and kudzu vines draped between the pine trees like giant hammocks. It reminded me of a Grimm Brothers forest, drawing up the nervous feelings I used to get when I stepped into the pages of fairy tales where unthinkable things were likely—you just never knew. Rosaleen broke open the cantaloupes, pounding them against a creek stone. We ate them down to their skins, then scooped water into our hands and drank, not caring about algae or tadpoles or whether the cows used the creek for their toilet. Then we sat on the bank and looked at each other.

‘I just wanna know, of all the places on this earth, why you picked Tiburon,’ Rosaleen said.

‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

Even though it was dark, I pulled the black Mary picture out of my bag and handed it to her.

‘It belonged to my mother. On the back it says Tiburon, South Carolina.’

‘Let me get this straight. You picked Tiburon ‘cause your mother had a picture with that town written on the back—that’s it?’

‘Well, think about it,’ I said.

‘She must have been there sometime in her life to have owned this picture. And if she was, a person might remember her, you never know.’

Rosaleen held it up to the moonlight to see it better.

‘Who’s this supposed to be?’

‘The Virgin Mary,’ I said.

‘Well, if you ain’t noticed, she’s colored,’ said Rosaleen, and I could tell it was having an effect on her by the way she kept gaz- ing at it with her mouth parted. I could read her thought: If Jesus’ mother is black, how come we only know about the white Mary? This would be like women finding out Jesus had had a twin sister who’d gotten half God’s genes but none of the glory. She handed it back.

‘I guess I can go to my grave now, because I’ve seen it all.’

I pushed the picture down in my pocket.

‘You know what T. Ray said about my mother?’ I asked, wanting finally to tell her what had happened.

‘He said she left me and him way before she died. That she’d just come back for her things the day the acci- dent happened.’

I waited for Rosaleen to say how ridiculous that was, but she squinted straight ahead as if weighing the possibility.

‘Well, it’s not true,’ I said, my voice rising like something had seized it from below and was shoving it up into my throat.

‘And if he thinks I’m going to believe that story, he has a hole in his so-called brain. He only made it up to punish me. I know he did.’

I could have added that mothers have instincts and hormones that prevent them leaving their babies, that even pigs and opossums didn’t leave their offspring, but Rosaleen, having finally pondered the matter, said, ‘You’re probably right. Knowing your daddy, he could do a thing like that.’

‘And my mother could never do what he said she did,’ I added.

‘I didn’t know your mama,’ Rosaleen said.

‘But I used to see her from a distance sometimes when I came out of the orchard from picking. She’d be hanging clothes on the line or watering her plants, and you’d be right there beside her, playing. I only saw her one time when you weren’t under her feet.’

I had no idea Rosaleen had ever seen my mother. I felt suddenly light-headed, not knowing if it was from hunger or tiredness or this surprising piece of news.

‘What was she doing that time you saw her alone?’ I asked.

‘She was out behind the tractor shed, sitting on the ground, staring off at nothing. When we walked by, she didn’t even notice us. I remember thinking she looked a little sad.’