Hour of the Bees (7 page)
Authors: Lindsay Eagar
I hear a buzz.
No, not a buzz. A different sound.
A rattle.
“Carol,” Dad says, his quietness a warning. “Stay still.”
My whole self seizes up. “Snake?”
Dad angles his light on the ridge. “Oh, wow,” he says. I follow the light, and now I really feel sick.
A knot of rattlesnakes has made a nest in a crevice on the ridge. I count a dozen heads, but can’t tell which snaky head belongs to which body. The tangle of snakes makes a collective hiss, a few tails rattling.
Dad whistles. “That looks like a nightmare come true.”
“What do we do?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It’s their desert, too. Nothing we can do except watch where we step.”
I scramble into the truck, my bare feet tingling with phantom snakebites. Dad gets in and starts the engine. “Don’t tell Mom about the snakes, or she won’t sleep the rest of the summer.” He yawns, leans over, and kisses my forehead. “Let’s get some shut-eye.”
“Okay, good. I’m beat.” That’s a lie. I couldn’t be more awake.
“Too beat to drive the truck back?” Dad offers.
I grin. He doesn’t have to say another word — I know the drill. We switch spots, and I scoot the seat up as far as it will go, though I still have to stretch out my toes to press the gas pedal. But once it’s in gear, my handling of the truck along the bumpy desert drive is as smooth as Dad’s.
After Alta almost failed drivers’ ed last year (and boy, it took all my strength not to gloat), Dad decided it wouldn’t hurt to give me a jump on things, and taught me how to drive on empty roads outside the city.
I really love to drive. The concentration required to handle the truck means everything else — dead sheep, rattlesnake nests, senile old grandfathers — blurs. Driving makes me feel in control when everything else in my life feels out of control.
Death lurks around every corner of this ranch. It’s under the porch, slithering around Lu. It’s dragging sheep out of their pasture to eat them alive. It’s sleeping in scaly piles on the ridge. It’s dusted all over the abandoned bedroom, where you can practically see the indent from where Grandma Rosa laid her head on the pillow.
Most of all, death hangs on Serge like a wet towel, tangled in his salty-white hair, dripping down his shoulders. . . .
Next to me, Dad yawns and rubs his eyes, but there’s no way I’ll be able to go back to sleep tonight; it’d be a parade of bad dreams — of snakes and dead sheep and those darn bees, always, the bees.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Dad says as I pull into the driveway.
“About the bees?” I blurt.
“Uh, no,” he says, looking at me strangely. “I meant about the dead sheep.”
Great, bees are buzzing aimlessly in my mind, just like Serge. “Sheep, I meant sheep. No, I’m okay. Circle of life and all that.”
Dad yawns and can barely reopen his eyes.
“It’s past midnight,” I say.
“Okay, okay.”
I snicker. First Dad acting like the parent with Serge, now me acting like the parent with Dad — this ranch makes everything all topsy-turvy.
“Will you kill the headlights?” Dad says as we get closer to the ranch house. “We don’t want to wake anyone up.”
I switch the truck’s lights off and pull into the gravel driveway as slowly and quietly as I can.
We climb out of the truck and walk up the porch stairs. I lean over the railing to get one more peek at that sky, at that cosmic mess and glow. A speck of light whizzes across the horizon. “A shooting star,” I whisper, but Dad’s already slumped into the house. I pass the star’s wish on to him; seems like he could use it even more than me.
“Rosa?” Serge scares a gasp out of me. I forgot he was out here.
“No, it’s me,” I say. “It’s Carol.”
“Yes, I know it’s you, Caro-leeen-a,” he says. “You just look so much like her. You shine like she used to shine.”
“Me?” I say.
“You belong with the stars, like she did.”
I shake my head and walk over to him. “I don’t think so. Dad says she was full of fire.”
Serge’s cat eyes gleam in the darkness. “But so are you, Caro-leeen-a. A hidden fire. A volcano.”
“That sounds more like Alta. Not me.” The truth of this statement burns, right above my stomach. Alta’s the fiery one. Not me.
“No,” Serge insists. “Sounds like you, Caro-leeen-a.”
His ancient hands carve into a piece of sandy-white wood with a knife. They work fast for old hands. He barely has to look down at them; he’s probably done this a thousand times, a thousand nights.
“What’s it going to be?” I lean closer to look.
“Who knows,” he says. “My mind wants to sleep, but my hands want to work.”
I sigh. “I can’t sleep, either.”
Some unidentifiable critter makes a noise in the pasture, and I jump. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
Serge nods. “Bees. Snakes. A whole sky full of magical things.” He coughs, a raspy hyena bark. “Caro-leeen-a, I need water.”
I fill a glass in the kitchen and take it out to him. He guzzles it and asks for another, and his cough finally stops. “Drought dries everything, inside and out,” he says. “Did you know there used to be a lake here? Right there.” He points beyond the ridge.
“It dried up in the drought, too?”
“No,” he says. “One hundred years ago, the bees flew away with our lake, and there’s been no water since. Not even rain.”
More word salad. Even when he seems just fine, the dementia simmers underneath, waiting to burst out. The patchy starlight gives every one of his bee-sting scars its own shadow, so his face mirrors the desert landscape: bursts of scrub and rocks, miles of flat.
“How could bees take a lake?” I say, a heavy dose of skepticism in my voice. I’ll fight dementia with logic.
Serge leans close to me, like it’s a secret. “One drop of water at a time.” He smells of campfire, of old wood burning. “If one bee can carry a single drop of water, a thousand bees can steal a puddle. To take our lake, our green-glass lake, the bees came by the millions. They took the lake, and it’s been drought ever since.”
Part of me knows I should wake Dad, let him know Serge is lost in time and space, but I’m frozen to the porch floor, with an image in my head: an army of sickle-winged bees, each with a drop of clear green water held in its spiky black legs.
“We never thought the bees would come back . . . but you’ve seen them, haven’t you, Caro-leeen-a? They’re coming home at last.”
“This is just a story, right?” I whisper.
“It is my best story,” he says. “You’re twelve this year,
chiquita
.” I’m surprised he knows this — surprised he remembers. But he’s probably kept count of every day since Grandma Rosa died. “Twelve is the border between childhood and old. Are you too old for my stories, Caro-leeen-a?”
Caro-leeen-a
. He pronounces my name like it’s the secret ingredient in one of Mom’s Mexican dinners. “No.” I cross my legs and settle near his snake-stomping boots. “I’m not too old.”
Serge smiles, his watery-blue eyes crinkling. “The story begins, like all good stories, with ‘Once upon a time . . .’ ”
O
nce upon a time, there was a tree, bigger around than three men could hug. Its leaves were emerald green, the bark black. The tree’s branches dipped and curved like a lazy river, and its roots kissed the shore of a green-glass lake
.
White blossoms burst from the branches. Summer, winter, and the days in between, the tree was always in bloom. The flowers breathed out their sweet scent, spicing the dry desert air with their honey-vanilla fragrance. Bees made colonies in the branches, and like good tenants, they kept the blossoms tidy, kept them pollinated, kept them healthy
.
The bees kept the whole tree alive
.
On a day hot enough to boil eagle eggs in their shells, a boy and a girl climbed to the tree’s highest branch. From here, they could see all the way to the ridge, which was striped in the fuzzy violets and peaches of sunset
.
“Your turn,” the boy said
.
“No.” The girl dangled from one twiggy arm, lopsided above the lake
.
Inés, the rascally black puppy, barked and chased a butterfly
.
“
Rosa,” the boy said, only he stretched the name out into long, dramatic syllables: Rrrose-uhhh. “Tell me.”
“Why?” she said
.
“I won’t laugh,” the boy promised. He shifted on the branch, legs shaking. Heights terrified him. The lake terrified him. The girl, also, terrified him, but in an entirely different way. He was rounder than the other boys in the village, and moon-faced, wearing an embarrassingly too-tight pair of linen trousers. “I told you what my wish would be. Now you.”
Rosa closed her eyes. The boy watched her soar miles away from earth, just with her imagination, her rose-petal lips pursed in thought. “My wish would be to leave the village,” she finally said. She let go of the branch and fell thirty feet —
splash
— into the cold water
.
For a minute, the only sound was the buzz of the bees
.
When Rosa’s head bobbed out of the water, the boy’s jaw was still dropped. “But no one ever leaves!” he called
.
“
I know.” Rosa’s crow-black hair spread behind her in the water like a fan
.
“
No one has ever left before,” the boy said
.
“
Sergio, I know.” She waded onto shore. “That’s why it’s just a silly wish.”
Every step she took, bees followed her in a halo around her head. They trailed behind wherever she went. No one else in the village had the bees follow when they walked; only Rosa. No one knew why, but no one really asked why — the village had plenty of mysteries. Bigger mysteries
.
Father Alejandro, the priest of the village’s mission, told his parishioners that these mysteries would never be explained by man, because some mysteries were gifts from God. The tree was a gift. The land was a gift. The bees, too, were a gift
.
If you asked Sergio, he would say that Rosa herself was a gift, and they were all blessed to know her. Father Alejandro insisted that she was the same as everyone else: born of an old village family, raised to tend the communal crops and attend church on Sundays. But Sergio knew different. Rosa was teeming with life. She was so full of life, it overflowed, like the village wells after a rain, and that’s why the bees always danced around her like honey-making angels. Where there was Rosa, there was life
.
And where there was Rosa, there was also Sergio
.
Rosa ran her fingers along the tree trunk, patting the lucky knothole. “Father Alejandro says with God, all things are possible. Mysteries. Miracles.”
“
Rosa!” Sergio cried. “You’re bleeding!”
She kept walking, circling the tree
.
Sergio dropped from his branch faster than an autumn leaf. “I said you’re bleeding!” He grabbed her shoulders and made her stop
.
“
Am I?” Rosa looked down at all her limbs. There it was, jagged down her shin, a stream of blood. Every time she put weight on that leg, blood oozed from the deep cut. “I must have scraped it on the rocks,” she said
.
“
Shh.” Sergio knelt next to her leg, waiting, watching
.
Then it happened — the cut sewed itself whole, the flaps of broken skin pulling together as if with invisible thread. He touched the healed flesh in wonder, as he always did. Father Alejandro once told him that in the world outside the village, pain and sickness weren’t healed like this. Cuts had to be stitched together with actual thread; injuries hurt; pain scorched like a fire in the flesh. Some wounds killed
.
Sergio couldn’t even imagine . . . Outside the village, would a cut like this keep bleeding forever? Would such a wound have
killed
Rosa?
He splashed lake water over her leg to clean it, and when the blood washed away, the skin was smooth, not a trace of the wound left. Then he sat against the tree trunk, panting until his pulse leveled
.
“
It was a little scratch,” Rosa said, flicking away a bee that buzzed too close to her ear. “It was nothing.”
“
It was not nothing.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “I could see your bone.”
“
So?” Rosa’s eyes burned. “I could have bashed the bone to shards and it still would have healed. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“
It does to me,” he muttered. A smoky wind blew past the children, rustling the leaves
.
The village was preparing for their annual fiesta. Every year, when summer turned up its heat, they slaughtered a lamb, and the people would mix the blood with green onions, lard, thyme, and dried red chili, and make a feast out of it. It was Sergio’s least favorite day of the year
.
“
You’re the only one in the village who’s scared of blood, you know that?” Rosa suddenly said
.
“
Am not,” he said
.
“
Are too,” she said. “Why?”
Sergio blew a gust of air out his mouth. “I’m not scared. It just makes me a little sick, is all.”
She filled a nearby pot with lake water and let Sergio take the first drink. “Blood’s a part of life,” she said. “Blood and bones. It’s normal.”
Sergio sat up as though he had just grown a spine. “No. It’s not. You scraped through to the bone. The bone, Rosa — that’s not normal. And what about this morning? A thorn went straight through your palm.” He reached out, almost daring to touch the place between Rosa’s thumb and wrist where earlier a cactus thorn had driven through an inch of her flesh. He put his hand back into his lap before he could make contact, but his point stood: where a fresh, painful wound should have been bandaged and still healing, Rosa’s skin was smooth, clean as an apricot
.
“
You worry too much.” She climbed back into the tree, bees following her up the trunk. “I could slip right now.” She dropped upside down, swinging by her ankles. “I could land headfirst on a rock. Crack my head open like a gourd. Blood, bits of brain everywhere —”
“
Stop, stop.” Sergio paled
.
“
It. Doesn’t. Matter,” she said. “The tree heals us, every time.” She sighed. “It’s boring. It’s too safe here. Nothing new ever happens.”
“
But that’s why no one ever leaves,” Sergio said quietly. It was impossible to understand Rosa sometimes. He liked that they were safe, that really bad things didn’t happen in the village. Rosa was so restless — Inés the puppy was better at sitting still than she was
.
“
I want to go.” She looked at the lake, her face soft, and stood, balancing on the branch, toes gripping the knobbled bark. “I want to see things. I want to know what’s out there.”
He climbed up next to her, pulled out his whittling knife, and carved a piece of dried rose locust wood. His fingers worked on their own; they didn’t need his eyes. He was busy watching Rosa’s every movement, her arms rising, hands pointed like a prayer, eyelids falling shut
.
“
I want to see the corners of the earth. I want to see oceans. Mountains, forests, even other deserts. Snow.” This last word she whispered
.
“
No one leaves,” Sergio whispered back. “Not ever. Not even you.”
“
I’ll find a way.”
Sergio wondered if she would unfold hidden wings and take to the sky right now, but she sat back down next to him, toes tucked beneath her. As though she were glued to the tree. Stuck
.
“
Don’t you ever think about those things?” she asked. “The things the Father told us, about the world?”
Sergio carved away a strip of wood and thought. Father Alejandro — the wiry, birdlike father of the mission — was born somewhere else. A kingdom of olive tree orchards, castles surrounded by sprawling gardens, and bullfighting. He came on a ship with a crew, hired to tear the desert apart until they found gold. They searched in rain-soaked jungles, atop the peaks of breathless mountains, along white beaches . . .
Instead of gold, when he led his expedition north into the dry rainbow desert, he found the lake. And the oasis
.
He found the tree
.
That was in 1480, Father Alejandro told them. Two hundred years ago — though the village had no use for years. He founded the village and built the mission with the crew, who also felt the tree was worth far more than gold. They made houses of stone and red desert clay, with yarrow thatched roofs
.
The village grew. That group of sailors married local women, then raised children and grandchildren, and kept sheep and goats. Their children and grandchildren built huts of their own on the lakeshore. No one ever left. No one ever died. Those sailors grew old, yes, enough to be called the elders of the village, but their aging was slow. They were cheating time
.
“
I saw shorelines made of pebbles,” Father Alejandro would say, remembering his former life, “and flowers the size of my head. We sailed on gray oceans for so many days and nights that we lost the memory of ground beneath our feet. Sometimes the wind died, and we didn’t move for weeks. I saw cities glittering silver and gold, people made of feathers.” Rosa was always the one begging the Father for these details
.
Even now Rosa’s cheeks glowed at the mention of Father Alejandro’s travels, but Sergio knew she missed the whole point of the Father’s stories — that the world was the empty clam shell and the tree, the pearl. Nothing outside the village would ever compare with what they had
.
“
Is this the tree of life?” a grown-up had once asked
.
“
The tree of life bore fruit,” Father Alejandro had counseled. “Our tree grows only blossoms.”
“
Then it is a magic tree!” Rosa had said
.
Father Alejandro’s face had darkened. “Magic is the devil’s tool,” he’d growled. “Our tree is simply a gift. A gift from God.”
“
What about everything else we have here?” Sergio tried to say to Rosa now. “What about the lake? And the stars? This tree gives the perfect shade, and the flowers make the village smell so nice, and the bees . . .”
The bees bring life, just like Rosa does,
he thought
.
Rosa scoffed. “I’ve had enough of this lake, these stars, this tree.” She glared at the nearest blossom. “We’ve seen everything there is to see here.” She sipped the lake water from the pot, and the two of them quieted as the sun fell
.
Inés, finally worn out, curled up next to the tree trunk and snoozed
.
The village, if one had a hawk’s view, would be a vivid green dot in the middle of the thirsty desert: an oasis. The pale-green lake filled a basin between mesas, and where its water ended, lush, cool grass grew. If the village were an eye, staring up at the sun, the tree was its black pupil, dead center
.
Rosa was right. The same people in the village did the same things every day. The only excitement was when a new baby came, born of the same old village families. But even that excitement wore off eventually; because of the tree, babies took longer to grow up than desert tortoises. A dozen years of watching the same baby coo erased the novelty of infancy
.
Time in the village moved slower, decades coming and going, almost in a dream
.
If time even existed in the village at all
.
And of course, when the babies finally did grow up, they stayed
.
Everyone stayed
.
Travelers were rare, since the village was far off the beaten path. Few souls crossed the desolate heat of the southwestern desert, and anyone who did find the village passed through quickly, as though somehow sensing the strangeness of this place — though they never suspected the truth about the oddly mesmerizing black tree. In their memories, the village was a helpful but forgettable stop on their journeys to bigger, better places
.
“
Father Alejandro says the tree is —” Sergio said
.
“
A gift, I know,” Rosa said. “Then we should use that gift to see the world. What else is life for?”
Sergio shrugged. “What about love? And marriage?”
Her teasing grin glowed through the foliage. “Me, married? To who?”
“
No one. I don’t know.” He stared at his whittling knife
.
Rosa stood. “Marriage is just another kind of sameness,” she said. Suddenly she sprang into a swan dive and disappeared in the water, a white ring of foam rippling into stillness
.
“
Rosa!” Rosa’s younger sister, Carolina, rang the mission bell. “
Mamá
says to come help make
the chile caribe
!”
Rosa let out a sigh that could be heard from the ridge. “I hate grinding the chilies. Makes my eyes burn.” She trudged to the shoreline. “It’s a child’s chore, anyway.”
“
But you
are
a child,” Sergio said
.
