The Secret Life of Bees (12 page)

During commercials I pretended to go for water and instead crept down the hall, where I tried to make out what June and Neil were saying.

“I'd like you to tell me why not,” I heard Neil say one evening.

And June, “Because I can't.”

“That's not a reason.”

“Well, it's the only one I've got.”

“Look, I'm not gonna wait around forever,” Neil said.

I was anticipating what June would say to that, when Neil came through the door without warning and caught me pressed against the wall listening to their most private sayings. He looked for a second like he might turn me over to June, but he left, banging the front door behind him.

I hightailed it back to the den, but not before I heard the beginnings of a sob in June's throat.

 

One morning August sent Zach and me six miles out in the county to bring in the last of the supers to be harvested. Lord, it was hot, plus we had at least ten gnats per square inch of air.

Zach drove the honey wagon as fast as it would go, which was about thirty miles an hour. The wind whipped my hair and flooded the truck with a weedy, new-mown smell.

The roadsides were covered with fresh-picked cotton, blown from the trucks carrying it to the gin in Tiburon. Zach said the farmers had planted and harvested their cotton early this year because of the boll weevil. Scattered along the highway, it looked for all the world like snow, which made me wish for a blizzard to come cool things down.

I went off into a daydream about Zach pulling the truck over because he couldn't see to drive for the snow and us having a snowball fight, blasting each other with soft white snow cotton. I imagined us building a snow cave, sleeping with our bodies twined together to get warm, our arms and legs like black-and-white braids. This last thought shocked my system so bad I shivered. I stuck my hands under my arms, and my sweat was ice-water cold.

“You all right?” asked Zach.

“Yeah, why?”

“You're shaking over there.”

“I'm fine. I do that sometimes.”

I turned away and looked out the window, where there was nothing but fields and now and then a falling-down wooden barn or some old, abandoned colored house. “How much further?” I said in a way that suggested the excursion could not be over too soon.

“You upset or something?”

I refused to answer him, glaring instead through the dirty windshield.

When we turned off the highway onto a beat-up dirt road, Zach said we were on property belonging to Mr. Clayton Forrest, who kept Black Madonna Honey and beeswax candles in the waiting room of his law office so his customers could buy them. Part of Zach's job was going around to deliver fresh supplies of honey and candles to places that sold them on consignment.

“Mr. Forrest lets me poke around his law office,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“He tells me about the cases he's won.”

We hit a rut and bounced on the seat so hard our heads rammed into the truck roof, which for some reason flipped my mood upside down. I started to laugh like somebody was holding me down tickling my armpits. The more my head slammed against the truck, the worse it got, till I was having one big, hilarious seizure. I laughed the way May cried.

At first Zach aimed for the ruts just to hear me, but then he got nervous because I couldn't seem to stop. He cleared his throat and slowed way down till we were bounce-free.

Finally it drained out of me, whatever it was. I remembered the pleasure of fainting that day during the Daughters of Mary meeting and thought now how much I would like to keel over right here in the truck. I envied turtles their shells, how they could disappear at will.

I was conscious of Zach's breathing, his shirt pulled across his chest, one arm draped on the steering wheel. The hard, dark look of it. The mystery of his skin.

It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I'd honestly thought such a thing couldn't happen, the way water could not run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. A law of nature. Maybe it was a simple matter of being attracted to what I couldn't have. Or maybe desire kicked in when it pleased without noticing the rules we lived and died by.
You gotta imagine what's never been
, Zach had said.

He stopped the honey wagon beside a cluster of twenty hives tucked in a thicket of trees, where the bees could have shade in the summer and shelter from the wind through the winter. Bees were more fragile than I ever imagined. If it wasn't mites ruining them, it was pesticides or terrible weather.

He climbed out and dragged a load of equipment off the back of the truck—helmets, extra supers, fresh brood frames, and the smoker, which he handed me to light. I moved through camphorweed and wild azalea, stepping over fire-ant mounds and swinging the smoker while he lifted the lids off the hives and peered inside looking for capped frames.

He moved like a person with a genuine love of bees. I could not believe how gentle and softhearted he could be. One of the frames he lifted out leaked honey the color of plums.

“It's purple!” I said.

“When the weather turns hot and the flowers dry up, the bees start sucking elderberry. It makes a purple honey. People will pay two dollars a jar for purple honey.”

He dipped his finger into the comb and, lifting my veil, brought it close to my lips. I opened my mouth, let his finger slide in, sucking it clean. The sheerest smile brushed his lips, and heat rushed up my body. He bent toward me. I wanted him to lift back my veil and kiss me, and I knew he wanted to do it, too, by the way he fixed his eyes on mine. We stayed like that while bees swirled around our heads with a sound like sizzling bacon, a sound that no longer registered as danger. Danger, I realized, was a thing you got used to.

But instead of kissing me, he turned to the next hive and went right on with his work. The smoker had gone out. I followed behind him, and neither of us spoke. We stacked the filled supers onto the truck like the cat had our tongues, and neither of us said a word till we were back in the honey truck passing the city-limits sign.

TIBURON, POPULATION
6,502

Home of Willifred Marchant

“Who is Willifred Marchant?” I said, desperate to break the silence and get things back to normal.

“You mean you've never heard of Willifred Marchant?” he said. “She is only a world-famous writer who wrote three Pulitzer Prize books about the deciduous trees of South Carolina.”

I giggled. “They didn't win any Pulitzer Prizes.”

“You better shut your mouth, because in Tiburon, Willifred Marchant's books are way up there with the Bible. We have an official Willifred Marchant Day every year, and the schools hold tree-planting ceremonies. She always comes wearing a big straw hat and carrying a basket of rose petals, which she tosses to the children.”

“She does not,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Miss Willie is very weird.”

“Deciduous trees are an interesting topic, I guess. But I myself would rather write about people.”

“Oh, that's right, I forgot,” he said. “You're planning on being a writer. You and Miss Willie.”

“You act like you don't believe I can do it.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You implied it.”

“What are you talking about? I did not.”

I turned to concentrate on things beyond the window. The Masonic Lodge, Hot Buy Used Cars, the Firestone Tire store.

Zach braked at a stop sign next to the Dixie Cafe, which sat practically in the front yard of the Tri-County Livestock Company, and for some reason this made me furious. What I wanted to know was how people ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the smell of cows—and worse—overwhelming their nose buds. I wanted to scream out the window, “Eat your damned breakfast grits somewhere else, why don't you? There's cow shit in the air!”

The way people lived their lives, settling for grits and cow shit, made me sick. My eyes stung all around the sockets.

Zach crossed the intersection. I could feel his eyes bore into the back of my head. “You mad at me?” he said.

I meant to say,
Yes, I most certainly am, because you think I will never amount to anything.
But what came out of my mouth was something else, and it was embarrassingly stupid. “I will never throw rose petals to anybody,” I said, and then I broke down, the kind of crying where you're sucking air and making heaving sounds like a person drowning.

Zach pulled over on the side of the road, saying, “Holy moly. What's the matter?” He wrapped one arm around me and pulled me across the seat to him.

I'd thought the whole thing was about my lost future, the one Mrs. Henry encouraged me to believe in by plying me with books and summer reading lists and big talk about scholarships to Columbia College, but sitting there close to Zach, I knew I was crying because he had that one-side dimple I loved, because every time I looked at him I got a hot, funny feeling that circulated from my waist to my kneecaps, because I'd been going along being my normal girl self and the next thing I knew I'd passed through a membrane into a place of desperation. I was crying, I realized, for Zach.

I laid my head on his shoulder and wondered how he could stand me. In one short morning I had exhibited insane laughter, hidden lust, pissy behavior, self-pity, and hysterical crying. If I'd been
trying
to show him my worst sides, I could not have done a better job than this.

He gave me a squeeze and spoke into my hair. “It's gonna be all right. You're gonna be a fine writer one day.” I saw him glance behind us, then across the road. “Now, you go back over to your side of the truck and wipe your face,” he said, and handed me a floor rag that smelled like gasoline.

 

When we got to the honey house, it was deserted except for Rosaleen, who was gathering up her clothes so she could move up to May's room. I'd been gone two slim hours, and our whole living arrangement had been overturned.

“How come you get to sleep over there?” I asked her.

“'Cause May gets scared at night by herself.”

Rosaleen was going to sleep in the extra twin bed, get the bottom drawer of May's dresser for her stuff, and have the bathroom at her fingertips.

“I can't believe you're leaving me over here by myself!” I cried. Zach grabbed the hand truck and wheeled it out as fast as he could to start unloading the supers from the honey wagon. I think he'd had enough female emotion for the time being.

“I'm not leaving you. I'm getting a mattress,” she said, and dropped her toothbrush and the Red Rose snuff into her pocket.

I crossed my arms over my blouse that was still damp from all the crying I'd been doing. “Fine then, go on. I don't care.”

“Lily, that cot is bad on my back. And if you ain't noticed, the legs on it are all bent out of whack now. Another week and it's gonna collapse on the floor. You'll be fine without me.”

My chest closed up. Fine without her. Was she out of her mind?

“I don't wanna wake up from the dream world,” I said, and midsentence my voice cracked, and the words twisted and turned in my mouth.

She sat on the cot, the cot I now hated with a passion because it had driven her to May's room. She pulled me down beside her. “I know you don't, but I'll be here when you do. I might sleep up there in May's room, but I'm not going anywhere.”

She patted my knee like old times. She patted, and neither of us said anything. We could've been back in the policeman's car riding to jail for how I felt. Like I would not exist without her patting hand.

 

I followed Rosaleen as she carried her few things over to the pink house, intending to inspect her new room. We climbed the steps onto the screen porch. August sat on the porch swing that was suspended from two chains in the ceiling. She was rocking back and forth, having her orangeade break and reading her new book, which she'd gotten from the bookmobile. I turned my head to read the title.
Jane Eyre.

May was on the other side of the porch running clothes through the rubber rollers on the wringer washing machine. A brand-new pink Lady Kenmore, which they kept out on the porch because there was no room in the kitchen. In television commercials the woman who worked the Lady Kenmore wore an evening gown and seemed to be enjoying herself. May just looked hot and tired. She smiled as Rosaleen went by with her things.

“Are you okay with Rosaleen moving over here?” August said, propping the book on her stomach. She took a sip of her drink, then ran her hand across the cold moisture on the glass and pressed her palm to the front of her neck.

“I guess so.”

“May will sleep better with Rosaleen in there,” she said. “Won't you, May?” I glanced over at May, but she didn't seem to hear over the washer.

Suddenly the last thing I wanted was to follow Rosaleen and watch her tuck her clothes into May's dresser. I looked at August's book.

“What are you reading about?” I asked, thinking I was making casual conversation, but boy, was I wrong.

“It's about a girl whose mother died when she was little,” she said. Then she looked at me in a way that made my stomach tip over, the same way it'd tipped over when she'd told me about Beatrix.

“What happens to the girl?” I asked, trying to make my voice steady.

“I've only started the book,” she said. “But right now she's just feeling lost and sad.”

I turned and looked out toward the garden, where June and Neil were picking tomatoes. I stared at them while the crank on the washer squeaked. I could hear the clothes falling into the basin behind the rollers.
She knows,
I thought.
She knows who I am.

I stretched out my arms like I was pushing back invisible walls of air and, looking down, caught sight of my shadow on the floor, this skinny girl with wild hair curling up in the humidity, with her arms flung out and her palms erect like she was trying to stop traffic in both directions. I wanted to bend down and kiss her, for how small and determined she looked.