The Secret Life of Bees (13 page)

When I glanced back at August, she was still staring at me, like she expected me to say something.

“Well, I guess I'll go see Rosaleen's new bed,” I said.

August picked up her book, and that was that. The moment passed, and so did the feeling that she knew who I was. I mean, it didn't make sense: how could August Boatwright know anything about me?

It was around this time that June and Neil started a first-class fight out there in the tomato garden. June shouted something, and he shouted back.

“Uh-oh,” said August. She put down the book and stood up.

“Why can't you just let it be?” yelled June. “Why does it always come back to this? Get this through your head: I'm not getting married. Not yesterday, not today, not next year!”

“What are you scared of?” Neil said.

“For your information, I'm not scared of anything.”

“Well, then, you're the most selfish bitch I ever met,” he said, and started walking toward his car.

“Oh, Lord,” said August under her breath.

“How dare you call me that!” said June. “You come back here. Don't you walk off when I'm talking to you!”

Neil kept right on walking, didn't look over his shoulder once. Zach, I noticed, had stopped loading supers onto the hand truck and watched, shaking his head like he couldn't believe he was witnessing another scene where people's worst sides come out.

“If you leave now, don't plan on coming back!” she yelled.

Neil climbed into his car, and suddenly June came running with tomatoes in her hands. She reared back and threw one,
smat!
right into the windshield. The second one landed on the door handle.

“Don't you come back!” she yelled as Neil drove off. Trailing tomato juice.

May sank down onto the floor, crying and looking so hurt inside I could almost see soft, red places up under her rib bones. August and I walked her out to her wall, and for the umpteenth time she wrote
June and Neil
on a scrap of paper and wedged it between the rocks.

 

We spent the rest of the day working on the supers that Zach and I had hauled in. Stacked six high, they made a miniature skyline all through the honey house. August said it looked like Bee City in there.

We ran twelve extractor loads through the whole system—all the way from the uncapping knife to the bottling tank. August didn't like her honey to sit around waiting too long, because the flavor got lost. We had two days to finish it up, she said. Period. At least we didn't have to store the honey in a special hot room to keep it from crystallizing, because every room we had was a hot room. Sometimes Carolina heat turned out to be good for something.

Just when I thought we were done for the day and could go eat dinner and say our evening prayers with the beads, no, we were just beginning. August had us load up the empty supers and haul them out to the woods so the bees could come and do the big cleanup. She would not store her supers for the winter until the bees had sucked out the last remaining bits of honey from the combs. She said that was because honey remnants attracted roaches. But really, I'm sure it was because she loved throwing a little end-of-the-year party for her bees, seeing them descend on the supers like they'd discovered honey heaven.

The whole time we worked, I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love. I myself, for instance. It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love.

 

That night it felt strange to be in the honey house by myself. I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the sound of ocean waves after you've gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn't realize how it had comforted me. Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.

I didn't know if it was the emptiness, the stifling heat, or the fact it was only nine o'clock, but I couldn't settle into sleep despite how tired I was. I peeled off my top and my underwear and lay on the damp sheets. I liked the feel of nudeness. It was a smooth, oiled feeling on the sheets, a set-free feeling.

I imagined then that I heard a car pull into the driveway. I imagined it was Zach, and the thought of him moving in the night just outside the honey house caused my breath to speed up.

I rose and slipped across the dark space to the wall mirror. Pearled light poured through the open window behind me, molding to my skin, giving me a true halo, not just around my head but across my shoulders, along my ribs and thighs. I was the last person to deserve a halo, but I studied the effect, cupping my hands under my breasts, studying my pinky-brown nipples, the thin curves of my waist, every soft and glowing turn. It was the first time I'd felt like more than a scraggly girl.

I closed my eyes, and the balloon full of craving finally burst open in my chest, and when it did, wouldn't you know—one minute I was dreaming of Zach and the next I was hungering for my mother, imagining her calling my name, saying,
Lily, girl. You are my flower.

When I turned to the window, there was no one there. Not that I had expected there would be.

 

Two days later, after we had run ourselves into the ground harvesting the rest of the honey, Zach showed up with the prettiest notebook—green with rosebuds on the cover. He met me coming out of the pink house. “This is for you,” he said. “So you can get a head start on your writing.”

That's when I knew I would never find a better friend than Zachary Taylor. I threw my arms around him and leaned into his chest. He made a sound like
Whoa,
but after a second his arms folded around me, and we stayed like that, in a true embrace. He moved his hands up and down my back, till I was almost dizzy.

Finally he unwound my arms and said, “Lily, I like you better than any girl I've ever known, but you have to understand, there are people who would kill boys like me for even looking at girls like you.”

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.

A
ugust tore the page for July 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 second 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 recognize 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 became 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?”

August took off her glasses and cleaned them on the scarf at her waist. “She taught me lots more about bees than just how to keep them. She used to tell me one tall bee tale after another.”

I perked up. “Tell me one,” I said.

August thumped her finger on her forehead like she was trying to tap one of them off some back shelf in her head. Then her eyes lit up, and she said, “Well, one time Big Mama told me she went out to the hives on Christmas Eve and heard the bees singing the words of the Christmas story right out of the gospel of Luke.” August started to sing then in a humming sort of way, “‘Mary brought forth her firstborn child and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger.'”

I giggled. “Do you think that really happened?”