The Secret Life of Bees (20 page)

After Clayton said good-bye, we fastened on our hats and veils and went out to the hives, bearing armloads of black crepe material cut in giant squares. August showed us how to drape a square over each hive box, securing it with a brick and making sure we left the bees' entrance door open.

I watched how August stood a moment before each hive with her fingers knitted together under her chin.
Exactly what are we doing this for?
I wanted to know, but it seemed like a holy ritual I shouldn't interrupt.

When we had all the hives covered, we stood under the pines and gazed at them, this little town of black buildings. A city of mourning. Even the humming turned gloomy under the black drapes, low and long like foghorns must sound going across the sea at night.

August pulled off her hat and walked to the lawn chairs in the backyard with me and Zach tagging behind her. We sat with the sun behind us, staring out toward the wailing wall.

“A long time ago beekeepers always covered their hives when someone in their family died,” said August.

“How come?” I asked.

“Covering the hives was supposed to keep the bees from leaving. You see, the last thing they wanted was their bees swarming off when a death took place. Having bees around was supposed to ensure that the dead person would live again.”

My eyes grew wide. “Really?”

“Tell her about Aristaeus,” Zach said.

“Oh, yes, Aristaeus. Every beekeeper should know that story.” She smiled at me in a way that made me feel I was about to get Part Two of the beekeeper's induction, Part One being the sting. “Aristaeus was the first keeper of bees. One day all his bees died, punishment by the gods for something bad that Aristaeus had done. The gods told him to sacrifice a bull to show he was sorry, and then return to the carcass in nine days and look inside it. Well, Aristaeus did just what they said, and when he came back, he saw a swarm of bees fly out of the dead bull. His own bees, reborn. He took them home to his hives, and after that people believed that bees had power over death. The kings in Greece made their tombs in the shape of beehives for that very reason.”

Zach sat with his elbows on his knees staring at the circle of grass, still fat and emerald green from our dance in the sprinkler. “When a bee flies, a soul will rise,” he said.

I gave him a blank look.

“It's an old saying,” August said. “It means a person's soul will be reborn into the next life if bees are around.”

“Is that in the Bible?” I said.

August laughed. “No, but back when the Christians hid from the Romans down in the catacombs, they used to scratch pictures of bees on the walls. To remind each other that when they died they'd be resurrected.”

I shoved my hands under my thighs and sat up, trying to picture catacombs, whatever they were. “Do you think putting black cloths over the hives will help May get to heaven?” I asked.

“Goodness no,” August said. “Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.”

I leaned back in my chair, gazing at the sky, how endless it was, the way it fit down over the world like the lid of a hive. I wished more than anything we could bury May in a beehive tomb. That I could, myself, lie down in one and be reborn.

 

When the Daughters of Mary showed up, they were loaded down with food. The last time I'd seen them, Queenie and her daughter, Violet, had on the smallest hats in the group, and this time they'd left them off completely. I think it was because Queenie hated to cover the whiteness of her hair, which she was proud to have, and Violet, who had to be forty at least, couldn't bring herself to wear a hat if her mother wasn't wearing one. If Queenie went into the kitchen and stuck her head in the oven, Violet would go stick hers in, too.

Lunelle, Mabelee, Cressie, and Sugar-Girl each wore a black hat, not as spectacular as the previous ones, except for Lunelle's, which had both a red veil and a red feather. They took off the hats and lined them up on the piano as soon as they came in, so that you wanted to say,
What's the use?

They got under way slicing ham, laying out fried chicken, shaking paprika on the deviled eggs. We had green beans, turnips, macaroni and cheese, caramel cake—all kinds of funeral foods. We ate standing in the kitchen holding paper plates, saying how much May would have liked everything.

When we were so full that what we needed was a nap, we went to the parlor and sat with May. The Daughters passed around a wooden bowl full of something they called manna. A salted mixture of sunflower, sesame, pumpkin, and pomegranate seeds drizzled with honey and baked to perfection. They ate it by the handfuls, saying they wouldn't dream of sitting with the dead without eating seeds. Seeds kept the living from despair, they explained.

Mabelee said, “She looks so good—doesn't she look good?”

Queenie snorted. “If she looks that good, maybe we ought to put her on display in the drive-by window at the funeral home.”

“Oh,
Queenie
!” cried Mabelee.

Cressie noticed Rosaleen and me sitting there in the dark and said, “The funeral home in town has a drive-by window. It used to be a bank.”

“Nowadays they put the open casket right up in the window where we used to drive through and get our checks cashed,” said Queenie. “People can drive through and pay their respects without having to get out. They even send the guest book out in the drawer for you to sign.”

“You ain't serious,” said Rosaleen.

“Oh, yeah,” Queenie said. “We're serious.”

They might've been speaking the truth, but they didn't look serious. They were falling on each other laughing, and there was May, dead.

Lunelle said, “I drove in there one time to see Mrs. Lamar after she passed, since I used to work for her way back when. The woman who sat in the window beside her casket used to be the bank teller there, and when I drove off, she said, ‘You have a nice day now.'”

I turned to August, who was wiping her eyes from tears of hilarity. I said, “You won't let them put May in the bank window, will you?”

“Honey, don't worry about it,” said Sugar-Girl. “The drive-by window is at the white people's funeral home. They're the only ones with enough money to fix up something that ridiculous.”

They all broke down again with hysterics, and I could not help laughing, too, partly with relief that people would not be joyriding through the funeral home to see May and partly because you could not help laughing at the sight of all the Daughters laughing.

But I will tell you this secret thing, which not one of them saw, not even August, the thing that brought me the most cause for gladness. It was how Sugar-Girl said what she did, like I was truly one of them. Not one person in the room said,
Sugar-Girl,
really,
talking about white people like that and we have a white person present.
They didn't even think of me being different.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

I felt so warm inside toward them I thought to myself that if I should die, I would be glad to go on display in the bank window and give the Daughters of Mary a good laugh.

 

On the second morning of the vigil, long before the Daughters arrived, even before June came downstairs, August found May's suicide note caught beneath the roots of a live oak, not ten yards from the spot she'd died. The woods had buried it under fresh-sprouted leaves, the kind that shoot up overnight.

Rosaleen was making banana cream pie in honor of May, and I was sitting at the table working on my cereal and trying to find something decent on the transistor radio when August burst into the kitchen holding the note with two hands, like the words might fall off if she wasn't real careful.

She yelled up the stairs, “June, come down here. I found a note from May.”

August spread it out on the table and stood over it with her hands pressed together. I turned off the plastic radio and stared at the crinkle-stiff paper, how the words were faded from being outside.

June's bare feet slapped the stairs, and she broke into the room. “Oh, God, August. What does it say?”

“It's so…May,” August said, and she lifted up the note and read it to us.

August laid the note down and turned to June. She opened her arms wide, and June walked into them. They clung to each other—big sister to little sister, bosom to bosom, their chins wrapped around each other's necks.

They stayed that way long enough for me to wonder—should Rosaleen and I leave the room?—but finally they unwound themselves, and we all sat with the smell of banana cream pie.

June said, “Do you think it was really her time to die?”

“I don't know,” said August. “Maybe it was. But one thing May was right about is that it's our time to live. It's her dying wish that we do that, June, so we need to see to it. All right?”

“What do you mean?” said June.

We watched August walk over to the window, put her hands on the countertop, and gaze out at the sky. It was aquamarine and shiny as taffeta. You had the feeling she was making a big decision.

“August,
what
?”

When August turned back, her jaw was set. “I'm going to say something to you, June.” She walked over and stood in front of her. “You've been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” June said.

“I'm saying marry Neil.”

“What?”

“Ever since Melvin Edwards backed out of your wedding all those years back, you've been afraid of love, refusing to take a chance. Like May said, it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.”

June's mouth sat open in a wide circle, and not a word crossed her lips.

Suddenly the air was coated with the smell of burning. Rosaleen flung open the oven and yanked out the pie to find every last meringue tip scorched.

“We'll eat it like that,” said August. “A little burn taste never hurt anybody.”

 

Every day for four days straight we kept the vigil. August had May's note with her at all times, tucked in her pocket or slipped under her belt if she had on a no-pocket dress. I watched June, how she seemed quieter since August had lowered the boom on her about Neil. Not exactly sulking. Contemplating is more like it. I would catch her sitting beside the coffin leaning her forehead against it, and you could tell she was doing more than saying good-bye to May. She was trying to find her own answers to things.

One afternoon August and Zach and I went out to the hives and took off the black cloths. August said we couldn't leave them on too long, since the bees had memorized everything about their hive and a change like that could make them disoriented. They might not find their way home again, she said.
Tell me about it,
I thought.

The Daughters of Mary showed up each day just before lunch and sat in the parlor with May through the afternoon, telling stories about her. We cried a good bit also, but I could tell we were starting to feel better about saying good-bye. I only hoped May was feeling all right about it, too.

Neil stayed at the house nearly as much as the Daughters, and seemed downright confused by the way June stared into his face. She could barely play the cello, because it meant turning loose of his hand. To tell the truth, the rest of us spent nearly as much time watching June and Neil as we did seeing May into the next life.

 

On the afternoon that the funeral home came to pick up May for the burial, bees buzzed around the front-window screens. As the coffin was loaded into the hearse, bee hum swelled and blended into the late-afternoon colors. Yellow-gold. Red. Tinges of brown.

I could still hear them humming at the graveside, even though we were miles away in a colored cemetery with crumbled markers and weeds. The sound carried on the breezes while we huddled together and watched them lower May's coffin into the ground. August passed around a paper bag full of manna, and we scooped up handfuls and threw the seeds into the hole with the coffin, and my ears were filled with nothing but bee hum.

That night, in my bed, when I closed my eyes, bee hum ran through my body. Ran through the whole earth. It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.

A
fter May's burial August shut down honey making, honey selling, even bee patrol. She and June took the meals that Rosaleen cooked to their rooms. I barely saw August except in the mornings when she crossed the yard headed toward the woods. She would wave at me, and if I ran over and asked where she was going, could I come, too, she would smile and say not today, that she was still doing her mourning. Sometimes she would stay out in the woods past lunch.

I had to fight an impulse to say,
But I need to talk to you.
Life was so funny. I'd spent over a month here dillydallying around, refusing to tell August about my mother when I could have done it so easy, and now that I really needed to tell her, I couldn't. You just don't interrupt somebody's mourning with your own problems.

I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.

It surprised me no end how much I missed our ordinary, routine life—the simple act of pouring wax into a candle mold or repairing a broken hive box. Kneeling between August and June for evening prayers to Our Lady.

I walked in the woods in the afternoon when I was sure August wasn't out there. I would pick out a tree and say,
If a bird lands in that tree before I count to ten, that is my mother sending her sign of love.
When I got to seven, I would start counting real slow, dragging it out. I would get to fifty sometimes, and no bird.

I studied my map of South Carolina at night when everyone was asleep, trying to figure where me and Rosaleen might head next. I had always wanted to see the rainbow-colored houses of Charleston, how they had real horse and buggies on the street, but as appealing as all that was, it nearly crushed me to think of leaving. And even if another cantaloupe truck miraculously appeared and drove us down there, Rosaleen and I would have to get jobs somewhere, rent a place to stay, and hope nobody asked any questions.

Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.

 

The only time I saw June was when Neil came over, which was every single day. She would come out wearing hoop earrings, and off they'd go, taking long rides in his car, which, she said, did her a world of good. The wind rearranged her thoughts, and the countryside made her see all the life still left out there waiting to be lived. Neil would get behind the wheel, and June would slide over on the front seat so she was practically under the wheel with him. Honestly, I worried for their safety.

Zach showed up a few times just to visit and found me in the lawn chair with my legs tucked under me, reading back over my notebook. Sometimes when I saw him my stomach went through a series of sudden drops and lurches.

“You are one-third friend, one-third brother, one-third bee partner, and one-third boyfriend,” I told him. He explained to me I had one too many thirds in the equation, which, of course, I knew, as I am bad in math but not
that
bad. We stared at each other as I tried to figure out which third would get deleted.

I said, “If I was a Negro girl—”

He placed his fingers across my lips so I tasted his saltiness. “We can't think of changing our skin,” he said. “Change the world—that's how we gotta think.”

All he could talk about was going to law school and busting ass. He didn't say
white
ass, and I was thankful for that, but I believe that's what he meant.

There was a place inside him now that hadn't been there before. Heated, charged, angry. Coming into his presence was like stepping up to a gas heater, to a row of blue fire burning in the dark, wet curve of his eyes.

His conversations were all about the race riots in New Jersey, policemen taking their nightsticks to Negro boys who threw rocks, about Molotov cocktails, sit-ins, righteous causes, Malcolm X, and the Afro-American Unity group giving the Ku Klux Klan a taste of their own medicine.

I wanted to say to Zach,
Remember when we ate May's Kool-Aid ice under the pine trees? Remember when you sang “Blueberry Hill”? Remember?

 

After nonstop mourning all week, just when I thought we would go on forever in our private, grieving worlds and never again eat another meal together or work side by side in the honey house, I found Rosaleen in the kitchen laying the table for four, using the Sunday-china plates with pink flowers and lacy scallops around the edge. I broke out with happiness because life seemed headed back to normal.

Rosaleen put a beeswax candle on the table, and I believe that was the first candlelit meal of my entire life. Here was the menu: smothered chicken, rice and gravy, butter beans, sliced tomatoes, biscuits, and
candlelight.

We had barely started in when Rosaleen said to June, “So are you gonna marry Neil or not?”

August and I both stopped chewing and sat up.

“That's for me to know and you to find out,” June answered.

“And how are we supposed to find out, if you won't tell us?” said Rosaleen.

When we'd finished the food, August produced four bottles of ice-cold Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, along with four little packages of salted peanuts. We watched her pop the tops off the Cokes.

“What the heck is
this
?” said June.

“It's Lily's and my favorite dessert,” August told her, smiling over at me. “We like to pour our peanuts straight into the bottle, but you can eat yours separately if you prefer.”

“I think I prefer mine separate,” said June, rolling her eyes.

“I wanted to make a cobbler,” Rosaleen told June, “but August said it was gonna be Cokes and peanuts.” She said “Cokes and peanuts” the way you might say “snot and boogers.”

August laughed. “They don't know a delicacy when they see one, do they, Lily?”

“No, ma'am,” I said, shaking the peanuts into my bottle, where they caused a little reaction of foam, then floated on the brown liquid. I drank and munched with the glory of salt and sweet in my mouth at the same time, all the while looking toward the window, at birds flying home to their nests and moonlight just starting to pour down on the midlands of South Carolina, this place where I was tucked away with three women whose faces shone with candle glow.

When we had drained the Cokes, we went to the parlor to say our Hail Marys together for the first time since May had died.

I knelt on the rug by June, while Rosaleen, as usual, helped herself to the rocker. August stood beside Our Lady and folded May's suicide letter so it resembled a tiny paper airplane. She wedged it into a deep crevice that ran down the side of Our Lady's neck. Then she patted black Mary's shoulder and let out a long sigh that made the airless room feel alive again. And said, “Well, that's that.”

 

I'd been staying up in May's room with Rosaleen ever since May died, but when Rosaleen and I started to climb the stairs that night, on impulse I said, “You know what? I think I'll move back into the honey house.” I found out I'd missed having a room to myself.

Rosaleen put her hands on her waist. “Good Lord, all that fuss you made about me moving out and leaving you, now here you are wanting to leave me.”

Actually, she didn't care one bit that I wanted to move out; she just couldn't pass up a chance to give me a hard time. “Come on, I'll help you carry your stuff over there,” she said.

“You mean,
now
?”

“No time like the present,” she told me.

I guess she'd missed having a room to herself, too.

After Rosaleen left, I looked around my old room in the honey house—it was so quiet. All I could think was how this time tomorrow the truth would be out, how everything would change.

I got my mother's photograph and the black Mary picture from my bag, ready to show August. I slid them under my pillow, but when I turned out the light, fear filled up my hard, narrow bed. It told me all the ways life could go wrong. It had me in a girls' prison camp in the Florida Everglades. Why the Everglades, I don't know, except I've always thought that would be the worst place to be in prison. Think of all the alligators and snakes, not to mention heat worse than we had here, and people had been known to fry not just eggs but bacon and sausage on South Carolina sidewalks. I could not imagine breathing in Florida. I would be down there suffocating and never see August again.

It was fear all night long. I would've given anything to be back in May's room, listening to Rosaleen snore.

 

The next morning I slept late, considering the on-and-off night I'd had, plus I'd been falling into lazy habits without the honey house to keep me industrious. The smell of fresh-baked cake wafted all the way from the pink house to my cot, curled into my nostrils, and woke me up.

When I got to the kitchen, there were August, June, and Rosaleen, dusted with flour, baking these small one-layer cakes the size of honey buns. They were singing while they worked, singing like the Supremes, like the Marvelettes, like the Crystals wiggling their butts to “Da Doo Ron Ron.”

“What are y'all doing?” I said, grinning from the doorway.

They stopped singing and giggled, giving each other little shoves and nudges.

“Well, look who's up,” said Rosaleen.

June had on lavender pedal pushers with daisy buttons up the sides, the likes of which I'd never seen before. She said, “We're baking cakes for Mary Day. It's about time you got over here and helped us. Didn't August tell you this was Mary Day?”

I glanced at August. “No, ma'am, she didn't.”

August, who was wearing one of May's aprons, the one with ruffles trailing over the shoulders, wiped her hands across the front and said, “I guess I forgot to mention it. We've been celebrating Mary Day around here every August for fifteen years. Come on and get your breakfast, and then you can help us. We've got so much to do I don't know whether we're gonna make it.”

I filled a bowl with Rice Krispies and milk, trying to think over the snap-crackle conversation it was having with itself. How was I supposed to have a life-altering talk with August with all
this
going on?

“A thousand years ago women were doing this exact same thing,” said August. “Baking cakes for Mary on her feast day.”

June looked at my blank face. “Today is the Feast of the Assumption. August fifteenth. Don't tell me you never heard of that.”

Oh, sure, the Feast of the Assumption—Brother Gerald preached on that every other Sunday. Of course I'd never heard of it. I shook my head. “We didn't really allow Mary at our church except at Christmas.”

August smiled and dunked a wooden drizzle into the vat of honey, which sat on the counter by the toaster oven. While she spun honey across the tops of a fresh pan of cakes, she explained to me in detail how the Assumption was nothing less than Mary rising up to heaven. Mary died and woke up, and the angels carried her up there in swirling clouds.

“May is the one who started calling it Mary Day,” said June.

“It's not just about the Assumption, though,” August said, shoveling the cakes onto the wire racks. “It's a special remembrance for our own Lady of Chains. We reenact her story. Plus we give thanks for the honey crop. The Daughters of Mary come. It's our favorite two days of the year.”

“You do this for two days?”

“We start this evening and finish tomorrow afternoon,” said August. “Hurry up with your cereal, because you've got to make streamers and garlands, hang the Christmas lights, put out the candleholders, wash the wagon, and get out the chains.”

I was thinking,
Whoa, back up.
Wash the wagon? Hang Christmas lights? Get out the chains? The
chains
?

The knock on the back door came as I was putting my bowl in the sink. “If this isn't the best-smelling house in Tiburon, I'll be a monkey's uncle,” said Neil, stepping inside.

“Well, I guess you're saved from that special relationship then,” June said.

She offered him a honey cake, but he shook his head, which was a dead giveaway right there that he had something on his mind. Neil did not refuse food. Ever. He stood in the middle of the floor, shuffling from one foot to the other.

“What are you doing here?” June asked.

He cleared his throat, rubbed his sideburns. “I—I came over here hoping for a word with you.”

This sounded so stiff coming out of his mouth that June narrowed her eyes and studied him a second. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.” He put his hands in his pockets. Took them out. “I just want a word with you.”

She stood there waiting. “Well, I'm listening,” she said.

“I thought we could take a drive.”

She looked around the kitchen. “If you haven't noticed, I'm up to my ears in work, Neil.”

“I can see that, but—”

“Look, just tell me what it is,” June said, starting to get into one of her huffs. “What is so all-fired important?”

I glanced at August, who had her lips screwed over to the side, trying to look busy. Rosaleen, on the other hand, had stopped all semblance of work and looked from June to Neil. Back to June.

“Hell,” he said, “I came over here planning to ask you, for the hundredth time, to marry me.”

I dropped my spoon in the sink. August laid down the honey drizzle. June opened her mouth and closed it without anything coming out. Everyone just stood there.

Come on. Don't mess up your time to live.

The house creaked, like old houses do. Neil glanced at the door. I felt my shirt dampen all under my arms. I had the sensation I used to get in fifth grade when the teacher would write some nonsense word on the blackboard, like “pnteahel,” and we had two minutes to unscramble it and find the word “elephant” before she dinged her bell. I used to break out in a sweat trying to beat the clock. I had that feeling now, like Neil was going to walk out the door before June could unscramble the answer in her heart.