The Secret Life of Bees (17 page)

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?’

‘Well, yes and no,’ she said.

‘Some things happen in a literal way, Lily. And then other things, like this one, happen in a not literal way, but they still happen. Do you know what I mean?’

I didn’t have a clue.

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘What I mean is that the bees weren’t really singing the words from Luke, but still, if you have the right kind of ears, you can listen to a hive and hear the Christmas story somewhere inside yourself. You can hear silent things on the other side of the everyday world that nobody else can. Big Mama had those kind of ears. Now, my mother, she didn’t really have that gift. I think it skipped a generation.’

I was itching to know more about her mother.

‘I bet your mother kept bees, too,’ I said. She seemed amused at that.

‘Goodness no, she wasn’t interested at all. She left here as soon as she could and went to live with a cousin up in Richmond. Got a job in a hotel laundry. You remember the first day you got here, I told you I grew up in Richmond? Well, that’s where my father was from. He was the first colored dentist in Richmond. He met my mother when she went to see him with a toothache.’

I sat there a minute and thought about the odd ways of life. If it wasn’t for a toothache, August wouldn’t be here. Or May or June, or Black Madonna Honey, and I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to her.

‘I loved Richmond, but my heart was always right here,’ she said.

‘Growing up, I couldn’t wait to get here and spend the summers, and when Big Mama died, she left all this property to me, June, and May. I’ve been here keeping bees nearly eighteen years now. Sunlight gleamed against the honey-house window, flickering now and then with a shifting cloud. We sat in the yellowish quiet for a while and worked without talking. I was afraid I’d tire her out with all my questions. Finally I couldn’t hold myself back. I said, ‘So what did you do in Virginia before you came here?’

She gave me a teasing look that seemed to say, My goodness, you sure do wanna know a lot of things, but then she dived right in, her hands not slowing down one bit pasting labels.

‘I studied at a Negro teachers’ college in Maryland. June did, too, but it was hard to get a job, since there weren’t that many places for Negroes to teach. I ended up working nine years as a housekeeper. Eventually I got a job teaching history. It lasted six years, till we moved down here.’

‘What about June?’

She laughed.

‘June—you wouldn’t catch her keeping house for white people. She went to work at a colored funeral home, dressing the bodies and doing their hair.’

That seemed like the perfect job for her. It would be easy for her to get along with dead people.

‘May said June almost got married one time.’

‘That’s right. About ten years ago.’

‘I was wondering—‘ I stopped, looking for a way to ask her.

‘You were wondering if there was ever a time when I almost got married.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘I guess I was.’

‘I decided against marrying altogether. There were enough restrictions in my life without someone expecting me to wait on him hand and foot. Not that I’m against marrying, Lily. I’m just against how it’s set up.’

I was thinking, Well, it’s not just marriage that’s set up like that. What about me waiting on T. Ray hand and foot, and we were just father and daughter? Pour me some more tea, Lily. Polish my shoes, Lily. Go get the truck keys, Lily. I sincerely hoped she didn’t mean this sort of thing went on in a marriage.

‘Weren’t you ever in love?’

I asked.

‘Being in love and getting married, now, that’s two different things. I was in love once, of course I was. Nobody should go through life without falling in love.’

‘But you didn’t love him enough to marry him?’

She smiled at me.

‘I loved him enough,’ she said.

‘I just loved my freedom more.’

We glued labels till we ran out of jars. Then, for the heck of it, I moistened the back of one more and pressed it onto my T–shirt, in the gully between my breasts. August looked at the clock, announcing we’d done so good with our time we had a whole hour left before lunch.

‘Come on,’ she said.

‘Let’s do bee patrol.’

Though I’d done bee patrol with Zach, I hadn’t been back to the hives with August since that first time. I pulled on long cotton pants that used to be June’s and August’s white shirt, which needed the sleeves rolled up about ten turns. Then I placed the jungle helmet on my head, letting the veil fall down over my face. We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.

‘There is one thing I don’t get,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?’

She laughed.

‘That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’

’

‘All this time I just figured you liked pink,’ I said. She laughed again.

‘You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart—now, that matters. The whole problem with people is—’

‘They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,’ I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.

‘I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.’

I couldn’t locate a stray bee anywhere. The hives looked like an abandoned neighborhood, the air groggy with heat. You got the impression the bees were inside having a big siesta. Maybe all that excessive work had finally caught up with them.

‘Where are they?’ I said. August placed her finger to her lips, signaling me to be quiet. She lifted off her helmet and laid the side of her face flat against the top of the hive box.

‘Come listen,’ she whispered. I removed my hat, tucking it under my arm, and placed my face next to hers so that we were practically nose to nose.

‘You hear that?’ she said. A sound rushed up. A perfect hum, high-pitched and swollen, like someone had put the teakettle on and it had come to a boil.

‘They’re cooling the hives down,’ she said, and her breath broke over my face with the smell of spearmint.

‘That’s the sound of one hundred thousand bee wings fanning the air.’

She closed her eyes and soaked it in the way you imagine people at a fancy orchestra concert drinking up highbrow music. I hope it’s not too backward to say that I felt like I had never heard anything on my hi-fi back home that came out that good. You would have to hear it yourself to believe the perfect pitch, the harmony parts, how the volume rolled up and down. We had our ears pressed to a giant music box. Then the whole side of my face started to vibrate as if the music had rushed into my pores. I could see August’s skin pulsating the tiniest bit. When we stood back up, my cheek prickled and itched.

‘You were listening to bee air-conditioning,’ August said.

‘Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.’

I loved the idea of bees having a secret life, just like the one I was living.

‘What other secrets have they got?’ I wanted to know.

‘Well, for instance, every bee has its role to play.’

She went through the whole thing. The nest builders were the group that drew the comb. I told her the way they created hexagons, they must be the ones who could do math in their heads, and she smiled and said, yes, nest builders had true math aptitude. Field bees were the ones with good navigation skills and tireless hearts, going out to gather nectar and pollen. There was a group called mortician bees whose pitiful job it was to rake the dead bees out of the hive and keep everything on the clean side. Nurse bees, August said, had a gift for nurturing, and they fed all the baby bees. They were probably the self-sacrificing group, like the women at church socials who said, ‘No, you take the chicken breast. I’m just fine with the neck and gizzard, really.’

The only males were the drones who sat around waiting to mate with the queen.

‘And of course,’ August said, ‘there’s the queen and her attendants.’

‘She has attendants?’

‘Oh, yes, like ladies-in-waiting. They feed her, bathe her, keep her warm or cool—whatever’s needed. You can see them always circled around her, fussing over her. I’ve even seen them caress her.’

August returned her helmet to her head.

‘I guess I’d want comfort, too, if I did nothing but lay eggs all day long, week in and week out.’

‘That’s all she does—lay eggs?’ I wasn’t sure what I expected, it wasn’t like she wore a crown and sat on a throne giving out royal orders.

‘Egg laying is the main thing, Lily. She’s the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don’t care what their job is—they know the queen is their mother. She’s the mother of thousands.’

The mother of thousands. Bees poured out, rushing up all of a sudden in spirals of chaos and noise, that caused me to jump.

‘Don’t move an inch,’ said August.

‘Remember what I told you. Don’t be scared.’

A bee flew straight at my forehead, collided with the net, and bumped against my skin.

‘She’s giving you a little warning,’ August said.

‘When they bump your forehead, they’re saying, I’ve got my eye on you, so you be careful. Send them love and everything will be fine.’

I love you, I love you, I said in my head. I LOVE Y. I tried to mean it. August pulled out the brood frames not even wearing her gloves. While she worked, the bees spun around us, gathering strength till they made soft wind on our faces. It reminded me of the way the bees had flown out of my bedroom walls, stranding me at the center of a bee whirlwind. I watched the different shadows on the ground. The funnel of bees. Me, still as a fence post. August bent over the hive, inspecting the frames, looking for wax buildup on the comb, the half moon shape of her helmet bouncing along. The bees began to light on my shoulders the ways birds sit on telephone wires. They sat along my arms, speckled the bee veil so I could scarcely see through it. I love you. I love you. They covered my body, filled the cuffs of my pants. My breath came faster, and something coiled around my chest and squeezed tighter and tighter, until suddenly, like somebody had snapped off the panic switch, I felt myself go limp. My mind became unnaturally calm, as if part of me had lifted right up out of my body and was sitting on a tree limb watching the spectacle from a safe distance. The other part of me danced with the bees. I wasn’t moving a lick, but in my mind I was spinning through the air with them. I had joined the bee conga line. I sort of forgot where I was. With my eyes closed, I slowly raised my arms, weaving them through the bees, until finally I stood with them stretched out from my sides in a dreamy place I’d never been before. My neck rolled back and my mouth opened. I was floating somewhere, somewhere that didn’t rub too close against life. Like I’d chewed the bark from a toothache tree and it had made me dizzy. Lost in the bees, I felt dropped into a field of enchanted clover that made me immune to everything, as if August has doused me with the bee smoker and quieted me down to the point I could do nothing but raise my arms and sway back and forth. Then, without warning, all the immunity wore off, and I felt the hollow, spooned-out space between my navel and breastbone begin to ache. The motherless place. I could see my mother in the closet, the stuck window, the suitcase on the floor. I heard the shouting, then the explosion. I almost doubled over. I lowered my arms, but I didn’t open my eyes. How could I live the whole rest of my life knowing these things? What could I ever do that would be good enough to make them go away? How come we couldn’t go back and fix the bad things we did? Later my mind would remember the plagues God had been fond of sending early in his career, the ones designed to make the pharaoh change his mind and let Moses take the people out of Egypt. Let my people go, Moses said. I’d seen the plague of locusts at the movies, the sky filled with hordes of insects looking like kamikaze planes. Back in my room on the peach farm, when the bees had first come out at night, I had imagined they were sent as a special plague for T. Ray. God saying, Let my daughter go, and maybe that’s exactly what they’d been, a plague that released me. But here, now, surrounded by stinging bees on all sides and the motherless place throbbing away, I knew that these bees were not a plague at all. It felt like the queen’s attendants were out here in a frenzy of love, caressing me in a thousand places. Look who’s here, it’s Lily. She is so weary and lost. Come on, bee sisters. I was the stamen in the middle of a twirling flower. The center of all their comforting.

‘Lily…Lily.’

My name came across the blue distances.