The Secret Life of Bees (33 page)

‘Who else?’ she said, and smiled.

‘It happened when your mother was a teenager. May caught her killing a roach with a fly swatter. She said, ‘Deborah Fontanel, every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?’

‘Then she showed her how to make a trail of marshmallows and graham crackers.’

I fingered the whale pin on my shoulder, picturing the whole thing. Then I looked around and noticed the world. It was such a pretty day you couldn’t imagine anything coming along to spoil it. According to August, if you’ve never seen a cluster of beehives first thing in the morning, you’ve missed the eighth wonder of the world. Picture these white boxes tucked under pine trees. The sun will slant through the branches, shining in the sprinkles of dew drying on the lids. There will be a few hundred bees doing laps around the hive boxes, just warming up, but mostly taking their bathroom break, as bees are so clean they will not soil the side of their hives. From a distance it will look like a big painting you might see in a museum, but museums can’t capture the sound. Fifty feet away you will hear it, a humming that sounds like it came from another planet. At thirty feet your skin will start to vibrate. The hair will lift on your neck. Your head will say, Don’t go any farther, but your heart will send you straight into the hum, where you will be swallowed by it. You will stand there and think, I am in the center of the universe, where everything is sung to life. August lifted the lid offa hive.

‘This one is missing its queen,’ she said. I’d learned enough beekeeping to know that a hive without a queen was a death sentence for the bees. They would stop work and go around completely demoralized.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘I discovered it yesterday. The bees were sitting out here on the landing board looking melancholy. If you see bees loafing and lamenting, you can bet their queen is dead. So I searched through the combs, and sure enough she was gone. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe it was just her time.’

‘What do you do now?’

‘I called the County Extension, and they put me in touch with a man in Goose Creek who said he’d drive over with a new queen sometime today. I want to get the hive requeened before one of the workers starts laying. If we get laying workers, we’ve got ourselves a mess.’

‘I didn’t know a worker bee could lay eggs,’ I said.

‘All they can do, really, is lay unfertilized drone eggs. They’ll fill up the combs with them, and as the workers naturally die off, there are none to replace them.’

As she lowered the lid, she said, ‘I just wanted to show you what a queenless colony looked like.’

She lifted back the veils from her hat, then lifted mine back, too. She held my gaze while I studied the gold flecks in her eyes.

‘Remember when I told you the story of Beatrix,’ she said, ‘the nun who ran away from her convent? Remember how the Virgin Mary stood in for her?’

‘I remember,’ I said.

‘I figured you knew I’d run away like Beatrix did. You were trying to tell me that Mary was standing in for me at home, taking care of things till I went back.’

‘Oh, that’s not what I was trying to tell you at all,’ she said.

‘You weren’t the runaway I was thinking about. I was thinking about your mother running away. I was just trying to plant a little idea in your head.’

‘What idea?’

‘That maybe Our Lady could act for Deborah and be like a stand-in mother for you.’

The light was making patterns on the grass. I stared at them, feeling shy about what I was going to say.

‘I told Our Lady one night in the pink house that she was my mother. I put my hand on her heart the way you and the Daughters always do at your meetings. I know I tried it that one time before and fainted, but this time I stayed on my feet, and for a while after that I really did feel stronger. Then I seemed to lose it. I think what I need is to go back and touch her heart again.’

August said, ‘Listen to me now, Lily. I’m going to tell you something I want you always to remember, all right?’

Her face had grown serious, intent. Her eyes did not blink.

‘All right,’ I said, and I felt something electric slide down my spine.

‘Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere, like a fairy godmother. She’s not the statue in the parlor. She’s something inside of you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’

‘Our Lady is inside me,’ I repeated, not sure I did.

‘You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.’

She held out her hand to me.

‘Give me your hand.’

I lifted my left hand and placed it in hers. She took it and pressed the flat of my palm up against my chest, over my beating heart.

‘You don’t have to put your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life,’ she said.

‘You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.’

August stepped closer. She kept the pressure steady against my hand.

‘All those times your father treated you mean, Our Lady was the voice in you that said, ‘No, I will not bow down to this. I am Lily Melissa Owens, I will not bow down.’

Whether you could hear this voice or not, she was in there saying it.’

I took my other hand and placed it on top of hers, and she moved her free hand on top of it, so we had this black-and-white stack of hands resting upon my chest.

‘When you’re unsure of yourself,’ she said, ‘when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she’s the one inside saying, ‘Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.’

She’s the power inside you, you understand?’

Her hands stayed where they were but released their pressure.

‘And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart, that’s Mary, too, not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love—but to persist in love.’

She paused. Bees drummed their sound into the air. August retrieved her hands from the pile on my chest, but I left mine there.

‘This Mary I’m talking about sits in your heart all day long, saying, ‘Lily, you are my everlasting home. Don’t you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.’

‘I closed my eyes, and in the coolness of morning, there among the bees, I felt for one clear instant what she was talking about. When I opened my eyes, August was nowhere around. I looked back toward the house and saw her crossing the yard, her white dress catching the light. The knock on the door came at 2:00
PM
I was sitting in the parlor writing in the new notebook Zach had left at my door, setting down everything that had happened to me since Mary Day. Words streamed out of me so fast I couldn’t keep up with them, and that’s all I was thinking about. I didn’t pay attention to the knock. Later I would remember it didn’t sound like an ordinary knock. More like a fist pounding. I kept writing, waiting for August to answer it. I was sure it was the man from Goose Creek with the new queen bee.

The pounding came again. June had gone off with Neil. Rosaleen was in the honey house washing a new shipment of mason jars, a job that belonged to me, but she’d volunteered for it, seeing how badly I needed to write everything out. I didn’t know where August was. Probably in the honey house, helping Rosa- leen. I look back and wonder: how did I not guess who was there? The third time the knocking came, I got up and opened the door. T. Ray stared at me, clean-shaven, wearing a white short sleeved shirt with chest hair curling through the neck opening. He was smiling. Not a smile of sweet adoring, I hasten to say, but the fat grin of a man who has been rabbit hunting all day long and has just now found his prey backed up in a hollow log with no way out. He said, ‘Well, well, well. Look who’s here.’

I had a sudden, terror-stricken thought he might that second drag me out to his truck and hightail it straight back to the peach farm, where I would never be heard from again. I stepped backward into the hallway, andwitha forced politeness that surprised me and seemed to throw him offstride, I said, ‘Won’t you come in?’

What else was I going to do? I turned and forced myself to walk calmly into the parlor. His boots clomped after me.

‘All right, goddamn it,’ he said, speaking to the back of my head.

‘If you want to pretend I’m making a social visit, we’ll pretend, but this ain’t a social visit, you hear me? I spent half my summer looking for you, and I’m gonna take you out of here nice and quiet or kicking and scream ing—don’t matter which to me.’

I motioned to a rocking chair.

‘Have a seat if you want to.’

I was trying to look ho-hum, when inside I was close to full blown panic. Where was August? My breath had turned into short, shallow puffs, a dog pant. He flopped into the rocker and pushed back and forth, that got-you-now grin glued on his face.

‘So you’ve been here the whole time, staying with colored women. Jesus Christ.’

Without realizing it, I’d backed over to the statue of Our Lady. I stood, immobilized, while he looked her over.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘A statue of Mary,’ I said.

‘You know, Jesus’ mother.’

My voice sounded skittish in my throat. Inside, I was racking my brain for something to do.

‘Well, it looks like something from the junkyard,’ he said.

‘How did you find me?’

Sliding up on the edge of the cane seat, he dug in his pants pocket until he brought up his knife, the one he used to clean his nails with.

‘It was you who led me here,’ he said, puffed up and pleased as punch to share the news.

‘I did no such thing.’

He tugged the blade out of the knife bed, pushed the point into the arm of the rocker, and carved out little chunks of wood, taking his sweet time to explain.

‘Oh, you led me here, all right. Yesterday the phone bill came, and guess what I found on there? One collect call from a lawyer’s office in Tiburon. Mr. Clayton Forrest. Big mistake, Lily, calling me collect.’

‘You went to Mr. Clayton’s and he told you where I was?’

‘No, but he has an old-lady secretary who was more than happy to fill me in. She said I would find you right here.’

Stupid Miss Lacy.

‘Where’s Rosaleen?’ he said.

‘She took off a long time ago,’ I lied. He might kidnap me back to Sylvan, but there was no need for him to know where Rosa- leen was. I could spare her that much at least. He didn’t comment on Rosaleen, though. He seemed happy to carve up the arm of the rocking chair like he was all of eleven years old, putting his initials in a tree. I think he was glad he didn’t have to fool with her. I wondered how I would survive back in Sylvan. Without Rosaleen. Suddenly he stopped rocking, and the nauseating smile faded off his mouth. He was staring at my shoulder with his eyes squinted almost to the closed position. I looked down to see what had grabbed his attention and realized he was staring at the whale pin on my shirt. He got to his feet and walked over to me, deliberately stopping four or five feet away, like the pin had some kind of voodoo curse on it.

‘Where did you get that?’ he said. My hand went up involuntarily and touched the little rhine- stone spout.

‘August gave it to me. The woman who lives here.’

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘I’m not lying. She gave it to me. She said it belonged to—‘ I was afraid to say it. He didn’t know anything about August and my mother. His upper lip had gone white, the way it did when he was badly upset.

‘I gave that pin to your mother on her twenty-second birthday,’ he said.

‘You tell me right now, how did this August woman get it?’

‘You gave this pin to my mother? You did?’

‘Answer me, damn it.’

‘This is where my mother came when she ran away from us. August said she was wearing it the day she got here.’

He walked back to the rocker, shaken-looking, and eased down onto the seat.

‘I’ll be goddamned,’ he said, so low I could hardly hear him.

‘August used to take care of her back when she was a little girl in Virginia,’ I said, trying to explain. He stared into the air, into nothing. Through the window, out there in the Carolina summer, I could see the sun beating down on the roof of his truck, lighting up the tips of the picket fence that had all but disappeared under the jasmine. The truck was spattered with mud, like he’d been trolling the swamps looking for me.

‘I should have known.’

He was shaking his head, talking like I wasn’t in the room.

‘I looked for her everywhere I could think. And she was right here. Jesus Christ, she was right here.’

The thought seemed to awe him. He shook his head and looked around, as if thinking, I bet she sat in this chair. I bet she walked on this rug. His chin quivered slightly, and for the first time it hit me how much he must’ve loved her, how it had split him open when she left. Before coming here, my whole life had been nothing but a hole where my mother should have been, and this hole had made me different, left me always aching for something, but never once did I think what he’d lost or how it might’ve changed him. I thought about August’s words. People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different. I don’t doubt he started off loving your mother. In fact, I think he worshiped her. I had never known T. Ray to worship anyone except Snout, the dog love of his life, but seeing him now, I knew he’d loved Deborah Fontanel, and when she’d left him, he’d sunk into bitterness. He jabbed the knife into the wood and got to his feet. I looked at the handle sticking in the air, then at T. Ray as he walked around the room touching things, the piano, the hatrack, a Look magazine on the drop-leaf table.

‘Looks like you’re here by yourself?’ he said. I could feel it coming. The end of everything. He walked straight toward me and reached for my arm. When, I jerked away, he brought his hand across my face. T. Ray had slapped me lots of times before, clean, sharp smacks on the cheek, the kind that cause you to draw a quick, stunned breath, but this was something else, not a slap at all. This time he’d hit me full force. I’d heard the grunt of exertion escape his lips as the blow landed, seen the momentary bulge of his eyes. And I’d smelled the farm on his hand, smelled peaches. The impact threw me backward into Our Lady. She crashed onto the floor a second before I did. I didn’t feel the pain at first, but sitting up, gathering my feet under me, it slashed from my ear down to my chin. It caused me to drop back again onto the floor. I stared up at him with my hands clutched at my chest, wondering if he would pull me by my feet outside to his truck. He was shouting.