The Secret Life of Bees (9 page)

‘I’m Lily, and that’s Rosaleen,’ I said, hesitating as June appeared in the doorway behind her. I opened my mouth without any sense of what I would say next. What came out couldn’t have surprised me more.

‘We ran away from home and don’t have any place to go,’ I told her. Any other day of my life I could have won a fibbing contest hands down, and that, that is what I came up with: the pathetic truth. I watched their faces, especially August’s. She took off her glasses and rubbed the depressions on each side of her nose. It was so quiet I could hear a clock ticking in another room. August replaced her glasses, walked to Rosaleen, and examined the stitches on her forehead, the cut under her eye, the bruises along her temple and arms.

‘You look like you’ve been beaten.’

‘She fell down the front steps when we were leaving,’ I offered, returning to my natural fibbing habit. August and June traded looks while Rosaleen narrowed her eyes, letting me know I’d done it again, speaking for her like she wasn’t even there.

‘Well, you can stay here till you figure out what to do. We can’t have you living on the side of the road,’ said August. The intake of June’s breath nearly sucked the air from the room.

‘But, August—’

‘They’ll stay here,’ she repeated in a way that let me know who the big sister was and who the little sister was.

‘It’ll be all right. We’ve got the cots in the honey house.’

June flounced out, her red skirt flashing around the door.

‘Thank you,’ I said to August.

‘You’re welcome. Now, sit down. I’ll get some orangeade.’

We got situated in the cane-bottom rockers while May stood guard, grinning her crazy-woman grin. She had great big muscles in her arms, I noticed.

‘How come y’all have names from a calendar?’ Rosaleen asked her.

‘Our mother loved spring and summer,’ May said.

‘We had an April, too, but…she died when she was little.’

May’s grin dissolved, and out of nowhere she started humming ‘Oh! Susanna’ like her life depended on it. Rosaleen and I stared at her as her humming turned into hard crying. She cried like April’s death had happened only this second. Finally August returned with a tray of four jelly glasses, orange slices stuck real pretty on the rims.

‘Oh, May, honey, you go on out to the wall and finish your cry,’ she said, pointing her to the door and giving her a nudge. August acted like this was the sort of normal behavior happening in every household in South Carolina.

‘Here you go orangeade.’

I sipped. Rosaleen, however, downed hers so fast she let out a belch that the boys in my old junior high would have envied. It was unbelievable. August pretended she didn’t hear it while I stared at the velvet footstool and wished Rosaleen could be more cultured.

‘So you’re Lily and Rosaleen,’ August said.

‘Do you have last names?’

‘Rosaleen…Smith, and Lily…Williams,’ I lied and then launched in.

‘See, my mother died when I was little, and then my father died in a tractor accident last month on our farm in Spar- tanburg County. I don’t have any other kin around here, so they were going to send me to a home.’

August shook her head. Rosaleen shook hers, too, but for a different reason.

‘Rosaleen was our housekeeper,’ I went on.

‘She doesn’t have any family but me, so we decided to go up to Virginia to find my aunt. Except we don’t have any money, so if you have any work for us to do while we’re here, maybe we could earn a little before heading on. We aren’t really in a hurry to get to Virginia.’

Rosaleen glared at me. For a minute there was nothing but ice clinking in our glasses. I hadn’t realized how sweltering the room was, how stimulated my sweat glands had gotten. I could actually smell myself. I cut my eyes over to the black Mary in the corner and back to August. She put down her glass. I had never seen eyes that color, eyes the purest shade of ginger.

‘I’m from Virginia myself,’ she said, and for some reason this stirred up the current that had moved in my limbs when I’d first entered the room.

‘All right, then. Rosaleen can help May in the house, and you can help me and Zach with the bees.

Zach is my main helper, so I can’t pay you anything, but at least you’ll have a room and some food till we call your aunt and see about her sending some bus money.’

‘I don’t exactly know her whole name,’ I said.

‘My father just called her Aunt Bernie; I never met her.’

‘Well, what were you planning to do, child, go door to door in Virginia?’

‘No, ma’am, just Richmond.’

‘I see,’ said August. And the thing was, she did. She saw right through it. That afternoon, heat built up in the skies over Tiburon; finally it gave way to a thunderstorm. August, Rosaleen, and I stood on the screen porch that jutted off the back of the kitchen and watched the clouds bruise dark purple over the treetops and the wind whip the branches. We were waiting for a let-up so August could show us our new quarters in the honey house, a converted garage in the back corner of the yard painted the same hot-flamingo shade as the rest of the house. Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn’t help but envy the way a good storm got everyone’s attention. August went back into the kitchen and returned with three aluminum pie pans and handed them out.

‘Come on. Let’s make a run for it. These will keep our heads dry, at least.’

August and I dashed into the downpour, holding the pans over our heads. Glancing back, I saw Rosaleen holding the pie pan in her hand, missing the whole point. When August and I reached the honey house, we had to huddle in the door and wait on her. Rosaleen glided along, gathering rain in the pan and flinging it out like a child would do. She walked on puddles like they were Persian carpets, and when a clap of thunder boomed around us, she looked up at the drowned sky, opened her mouth, and let the rain fall in. Ever since those men had beaten her, her face had been so pinched and tired, her eyes dull like they’d had the light knocked out of them. Now I could see she was returning to herself, looking like an all-weather queen out there, like nothing could touch her. If only she could get some manners. The inside of the honey house was one big room filled with strange honey-making machines—big tanks, gas burners, troughs, levers, white boxes, and racks piled with waxy honeycombs. My nostrils nearly drowned in the scent of sweetness. Rosaleen made gigantic puddles on the floor while August ran for towels. I stared at a side wall that was covered with shelves of mason jars. Pith helmets with netting, tools, and wax candles hung from nails near the front door, and a thin veneer of honey lay across everything. The soles of my shoes stuck slightly as I walked. August led us to a tiny corner room in the back with a sink, a full-length mirror, one curtainless window, and two wooden cots made up with clean white sheets. I placed my bag on the first cot.

‘May and I sleep out here sometimes when we’re harvesting honey round the clock,’ August said.

‘It can get hot, so you’ll need to turn the fan on.’

Rosaleen reached up to where it sat on a shelf along the back wall and flipped the switch, causing cobwebs to blow off the blades and fly all over the room. She had to pick them off her cheekbones.

‘You need dry clothes,’ August told her.

‘I’ll air-dry,’ Rosaleen said, and she stretched out on the cot, making the legs on it bow.

‘You’ll have to come into the house to use the bathroom,’ August said.

‘We don’t lock the doors, so just come on in.’

Rosaleen’s eyes were closed. She had already drifted off and was making little puff noises with her mouth. August lowered her voice.

‘So she fell down the steps?’

‘Yes, ma’am, she went down headfirst. Caught her foot in the rug at the top of the stairs, the one my mother hooked herself.’

The secret of a good lie is don’t overly explain, and throw in one good detail.

‘Well, Miss Williams, you can start work tomorrow,’ she said. I stood there wondering who she was talking to, who was Miss Williams, when I remembered I was Lily Williams now. That’s the other secret to lying—you have to keep your stories straight.

‘Zach will be away for a week,’ she was saying.

‘His family has gone down to Pawley’s Island to visit his mama’s sister.’

‘If you don’t mind me asking, what will I be doing?’

‘You’ll work with Zach and me, making the honey, doing whatever needs doing. Come on, I’ll give you the tour.’

We walked back to the large room with all the machines. She led me to a column of white boxes stacked one on top of the other.

‘These are called supers,’ she said, setting one on the floor in front of me and removing the lid.

From the outside it looked like a regular old drawer pulled out of the dresser, but inside it were frames of honeycomb hung in a neat row. Each frame was filled with honey and sealed over with beeswax. She pointed her finger.

‘That’s the uncappcr over there, where we take the wax off the comb. Then it goes through the wax melter over here.’

I followed her, stepping over bits and pieces of honeycomb, which is what they had instead of dust bunnies. She stopped at the big metal tank in the center of the room.

‘This is the spinner,’ she said, patting the side like it was a good dog.

‘Go on up there and look in.’

I climbed up the two-step ladder and peered over the edge, while August flipped a switch and an old motor on the floor sputtered and cranked. The spinner started slowly, gaining speed like the cotton-candy machine at the fair, until it was sending heavenly smells into the atmosphere.

‘It separates out the honey,’ she said.

‘Takes out the bad stuff, leaves in the good. I’ve always thought how nice it would be to have spinners like this for human beings, just toss them in and let the spinner do its work.’

I looked back at her, and she was staring at me with her ginger-cake eyes. Was I paranoid to think that when she’d said human beings, what she really meant was me? She turned off the motor, and the humming stopped with a se- ries of ticking sounds. Bending over the brown tube leading from the spinner, she said, ‘From here it goes into the baffle tank, then over to the warming pan, and finally into the settling tank. That’s the honey gate, where we fill the buckets.

You’ll get the hang of it.’

I doubted it. I’d never seen such a complex situation in my life.

‘Well, I imagine you’ll want to rest up like Rosaleen. Supper is at six. You like sweet-potato biscuits? That’s May’s specialty.’

When she left, I lay on the empty cot while rain crashed on the tin roof. I felt like I’d been traveling for weeks, like I’d been dodging lions and tigers on a safari through the jungle, trying to get to the Lost Diamond City buried in the Congo, which happened to be the theme of the last matinee I’d seen in Sylvan before leaving. I felt that somehow I belonged here, I really did, but I could have been in the Congo for how unfamiliar it felt. Staying in a colored house with colored women, eating off their dishes, lying on their sheets—it was not something I was against, but I was brand-new to it, and my skin had never felt so white to me. T. Ray did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That’s what let me know I had some prejudice buried in- side me. When Rosaleen woke from her nap, before she had a chance to raise her head off the pillow, I said, ‘Do you like it here?’

‘I guess I do,’ she said, working to get herself to a sitting posi- tion.

‘So far.’

‘Well, I like it, too,’ I said.

‘So I don’t want you saying anything to mess it up, okay?’

She crossed her arms over her belly and frowned.

‘Like what?’

‘Don’t say anything about the black Mary picture I got in my bag, okay? And don’t mention my mother.’

She reached up and started twisting some of her loose braids back together.

‘Now, how come you wanna keep that a secret?’

I hadn’t had time to sort out my reasons. I wanted to say, Because I just want to be normal for a little while—not a refugee girl looking for her mother, but a regular girl paying a summer visit to Tiburon, South Carolina. I want time to win August over, so she won’t send me back when she finds out what I’ve done. And those things were true, but even as they crossed my mind, I knew they didn’t completely explain why talking to August about my mother made me so uneasy. I went over and began helping Rosaleen with her braids. My hands, I noticed, were shaking a little.

‘Just tell me you aren’t gonna say anything,’ I said.

‘It’s your secret,’ she said.

‘You do what you want with it.’

The next morning I woke early and walked outside. The rain had stopped and the sun glowed behind a bank of clouds. Pinewoods stretched beyond the honey house in every direction. I could make out about fourteen beehives tucked under the trees in the distance, the tops of them postage stamps of white shine. The night before, during dinner, August had said she owned twenty-eight acres left to her by her granddaddy. A girl could get lost on twenty-eight acres in a little town like this. She could open a trapdoor and disappear. Light spilled through a crack in a red-rimmed cloud, and I walked toward it along a path that led from the honey house into the woods. I passed a child’s wagon loaded with garden tools. It rested beside a plot growing tomatoes tied to wooden stakes with pieces of nylon hose. Mixed in with them were orange zinnias and lavender gladiolus that dipped toward the ground. The sisters loved birds, I could see. There was a concrete birdbath and tons of feeders—hollowed-out gourds and rows of big pinecones sitting everywhere, each one smeared with peanut butter. Where the grass gave way to the woods, I found a stone wall crudely cemented together, not even knee high but nearly fifty yards long. It curved on around the property and abruptly stopped. It didn’t seem to have any purpose to it. Then I noticed tiny pieces of folded-up paper stuck in the crevices around the stones. I walked the length of the fence, and it was the same all the way, hundreds of these bits of paper. I pulled one out and opened it, but the writing was too blurred from rain to make out. I dug out another one. Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead. I folded it and put it back, feeling like I’d done something wrong. Stepping over the wall, I moved into the trees, picking my way through little ferns with their blueogreen feathers, careful not to tear the designs the spiders had worked so hard on all morning. It was like me and Rosaleen really had discovered the Lost Dia- mond City. As I walked, I began to hear the sound of running water. It’s impossible to hear that sound and not go searching for the source. I pushed deeper into the woods. The growth turned thick, and sticker bushes snagged my legs, but I found it—a little river, not much bigger than the creek where Rosaleen and I had bathed. I watched the currents meander, the lazy ripples that once in a while broke along the surface. Taking off my shoes, I waded in. The bottom turned mushy, squishing up through my toes. A turtle plopped offa rock into the water right in front of me, nearly scaring the Lord Jesus out of me. There was no telling what other invisible creatures I was out here socializing with—snakes, frogs, fish, a whole river world of biting bugs, and I could have cared less. When I put on my shoes and headed back, the light poured down in shafts, and I wanted it to always be like this—no T. Ray, no Mr. Gaston, nobody wanting to beat Rosaleen senseless. Just the rain-cleaned woods and the rising light.