“Yesterday, while you were at work,” I told her carefully, gauging her reaction, “I made another forty-two dollars selling apples up at the road.” I pulled that secret stash from my jeans and laid the bills and coins on the table. Ma’s mouth opened, then shut.
Tears slid down her face. “I don’t want my children to have to grub for a living. I want to provide for you-all decently.”
“I’m not grubbin’.” I swallowed hard and leaned close to her. “Ma, I have to tell you something. I’m meant to sell apples. I can do it. I know I can. Because . . . I’ve got sugar skin.”
Sugar skin. Most people said sugar skin was only a tall tale McGillens had concocted in the glory years to gild their own legends a little more. But old folks in my family claimed sugar skin was real magic, and that all the Hush McGillens, so far, had been endowed with it. Mama sucked in a deep breath. “Have you tested yourself?”
“Yessim. More than once. I didn’t want to scare you, so I didn’t tell.”
“Oh, my lord. You coulda been stung to death.”
I nodded. There was only way to know if a person had sugar skin. You went outdoors in the fall, when the yellow jackets were potent and swarming, looking for trouble with their red-hot stingers full of poison, and you found one of their nests in the ground, and you walked over to it.
And then you held your hand down to the bees.
“They lit all over me, Ma,” I whispered. “I bet I had a hundred on me. But not one stung me. They . . . licked my skin, Ma. They really did. I’ve got sugar skin.”
“Oh, my lord,” Ma said, again.
“Ma, I’m gonna set up an apple stand every weekend, and I’m gonna make us rich, and I’m gonna go to college to learn how to sell even more apples, and nobody’s ever gonna laugh at us, again.”
“You promise me. College. You promise.” Mama had quit school in the eighth grade. She’d married Daddy when she was fourteen and he was thirty. I was born six months after the wedding. She had kinder dreams for me, and for Logan. College dreams. “College,” she repeated.
“I promise. I swear on Daddy’s spirit.” I clutched his picture to my chest.
She hugged me, hard. We both cried. She pushed me back and looked at me fiercely. “I don’t doubt you’ve got the magic, the sugar skin. And I don’t doubt you can sell apples. But I also don’t doubt bees ain’t the only creatures who know you’re as sweet as an apple. You keep that damned Davy Thackery at arm’s length or he’ll take it all away from you.” She shook me a little. “Promise me.”
I looked at her in confusion. “But Davy’s good to me, and he wants to take care of me—” The harsh disbelief on Mama’s face stopped me. “I promise,” I said.
I really believed I wouldn’t break that vow.
And that she’d live to see me prove it.
She didn’t. A mother can only protect you so much before she leaves you to protect yourself.
Chapter 2
THE WEEK BEFORE my sixteenth birthday, Mama died of an infection from a ruptured appendix. I remember sitting under the original Sweet Hush apple tree on the icy winter night after her death, just sitting there in the dark with a blanket around me, one arm hugging Logan and the other hugging the old tree as if she had become our mother surrogate. I cried to that old tree, I talked to that old tree, and I began to believe, in that pit of desperate loneliness, that she—I called her the Great Lady—listened and answered.
Hold onto the earth, Hush. Hold on tight to me and sink your own roots alongside mine.
I will, and I’ll never let go.
Forces beyond all my circle of experience began to crowd in on me. I found myself sitting in the small, pine-paneled courtroom of the Chocinaw County Courthouse while lawyers debated mine and my brother’s future and the future of the farm in Sweet Hush Hollow.
“Your Honor, there is simply no way a child of Hush’s tender years can maintain proper control of a large orchard and a home with amenities,” lawyer Mac Crawford intoned, leading the cause for a cousin Daddy had loathed. “Aaron McGillen is a greedy son of a bitch,” I heard my father say many times.
“Now, Mr. Aaron McGillen is a well-known merchant with a stake in the Pancake Diner franchise over on the new interstate, and he’s prepared to buy the entire Sweet Hush Hollow from his late cousin’s estate at a fair market value that will give young Miss Hush and her poor little orphaned brother a nice amount of money to live on.”
My attorney, the ancient and cheap Fred Carlisle, who drank bourbon in his office near the courthouse and wore a bad red hairpiece to hide a dent in the top of his graying head, stood with arthritic melodrama. “Yo’ Honor,” he drawled, “Aaron McGillen cheats his own waitresses out of their flapjack tips.”
The audience of McGillens and McGillen relatives nodded solemnly. I had a lot of support among my relatives. But the judge grunted, unimpressed, and I stiffened even more at the defendant’s table. Mr. Carlisle’s mentholated and bourboned scent nearly gagged me. Sweat slid down my small breasts, and the discount-store blazer and dress I’d bought itched on my skin. Behind me on a front pew, Logan wiggled between Smooch and Davy. My chubby, good-natured little brother whispered loudly, as any bored five-year-old would do, “Hush? Comeon! Hush! Let’s go home.” Finally I turned around and whispered, “Bubba Logan, I’m doing the best I can to get us back home and keep us there, just like Mama and Daddy would want.” That made several of my women relatives cry.
Judge Redman, a red-faced, portly old man who smoked filter-tip cigarillos during the proceedings, waved old Mr. Carlisle aside and pointed at me. “Miss McGillen, I would be a fool to let a sixteen-year old girl keep control of that Hollow, now, wouldn’t I?”
I stood. Resting my clammy hands atop a small briefcase I’d bartered for at the Dalyrimple Flea Market, I said very clearly, “Yes, Your Honor, you’d be a fool to do that, if I was an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl. But since I’m not ordinary, you’d be a fool not to.”
People gasped. His eyes narrowed. He smoked his cigarillo until the ash tip dropped on his desk. “Tell me how you’re gonna ease my fool mind, Miss McGillen.”
I opened my briefcase, turned it to face him, and dumped the contents on the table. Bundles of twenty-dollar bills fell out. Stock certificates fluttered against Mr. Carlisle’s suspiciously mentholated water glass. Government bonds tumbled atop the pile. “Here are my assets, Your Honor. Earned from selling apples by the road over the last four years. My mother wouldn’t take much of my earnings. She insisted I save the majority. So, I did.” I pointed to various piles. “Cash. Stocks. Bonds. A total of five thousand, two hundred, eight five dollars and twenty-seven cents in value, based on the closing market prices as reported in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal newspaper, Your Honor.”
The courtroom came alive with whispers. The judge rapped his gavel. “Miss McGillen, you are plain amazing. Everybody says so. I don’t disagree. But you’ve got to get an education and care for your baby bubba here. Your mama wanted you to go to college. How you gonna sell apples and do all that?”
“I’m graduating a year early from high school. I have a scholarship from the League of Farm Women and another one from the Kiwanis. Enough money to get me through my freshman year commuting over to North Georgia College. Smooch and Davy Thackery’s grandmother have agreed to baby-sit my brother while I attend class. And I’ll be able to work fulltime at the farm, too.”
Mac Crawford snorted. “This girl is well-intended, Your Honor, and nobody doubts she’s an outstanding young citizen. But it’s just not sensible, Your Honor, to let her retain control of two hundred valuable acres of orchards. Why, that Hollow is a sacred place to the McGillen family. It ought to be in the care of a grown male McGillen who—”
“Who cheats his waitresses out of flapjack money!” Mr. Carlisle repeated. Everyone laughed. My heart sank.
The jud
ge leaned on an elbow and eyed Mac Crawford. “Tell me, Mr. Crawford, have you ever managed to save five thousand dollars?”
“Your Honor, that’s beside the point—”
“No, I’d say it’s pretty much right smack on the point. How about you, Mr. McGillen? Can you produce that much cash and stock right now?” The judge pointed at Aaron, who sat on a front pew, skinny and stern, dressed in a nice suit. I had marked his name in a ledger I kept. He would never set foot in the Hollow again, if I could help it.
Aaron shifted uneasily. “I have investments, Your Honor. Not a lot of cash flow, but quite a nice income.”
The judge smiled. “Maybe I should call your waitresses up to testify about your management techniques.”
People guffawed. Mr. Carlisle said, “Here, here, I told you so!”
“This is a joke, isn’t it?” Aaron said stiffly. “Nobody but an ignoramus would leave the Hollow in the hands of a sixteen-year-old girl with not even a farmhand to help her pick the apples.”
“You callin’ me an ignoramus?” the judge asked.
“Oh, no, no, Your Honor! But poor young Hush doesn’t have any reliable help—”
“That’s a damn lie! I’m her help!” Davy said loudly. He leapt up like a soldier coming to attention. I twisted in my seat to stare at him. Seventeen and six-foot-two, lean as a post in jeans and leather, he had long-lashed eyes and dark, luxurious Thackery hair, plus a glorious brand of rowdy charm but hopeless bullshit. He made a serious show of straightening the half-assed tie he wore with a plaid shirt beneath his leather jacket. “I’m a grown man,” Davy announced. “And I’m damned sure serious about apple farming.”
Most of my relatives rolled their eyes. The rest of the audience laughed outright. Even the judge couldn’t repress a smile. “Mr. Thackery, I know you way too well. Words are cheap, son, and you dole ‘em out by the bushel.”
Davy went very still. Usually he seemed to swagger even when not moving, but not that time. He looked Judge Redman straight in the eye—calmly, beseeching, promising. God help me, a trill of excitement and adoration went through me. At that moment I believed in him, and I fell in love just enough to set my fate. “Your Honor,” he said in a quiet, manly drawl, “I swear to you on my soul, I’ll work my fingers to the bone for Hush McGillen. I’ll never turn away from her, and I’ll never betray her trust, and I’ll be there every time she needs me. I know I’ve got a lot to prove, and I’ll prove it, for her sake. Just please, Your Honor, let her keep the Hollow. She’ll die without it. And if she dies, so will I.”
Goosebumps went up my spine and tears came to my eyes. I brushed them away. Smooch gaped up at her brother as if aliens had replaced him with a sentimental stranger. The whole courtroom sat stone-silent, awed.
A long ash smoldered and fell from Judge Redman’s cigarillo. He laid the cigarillo in an ashtray, steepled his hands to his lips, and spoke between his fingers. “Miss Hush, my reputation for not bein’ a fool or an ignoramus is ridin’ on your shoulders. Don’t you and your helper here do anything to ruin that reputation, or we’ll be right back here again. You understand?”
I stood, breathless with hope. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“All right, then.” He scowled at Aaron McGillen, nodded to the assembled McGillen audience, then raised his head for a proper oratorical moment. “Control of the Sweet Hush Hollow property is hereby left to Miss Hush McGillen!” He rapped his gavel.
The crowd applauded.
I turned around and looked up into Davy’s gleaming eyes. He blushed, frowned, and restored his everyday persona with a shrug. “How’s that for shovelin’ some deep shit?” he whispered. I reached up and touched his cheek, making him blink and suck in a startled breath.
At that moment, I was sure he loved me with all the faith and honor in the world.
NO ONE SERIOUSLY believed I’d keep the farm. I was so sunk in grief and worry I barely looked up—but every time I did, Davy was there. A charmer, a bullshit artist of the old school, driving too fast and cheating his luck. Most men, women, and children couldn’t help but grin back at him. At the race track, he was already an idol. Hard-toothed, big-haired women wore his number—52—on their sequined t-shirts. Men placed bets on him to win. Girls flirted with him endlessly. I knew about them. He said they were just his fans. I believed him.
But he worked alongside me in the orchards harder than he’d ever worked before in his life or would ever work again, although in his spare time he howled at the moon and tried to charm me into howling with him. “I don’t like the race track,” I said bluntly. “I’d rather read a book.”
“Aw, hell, Beautiful,” he drawled with just the slightest sinister hint of unhappiness in his eyes, “Reading won’t win you the jackpot.”
“Not just reading. Education. Education will make me more money than all the jackpots in the world. Being smart pays off.”
“You’re already smarter than any other girl in the world. And prettier.”
He had a way with words.
But not with me. Not yet. I couldn’t risk getting tangled in the sheets with him.
Not yet.
“I’D BE A FOOL TO GIVE a sixteen-year-old girl a construction loan,” the bank president said. He was a newcomer to Dalyrimple and didn’t know a thing about McGillens in general or me in particular. A big Atlanta bank had bought out the Farmers Bank of Chocinaw County that year.
I replied with my best line. It had worked, before. “Sir, I’m no ordinary girl, and the Sweet Hush is no ordinary apple, so you’d be a fool not to give me a loan.”
He gaped at me. “Just exactly what do you want to build?”
“A little apple barn up in the front of the Hollow where people driving by can see it. With a kitchen for making baked apple goods, and a graveled parking lot.” I paused. “And I want a big Sweet Hush Farms sign by the entrance. Smooch Thackery is going to design it, but I’ll need a professional sign man to make it.” Another pause. “And I’ll put another sign over where people turn off the interstate. My mother’s cousin owns a strip of land along that road, and he’s given me permission to set a sign there.”
“A sign asking people from Atlanta to drive ten miles over Chocinaw Mountain just to buy apples?” The banker shook his head.
“No, sir. Not to buy apples. To buy Sweet Hush magic.” I went off on a long, rambling explanation of nostalgia and heritage and the Hollow and dead soldiers, while he sat there smiling ignorantly.
When I finished he said, “I’m sorry, but I need proof that your business plan will work, Miss McGillen, and you have none.”
I stood up, set a basket of Sweet Hushes on his desk, and said, “Then I’ll get you some.”
I STOOD AMONG the apple trees in the full fruit of determination—theirs and mine. Smooch watched in horror from fifty feet away, but Davy, white-faced and balancing a video camera on one shoulder, stood only a few yards from me. He’d borrowed the camera from the so-called media department at Chocinaw County High. With a flick of one finger he turned on its scalding white light. “Let ‘em rip,” he said.
I clutched a microphone in my right hand. Beads of sweat ran down my face and stained the armpits of my red-checkered shirt. I smiled. “Come to Sweet Hush Farms,” I intoned, “and see why Sweet Hush apples are so good they charm the bees.”
With my right foot out of camera range, I toed the lid off a five-gallon tin can. Hundreds of furious yellow jackets swarmed out. Within seconds they covered my sleeves, my hair, my face. I barely breathed. “Let me tell you all about the McGillens of Chocinaw County and their Sweet Hush apples,” I went on finally, gazing at the camera as yellow jackets crept around my eyebrows. “And let me tell you all why you’ll love visiting me and my bees, and why you’ll take home bushels of the best Southern apples bees ever kissed.”
I rambled on, covered in bees. I had learned t
o see them as purposeful trouble—the thorns around the rose, the poison that went with the sweetest fruit unless you held your breath just right when you reached for a taste—another of life’s prices to pay for a good harvest in apples or matters of the heart. There were always hurts that stung so badly I thought I’d die. Mama. Daddy. Logan calling for Mama when I was the only one there. Too much pride. Too much responsibility. Loving Davy Thackery so much I couldn’t think straight around him. But I kept on living.
We took the videotape down to all the Atlanta TV stations and left copies – along with a florid press release written by Smooch. And then we waited.
It worked.
I was interviewed by two news crews. Clips of me covered in bees were shown on the Atlanta TV stations, and then CNN picked up the story. That was in the early years when people made fun of CNN as much as they made fun of me. At any rate, Hush McGillen And her Hypnotized Bees went national.
That weekend I sold five hundred bushels of apples to Atlanta visitors and took orders to ship nearly four hundred more.
And I got my bank loan.
“I’d be a fool not to do business with CNN’s Bee Girl,” the banker said solemnly.
“Thank you. And by the way, sir, when I make my first million dollars I’ll give it to you to handle. But only on one condition.”
He could only shake his head and smile. “What, pray tell?”