The Secret Life of Bees

  “So,” she said, getting down to business, “what we have to do is take out the frames filled with honey and put in empty ones.”

  August pulled the wagon while I walked behind it carrying the smoker stuffed with pine straw and tobacco leaves. Zach had placed a brick on top of each hive telling August what to do. If the brick was at the front, it meant the colony had nearly filled the combs and needed another super. If the brick was at the back, there were problems like wax moths or ailing queens. Turned on its side, the brick announced a happy bee family, no Ozzie, just Harriet and her ten thousand daughters.

  August struck a match and lit the grass in the smoker. I watched her face flare with light, then recede into the dimness. She waved the bucket, sending smoke into the hive. The smoke, she said, worked better than a sedative.

  Still, when August removed the lids, the bees poured out in thick black ropes, breaking into strands, a flurry of tiny wings moving around our faces. The air rained bees, and I sent them love, just like August said.

  She pulled out a brood frame, a canvas of whirling blacks and grays, with rubbings of silver. “There she is, Lily, see her?” said August. “That’s the queen, the large one.”

  I made a curtsy like people do for the queen of England, which made August laugh.

  I wanted to make her love me so she would keep me forever. If I could make her love me, maybe she would forget about Beatrix the nun going home and let me stay.

  When we walked back to the house, darkness had settled in and fireflies sparked around our shoulders. I could see Rosaleen and May through the kitchen window finishing the dishes.

  August and I sat in collapsible lawn chairs beside a crepe myrtle that kept dropping blossoms all over the ground. Cello music swelled out from the house, rising higher and higher until it lifted off the earth, sailing toward Venus.

  I could see how such music drew the ghosts out of dying people, giving them a ride to the next life. I wished June’s music could’ve seen my mother out.

  I gazed at the stone wall that edged the backyard.

  “There are pieces of paper in the wall out there,” I said, as if August didn’t know this.

  “Yes, I know. It’s May’s wall. She made it herself.”

  “May did?” I tried to picture her mixing cement, carrying rocks around in her apron.

  “She gets a lot of the stones from the river that runs through the woods back there. She’s been working on it ten years or more.”

  So that’s where she got her big muscles—rock lifting. “What are all those scraps of paper stuck in it?”

  “Oh, it’s a long story,” August said. “I guess you’ve noticed—May is special.”

  “She sure does get upset easy,” I said.

  “That’s because May takes in things differently than the rest of us do.” August reached over and laid her hand on my arm. “See, Lily, when you and I hear about some misery out there, it might make us feel bad for a while, but it doesn’t wreck our whole world. It’s like we have a built-in protection around our hearts that keeps the pain from overwhelming us. But May—she doesn’t have that. Everything just comes into her—all the suffering out there—and she feels as if it’s happening to her. She can’t tell the difference.”

  Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray’s mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother—that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone’s joy seemed to double it?

  Rosaleen’s voice drifted from the kitchen window, followed by May’s laughter. May sounded so normal and happy right then, I couldn’t imagine how she’d gotten the way she was—one minute laughing and the next overrun with everybody’s misery. The last thing I wanted was to be like that, but I didn’t want to be like T. Ray either, immune to everything but his own selfish life. I didn’t know which was worse.

  “Was she born like that?” I asked.

  “No, she was a happy child at first.”

  “Then what happened to her?”

  August focused her eyes on the stone wall. “May had a twin. Our sister April. The two of them were like one soul sharing two bodies. I never saw anything like it. If April got a toothache, May’s gum would plump up red and swollen just like April’s. Only one time did our father use a belt strap on April, and I swear to you, the welts rose on May’s legs, too. Those two had no separation between them.”

  “The first day we were here May told us that April died.”

  “And that’s when it all started with May,” she said, then looked at me like she was trying to decide whether to go on. “It’s not a pretty story.”

  “My story’s not pretty either,” I said, and she smiled.

  “Well, when April and May were eleven, they walked to the market with a nickel each to buy an ice cream. They’d seen the white children in there licking their cones and looking at cartoon books. The man who owned the market gave them the cones but said they had to go outside to eat them. April was headstrong and told him she wanted to look at the cartoon books. She argued with the man for her own way, like she used to do with Father, and finally the man took her arm and pulled her to the door, and her ice cream dropped to the floor. She came home screaming that it wasn’t fair. Our father was the only colored dentist in Richmond, and he’d seen more than his share of unfairness. He told April, ‘Nothing’s fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now.’”

  I was thinking how I myself had gotten that straight long before I was eleven. I blew a puff of air across my face, bending my neck to behold the Big Dipper. June’s music poured out, serenading us.

  “I think most children might have let that roll on by, but it did something to April,” August said. “She got deflated about life, I suppose you’d say. It opened her eyes to things she might not have noticed, being so young. She started having stretches when she didn’t want to go to school or do anything. By the time she was thirteen, she was having terrible depressions, and of course the whole time, whatever she was feeling, May was feeling. And then, when April was fifteen, she took our father’s shotgun and killed herself.”

  I hadn’t expected that. I sucked in my breath, then felt my hand go up and cover my mouth.

  “I know,” said August. “It’s terrible to hear something like that.” She paused a moment. “When April died, something in May died, too. She never was normal after that. It seemed like the world itself became May’s twin sister.”

  August’s face was blending into the tree shadows. I slid up in my chair so I could still see her.

  “Our mother said she was like Mary, with her heart on the outside of her chest. Mother was good about taking care of her, but when she died, it fell to me and June. We tried for years to get May some help. She saw doctors, but they didn’t have any idea what to do with her except put her away. So June and I came up with this idea of a wailing wall.”

  “A what kind of wall?”

  “Wailing wall,” she said again. “Like they have in Jerusalem. The Jewish people go there to mourn. It’s a way for them to deal with their suffering. See, they write their prayers on scraps of paper and tuck them in the wall.”

  “And that’s what May does?”

  August nodded. “All those bits of paper you see out there stuck between the stones are things May has written down—all the heavy feelings she carries around. It seems like the only thing that helps her.”

  I looked in the direction of the wall, invisible now in the darkness. Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead.

  “Poor May,” I said.

  “Yes,” said August. “Poor May.” And we sat in the sorrow for a while, until the mosquitoes collected around us and chased us indoors.

  In the honey house Rosaleen was on her cot with the lights out and the fan going full blast. I stripped down to my panties and sleeveless top, but it was still too hot to move.

 
My chest hurt from feeling things. I wondered if T. Ray was pacing the floors feeling as injured as I hoped he did. Maybe he was telling himself what a rotten excuse for a father he was for not treating me better, but I doubted it. Thinking up ways to kill me was more like it.

  I turned my pillow over and over for the coolness, thinking about May and her wall and what the world had come to that a person needed something like that. It gave me the willies to think what might be stuffed in among those rocks. The wall brought to my mind the bleeding slabs of meat Rosaleen used to cook, the gashes she made up and down them, stuffing them with pieces of wild, bitter garlic.

  The worst thing was lying there wanting my mother. That’s how it had always been; my longing for her nearly always came late at night when my guard was down. I tossed on the sheets, wishing I could crawl into bed with her and smell her skin. I wondered: Had she worn thin nylon gowns to bed? Did she bobby-pin her hair? I could just see her, propped in bed. My mouth twisted as I pictured myself climbing in beside her and putting my head against her breast. I would put it right over her beating heart and listen. Mama, I would say. And she would look down at me and say, Baby, I’m right here.

  I could hear Rosaleen trying to turn over on her cot. “You awake?” I said.

  “Who can sleep in this oven?” she said.

  I wanted to say, You can, as I’d seen her sleeping that day outside the Frogmore Stew General Store and Restaurant, and it had been at least this hot. She had a fresh Band-Aid on her forehead. Earlier, August had boiled her tweezers and fingernail scissors in a pot on the stove and used them to pluck out Rosaleen’s stitches.

  “How’s your head?”

  “My head is just fine.” The words came out like stiff little jabs in the air.

  “Are you mad or something?”

  “Why would I be mad? Just ’cause you spend all your time with August now ain’t no reason for me to care. You pick who you want to talk with, it’s not my business.”

  I couldn’t believe it; Rosaleen sounded jealous.

  “I don’t spend all my time with her.”

  “Pretty much,” she said.

  “Well, what do you expect? I work in the honey house with her. I have to spend time with her.”

  “What about tonight? You out there working on honey sitting on the lawn?”

  “We were just talking.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, and then she rolled toward the wall, turning her back into a great hump of silence.

  “Rosaleen, don’t act like that. August might know things about my mother.”

  She raised up on her elbow and looked at me. “Lily, your mama’s gone,” she said softly. “And she ain’t coming back.”

  I sat straight up. “How do you know she isn’t alive right in this very town? T. Ray could’ve lied about her being dead, just like he lied about her leaving me.”

  “Oh, Lily. Girl. You got to stop all this.”

  “I feel her here,” I said. “She’s been here, I know it.”

  “Maybe she was. I can’t say. I just know some things are better left alone.”

  “What do you mean? That I shouldn’t find out what I can about my own mother?”

  “What if—” She paused and rubbed the back of her neck. “What if you find out something you don’t wanna know?”

  What I heard her say was Your mother left you, Lily. Let it alone. I wanted to yell how stupid she was, but the words bunched in my throat. I started hiccuping instead.

  “You think T. Ray was telling me the truth about her leaving me, don’t you?”

  “I don’t have any idea about that,” Rosaleen said. “I just don’t want you getting yourself hurt.”

  I lay back on the bed. In the silence my hiccups ricocheted around the room.

  “Hold your breath, pat your head, and rub your tummy,” Rosaleen said.

  I ignored her. Eventually I heard her breathing shift to a deeper place.

  I pulled on my shorts and sandals and crept to the desk where August filled honey orders. I tore a piece of paper from a tablet and wrote my mother’s name on it. Deborah Owens.

  When I looked outside, I knew I would have to make my way by starlight. I crept across the grass, back to the edge of the woods, to May’s wall. Hiccuping all the way. Placing my hands on the stones, all I wanted was not to ache so much.

  I wanted to let go of my feelings for a little while, to pull in my moat bridge. I pressed the paper with her name into a cranny that seemed right for her, giving her to the wailing wall. Somewhere along the way my hiccups disappeared.

  I sat on the ground with my back against the stones and my head tilted back so I could see the stars with all the spy satellites mixed in. Maybe one of them was taking my picture this very minute. They could spot me even in the dark. Nothing was safe. I would have to remember that.

  I started thinking maybe I should find out what I could about my mother, before T. Ray or the police came for us. But where to start? I couldn’t just pull out the black Mary picture and show it to August without the truth wrecking everything, and she would decide—might decide, would decide, I couldn’t say—that she was obliged to call T. Ray to come get me. And if she knew that Rosaleen was a true fugitive, wouldn’t she have to call the police?

  The night seemed like an inkblot I had to figure out. I sat there and studied the darkness, trying to see through it to some sliver of light.

  The queen must produce some substance that attracts the workers and that can be obtained from her only by direct contact. This substance evidently stimulates the normal working behavior in the hive. This chemical messenger has been called “queen substance.” Experiments have shown that the bees obtain it directly from the body of the queen.

  —Man and Insects

  Chapter Six

  The next morning, inside the honey house, I woke to banging in the yard. When I pulled myself off the cot and wandered outside, I found the tallest Negro man I’d ever seen working on the truck, bent over the motor, tools scattered around his feet. June handed him wrenches and what-have-you, cocking her head and beaming at him.

  In the kitchen May and Rosaleen were working on pancake batter. I didn’t like pancakes that much, but I didn’t say so. I was just thankful it wasn’t grits. After kneeling on them half your life, you don’t care to eat them.

  The trash can was full of banana peels, and the electric percolator bubbled into the tiny glass nozzle on top of it. Bloop, bloop. I loved the way it sounded, the way it smelled.

  “Who’s the man out there?” I asked.

  “That’s Neil,” said May. “He’s sweet on June.”

  “It looks to me like June is sweet on him, too.”

  “Yeah, but she won’t say so,” said May. “She’s kept that poor man strung along for years. Won’t marry him and won’t let him go.”

  May drizzled batter on the griddle in the shape of a big L. “This one’s yours,” she said. L for Lily.

  Rosaleen set the table and warmed the honey in a bowl of hot water. I poured orange juice into the jelly glasses.

  “How come June won’t get married to him?” I asked.

  “She was supposed to get married to somebody else a long time ago,” said May. “But he didn’t show up for the wedding.”

  I looked at Rosaleen, afraid this situation of jilted love might be unfortunate enough to send May into one of her episodes, but she was intent on my pancake. It struck me for the first time how odd it was that none of them were married. Three unmarried sisters living together like this.

  I heard Rosaleen make a sound like Hmmmph, and I knew she was thinking about her own sorry husband, wishing he hadn’t shown up for their ceremony.

  “June swore off men and said she would never get married, and then she met Neil when he came to be the new principal at her school. I don’t know what happened to his wife, but he didn’t have one anymore after he moved here. He has tried every which way to get June to marry him, but she won’t do it. Me and August can’t convince
her either.”

  A wheeze welled up from May’s chest, and then out came “Oh! Susanna.” Here we go.

  “Lord, not again,” said Rosaleen.

  “I’m sorry,” May said. “I just can’t help it.”

  “Why don’t you go out to the wall?” I said, prying the spatula out of her hand. “It’s okay.”

  “Yeah,” Rosaleen told her. “You do what you gotta do.” We watched from the screen door as May cut past June and Neil.

  A few minutes later June came in with Neil behind her. I worried that his head wouldn’t clear the door.

  “What started May off?” June wanted to know. Her eyes followed a roach that darted beneath the refrigerator. “You didn’t step on a roach in front of her, did you?”

  “No,” I said. “We didn’t even see a roach.”

  She opened the cabinet under the sink and dug into the back for a pump can of bug killer. I thought about explaining to her my mother’s ingenious method of ridding the house of roaches—cracker crumbs and marshmallow—but then I thought, This is June, forget it.

  “Well, what upset her, then?” June asked.

  I hated to come out and say it with Neil standing right there, but Rosaleen didn’t have any problem with it. “She’s upset you won’t marry Neil.”

  I had never considered until then that colored people could blush, or maybe it was anger that turned June’s face and ears such a dark plum color.

  Neil laughed. “See there. You should marry me and quit upsetting your sister.”

  “Oh, get out of here,” she said, and gave him a push.

  “You promised me pancakes, and I’m gonna have them,” he said. He wore blue jeans and an undershirt with grease smears on it, along with horn-rimmed glasses. He looked like a very studious mechanic.

  He smiled at me and then Rosaleen. “So are you gonna introduce me or keep me in the dark?”

  I have noticed that if you look carefully at people’s eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away. June’s eyes turned dull and hard when she looked at me.