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.
I put on my helmet as August lifted the lid. The way the bees poured out, rushing up all of a sudden in spirals of chaos and noise, 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 YOU. I tried to say it thirty-two ways.
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. “Lily!”
I opened my eyes. August stared through her spectacles. The bees had shaken the pollen dust off their feet and were starting to settle back into the hive. I could see tiny grains of it drifting in the air.
“Are you okay?” August said.
I nodded. Was I? I had no idea.
“You know, don’t you, that the two of us need to have a good talk. And this time not about me. About you.”
I wished I could do like the bees, just bump her forehead with a warning, tap it with my finger. I got my eye on you. Be careful. Don’t go any further.
“I suppose,” I answered.
“What about right now?”
“Not right now.”
“But, Lily—”
“I’m starved,” I said. “I think I’ll go on back to the house and see if lunch is ready.”
I didn’t wait for her to speak. Walking to the pink house, I could almost see the end of the line. I touched the place on my shirt where I’d stuck the black Mary. She was starting to come unglued.
The whole house smelled like fried okra. Rosaleen was setting the table in the kitchen while May dipped down in the grease and brought up the golden brown kernels. I didn’t know what had brought on the okra, since it was usually bologna sandwiches and more bologna sandwiches.
May had not had a crying jag since June performed her tomato-throwing fit, and we were all holding our breath. After going this long, I worried that even something as simple as burned okra might send her over the edge.
I said I was hungry, and Rosaleen said to hold my wild horses. Her lower lip was plumped out with Red Rose snuff. The smell followed her around the kitchen like it was on a leash, a combination of allspice, fresh earth, and rotten leaves. Between the okra and the snuff I could not get a decent breath. Rosaleen walked across the back porch, leaned out the door, and spit a tiny jet stream across the hydrangeas.
Nobody could spit like Rosaleen. I’d had fantasies of her winning a hundred dollars in a spitting contest and the two of us going to a nice motel in Atlanta and ordering room service with the prize money. It had always been my fond wish to stay in a motel, but at that moment if you had told m
e I could’ve had my choice of luxury motels with heated pools and television sets right in the room, I would’ve turned it down flat for the pink house.
There had been a few times, though, just after I woke up, when I thought about my old house, and I would miss it for a second or two before I remembered kneeling on the kitchen floor with grits digging into my kneecaps or trying to step around a great big pile of T. Ray’s nasty mood but usually landing right in it. I would remember him tearing into me, shouting Jesus H. Christ, Jesus H. Christ! The worst slap across the face I ever got was when I interrupted him to ask just what did the H. stand for anyway? One quick walk down memory lane and the old-home feeling would blow right over. I would take the pink house any day.
Zach shuffled into the kitchen behind August.
“My, my. Okra and pork chops for lunch. What’s this about?” August asked May.
May sidled over to her and said in a low voice, “It has been five days since I’ve been to the wall,” and I could see how proud of this fact she was, how she wanted to believe her days of hysterical crying were behind her, how this okra lunch was a celebration.
August smiled at her. “Five days, really? Well, that deserves a feast,” she said. And May, she beamed.
Zach plopped down in a chair.
“Did you finish delivering the honey?” August asked him.
“Everywhere but Mr. Clayton’s law office,” he said. He was fidgeting with everything in sight. First the place mat, then a loose thread on his shirt. Like he was bursting to say something.
August looked him over. “You got something on your mind?”
“You won’t believe what people downtown are saying,” he said. “They’re saying Jack Palance is coming to Tiburon this weekend and bringing a colored woman with him.”
We all stopped what we were doing and looked at each other.
“Who’s Jack Palance?” Rosaleen said. Even though we hadn’t started lunch yet, she had bitten into a piece of pork chop and was chewing and talking with her mouth open. I tried to catch her eye, pointing to my closed mouth, hoping she’d get the message.
“He’s a movie star,” said Zach.
June snorted. “Well, how dumb is that? What would a movie star be doing in Tiburon?”
Zach shrugged. “They say his sister lives here, and he’s coming to visit and intends to take this colored woman to the movie theater this Friday. Not to the balcony, but downstairs in the white section.”
August turned to May. “Why don’t you go out to the garden and pick some fresh tomatoes to go with our lunch?” she said, then waited till May was out the door. I could tell she was afraid Jack Palance trying to integrate the movie theater might ruin May’s okra feast. “Are people stirred up about this?” she asked Zach. Her eyes looked serious.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “In Garret’s Hardware there were white men talking about standing guard outside the theater.”
“Lord, here we go,” said Rosaleen.
June made a pffff sound with her lips while August shook her head, and it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of it.
In Sylvan we’d had a rumor at the first of the summer about a busload of people from New York City showing up to integrate the city pool. Talk about a panic. We had a citywide emergency on our hands, as there is no greater affliction for the southern mind than people up north coming down to fix our way of life. After that was the whole mess with the men at the Esso station. It seemed to me it would have been better if God had deleted skin pigment altogether.
As May came back into the kitchen, August said, “Let’s enjoy our meal,” which meant Jack Palance was not a lunch topic.
May plopped down three big tomatoes, and while she and Rosaleen sliced them up, August went to the den and put a Nat King Cole record on the player—a machine so old the records would not even drop automatic fashion. She was crazy about Nat King Cole, and she returned, with the volume up, frowning in that way people do when they bite into something and it tastes so delicious they appear to be in pain over it. June turned up her nose. She only cared for Beethoven and that whole group. She went and turned the sound down. “I can’t think,” she said.
August said, “You know what? You think too much. It would do you a world of good to stop thinking and just go with your feelings once in a blue moon.”
June said she would take her lunch in her room, thank you.
I guess that was just as well, because I was looking at the tomatoes May and Rosaleen were slicing and rehearsing in my head how I would say, So will you have some tomatoes, June? Don’t you love tomatoes? Now at least I would be saved from that.
We ate till we were tired out from eating, which is the way people in South Carolina eat at family reunions. Zach pushed back from the table, saying he was heading to Clayton Forrest’s office to leave a dozen jars of honey.
“Can I go?” I asked.
August knocked over her sweet tea, a thing so unlike her. You did not associate spills with August. With May, for sure, but not August. Tea ran across the table and onto the floor. I thought this might set May off, the tragedy of a spilled drink. But she only got up, humming “Oh! Susanna” without real urgency, and grabbed a towel.
“I don’t know, Lily,” August said.
“Please.” All I really wanted was some time with Zach and to expand my world by visiting the office of a real-life lawyer.
“Well, all right,” she said.
The office was situated one block off Main Street, where Rosaleen and I had paraded into town that Sunday more than three weeks ago. It didn’t look like my idea of a law office. The whole operation was really a large house, white with black shutters and a wraparound porch with big rocking chairs, which must have been for people to collapse into with relief after they’d won their cases. A sign on the lawn said CLAYTON FORREST, ATTORNEY AT LAW.
His secretary was a white lady who looked about eighty years old. She sat at a desk in the reception area, putting on fire-red lipstick. Her hair was permed into tight curls that had a faint blue cast.
“Hi, Miss Lacy,” Zach said. “I brought more honey.”
She worked the lipstick back into the tube, looking mildly annoyed. “More honey,” she said, shaking her head. She let out an overdone sigh and reached into a drawer. “The money for the last batch is in here.” She dropped an envelope onto the desk.
She looked me over. “You’re new.”
“I’m Lily,” I said.
“She’s staying with August,” Zach explained.
“You’re staying in her house?” she said.
I wanted to tell her that her lipstick was bleeding into the wrinkles around her lips. “Yes, ma’am, I’m staying there.”
“Well, I’ll be,” she said. She gathered her pocketbook and stood up. “I’ve got an appointment at the dentist. Put the jars over there on the table.”
I pictured her whispering the news to all the people in the waiting room who were about to get their cavities drilled. This white girl, Lily, is staying with the colored Boatwright sisters. Now, doesn’t that seem strange to you?
As she left, Mr. Forrest came out of his office. The first thing I noticed was his red suspenders. I’d never seen a thin person wear suspenders, and it was a nice look, the way it matched his red bow tie. He had sandy hair, and bushy eyebrows that curled toward his blue eyes, and smile crinkles in his face that signaled a good person. So good that apparently he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of Miss Lacy.
He looked at me. “And who would this pretty young lady be?”
“Lily uh—” I could not remember what last name I was currently using. I think it was because he’d referred to me as pretty, which had been a shock to my system. “Just Lily.” I stood there
looking gawky, with one foot tucked behind the other. “I’m staying with August till I go live with my aunt in Virginia.” Him being a lawyer, I worried he might ask me to take a lie-detector test.
“How nice. August is a good friend of mine,” he said. “I hope you’re enjoying your stay?”
“Yes, sir. Very much.”
“What case are you working on?” asked Zach, stuffing the envelope of honey money into his pocket and setting the box of jars on the side table by the window. It had a framed HONEY FOR SALE sign on it.
“Run-of-the-mill stuff. Deeds, wills. I got something for you, though. Come on back to the office and I’ll show you.”
“I’ll just wait out here and arrange the honey,” I said, hating to intrude but mostly feeling uncommonly awkward around him.
“You sure? You’re welcome to come, too.”
“I’m sure. I like it out here.”
They disappeared down a hallway. I heard a door close. A car horn on the street. The blast of the window air conditioner that dripped water into a dog bowl on the floor. I stacked the jars in a pyramid. Seven on bottom, four in the middle, and one on top, but it looked misshapen, so I took it apart and settled for plain rows.
I went over and inspected the pictures that covered one whole wall. First was a diploma from the University of South Carolina and then another one from Duke University. Next was a picture of Mr. Forrest on a boat, wearing sunglasses and holding a fish about my size. After that, Mr. Forrest shaking hands with Bobby Kennedy. Last, Mr. Forrest and a small blond-headed girl, standing in the ocean. She was jumping over a wave. The spray made a blue fan behind her, a peacock tail of water, and he was helping her, lifting her up and over it with his hand, smiling down on her. I bet he knew her favorite color, what she ate for afternoon snacks, everything she loved.
I went and sat on one of the two red sofas in the room. Williams. My made-up last name finally came to me. I counted the plants in the room. Four. The floorboards from the desk to the front door. Fifteen. Closing my eyes, I pictured the ocean stretched out the color of fresh-polished silver, the white froth on it, light scattering everywhere. I saw myself jumping a wave. T. Ray held my hand, pulling me up and over. I had to concentrate so hard to make this happen.