The Secret Life of Bees

  Heading back to the pink house, wearing clean shorts and a top, my hair all combed, I stopped to behold everything. August, June, Rosaleen, Zach, Neil, Otis, and all the Daughters of Mary stood around on the mowed grass beside the card tables, their laughter low and vibrating. Piles of food. Blue-and-white streamers rippling in the breezes. The Christmas lights glowed in spirals of color around the porch, and all the candles were lit, even though the sun was still working its way down. Every molecule of air gave off red fire.

  I said to myself, I love this place with my whole heart.

  The Daughters fussed over me—how good I smelled, how exceptional my hair was when it was combed. Lunelle said, “Would you like me to make you a hat, Lily?”

  “Really? You’d make me a hat?” Where I would wear a Lunelle-created hat was a mystery, but I wanted one all the same. At the least, I could get buried in it one day.

  “Of course I’ll make you a hat. I’ll make you a hat you won’t believe. What color would you like?”

  August, who was listening in, said, “Blue,” and winked at me.

  First we ate. By now I’d learned eating was a high priority with the Daughters. When we finished, the redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue-black. Rosaleen brought out the platter of honey cakes and set them on one of the tables.

  August motioned us to stand around the table in a circle. The Mary Day program was under way.

  “These are Mary’s honey cakes. Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,” August said.

  She took one of them in her hand and, pinching off a piece, held it before Mabelee, who stood next to her in the circle. August said, “This is the body of the Blessed Mother.” Mabelee closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and August laid the cake on her tongue.

  After Mabelee had swallowed, she did the same thing August had done—snipped off a piece and gave it to the next person in the circle, who happened to be Neil. Mabelee, who could not have measured five feet tall in spike heels, practically needed a stepladder to get up to his mouth. Neil crouched down and opened wide. “This is the body of the Mother,” Mabelee said, and popped it in.

  I did not know one thing, really, about the Catholic Church, but somehow I felt sure the pope would have keeled over if he’d seen this. Not Brother Gerald, though. He wouldn’t have wasted time fainting, just gotten busy arranging the exorcism.

  Me, I had never seen grown-ups feed each other, and I watched with the feeling I might burst out crying. I don’t know what got to me about it, but for some reason that circle of feeding made me feel better about the world.

  As life would have it, the one who fed me turned out to be June. Opening my mouth, closing my eyes, and waiting for the body of the Mother, I heard June’s whisper brush my ear—“I’m sorry for being hard on you when you first got here”—and then the sweetness of honey cake spread through my mouth.

  I wished it could have been Zach standing next to me so I could lay the cake on his tongue. I would have said, I hope this softens you toward the world. I hope it brings you a tender feeling. Instead I got to give the pinch of cake to Cressie, who ate it with her eyes closed.

  After we were all fed, Zach and Neil went to the parlor and returned carrying Our Lady of Chains. Otis followed after them, lugging the pile of chain. They stood her upright in the red wagon. August leaned over to me. “We’re going to reenact the story of Our Lady of Chains. We’re taking her over to the honey house and chaining her in there for the night.”

  I thought, Our Lady is spending the night in the honey house. With me.

  As August pulled the wagon slowly across the yard, Zach and Neil braced Our Lady with their hands. If I do say so, the flower garland around the wagon set the whole thing off.

  June carried her cello, while the Daughters trailed the wagon single file, carrying burning candles. They sang, “Mary, star of the sea, Mary, brightest moon, Mary, comb of honey.”

  Rosaleen and I brought up the rear, toting candles, too, trying to hum along, since we didn’t know the words. I cupped one hand around the flame of my candle to be sure it didn’t blow out.

  At the door of the honey house, Neil and Zach lifted the statue out of the wagon and carried her inside. Sugar-Girl nudged Otis with her elbow, and he stepped up and helped them get her situated between the extractor and the baffle tank.

  “All right,” August said. “Now we’ll start the last part of our service. Why don’t you stand in a semicircle right here around Our Lady.”

  June played us a gloomy-sounding song on the cello while August retold black Mary’s story start to finish. When she got to the part about the slaves touching Our Lady’s heart and how she filled them with fearlessness and plans of escape, June turned up the volume.

  “Our Lady became so powerful,” said August, “that the master was forced to put her under house arrest, to chain her in the carriage house. She was cast down and bound up.”

  “The blessed, blessed Mother,” mumbled Violet.

  Neil and Otis took the chains and started wrapping them around Our Lady. The way Otis tossed the chain around in the candlelight, I was sure it would be a miracle if he didn’t kill somebody.

  August went on. “But each time the master chained Mary in the carriage house, she would break the chains and return to her people.”

  August paused. She went around the circle and looked at us one by one, letting her eyes settle on each face like she wasn’t in any kind of rush.

  Then she lifted her voice. “What is bound will be unbound. What is cast down will be lifted up. This is the promise of Our Lady.”

  “Amen,” said Otis.

  June began to play again, this time a more joyful tune, thank goodness. I gazed at Mary, wrapped head to toe in rusted chain. Outside, heat lightning pulsed across the sky.

  They all seemed to be sunk in their meditating, or whatever it was they were doing. Everyone’s eyes were closed, except Zach’s. He stared right at me.

  I glanced at poor, shackled Mary. I couldn’t bear seeing her like that. “It is only a reenactment,” August had said. “To help us remember. Remembering is everything.” Still, the whole idea wrapped me in sadness. I hated remembering.

  I turned and walked out of the honey house, into the warm hush of night.

  Zach caught up with me as I reached the tomato garden. He took my hand, and we kept walking, stepping over May’s wall, walking into the woods without speaking. The cicadas were going crazy, filling the air with their strange brand of singing. Twice I walked into a spider’s web, feeling the fine, transparent threads across my face, and I liked them there. A veil spun from the night.

  I wanted the river. Its wildness. I wanted to strip naked and let the water lick my skin. Suck river stones the way I’d done that night Rosaleen and I’d slept by the creek. Even May’s death had not ruined the river for me. The river had done its best, I was sure, to give her a peaceful ride out of this life. You could die in a river, but maybe you could get reborn in it, too, like the beehive tombs August had told me about.

  Beneath the trees, moonlight trailed down. I steered us toward the water.

  Water can be so shiny in the dark. We stood on the bank and watched the moving pockets of light, letting the water sounds swell up around us. We were still holding hands, and I felt his fingers tighten around mine.

  “There was a pond near where I used to live,” I said. “Sometimes I would go there to wade in the water. One day the boys from the next farm were there fishing. They had all these little fish they’d caught fastened onto a stringer. They held me down on the bank and hooked it around my neck, making it too small to pull over my head. I was shouting, ‘Let me up, get that off me,’ but they laughed and said, ‘What’s the matter, don’t you like your fish necklace?’”

  “Goddamn boys,” Zach said.

  “A few of the fish were already dead, but most of them flapped around with their eyes staring at me, looking
scared. I realized if I swam out into the water up to my neck, they could breathe. I got as far as my knees, but then I turned back. I was too afraid to go any further. I think that was the worst part. I could’ve helped them, but I didn’t.”

  “You couldn’t have stayed out there in the pond forever,” Zach said.

  “But I could’ve stayed a long time. All I did was beg them to undo the stringer. Begged. They said to shut up, I was their fish holder, so I sat there till all the fish died against my chest. I dreamed about them for a year. Sometimes I would be hooked on the chain along with them.”

  “I know that feeling,” he said.

  I looked as far into his eyes as I could see. “Getting arrested—” I didn’t know how to put it.

  “What about it?” he said.

  “It changed you, didn’t it?”

  He stared at the water. “Sometimes, Lily, I’m so angry I wanna kill something.”

  “Those boys who made me wear the fish—they were angry like that, too. Angry at the world, and it made them mean. You have to promise me, Zach, you won’t be like them.”

  “I don’t want to,” he said.

  “Me either.”

  He bent his face close to mine and kissed me. At first it was like moth wings brushing my lips, then his mouth opening on mine. I gave way against him. He kissed me gently, but at the same time hungrily, and I liked how he tasted, the scent of his skin, the way his lips opened and closed, opened and closed. I was floating on a river of light. Escorted by fish. Jeweled with fish. And even with so much beautiful aching inside my body, with life throbbing beneath my skin and the rushing ways of love taking over, even with all of that, I could feel the fish dying against my heart.

  When the kiss was over, he looked at me with burning in his face. “Nobody will believe how hard I’m gonna study this year. That jail cell is gonna make me earn grades higher than I ever got. And when this year is over, nothing can keep me from leaving here and going to college.”

  “I know you’ll do it,” I said. “You will.” And it wasn’t just words. I’m good at sizing up people, and I knew for a fact he would make himself into a lawyer. Changes were coming, even to South Carolina—you could practically smell them in the air—and Zach would help bring them. He would be one of those drum majors for freedom that Martin Luther King talked about. That’s how I liked to think of Zach now. A drum major.

  He faced me, and shifting around on his feet, he said, “I want you to know that I—” He stopped and looked up into the treetops.

  I stepped nearer to him. “You want me to know what?”

  “That I—I care about you. I think about you all the time.”

  It crossed my mind to say there were things he didn’t know about me, that he might not care so much if he knew them, but I smiled and said, “I care about you, too.”

  “We can’t be together now, Lily, but one day, after I’ve gone away and become somebody, I’m gonna find you, and we’ll be together then.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.” He lifted the chain with his dogtag from around his neck and lowered it over my head. “So you won’t forget, okay?”

  The silver rectangle dropped down under my shirt, where it dangled cold and certain between my breasts. Zachary Lincoln Taylor, resting there, along my heart.

  Wading in up to my neck.

  If the queen were smarter, she would probably be hopelessly neurotic. As is, she is shy and skittish, possibly because she never leaves the hive, but spends her days confined in darkness, a kind of eternal night, perpetually in labor…. Her true role is less that of a queenthan mother of the hive, a title often accorded to her. And yet, this is something of a mockery because of her lack of maternal instincts or the ability to care for her young.

  —The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men

  Chapter Twelve

  I waited for August in her room. Waiting was a thing I’d had tons of experience doing. Waiting for the girls at school to invite me somewhere. For T. Ray to change his ways. For the police to show up and drag us off to the Everglades prison. For my mother to send a sign of love.

  Zach and I had hung around outside till the Daughters of Mary finished in the honey house. We’d helped them clean up the mess in the yard, me stacking plates and cups and Zach folding up card tables. Queenie had smiled and said, “How come you two left before we finished?”

  “It got too long,” said Zach.

  “So that’s what it was,” she teased, and Cressie giggled.

  When Zach left, I slipped back into the honey house and retrieved my mother’s photograph and her black Mary picture from underneath my pillow. Clutching them in my hands, I glided past the Daughters as they finished up the dishes in the kitchen. They called to me, “Where’re you going, Lily?”

  I hated to be rude, but I found I couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak a word of idle talk. I wanted to know about my mother. I didn’t care about anything else.

  I marched straight into August’s room, a room filled with the smell of beeswax. I switched on a lamp and sat on the cedar chest at the end of her bed, where I folded and unfolded my hands eight or ten times. They were cool, damp, with a mind of their own. All they wanted to do was fidget and pop knuckles. I stuck them under my thighs.

  The only other time I’d been in August’s room was the time I’d fainted during the Daughters of Mary meeting and wakened in her bed. I must have been too muddled then to see it, because it all seemed new to me. You could’ve wandered around in this room for hours and had a field day looking at her stuff.

  For starters, everything was blue. Bedspread, curtains, rug, chair cushion, lamps. Don’t get the idea it was boring, though. She had ten different shades of it. Sky blue, lake blue, sailor blue, aqua blue—you name a blue. I had the feeling of scuba diving through the ocean.

  On her dressing table, where less interesting people would’ve put a jewelry box or a picture frame, August had a fish aquarium turned upside down with a giant piece of honeycomb inside it. Honey had oozed out and formed puddles on the tray underneath.

  On her bedside tables were beeswax candles, melted down into brass holders. I wondered if they could be the ones I’d personally created. It gave me a little thrill to think so, how I had helped to light August’s room when it was dark.

  I walked over and inspected the books arranged neatly on her bookshelf. The Advanced Language of Beekeeping, Apiary Science, Bee Pollination, Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, The Myths of Greece, The Cultivation of Honey, Bee Legends Around the World, Mary Through the Ages. I pulled the last one off the shelf and opened it across my lap, thumbing through the pictures. Sometimes Mary was brunette and brown-eyed, other times blond and blue-eyed, but gorgeous every time. She looked like a Miss America contestant. A Miss Mississippi. You can usually count on the girls from Mississippi to win. I couldn’t help wishing to see Mary in a swimsuit and heels—before her pregnancy, of course.

  The big shock, though, was all the pictures of Mary being presented with a lily by the angel Gabriel. In every one, where he showed up to tell her she was going to have the baby of babies, even though she wasn’t married yet, he had a big white lily for her. As if this was the consolation prize for the gossip she was in for. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf.

  A breeze moved through the room from the open window. I walked to it and stared out at the dark fringe of trees by the edge of the woods, a half moon wedged like a gold coin into a slot, about to drop through the sky with a clink. Voices filtered through the screen. Women voices. They rose in chirps and melted away. The Daughters were leaving. I twisted my hair with my fingers, walked around the throw rug in circles, the way a dog will do before it settles onto the floor.

  I thought about prison movies in which they’re about to electrocute some prisoner—wrongly convicted, of course—the camera going back and forth between the poor man sweating in his cell block and the clock creeping toward twelve.

  I sat down on the ced
ar chest again.

  Footsteps landed on the floorboards in the hallway, precise, unhurried steps. August steps. I sat up straighter, taller, my heart starting to beat so I could hear it in my ears. When she stepped into the room, she said, “I thought I might find you here.”

  I had a desire to bolt past her through the door, dive out the window. You don’t have to do this, I told myself, but the wanting rose up. I had to know.

  “Remember when…” I said. My voice came out barely a whisper. I cleared my throat. “Remember when you said we should have a talk?”

  She closed the door. A sound so final. No turning back, it said. This is it, it said.

  “I remember it very well.”

  I laid out the photograph of my mother on the cedar chest.

  August walked over and picked up the picture. “You are the spitting image of her.”

  She turned her eyes on me, her big, flickering eyes with the copper fire inside them. I wished I could look out at the world through them just one time.

  “It’s my mother,” I said.

  “I know, honey. Your mother was Deborah Fontanel Owens.”

  I looked at her and blinked. She stepped toward me, and the yellow lamplight glazed her glasses so I could no longer make out her eyes. I shifted my position so I could see them better.

  She dragged the chair from her dressing table over to the cedar chest and sat down facing me. “I’m so glad we’re finally going to talk this out.”

  I could feel her knee barely touching mine. A full minute passed without either of us saying a word. She held the picture, and I knew she was waiting for me to break the silence.

  “You knew she was my mother all along,” I said, uncertain whether I felt anger, or betrayal, or just plain surprise.

  She placed her hand on mine and brushed her thumb back and forth across my skin. “The first day you showed up, I took one look at you and all I could see was Deborah when she was your age. I knew Deborah had a daughter, but I thought no, you couldn’t be; it was too much to believe that Deborah’s daughter would turn up in my parlor. Then you said your name was Lily, and right that minute I knew who you were.”