I stood outside the door and watched, even though it was a private moment. June gripped August’s back, and her hands trembled. “May would’ve loved this wedding,” she said. “She must’ve told me a hundred times I was being stubborn about Neil. Oh, God, August, why didn’t I do it sooner, while she was still alive?”
August turned slightly and caught sight of me in the doorway. She held June, who was starting to cry, but she kept her eyes on mine. She said, “Regrets don’t help anything, you know that.”
The next day I actually felt like eating. I wandered in for lunch to find Rosaleen wearing a new dress and her hair freshly plaited. She was poking tissues into her bosom for safekeeping.
“Where did you get that dress?” I said.
She turned a circle, modeling it, and when I smiled, she turned another one. It was what you would call a tent dress—yards of material falling from her shoulders without benefit of waistband and darts. It had a bright red background with giant white flowers all over it. I could see she was in love with it.
“August took me into town yesterday, and I bought it,” she said. I felt startled suddenly by the things that had been going on without me.
“Your dress is pretty,” I lied, noticing for the first time there were no lunch fixings anywhere.
She smoothed her hands down the front of it, looked at the clock on the stove, and reached for an old white vinyl purse of May’s that she’d inherited.
“You going somewhere?” I said.
“She sure is,” said August, stepping into the room, smiling at Rosaleen.
“I’m gonna finish what I started,” Rosaleen said, lifting her chin. “I’m gonna register to vote.”
My arms dropped by my sides, and my mouth came open. “But what about—what about you being…you know?”
Rosaleen squinted at me. “What?”
“A fugitive from justice,” I said. “What if they recognize your name? What if you get caught?”
I cut my eyes over at August.
“Oh, I don’t think there’ll be a problem,” August said, taking the truck keys off the brass nail by the door. “We’re going to the voter drive at the Negro high school.”
“But—”
“For heaven’s sake, all I’m doing is getting my voter’s card,” said Rosaleen.
“That’s what you said last time,” I told her.
She ignored that. She strapped May’s purse on her arm. A split ran from the handle around onto the side.
“You wanna come, Lily?” said August.
I did and I didn’t. I looked down at my feet, tanned and bare. “I’ll just stay here and make some lunch.”
August lifted her eyebrows. “It’s nice to see you’re hungry for a change.”
They went onto the back porch, down the steps. I followed them to the truck. As Rosaleen got in, I said, “Don’t spit on anybody’s shoes, okay?”
She let out a laugh that made her whole body shake. It looked like all the flowers on her dress were bobbing in a gust of wind.
I went back inside, boiled two hot dogs, and ate them without buns. Then I headed back to the woods, where I picked a few bachelor buttons that grew wild in the plots of sunshine before getting bored and tossing them away.
I sat on the ground, expecting to sink down into my dark mood and think about my mother, but the only thoughts I had were for Rosaleen. I pictured her standing in a line of people. I could almost see her practicing writing her name. Getting it just right. Her big moment. Suddenly I wished I’d gone with them. I wished it more than anything. I wanted to see her face when they handed her her card. I wanted to say, Rosaleen, you know what? I’m proud of you.
What was I doing sitting out here in the woods?
I got up and went inside. Passing the telephone in the hallway, I had an urge to call Zach. To become part of the world again. I dialed his number.
When he answered, I said, “So what’s new?”
“Who’s this?” he said.
“Very funny,” I told him.
“I’m sorry about…everything,” he said. “August told me what happened.” Silence floated between us a moment, and then he said, “Will you have to go back?”
“You mean back to my father?”
He hesitated. “Yeah.”
The minute he said it, I had the feeling that’s exactly what would happen. Everything in my body felt it. “I suppose so,” I said. I coiled the phone cord around my finger and stared down the hall at the front door. For a few seconds I was unable to look away, imagining myself leaving through it and not coming back.
“I’ll come see you,” he said, and I wanted to cry.
Zach knocking on the door of T. Ray Owens’s house. It could never happen.
“I asked you what was new, remember?” I didn’t expect anything was, but I needed to change the subject.
“Well, for starters, I’ll be going to the white high school this year.”
I was speechless. I squeezed the phone in my hand. “Are you sure you wanna do that?” I said. I knew what those places were like.
“Somebody’s got to,” he said. “Might as well be me.”
Both of us, it seemed like, were doomed to misery.
Rosaleen came home, a bona fide registered voter in the United States of America. We all sat around that evening, waiting to eat dinner, while she personally called every one of the Daughters on the telephone.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m a registered voter,” she said each time, and there would be a pause, and then she’d say, “President Johnson and Mr. Hubert Humphrey, that’s who. I’m not voting for Mr. Pisswater.” She laughed every time, like this was the joke of jokes. She would say, “Goldwater, Pisswater, get it?”
This went on even after dinner. Just when we’d think she had it out of her system, out of the complete blue, she’d say, “I’ll be casting my vote for Mr. Johnson.”
When she finally wound down and said good night, I watched her climb the stairs wearing her red-and-white voter-registration dress, and I wished again that I’d been there.
Regrets don’t help anything, August had told June, you know that.
I ran up the stairs and grabbed Rosaleen from behind, stopping her with one foot poised in the air, searching for the next step. I wrapped my arms around her middle. “I love you,” I blurted out, not even knowing I was going to say this.
That night when the katydids and tree frogs and every other musical creature were wound up and going strong, I walked around the honey house, feeling like I had spring fever. It was ten o’clock at night, and I honestly felt like I could’ve scrubbed the floors and washed the windows.
I went over to the shelves and straightened all the mason jars, then took the broom and swept the floor, up under the holding tank and the generator, where nobody had swept for fifty years, it looked like. I still wasn’t tired, so I stripped the sheets off my bed and went over to the pink house and got a set of clean ones, careful to tiptoe around and not wake anybody up. I got dust rags and Comet cleanser in case I needed them.
I came back, and before I knew it I was involved in a full-blown cleaning frenzy. By midnight I had the place shining.
I even went through my stuff and got rid of some things. Old pencils, a couple of stories I’d written that were too embarrassing for anybody to read, a torn pair of shorts, a comb with most of its teeth missing.
Next I gathered up the mouse bones that I’d kept in my pockets, realizing I didn’t need to carry them around anymore. But I knew I couldn’t throw them away either, so I tied them together with a red hair ribbon and set them on the shelf by the fan. I stared at them a minute, wondering how a person got attached to mouse bones. I decided sometimes you just need to nurse something, that’s all.
By now I was starting to get tired, but I took my mother’s things out of the hatbox—her tortoiseshell mirror, her brush, the poetry book, her whale pin, the picture of us with our faces together—and set them up on the shelf with the mouse bones. I ha
ve to say, it made the whole room look different.
Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.
The next morning I showed up in the kitchen with the whale pin fastened to my favorite blue top. A Nat King Cole record was going. “Unforgettable, that’s what you are.” I think it was on to drown out all the commotion the pink Lady Kenmore washer was making on the porch. It was a wondrous invention, but it sounded like a cement mixer. August sat with her elbows on the tabletop, drinking the last of her coffee and reading another book from the bookmobile.
When she lifted her eyes, they took in my face, then went straight to the whale pin. I saw her smile before she went back to her book.
I fixed my standard Rice Krispies with raisins. After I finished eating, August said, “Come on out to the hives. I need to show you something.”
We got all decked out in our bee outfits—at least I did. August hardly ever wore anything but the hat and veil.
Walking out there, August widened her step to miss squashing an ant. It reminded me of May. I said, “It was May who got my mother started saving roaches, wasn’t it?”
“Who else?” she said, and smiled. “It happened when your mother was a teenager. May caught her killing a roach with a flyswatter. She said, ‘Deborah Fontanel, every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?’ Then she showed her how to make a trail of marshmallows and graham crackers.”
I fingered the whale pin on my shoulder, picturing the whole thing. Then I looked around and noticed the world. It was such a pretty day you couldn’t imagine anything coming along to spoil it.
According to August, if you’ve never seen a cluster of beehives first thing in the morning, you’ve missed the eighth wonder of the world. Picture these white boxes tucked under pine trees. The sun will slant through the branches, shining in the sprinkles of dew drying on the lids. There will be a few hundred bees doing laps around the hive boxes, just warming up, but mostly taking their bathroom break, as bees are so clean they will not soil the inside of their hives. From a distance it will look like a big painting you might see in a museum, but museums can’t capture the sound. Fifty feet away you will hear it, a humming that sounds like it came from another planet. At thirty feet your skin will start to vibrate. The hair will lift on your neck. Your head will say, Don’t go any farther, but your heart will send you straight into the hum, where you will be swallowed by it. You will stand there and think, I am in the center of the universe, where everything is sung to life.
August lifted the lid off a hive. “This one is missing its queen,” she said.
I’d learned enough beekeeping to know that a hive without a queen was a death sentence for the bees. They would stop work and go around completely demoralized.
“What happened?” I said.
“I discovered it yesterday. The bees were sitting out here on the landing board looking melancholy. If you see bees loafing and lamenting, you can bet their queen is dead. So I searched through the combs, and sure enough she was gone. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe it was just her time.”
“What do you do now?”
“I called the County Extension, and they put me in touch with a man in Goose Creek who said he’d drive over with a new queen sometime today. I want to get the hive requeened before one of the workers starts laying. If we get laying workers, we’ve got ourselves a mess.”
“I didn’t know a worker bee could lay eggs,” I said.
“All they can do, really, is lay unfertilized drone eggs. They’ll fill up the combs with them, and as the workers naturally die off, there are none to replace them.”
As she lowered the lid, she said, “I just wanted to show you what a queenless colony looked like.”
She lifted back the veils from her hat, then lifted mine back, too. She held my gaze while I studied the gold flecks in her eyes.
“Remember when I told you the story of Beatrix,” she said, “the nun who ran away from her convent? Remember how the Virgin Mary stood in for her?”
“I remember,” I said. “I figured you knew I’d run away like Beatrix did. You were trying to tell me that Mary was standing in for me at home, taking care of things till I went back.”
“Oh, that’s not what I was trying to tell you at all,” she said. “You weren’t the runaway I was thinking about. I was thinking about your mother running away. I was just trying to plant a little idea in your head.”
“What idea?”
“That maybe Our Lady could act for Deborah and be like a stand-in mother for you.”
The light was making patterns on the grass. I stared at them, feeling shy about what I was going to say. “I told Our Lady one night in the pink house that she was my mother. I put my hand on her heart the way you and the Daughters always do at your meetings. I know I tried it that one time before and fainted, but this time I stayed on my feet, and for a while after that I really did feel stronger. Then I seemed to lose it. I think what I need is to go back and touch her heart again.”
August said, “Listen to me now, Lily. I’m going to tell you something I want you always to remember, all right?”
Her face had grown serious, intent. Her eyes did not blink.
“All right,” I said, and I felt something electric slide down my spine.
“Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere, like a fairy godmother. She’s not the statue in the parlor. She’s something inside of you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Our Lady is inside me,” I repeated, not sure I did.
“You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.” She held out her hand to me. “Give me your hand.”
I lifted my left hand and placed it in hers. She took it and pressed the flat of my palm up against my chest, over my beating heart. “You don’t have to put your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life,” she said. “You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.”
August stepped closer. She kept the pressure steady against my hand. “All those times your father treated you mean, Our Lady was the voice in you that said, ‘No, I will not bow down to this. I am Lily Melissa Owens, I will not bow down.’ Whether you could hear this voice or not, she was in there saying it.”
I took my other hand and placed it on top of hers, and she moved her free hand on top of it, so we had this black-and-white stack of hands resting upon my chest.
“When you’re unsure of yourself,” she said, “when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she’s the one inside saying, ‘Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.’ She’s the power inside you, you understand?”
Her hands stayed where they were but released their pressure. “And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart, that’s Mary, too, not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love—but to persist in love.”
She paused. Bees drummed their sound into the air. August retrieved her hands from the pile on my chest, but I left mine there.
“This Mary I’m talking about sits in your heart all day long, saying, ‘Lily, you are my everlasting home. Don’t you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.’”
I closed my eyes, and in the coolness of morning, there among the bees, I felt for one clear instant what she was talking about.
When I opened my eyes, August was nowhere around. I looked back toward the house and saw her crossing the yard, her white dress catching the light.
The knock on the door came at 2:00 P.M. I was sitting in the parlor writing in the new notebook Zach had left at my door, setting down everything that had happened to me since Mary Day. Words stream
ed out of me so fast I couldn’t keep up with them, and that’s all I was thinking about. I didn’t pay attention to the knock. Later I would remember it didn’t sound like an ordinary knock. More like a fist pounding.
I kept writing, waiting for August to answer it. I was sure it was the man from Goose Creek with the new queen bee.
The pounding came again. June had gone off with Neil. Rosaleen was in the honey house washing a new shipment of mason jars, a job that belonged to me, but she’d volunteered for it, seeing how badly I needed to write everything out. I didn’t know where August was. Probably in the honey house, helping Rosaleen.
I look back and wonder: how did I not guess who was there?
The third time the knocking came, I got up and opened the door.
T. Ray stared at me, clean-shaven, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with chest hair curling through the neck opening. He was smiling. Not a smile of sweet adoring, I hasten to say, but the fat grin of a man who has been rabbit hunting all day long and has just now found his prey backed up in a hollow log with no way out. He said, “Well, well, well. Look who’s here.”
I had a sudden, terror-stricken thought he might that second drag me out to his truck and hightail it straight back to the peach farm, where I would never be heard from again. I stepped backward into the hallway, and with a forced politeness that surprised me and seemed to throw him off stride, I said, “Won’t you come in?”
What else was I going to do? I turned and forced myself to walk calmly into the parlor.
His boots clomped after me. “All right, goddamn it,” he said, speaking to the back of my head. “If you want to pretend I’m making a social visit, we’ll pretend, but this ain’t a social visit, you hear me? I spent half my summer looking for you, and I’m gonna take you out of here nice and quiet or kicking and screaming—don’t matter which to me.”
I motioned to a rocking chair. “Have a seat if you want to.”
I was trying to look ho-hum, when inside I was close to fullblown panic. Where was August? My breath had turned into short, shallow puffs, a dog pant.