The Secret Life of Bees

  He followed me up the stairs. I moved with deliberate slowness, anger suddenly building in me. How could he leave Rosaleen in jail like that?

  As I stepped inside my room, he stopped at the doorway. “I have to go settle the payroll for the pickers,” he said. “Don’t you leave this room. You understand me? You sit here and think about me coming back and dealing with you. Think about it real hard.”

  “You don’t scare me,” I said, mostly under my breath.

  He’d already turned to leave, but now he whirled back. “What did you say?”

  “You don’t scare me,” I repeated, louder this time. A brazen feeling had broken loose in me, a daring something that had been locked up in my chest.

  He stepped toward me, raising the back of his hand like he might bring it down across my face. “You better watch your mouth.”

  “Go ahead, try and hit me!” I yelled.

  When he swung, I turned my face. It was a clean miss.

  I ran for the bed and scrambled onto the middle of it, breathing hard. “My mother will never let you touch me again!” I shouted.

  “Your mother?” His face was bright red. “You think that goddamn woman gave a shit about you?”

  “My mother loved me!” I cried.

  He threw back his head and let out a forced, bitter laugh.

  “It’s—it’s not funny,” I said.

  He lunged toward the bed then, pressing his fists into the mattress, bringing his face so close I could see the tiny holes where his whiskers grew. I slid backward, toward the pillows, shoving my back into the headboard.

  “Not funny?” he yelled. “Not funny? Why, it’s the funniest goddamn thing I ever heard: you thinking your mother is your guardian angel.” He laughed again. “The woman could have cared less about you.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “It’s not.”

  “And how would you know?” he said, still leaning toward me. A leftover smile pulled the corners of his mouth.

  “I hate you!” I screamed.

  That stopped his smiling instantly. He stiffened. “Why, you little bitch,” he said. The color faded from his lips.

  Suddenly I felt ice cold, as if something dangerous had slipped into the room. I looked toward the window and felt a tremor slide along my spine.

  “You listen to me,” he said, his voice deadly calm. “The truth is, your sorry mother ran off and left you. The day she died, she’d come back to get her things, that’s all. You can hate me all you want, but she’s the one who left you.”

  The room turned absolutely silent.

  He brushed at something on his shirtfront, then walked to the door.

  After he left, I didn’t move except to trace the bars of light on the bed with my finger. The sound of his boots banging down the stairs drifted away, and I took the pillows from underneath the bedspread and placed them around me like I was making an inner tube that might keep me afloat. I could understand her leaving him. But leaving me? This would sink me forever.

  The bee jar sat on the bedside table, empty now. Sometime since this morning the bees had finally gotten around to flying off. I reached over and took the jar in my hands, and out came the tears I’d been holding on to, it seemed like for years.

  Your sorry mother ran off and left you. The day she died, she’d come back to get her things, that’s all.

  God and Jesus, you make him take it back.

  The memory settled over me. The suitcase on the floor. The way they’d fought. My shoulders began to shake in a strange, uncontrollable way. I held the jar pressed between my breasts, hoping it would steady me, but I couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t stop crying, and it frightened me, as though I’d been struck by a car I hadn’t seen coming and was lying on the side of the road, trying to understand what had happened.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, replaying his words over and over. Each time there was a wrench in what felt like my heart.

  I don’t know how long I sat there feeling broken to pieces. Finally I walked to the window and gazed out at the peach trees stretching halfway to North Carolina, the way they held up their leafy arms in gestures of pure beseeching. The rest was sky and air and lonely space.

  I looked down at the bee jar still clutched in my hand and saw a teaspoon of teardrops floating in the bottom. I unfastened the window screen and poured it out. The wind lifted it on her skirt tails and shook it over the blistered grass. How could she have left me? I stood there several minutes looking out on the world, trying to understand. Little birds were singing, so perfect.

  That’s when it came to me: What if my mother leaving wasn’t true? What if T. Ray had made it up to punish me?

  I felt almost dizzy with relief. That was it. That had to be it. I mean, my father was Thomas Edison when it came to inventing punishments. Once after I’d back-talked him, he’d told me my rabbit, Mademoiselle, had died, and I’d cried all night before I discovered her the next morning healthy as anything in her pen. He had to be making this up, too. Some things were not possible in this world. Children did not have two parents who refused to love them. One, maybe, but for pity’s sake, not two.

  It had to be like he’d said before: she was cleaning out the closet the day of the accident. People cleaned out closets all the time.

  I took a breath to steady myself.

  You could say I’d never had a true religious moment, the kind where you know yourself spoken to by a voice that seems other than yourself, spoken to so genuinely you see the words shining on trees and clouds. But I had such a moment right then, standing in my own ordinary room. I heard a voice say, Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open.

  In a matter of seconds I knew exactly what I had to do—leave. I had to get away from T. Ray, who was probably on his way back this minute to do Lord-knows-what to me. Not to mention I had to get Rosaleen out of jail.

  The clock read 2:40. I needed a solid plan, but I didn’t have the luxury of sitting down to think one up. I grabbed my pink canvas duffel bag, the one I’d planned to use for overnights the minute anyone asked me. I took the thirty-eight dollars I’d earned selling peaches and stuffed it into the bag with my seven best pairs of panties, the ones that had the days of the week printed across the backside. I dumped in socks, five pairs of shorts, tops, a nightgown, shampoo, brush, toothpaste, toothbrush, rubber bands for my hair, all the time watching the window. What else? Catching sight of the map tacked on the wall, I snatched it down, not bothering to pry out the tacks.

  I reached under the mattress and pulled out my mother’s picture, the gloves, and the wooden picture of black Mary, and tucked them down in the bag, too.

  Tearing a sheet of paper from last year’s English notebook, I wrote a note, short and to the point: “Dear T. Ray, Don’t bother looking for me. Lily. P.S. People who tell lies like you should rot in hell.”

  When I checked the window, T. Ray was coming out of the orchard toward the house, fists balled, head plowed forward like a bull wanting to gore something.

  I propped the note on my dresser and stood a moment in the center of the room, wondering if I’d ever see it again. “Good-bye,” I said, and there was a tiny sprig of sadness pushing up from my heart.

  Outside, I spied the broken space in the latticework that wrapped around the foundation of the house. Squeezing through, I disappeared into violet light and cobwebbed air.

  T. Ray’s boots stomped across the porch.

  “Lily! Li-leeeee!” I heard his voice sailing along the floorboards of the house.

  All of a sudden I caught sight of Snout sniffing at the spot where I’d crawled through. I backed deeper into the darkness, but she’d caught my scent and started barking her mangy head off.

  T. Ray emerged with my note crumpled in his hand, yelled at Snout to shut the hell up, and tore out in his truck, leaving plumes of exhaust all along the driveway.

  Walking along the weedy strip beside the highway for the second time that day, I was thinking how much older fourteen had made me. In the space
of a few hours I’d become forty years old.

  The road stretched empty as far as I could see, with heat shimmer making the air seem wavy in places. If I managed to get Rosaleen free—an “if” so big it could have been the planet Jupiter—just where did I think we’d go?

  Suddenly I stood still. Tiburon, South Carolina. Of course. The town written on the back of the black Mary picture. Hadn’t I been planning to go there one of these days? It made such perfect sense: my mother had been there. Or else she knew people there who’d cared enough to send her a nice picture of Jesus’ mother. And who would ever think to look for us there?

  I squatted beside the ditch and unfolded the map. Tiburon was a pencil dot beside the big red star of Columbia. T. Ray would check the bus station, so Rosaleen and I would have to hitchhike. How hard could that be? You stand there with your thumb out and a person takes pity on you.

  A short distance past the church, Brother Gerald whizzed by in his white Ford. I saw his brake lights flicker. He backed up.

  “I thought that was you,” he said through the window. “Where’re you headed?”

  “Town.”

  “Again? What’s the bag for?”

  “I’m…I’m taking some things to Rosaleen. She’s in jail.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, flinging open the passenger door. “Get in, I’m heading there myself.”

  I’d never been inside a preacher’s car before. It’s not that I expected a ton of Bibles stacked on the backseat, but I was surprised to see that, inside, it was like anybody else’s car.

  “You’re going to see Rosaleen?” I said.

  “The police called and asked me to press charges against her for stealing church property. They say she took some of our fans. You know anything about that?”

  “It was only two fans—”

  He jumped straight into his pulpit voice. “In the eyes of God it doesn’t matter whether it’s two fans or two hundred. Stealing is stealing. She asked if she could take the fans, I said no, in plain English. She took them anyway. Now that’s sin, Lily.”

  Pious people have always gotten on my nerves.

  “But she’s deaf in one ear,” I said. “I think she just mixed up what you said. She’s always doing that. T. Ray will tell her, ‘Iron my two shirts,’ and she’ll iron the blue shirts.”

  “A hearing problem. Well, I didn’t know that,” he said.

  “Rosaleen would never steal a thing.”

  “They said she’d assaulted some men at the Esso station.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “See, she was singing her favorite hymn, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ I don’t believe those men are Christians, Brother Gerald, because they yelled at her to shut up with that blankety-blank Jesus tune. Rosaleen said, ‘You can curse me, but don’t blaspheme the Lord Jesus.’ But they kept right on. So she poured the juice from her snuff cup on their shoes. Maybe she was wrong, but in her mind she was standing up for Jesus.” I was sweating through my top and all along the backs of my thighs.

  Brother Gerald dragged his teeth back and forth across his lip. I could tell he was actually weighing what I’d said.

  Mr. Gaston was in the station alone, eating boiled peanuts at his desk, when Brother Gerald and I came through the door. Being the sort of person he was, Mr. Gaston had shells all over the floor.

  “Your colored woman ain’t here,” he said, looking at me. “I took her to the hospital for stitches. She took a fall and hit her head.”

  Took a fall, my rear end. I wanted to throw his boiled peanuts against the wall.

  I could not keep myself from shouting at him. “What do you mean, she fell and hit her head?”

  Mr. Gaston looked over at Brother Gerald, that all-knowing look men give each other when a female acts the least bit hysterical. “Settle down, now,” he said to me.

  “I can’t settle down till I know if she’s all right,” I said, my voice calmer but still shaking a little.

  “She’s fine. It’s only a little concussion. I expect she’ll be back here later this evening. The doctor wanted her watched for a few hours.”

  While Brother Gerald was explaining how he couldn’t sign the warrant papers seeing as how Rosaleen was nearly deaf, I started for the door.

  Mr. Gaston shot me a warning look. “We got a guard on her at the hospital, and he’s not letting anybody see her, so you go on back home. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m going home.”

  “You do that,” he said. “’Cause if I hear you’ve been anywhere near that hospital, I’m calling your daddy again.”

  Sylvan Memorial Hospital was a low brick building with one wing for whites and one for blacks.

  I stepped into a deserted corridor clogged with too many smells. Carnations, old people, rubbing alcohol, bathroom deodorizer, red Jell-O. Air conditioners poked out from the windows in the white section, but back here there was nothing but electric fans moving the hot air from one place to another.

  At the nurses’ station a policeman leaned on the desk. He looked like somebody just out of high school, who’d flunked PE and hung out with the shop boys smoking at recess. He was talking to a girl in white. A nurse, I guess, but she didn’t look much older than I was. “I get off at six o’clock,” I heard him say. She stood there smiling, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.

  At the opposite end of the hall an empty chair sat outside one of the rooms. It had a policeman’s hat underneath it. I hurried down there to find a sign on the door. NO VISITORS. I went right in.

  There were six beds, all empty, except the farthest one over by the window. The sheets rose up, trying hard to accommodate the occupant. I plopped my bag on the floor. “Rosaleen?”

  A gauze bandage the size of a baby’s diaper was wrapped around her head, and her wrists were tied to the bed railing.

  When she saw me standing there, she started to cry. In all the years she’d looked after me, I’d never seen a tear cross her face. Now the levee broke wide open. I patted her arm, her leg, her cheek, her hand.

  When her tear glands were finally exhausted, I said, “What happened to you?”

  “After you left, that policeman called Shoe let those men come in for their apology.”

  “They hit you again?”

  “Two of them held me by the arms while the other one hit me—the one with the flashlight. He said, ‘Nigger, you say you’re sorry.’ When I didn’t, he came at me. He hit me till the policeman said that was enough. They didn’t get no apology, though.”

  I wanted those men to die in hell begging for ice water, but I felt mad at Rosaleen, too. Why couldn’t you just apologize? Then maybe Franklin Posey would let you off with just a beating. All she’d done was guarantee they’d come back.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” I said, untying her wrists.

  “I can’t just leave,” she said. “I’m still in jail.”

  “If you stay here, those men are gonna come back and kill you. I’m serious. They’re gonna kill you, like those colored people in Mississippi got killed. Even T. Ray said so.”

  When she sat up, the hospital gown rode up her thighs. She tugged it toward her knees, but it slid right back like a piece of elastic. I found her dress in the closet and handed it to her.

  “This is crazy—” she said.

  “Put on the dress. Just do it, all right?”

  She pulled it over her head and stood there with the bandage sloped over her forehead.

  “That bandage has got to go,” I said. I eased it off to find two rows of catgut stitches. Then, signaling her to be quiet, I cracked the door to see if the policeman was back at his chair.

  He was. Naturally it was too much to hope he’d stay off flirting long enough for us to float out of here. I stood there a couple of minutes, trying to think up some kind of scheme, then opened my bag, dug into my peach money, and took out a couple of dimes. “I’m gonna try and get rid of him. Get in the bed, in case he looks in here.”


  She stared at me, her eyes shrunk to mere dots. “Baby Jesus,” she said.

  When I stepped out into the hall, he jumped up. “You weren’t supposed to be in there!”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said. “I’m looking for my aunt. I could have sworn they told me Room One-oh-two, but there’s a colored woman in there.” I shook my head, trying to look confused.

  “You’re lost, all right. You need to go to the other side of the building. You’re in the colored section.”

  I smiled at him. “Oh.”

  Over on the white side of the hospital I found a pay phone next to a waiting area. I got the hospital number from Information and dialed it up, asking for the nurses’ station in the colored wing.

  I cleared my throat. “This is the jailer’s wife over at the police station,” I said to the girl who answered. “Mr. Gaston wants you to send the policeman that we’ve got over there back to the station. Tell him the preacher is on his way in to sign some papers, and Mr. Gaston can’t be here ’cause he had to leave just now. So if you could tell him to get over here right away…”

  Part of me was saying these actual words, and part of me was listening to myself say them, thinking how I belonged in a reform school or a juvenile delinquent home for girls, and would probably soon be in one.

  She repeated it all back to me, making sure she had it straight. Her sigh passed over the receiver. “I’ll tell him.”

  She’ll tell him. I couldn’t believe it.

  I crept back to the colored side and hunched over the water fountain as the girl in white relayed all this to him, using a lot of hand gestures. I watched as the policeman put on his hat and walked down the corridor and out the door.

  When Rosaleen and I stepped from her room, I looked left, then right. We had to go past the nurses’ desk to get to the door, but the girl in white seemed preoccupied, sitting with her head down, writing something.

  “Walk like a visitor,” I told Rosaleen.