Authors: Lindsay Eagar
Hour of the Bees (18 page)
Bzzz, bzzz . . .
A bee flies above me. I barely notice as I scramble for something to stop the bleeding. But there’s literally nothing left in the house. Everything is packed, even the toilet paper. I yank the fabric belt out of my shorts and wrap it around his wound, my knees turning to jelly.
“Summer’s turned up its heat,
chiquita
. Time to slaughter the lamb and make a feast of the blood.” His oxygen tube murmurs with air.
Stop saying “blood,”
I silently command. “That’s only a story,” I remind him. All of it, just a story he cooked up.
“It is my best story,” he says.
“We’re supposed to get in the truck. We’re moving, remember?”
“Moving,” he repeats, staring at the blood seeping through the fabric of my belt.
I grasp the closet doorknob, suddenly light-headed.
“I don’t like blood, either, Caro-leeen-a,” Serge says, his voice far away. He’s pale, his bee-sting lumps extra purple. “My knife slipped. Old hands, very old hands.” The red stain blossoms, bigger and bigger. I can see the layers of his skin, like a cake . . .
“Grandpa, I can’t . . .” My world is spinning to a pinhole, the bee buzzing around and around, a shooting star.
“Mom!” I cry. “He’s here . . .” But I’m going, going, gone.
When I open my eyes, Mom’s waving her hands an inch from my nose and I’m flat on my back, Dad elevating my legs.
“What happened?” I say.
“You fainted,” Mom says.
Serge putters into the room and pushes a cool glass of water to me. “Here,” he says. “Drought dries you out. Dries you to the bones.”
I sip.
“Must be the heat,” Mom says.
But that’s not why I passed out. I remember. “Is Serge’s hand okay?”
Don’t think of the blood, don’t think of the blood
.
Mom raises her eyebrows. “Did something happen to it?”
“He cut it.”
Serge holds out his hand. The palm is whole, not a scratch in sight.
“But . . .” I try to speak but my head spins, and I trail off into silence. Did I just imagine the cut? I must have. How else did Serge’s hand go from torn and bleeding to the clean, weathered hands of an old sheep farmer?
Mom links her arm in mine and walks me to the moving van. “I want you to wait in here with the AC on. We’ll finish loading up.”
I don’t protest, and moments later I bask in my first air-conditioning of the summer. Alta glares at me while she lugs things to the van.
Did I really pass out from the heat? I swear I saw a slice in Serge’s hand, deep as a gully. I used my fabric belt to stop the blood, didn’t I? I glance down; the belt is missing from my shorts.
But the AC cools my head, and as my world stops spiraling, I think about it logically. I must have dreamed up the cut. This isn’t one of Serge’s stories. Wounds don’t just heal themselves.
I rest my legs against the dashboard, AC fanning my hair, and look at the ranch house — probably for the last time. If I squint, the windows turn into flat glassy eyes and the front door is a sad, square mouth, sighing. If the house could speak, what would it say? Would it sneeze out red desert dust, then talk about the bees, the bees, the bees? The ranch saw Rosa come and go. It saw her die. It saw Serge’s mind slowly darken, lightbulbs dimming year after year. It saw my family arrive and turn our noses up at its ancient beams, its funny smells, its old-fashioned ways.
I was wrong about you
, I want to say to the house.
We were all wrong about you
.
My family comes out of the ranch house for the last time. Serge follows them, slumping, a defeated soldier. He stops on the porch and turns back for a final look, but no one else does.
The air-conditioning is supposed to be cooling me off, but something inside of me is snapped open, burning, festering.
We can’t sell it
. As the thought pops into my head, I say it out loud. “We can’t sell it.” Dad was right when he said Serge isn’t the only one who cares about this house.
I care, too. I care so much.
I get out of the van and nearly trip; my legs still feel like warmed-up Jell-O.
“Carol, slow down! You’re supposed to be resting,” Mom says.
I ignore her, ignore my knees, which threaten to buckle. “Dad, please, don’t sell the ranch!” I sob, and choke on a scratchy gust of desert dirt. “Don’t let it go, Dad, please!”
“Carol, honey,” Dad starts. “The land belongs to someone else now. It’s a done deal.”
Anger boils up and out of me. “But the bees!”
I sound exactly like Serge
. It’s a fleeting thought, and I brush it away. “The bees have been flying around the ranch all summer. You guys don’t believe me, but it’s true! I found a seed in Grandma Rosa’s closet”— Dad winces and peeks at Serge —“and I planted it, and the bees came and . . . and . . .”
I can’t say it. I can’t say,
The bees brought back the rain
. Of all the things that have come out of Serge’s mouth, that sentence sounds the craziest. But it’s not. Now I know it’s not.
Alta heaves a sigh that could be heard from the ridge. “Can we go already?”
“Yes,” Dad says. “Carol, it’s time. Say good-bye.”
“Nooo!” I cling to the porch railing. “We can’t sell the ranch!”
“Stop!” Mom stomps over to me and wraps her arms around my middle. I hold on tighter as she pulls, clawing the wood, making a tug-of-war game out of this: Mom versus the porch, me as the rope. “Carol, this is ridiculous!”
“Please, nooo!” I howl.
“Come on, Carol! Stop acting like such a baby,” Alta says.
Her words sting the parts of me that are trying so hard to leave childhood behind. But I grip the porch railing tighter, digging my nails in.
“Caro-leeen-a.” Serge walks, calmly as a cat, into the eye of our storm. “Come get in the van, and I’ll tell you the next part of the story.”
He freezes me. I stare, Mom’s hands still around my middle.
“I’ll tell you what happened to the village and the tree,” he says. “To Sergio and Rosa.”
And just like I have been all summer, I’m drawn to Serge like a magnet. I let him help me in the van, where he buckles my seat belt. His wizened hands are steady, his breathing lulling my own inhales and exhales to half time.
Mom and Dad murmur behind him, and I know what they’re saying:
What’s going on? He’s supposed to be the wreck, not Carol
.
“Grandpa,” I say, and my eyes flood. For the first time, that name clicks — a summer shifting into autumn, a minute hand ticking a new hour into place. Not Serge, but Grandpa. It finally feels right to say it.
I say it again: “Grandpa. We have to say good-bye today.”
“Shh,” he says, patting my hand with his hand, just like a real grandfather, one whose brain isn’t being eaten away by dementia. My grandfather.
“Do you remember where you’re going today?” I whisper, before he launches me into a world of bees and lakes and cuts that always heal.
“Caro-leeen-a,” he says. “Just make sure Inés gets fed.”
My heart disintegrates to dust, and I lean into the seat, eyes closed. I’ll keep them closed the whole way home. I don’t want to see the ranch shrink in the distance. I don’t want to see telephone poles start to pop up or artificial, man-made colors trickle into the landscape. I don’t want the desert to end.
“Once upon a time,” Grandpa says, and I, on the border of sleep, listen.
O
nce upon a time, there was no tree. Strangers hadn’t passed through the village in years. There wasn’t even an off-ramp from the highway. Cars zipped past and didn’t know that beyond the mountain lay a ghost town of time-eaten, abandoned shacks and swampy green water, which was now more pond than lake. The tree-stump scab baked on the shore; the whole village was a scab, parched and brown and dead in the desert
.
If a stranger was to pass through, he would hear thunder rolling above the village. Always thunder, never rain. But it wasn’t really thunder — it was bees. Bees scurrying in the cracks of the boarded-up windows, bees crawling over every beached lake rock, searching for the white blossoms and the gnarled black tree that had been their world
.
Sergio sat in his wicker chair on the porch of the ranch house. This is where he was every evening, frowning at the drying-up lake while sunlight faded into darkness. He stared right at the spot where the tree would have been, as if he could see it. As if trees had ghosts
.
Raúl had shot up these last years, ripening faster than any child had ever grown in the village. He was now big enough to be Sergio’s right hand, to learn the business of sheepherding
.
Only Rosa kept returning to the sleepy village. Everyone else had taken their slivers of the trees, their “gifts,” to the four corners of the world, and gradually, over the years, they died
.
The tree’s magic was gone
.
Some died on the front lines of the wars in Europe. One minute they were storming the enemy lines, unafraid of gunfire because of the protection of the tree. Then they lay broken in the mud, their first tastes of pain, of blood, of mortality also their last, still clutching their pieces of the tree against their chests
.
They all died
.
Some died of old age, their bodies centuries past their expiration dates. Most of the old ones died tucked into quilted beds, closing their eyes for sleep, not realizing they would never open them again
.
One girl died in a train crash. A corn farmer died when he fell from a silo. Whole families died within minutes of each other, even when separated by thousands of miles of world
.
Beloved Father Alejandro died of influenza. Sergio didn’t speak for a full month after he went into the ground
.
Rosa walked the halls of the mission while Sergio glared at the treeless horizon. Raúl played with Inés on the crunchy grass. Inés — a miracle, the magic dog — was one of the last villagers still alive
.
With no one living in it, the mission was an echo chamber, a new home for baby jackrabbits. A tomb
.
Clack, clack, clack . . .
Rosa had invested in a pair of her own snake-stomping boots, because now a rattler’s bite would kill. No more bare feet
.
One day Sergio took Raúl out in Father Alejandro’s old boat, rowing across the lake-pond. Such a good boat, still seaworthy. The slimy green water sloshed the boat’s sides, the only sound penetrating Sergio’s cobwebbed mind
.
“The lake is still here,” he said to his son. “The tree is gone; the blossoms are gone. But at least we still have our lake.”
When they came to shore, Rosa came up behind them. “There you are.”
Sergio jumped. “You startled me.” She was much quieter, now that a cloud of buzzing bees no longer followed her
.
“Come on,” she said. Raúl quickly left Sergio’s side and ran to Rosa. “I have a surprise for both of you.”
Sergio noticed a strand of gray in her hair and networks of wrinkles lining her mouth and eyes. When did she start to look so old? Did he look as old as she did?
“What is it this time, huh?” he said. “A riverboat? A unicorn with wings? A train that travels upside down in the clouds?”
She held out three paper tickets. “An airplane.”
“Airplane?” he repeated
.
“Airplane!” Raúl jumped up and down
.
“A silver machine that flies in the air like a bird. I bought us tickets to Spain. We’ll see Madrid, Barcelona, Seville —”
Raúl shouted, “You mean we get to go with you? Hooray!”
But Sergio shook his head. “We cannot leave,” he said. “Look around us. The tree is dead.”
“It isn’t dead,” Rosa argued. “It lives in the wood. In the house, in my bracelet. It lives in the hundreds of years we had. It lives in us.”
“But its magic is gone,” he said. “How many more years could we have had, if you hadn’t cut down the tree?”
“How many more years would you have wanted, stuck in this village?” she said
.
A congregation of vultures squawked and danced around their rabbit-carcass feast. “You see?” Sergio pointed at the birds as his evidence. “We never had a buzzard here before, not in a thousand years. We cut down that tree and let death into our camp!”
“We cut down the tree so we could live,” she said. “See things. Feel things, feel pine needles, and dolphin’s skin, and cold winds, and —”
“Pain,” Sergio said
.
Raúl shuddered. He knew that word, from
Papí’
s stories. Pain was a fire in the flesh
.
“Yes, pain,” Rosa said. “Pain is how you know you’re alive.”
“Your sister, dead,” he said, shaking his head. “Father Alejandro, dead. The old ones, dead. All our friends, dead. Dead, dead, dead! Such an ugly word.” He hurled a stone into the water. “This village was never supposed to taste death.”
“You’re scared.” Rosa waded into the lake in her boots. “Scared little boy in the tree.”
“Scared of death? Of course,” Sergio spat. “Everyone is.”
“I’m not,” she said
.
“
I’m not, either,” Raúl said
.
“The tree was a gift, Father Alejandro told us.” Sergio tried again. “A gift. And we chopped it up, for lumber, and toys, and jewelry.”
“For life,” Rosa corrected him. “We did it all for life.”
“But now we will die,” he said
.
“But at least we will have lived.”
Once upon a time, an old man and an old woman stood where a tree once stood, a tree that would have shaded them and their young son. Instead, the sun glared on their backs like a spotlight, boiling their tempers and pushing harsh words to the surface
.
Harsh words that were interrupted by a buzz
.
Raúl heard it first. “What is that?” he said
.
Rosa shielded her eyes with her hands, searching the skies. “It sounds like a helicopter.”
“What the devil is a helly-copter?” Sergio said
.
The buzzing grew louder
.
“One of those newfangled flying machines. Just like an airplane. You’d hate it,” Rosa said, folding her arms
.
“Sí,
I would!” Sergio yelled
.
It wasn’t a helicopter
.
It was a storm. A storm of bees, yellow-and-black stripes, an angry buzz
.
Rosa accepted Sergio’s arm around her, protective and strong. Even though they argued, she was his wife and he was her husband, and their love was deeper than the old tree’s black roots. Raúl nestled between them
.
“What’s happening?” Rosa asked, but Sergio had no answers. There were no answers, no words. Only bees. They tipped their heads back and watched
.
A million bees, maybe more. An uncountable storm of bees, flying in a cyclone, stirring up dust, blocking the sun, making it midnight dark on the lake’s shore. The bees plummeted down to the water, then back up, down and back up
.
“Is this it?” Rosa cried
.
“Is this what?”
She drew back to meet his sky-blue eyes. “Is this how we die?”
Sergio swallowed. He was panicking, but she was reveling, head thrown back, mouth dropped in awe at this glorious, terrifying sight. Raúl, too, wasn’t afraid — he reached out to touch one of the bees, but Sergio yanked his arm back
.
Then the bees moved
.
Each bee dipped into the lake and took a single water droplet, clutching it between needle-thin black legs. Bee after bee, in militarized lines, rocketed down, took water, and flew away. The lake’s shore began to recede. Somewhere behind them, the dog barked
.
“They’re taking the water!” Sergio rushed to the shrinking lake, now only fifty feet in diameter. He swatted at the bees, arms flailing. The lake shrank to twenty feet. Then ten
.
Then the lake was gone
.
Once upon a time, a storm of bees lifted up a lake and carried it away
.
No more clear green water, only a dried lake bottom, the sand already crackling in the vicious heat. The desert was quiet as a cemetery
.
“We took their tree,” Sergio whispered, “so they took our lake.”
“You got stung.” Rosa touched her husband’s swollen face, covered in red bee stings. His skin burned with the new maze of bumpy stings. So this was pain
.
This was what Rosa cut down the tree for
.
“No more water,” he murmured. “No more bees.”
“Now where do we go?” Rosa said
.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s time for us to leave, like everyone else,” Rosa said
.
“We’re not leaving.”
“We have no water.” She absentmindedly stroked her black wood bracelet. Was it Serge’s imagination, or did she seem unsure of herself for the first time in her life?
He cleared his throat, taking advantage of her silence. “We do have water,” he reminded her. “The village wells.”
Raúl ran with Inés across the crusty lake bottom, now just a bowl of land, hollow and haunting
.
Sergio and Rosa looked at the new landscape of the village: no tree, no people, no lake. She looked at the new landscape of his face, the bee stings that would never heal
.
Once upon a time, there was no tree. There was no lake. There was no rain
.
And a drought began
.