Telling the Bees (9 page)

“Try these on for size,” my mother said when she emerged from the house, a dusty cobweb or two clinging to her strawberry blond hair, and my old coveralls, a spare beekeeper’s hat and veil, and a worn pair of gloves bundled in her sun-freckled arms. “They were Albert’s. I’ve been saving them for a rainy day.”

Patiently, she showed our young neighbor how to tuck the legs of the coveralls into her stockings and the long sleeves into the cuffs of the canvas gloves she slipped over her slender fingers. Though Claire was nearly two years older than myself, at ten years old I was already being described as a “strapping” lad while Claire, as I have said before, was of a more delicate stature—so much so, in fact, that my coveralls, which I had outgrown by half a foot by then, were rather comically outsized on her.

Thus clothed, Claire was gently convinced by my mother that with such proper precautions, a contented hive of industrious honeybees was no more dangerous than a mewling basket of newborn kittens.

“Just remember to walk slowly and deliberately when you approach the hives, and don’t make any sudden noise or movements,” my mother admonished as Claire allowed the comforting drone of our precious honeybees to envelop her at last.

Twelve

S
TING:
A barbed, modified ovipositor, it is used by worker bees primarily in defense of the hive. Drones do not have stings. The queen bee’s sting is smooth and is not used for defense of the hive but to vanquish her rivals.

W
hereas I am content to assist in the day-to-day survival of the hive in return for a small measure of the excess honey its inhabitants are able to share with me, from the very beginning Claire craved a more intimate interaction with the bees. She seemed to draw surprising strength and inner resolve from what she liked to call the spirit of the hive, the wondrous and constant striving of each and every worker, drone, forager, guard, nurse, and even its exalted queen toward the collective future of the colony, a spirit that supersedes the will and well-being of each individual hive inhabitant for the good of the whole.

The honey Claire harvested, after all was said and done, seemed somehow incidental to her ardent application on the hive’s behalf—so much so, in fact, as to give the impression that she considered herself not so much a benevolent keeper of bees as she did their oddly configured sibling.

There was no mistaking that Claire was hard bitten by the fever that long-ago spring. Her weekday visits to our backyard enterprise soon became regular as clockwork. Arriving shortly after school let out, she would dive into whatever task my father and I were doing with unmitigated vigor and enthusiasm until four o’clock on the dot when Hilda came and stood at the entrance of our side yard and silently telegraphed their departure time.

I soon learned that there had been a terrible row between the two sisters over Claire’s first halting steps toward her apicultural avocation.

“Hilda doesn’t like me coming over here,” Claire confided to me one day out of the blue as we walked together through the orchard, stopping to check the oil pans on our hive bases and refilling any that had grown perilously low as we went. Taken aback by her candor, I was hard-pressed to respond, though I needn’t have worried as she, like my mother, possessed the verbal facility for carrying on a conversation when, technically speaking, none yet existed.

“She thinks Mother will be angry at her if she finds out where I’m spending my afternoons.”

Not knowing what to say, I headed for the next hive on our circuit through the orange grove.

“I told Hilda, ‘Don’t be silly, the only way she’ll find out is if you tell her.’ But Hilda doesn’t like it. I think she’s jealous, if you ask me, because I have a friend now and she doesn’t have any.”

I was uncomfortably aware at that moment that Claire had stooped to the ground and grabbed her slender ankles with her hands in a maneuver that brought her eyes level with mine as I bent down to get a better look at the two pans fastened to the back side of the hive with considerably more concentration than such a task usually requires.

There was a warm, unnaturally dry breeze blowing through the trees that particular spring day, rustling the supple young leaves and pale blossoms above our head and leaving my mouth thick and parched at the same time.

“You mean your parents don’t know you’re here?” I stammered, setting down the container of oil with a thump that sent a puff of dust spurting up from the dry ground.

“Well, not exactly,” Claire replied. “Mother isn’t well. She has the sugar, you know. Last month, the doctor ordered her to bed. She’s not supposed to, but sometimes when she’s feeling up to it she still likes to come out of her room and join us for dinner, but hardly ever, and even when she does she never gets up before five. So you see, I’m doing Mother a favor, really, coming over here in the afternoon so she is able to nap. I make quite enough ruckus for two without hardly trying, or so Hilda tells me.”

“What about your father. Doesn’t he wonder where you are?”

“My father works for the railroad. He’s a conductor on the Southern Pacific’s Los Angeles–to–Portland run,” she replied with an odd lilt to her voice that I took to mean she was either exceedingly proud or, conversely, distressed by his chosen occupation. “Father comes home only on weekends.”

I sat down on the bare ground and began drawing concentric circles in the dust next to my oilcan. I could no more imagine going off somewhere—even next door—without first informing my parents of my intentions than I could conceive of lying to them about my whereabouts after the fact. Claire, I believe, read something of my thoughts in my eyes. She sat down on the ground next to me and wiped my slate of circles clean.

“I don’t see the harm in coming over here for a bit while Mother rests as long as I’m home in time to help prepare supper,” she said with the same disarming lilt in her voice as before. “And Hilda makes quite certain that I am.”

Which had been true enough until the day some weeks hence that my father came upon a wild swarm affixed to a crook in a gnarled old walnut tree limb on the far side of our family’s orchards.

“Albert! Claire! Come with me to the honey shed. I need your help with a catcher hive,” my father called out when he spied us silently observing a squadron of pollen-laden field bees alighting with great excitement on the landing board of our number fifteen hive.

“There it is,” my father whispered, halting some twenty feet from where the swarm hung in a low-slung branch that seemed to droop like the flesh of an old woman’s arm.

“Would you like to feel it?” my father asked Claire as he nodded at the swarm and back to Claire again.

“You mean touch the swarm?” Claire stared wide-eyed at my father. He nodded. Even from our distant vantage, we could hear the swarm’s rapturous hymn of emancipation.

“Don’t worry,” I assured Claire, seeing the fear in her eyes. “Bees are gentle as lambs when they swarm. They won’t hurt you.”

I don’t believe it was my persuasive skills that convinced Claire to set aside her misgivings, however. I think it was the swarm itself that called to her in its collective song of ecstasy, for such is the state of a colony of bees that chooses to forsake the comfort and wealth of the hive to follow its deposed regent in search of a new home.

I told Claire what I knew: that even the most disgruntled faction of bees will not abandon its hive in times of need or scarcity of resources. Only in the full ripeness of spring, when the hive is teeming with healthy worker bees and brood and its combs are stocked to the brim with honey, does the colony think to raise up a new virgin queen to displace the old. Such is the democratic nature of their magnificently ordered society that any one of a hundred thousand anonymous handmaidens, soldiers, nurses, or workers may be snatched from a life of unyielding toil to be transformed while still in the cradle into the sole reigning matriarch of the hive.

Though there may be a battle for supremacy once the new regent, having reached maturity, returns from her marriage flight, newly widowed yet fully impregnated with the seed of a million future lives, to take up her rightful place as revered queen mother of the hive, usually there is not. Occasionally, however, an aging regent, sensing some greater imperative, will grow increasingly agitated as the birth of an heiress to her throne approaches until she incites as many as half the hive’s inhabitants to join in her quest for a new realm. Bursting forth from the hive into the sunshine she has not felt on her wings since her own nuptial flight, she takes to the sky with a legion of loyal daughters trailing in her wake.

They seldom travel far, for, in truth, the queen’s wings will have atrophied almost to the point of dysfunction over the dark months of her royal confinement, and so it is that she generally alights upon the first inviting branch or fence post that she encounters. No doubt exhausted by her bold adventure, she is surrounded at once by her band of mutineers, who now huddle close to warm and comfort their exiled queen while a party of scouts sets off to find suitable new quarters for them all.

It was just such an assemblage of queen and courtiers that Claire so tremulously approached that long-ago afternoon, her palm held upward as if reaching for a gift from God. And I suppose this description is as close as anything to what she did in fact receive, for I have never witnessed a look at once so full of fear and bliss as that I saw come over Claire’s countenance when she stepped up onto the cement block my father and I had placed beneath the limb and she inserted her hand directly into the core of the swarm. Like the enraptured Saint Teresa, only the slightest gasp of surprise escaped her lips before they parted in a smile.

Honeybees are at their most docile state when they swarm. So docile, in fact, that their normally exposed stingers lie sheathed within the hilt of their downy bodies so that their aggregate mass is not at all prickly to the touch as one might anticipate, but rather the feel is infinitely more forgiving, like velvet-covered pebbles slipping through one’s outstretched fingers in an ebb and flow of motion as gentle as a lover’s caress.

Later, Claire would say, “It was so soft. So warm. So accepting. It moved all over and around and through my open fingers as if it was of a single living, breathing mind that wished to know everything about me in an instant and for all of eternity, and I don’t quite know how but I felt I was becoming a part of it. The longer I held my hand inside the swarm, the less it felt like my own flesh and blood and bone and the more I thought I would never, ever let go.”

I sometimes think she never would have either had my father not finally taken her free hand, which by this time was clenched tight around a fistful of her cotton skirt, and pulled her slowly but insistently off her concrete perch. Even as she allowed herself to be led away from the swarm, her head was turned and her eyes remained riveted on the pulsing mass, as my father whispered softly, “Come now, Claire. There’s work to be done.”

My father set the open-topped catcher hive he had fetched from the honey shed on the concrete block beneath the swarm. Meanwhile, I drew a pail of cold water from a nearby irrigation line and into this my father plunged his arms up to his elbows, and I quickly followed his lead.

“This old branch is too thick to shake,” my father said as he reached up and wrapped one of his hands around its unyielding base. Still holding on to the limb, he called out to Claire, who stood off a ways stroking her hand.

“See those two wooden ladles by the bucket? Bring them here, girl.”

Roused perhaps by the firmness of his voice, Claire dashed over to the pail and retrieved the ladles. My father took one and handed the other to me.

“Now, go stand back there and watch.”

Reaching into the center of the mass, my father ladled out a living spoonful of bees and deposited it in the new hive. I quickly plunged my ladle into another section of the swarm and did the same. Moving in a slow, syncopated rhythm, my father and I ladled most of the swarm into the awaiting hive like creamed corn into a cooking pot. Indeed, there was liquidity to the swarm that soon caused great dripping gobs to fall off the tree limb into the hive below. Most, but not all, of the bees were transferred to the hive in this manner, while a few strays flitted harmlessly about our hands and faces, filling the air with their joyous aria. Just as Claire had no need to fear their touch en masse, these happy stragglers were no less peaceable.

The entire operation took less than two hours from start to finish, but we were so engrossed that neither my father, Claire, nor myself took note of the dwindling light that played out as we at last capped the hive. Still feeling the exhilaration of a job well done, we made the leisurely stroll from the far end of our property back to the honey shed to return our tools to their proper shelves.

“A place for everything and everything in its place,” my father intoned from habit.

Emerging from the shed into the dusky shadows of the oncoming evening, Claire uttered a tiny gasp not unlike the one that had issued from her lips earlier that day.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Half past six or thereabouts,” my father replied after a quick glance at the sky above.

“Are you hungry? I am sure Mrs. Honig would love for you to join us for supper,” my father uttered in a practically unheard-of glut of verbiage.

“Oh no. I have to go,” she said, but she made no move to leave at first. Claire looked to me and then to my father as if to speak, but no words came. Instead, she stared a moment or two longer at the setting sun and then turned and made a mad dash for home.

Thirteen

B
EE SPACE:
Measuring between one-quarter to three-eighths of an inch, it is the space around which modern, movable-frame hives are designed as it is large enough to permit comfortable passage by worker bees but too small to encourage comb building and too large to induce propolizing activities.

C
laire stopped coming around our house the very next day. Though I thought to ask her when I ran into her at school from time to time over the next few days, she seemed reluctant to stop and talk whenever I approached.

Which was just as well, I suppose, as I learned later that my mother had gone next door one morning shortly after Claire’s daily visits had ceased to inquire after her health only to be told in no uncertain terms by Mrs. Straussman that Claire was just fine, thank you, and furthermore that she would not be coming around to dally with our bees or any other such nonsense in the future.

I learned of my mother’s visit to the Straussmans’ house when I overheard her telling my father what had occurred that same evening as I sat on the front porch swing after dinner silently observing the constellations overhead.

Eloise had already retired to her bedroom to work on her homework, and my mother and father sat in our parlor—he in his overstuffed chair and she in her wooden rocker—discussing the day’s events, as was their after-dinner habit.

“I realize a family has a right to conduct their own business as they see fit,” my mother said, a trace of indignation tainting her usually sunny voice. “But there is just no call for that sort of rudeness between neighbors. The very idea, calling me ‘meddlesome,’ Walter. I was simply worried about the girl. I thought she might have taken ill, after all.”

I heard the rustle of paper, and even as I stared at the handle of the Big Dipper, counting and recounting the number of stars from tip to tip, I could visualize the deliberate way my father had of opening the newspaper wide and giving it a shake before turning the page, shaking it once more, and folding it back to readable proportions.

“I worry about her, Walter,” my mother said, and then she lowered her voice so that I could barely hear her whisper. “We still don’t know what happened to that boy.”

“That’s right. You don’t know what happened,” my father said. “And no good can come of stirring that hornet’s nest up again, Elizabeth. There’s already been enough ill will to last a lifetime.”

I heard the newspaper rustle again and then my mother’s voice. It was louder, more insistent, than before.

“Now, you know I believe what the Good Book says about judging not lest ye be judged, but, Walter, I swear to you, there’s something not right about that family. You’ve seen that poor girl’s mother as I have, sitting on her front porch, shaking her cane at everyone who passes by like they’ve no right at all to stroll along a perfectly lovely public street. I’ve seen her frighten the living daylights out of innocent schoolchildren who’ve done no more harm than to step an inch or two onto her precious front lawn. Why she holds it so dear, dry and neglected as it is, I’ll never know. Even you must admit I’ve always held my tongue when it has come to that woman until this very moment. But really, Walter, there’s just no call for it. No call for it at all.”

It was true that most of the neighborhood children, myself included, were loath to walk past the Straussman house for fear of incurring Mrs. Straussman’s considerable wrath. It was also true that as time wore on and her tetchy reputation seemed to grow right along with her girth, quite a few of these same children took to spreading tales, especially around Halloween, about seeing Mrs. Straussman—dressed all in black, as was her habit—hunkered over an enormous iron cauldron when the moon was full. It was said that she could be seen stirring all manner of ghoulish ingredients. Some even said they’d seen little children tossed, kicking and screaming, into the pot as she chanted mysterious incantations that made one’s hair curl. I’d even heard some of the older children say that they’d heard from their own parents that the Straussman family had stolen a baby years ago to replace the one they’d lost, while others insisted they’d used it for far darker purposes.

I myself refrained from such fanciful slander, but I cannot say I spoke out on her behalf either. Perhaps it was because I, through my family home’s proximity to hers, had been one of the more frequent recipients of her increasingly vitriolic confrontations.

This is what had made the experience of sipping tea from golden cups with Mrs. Straussman all the more disquieting. It had somehow singled me out from the rest of my schoolmates, at least in my own mind.

Though I had told none of them of my experience, I had begun to nurture an unaccustomed sense of superiority over them, as though I alone had entered the belly of the beast and, having returned unscathed, I alone need not fear the specter of their childish fantasies.

I was still basking in my clandestine glory on a blustery morning nearly six weeks after “my little tea party,” which is how I’d come to think of my semiprivate audience with Mrs. Straussman. I had just come out of my house to join a group of my classmates who were walking to school together when a sudden gust of wind whipped some homework papers right out of Mary McMasters’s hands. The next thing we all knew, Mary was gasping in horror, and her homework was skittering across the lawn and up onto the Straussmans’ front porch. Though Mrs. Straussman’s porch seat was vacant, even the possibility that she might open the door at any moment was enough to prevent any of the other assembled children from venturing onto the forbidden lawn to retrieve Mary’s errant papers.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once,” I solemnly intoned as if I’d coined the words myself, confident none of my school chums had read William Shakespeare, another of the cherished poets whose verses my mother had helped me memorize. Then with what I fancied a gallant nod to Mary McMasters, I dashed across the lawn and up the porch steps after the fluttering papers, which by this time were plastered against the Straussmans’ front door. With a triumphant flourish, I snatched the papers up and returned slowly—more slowly, in fact, than I knew even the bravest among the gathering before me would have dared.

“Here you are,” I said simply, straightening the papers and handing them to Mary, who stood dumbstruck by the side of the road.

“Thank you, Albert,” she said, making the statement sound more like a question than a declaration.

“You’re welcome,” I said with only the slightest hint of a bow before I turned and began walking to school with an unfamiliar spring in my step.

I did not tell Mary McMasters, or any in the cluster of awestruck children around her, that only the afternoon before Claire had mentioned to me that their family doctor had prescribed twenty-four hours’ bed rest for her mother after a flare-up of gout and high blood pressure and so I was fairly certain she would not interrupt my heroics with a sudden looming appearance at her front door.

Seldom recognized outside my home for anything other than my taller-than-average frame and disproportionate shyness, I did not consider beforehand how my simple rescue of a classmate’s homework assignment would become the talk of the school that day or how many times Claire or Hilda Straussman would overhear the tale. Nor did I anticipate that the story would grow ever more exaggerated with each retelling until, by day’s end, I was said to have stood bold as you please on the Straussmans’ front porch, thumbs cocked to my ears as I waggled my hands up and down and dared the old witch—for sadly that is what my classmates said I had called Mrs. Straussman, though I swear I said no such thing—to come out and get me.

“I dare you! I dare you, you old hag!” I was said to have shouted one last time before turning on my heels and strutting down her porch stairs and all the way to school, my newfound admirers trailing behind me.

And so it went all day long. After school, I was stopped on the dirt road in front of the schoolhouse by yet another group of classmates, who were clapping me on the back and urging me to tell the tale again, when I spied Claire and Hilda cutting across the school lawn so as to avoid having to pass by us. Breaking away from my admirers with hurried apologies, I walked slowly around the corner after them before sprinting to Claire’s and Hilda’s sides. Wordlessly, the sisters quickened their pace.

“Wait up, Claire,” I beseeched. “Let me explain.”

“What’s to explain?” Claire replied without turning her head.

“I just retrieved Mary McMasters’s homework,” I said. “It blew out of her hands and got stuck up against your front door. I just ran and got it back.”

Claire said nothing, but she stopped, as did Hilda. Slowly they turned around, and then Claire lifted her eyes to mine and held them there. Hilda, silent as always, seemed to fade like watercolors into the background.

“I didn’t do what they said I did. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then why did you let them say you did?” Claire asked at last.

I shrugged. I did not want to admit it to Claire, but it had felt good—if only for a moment—to feel like a hero. And it had all seemed harmless enough.

“I thought you were my friend,” Claire said as if everything that has a beginning must also have an end. “You’re the one who’s always preaching to me about the truth.”

“I didn’t lie. I didn’t start the stories. That was Robert Hooker and his brother Ellis. But once all the stories got started, I didn’t know how to stop them,” I said, knowing even as I uttered the words how full of smoke and mirrors they were. Claire continued to hold her eyes on mine. Another of my mother’s scrapbook quotes came to mind, this one from Mark Twain: “When in doubt, tell the truth.”

It was as simple and as complicated as that, and it was, I knew, exactly what I should have done all along.

“I am truly sorry, Claire,” I said, and I truly meant what I said. But for Claire, it was never enough.

“You know, Albert, for all your fancy words, you’re not always so good at living up to them,” Claire said.

I started to protest, but just then a group of schoolmates rounded the bend and shouted their greetings to me. I turned my head to wave, and when I turned back around Claire and Hilda had resumed their brisk walk home.

Claire continued to avoid me for the rest of the week after the homework incident. The week after that, school let out for the summer, and I did not speak to her again until after Labor Day. I wish that I had.

I watched her from my backyard gathering walnuts that long-ago summer. I even waved to her once or twice as I made my rounds between our front hives, but she turned her head without acknowledging me and walked quickly back into her house. It’s hard to say whether she stayed away because of her mother’s or her own accord or some combination of the two. I only know it was a long, lonely summer, and my bees and my books were my only small comfort.

When we first met again at school the following September, Claire made a good show of ignoring me when I first attempted to greet her on the steps of the building.

“My mother was worried when you stopped coming round,” I said after I pursued her down the hallway, hardly able to contain my sincere expression of joy at being able to speak to her after so long an absence. Indeed, I surprised myself with my exuberance. “Have you been well? My mother inquired after your health, you know.”

I could see by the softening of the set of her jaw that Claire had been unaware of any such efforts on her behalf. So I told her that my mother had gone not once but twice to her house to inquire after her despite my father’s admonition to leave well enough alone. It had been Hilda who met my mother at the door the second time and it was she who had quietly but assuredly discouraged her from any further intervention on Claire’s account.

“I missed you,” I said. Or at least that is what I intended to say, but the bell rang just after Claire whispered that she had missed me and she had already run off to class.

I saw Claire later that morning, and despite the teasing I feared I would face when I returned to my desk after lunch I invited her to sit with me and eat. It wasn’t exactly like old times, as we’d hardly had time the preceding spring to sow anything but the most tenuous friendship, but I attempted to reseed the garden by turning the conversation back to our shared love of bees.

“Remember the swarm you helped us capture?” I said in a voice barely above a whisper, and I was instantly rewarded with the ignition of a flinty spark in her sky blue eyes. I had forgotten how intensely that spark could shine. “Honestly, Claire, you should see how strong the hive has grown.”