Telling the Bees

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Copyright © 2013 by Peggy Hesketh

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hesketh, Peggy.

  Telling the bees / Peggy Hesketh.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60926-2

  1. Older men—Fiction. 2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Bee culture—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E796T45 2013 2012028674

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Don the Duck, a drunken, pinball-playing,

  Thanksgiving dinner’s last-night stand

  To Leroy the Goon, the fearsome bouncer at Dave and Jake’s Snake Pit

  To George Washington, the motorcycle-riding red-haired madam who was so ugly her face looked like a cow stepped on it and her nose came up through the hoof

  And to the gazillion other memorable characters in the heartbreakingly goofy bedtime stories my father used to tell me

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Telling The Bees

  THE COLONY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE HARVEST

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  WINTERKILL

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Acknowledgments

  TELLING THE BEES

  By John Greenleaf Whittier

  Here is the place; right over the hill

  Runs the path I took;

  You can see the gap in the old wall still,

  And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

  There is the house, with the gate red-barred,

  And the poplars tall;

  And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard,

  And the white horns tossing above the wall.

  There are the beehives ranged in the sun;

  And down by the brink

  Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun,

  Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

  A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,

  Heavy and slow;

  And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,

  And the same brook sings of a year ago.

  There’s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;

  And the June sun warm

  Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,

  Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.

  I mind me how with a lover’s care

  From my Sunday coat

  I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,

  And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.

  Since we parted, a month had passed,—

  To love, a year;

  Down through the beeches I looked at last

  On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.

  I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain

  Of light through the leaves,

  The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane,

  The bloom of her roses under the eaves.

  Just the same as a month before,—

  The house and the trees,

  The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,—

  Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

  Before them, under the garden wall,

  Forward and back,

  Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,

  Draping each hive with a shred of black.

  Trembling, I listened: the summer sun

  Had the chill of snow;

  For I knew she was telling the bees of one

  Gone on the journey we all must go!

  Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps

  For the dead to-day:

  Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps

  The fret and the pain of his age away.”

  But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,

  With his cane to his chin,

  The old man sat; and the chore-girl still

  Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

  And the song she was singing ever since

  In my ear sounds on:—

  “Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!

  Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”

  One

  APICULTURE: The art and science of raising honeybees.

  The bees travel along the high-tension wires, just as surely as one true sentence follows the next. I am not sure why the bees took to this peculiar mode of travel, but I suspect they have their reasons, and their reasons have everything to do with the Bee Ladies’ murder.

  There is a family living not far from my home that mistakenly holds the electricity that hums and buzzes over their heads responsible for all the people in our neighborhood who have chanced to die in recent years. It is a complicated theory based on the deleterious effects of electromagnetic fields. I hardly know this family beyond what I have been able to discern from the slogans on the handmade signs they display in their front yard. I know they believe the overhead wires that run above our homes cause all manner of human ailments, and for this reason they have planted a growing field of carefully tended crosses in their lawn, one for each neighbor who has died since they began keeping track of such things shortly after moving into one of the newer housing tracts not far from my home nearly eight years ago.

  I only spoke to them once, not long after they’d begun planting crosses in their lawn. It was one of those impossibly warm Southern California days that almost always occurs in early February, the sort of day that sings to those who wish to leave behind the bone-chilling heartbreak of winter and make a new life for themselves in the promise of eternal sunshine.

  I probably would not have stopped to talk to this particular family, except that I was driving slowly past their home so that I might get a better look
at the crosses and the curious signs on their lawn. Because of the heat, my car windows were open.

  “Hey, Grandpa!” I heard a man shout. My initial instinct was to press my acceleration pedal down. But then I heard another voice. A woman’s voice. It sounded determined yet vulnerable at the same time.

  “You will help us?”

  I know it seems foolish. They were strangers. But they were my neighbors as well. I pulled to the curb. The woman smiled and rushed to the edge of her lawn. She was thin and agitated, with dark, lanky hair and an oily copper complexion. She held a clipboard in her hand.

  “Can you sign this?” she said, running around to the driver’s side of my car. She handed me the clipboard and a pen through my open window.

  “¿Por favor?”

  “May I read it first?”

  She glanced back at the man who stood thirty feet away in the gape of the open garage, a beer in one hand and some sort of power tool in the other. She nodded quickly at me.

  As I read through the xeroxed copy of the petition which would ban all manner of overhead electrical wires in residential neighborhoods, it seemed prudent to ask the woman who stood so desperately by my car door why she was doing what she was doing, but that wouldn’t have been polite.

  Instead, I inquired where she was from. That is what new neighbors do. At least, that is what they used to do. This is how I learned she was originally from Texas, somewhere south of Dallas, that she’d moved to California with her father, who was in the military. It is also how I learned that she loved sunshine and open spaces, and that she feared the overhead power lines, which she said reminded her of barbed-wire fences.

  When I was finished reading her petition, I told her I was very sorry but I did not wish to sign it. I told her it made no sense to me. She squeezed her eyes shut, and she thanked me just the same, scurrying back to the garage and handing the clipboard to the man I can only assume was her husband. I heard shouting as I pulled away from the curb. It was only later that I realized I’d forgotten to ask her name.

  The following December my neighbors took to stringing their crosses with winking colored lights to mark the Christmas season. The spring after that they tied pastel pink and blue and yellow ribbons on the crosses at Eastertide. Independence Day is now demarcated by tiny American flags, and every October they drape their crosses in orange and black crepe paper and set a lighted jack-o’-lantern in their midst. And all the while, their field of crosses continues to grow. I found their agitated theories rather ludicrous, disturbing even. But what disturbed me for far too long is that I did not recognize a single name on any of their crosses.

  My neighbors are no longer my neighbors. There is no longer any visceral connection between us other than that they are the strangers who live nearest to me. Day after day all I hear are leaf blowers and cars with pounding speakers that cruise slowly down my street, and night after night sirens wail and helicopters beat the air over my home with a roar that makes my head hurt.

  So much noise.

  I suspect this is why my bees no longer produce as much honey as they used to, nor does it taste quite as sweet as it once did.

  Though I am an old man and my memory has begun to fade, I still recall a quiet time when the road in front of my home was made of dirt and gravel, and my dear mother could rock on our front porch swing and greet each and every one of our neighbors by their given names. But that time is long gone, and with it a definition of home and family that inextricably linked bricks and mortar and genes and bloodlines.

  I have tried to adjust as best I can to this modern era, and I have found that thankfully my bees continue to wax and wane with the seasons. They remind me that the hundreds and thousands of births and deaths that occur each honey season are the natural life cycle of the hive, and this in turn has helped to ease my pain at the passing of all of the people I have held dear. Death is a constant in life. I thought I had long since made my peace.

  But then, last August, I saw a new cross on my neighbors’ front yard. I noticed it because it was different from the rest. Not the cross itself, which was fashioned from the same t-shaped slats of wood, nailed together, scrawled with a name and date of death, and planted in the ground. What was different were the flowers and candles and stuffed animals and balloons crowded around its spindly stake. In all the times I had driven past this house on my way to my honey consignments, or the library, the grocery store, the gas station, and whatever other random errand drew me less and less frequently from my home, I had never seen such a singular display on their lawn. Summer was just ending. There was no holiday to commemorate.

  Had my neighbors been gathered in their garage workshop with what had become over the years a progressively more menacing group of friends, shouting, listening to loud music, and imbibing liquor, I surely would not have stopped to examine this curious memorial. But on this particular evening their garage door was down, as were my automobile windows, and I thought I caught the faint scent of eucalyptus and orange blossoms in the air. Despite all my better instincts, I pulled to the curb with a firm twist on my unpadded steering wheel, climbed out of my old Ford Fairlane, and approached what was from my rough count the twenty-first cross on the lawn.

  There was a flickering phalanx of tall glass candleholders painted with pictures of saints that made the cross appear more like an altar than my neighbors’ usual generic protest. Scattered around the candles were prayer cards and hand-scrawled notes. Many were written in Spanish and attached to sprays of carnations and baby’s breath wrapped in grocery store cellophane. There were also bunches of roses, geraniums, calla lilies, and hydrangeas that clearly were snipped from backyard gardens, and two or three plush bears and a cheap felt pirate’s hat piled among the flowers. Though the memorial was crude, there was no mistaking that the grief expressed was both real and personal.

  I bent down to read the hand-painted lettering on the cross: Christina Perez: 1974–2011.

  That I did not recognize the name when I first read it saddened me as none of the other names on the crosses before it had. When the name finally struck a chord, some months later, it shattered what little faith I had left in all I still held dear. And yet, it brought me some small measure of comfort at the same time. The first I’d felt in far too many years.

  My neighbors continue to blame the electricity for all that has gone wrong around them because they need something to blame for what they have found lacking in their own lives. They never knew the Bee Ladies, or a time not so long ago when the wires did not whine and sputter over their heads like an angry swarm. They do not recall quiet summer evenings thick with the sweet scent of eucalyptus, jasmine, and orange blossoms as I do. They believe malevolence needs a scientific explanation that can be measured in voltages and magnetic fields.

  I do not subscribe to my neighbors’ strange theories, or their garish memorial displays, but I am no longer as inclined to judge their scientific folly as harshly as I once did. Perhaps our need to make sense of profound loss is what makes us not so different after all.

  Two

  APIS MELLIFERA: A mixed zoological nomenclature meaning “honey-carrying bee,” it is used to designate the so-called Western or European honeybee. Apis derives from the Latin word for “bee.” Mellifera combines the Greek words for “honey”: melli, and “to carry”: ferre.

  The bees began speaking to me through the utility wires that crisscross the sky above my home nearly twenty years ago. It was an unseasonably warm Sunday morning in early May—May 10, 1992, to be exact. I was at the kitchen sink scouring the remains of my usual breakfast of two poached eggs and a slice of toast from my plate when I heard a low-pitched hum that sounded at first rather like a small group of monks softly chanting their matins, but before long there was no mistaking the collective whine of wings that denotes an angry swarm. The hum seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Drawn outside, I expected to see a great dark cloud of bees. Instead, my eyes were drawn to the five black utility wires that o
verhang my house—the wires were alive with the sound of this feverish, disembodied hum. As I walked beneath the wires, the deepening hum grew louder and more insistent as I approached the house next door where the two women I had once called my friends lived.

  The Bee Ladies’ house was clearly at the epicenter of this strange disturbance, and so I knocked on their front door, and when there was no answer, I knocked again. It was not altogether surprising that they did not answer at once, but given the persistence of my rapping, it concerned me that I heard no response, not even a curt command to go away, and so I went around to the rear of the house and knocked this time on their kitchen door. Again, no answer.

  In days gone by, the next place I would have looked for them would have been in the farthest reaches of their almond orchards. Their family had once owned nearly five acres of land, and the Bee Ladies spent hour upon hour deep within the groves tending their hives. But over time, my neighbors had slowly sold off all but a small sliver of their family’s former property, holding on to just a small copse of almond trees, their three remaining hives, and the modicum of privacy they craved. While I had been forced to make similar concessions over the years, thanks to my family’s thriftiness and the success of our long-standing honey business I’d managed to hold on to more than an acre of our old groves, which were more than enough to sustain the sixteen hives and the simple distribution network of farmers’ markets, consignment stores, and mail-order sales that continued to support my modest needs. I do not say this to boast. Business was the last thing on my mind that awful morning. Since I could see that the Bee Ladies weren’t in their backyard, I assumed they were most likely in their house.

  Putting my ear to the Bee Ladies’ door, I heard tinny radio voices projecting from inside, and I thought for a moment that perhaps they had gone off to the market and left the radio playing, as I myself do when I run errands, so as to lend the appearance of occupancy in my absence.

  I cast this notion aside, however, as soon as I peeked through the side window of the little garage at the end of their driveway and saw their Rambler station wagon parked inside. I knew that neither of the Bee Ladies cared to stroll the neighborhood for pleasure or need, nor were they likely to travel about in the company of anyone other than themselves. I began to fear something was truly amiss.