Telling the Bees Page 11

  “She’s starved for something,” my father said, and then he shook his newspaper open to signal the conversation had concluded as far as he was concerned. I could not help but be struck by the contrasting images of an undernourished young girl and her hulking mother that my father’s remark produced in my own mind as I opened the door to the back porch and slipped into the silent embrace of the evening sky.

  It certainly was true that sparks seemed to fly whenever Claire was around. And sometimes even when she wasn’t. I sensed that more was said between my parents that night regarding Claire’s antics, as the air seemed thicker than the temperature warranted when I sat down to breakfast the next morning. I had little chance to contemplate the atmospheric anomaly, however, as I was compelled to hurry off directly after breakfast to practice for our school’s upcoming fall recital.

  I had only recently taken up playing the tuba, in the main to please my mother who said she always wanted a little “German band” in the house, and though my lack of musical aptitude was soon evident I felt obliged to attempt to fulfill her modest desire, as did Eloise, who, contrary to my parents’ wishes, took up the clarinet instead of the accordion. I showed not the least inkling of musical talent and so within another year or so I was thankfully allowed to discontinue my hapless efforts. My sister showed no more musical aptitude than me, though she did develop a lifelong affinity for big band music and jazz. But in the meantime, while my mother still held out hope for us both, we’d been hooked into performing in our school’s annual fall concert. For me, at least, this meant early-morning and after-school practice sessions every weekday without fail. The point of which is that I was sorely disappointed to learn that Claire was already in the honey shed helping my father load some foundation frames into the extractor when I arrived home from school one day in late September after an extended musical practice. I say disappointed, not so much because Claire was there but because I feared I might have missed what was for me my most cherished aspect of beekeeping: the long-awaited harvesting of the excess honey from the hive.

  This is not a complicated procedure, but it is best accomplished when working in tandem—one lifting and uncapping the foundation frames brimming with honey while the other fastens them into the frame holders inside the drum of the extracting machine. A machine of true beauty, the extractor resembles in size and shape an old-fashioned mechanical clothes washer in which one lifts, one by one, the still-dripping articles of clothing from the washer’s drum and passes them through a metal hand-cranked platen, except that there is no platen, and the extractor drum is made of sparkling stainless steel instead of the infinitely less glamorous white enamel. I believe some of the glamour of the extractor lies in its function. Instead of cranking loads of wet clothing by hand through a pair of rollers to wring the moisture from workaday garments, as my mother and sister did each Monday without fail, the foundation frames are attached like spokes to a central hub and, when cranked at the proper speed, extrude glorious golden honey from the combs by centrifugal force. Though it seems a simple enough motion, there is a knack to turning the crank, slowly at first, then building to a moderate easy-to-turn pace so as not to risk breaking the combs out of the frame. When extracting is done properly, the honey soon begins to collect on the walls of the extractor and drains out into a gallon-sized collector can that we place beneath the spigot.

  As a boy, it generally was my job to fasten the frames to the anchor chains of the extractor and, when everything was secured, to turn the crank and watch to see that the honey did not overflow, while my father’s job was to slice away the protective wax topping the bees make over each of the comb chambers of the foundation frame after it has been filled with honey. Working as a team, with my father preparing the frames and me cranking the extractor, we could harvest a full super in an hour or less, which was a demanding but necessary pace to maintain during the height of the honeyflow season when our industrious bees worked night and day to keep up with the wildflower bloom.

  On this particular occasion, my father and I had for several days previous been keeping an eye on our number thirteen hive, which appeared to be nearing time for harvest, and hoping for a warm day so as to cause the least discomfort to our bees when we opened the hive to remove the full supers and replace them with newly prepared frames to fill with more golden honey. On the afternoon of the first temperate day in nearly a week, I found myself fidgeting through a particularly frustrating bass line of a John Philip Sousa composition. When at last our ragtag school band was dismissed for the afternoon, I ran all the way home only to be informed by my mother, who greeted me as she always did when I arrived home from school, that the supers on our number thirteen had already been replaced.

  “Calm yourself,” my mother said, tousling my hair when she beheld my obvious dejection. “There’s no use crying over spilt milk.”

  She urged me to take a seat at the kitchen table and had soon laid out for me a consoling plate of leftover breakfast scones and a glass of cool lemonade. As I ate, she explained that my father had been anxious to take advantage of the afternoon’s warmth. When Claire arrived directly after school, he enlisted her aid in removing the full supers and carrying them to the honey shed.

  “All right, young lord,” my mother said with an approving smile once I’d finished my snack and appeared adequately calmed to her eye, “run along now. I’ll bet they can still use some help.”

  Of course my mother’s instincts had been correct. Even before I entered the shed, I could hear the agitation in Claire’s voice as she insisted that she knew exactly what she was doing over my father’s equally emphatic insistence that surely she did not.

  When I opened the door to the shed, I found my father hunkered awkwardly over her tiny shoulders trying, it seemed to me, to wrestle the uncapping knife from her grasp as she struggled to balance a foundation frame on the pivot bar that steadied it during the uncapping process. The sudden shaft of sunlight that flooded the room from the open door seemed to startle them both, and the frame and knife clattered to the wooden floor of the shed as Claire darted from beneath my father’s arms to stand and fiddle with the crank of the extractor. As I believe I’ve mentioned many times, Claire was slightly built, but never in life did she seem so frail as she did at that moment, frozen in a hailstorm of dust motes that swirled in the stark sunlight surrounding her.

  She began to cry then, not loudly, but as though a soft stream of air was seeping from a punctured bicycle tire. She stood there like that, even after my father called for me to come quickly to help him retrieve the fallen frame.

  “We’ll take it from here, Claire,” my father said gruffly as my chest swelled with self-importance. Luckily the frame had not yet been uncapped and so no honey was spilt in the mishap. Still, Claire seemed so distraught by her clumsiness that after a moment of indecision she excused herself and hurried into the house, where she spent the rest of the afternoon helping my mother clean out the icebox. Neither my father nor I mentioned the incident in the honey shed that evening at dinner, or ever. Nor did Claire say anything about it to my father, as far as I know. She did, however, seem less inclined to spend time out of doors with either my father or myself for quite some time after that. I can’t be certain, as nothing was ever certain in my mind when it came to Claire, but I believe this unfortunate incident was one of the few times in her life when Claire clearly regretted biting off more than she could chew.

  Fifteen

  THE DRONE’S EYE: Larger than either the worker’s or the queen’s, it can contain as many as eight thousand lenses. Able to perceive a full 360-degree range of vision, it is designed for optimal mating pursuit of the queen on the fly.

  I am an old man now, an old man whose memories pulse more strongly than the blood in my veins. Marcel Proust described these remnants of the past as “souls bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence.” I am no French philosopher, but I think I understand what he meant. If the breeze is just right, I ca
n catch a whiff of eucalyptus, pungent as camphor and lye, and my thoughts turn, almost against my will, to the place where Claire lived and died.

  Of course I know that the eucalyptus windbreak that ran alongside the north border of the Straussmans’ property is long gone. But somewhere deep inside the cluster of asphalt and stucco and artificial wood trim that engulfs me on all sides now, something of Claire remains in the ephemeral perfume of these old trees, especially on warm summer evenings when the fragrance is so strong that I wonder if I am the only one left who desires nothing more than to savor this heady aroma like an elixir that used to infuse the thick air with such possibilities.

  On such nights, I close my eyes and I am drawn once again to the siren song of the Harmony Park Ballroom where dances were held once upon a time every Saturday night.

  For nearly three-quarters of a century, the Harmony Park Ballroom hunkered like the hull of a giant overturned boat run aground in a dusty clearing overhung with peppertrees and backed by another tall windbreak of eucalyptus that abutted the railway switchyard. On balmy nights when I was still a teen, I used to sit out on our back porch immersed in the redolent jumble of car doors slamming and whiskey glasses and beer bottles clinking amid bursts of smoky laughter while an armada of guitars strummed hot-blooded song after song, the music seeming to float through the thickly scented air, while truckloads of soldiers and farm workers, reeking of Fels-Naptha soap and cheap whiskey, swaggered across the graveled parking lot and on through the Harmony’s big double doors to celebrate the end of another backbreaking week while the music played into the dawn of another Sabbath.

  Even as a young man, I was struck by the contrast between my parents’ shy first rendezvous at their long-ago church social, and the raucous goings-on down the road, and I found myself more often than not wondering what it would be like to stand in the shadows of the dance floor for an hour or so and to judge for myself if the men were as dangerous and the women as wanton as I imagined they must be to drink and dance until the wee hours of the night in the cavernous darkness of the Harmony Park Ballroom.

  I can recall as if it were yesterday how after a particularly boisterous night of revelry at the Harmony, I confessed these guilty thoughts to Claire.

  I was thirteen and a half years old. Claire had just turned fifteen the month before. We had spent most of the evening collecting fallen walnuts from her family’s grove. When the basket was full, I asked her if she minded coming with me to my family’s number twelve hive.

  “I forgot my smoker can,” I stammered.

  “Silly goose,” she said, laughing, reaching for my hand. “Let’s go. The night is still young.”

  And I would have taken her hand, too, had I not been carrying the bushel basketful of walnuts we’d just gathered. I did manage to keep up with her as she skipped and danced beneath the bowers all the way to our number twelve hive, which was near enough to the Harmony Ballroom that we could hear the music, which in the viscous night air seemed sung by mermaids. I had never heard a song so beautiful. But then, my family frowned upon secular music.

  “I like this,” I said, staring into her eyes.

  “You too?” Claire finally whispered, and then it was my turn to stare. Something in her eyes told me it wasn’t the music she was referring to. I felt my cheeks flush with the realization that such forbidden urges were harbored by this delicate girl who had grown into my most cherished—and, in fact, my only—friend if one didn’t count my bees.

  That our friendship had survived during our early adolescence, despite the restrictions placed upon Claire’s activities by her mother, I once believed we owed to the relative freedom I enjoyed within my own family.

  Looking back now, I realize I may have exaggerated Claire’s deceptive talent, as between her father’s extended absences, her sister’s obsessive reclusiveness, and her mother’s lack of mobility—old Mrs. Straussman’s left leg having been amputated due to the complications from diabetes—it may not have been as difficult as I once imagined for Claire to invent the litany of plausibilities that enabled her and I to retrieve a bushel of almonds from her family’s orchard or fetch a quart of milk and a pound of butter from the neighborhood grocer. Nor did it take much effort on my part to sit on my back porch and watch for her to stand on her own back porch, hands on hips, breathing in the summer fragrances, before trotting off to fetch a bushel basket or grocery sack or whatever else she needed to signal wordlessly from across the distance of our two yards where to find her later if I had a mind to follow.

  And of course I always did.

  Sixteen

  ARTEMIS: The Greek goddess of the hunt, forests, and childbirth, she was often portrayed as the virgin protectress of young girls, who ritualistically sacrificed their tunics, toys, dolls, and all youthful belongings to her as a farewell to their youth on the night before their marriage. Her priests were generally eunuchs, and her priestesses were virgins called the Melissae, meaning honeybees.

  In the dark months following Claire’s death, my thoughts drifted like desert sand around the regret of hours that had transformed fleeting days into long weeks and months, and on into irretrievable years of stubborn silence.

  It all seems so foolish now, but throughout the drift of those wasted years I peevishly clung to the belief that as long as the silence could be broken, should either of us choose to do so, then the silence was somehow less complete.

  But we did not speak, choosing instead to cultivate in the hothouses of our solitude all the real and imagined slights like so many rare and exotic orchids, and then all at once, in no more time than it took to stuff a dirty red bandanna inside a human mouth and fasten a careless strip of silver tape across it, the choice was rendered moot and the silence eternal.

  And so I am left with nothing but memories.

  When I was still in my teens, I used to sit out on our back porch late into the evening watching for signs that Claire was out and about, and I often overheard my mother lament to my father that she was afraid for “that poor dear girl.” I knew without her saying so that she meant Claire.

  “You have a daughter, Elizabeth,” I heard my father say more than once.

  “But she’s not like me,” my mother always replied.

  I am not exactly like my father either. I wonder sometimes if this is the dichotomy of hope that all parents face. The wish, on the one hand, that their child, will carry their own dreams forward while at the same time hoping they will do so somehow better, yet, on the other hand, not so much better as to lose sight of who they are and where they came from.

  My father’s consternation that night, however, was more straightforward. He worried about what he considered to be an unseemly meddling into other people’s affairs.

  My mother had other concerns. While hesitant to defy my father’s wishes outright, she often wondered aloud whether it might not be best to at least question the girl after she noticed, just as I had, what looked to be bruises on Claire’s delicate wrists and forearms and another on her jawbone.

  “She’s fifteen. Surely she’s too old to be getting those kinds of marks from innocent roughhousing,” my mother had pointed out rather indignantly to my father as they sat together in the parlor one evening after dinner. “As God as my witness, they look to be deliberately made.”

  “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” I heard my father firmly reply after a long moment’s consideration. His voice seemed to punctuate the rhythmic squeak of my mother’s wooden rocker.

  “That’s what the Good Book says, Elizabeth.”

  “But does not the Bible also say, ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap’?” my mother had said in rejoinder. Regrettably, I could not hear my father’s response to this as Eloise, who was old enough to know better, chose that most inopportune moment to intrude upon my solitary stargazing with a shouted invitation to join her in the dining room for a game of checkers, which I declined despite her loud and repeated entreaties.

  My parents’ conversation had long since con
cluded by the time I finally was able to quiet my sister by promising to play one game with her later that evening, so I can only assume my mother eventually deferred to my father’s entreaty, at least for the time being, as I did not hear them discuss the matter again for the rest of that summer.

  As had become the cycle, Claire’s mother had ordered her once again to stop coming around to our house to “dally,” as she put it, in our family’s apiary shortly after my parents’ initial conversation. But the ban was only haphazardly enforced after a time, and by the following winter Claire had more or less resumed her daily routine.

  “That poor girl didn’t seem to be herself last week. She seemed so pale and distracted,” my mother said to no one in particular as she passed a bowl of mashed potatoes to my father when the subject of Claire’s sudden absence came up once again the following spring. “Did either of you see Claire at school at all last week?”

  Eloise never warmed to Claire the way my parents and I did. And Claire had likewise avoided any significant conversation with Eloise, having confided in me that she had been angered many years earlier when she chanced to overhear my sister and some of her schoolmates mocking Hilda’s rather awkward attempt to join in one of the girls’ schoolyard games.

  “Just because your mother teaches Sunday school doesn’t give that snooty sister of yours the right to act all holier than thou,” Claire had fumed.

  Of course I agreed with Claire that my sister had acted insensitively, but in her defense I also ventured that Hilda had hardly given Eloise, or anyone else for that matter, much in the way of neighborly encouragement.

  “She may not say much, but that doesn’t mean she can’t hear what people say about her,” Claire had snapped back. But then, just as abruptly, her demeanor softened and her eyes took on that distant cast they often did when she spoke of her family. “You know, Hilda wasn’t always this way. When she was small, my father used to call her his little chatterbox.”