Telling the Bees Read online

  I tried to picture the eerily silent young woman I knew as a loquacious child, but the image would not form in my mind. Claire, I believe, must have read something of the skepticism in my face.

  “Well, it’s the truth, Albert,” Claire said defiantly. “You could hardly get a word in edgewise with her when she was little.”

  “I believe you,” I said, not wishing to rile her further, as Claire could work up quite a lather when she believed her family, especially her older sister, was under attack.

  But even if what Claire had said was true, what was there to do about it? Claire stared into my eyes as if searching for the answer to my own question, and when I faltered under her gaze, I could not help feeling that I had somehow come up short.

  This is why I felt it was my duty, though I hadn’t been asked directly, to inform my mother on that particular occasion that I had not seen Claire since the previous Thursday.

  “Now, Elizabeth, don’t go getting yourself all worked up over nothing again,” my father said. “She’s probably just come down with a cold.”

  “Fiddlesticks!”

  “I said leave it be, Elizabeth,” my father insisted in a tone at once so cold and firm that even my sister looked up from her dinner plate.

  “But Walter . . .” my mother started to object.

  “I tell you that girl can take care of herself,” my father insisted. My mother’s mouth snapped shut and remained uncharacteristically so until the conclusion of the meal. She remained noticeably taciturn for another day or two, her sunny disposition returning only after Claire reappeared on our doorstep the following week. My mother welcomed her back with a flurry of hugs and warm words of affection that seemed excessive even for her normally demonstrative self. My father, however, maintained his usual dignified demeanor. And Claire, for her part, seemed unmoved by either response and volunteered no more concrete explanation for her extended absence than to say she hadn’t been feeling well, which I suspect both my mother and father interpreted according to their own inclinations.

  We probably wouldn’t have noticed the new set of bruises on her at all, since Claire tended at that time to favor long sleeves and high necklines, had she not chanced that day to snag the back of her sweater on an overhanging bramble as she was carrying a load of new foundation frames from the honey shed to our number sixteen hive.

  Claire was wearing a peach-colored pullover sweater and she had gotten entangled in a particularly awkward spot right between her shoulder blades. Not wanting to drop the frames to extricate herself, she had called out for help. My mother and I had come running at the sound of her voice in distress.

  Quickly assessing the situation, my mother ordered me to relieve Claire of her burden. I am sure my mother saw the discoloration at the base of Claire’s throat at the same moment I did because I heard her gasp just as I did when she tugged at the stubborn snag at the neckline of Claire’s sweater and a mass of angry purple-and-yellow splotches just above her collarbone was revealed.

  Of course having witnessed Mrs. Straussman’s dauntingly mercurial verbal assaults on numerous prior occasions, I am sure my mother naturally presumed, as I did, a propensity for physical violence as well. I assume as much as neither of us spoke directly to Claire or to each other about what we saw or suspected. Which is not to say we weren’t concerned about Claire’s welfare, but there was only so much we could do under the circumstances. My father was quite firm in his directive that we should refrain from meddling in the Straussmans’ affairs.

  Times were very different back then. My father was not alone in his sincere belief that what went on between family members was nobody’s business but their own, nor was he swimming against the tide of common wisdom when he exhorted my mother not to go stirring up a hornet’s nest in her own backyard.

  “You’ll just get yourself stung like before,” my father had said. “And the rest of us right along with you.”

  “But you can’t expect me to stand by and do nothing.”

  “That’s exactly what I expect you to do, Elizabeth. You have no more proof now than you did with that boy of theirs. What makes you think it would be any different this time?”

  This time.

  I could not know what my mother could have done about the tragic circumstances of Harry Junior’s death. But I could imagine myself Claire’s heroic rescuer—her knight in shining armor who stood up for her when no one else would. But what I allowed myself to imagine, and what I could realistically be expected to act upon, were two entirely different matters.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Claire said as we strolled together through her family’s walnut grove, stopping to pick up the ripened nuts that had fallen to the ground and deposit them in the customary bushel basket she’d brought along as a ruse should her parents inquire where she’d gotten off to. The last of the sun’s rays were glinting through the tops of the trees. It could not have been more than a week after my mother and I had discovered the unsettling bruises on her neck.

  “I could say the same of you,” I replied.

  “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said. Dark circles ringed her eyes, and her hair seemed to hang rather more limply than usual across her forehead and pale cheeks.

  “Perhaps if you drank a glass of warm milk at bedtime,” I ventured, “that might help you sleep.”

  “I don’t want to sleep,” she said.

  And then she said nothing more for several minutes until we found ourselves standing in a small clearing to the rear of her family’s property.

  “I used to hate when Father went away for work, but I loved it when he came back home,” Claire said. She set her basket on the ground. “Hilda too. She used to look forward to his presents.”

  When it appeared that Claire might never speak again, I cleared my throat, and then she told me that the previous March her father had brought Hilda home a beautiful china doll with long red curls and a green satin dress. Claire said that instead of reacting with her customary delight to her father’s latest gift, Hilda had taken one look at the doll and thrown it right back at him. Claire said it hit the wall behind her father’s head and its face shattered into what had seemed like a thousand pieces.

  “Father never said a word,” Claire said. “He just turned round and went straight to the dining room and poured himself a glass of whiskey from the bottle he keeps on the top shelf of the hutch. I think he thinks he’s hiding it from us up there. He forgets that Hilda and I do all the dusting since Mother’s taken ill.

  “Mother made me pick up the broken doll because Hilda refused to come out of her room until she heard Father leave the house,” Claire continued. “I didn’t know what to do with it, so I brought it out here.”

  I nodded, more out of sympathy than understanding, as I could no more imagine what had possessed her to dispose of a lifeless object in so eccentric a manner as I could see myself asking her why she had chosen to share the details of Hilda’s tantrum with me. Clearly her mother wasn’t the only Straussman prone to violent fits of temper. Having been the recipient of my own sister’s not-inconsiderable wrath on occasion, it made me reconsider whether the sister, and not the mother, might not be the actual source of Claire’s torment.

  “Father gave me a present on his next trip home,” Claire said, and again I nodded, if for no other reason than I imagined the gesture was just enough to signify interest in her disclosure without implying outright understanding. “It was a china doll almost just like Hilda’s. I used to keep it on top of my bureau, but it seemed to upset Hilda so much that I finally put it in my underwear drawer.”

  Claire reached into the basket and withdrew a bundle from beneath the walnuts she had gathered. Slowly she unwrapped the cloth to reveal a china doll with long golden locks and a blue satin dress. Then she reached back into the basket and took out a gardener’s trowel.

  “When I finally fell asleep last night, I had a dream,” Claire said. “I dreamed there was a herd of horses grazing in the orchard behind our h
ouse. White horses with flames for manes. They were frightening to look at, but somehow I wasn’t afraid. I ran straight to the biggest one of all and I reached up and grabbed the flaming strands of his mane and I pulled myself onto his bare back. I could feel the flames crackling all around my fingers, but I didn’t care. I knew the pain would not begin until I let go, so I held on for all I was worth, and the horse took off running through the trees.”

  “I didn’t know you liked horses,” I said.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t like them at all.”

  After a moment or two, she began to dig a hole, clearly not the first she’d dug at this spot. I saw a small cross, roughly fashioned from twigs tied together with long grass, that appeared to have fallen over beside a dry mound of dirt.

  “The horse was galloping so fast,” Claire whispered, “I was afraid I might be knocked off by a tree branch and so I leaned down as far as I could until my face was buried in the flames on his neck and I closed my eyes, and that’s when I knew what it felt like to die.”

  “Claire,” I said as gently as I could. The sound of my voice seemed to rouse her from the memory of her nightmare. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Claire did not look up, but she nodded her head and began to scrabble the ground with the trowel even more furiously. “Because you’re the only one I can tell,” she said.

  “But I don’t understand,” I protested.

  “You don’t have to,” she said, picking up the fallen cross and working it back into the ground.

  “But Claire,” I persisted.

  “Let’s just say I’m too old to play with dolls and let it go at that.”

  Seventeen

  THE DRONE: Distinguished by his large size, rectangular abdomen, and additional eye facets, he neither gathers honey nor guards the hive. His sole purpose is to mate with a newly emerged queen. Once that function has been fulfilled, the surviving drones are generally driven from the hive when winter comes.

  How does one measure time? Physicists now believe Albert Einstein may have been wrong, that subatomic particles may be able to move faster than the speed of light. From what I’ve read, this may ultimately alter the way we perceive the universe.

  I find the implications of such calculations fascinating in the abstract sense, yet I am a simple beekeeper. Like my bees, I was raised to perceive time by the passing of seasons. It is, I admit, a less precise measurement, but it has for most of my life allowed me the comfort of predictability. Spring is the season of new life. Summer marks its fullness. Fall, the decline. And winter heralds both death and with the first blades of spring, the ultimate hope of renewal.

  And then time fell apart.

  It fell apart for me on that awful spring morning when I discovered Claire and Hilda Straussman’s lifeless bodies lying bound and gagged on their parlor floor. The memory of Claire’s eyes, fixed and milky with dead fright, plagued the certainty of my days and the silence of my nights.

  Not that I am unfamiliar with acts of violence within the rhythm of the natural world, for even within the circumscription of my daily orbit I have witnessed my own honeybees driven to such hard-hearted acts against members of their own species that I shudder to recollect them. I have had, more times than I care to recount, the distinct misfortune of coming upon a horde of robber bees in the midst of a murderous raid on one of my hives and I have wept with grief seeing these hapless creatures pulling at one another and tumbling about the entrance to the hive in a brutal fight to the death. And if truth be told, though I am ashamed to admit it, on such occasions I have been tempted to curse the Good Lord for the hardness of His grand design even as I hasten to swat and kill these rogue maidens engaged against their own in mortal combat.

  But while it pains my heart beyond measure to see this cruel perversion of a honeybee’s communal spirit, I have accepted the necessity of this harsh struggle. I understand the rhythm of the hive dictates that when honey is scarce or flaunted unnecessarily by a careless keeper, the inhabitants of a rival hive or a feral swarm are naturally driven to set upon their neighbors to steal their precious store of food. In such cases, I can only hope I am lucky enough to come upon these warring factions while there is yet time to stay the carnage. That this can be accomplished I know because I have gained a regrettable expertise in fitting the entrance of the besieged hive with small wooden cleats made to narrow the opening until no more than a single invader or two may enter at a time, thus improving the defensive odds in favor of the hive’s guard bees stationed on the inside of the landing board to repel such attacks.

  If only the Straussman sisters had had such vigilance discharged on their behalf. At one time, I would like to think it would have been me. It should have been me.

  Certainly Hilda could not defend herself nor, I fear, would not. Slowed as she was by age and a corpulent infirmity that resembled more each year the funereal fabric that had likewise shrouded her mother’s bleak spirit, I believe there was a large part of Hilda that would have welcomed the inevitability, if not the exact manner, of her demise. Which left only Claire—poor, proud Claire—whose delicate spine, though it seemed no thicker than a bird’s leg, refused to stoop even under the burden of all the years it carried. But for all her exalted pride, what defense could she hope to mount for herself and her sister, all alone and unprotected, against the senseless depravity of her fellow man or woman?

  Such had been the connective thread of my tortured thoughts in the six long months that had passed since I’d last heard from Detective Grayson. I’d just come upon my number seven hive to find scores of dead bees, some with their attackers’ lethal stingers still embedded in their bodies, littering the landing board, and nothing but more dead bodies inside piled in heaps on the bottom cover.

  Consumed as I was, working with feverish speed to nail the last cleat down to the landing board before all was lost to marauding interlopers, I make no excuses for my startled reaction to Detective Grayson’s sudden looming appearance on the doorstep of my honey shed, where I had gone to put away my smoker and bee brush.

  “Sorry, Mr. Honig, I didn’t mean to scare you like that,” Detective Grayson demurred, extending one of his great bear paws and clapping me on the back in greeting as I bent over to pick up the tin smoker can and brush I’d just dropped.

  “No need to apologize,” I assured the detective, who I noted had added a disturbing ring of shadows beneath his hazel eyes since our last conversation regarding Claire’s enigmatic excursion to Detroit. “You gave me quite a start, that’s all.”

  “Sorry anyway,” he insisted. “So how you been doing?”

  “I’ve kept myself busy,” I replied.

  “That’s good to hear. I’ve been keeping pretty busy myself,” he said, and in the unnatural pause between his sentences I intuited his amiable grin was somewhat forced. “Maybe a little busier than I’d like.”

  He pulled a color photograph from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. I recognized it at once.

  “Can I ask you again what you might be able to tell me about this young fellow here?” he said. I noticed another slight hitch in his voice, this time between young and fellow that confirmed my suspicion.

  “What can you tell me about him?” he pressed.

  Only everything and nothing at all, I thought, but I did not say as much. Yet I could not repress a small sigh as I stared once again at the smiling face of the young Marine in the photograph that had mingled for so long among the other faded snapshots perched upon the Straussmans’ polished mantle. I handed the photograph back to the detective and turned to my workbench to put away the smoker and brush I’d retrieved.

  “What is it you want to know?” I said. Having held my silence for so long, how much I should reveal at that particular moment was still a matter of debate in my mind.

  “Well, Mr. Honig, I’d like to know why you didn’t tell me you knew who this was the first time I showed you his picture or how come you didn’t say anything about him when I asked
you if the Straussman sisters had any next of kin?”

  Why indeed?

  When I thought for a moment of all the things I should have said or done in my life, all the real and imagined crimes of commission and omission, and all the reasons and regrets I had accumulated in the face of everything that had gone before, I could not help feeling this one small silence was the very least of my transgressions.

  “My mother always told me to let sleeping dogs lie,” I said, though, in truth, it was not my mother who had made for me the most adamant argument for such discretion.

  “Well, my mother had a saying of her own,” Detective Grayson said after a moment’s consideration. “She used to say that he is not an honest man who has burned his tongue and does not tell the company the soup is hot.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do, Mr. Honig.” He narrowed his eyes and caught mine in his. “No more bee stories. No more BS.”

  For once, I did not blink.

  “His name is David Gilbert,” I said. I couldn’t swear that I felt better, but for the first time in what seemed like forever I didn’t feel worse.

  Detective Grayson smiled. His eyes held mine, but it seemed to me the tension in his shoulders had eased a bit. He pulled his ubiquitous notebook and pen from his jacket pocket. “So, Mr. Honig, can you tell me how the heck to find this guy?”

  I was sure at that moment that I was the only one who had known where David Gilbert had come from and, besides Claire herself, why he had left, but to my shame and sorrow I never cared to find out what had become of him since. In this deliberate dearth of concern, I had always been my father’s son.

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” I replied with sincere remorse, though I believe the good detective had begun to find my abjurations ever less compelling than I intended, “I have no idea where he is or how to find him. I truly don’t.”