Telling the Bees Read online

  CHILLED BROOD: Immature bees that have died from cold or lack of proper care.

  In the innocence of my youth, I believed in the absolute nature of truth, and, like Aristotle, I saw philosophy as the science that considers truth. But under the burden of mounting years and the bitter experience of Claire’s untimely death, I began to wonder if perhaps the learned French essayist Michel de Montaigne was closer to the mark in his supposition that philosophy was doubt. This much I now know: Though my revelation to Detective Grayson as to David Gilbert’s origins had dredged up many painful memories, I had taken some small comfort in the fact that the information I had provided had led at least indirectly to the eventual conviction of the Straussman sisters’ murderers. I had assumed that this legal determination would ultimately bring me peace over, if not full absolution from, the part I had played in the whole sordid affair. But I was wrong. While my loyal honeybees continued to provide me with a measure of joy and companionship, my evenings grew progressively colder and darker, and I found myself turning ever more inward to a place where even my beloved books, though they helped me pass the time, provided little in the way of true solace. Truth, I was forced to conclude, is an elusive science at best, and philosophy is the cold comfort we take in our doubt.

  Such were my thoughts on a cool summer evening nearly a dozen years after the so-called book had been closed, for all intents and purposes, on Claire’s and Hilda’s tragic deaths. I was sitting on my front porch swing rereading an unexpected letter I’d received just that afternoon from Detective Grayson.

  I remembered the tired smile that had crept across the good detective’s face as he gripped my hand warmly at the conclusion of the formal sentencing hearing for the murderers.

  “Well, Mr. Honig,” he’d said by way of farewell, “I bet you feel a whole lot better now that this case is finally closed.”

  Case closed. Within the limits of his professional vernacular, they were, I suppose, the two most precise and comforting words he could use to put to rest what must surely have been the very last in a distressingly long and twisted line of inquiries into the darkest reaches of human psychology. I wondered that he had managed to retain even a shred of his own humanity in the process.

  “Yes, of course,” I’d replied without conviction as we stood facing each other beneath the harsh fluorescent fixtures that lit the interminable hallway outside the courtroom where the final judgment on the case had just been rendered.

  The desolation of that long-ago moment resurfaced with palpable intensity as I fingered the edge of the detective’s unanticipated missive. It was the first such communication I’d received from him since he’d left the police force at the end of 1993, only a few weeks after the Straussman case had officially concluded.

  Dear Mr. Honig,

  How are you doing? Well, I hope. Me and the wife are doing fine ourselves. We bought a little spread just outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, just like I said we would and we’ve been living up here for the last ten years. Bet you never thought you’d be hearing from me again!! But here’s the funny thing. I’ve taken up beekeeping. Who would’ve thunk it? Ha-ha! No, really. I met a beekeeper at the local farmers’ market a while back and we got to talking. About you, in fact, and one thing led to another, and a couple years ago he helped me set up a beehive in my backyard. I’ve got three hives now, and counting.

  I gotta tell you, Mr. Honig, beekeeping’s really a kick. Even the wife says she’s seen a change in me. She says she’s never seen me so relaxed.

  So here’s why I’m writing. One of my hives isn’t producing like it used to. I think it might have a parasite infection. I’m pretty sure it’s not ants causing the problem. I’ve been using your old pie tin trick since I set up my first hive. My buddy up here thought the problem I’m having might be due to Tracheal Mites. He showed me this menthol trick, but maybe the weather was too cold for the crystals to vaporize. At any rate, the hive didn’t improve. So then we checked for Varroa Mites. We tried using an ether roll on a jar of bees, but we couldn’t find any mites on the glass, so we were pretty sure it wasn’t that.

  So what do you think? Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated.

  Sincerely,

  Raymond Grayson

  What I thought first of all, after all these years, was he’d finally seen fit to use his first name with me. That pleased me no end, as did his inclusion of a photograph of himself standing in front of one of his beehives. He had lost a great deal of weight since I’d last seen him as though he had regained a semblance of his youthful vigor. His hair was a close-cropped silver, and his face, though lined from the sun, had lost its soft jowls. He was smiling.

  The letter came in the early part of August 2005, nearly a dozen years after Claire’s and Hilda’s murderers had been sent to jail and nearly two years since my new neighbors began planting rows of crosses in their front lawn. In spite of, or perhaps because of, all that had passed between us, I suppose I should not have been surprised to discover that Detective Grayson had eventually followed my advice and taken up beekeeping as an avocation. What surprised me more was the casual ease with which he had apparently put the solemn weight of his former vocation behind him.

  I finished reading the letter for the third time as the ocean chill began rolling in with the evening shadows. I remember savoring the luminous quality of the twilight as I carefully refolded the pages of the missive and slipped it back into its envelope. I thought for a while as to how to respond to his inquiry. There were a few more tests I thought he might try before ruling out varroa mites entirely. I may have closed my eyes for a moment—I can’t be sure. I am sure of so little these days. When I lifted my eyes from the envelope clutched in my lap, the graying sky was smeared with streaks of gold and blue and orange, and Claire’s older brother, Harry Junior, was standing quietly at the foot of the steps in front of me.

  I’d only seen that one photograph of him: the one where he was formally dressed in his short pants and button-down shirt and was sitting like a rosy cherub on the arm of the davenport in his parents’ front room, but I was sure it was him. Even without his apple-plump cheeks there to hide the finely chiseled features of the man he might have become, and his baby blond ringlets shorn and faded to dusky brown, there remained yet about him the unmistakable essence of the child that once was in the faraway gaze of his father’s steely blue eyes. If there was evil there, I couldn’t find it. Only sadness. So much sadness.

  I stared at him, fearful that if I looked away he’d melt back into the gathering mist, and he stared right back at me, standing stock-still and silent, his left hand gripping the stair railing and his right foot poised on the bottom step. I knew he was waiting for me to say or do something—to invite him up on the porch, perhaps, or to go to where he stood on the stairs and offer him my hand. As I hesitated, I watched the evening shadows spread like the pitch of avocado honey across the wooden planks beneath the swing on which I sat.

  “Where are our crosses?” he said, his voice softened by the down of disuse. I knew what he meant right away: his cross, his mother’s cross, his father’s, Claire’s, and Hilda’s. They were all dead, and none but the tears of Ra had been shed for any of them. And now in the very same neighborhood where each and every one of them had lived and died, a garish memorial was being assembled for all to see, to commemorate the passing of strangers whose roots to the land ran no deeper than the patchwork of tidy rose beds and Bermuda grass lawns that had taken the place of the almond, orange, and eucalyptus groves which were already old before Harry and I were born.

  “I have no say over the names on the crosses,” I heard myself say.

  “You have no say over anything,” Harry said to me. And as he spoke, small dark feathers spurted in downy puffs from his mouth into the cold night air, and with each puff the sound of his voice grew stronger and coarser, and the feathers sprouted wings and the wings began to beat furiously and buzz and hum and hover about Harry’s head in a great Cimmerian swarm
.

  “We’re not as dead as you think,” he said, his voice rising above the din. “And that’s your fault, too.”

  Twenty-five

  HEAVING UP THE HIVE: A traditional practice sometimes performed in addition to “telling the bees,” it requires that both hive and coffin be lifted at the same moment as the funeral party prepares to leave the house.

  Alexander the Great was said to have been buried in a coffin filled with honey. This was in accordance with the oldest beliefs of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who like the Egyptians and the Babylonians before them ascribed certain divine properties to the industrious honeybee and the golden ambrosia she produced. The ancients believed that once earthly existence passed, a human soul remained near men, living underground. That is why a soul could not rest until its human remains were buried in the soil and the rites of sepulture observed. No less than Virgil concluded his account of the funeral of Polydorus with these words: “We enclose the soul in the grave.”

  The ancients believed such rituals were necessary to confine the soul to its subterranean abode. So, too, it was necessary to call the soul of the deceased three times by the name with which it had been born and to wish it a happy life underground.

  “Fare thee well,” Ovid recorded, “Sit tibi terra levis. May the earth rest lightly upon thee.”

  To fail to perform these rituals properly was to risk the soul’s unhappy return to the earth above.

  Though my good Christian father was, as far as I know, devoutly ignorant of the seed of these pagan rites and beliefs, he did hold to a similar custom, one that many old beekeepers I know still observe upon the death of a friend or family member. They call this ritual telling the bees.

  My father learned the practice from his own father, who as a boy had performed the rite when a loved one died just as his father had before him. I was six years old when my turn came to perform this traditional rite of passage for our neighbor Mrs. Lupitas, who until her departure from this earth at the ripe age of ninety-two had come by our house once a month without fail to purchase honey from my parents’ stock. It had been Mrs. Lupitas who had first welcomed my parents to their new home with a basket of fresh-baked bread and garden vegetables, and in the absence of any other nearby blood relatives, my sister and I had come to think of her as a surrogate grandmother.

  On the morning of her funeral, my father called me to his side and handed me the ring of keys that he always carried in the right front pocket of his dungarees.

  “Albert, I’m afraid dear Mrs. Lupitas has breathed her last,” he said, glancing at the gold watch he had removed from his pocket along with his keys. “It’s time to go tell the bees.”

  With that simple pronouncement, my father proceeded to explain to me that after a death in the family it was customary for the youngest member of the household to visit the hives and tell the bees of the death. And while acknowledging that Mrs. Lupitas was not a true blood relative, he said she had shown our family and our bees genuine affection over the years. Anything we could do to ease her passage into heaven seemed a small favor in return for all her many kindnesses.

  To perform the ceremony properly, my father instructed that I was to go to each and every hive in our family compound and to rattle the keys he had given me as I tapped on the hive and whispered three times:

  Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

  Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

  Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

  Then I was to tie a piece of funeral crepe, which my father also produced, to each of our hives. And finally, he said, I was to bring sweets to the hives for the bees to feed upon and to invite the bees to her funeral.

  “On a number of occasions in my memory,” he added with a mysterious wink, “the bees have seen fit to attend.”

  “What should I tell them?” I remember asking my father.

  “Whatever you think will best ease that dear lady’s passage to the Promised Land,” he replied.

  Laden thus with keys, black crepe, a basket of sugar cookies my mother had prepared for the occasion, and what I believed to be the full weight of Mrs. Lupitas’s salvation resting upon my young shoulders, I was left alone to perform the ritual as my father had instructed.

  That morning was gray and damp, and our honeybees had been slow to rise to face the chill of the day. Loath to disturb them, I stopped at the first hive I came to and, setting my bundles of funeral crepe and cookies upon it, I shook my father’s keys softly and began to whisper the words of the chant he had just taught me. “Little brownies, little brownies,” I said, “your mistress is dead.”

  I thought I heard a stirring inside the hive as I repeated my lines a little louder the second time and louder still the third. By then there was no mistaking that the hum inside the hive had grown in force, and I felt compelled to add that Mrs. Lupitas was a very old woman and that I was sure she would be happier communing with Jesus in heaven than she had been living all alone in her big house with no one to talk to but her old dog Tavish. The words just tumbled out. And then so did the bees, tumbling out in a big black swarm and up into the air, where they gathered in a swirling mass fifty feet above my head. Not knowing what else to say, I took a ribbon of black crepe and wrapped it around the top of the hive and then I placed one of my mother’s sugar cookies on the landing board. Finally, with only a single glance overhead, I carried my bundles to the next hive.

  I believe it may have been something about the rhythmic jangling of the keys that drove the bees to quit their hives that morning, or perhaps it was the high-pitched rasp of my small voice, because, as truly as I live and breathe, something stirred the bees that day. One by one, I stopped in front of each of our sixteen hives, and from each, as I began to shake my father’s keys and repeat the words he’d taught me, a cloud of bees poured forth to join the growing cloud overhead. Soon, the roar of the bees had overwhelmed the sound of my small voice, and I found myself shaking the keys with both hands as I danced in a feverish circle beneath the swarming bees and shouted my childish prayers for Mrs. Lupitas’s safe passage to heaven.

  “Little brownies, little brownies,” I sang out to each hive in turn, and above each in turn the heavens turned dark with bees, “your mistress is dead.”

  When I returned from my funerary duties later that morning, I was drenched with sweat. My father, who was sitting on the front porch sipping a cool glass of lemonade, dug his bandanna out from his pocket and handed it to me. I wiped my face and hands as clean as I could manage and handed it back to him.

  “Have you done as you were told?” he inquired, replacing the muddied bandanna in his pocket as I clambered up onto the porch swing to sit next to him. I nodded, and though I wanted to tell him what had happened and to ask him if anything as wondrous had ever happened to him, I could see from the distant look on his face that he preferred to keep his own counsel. We sat together like that for a spell, rocking back and forth in the late-morning breeze. Then, setting his empty glass down on the wicker table next to the swing, my father asked me if I would sit with him for a while longer.

  I settled back in the swing and placed my folded hands upon my lap.

  “Bees do not thrive in a quarrelsome family,” he said. “They dislike bad language. And they should never, ever be bought or sold for money.

  “Bees should be given without compensation, but if such compensation is essential, barter or trade is greatly preferable to cold cash. And you must always be sure to tell the bees when they have changed hands,” he said.

  My father then told me of a woman who had come to his father shortly after moving to the farm next door to theirs many, many years ago. She complained to him of the incessant swarming of the bees that had come part and parcel with the place she and her husband had recently purchased. My father said my grandfather asked his new neighbor whether she had bothered to tell the bees they had a new mistress. The puzzled woman averred that she had not,
and so my grandfather accompanied her back to her farm and proceeded to visit each of her hives.

  “She watched silently as my father walked up and down in front of the hives, talking quietly and calmly all the while, and when he was done the bees settled down and gave her no more trouble,” my father explained.

  My father then fell into a private reverie that was only broken when a large black crow that had been pecking at seeds in the yard abruptly took to the air in a flurry of flapping wings and dust.

  “Mark my words, young Albert,” my father said after the bird disappeared from view, “among those who know them well, bees are understood to be quiet and sober beings that disapprove of lying, cheating, and wanton women.”

  My father then rose from the swing and, out of respect for Mrs. Lupitas, he adjourned to his room for the remainder of the morning. My mother and sister, meanwhile, were busy in the kitchen, preparing the afternoon meal, and I was left alone to ponder my father’s words.

  Many years later, I would sit on that same porch swing with my mother as she taught me how to sew.

  “Draw the stitch forward, now back by half, then forward by half again,” she would remind me as we sat together, her sewing basket nestled between us.

  “This loop stitch will not win you any contests at a sewing bee,” she pronounced just the week before she died, “but it will hold.”

  But what if there is nothing of substance left to hold?

  Only a handful of hardy workers took to the skies the dark day it fell upon me to tell the bees of my dear mother’s sudden passing. The rest seemed content enough to pick and crawl about the stale offering of leftover scones I dutifully set in front of each hive I visited on my mournful funereal rounds.