Telling the Bees Page 9

  I was surprised when my mother agreed. Knowing that I had inherited my father’s tendency toward reticence, she took the precaution of writing out a formal invitation to our young neighbors, in what seemed to me an unusually flowery script, before sending me off to deliver it directly after supper.

  It was Hilda who answered the door when I knocked the second time, the first and somewhat softer knock having brought no response whatsoever.

  “This is for you. And your sister,” I believe I stammered, and then I thrust the note my mother had written in her hand.

  Wordlessly, Hilda unfolded the scented paper. And, after reading the invitation, she just as wordlessly turned and closed the front door behind her, leaving me standing dumbfounded on the unlit porch.

  Given Hilda’s less-than-forthcoming response, I was surprised to see my mother bustling about our kitchen Friday morning preparing for the afternoon get-together with the Straussman sisters that my sister and I were convinced would never take place.

  When we returned home from school that same day, we found a plate of my mother’s fresh scones laid out on the dining room table along with two small serving bowls filled with orange blossom honey and homemade currant jam.

  My sister shook her head as if to say “She’s gone mad as a hatter” when my mother entered the room carrying an iced pitcher of lemonade and four crystal tumblers on her best silver tray.

  “Mother, what makes you think they’ll come?” Eloise said. “We haven’t heard a word from them all week. They’re really a couple of odd ducks, the way they keep to themselves. Even when they’re at school, they never talk to anyone besides each other. I don’t think they have any friends at all.”

  “All the more reason to open our doors and our hearts to them,” my mother had replied, setting down the tray and arranging the tumblers in a semicircle around the pitcher that she had placed in the middle of the table. “Poor dears . . .”

  My sister and I had been right, of course. The Straussman sisters never arrived that Friday, or the next Friday, and still my mother was prepared, I think, to send off yet another invitation to our neighbors’ house had not my father issued a rare opinion as to what he termed to be my mother’s “strange fixation with the Straussman sisters.”

  “You’ve got two growing children of your own to fret over,” he said. “And those girls have a perfectly fine family of their own to take care of them.”

  “How would you know, Walter?” my mother responded. “They’ve got a father who’s hardly ever home, and that mother of theirs . . . well, you know how I feel about her. Sitting on that front porch in her fancy chair all day long like the Queen of Sheba—and those girls waiting on her hand and foot. It’s bad enough she and her husband don’t attend church, but to deny those poor girls the Lord’s teachings just because of what a few old busybodies had to say after the boy . . .”

  “You don’t know that’s the reason,” my father interrupted just as my mother appeared to be working herself into what my father used to call one of her moods. “Just let it go.”

  But as was her nature, my mother seldom let anything go once she’d gotten hold of it in the first place.

  “Hello, Claire,” my mother called out cheerily when she observed Claire lingering beyond our hedgerow on her way home from school the following Monday. Hilda, who stood silent watch from the roadway, started like a filly at the sound of my mother’s voice and dashed clumsily down the road to her house with Claire trailing somewhat more slowly behind her.

  Yet my mother swore Claire smiled back when she greeted her. And within another week, Claire accepted my mother’s entreaty to join her on the front porch for a nice cool glass of lemonade. Eloise stayed upstairs in her room the whole afternoon. I know because I saw her watching from her window.

  I believe Hilda kept a silent vigil by the roadside the entire time Claire sat with my mother, but I can’t say for sure as the passage of the years has only served to accentuate Hilda’s considerable insubstantiality in my recall.

  “She seems such an old soul for such a young girl,” my mother remarked after spending a half hour on the porch with Claire that first afternoon. They chatted, I suppose, about the sort of things the fairer sex find interesting and I myself can only imagine. My mother declined to reveal the details, but the next afternoon Claire came directly around the side of our house bold as you please to join my mother on the back porch, where together they sat quietly watching my father and me add a new super to our number two hive as they sipped from dewy glasses of lemonade.

  I still can picture how cool and refreshing those lemonade glasses looked from afar as my father and I labored under the hot sun that day. And the next day and the next.

  “It’s a slow process, gaining that girl’s confidence,” my mother confided to my father one evening after supper when she thought I’d gone off to bed. I had slipped out onto the back porch to watch the stars, however, which I do on occasion even now when I have trouble sleeping.

  “Do you know what that dear girl said to me this afternoon, Walter?” my mother said, and without waiting for my father to reply she lowered her voice so that I had to strain to hear her. “She said she sorely misses the sound of the bees in her parlor wall. She said she found something comforting in the hum of activity that she heard as she went about her daily chores. You know, Walter, I do believe she’s bitten by the fever, but she just doesn’t know it yet.”

  I could not hear my father’s response, but I did hear my mother’s musical laughter burst from the parlor like wind chimes on a summer breeze, fading down the hall and up the stairs, as the lights in our house blinked out one by one.

  Two days later, my mother convinced Claire to venture off the back porch and take a few tentative steps toward the hive we were fretting over that particular afternoon, but, try as my mother might, she could urge her no farther. They reached the same impasse every day for the next week or so until my mother remarked loud enough for both my father and me to hear that it looked like a rainstorm was brewing and, despite his protest that the skies looked clear to him, she dashed indoors.

  “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

  STING: 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.

  Whereas 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.