The Secret Life of Bees (5 page)

T. Ray's boots stomped across the porch.

“Lily! Li-leeeee!” I heard his voice sailing along the floorboards of the house.

All of a sudden I caught sight of Snout sniffing at the spot where I'd crawled through. I backed deeper into the darkness, but she'd caught my scent and started barking her mangy head off.

T. Ray emerged with my note crumpled in his hand, yelled at Snout to shut the hell up, and tore out in his truck, leaving plumes of exhaust all along the driveway.

 

Walking along the weedy strip beside the highway for the second time that day, I was thinking how much older fourteen had made me. In the space of a few hours I'd become forty years old.

The road stretched empty as far as I could see, with heat shimmer making the air seem wavy in places. If I managed to get Rosaleen free—an “if” so big it could have been the planet Jupiter—just where did I think we'd go?

Suddenly I stood still.
Tiburon, South Carolina.
Of course. The town written on the back of the black Mary picture. Hadn't I been planning to go there one of these days? It made such perfect sense: my mother had been there. Or else she knew people there who'd cared enough to send her a nice picture of Jesus' mother. And who would ever think to look for us there?

I squatted beside the ditch and unfolded the map. Tiburon was a pencil dot beside the big red star of Columbia. T. Ray would check the bus station, so Rosaleen and I would have to hitchhike. How hard could that be? You stand there with your thumb out and a person takes pity on you.

A short distance past the church, Brother Gerald whizzed by in his white Ford. I saw his brake lights flicker. He backed up.

“I thought that was you,” he said through the window. “Where're you headed?”

“Town.”

“Again? What's the bag for?”

“I'm…I'm taking some things to Rosaleen. She's in jail.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, flinging open the passenger door. “Get in, I'm heading there myself.”

I'd never been inside a preacher's car before. It's not that I expected a ton of Bibles stacked on the backseat, but I was surprised to see that, inside, it was like anybody else's car.

“You're going to see Rosaleen?” I said.

“The police called and asked me to press charges against her for stealing church property. They say she took some of our fans. You know anything about that?”

“It was only two fans—”

He jumped straight into his pulpit voice. “In the eyes of God it doesn't matter whether it's two fans or two hundred. Stealing is stealing. She asked if she could take the fans, I said no, in plain English. She took them anyway. Now that's sin, Lily.”

Pious people have always gotten on my nerves.

“But she's deaf in one ear,” I said. “I think she just mixed up what you said. She's always doing that. T. Ray will tell her, ‘Iron my
two
shirts,' and she'll iron the
blue
shirts.”

“A hearing problem. Well, I didn't know that,” he said.

“Rosaleen would never steal a thing.”

“They said she'd assaulted some men at the Esso station.”

“It wasn't like that,” I said. “See, she was singing her favorite hymn, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?' I don't believe those men are Christians, Brother Gerald, because they yelled at her to shut up with that blankety-blank Jesus tune. Rosaleen said, ‘You can curse me, but don't blaspheme the Lord Jesus.' But they kept right on. So she poured the juice from her snuff cup on their shoes. Maybe she was wrong, but in her mind she was standing up for Jesus.” I was sweating through my top and all along the backs of my thighs.

Brother Gerald dragged his teeth back and forth across his lip. I could tell he was actually weighing what I'd said.

 

Mr. Gaston was in the station alone, eating boiled peanuts at his desk, when Brother Gerald and I came through the door. Being the sort of person he was, Mr. Gaston had shells all over the floor.

“Your colored woman ain't here,” he said, looking at me. “I took her to the hospital for stitches. She took a fall and hit her head.”

Took a fall, my rear end. I wanted to throw his boiled peanuts against the wall.

I could not keep myself from shouting at him. “What do you mean, she fell and hit her head?”

Mr. Gaston looked over at Brother Gerald, that all-knowing look men give each other when a female acts the least bit hysterical. “Settle down, now,” he said to me.

“I can't settle down till I know if she's all right,” I said, my voice calmer but still shaking a little.

“She's fine. It's only a little concussion. I expect she'll be back here later this evening. The doctor wanted her watched for a few hours.”

While Brother Gerald was explaining how he couldn't sign the warrant papers seeing as how Rosaleen was nearly deaf, I started for the door.

Mr. Gaston shot me a warning look. “We got a guard on her at the hospital, and he's not letting anybody see her, so you go on back home. You understand?”

“Yes, sir. I'm going home.”

“You do that,” he said. “'Cause if I hear you've been anywhere near that hospital, I'm calling your daddy again.”

 

Sylvan Memorial Hospital was a low brick building with one wing for whites and one for blacks.

I stepped into a deserted corridor clogged with too many smells. Carnations, old people, rubbing alcohol, bathroom deodorizer, red Jell-O. Air conditioners poked out from the windows in the white section, but back here there was nothing but electric fans moving the hot air from one place to another.

At the nurses' station a policeman leaned on the desk. He looked like somebody just out of high school, who'd flunked PE and hung out with the shop boys smoking at recess. He was talking to a girl in white. A nurse, I guess, but she didn't look much older than I was. “I get off at six o'clock,” I heard him say. She stood there smiling, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.

At the opposite end of the hall an empty chair sat outside one of the rooms. It had a policeman's hat underneath it. I hurried down there to find a sign on the door.
NO VISITORS.
I went right in.

There were six beds, all empty, except the farthest one over by the window. The sheets rose up, trying hard to accommodate the occupant. I plopped my bag on the floor. “Rosaleen?”

A gauze bandage the size of a baby's diaper was wrapped around her head, and her wrists were tied to the bed railing.

When she saw me standing there, she started to cry. In all the years she'd looked after me, I'd never seen a tear cross her face. Now the levee broke wide open. I patted her arm, her leg, her cheek, her hand.

When her tear glands were finally exhausted, I said, “What happened to you?”

“After you left, that policeman called Shoe let those men come in for their apology.”

“They hit you again?”

“Two of them held me by the arms while the other one hit me—the one with the flashlight. He said, ‘Nigger, you say you're sorry.' When I didn't, he came at me. He hit me till the policeman said that was enough. They didn't get no apology, though.”

I wanted those men to die in hell begging for ice water, but I felt mad at Rosaleen, too.
Why couldn't you just apologize? Then maybe Franklin Posey would let you off with just a beating.
All she'd done was guarantee they'd come back.

“You've got to get out of here,” I said, untying her wrists.

“I can't just
leave,
” she said. “I'm still in jail.”

“If you stay here, those men are gonna come back and kill you. I'm serious. They're gonna kill you, like those colored people in Mississippi got killed. Even T. Ray said so.”

When she sat up, the hospital gown rode up her thighs. She tugged it toward her knees, but it slid right back like a piece of elastic. I found her dress in the closet and handed it to her.

“This is crazy—” she said.

“Put on the dress. Just do it, all right?”

She pulled it over her head and stood there with the bandage sloped over her forehead.

“That bandage has got to go,” I said. I eased it off to find two rows of catgut stitches. Then, signaling her to be quiet, I cracked the door to see if the policeman was back at his chair.

He was. Naturally it was too much to hope he'd stay off flirting long enough for us to float out of here. I stood there a couple of minutes, trying to think up some kind of scheme, then opened my bag, dug into my peach money, and took out a couple of dimes. “I'm gonna try and get rid of him. Get in the bed, in case he looks in here.”

She stared at me, her eyes shrunk to mere dots. “Baby
Jesus,
” she said.

When I stepped out into the hall, he jumped up. “You weren't supposed to be in there!”

“Don't I know it,” I said. “I'm looking for my aunt. I could have sworn they told me Room One-oh-two, but there's a colored woman in there.” I shook my head, trying to look confused.

“You're lost, all right. You need to go to the other side of the building. You're in the colored section.”

I smiled at him. “Oh.”

Over on the white side of the hospital I found a pay phone next to a waiting area. I got the hospital number from Information and dialed it up, asking for the nurses' station in the colored wing.

I cleared my throat. “This is the jailer's wife over at the police station,” I said to the girl who answered. “Mr. Gaston wants you to send the policeman that we've got over there back to the station. Tell him the preacher is on his way in to sign some papers, and Mr. Gaston can't be here 'cause he had to leave just now. So if you could tell him to get over here right away…”

Part of me was saying these actual words, and part of me was listening to myself say them, thinking how I belonged in a reform school or a juvenile delinquent home for girls, and would probably soon be in one.

She repeated it all back to me, making sure she had it straight. Her sigh passed over the receiver. “I'll tell him.”

She'll tell him.
I couldn't believe it.

I crept back to the colored side and hunched over the water fountain as the girl in white relayed all this to him, using a lot of hand gestures. I watched as the policeman put on his hat and walked down the corridor and out the door.

 

When Rosaleen and I stepped from her room, I looked left, then right. We had to go past the nurses' desk to get to the door, but the girl in white seemed preoccupied, sitting with her head down, writing something.

“Walk like a visitor,” I told Rosaleen.

Halfway to the desk, the girl stopped writing and stood up.

“Shitbucket,” I said. I grabbed Rosaleen's arm and pulled her into a patient's room.

A tiny woman was perched in the bed, old and birdlike, with a blackberry face. Her mouth opened when she saw us, and her tongue curled out like a misplaced comma. “I need a little water,” she said. Rosaleen went over and poured some from a pitcher and gave the woman the glass, while I held my duffel bag at my chest and peeped out the door.

I watched the girl disappear into a room a few doors down carrying some sort of glass bottle. “Come on,” I said to Rosaleen.

“Y'all leaving already?” said the tiny woman.

“Yeah, but I'll probably be back before the day's out,” said Rosaleen, more for my benefit than the woman's.

This time we didn't walk like visitors, we tore out of there.

Outside, I took Rosaleen's hand and tugged her down the sidewalk. “Since you got everything else figured out, I guess you know where we're going,” she said, and there was a tone in her voice.

“We're going to Highway Forty and thumb a ride to Tiburon, South Carolina. At least we're gonna try.”

I took us the back way, cutting through the city park, down a little alley to Lancaster Street, then three blocks over to May Pond Road, where we slipped into the vacant lot behind Glenn's Grocery.

We waded through Queen Anne's lace and thick-stalked purple flowers, into dragonflies and the smell of Carolina jasmine so thick I could almost see it circling in the air like golden smoke. She didn't ask me why we were going to Tiburon, and I didn't tell her. What she did ask was “When did you start saying ‘shitbucket'?”

I'd never resorted to bad language, though I'd heard my share of it from T. Ray or else read it in public restrooms. “I'm fourteen now. I guess I can say it if I want to.” And I wanted to, right that minute. “Shitbucket,” I said.

“Shitbucket, hellfire, damnation, and son of a mother bitch,” said Rosaleen, laying into each word like it was sweet potatoes on her tongue.

 

We stood on the side of Highway 40 in a patch of shade provided by a faded billboard for Lucky Strike cigarettes. I stuck out my thumb while every car on the highway sped up the second they saw us.

A colored man driving a beat-up Chevy truck full of cantaloupes had mercy on us. I climbed in first and kept having to scoot over as Rosaleen settled herself by the window.

The man said he was on his way to visit his sister in Columbia, that he was taking the cantaloupes to the state farmers' market. I told him I was going to Tiburon to visit my aunt and Rosaleen was coming to do housework for her. It sounded lame, but he accepted it.

“I can drop you three miles from Tiburon,” he said.

Sunset is the saddest light there is. We rode a long time in the glow of it, everything silent except for the crickets and the frogs who were revving up for twilight. I stared through the windshield as the burned lights took over the sky.

The farmer flicked on the radio and the Supremes blared through the truck cab with “Baby, baby, where did our love go?” There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful. I laid my head against Rosaleen's arm. I wanted her to pat life back into place, but her hands lay still in her lap.