The Secret Life of Bees (8 page)

If only she could get some manners.

The inside of the honey house was one big room filled with strange honey-making machines—big tanks, gas burners, troughs, levers, white boxes, and racks piled with waxy honeycombs. My nostrils nearly drowned in the scent of sweetness.

Rosaleen made gigantic puddles on the floor while August ran for towels. I stared at a side wall that was covered with shelves of mason jars. Pith helmets with netting, tools, and wax candles hung from nails near the front door, and a thin veneer of honey lay across everything. The soles of my shoes stuck slightly as I walked.

August led us to a tiny corner room in the back with a sink, a full-length mirror, one curtainless window, and two wooden cots made up with clean white sheets. I placed my bag on the first cot.

“May and I sleep out here sometimes when we're harvesting honey round the clock,” August said. “It can get hot, so you'll need to turn the fan on.”

Rosaleen reached up to where it sat on a shelf along the back wall and flipped the switch, causing cobwebs to blow off the blades and fly all over the room. She had to pick them off her cheekbones.

“You need dry clothes,” August told her.

“I'll air-dry,” Rosaleen said, and she stretched out on the cot, making the legs on it bow.

“You'll have to come into the house to use the bathroom,” August said. “We don't lock the doors, so just come on in.”

Rosaleen's eyes were closed. She had already drifted off and was making little puff noises with her mouth.

August lowered her voice. “So she fell down the steps?”

“Yes, ma'am, she went down headfirst. Caught her foot in the rug at the top of the stairs, the one my mother hooked herself.”

The secret of a good lie is don't overly explain, and throw in one good detail.

“Well, Miss Williams, you can start work tomorrow,” she said. I stood there wondering who she was talking to, who was Miss Williams, when I remembered
I
was Lily Williams now. That's the other secret to lying—you have to keep your stories straight.

“Zach will be away for a week,” she was saying. “His family has gone down to Pawley's Island to visit his mama's sister.”

“If you don't mind me asking, what will I be doing?”

“You'll work with Zach and me, making the honey, doing whatever needs doing. Come on, I'll give you the tour.”

We walked back to the large room with all the machines. She led me to a column of white boxes stacked one on top of the other. “These are called supers,” she said, setting one on the floor in front of me and removing the lid.

From the outside it looked like a regular old drawer pulled out of the dresser, but inside it were frames of honeycomb hung in a neat row. Each frame was filled with honey and sealed over with beeswax.

She pointed her finger. “That's the uncapper over there, where we take the wax off the comb. Then it goes through the wax melter over here.”

I followed her, stepping over bits and pieces of honeycomb, which is what they had instead of dust bunnies. She stopped at the big metal tank in the center of the room.

“This is the spinner,” she said, patting the side like it was a good dog. “Go on up there and look in.”

I climbed up the two-step ladder and peered over the edge, while August flipped a switch and an old motor on the floor sputtered and cranked. The spinner started slowly, gaining speed like the cotton-candy machine at the fair, until it was sending heavenly smells into the atmosphere.

“It separates out the honey,” she said. “Takes out the bad stuff, leaves in the good. I've always thought how nice it would be to have spinners like this for human beings. Just toss them in and let the spinner do its work.”

I looked back at her, and she was staring at me with her ginger-cake eyes. Was I paranoid to think that when she'd said human beings, what she really meant was me?

She turned off the motor, and the humming stopped with a series of ticking sounds. Bending over the brown tube leading from the spinner, she said, “From here it goes into the baffle tank, then over to the warming pan, and finally into the settling tank. That's the honey gate, where we fill the buckets. You'll get the hang of it.”

I doubted it. I'd never seen such a complex situation in my life.

“Well, I imagine you'll want to rest up like Rosaleen. Supper is at six. You like sweet-potato biscuits? That's May's specialty.”

When she left, I lay on the empty cot while rain crashed on the tin roof. I felt like I'd been traveling for weeks, like I'd been dodging lions and tigers on a safari through the jungle, trying to get to the Lost Diamond City buried in the Congo, which happened to be the theme of the last matinee I'd seen in Sylvan before leaving. I felt that somehow I belonged here, I really did, but I
could
have been in the Congo for how unfamiliar it felt. Staying in a colored house with colored women, eating off their dishes, lying on their sheets—it was not something I was against, but I was brand-new to it, and my skin had never felt so white to me.

T. Ray did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was
August is so intelligent, so cultured,
and I was surprised by this. That's what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.

When Rosaleen woke from her nap, before she had a chance to raise her head off the pillow, I said, “Do you like it here?”

“I guess I do,” she said, working to get herself to a sitting position. “So far.”

“Well, I like it, too,” I said. “So I don't want you saying anything to mess it up, okay?”

She crossed her arms over her belly and frowned. “Like what?”

“Don't say anything about the black Mary picture I got in my bag, okay? And don't mention my mother.”

She reached up and started twisting some of her loose braids back together. “Now, how come you wanna keep that a secret?”

I hadn't had time to sort out my reasons. I wanted to say,
Because I just want to be normal for a little while—not a refugee girl looking for her mother, but a regular girl paying a summer visit to Tiburon, South Carolina. I want time to win August over, so she won't send me back when she finds out what I've done.
And those things were true, but even as they crossed my mind, I knew they didn't completely explain why talking to August about my mother made me so uneasy.

I went over and began helping Rosaleen with her braids. My hands, I noticed, were shaking a little. “Just tell me you aren't gonna say anything,” I said.

“It's your secret,” she said. “You do what you want with it.”

 

The next morning I woke early and walked outside. The rain had stopped and the sun glowed behind a bank of clouds.

Pinewoods stretched beyond the honey house in every direction. I could make out about fourteen beehives tucked under the trees in the distance, the tops of them postage stamps of white shine.

The night before, during dinner, August had said she owned twenty-eight acres left to her by her granddaddy. A girl could get lost on twenty-eight acres in a little town like this. She could open a trapdoor and disappear.

Light spilled through a crack in a red-rimmed cloud, and I walked toward it along a path that led from the honey house into the woods. I passed a child's wagon loaded with garden tools. It rested beside a plot growing tomatoes tied to wooden stakes with pieces of nylon hose. Mixed in with them were orange zinnias and lavender gladiolus that dipped toward the ground.

The sisters loved birds, I could see. There was a concrete birdbath and tons of feeders—hollowed-out gourds and rows of big pinecones sitting everywhere, each one smeared with peanut butter.

Where the grass gave way to the woods, I found a stone wall crudely cemented together, not even knee high but nearly fifty yards long. It curved on around the property and abruptly stopped. It didn't seem to have any purpose to it. Then I noticed tiny pieces of folded-up paper stuck in the crevices around the stones. I walked the length of the fence, and it was the same all the way, hundreds of these bits of paper.

I pulled one out and opened it, but the writing was too blurred from rain to make out. I dug out another one.
Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead.

I folded it and put it back, feeling like I'd done something wrong.

Stepping over the wall, I moved into the trees, picking my way through little ferns with their blue-green feathers, careful not to tear the designs the spiders had worked so hard on all morning. It was like me and Rosaleen really had discovered the Lost Diamond City.

As I walked, I began to hear the sound of running water. It's impossible to hear that sound and not go searching for the source. I pushed deeper into the woods. The growth turned thick, and sticker bushes snagged my legs, but I found it—a little river, not much bigger than the creek where Rosaleen and I had bathed. I watched the currents meander, the lazy ripples that once in a while broke along the surface.

Taking off my shoes, I waded in. The bottom turned mushy, squishing up through my toes. A turtle plopped off a rock into the water right in front of me, nearly scaring the Lord Jesus out of me. There was no telling what other invisible creatures I was out here socializing with—snakes, frogs, fish, a whole river world of biting bugs, and I could have cared less.

When I put on my shoes and headed back, the light poured down in shafts, and I wanted it to always be like this—no T. Ray, no Mr. Gaston, nobody wanting to beat Rosaleen senseless. Just the rain-cleaned woods and the rising light.

T
he first week at August's was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

All that week no one brought up my father, supposedly dead in a tractor accident, or my long-lost aunt Bernie in Virginia. The calendar sisters just took us in.

The first thing they did was take care of Rosaleen's clothes. August got into her truck and went straight to the Amen Dollar Store, where she bought Rosaleen four pairs of panties, a pale blue cotton nightgown, three waistless, Hawaiian-looking dresses, and a bra that could have slung boulders.

“This ain't charity,” said Rosaleen when August spread them across the kitchen table. “I'll pay it all back.”

“You can work it off,” said August.

May came in with witch hazel and cotton balls and began to clean up Rosaleen's stitches.

“Somebody knocked the daylights out of you,” she said, and a moment later she was humming “Oh! Susanna” at that same frantic speed she'd hummed it before.

June jerked her head up from the table, where she was inspecting the purchases. “You're humming the song again,” she said to May. “Why don't you excuse yourself?”

May dropped her cotton ball on the table and left the room.

I looked at Rosaleen, and she shrugged. June finished cleaning the stitches herself; it was distasteful to her, I could tell by the way she held her mouth, how it drew into a tight buttonhole.

I slipped out to find May. I was going to say,
I'll sing “Oh! Susanna” with you start to finish,
but I couldn't find her.

 

It was May who taught me the honey song:

I loved the silliness of it. Singing made me feel like a regular person again. May sang the song in the kitchen when she rolled dough or sliced tomatoes, and August hummed it when she pasted labels on the honey jars. It said everything about living here.

We lived for honey. We swallowed a spoonful in the morning to wake us up and one at night to put us to sleep. We took it with every meal to calm the mind, give us stamina, and prevent fatal disease. We swabbed ourselves in it to disinfect cuts or heal chapped lips. It went in our baths, our skin cream, our raspberry tea and biscuits. Nothing was safe from honey. In one week my skinny arms and legs began to plump out and the frizz in my hair turned to silken waves. August said honey was the ambrosia of the gods and the shampoo of the goddesses.

I spent my time in the honey house with August while Rosaleen helped May around the house. I learned how to run a steam-heated knife along the super, slicing the wax cap off the combs, how to load them just so into the spinner. I adjusted the flame under the steam generator and changed the nylon stockings August used to filter the honey in the settling tank. I caught on so fast she said I was a marvel. Those were her very words:
Lily, you are a
marvel.

My favorite thing was pouring beeswax into the candle molds. August used a pound of wax per candle and pressed tiny violets into them, which I collected in the woods. She had a mail-order business to stores in places as far away as Maine and Vermont. People up there bought so many of her candles and jars of honey she couldn't keep up with it, and there were tins of Black Madonna All-Purpose Beeswax for her special customers. August said it could make your fishing line float, your button thread stronger, your furniture shinier, your stuck window glide, and your irritated skin glow like a baby's bottom. Beeswax was a miracle cure for everything.

May and Rosaleen hit it off right away. May was simpleminded. I don't mean retarded, because she was smart in some ways and read cookbooks nonstop. I mean she was naive and unassuming, a grown-up and a child at the same time, plus she was a touch crazy. Rosaleen liked to say May was a bona fide candidate for the nuthouse, but she still took to her. I would come into the kitchen and they would be standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink, holding ears of corn they couldn't get shucked for talking. Or they'd be dabbing pinecones with peanut butter for the birds.

It was Rosaleen who figured out the mystery of “Oh! Susanna.” She said if you kept things on a happy note, May did fine, but bring up an unpleasant subject—like Rosaleen's head full of stitches or the tomatoes having rot-bottom—and May would start humming “Oh! Susanna.” It seemed to be her personal way of warding off crying. It worked for things like tomato rot, but not for much else.

A few times she cried so bad, ranting and tearing her hair, that Rosaleen had to come get August from the honey house. August would calmly send May out back to the stone wall. Going out there was about the only thing that could bring her around.

May didn't allow rat traps in the house, as she couldn't even bear the thought of a suffering rat. But what really drove Rosaleen crazy was May catching spiders and carrying them out of the house in the dustpan. I liked this about May, since it reminded me of my bug-loving mother. I went around helping May catch granddaddy longlegs, not just because a smashed bug could send her over the edge but because I felt I was being loyal to my mother's wishes.

May had to have a banana every morning, and this banana absolutely could not have a bruise on it. One morning I watched her peel seven bananas in a row before she found one without a bad place. She kept tons of bananas around the kitchen, stoneware bowls chock-f; next to honey, they were the most plentiful thing in the house. May could go through five or more every morning looking for the ideal, flawless banana, the one that hadn't gotten banged up by the grocery world.

Rosaleen made banana pudding, banana cream pie, banana Jell-O, and banana slices on lettuce leaf till August told her it was all right, just throw the blooming things away.

The one it was hard to get a fix on was June. She taught history and English at the colored high school, but what she really loved was music. If I got finished early in the honey house, I went to the kitchen and watched May and Rosaleen cook, but really I was there to listen to June play the cello.

She played music for dying people, going to their homes and even to the hospital to serenade them into the next life. I had never heard of such a thing, and I would sit at the table drinking sweet iced tea, wondering if this was the reason June smiled so little. Maybe she was around death too much.

I could tell she was still bristled at the idea of me and Rosaleen staying; it was the one sore point about our being here.

I overheard her talking to August one night on the back porch as I was coming across the yard to go to the bathroom in the pink house. Their voices stopped me beside the hydrangea bush.

“You know she's lying,” said June.

“I know,” August told her. “But they're in some kind of trouble and need a place to stay. Who's gonna take them in if we don't—a white girl and a Negro woman? Nobody around here.”

For a second neither spoke. I heard the moths landing against the porch lightbulb.

June said, “We can't keep a runaway girl here without letting somebody know.”

August turned toward the screen and looked out, causing me to step deeper into the shadows and press my back against the house. “Let who know?” she said. “The police? They would only haul her off someplace. Maybe her father really did die. If so, who better is she gonna stay with for the time being than us?”

“What about this aunt she mentioned?”

“There's no aunt and you know it,” said August.

June's voice sounded exasperated. “What if her father
didn't
die in this so-called tractor accident? Won't he be looking for her?”

A pause followed. I crept closer to the edge of the porch. “I just have a feeling about this, June. Something tells me not to send her back to some place she doesn't want to be. Not yet, at least. She has some reason for leaving. Maybe he mistreated her. I believe we can help her.”

“Why don't you just ask her point-blank what kind of trouble she's in?”

“Everything in time,” August said. “The last thing I want is to scare her off with a lot of questions. She'll tell us when she's ready. Let's be patient.”

“But she's
white,
August.”

This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want me here because of my skin color. I hadn't known this was possible—to reject people for being
white.
A hot wave passed through my body. “Righteous indignation” is what Brother Gerald called it. Jesus had righteous indignation when he turned over the tables in the temple and drove out the thieving moneychangers. I wanted to march up there, flip a couple of tables over, and say,
Excuse me, June Boatwright, but you don't even
know
me!

“Let's see if we can help her,” August said as June disappeared from my line of sight. “We owe her that.”

“I don't see that we owe her anything,” June said. A door slammed. August flipped off the light and let out a sigh that floated into the darkness.

I walked back toward the honey house, feeling ashamed that August had seen through my hoax but relieved, too, that she wasn't planning on calling the police or sending me back—
yet. Yet,
she'd said.

Mostly I felt resentment at June's attitude. As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched it puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss and June's. That's what I thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss was piss.

 

Every evening after supper we sat in their tiny den around the television set with the ceramic bee planter on top. You could hardly see the screen for the philodendron vines that dangled around the news pictures.

I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was not, shape it into a person, and you would get Walter Cronkite.

He filled us in on an integration parade in St. Augustine that got attacked by a mob of white people, about white vigilante groups, fire hoses, and teargas. We got all the totals. Three civil rights workers killed. Two bomb blasts. Three Negro students chased with ax handles.

Since Mr. Johnson signed that law, it was like somebody had ripped the side seams out of American life. We watched the lineup of governors coming on the TV screen asking for “calm and reason.” August said she was afraid it was only a matter of time before we saw things like that happen right here in Tiburon.

I felt white and self-conscious sitting there, especially with June in the room. Self-conscious and ashamed.

Usually May didn't watch, but one night she joined us, and midway through she started to hum “Oh! Susanna.” She was upset over a Negro man named Mr. Raines, who was killed by a shotgun from a passing car in Georgia. They showed a picture of his widow, holding her children, and suddenly May started to sob. Of course everybody jumped up like she was an unpinned grenade and tried to quiet her, but it was too late.

May rocked back and forth, slapping her arms and scratching at her face. She tore open her blouse so the pale yellow buttons went flying like popped corn. I had never seen her like this, and it frightened me.

August and June each took one of May's elbows and guided her through the door in a movement so smooth it was plain they'd done it before. A few moments later I heard water filling the claw-footed tub where twice I'd bathed in honey water. One of the sisters had put a pair of red socks on two of the tub's feet—who knows why. I supposed it was May, who didn't need a reason.

Rosaleen and I crept to the door of the bathroom. It was cracked open enough for us to see May sitting in the tub in a little cloud of steam, hugging her knees. June scooped up handfuls of water and drizzled them slowly across May's back. Her crying had eased off now into sniffling.

August's voice came from behind the door. “That's right, May. Let all that misery slide right off you. Just let it go.”

 

Each night after the news, we all knelt down on the rug in the parlor before black Mary and said prayers to her, or rather the three sisters and I knelt and Rosaleen sat on a chair. August, June, and May called the statue “Our Lady of Chains,” for no reason that I could see.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women…

The sisters held strands of wooden beads and moved them in their fingers. In the beginning Rosaleen refused to join in, but soon she was going right along with the rest of us. I had the words memorized after the first evening. That's because we said the same thing over and over till it went on repeating itself in my head long after I stopped mouthing it.

It was some kind of Catholic saying, but when I asked August if they were Catholic, she said, “Well, yes and no. My mother was a good Catholic—she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.”

I had no idea what sort of denomination Orthodox Eclectic was, but I nodded like we had a big group of them back in Sylvan.

She said, “May and June and I take our mother's Catholicism and mix in our own ingredients. I'm not sure what you call it, but it suits us.”

When we finished saying Hail Mary about three hundred times, we said our personal prayers silently, which was kept to a minimum, since our knees would be killing us by then. I shouldn't complain, since it was nothing compared to kneeling on the Martha Whites. Finally the sisters would cross themselves from their foreheads to their navels, and it would be over.