Fields of Home (13 page)

14

Trouble with Bees

I
T WAS
as black as pitch, and I could hear the rain pattering on the roof, when Grandfather called me at four o’clock the next morning. The chores were done, breakfast eaten, and the cows taken to pasture by five o’clock. Grandfather’s train wasn’t leaving Lisbon Falls until half-past eight, but he was all in a dither.

Anyone would have thought he was going away for a year instead of a week. He had to look at the old sow with the litter of pigs, at the hogs in the barn cellar, at the spider web and the calf in the sheep barn, and he said good-bye to the yella colt every time we went past his stall. Then I had to go to the high field with him while he showed me just how he wanted the dressing spread.

“Don’t spread it stingy and don’t waste none of it, Ralphie,” he told me as we tramped over the field in the rain. “Didn’t winter but six–seven head of stock, and dressing is tarnal scarce this year. Spread it even; no big lumps and bare spots, and dress the hilltop heavier’n the edges. Water’ll leach it down whenst the snow melts, come spring. I cal’late on eight loads being a day’s work, if you spread it nice and even. The dumpcart’s under the barn. Might need a dite of mending afore you commence, but there ain’t no call to waste time on it.”

All the way to the Falls, Grandfather told me stories about Gettysburg. At the depot, four other Grand Army men were waiting for him. He only let me stop long enough for him to get out his valise, tell me he’d be home in a week’s time, and pat Old Nell on the rump. Then, as I drove away, he called after me, “I’m cal’lating on you a-hauling forty-fifty loads of dressing whilst I’m gone, Ralphie. You won’t have time to dawdle, and it’ll keep you out of mischief. Tell Millie I’ll fetch her a present whenst I come home, and you meet me here a week from this morning.”

I’d seen the dumpcart backed into the corner of the barn cellar. It wasn’t really a cart at all, but a wagon. There were two great big wheels in back, with the body balanced across the axle, and two little wheels in front. I was afraid it would go to pieces like the “one-hoss shay” before I got it hauled up to the carriage house. Most of the planks in the bottom were rotted or broken, nuts and bolts were missing, all the wheels creaked, and one of them was held together with rusty wire.

The rain had settled into a steady drizzle when I backed the dumpcart into the middle of the carriage-house floor, put the horses away, and went back to start working on it. I was sure it would keep right on raining for a couple of days, so I wouldn’t have to hurry, and made up my mind that I’d do just as good a job on that dumpcart as Uncle Levi would have done if he’d been there. Of course, I had to take the rotten wood, rusty bolts, and old wires off before new parts could be put on. It took longer than I thought it would, and when I was nearly finished, the whole thing sort of collapsed. It acted the way an old cow does when she’s been driven till she can’t take another step. At first, it just groaned and settled a little in front, then the back end swayed, and thumped down on one haunch. It did look kind of wrecked when Millie came running out to see what had made all the noise.

For a minute, she just stood there in the doorway with her mouth open and her eyes looking like white saucers with bright blue centers. “Good Lord a-living! What in tunket did you do to it?” she asked. “Thomas’ll skin you alive and hang your hide on the barn door!”

“Oh, no, he won’t,” I told her. “By the time I get finished it will be as good as a new dumpcart.”

“Hmfff! By the time Christmas comes, it’ll be a-snowing, and you can haul dressing on a sled! How long you cal’late it’s going to take to piece the cussed thing back together again?”

“I’ll bet you I have it all done by the time it stops raining,” I told her. “That wheel isn’t broken; it’s just fallen apart, and Uncle Levi left me the keys to his tool drawers.”

“Drawers!” she sniffed. “Trouble with you is, you’re getting too big for your drawers! Levi, hisself, couldn’t put the devilish thing together in two days, and I’ll drink all the rain that falls ’twixt now and sundown tomorrow.”

I’d been so busy that I hadn’t paid any attention to the weather. When I looked out through the doorway, the whole eastern sky was bright blue, hens were picking up worms in the dooryard, and the sun made drops of water on the apple trees look like diamonds. Before I said anything more, I had to think a little. “Well, tomorrow’s the Fourth of July,” I told her. “That’s a legal holiday, and you’re not supposed to have to work. By tomorrow night, I can have it looking almost new.”

If it hadn’t been for Millie’s helping me, I’d have turned out to be a liar at that. And, though we made it strong enough, we never did get it looking nearly like new, but it took us till nearly midnight on the Fourth.

Millie called me at four o’clock the next morning. By sunrise, I was pitching my first load of dressing, while she did the chores. I didn’t like the job. The dressing was smelly, as heavy as lead, and it took two hundred forkfuls to make a load. The spreading took twice as long as the loading. No matter how hard I snapped my wrists, the dressing would fall in big blobs, and I’d leave bare spaces bigger than a wash tub. After each unloading, I’d have to climb down, break up the lumps, and scatter them with the fork. It was nearly nine o’clock before I had the second load spread, and I’d run all out of breakfast. After I had the dumpcart backed in under the barn, I started for the kitchen to get a piece of johnnycake or something.

I was halfway to the house when I heard what sounded like an engine letting off steam in the east orchard. At first, I didn’t see anything that could be making the noise, but when I’d poked around awhile, I found it was bees. About a bushel of them were clustered on the top branch of the tallest apple tree, and the whole mass was seething. I watched them for a few minutes, then went up to the house and told Millie about it. She couldn’t have jumped quicker if one of the bees had stung her. She was peeling apples for a pie, and bounced out of the chair so fast that she spilled peelings all over the kitchen floor.

I didn’t know that bees split up into families, or that they swarmed and would fly off to the woods if you didn’t put them into a new hive right away. But Millie knew all about it. She went tearing down to the orchard as fast as she could run, took a quick look at the bees and shouted, “Fetch a high ladder as fast as the Lord will let you! Them’s Thomas’s blackbelts, and he’ll skin us alive if we let ’em get away. I’ll fetch the bee hats.”

I ran for the tall ladder, let it down, and had carried it as far as the yard wall, when Millie called me to come to the bee shop. She already had on a straw hat with a mosquito netting veil that came down over her shoulders. She crammed another one on my head, pulled the veil down, and gave me a pair of gloves with netting sleeves at least two feet long. “Get ’em on! Get ’em on!” she snapped at me, as she threaded her own arm into a sleeve. “Never seen such a helpless, awkward boy! Make a fist! Don’t go ramming your thumb through the netting. Good lands, hurry up! Bees don’t wait on nobody!” Before I had one hand in a glove, she’d put both of hers on, had grabbed up an old dishpan, and was running toward the ladder. I didn’t bother with my second glove, but stuffed it into my pocket and ran after her.

We had a lot of trouble getting the ladder up into the tree. The branches were thick, but where the bees were, there wasn’t a branch to rest it against. Both our hats got twisted around on our heads, sweat was running down into my eyes, and Millie was yapping like a fox terrier. Before the ladder was set solidly, she grabbed the dishpan in one hand and started climbing. With the ladder sort of balanced in mid-air, I couldn’t keep it from wabbling a little. Millie was up about six rungs, when she hollered down to me, “Watch what you’re doing, and hold that devilish ladder still!”

I braced my feet and held my shoulder against one of the uprights but it didn’t do much good. After every couple of rungs, Millie would stop and yell at me to quit mooning around like a sick calf and to hold the ladder still. Then a bee started crawling up my arm. At every step, I expected it to sting me, and when I put my head over to try brushing it off with my hat, the ladder began dancing. I just had to shut my eyes tight and let the bee crawl. It had nearly reached my elbow when Millie screamed.

When I first looked up, all I could see was Millie’s pink bloomers. She’d shaken the bees off into the dishpan and started down, holding the pan in both pans, but her skirt had caught on a twig and she backed out of it. She’d yanked at the skirt a few times with her elbow, but the twig only poked through the cloth, and the bees seemed to have gone crazy. They were everywhere. The tune of their hum had changed till it sounded like forty runaway buzz saws, and Millie’s howls made it sound as if all the saws were hitting nails. I didn’t have time to find a solid limb for the ladder, but shoved it toward the center of the tree, and scrambled up to get Millie unhooked.

Just as I reached for the twig that was holding her skirt, the ladder lurched and one of my feet went through between two rungs. I grabbed for anything to save myself. The next thing I knew, I was hanging there with Millie’s skirt hauled down over me like a tent. There were forty or fifty mad bees in there with me, and Millie was shrieking like a fire whistle. I heard the dishpan fall just as she started pounding my head with both fists and calling me a senseless idiot.

Tree branches were breaking and I could feel we were falling, but I couldn’t see a thing, and clutched the skirt tighter. If it hadn’t been for Millie, I wouldn’t have known what to do when we hit the ground. My veil was ripped loose from my hat, Millie’s skirt was split to the waist, and my legs were all tangled in the ladder. She stopped just long enough to see that I could get free, then jumped up and ran for the watering trough at the back corner of the barn. I went right behind her, and at least half of the bees went with us. It felt as if a million wild bushmen were shooting me with poisoned arrows.

It was lucky that the old watering trough was a great big hogshead, and that all but a foot of it was set down into the ground. Millie jumped into it like a bullfrog—only she went feet first—and I jumped in right beside her. My mouth was open, and I was still catching my breath from running, when Millie ducked my head under the cold water. When she let me up, I was choking and nearly drowned, and two or three dozen bees were floating around on top of the hogshead.

I never knew before that cold water could feel so good, and would have stayed there all morning if Millie had let me. As soon as the bees had stopped buzzing around our heads, she made me climb out. She said we’d have to put mud on our welts right away to draw the poison, or we would be awfully sick, and we might even die. Millie was stung just as much as I, but mine were mostly on my face, neck, and arms. We dug into the bank below the spring and got some smooth, wet, blue clay. I plastered it on my neck and face till there were just holes for my eyes, nose and mouth. And, from the tops of her shoes to her bloomers, Millie looked like an artist’s clay model.

At first, the wet clay felt about as good as the cold water, but when it began to dry out, I thought my head and arms would break into flames. All the time we were putting on the clay, Millie kept worrying and fretting about what Grandfather would say because we’d lost the swarm of bees. But as it dried, she forgot about Grandfather, and only talked about bees. The things she said about them got hotter right along with the stings.

I’d been stung so many times between the fingers of my right hand that they stuck out like red bananas on a stalk. Of course, I couldn’t pitch dressing with them, and Millie had to help me unharness the horses. Mrs. Littlehale had heard Millie scream and had seen what was happening. She brought us some white pills that we had to take every hour, but they didn’t seem to help the burning or the swelling. By noon, my face had swollen till I could only see a crack of light through one eye, and my lips felt as if they were big enough for a hippopotamus. I knew Millie must be feeling just as bad as I, but she did all the evening chores alone, and made me sit in the house with a cold, wet towel over my face. I couldn’t eat anything, but before bedtime, she brought me a couple of eggs, beaten up with warm milk and vanilla. And she never said a word about my letting the ladder wabble so that she caught her dress in the apple tree.

In spite of the bee stings, I’d been sort of drowsy during the afternoon, but couldn’t sleep when I went to bed. The night was hot, I was sweaty, and every way I turned made the stings burn more. Then I started worrying. Having lost the bees didn’t bother me nearly as much as it did Millie, but I did feel worried about the dressing. With Grandfather expecting me to haul eight loads a day, that would be forty loads in a week—not counting Sunday or the Fourth of July. Three days had already passed and I’d only hauled two loads. Unless my hand got a lot better during the night, I’d lose the next day, too—and then there’d be Sunday. When Grandfather came home, he’d have every reason to say I was shiftless and lazy, and that he couldn’t go away and trust me to do a job man-fashion.