Five Boys (27 page)

He managed to track down Judges without too much trouble, and the Bee King’s coordinates led him straight to the passage with Samson in it. As usual, some of the Bible’s words were in the wrong order and others were too old-fashioned to make any sense, but Aldred persevered.

Vengeance, it seemed, abounded. Samson smote his enemy’s hip and thigh, and once used the jawbone of an ass to “slew a thousand men therewith.” Other slewings and smitings were recorded and Aldred noticed how they were frequently preceded by Samson calling on the Spirit of the Lord to come mightily upon him. He found the passage with the Philistines and the riddles but the jumbled syntax and the ancient words kept getting in the way, and no matter how many different ways he came at it, the hidden riddle refused to reveal itself.

He shut the Bible and crept back down the pulpit stairs. Blew out the candle and slipped into the night. Walked right around the church and was returning the key to its hiding place, with his hand deep in the wall of the porch, when he saw a light go on in an upstairs window at the vicarage and the Reverend Bentley come limping in. Now, even if he’d not wanted to watch the little show unfolding before him Aldred would have found it difficult to get away. So he flattened himself against the porch wall and watched and told himself that he’d go home just as soon as the opportunity arose.

The Reverend Bentley slipped off his dressing gown, sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the floor for a couple of minutes. When he looked up Aldred was sure that he’d been spotted, but the reverend gazed right through him, then turned, reached out to a bedside table and picked up a small porcelain pot. He removed the lid, dipped his fingers in it, pulled up the leg of his long johns and began rubbing whatever lotion or potion it contained into his knee. He rubbed some into his hips and wrists, some into his shoulders and ankles. Then he put the lid back on the pot and stretched out on the bed.

He lay so still that Aldred thought he must be praying. Either that or he was the kind of person who could fall asleep at the drop of a hat. He watched, mystified, for several minutes. Thought he must just have witnessed some sort of holy self-anointment, with frankincense or myrrh. But Aldred was lying in his own bed an hour or so later and entering something like his own state of spiritual grace when the revelation eventually came to him.

He had been contemplating the Spirit of the Lord coming
upon Samson prior to him smiting his enemies, and had tried to imagine what form such a Spirit might take. And in that moment the key turned—the riddle was revealed and answered. The bees were the lion’s Spirit. They gave the lion its roar.

T
HE REVEREND BENTLEY
did his best to keep his bee stings secret. He pulled his shirt cuffs down over his wrists, preached in his slippers, and the only thing anyone noticed was a faint whiff of antiseptic in his wake.

For the best part of a week his body was just a sack of pain. When the swelling finally subsided the thousand agonies gave way to one all-consuming itch. On Thursday, he found that he could get in and out of bed without groaning. Three days later he found he could touch his toes. He went over and stood before the mirror. Touched his toes again.

“Good heavens,” he said.

He started taking a stroll up the hill before breakfast and, if he was feeling up to it, would sometimes have a bit of a canter on the way back down. The next time he was in Totnes he bought a pair of plimsolls and got into the habit of rising early every other day, pulling on his old cricket trousers and heading off on a half-hour run.

On a couple of occasions he bumped into the Bee King, who he naturally assumed was out mushrooming. The second time they met the reverend asked if he was having any luck, but the Bee King just nodded and strolled right past him. The reverend couldn’t help but notice that the canvas
bag he was carrying rattled as if it were full of chisels, and that the fellow was covered in dust.

Phyllis Massie was at the sink peeling potatoes one afternoon when someone started hammering at the door. She went down the hall, wiping her hands on her pinny—couldn’t decide whether to take it off or leave it on—and opened the door to find Marjory Pye doubled up on her doorstep, trying to catch her breath.

“Phyllis,” she said, her chest heaving. “You’d better come along.”

Considering her size, Marjory Pye could fairly motor. Phyllis did her best to keep up with her, but was plagued by visions of a son tangled up in a harvester and a husband gored by a bull.

The Captain had been the first to see the Five Boys dancing. Had watched them assemble by the war memorial, like Boy Scouts preparing for a five-mile hike. They hopped from one foot to the other and talked with great excitement until the Bee King arrived, climbed up onto the base of the memorial, made a brief, inaudible announcement, then climbed back down.

The Boys spread out in a circle and the Bee King stepped into the middle. He took Lewis by the hand; the two of them stood and positioned their feet. Then they set off together, stride by measured stride.

When Mrs. Heaney left the post office a couple of minutes later the first thing she saw was Lewis Bream skipping. Then she saw the Bee King and the other Boys watching and clapping along. For a while she just stood there, wondering what they were up to, and by the time Marjory Pye
popped her head out of the post office the Boys were all stamping and clapping as the Bee King guided Hector Massie through a couple of turns.

Mrs. Heaney glanced over at Marjory Pye. “What do you make of that?” she said. Then Marjory was off, galloping up the road toward the Massies’, clutching her cardigan to her chest.

Mrs. Heaney put her basket down to enjoy the entertainment. It seemed the Boys were learning the steps to two quite different routines, one of which tracked back and forth along a circle’s circumference, while the other was more like a figure-of-eight. The Bee King led each boy through each of the sequences until they had enough confidence to carry on alone, and soon all five of them were hopping and jigging about like little morris men.

When Marjory Pye returned with Phyllis some of the Boys had taken off their jerkins and the Bee King had them knotted around his shoulders, like an umpire at a cricket match. Hector was shuffling along like a puffer train and for a while the Bee King shuffled along beside him. When he was happy that he’d got the right idea he gave him a little pat and sent him on his way.

Phyllis Massie was dumbstruck. All she saw was her son wiggling his hips and strutting up and down the place like Carmen Miranda and the old man rubbing his hands with glee.

Miss Pye was right beside her. Saw her tilt her head back on her shoulders and let out a terrible howl.

The dancing and clapping sputtered to a halt. The spell was broken. The Boys looked over to see what all the fuss was about. Hector’s mother just stood there in her pinny. It was Aldred who finally spoke.

“It’s all right, Mrs.,” he said. “We’re just learning to
waggle.”

“Like the bees,” said Lewis Bream.

Phyllis rocked on her heels for a second, like a bowling pin, then suddenly threw herself into the fray. Grabbed her son by the arm and began dragging him away, keeping an eye on the Bee King the whole time, as if he might try to snatch him back.

“Evil,
” she whispered, as she retreated. “You
evil
man.”

The other Boys watched as Hector and his mother disappeared around the corner. The whole thing left a bitter taste in their mouths. For a while they just stood and looked at one another. Then they shrugged and started dancing again.

That evening Phyllis Massie and some of the other women carved out their own little circuit around the village’s lanes and alleys, calling at every door and telling the whole sordid story—the bucking, the bottom wiggling, the barebacked dancing and how the Bee King had picked up each boy in turn and carried him on his knee.

Once they were party to the facts everyone agreed that the only option was to stop the Boys ever seeing the fellow again. And the next morning the parents took the Boys aside and told them, in no uncertain terms, that their friendship with the beekeeper was at an end. The Boys seemed to accept the decision with surprising equanimity and within days the village had returned to something like its old order. But beneath their triumphalism the Boys’ mothers and fathers had the nagging sense of a victory too easily gained.

T
HE BOYS
hung from the fence and watched the Bee King in silence. Watched him strip the hives, stack the supers, put the roofs back on the brood boxes and carry the frames into the shed. And when he pulled the door shut, they slipped through the fence, gathered at the window and stood there looking in on him as he’d looked in on them a matter of weeks before.

He took down a long knife, dipped it in a bucket of hot water and sliced the caps off the honeycomb. Loaded the frames into a metal drum and began cranking it up. Wound the handle so hard he seemed to summon up every flicker of a bee’s wing that had gone into the honey’s creation, and the Boys began to fear that the shed would take off, with their beloved Bee King inside.

The next day they watched him filter the honey, then bottle it. Watched him clean the steel tanks and stack the empty boxes away. The hives had lost half their height. The shed was full of honey. Then the Bee King walked up through the garden and disappeared into the house.

It was six months since Steere had plowed the rats up. Since then he’d fixed most of his fences, relaid the walls, trimmed his hedges and just about got his house back on its feet.
He’d cleared the ditch at the bottom of the old meadow, let it drain for the best part of a month and was out on his tractor, with two-thirds of it turned already and his dinner clearly in sight.

Working a couple of acres would have been a full day’s work before the tractor’s arrival, but nowadays any man who could drive and keep a straight line was capable of covering five times that amount, without taking a step. When old man Pearce had pulled up on his Massey-Harris in ‘37 the whole village came out to have a look. The children patted its wheels and the older men circled it. The thing was a spotless monster. Looked as if it belonged in a laboratory rather than out among the elements.

“Good God, man,” said Steere to Pearce. “You’re going to have to be a mechanic on top of everything else.”

He’d got his own Allis Chalmers a couple of years later. During the war every farmer was encouraged to mechanize. But Steere still found it a tremendous novelty to be sitting up off the ground and working the levers instead of staring up some horse’s behind.

The plowshare turned the earth in four unbroken ridges, which came up raw and sodden, like Christmas pud. But when, about an hour before he was due to finish, he felt it snag on something, he heard a “Whoa” instinctively come up out of him, even though there wasn’t a horse in sight.

It wasn’t the blade-busting
“clack”
of a boulder. The front wheels never threatened to leave the ground. But there was something down there and once he stopped, Steere turned and looked over his shoulder and let the clutch back out, nice and slow. He crept forward an inch or two and saw some string or twine go taut between the
blades. And as he let the clutch out a little more, the body came up out of the ground. Heavy, with its head slumped to one side, and the string tangled around its neck and hands bringing it up into a sitting position, like one of the Captain’s ships being pulled into place.

T
HE SKY WAS
thick with stars and the lanes were empty when the Bee King stepped out of his house. The only sound, apart from his footsteps, was the Gladstone bag in his right hand, which gently jangled, like a milkman’s crate. He went along the top road, turned down Gant’s Lane by Mrs. Heaney’s, but when he reached Lewis’s cottage he slowed down, looked up at the windows and dragged his feet, so that the loose stones caught beneath them and made a grinding, rattling sound.

At the bottom of the lane he turned right and headed toward the high street. When he passed the Crouches’ house he slowed down and dragged his feet again, then carried on, turning right just below the Captain’s cottage and heading up toward the church.

He crossed the road, turned into Far Bank and followed the lane around the back of the graveyard, past the Massies’ and the Noyces’, then headed back into town. The whole walk took no more than five minutes but was carried out with all the formality of a sacred ritual, and its figure-of-eight managed to incorporate each of the Five Boys’ houses, like the Stations of the Cross.

As he went by, the Five Boys stirred beneath their blankets. Slipped from their beds, found their dressing gowns and slippers and tiptoed across the bedroom floor. Eased
open the windows, hung from gables, climbed down drainpipes and softly dropped to the ground.

The Bee King was waiting by the war memorial and when all five boys were finally gathered in he set off up the hill, with the sky still hours from daylight, and the Boys padding along behind.

The river was flat and wide and silent and looked no more than ankle-deep. The Bee King’s oars barely broke the surface, yet the trees and meadows crept steadily by and the banks unfolded down either side. The sky was locked onto the river. The land had slipped its moorings and headed back toward the moors. The water was polished with moonlight. Every clank of the rowlocks carried across it. Every whispered word.

The river unraveled. An occasional cottage stole by among the foliage, as gray as a gravestone. The Boys huddled on the boat’s crosspieces and the Bee King rowed them effortlessly out on the tide. Three miles down, the banks receded and the river became as wide as a lake, and as he rowed the Bee King told the Boys how, in Egypt, the beekeepers stacked their hives on barges and followed the seasons up and down the mighty Nile, traveling by night and releasing the bees in the morning to feed on all the blossoms along the riverside.