The Secret Life of Bees (10 page)

The worst thing was lying there wanting my mother. That's how it had always been; my longing for her nearly always came late at night when my guard was down. I tossed on the sheets, wishing I could crawl into bed with her and smell her skin. I wondered: Had she worn thin nylon gowns to bed? Did she bobby-pin her hair? I could just see her, propped in bed. My mouth twisted as I pictured myself climbing in beside her and putting my head against her breast. I would put it right over her beating heart and listen.
Mama,
I would say. And she would look down at me and say,
Baby, I'm right here.

I could hear Rosaleen trying to turn over on her cot. “You awake?” I said.

“Who can sleep in this oven?” she said.

I wanted to say,
You can,
as I'd seen her sleeping that day outside the Frogmore Stew General Store and Restaurant, and it had been at least this hot. She had a fresh Band-Aid on her forehead. Earlier, August had boiled her tweezers and fingernail scissors in a pot on the stove and used them to pluck out Rosaleen's stitches.

“How's your head?”

“My head is just fine.” The words came out like stiff little jabs in the air.

“Are you mad or something?”

“Why would I be mad? Just 'cause you spend all your time with August now ain't no reason for me to care. You pick who you want to talk with, it's not my business.”

I couldn't believe it; Rosaleen sounded jealous.

“I don't spend
all
my time with her.”

“Pretty much,” she said.

“Well, what do you expect? I work in the honey house with her. I have to spend time with her.”

“What about tonight? You out there working on honey sitting on the lawn?”

“We were just talking.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, and then she rolled toward the wall, turning her back into a great hump of silence.

“Rosaleen, don't act like that. August might know things about my mother.”

She raised up on her elbow and looked at me. “Lily, your mama's gone,” she said softly. “And she ain't coming back.”

I sat straight up. “How do you know she isn't alive right in this very town? T. Ray could've lied about her being dead, just like he lied about her leaving me.”

“Oh, Lily. Girl. You got to stop all this.”

“I feel her here,” I said. “She's been here, I know it.”

“Maybe she was. I can't say. I just know some things are better left alone.”

“What do you mean? That I shouldn't find out what I can about my own mother?”

“What if—” She paused and rubbed the back of her neck. “What if you find out something you don't wanna know?”

What I heard her say was
Your mother left you, Lily. Let it alone.
I wanted to yell how stupid she was, but the words bunched in my throat. I started hiccuping instead.

“You think T. Ray was telling me the truth about her leaving me, don't you?”

“I don't have any idea about that,” Rosaleen said. “I just don't want you getting yourself hurt.”

I lay back on the bed. In the silence my hiccups ricocheted around the room.

“Hold your breath, pat your head, and rub your tummy,” Rosaleen said.

I ignored her. Eventually I heard her breathing shift to a deeper place.

I pulled on my shorts and sandals and crept to the desk where August filled honey orders. I tore a piece of paper from a tablet and wrote my mother's name on it. Deborah Owens.

When I looked outside, I knew I would have to make my way by starlight. I crept across the grass, back to the edge of the woods, to May's wall. Hiccuping all the way. Placing my hands on the stones, all I wanted was not to ache so much.

I wanted to let go of my feelings for a little while, to pull in my moat bridge. I pressed the paper with her name into a cranny that seemed right for her, giving her to the wailing wall. Somewhere along the way my hiccups disappeared.

I sat on the ground with my back against the stones and my head tilted back so I could see the stars with all the spy satellites mixed in. Maybe one of them was taking my picture this very minute. They could spot me even in the dark. Nothing was safe. I would have to remember that.

I started thinking maybe I should find out what I could about my mother, before T. Ray or the police came for us. But where to start? I couldn't just pull out the black Mary picture and show it to August without the truth wrecking everything, and she would decide—might decide, would decide, I couldn't say—that she was obliged to call T. Ray to come get me. And if she knew that Rosaleen was a true fugitive, wouldn't she
have
to call the police?

The night seemed like an inkblot I had to figure out. I sat there and studied the darkness, trying to see through it to some sliver of light.

 

T
he next morning, inside the honey house, I woke to banging in the yard. When I pulled myself off the cot and wandered outside, I found the tallest Negro man I'd ever seen working on the truck, bent over the motor, tools scattered around his feet. June handed him wrenches and what-have-you, cocking her head and beaming at him.

In the kitchen May and Rosaleen were working on pancake batter. I didn't like pancakes that much, but I didn't say so. I was just thankful it wasn't grits. After kneeling on them half your life, you don't care to eat them.

The trash can was full of banana peels, and the electric percolator bubbled into the tiny glass nozzle on top of it.
Bloop, bloop.
I loved the way it sounded, the way it smelled.

“Who's the man out there?” I asked.

“That's Neil,” said May. “He's sweet on June.”

“It looks to me like June is sweet on him, too.”

“Yeah, but she won't say so,” said May. “She's kept that poor man strung along for years. Won't marry him and won't let him go.”

May drizzled batter on the griddle in the shape of a big L. “This one's yours,” she said. L for Lily.

Rosaleen set the table and warmed the honey in a bowl of hot water. I poured orange juice into the jelly glasses.

“How come June won't get married to him?” I asked.

“She was supposed to get married to somebody else a long time ago,” said May. “But he didn't show up for the wedding.”

I looked at Rosaleen, afraid this situation of jilted love might be unfortunate enough to send May into one of her episodes, but she was intent on my pancake. It struck me for the first time how odd it was that none of them were married. Three unmarried sisters living together like this.

I heard Rosaleen make a sound like
Hmmmph
, and I knew she was thinking about her own sorry husband, wishing he hadn't shown up for
their
ceremony.

“June swore off men and said she would never get married, and then she met Neil when he came to be the new principal at her school. I don't know what happened to his wife, but he didn't have one anymore after he moved here. He has tried every which way to get June to marry him, but she won't do it. Me and August can't convince her either.”

A wheeze welled up from May's chest, and then out came “Oh! Susanna.”
Here we go.

“Lord, not again,” said Rosaleen.

“I'm sorry,” May said. “I just can't help it.”

“Why don't you go out to the wall?” I said, prying the spatula out of her hand. “It's okay.”

“Yeah,” Rosaleen told her. “You do what you gotta do.” We watched from the screen door as May cut past June and Neil.

A few minutes later June came in with Neil behind her. I worried that his head wouldn't clear the door.

“What started May off?” June wanted to know. Her eyes followed a roach that darted beneath the refrigerator. “You didn't step on a roach in front of her, did you?”

“No,” I said. “We didn't even see a roach.”

She opened the cabinet under the sink and dug into the back for a pump can of bug killer. I thought about explaining to her my mother's ingenious method of ridding the house of roaches—cracker crumbs and marshmallow—but then I thought,
This is June, forget it.

“Well, what upset her, then?” June asked.

I hated to come out and say it with Neil standing right there, but Rosaleen didn't have any problem with it. “She's upset you won't marry Neil.”

I had never considered until then that colored people could blush, or maybe it was anger that turned June's face and ears such a dark plum color.

Neil laughed. “See there. You should marry me and quit upsetting your sister.”

“Oh, get out of here,” she said, and gave him a push.

“You promised me pancakes, and I'm gonna have them,” he said. He wore blue jeans and an undershirt with grease smears on it, along with horn-rimmed glasses. He looked like a very studious mechanic.

He smiled at me and then Rosaleen. “So are you gonna introduce me or keep me in the dark?”

I have noticed that if you look carefully at people's eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away. June's eyes turned dull and hard when she looked at me.

“This is Lily and Rosaleen,” she said. “They're visiting for a while.”

“Where do you come from?” he asked me. This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together. It was rare, though, for Negroes to ask white people where they're from, because there was nothing much to be gained from it, as their stories weren't that likely to link up.

“Spartanburg County,” I said, having to pause and remember what I'd said earlier.

“And you?” he said to Rosaleen.

She stared at the copper Jell-O molds that hung on either side of the window over the sink. “Same place as Lily.”

“What's that burning?” said June.

Smoke poured off the griddle. The L-shaped pancake had burned to a crisp. June yanked the spatula from my fingers, scraped up the mess, and dropped it into the trash.

“How long are you planning on staying?” Neil asked.

June stared at me. Waiting. Her lips pinched tight along her teeth.

“A while longer,” I answered, looking over into the garbage can. L for Lily.

I could feel the questions gathering in him, knew I could not face them.

“I'm not hungry,” I said, and walked out the back door.

Crossing the back porch, I heard Rosaleen say to him, “Have you registered yourself to vote?”

 

On Sunday I thought they would go to church, but no, they held a special service in the pink house, and people came to them. It was a group called the Daughters of Mary, which August had organized.

The Daughters of Mary started showing up in the parlor before 10:00
A.M.
First was an old woman named Queenie and her grown daughter, Violet. They were dressed alike in bright yellow skirts and white blouses, though they wore different hats, at least. Next came Lunelle, Mabelee, and Cressie, who wore the fanciest hats I'd ever laid eyes on.

It turned out Lunelle was a hatmaker without the least bit of shyness. I'm talking about purple felt the size of a sombrero with fake fruit on the back. That was Lunelle's.

Mabelee wore a creation of tiger fur wrapped with gold fringe, but it was Cressie who carried the day in a crimson smokestack with black netting and ostrich feathers.

If this was not enough, they wore clip-on earbobs of various colored rhinestones and circles of rouge on their brown cheeks. I thought they were beautiful.

In addition to all these Daughters, it turned out Mary had one son besides Jesus, a man named Otis Hill, with stubby teeth, in an oversize navy suit, so technically the group was the Daughters and Son of Mary. He'd come with his wife, who was known to everyone as Sugar-Girl. She wore a white dress, turquoise cotton gloves, and an emerald green turban on her head.

August and June, hatless, gloveless, earbobless, looked practically poverty-stricken next to them, but May, good old May, had tied on a bright blue hat with the brim up on one side and down on the other.

August had brought in chairs and arranged them in a semicircle facing the wooden statue of Mary. When we were all seated, she lit the candle and June played the cello. We said the Hail Marys together, Queenie and Violet moving strings of wooden beads through their fingers.

August stood up and said she was glad me and Rosaleen were with them; then she opened a Bible and read, “And Mary said…Behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things…. He hath scattered the proud…. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

Laying the Bible in her chair, she said, “It's been a while since we've told the story of Our Lady of Chains, and since we have visitors who've never heard the story of our statue, I thought we'd tell it again.”

One thing I was starting to understand was that August loved to tell a good story.

“Really, it's good for all of us to hear it again,” she said. “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”

Cressie nodded, making the ostrich feathers wave through the air so you had the impression of a real bird in the room. “That's right. Tell the story,” she said.

August pulled her chair close to the statue of black Mary and sat facing us. When she began, it didn't sound like August talking at all but like somebody talking through her, someone from another time and place. All the while her eyes looked off toward the window, like she was seeing the drama play out in the sky.

“Well,” she said, “back in the time of slaves, when the people were beaten down and kept like property, they prayed every day and every night for deliverance.

“On the islands near Charleston, they would go to the praise house and sing and pray, and every single time someone would ask the Lord to send them rescue. To send them consolation. To send them freedom.”

I could tell she had repeated those opening lines a thousand times, that she was saying them the exact way she'd heard them coming from the lips of some old woman, who'd heard them from the lips of an even older one, the way they came out like a song, with rhythms that rocked us to and fro till we had left the premises and were, ourselves, on the islands of Charleston looking for rescue.

“One day,” August said, “a slave named Obadiah was loading bricks onto a boat that would sail down the Ashley River, when he saw something washed up on the bank. Coming closer, he saw it was the wooden figure of a woman. Her body was growing out of a block of wood, a black woman with her arm lifted out and her fist balled up.”

At this point August stood up and struck the pose herself. She looked just like the statue standing there, her right arm raised and her hand clutched into a fist. She stayed like that for a few seconds while we sat, spellbound.

“Obadiah pulled the figure out of the water,” she went on, “and struggled to set her upright. Then he remembered how they'd asked the Lord to send them rescue. To send them consolation. To send them freedom. Obadiah knew the Lord had sent this figure, but he didn't know who she was.

“He knelt down in the marsh mud before her and heard her voice speak plain as day in his heart. She said, ‘It's all right. I'm here. I'll be taking care of you now.'”

This story was ten times better than Beatrix the nun. August glided back and forth across the room as she spoke. “Obadiah tried to pick up the waterlogged woman who God had sent to take care of them, but she was too heavy, so he went and got two more slaves, and between them they carried her to the praise house and set her on the hearth.

“By the time the next Sunday came, everyone had heard about the statue washing up from the river, how it had spoken to Obadiah. The praise house was filled with people spilling out the door and sitting on the window ledges. Obadiah told them he knew the Lord God had sent her, but he didn't know who she was.”

“He didn't know who she was!” cried Sugar-Girl, breaking in to the story. Then all the Daughters of Mary broke loose, saying over and over,
“Not one of them knew.”

I looked over at Rosaleen, who I hardly recognized for the way she leaned forward in her chair, chanting along with them.

When everything had quieted down, August said, “Now, the oldest of the slaves was a woman named Pearl. She walked with a stick, and when she spoke, everyone listened. She got to her feet and said, ‘This here is the mother of Jesus.'

“Everyone knew the mother of Jesus was named Mary, and that she'd seen suffering of every kind. That she was strong and constant and had a mother's heart. And here she was, sent to them on the same waters that had brought them here in chains. It seemed to them she knew everything they suffered.”

I stared at the statue, feeling the fractured place in my heart.

“And so,” August said, “the people cried and danced and clapped their hands. They went one at a time and touched their hands to her chest, wanting to grab on to the solace in her heart.

“They did this every Sunday in the praise house, dancing and touching her chest, and eventually they painted a red heart on her breast so the people would have a heart to touch.

“Our Lady filled their hearts with fearlessness and whispered to them plans of escape. The bold ones fled, finding their way north, and those who didn't lived with a raised fist in their hearts. And if ever it grew weak, they would only have to touch her heart again.

“She grew so powerful she became known even to the master. One day he hauled her off on a wagon and chained her in the carriage house. But then, without any human help, she escaped during the night and made her way back to the praise house. The master chained her in the barn fifty times, and fifty times she loosed the chains and went home. Finally he gave up and let her stay there.”

The room grew quiet as August stood there a minute, letting everything sink in. When she spoke again, she raised her arms out beside her. “The people called her Our Lady of Chains. They called her that not because she
wore
chains…”

“Not because she wore chains,”
the Daughters chanted.

“They called her Our Lady of Chains because
she broke them
.”

June wedged the cello between her legs and played “Amazing Grace,” and the Daughters of Mary got to their feet and swayed together like colorful seaweed on the ocean floor.