The Secret Life of Bees (11 page)

I thought this was the grand finale, but no, June switched over to the piano and banged out a jazzed-up version of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” That's when August started a conga line. She danced over to Lunelle, who latched on to August's waist. Cressie hooked on to Lunelle, followed by Mabelee, and off they went around the room, causing Cressie to grab hold of her crimson hat. When they swung back by, Queenie and Violet joined them, then Sugar-Girl. I wanted to be part of it, too, but I only watched, and so did Rosaleen and Otis.

June seemed to play faster and faster. I fanned my face, trying to get a little air, feeling light-headed.

When the dance ended, the Daughters stood panting in a half circle before Our Lady of Chains, and what they did next took my breath away. One at a time they went and touched the statue's fading red heart.

Queenie and her daughter went together and rubbed their palms against the wood. Lunelle pressed her fingers to Mary's heart, then kissed each one of them in a slow, deliberate way, a way that brought tears to my eyes.

Otis pressed his forehead to the heart, standing there the longest time of them all, head to heart, like he was filling up his empty tank.

June kept playing while each of them came, until there was only Rosaleen and me left. May nodded to June to keep on with the music and took Rosaleen's hand, pulling her to Our Lady of Chains, so even Rosaleen got to touch Mary's heart.

I wanted to touch her vanishing red heart, too, as much as anything I'd ever wanted. As I rose from my chair, my head was still swimming some. I walked toward black Mary with my hand lifted. But just as I was about to reach her, June stopped playing. She stopped right in the middle of the song, and I was left in the silence with my hand stretched out.

Drawing it back, I looked around me, and it was like seeing everything through a train's thick window. A blur passed before me. A moving wave of color.
I am not one of you,
I thought.

My body felt numb. I thought how nice it would be to grow smaller and smaller—until I was a dot of nothing.

I heard August scolding, “June, what got into you?” but her voice was so distant.

I called to the Lady of Chains, but maybe I wasn't really saying her name out loud, only hearing myself call on the inside. That's the last I remember. Her name echoing through the empty spaces.

When I woke, I was lying on August's bed across the hall with an ice-cold washcloth folded over my forehead and August and Rosaleen staring down at me. Rosaleen had pulled up the skirt of her dress and was fanning me with it, showing most of her thighs.

“Since when have you started fainting?” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed, causing me to roll into her side. She scooped me into her arms. For some reason this caused my chest to fill with more sadness than I could bear, and I wrestled myself free, claiming I needed a drink of water.

“Maybe it was the heat,” August said. “I should've turned on the fans. It must've been ninety degrees in there.”

“I'm all right,” I told them, but to tell the truth, I was bewildered at myself.

I felt I'd stumbled upon an amazing secret—it was possible to close your eyes and exit life without actually dying. You just had to faint. Only I didn't know how to make it happen, how to pull the plug so I could drain away when I needed to.

My fainting spell had broken up the Daughters of Mary and sent May to the wailing wall. June had gone upstairs to her room and locked the door, while the Daughters huddled in the kitchen.

We chalked it up to heat. Heat, we said. Heat would make a person do strange things.

 

You should have seen how August and Rosaleen fussed over me the rest of the evening. You want some root beer, Lily? How about a feather pillow? Here, swallow this spoon of honey.

We sat in the den, where I ate supper off a tray, which was a privilege in itself. June was still in her room, not answering August's calls at the door, and May, who wasn't allowed near the TV because she'd already spent way too much time today at the wall, was in the kitchen clipping recipes from
McCall's
magazine.

On the television Mr. Cronkite said they were going to send a rocket ship to the moon. “On July twenty-eighth, the United States of America will launch
Ranger Seven
from Cape Kennedy, Florida,” he said. It was going to take a 253,665-mile flight before it crash-landed onto the moon. The whole point was to take pictures of the surface and send them back.

“Well, baby Jesus,” said Rosaleen. “A rocket to the moon.”

August shook her head. “Next they'll be walking around up there.”

We had all thought President Kennedy was off his rocker when he declared we'd land a man on the moon. The Sylvan newspaper had called it a “Luna-tic Vision.” I took the article to class for the current-events bulletin board. We all said, A man on the moon.
Right.

But you can never underestimate the power of cutthroat competition. We wanted to beat the Russians—that was what made the world go around for us. Now it looked like we would.

August cut off the TV set. “I need some air.”

We all went, Rosaleen and August holding on to my elbows in case I started to keel over again.

It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I've never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming. August gazed at the sky where the moon was rising, large and ghostly silver.

“Look at her good, Lily,” she said, “'cause you're seeing the end of something.”

“I am?”

“Yes, you are, because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark.”

August stared at the sky a long moment and then, turning toward the house, said, “Now it won't ever be the same, not after they've landed up there and walked around on her. She'll be just one more big science project.”

I thought about the dream I'd had that night Rosaleen and I slept by the pond, how the moon had cracked to pieces.

August disappeared into the house, and Rosaleen headed for her cot in the honey house, but I stayed on and stared at the sky, imagining
Ranger 7
blasting away for it.

I knew one day I would go back into the parlor when no one was around and touch the Lady's heart. Then I would show August the picture of my mother and see if the moon broke loose and fell out of the sky.

I
jumped every time I heard a siren. It might have been an ambulance off in the distance or a police chase on television—it didn't matter. Part of me was always braced for T. Ray or Mr. Shoe Gaston to drive up and end my charmed life. We had been at August's house eight whole days. I didn't know how long black Mary could keep the curtain drawn.

On Monday morning, July 13, I was walking back to the honey house after breakfast when I noticed a strange black Ford parked in the driveway. I lost my breath for a moment, till I remembered Zach was coming back to work today.

It would be me and August
and
Zach. I'm not proud of it, but I resented the intrusion.

He was not what I expected. I found him inside holding a honey drizzle like a microphone, singing, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill.” I watched unseen from the doorway, not making a sound, but when he launched into “Viva Las Vegas,” slinging his hips around Elvis-style, I broke out laughing.

He whirled around, knocking over a tray of brood frames, which made a great big mess all over the floor.

“I was just singing,” he said, like this was news to me. “Who are you anyway?”

“Lily,” I said. “I'm staying with August and them for a while.”

“I'm Zachary Taylor,” he said.

“Zachary Taylor was a president,” I told him.

“Yeah, so I've heard.” He fished out a dogtag suspended on a chain under his shirt and held it up to my nose. “See right there. Zachary Lincoln Taylor.” He smiled then, and I saw he had a one-side dimple. It's a feature that has always gotten to me.

He went and got a towel and cleaned up the floor. “August told me about you being here and helping us out, but she didn't say anything about you being…white.”

“Yep, I'm white, all right,” I said. “White as can be.”

There was nothing white about Zachary Lincoln Taylor. Even the whites of his eyes weren't exactly white. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and short-cropped hair like most of the Negro boys wore, but it was his face I couldn't help staring at. If he was shocked over me being white, I was shocked over him being handsome.

At my school they made fun of colored people's lips and noses. I myself had laughed at these jokes, hoping to fit in. Now I wished I could pen a letter to my school to be read at opening assembly that would tell them how wrong we'd all been. You should see Zachary Taylor, I'd say.

I wondered how August could forget to tell him a thing like the fact that I was white. She'd told
me
plenty about
him
. I knew she was his godmother. That his daddy had left him when he was small, that his mama worked as a lunchroom lady at the same school where June taught. He was about to be a junior at the black high school, where he made all A's and played halfback on the football team. She'd said he ran like the wind, which might be his ticket to a college up north. This had struck me as better than I would manage, since I was probably headed for beauty school now.

I said, “August went out to the Satterfield farm to check on some hives. She said I should help you in here. What do you want me to do?”

“Grab some frames from the hive boxes over there and help me load the uncapper, I guess.”

“So who do you like best, Fats Domino or Elvis?” I asked, dropping in the first frame.

“Miles Davis,” he said.

“I don't know who that is.”

“Of course you don't. But he's the best trumpet player in the world. I'd give anything to play like him.”

“Would you give up football?”

“How do you know I play football?”

“I know things,” I said, and smiled at him.

“I can see that.” He was trying not to smile back.

I thought,
We're going to be friends
.

He flipped the switch, and the extractor started to spin, building speed. “So how come you're staying here?”

“Me and Rosaleen are on our way to Virginia to live with my aunt. My daddy died in a tractor accident, and I haven't had a mother since I was little, so I'm trying to get to my family up there before I get put in an orphanage or something.”

“But how come you're
here
?”

“Oh, you mean at August's. We were hitchhiking and got let out at Tiburon. We knocked on August's door, and she gave us a bed. That's it.”

He nodded like this made some kind of actual sense.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked, happy to change the subject.

“All through high school. I come after school when it's not football season, every Saturday and all summer. I bought a car with the money I made last year.”

“That Ford out there?”

“Yeah, it's a '59 Ford Fairlane,” he said.

He flipped the switch on the extractor again, and the machine groaned while it came to a stop. “Come on, I'll show you.”

I could see my face in the surface of it. I figured he stayed up nights polishing it with his undershirts. I walked along giving it the white-glove inspection.

“You can teach me to drive,” I said.

“Not in this car.”

“Why not?”

“Because you look like the kind of girl who'll wreck something for sure.”

I turned to face him, ready to defend myself, and saw he was grinning. And there was the one-side dimple again.

“For sure,” he said. “Wreck something for sure.”

 

Every day Zach and I worked in the honey house. August and Zach had already extracted most of the honey from her bee yards, but there were still several stacks of supers on pallets sitting around.

We ran the warmer and caught the wax in a tin tub, then loaded the frames into the extractor and filtered the honey through brand-new nylon hose. August liked to keep a little pollen in her honey because it was good for people, so we saw to that, too. Sometimes we broke off pieces of comb and pushed them down into the jars before we filled them. You had to make sure they were new combs with no brood eggs in them, since nobody wanted to have baby bee larvae in their honey.

And if we weren't doing all that, we were filling candle molds with beeswax and washing mason jars till my hands turned stiff as corn husk from detergent.

The only part of the day I dreaded was dinner, when I had to be around June. You'd think anybody who played music for dying people would be a nicer person. I couldn't understand why she resented me so much. Somehow even me being white and imposing on their hospitality didn't seem enough reason.

“How are things coming with you, Lily?” she'd say every night at the table. Like she'd rehearsed this in the mirror.

I'd say, “Things are coming fine. And how are they coming with you, June?”

She would glance at August, who would be following all this like she was overcome with interest. “Fine,” June would say.

Having gotten that out of the way, we would shake out our napkins and do our best to ignore each other the rest of the meal. I knew that August was trying to correct June's rudeness toward me, but I wanted to say to her,
Do you think me and June Boatwright give a damn how each other is coming? Just give up.

One night after the Hail Marys, August said, “Lily, if you wish to touch Our Lady's heart, you're welcome, isn't she, June?”

I glanced at June, who gave me a forced smile.

“Maybe some other time,” I said.

I'm here to tell you, if I was dying on my cot in the honey house and the only thing that could save me was June's change of heart, I would meet my death and shoot straight to heaven. Or maybe hell. I wasn't even sure anymore.

The best meal was lunch, which Zach and I ate under the cool of the pine trees. May fixed us bologna sandwiches nearly every single day. We could also count on candlestick salad, which meant half a banana standing up in a pineapple slice. “Let me light your candle,” she'd say, and strike an imaginary match. Then she'd fasten a bottled cherry on the tip of the banana with a toothpick. Like Zach and I were still in kindergarten. But we'd go along with her, acting all excited over her lighting the banana. For dessert we crunched cubes of lime Kool-Aid, which she'd frozen in ice trays.

One day we sat on the grass after lunch, listening to the wind snap the sheets Rosaleen had hung on the clothesline.

“What's your favorite subject in school?” Zach asked.

“English.”

“I bet you like to write themes,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“As a matter of fact I do. I was planning on being a writer and an English teacher in my spare time.”

“
Was
planning?” he said.

“I don't think I have much of a future now, being an orphan.” What I meant was being a fugitive from the law. Considering the state of things, I didn't know if I'd even get back to high school.

He studied his fingers. I could smell the sharp scent of his sweat. He had patches of honey on his shirt, which were attracting a horde of flies and causing him to swat incessantly.

After a while he said, “Me either.”

“You either
what
?”

“I don't know if I'll have much of a future either.”

“Why not?
You're
not an orphan.”

“No,” he said. “I'm a Negro.”

I felt embarrassed. “Well, you could play football for a college team and then be a professional player.”

“Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football,” he said. “I wanna be a lawyer.”

“That's fine with me,” I said, a little annoyed. “I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them.”

“Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been.”

I closed my eyes. “All right then, I'm imagining a Negro lawyer. You are a Negro Perry Mason. People are coming to you from all over the state, wrong-accused people, and you get at the truth at the very last minute by tricking the real criminal on the witness stand.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I bust their ass with the truth.” When he laughed, his tongue was grass green from Kool-Aid.

I started calling him Zach the ass-busting lawyer. “Oh, look who's here, Zach the ass-busting lawyer,” I'd say.

 

It was along about this point Rosaleen started asking me what did I think I was doing—auditioning myself to get adopted by the calendar sisters? She said I was living in a dream world. “Dream world” became her favorite two words.

It was living in a dream world to pretend we had a regular life when there was a manhunt going on, to think we could stay here forever, to believe I would find out anything worth knowing about my mother.

Every time I shot back,
What's wrong with living in a dream world?
And she'd say,
You have to wake up.

One afternoon when I was alone in the honey house, June wandered in looking for August. Or so she said. She crossed her arms over her chest. “So,” she said, “you've been here—what? Two weeks now?”

How obvious can you get?

“Look, if you want us to leave, me and Rosaleen will be on our way,” I said. “I'll write my aunt, and she'll send us bus money.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I thought you didn't remember your aunt's last name, and now you know her name
and
her address.”

“Actually, I knew it all along,” I said. “I was just hoping for a little time before we had to leave.”

It seemed like her face softened some when I said that, but it could've been wishful thinking on my part.

“Heavens to Betsy, what's this talk about you leaving?” said August, standing in the doorway. Neither one of us had seen her come in. She gave June a hard look. “Nobody wants you to leave, Lily, till you're good and ready.”

Standing beside August's desk, I fidgeted with a stack of papers. June cleared her throat. “Well, I need to get back and practice,” she said, and breezed out the door.

August walked over and sat down in her desk chair. “Lily, you can talk to me. You know that, don't you?”

When I didn't answer, she caught my hand and drew me to her, pulling me right down onto her lap. It was not mattress deep like Rosaleen's but thin and angular.

I wanted nothing more than to come clean with her. Go pull my bag from underneath the cot and bring out my mother's things. I wanted to produce the black Mary picture and say,
This belonged to my mother, this exact same, identical picture you put on your honey jars. And it has Tiburon, South Carolina, written on the back, so I know she must've been here.
I wanted to hold up her photograph and say,
Have you ever seen her? Take your time now. Think carefully.

But I hadn't yet pressed my hand to the black Mary's heart in the parlor, and I was too afraid to say all this without having done at least that. I leaned against August's chest, pushing aside my secret wanting, too afraid she'd say,
No, I never saw this woman in my life.
And that would be that. Not knowing anything at all was better.

I struggled to my feet. “I guess I'll go help in the kitchen.” I crossed the yard without a glance back.

That night, when the darkness was weighed down with singing crickets and Rosaleen was snoring right along with them, I had myself a good cry. I couldn't even say why. Just everything, I guess. Because I hated lying to August when she was so good to me. Because Rosaleen was probably right about dream worlds. Because I was pretty sure the Virgin Mary was not back there on the peach farm standing in for me the way she'd stood in for Beatrix.

 

Neil came over most evenings and sat with June in the parlor while the rest of us watched
The Fugitive
on television in the den. August said she wished the fugitive would go ahead and find the one-armed man and get it over with.