The Secret Life of Bees (18 page)

“Now, what about bail?” August said.

Clayton cleared his throat. “Judge Monroe is out of town on vacation, so nobody is getting out before next Wednesday, it looks like.”

Neil stood up and walked over to the window. His hair was cut in a neat square at the back. I tried to concentrate on it to keep from breaking down. Next Wednesday was five days from now.
Five days
.

“Well, is he all right?” asked June. “He wasn't hurt, was he?”

“They only let me see him for a minute,” said Clayton. “But he seemed all right.”

Outside, the night sky was moving over us. I was aware of it, aware of the way Clayton had said
he seemed all right,
as if we all understood he wasn't but would pretend otherwise.

August closed her eyes, used her fingers to smooth out the skin on her forehead. I saw a shiny film across her eyes—the beginning of tears. Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold, or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you. I felt like we were all adrift in the world, and all we had was the wet fire in August's eyes. But it was enough.

Rosaleen looked at me, and I could read her thoughts.
Just because you broke
me
out of jail, don't get any bright ideas about Zach.
I understood how people became career criminals. The first crime was the hardest. After that you're thinking,
What's one more?
A few more years in the slammer. Big deal.

“What are you gonna do about this?” said Rosaleen, standing beside Clayton, looking down at him. Her breasts sat on her stomach, and her fists were planted in her hips. She looked like she wanted us all to fill our lips with snuff and go directly to the Tiburon jail and spit on people's shoes.

It was plain Rosaleen had fire in her, too. Not hearth fire, like August, but fire that burns the house down, if necessary, to clean up the mess inside it. Rosaleen reminded me of the statue of Our Lady in the parlor, and I thought,
If August is the red heart on Mary's chest, Rosaleen is the fist.

“I'll do my best to get him out,” said Clayton, “but I'm afraid he's got to stay in there a little while.”

I reached into my pocket and felt the black Mary picture, remembering the things I'd planned to say to August about my mother. But how could I do that now, with this terrible thing happening to Zach? Everything I wanted to say would have to wait, and I'd go back to the same suspended animation I'd been in before.

“I don't see why May needs to know about this,” June said. “It will do her in. You know how she loves that boy.”

Every one of us turned to look at August. “You're right,” she said. “It would be too much for May.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“In her bed, asleep,” Rosaleen said. “She was worn out.”

I remembered I had seen her in the afternoon, out by the wall, pulling a load of stones in the wagon. Building onto her wall. As if she sensed a new addition was called for.

 

The jail in Tiburon did not have curtains like the one in Sylvan. It was concrete-block gray, with metal windows and poor lighting. I told myself it was an act of stupidity to go inside. I was a fugitive from justice, and here I was breezing into a jail where there were probably policemen trained to recognize me. But August had asked if I wanted to come with her to visit Zach. How was I going to say anything but yes to that?

The policeman inside had a crew cut and was very tall, taller than Neil, and Neil was Wilt Chamberlain size. He didn't seem especially glad to see us. “Are you his mother?” he asked August.

I looked at his name tag. Eddie Hazelwurst.

“I'm his godmother,” August said, standing very erect, like she was having her height measured. “And this is a friend of the family.”

His eyes passed over me. The only thing he seemed suspicious about was how a girl as white as me could be a friend of the family. He picked up a brown clipboard from a desk and popped the fastener up and down while he tried to decide what to do with us. “All right, you can have five minutes,” he said.

He opened a door into a corridor that led to a single row of four jail cells, each of them holding a black boy. The smell of sweating bodies and sour urinals almost overpowered me. I wanted to bring my fingers up to pinch my nose, but I knew that would be the worst insult. They couldn't help that they smelled.

They sat on benchlike cots hooked along the wall, staring at us as we passed. One boy was throwing a button against the wall, playing some kind of game. He stopped when we came by.

Mr. Hazelwurst led us to the last cell. “Zach Taylor, you got visitors,” he said, then glanced at his watch.

When Zach stepped toward us, I wondered if he'd been handcuffed, fingerprinted, photographed, pushed around. I wanted so much to reach through the bars and touch him, to press my fingers against his skin, because it seemed only by touch that I could be sure all this was actually happening.

When it was apparent Mr. Hazelwurst wasn't leaving, August began to speak. She spoke about one of the hives she kept over on the Haney farm, how it had up and swarmed. “You know the one,” she said. “The one that had trouble with mites.”

She went into minute detail about the way she'd searched high and low, into the dusk hours, combing the woods out past the watermelon fields, finally finding the bees in a magnolia sapling, the whole swarm hanging there like a black balloon caught in the branches. “I used the funnel to drop them in a swarm box,” she said, “then I hived them again.”

I think she was trying to put it in Zach's mind that she would never rest till he was back home with us. Zach listened with his eyes watery brown. He seemed relieved to keep the conversation on the level of bee swarms.

I'd worked on lines I wanted to say to him, too, but in the moment I couldn't remember them. I stood by while August asked him questions—how was he doing, what did he need?

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

When Mr. Hazelwurst said, “Time's up, let's go,” Zach cast his eyes in my direction. A vein stuck out right above his temple. I watched it quiver, the blood pulsing through it. I wanted to say something helpful, to tell him we were more alike than he knew, but it seemed ridiculous to say that. I wanted to reach through the bars and touch the vein with the blood rushing through it. But I didn't do that either.

“Are you writing in your notebook?” he asked, his face and voice suddenly, oddly, desperate.

I looked at him and nodded. In the next cell, the boy—Jackson—made a noise, a kind of catcall, that caused the moment to seem silly and cheap. Zach shot him an angry look.

“Come on, you've had your five minutes,” the policeman said.

August placed her hand on my back, nudging me to leave. Zach seemed as if he wanted to ask me something. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

“I'll write this all down for you,” I said. “I'll put it in a story.”

I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants—for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

 

We went around not bothering to smile, even in front of May. When she was in the room, we didn't talk about Zach, but we didn't act like the world was fine and rosy either. June resorted to her cello, the way she always did when sorrow came along. And walking to the honey house one morning, August stopped and stared at the tire ruts in the driveway left by Zach's car. The way she stood there, I thought she might start to cry.

Everything I did felt heavy and difficult—drying the dishes, kneeling for evening prayers, even pulling down the sheets to get into bed.

On the second day of the month of August, after the supper dishes were washed up, and the Hail Marys had been done, August said, No more moping tonight, we're going to watch Ed Sullivan. And that's what we were doing when the phone rang. To this day August and June wonder how our lives would have been different if one of them had answered the phone instead of May.

I remember that August made a move to answer it, but May was closest to the door. “I'll get it,” she said. No one thought a thing about it. We fixed our eyes on the television, on Mr. Sullivan, who introduced a circus act involving monkeys that rode tiny scooters across a high wire.

When May stepped back into the room a few minutes later, her eyes zigzagged from face to face. “That was Zach's mother,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me about him getting put in jail?”

She looked so normal standing there. For a moment none of us moved. We watched her like we were waiting for the roof to cave in. But May just stood there, calm as she could be.

I started thinking maybe some sort of miracle had taken place and she'd somehow gotten cured.

“You all right?” said August, easing to her feet.

May didn't answer.

“May?” June said.

I even smiled over at Rosaleen and nodded, as if to say,
Can you believe how well she's taking this?

August, though, turned off the television and studied May, frowning.

May's head was angled to the side, and her eyes were fixed on a cross-stitched picture of a birdhouse that hung on the wall. It struck me all of a sudden that her eyes weren't actually seeing the picture. They had glazed completely over.

August went over to May. “Answer me. Are you all right?”

In the silence I heard May's breathing grow loud and a little ragged. She took several steps backward, until she came to the wall. Then she slid down onto the floor without making a sound.

I'm not sure when it sank in that May had gone off to some unreachable place inside herself. Even August and June didn't realize it right away. They called her name like she'd only lost her hearing.

Rosaleen bent over May and spoke in a loud voice, trying to get through to her. “Zach is gonna be all right. You don't need to worry any. Mr. Forrest is getting him out of jail on Wednesday.”

May stared straight ahead like Rosaleen wasn't even there.

“What's happened to her?” June asked, and I could hear a note of panic in her voice. “I've never seen her like this.”

May was here but not here. Her hands lay limp in her lap, palms up. No sobbing into her dress skirt. No rocking back and forth. No pulling at her hair braids. She was so quiet, so different.

I turned my face to the ceiling, I just couldn't watch.

August went to the kitchen and came back with a dish towel filled with ice. She pulled May's head to her so it rested against her shoulder for a minute, and then she lifted her sister's face and pressed the towel to May's forehead and temples and along her neck. She kept on doing this for several minutes, then put the cloth down and tapped May's cheeks with her hands.

May blinked a time or two and looked at August. She looked at all of us, huddled above her, as if she were returning from a long trip.

“You feel better?” said August.

May nodded. “I'll be okay.” Her words came out in an odd monotone.

“Well, I'm glad to see you can talk,” said June. “Come on, let's get you in the bathtub.”

August and June pulled May to her feet.

“I'm going to the wall,” May said.

June shook her head. “It's getting dark.”

“Just for a little while,” May said. She moved into the kitchen, with all of us following after her. She opened a cabinet drawer, took out a flashlight, her tablet, a stub of a pencil, and walked onto the porch. I pictured her writing it down—
Zach in jail
—and pushing it into a crevice in the wall.

I felt somebody should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one and say,
We are sorry, but something strong and lasting had to do this for May, and you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts.

“I'll go with you,” said August.

May spoke over her shoulder. “No, please, August, just me.”

August started to protest. “But—”

“Just me,” said May, turning to face us. “Just me.”

We watched her go down the porch steps and move into the trees. In life there are things you can't get over no matter how hard you try, and that sight is one of them. May walking into the trees with the little circle of light bobbing in front of her, then swallowed up by the dark.

I
sat in the kitchen with August, June, and Rosaleen while the night spread out around the house. May had been gone a whole five minutes when August got up and began to pace. She walked out to the porch and back and then stared out toward the wall.

After twenty minutes she said, “That's it. Let's go get her.”

She got the flashlight from the truck and struck out for the wall, while June, Rosaleen, and I hurried to keep pace. A night bird was singing from a tree branch, just singing its heart out, urgent and feverish, like it was put there to sing the moon up to the top of the sky.

“Ma-a-a-a-y,” called August. June called, too, then Rosaleen and me. We went along shouting her name, but no sound came back. Just the night bird singing up the moon.

After we walked from one end of the wailing wall to the other, we went back and walked it again, like this time we were going to get it right. Walk slower, look closer, call louder. This time May would be there kneeling with the flashlight batteries burned out. We would think,
My goodness, how did we miss her here the first time?

That didn't happen, though, so we walked into the woods behind the wall, calling her name louder and louder till I could hear the hoarseness creeping into our throats, but not one of us would say,
Something is terribly wrong.

Despite the night, the heat had lingered on bad as ever, and I could smell the hot dampness of our bodies as we combed the woods with a spot of light four inches across. Finally August said, “June, you go to the house and call the police. Tell them we need help to find our sister. When you hang up, you kneel before Our Lady and beg her to watch over May, then you come back. We're going to walk toward the river.”

June took off running. We could hear her crashing through the brush as we turned toward the back of the property where the river flowed. August's legs moved faster and faster. Rosaleen struggled to keep up, gulping for air.

When we reached the river, we stood there a moment. I'd been in Tiburon long enough for the full moon to fade away and grow back full again. It hung over the river, sliding in and out of clouds. I stared at a tree on the opposite bank, where the roots were exposed and twisted, and felt a metallic-dry taste rise from the back of my throat and slide over my tongue.

I reached for August's hand, but she had turned right and was moving along the bank, calling May's name.

“Ma-a-a-ay.”

Rosaleen and I moved behind her in our clumsy knot, so close we must have seemed to the night creatures like one big organism with six legs. I was surprised when the prayer we said after dinner each night, the one with the beads, started up of its own accord and recited itself in the back reaches of my head. I could hear each word plainly.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

It wasn't till August said, “Good, Lily, we should all pray,” that I realized I'd been repeating it out loud. I couldn't tell if I was saying it as a prayer or muttering it as a way to push down the fear. August said the words with me, and then Rosaleen did, too. We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.

When June came back, she was holding another flashlight she'd dug up somewhere at the house. The puddle of light wobbled as she came through the woods.

“Over here,” called August, aiming her flashlight up through the trees. We waited for June to reach the riverbank.

“The police are on their way,” she said.

The police are coming.
I looked at Rosaleen, at the ends of her mouth turned down. The police hadn't recognized me the day I'd visited the jail; I hoped they didn't get lucky with Rosaleen.

June shouted May's name and plowed up the riverbank into the dark, followed by Rosaleen, but August moved slowly now, carefully. I stayed close behind her, saying Hail Marys to myself, faster and faster.

Suddenly August stopped in her tracks. I stopped, too. And I didn't hear the night bird singing anymore.

I watched August, not taking my eyes off her. She stood tense and alert, staring down at the bank. At something I could not see.

“June,” she called in a strange, whispery voice, but June and Rosaleen had pushed farther up the riverbank and didn't hear. Only I heard.

The air felt thick and charged, too thick to breathe. I stepped over beside August, letting my elbow touch her arm, needing the weight of her next to me; and there was May's flashlight, shut off and sitting on the wet ground.

It seems odd to me now how we went on standing there another minute, me waiting for August to say something, but she didn't speak, just stood, soaking up that last moment. A wind rose up, raking its sound along the tree branches, hitting our faces like an oven blast, like the sudden breezes of hell. August looked at me, then moved her flashlight beam out to the water.

The light swept across the surface, making a spatter of ink-gold splotches before it stopped, abruptly. May lay in the river, just beneath the surface. Her eyes were wide open and unblinking, and the skirt of her dress fanned out and swayed in the current.

I heard a noise come from August's lips, a soft moan.

I clutched frantically at August's arm, but she pulled free of me, threw down her flashlight, and waded into the river.

I splashed in after her. Water surged around my legs, causing me to fall once on the slippery bottom. I grabbed for August's skirt, just missing. I came up sputtering.

When I reached her, August was staring down at her baby sister. “June,” she shouted.
“June!”

May lay in two feet of water with a huge river stone on top of her chest. It weighted her body, holding it on the bottom. Looking at her, I thought,
She will get up now. August will roll away the stone, and May will come up for air, and we will go back to the house and get her dry.
I wanted to reach down and touch her, shake her shoulder a little. She couldn't have died out here in the river. That would be impossible.

The only parts of her not submerged were her hands. They floated, her palms little ragged cups bobbing on the surface, the water weaving in and out of her fingers. Even now that's the picture that will wake me up in the night, not May's eyes, open and staring, or the stone resting on her like a grave slab. Her hands.

June came thrashing into the water. When she reached May, she stood beside August, panting, her arms dangling beside her body.
“Oh, May,”
she whispered and looked away, squeezing her eyes closed.

Glancing toward the bank, I saw Rosaleen standing ankle deep in the river, her whole body shaking.

August knelt down in the water and shoved the stone off May's chest. Grabbing May by the shoulders, she pulled her up. Her body made an awful sucking sound as it broke the surface. Her head rolled back, and I saw that her mouth was partially open and her teeth were rimmed with mud. River reeds clung to her hair braids. I looked away. I knew then.
May was dead.

August knew, too, but she put her ear to May's chest, listening. After a minute, though, she drew back and pulled May's head to
her
breast, and it almost seemed like she wanted May to listen now for
her
heart.

“We've lost her,” August said.

I started to shiver. I could hear my teeth in my mouth, crashing against each other. August and June scooped their arms under May's body and struggled to carry her to the bank. She was saturated, bulging. I grabbed her ankles and tried to steady them. The river, it seemed, had carried away her shoes.

When they laid her down on the bank, water gushed from her mouth and nostrils. I thought,
This is the way Our Lady came washing up on the river near Charleston.
I thought,
Look at her fingers, her hands. They are so precious.

I imagined how May had rolled the rock from the bank out into the river, then lay down, pulling it on top of her. She had held it tight, like a baby, and waited for her lungs to fill. I wondered if she had flailed and jerked toward the surface at the last second, or did she go without fighting, embracing the rock, letting it soak up all the pain she felt? I wondered about the creatures that had swum by while she died.

June and August, sopping wet, stooped on either side of her, while mosquitoes sang in our ears and the river went on about its business, coiling off into the darkness. I was sure they'd pictured May's last moments, too, but I did not see horror on their faces now, just a heartbroken acceptance. This had been the thing they'd been waiting for half their lives without even realizing it.

August tried to close May's eyes with her fingers, but they would only stay half shut. “It's just like April,” June said.

“Hold the flashlight on May for me,” August said to her. The words came out quiet and steady. I could barely hear them over the bamming of my heart.

By the small beam of light, August plucked out the tiny green leaves stuck in the plaits in May's hair and tucked each one into her pocket.

August and June scraped off every piece of river debris there was from May's skin and clothes, and Rosaleen, poor Rosaleen, who I realized had lost her new best friend, stood, not making a sound, but with her chin shaking so awful I wanted to reach up and hold it for her.

Then a sound I will never forget whooshed out of May's mouth—a long, bubbling sigh, and we all looked at each other, confused, with a second of actual hope, as if the miracle of miracles was about to take place after all, but it was only a pocket of swallowed air that had suddenly been released. It swept across my face, smelling like the river, like a piece of old wood that had gone moldy.

I looked down at May's face and felt a wave of nausea. Stumbling off into the trees, I bent over and vomited.

Afterward, as I wiped my mouth on the hem of my shirt, I heard a sound break through the darkness, a cry so piercing it made the bottom of my heart drop. Looking back, I saw August framed in the light of June's flashlight, the sound coming from deep in her throat. When it faded away, she dropped her head straight down onto May's soggy chest.

I reached for the limb of a small cedar and held tight, as though everything I had was about to slip from my hands.

 

“So you're an orphan?” the policeman said. It was that tall, crew-cut Eddie Hazelwurst who'd escorted August and me in to see Zach in jail.

Rosaleen and I sat in the rocking chairs in the parlor, while he stood before us holding a small notebook, ready to capture every word. The other policeman was outside searching around the wailing wall, for what I couldn't imagine.

My chair rocked so fast I was in danger of being pitched out of it. Rosaleen's, however, remained motionless—her face closed down.

When we'd first gotten back to the house after finding May, August had met both policemen and then sent me and Rosaleen upstairs. “Go on up there and get dried off,” she'd said to me.

I'd peeled off my shoes and rubbed myself with a towel while we stood at the upstairs window. We'd watched the men from the ambulance bring May back from the woods on a stretcher, then listened as the two policemen asked August and June all sorts of questions. Their voices had floated up the stairwell.
Yes, she's been depressed lately. Well, actually, she was depressed on and off all the time. She had a condition. She couldn't seem to distinguish other people's suffering from her own. No, we didn't find a note. An autopsy? All right, we understand.

Mr. Hazelwurst had wanted to talk to everyone, so here we were. I'd told him exactly what happened from the time May answered the telephone to the moment we found her in the river. Then he started with the personal questions. Wasn't I that girl who came to the jail last week to see one of the colored boys? What was I doing staying here? Who was Rosaleen?

I explained everything about my mother dying when I was small, my father going to his Maker earlier this summer after a tractor accident, which was the story I was sticking with. Rosaleen, I said, was my nanny.

“I guess you could say I'm an orphan,” I told him. “But I've got family in Virginia. It was my father's dying wish for me to go live with my aunt Bernie. She's expecting me and Rosaleen both. She'll be sending us bus fare or driving down here and picking us up herself. She keeps saying, ‘Lily, I can't wait for you to get here.' I tell her, ‘Just so we're there before school starts.' I'll be a sophomore, which I cannot believe.”

He narrowed his eyes like he was trying to follow all this. I was breaking every rule of successful lying.
Do not talk so much,
I told myself, but I couldn't seem to stop.

“I am so happy about going to live with her up there. She is real nice. You wouldn't believe all the stuff she has sent me over the years. Especially costume jewelry and teddy bears. One bear after another.”

I was only glad August and June were not present to hear this. They had left to follow the ambulance in the honey wagon, wanting to see May's body delivered safe and sound to wherever it was going. It was bad enough Rosaleen was in the room. I was afraid she was going to give us away, say something like
Actually we came here right after Lily broke me out of jail.
But she sat drawn into herself, a complete mute.

“Now, what was your last name again?” he said.

“Williams,” I said. I had told him this twice already, so I had to wonder what kind of educational requirements they had for policemen in Tiburon. It looked like the same ones as Sylvan.

He drew up even taller. “Well, what I don't understand is, if you're going to live with your aunt in Virginia, what are you doing here?”

Here is the translation:
I am completely confused what a white girl like you is doing staying in a colored house.