The Secret Life of Bees (25 page)

 

The Daughters and Otis arrived at noon, lugging in all manner of potluck dishes, as if we hadn't eaten ourselves sick the night before. They tucked them into the oven to keep warm and stood around in the kitchen sneaking bites of Rosaleen's corn fritters, saying they were the finest fritters they'd ever had the pleasure of eating, which caused Rosaleen to swell up with pride.

“Y'all stop eating up all Rosaleen's fritters,” June said. “They're for our lunch.”

“Oh, let 'em eat,” said Rosaleen, which floored me, since she'd been known to smack my hand sideways for pinching a single crumb off her fritters before dinner. By the time Neil and Zach arrived, the fritters were nearly gone, and Rosaleen was in danger of floating off into the atmosphere.

I stood numb and plaster stiff in the corner of the kitchen. I wanted to crawl on my knees back to the honey house and ball up in the bed. I wanted everybody to shut up and go home.

Zach started toward me, but I turned away and stared down the sink drain. From the corner of my eye I grew aware of August watching me. Her mouth was bright and shiny, like she'd rubbed on Vaseline, so I knew she'd been dipping into the fritters, too. She walked over and touched her hand to my cheek. I didn't think August knew about me turning the honey house into a disaster zone, but she had a way of figuring things out. Maybe she was letting me know it was okay.

“I want you to tell Zach,” I said. “About me running away, about my mother, about everything.”

“Don't you want to tell him yourself?”

My eyes started to fill up. “I can't. Please, you do it.”

She glanced in his direction. “All right then. I'll tell him the first chance I get.”

She led the group outside for the last of the Mary Day ceremony. We paraded into the backyard, all the Daughters with tiny smudges of grease clinging to their lips. June was out there waiting for us, sitting in an armless kitchen chair, playing her cello. We gathered around her while the lights of noontime bore down. The music she played was the kind that sawed through you, cutting into the secret chambers of your heart and setting the sadness free. Listening to it, I could see my mother sitting on a Trailways bus, riding out of Sylvan, while my four-year-old self napped on the bed, not yet knowing what I would wake to.

June's music turned into air, and the air into aching. I swayed on my feet and tried not to breathe it in.

It was a relief when Neil and Zach stepped out of the honey house carrying Our Lady; it got my mind off the Trailways bus. They carried her under their arms like a tube of carpet, with the chains slapping back and forth against her body. You'd think they would use the wagon again, something a little more dignified than this. And if that wasn't bad enough, when they set her down, they deposited her in the middle of an anthill, which started an ant stampede. We had to jump around, shaking them off our feet.

Sugar-Girl's wig, which for some reason she insisted on calling a “wig hat,” had slid down toward her eyebrows from the jumping around, so we had to have time out for her to go inside and adjust it. Otis yelled after her, “I told you not to wear that thing, it's too hot for a wig. It's sliding around on your head from the perspiration.”

“If I wanna wear my wig hat, I'm gonna wear it,” she said over her shoulder.

“Don't we know it,” he snapped back, looking at us like we were all on his side, when really we were backing Sugar-Girl one hundred percent. Not because we
liked
her wig—it was the worst-looking thing you ever saw—we just didn't like Otis giving her orders.

When all that finally settled down, August said, “Well, here we are, and here's Our Lady.”

I looked her over, proud of how clean she was.

August read Mary's words from the Bible: “‘For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed—'”

“Blessed Mary,” Violet interrupted. “Blessed, blessed Mary.” She stared at the sky, and we all looked up, wondering if she'd caught a glimpse of Mary climbing through the clouds. “Blessed Mary,” she said one more time.

“Today we're celebrating the Assumption of Mary,” August said. “We're celebrating how she woke from her sleep and rose into heaven. And we're here to remember the story of Our Lady of Chains, to remind ourselves that those chains could never keep her down. Our Lady broke free of them every time.”

August grabbed hold of the chain around black Mary and unwrapped a loop before handing it off to Sugar-Girl, who unwrapped it a little further. Every one of us got to join in taking off a loop of chain. What I remember is the clinking noise it made as it uncoiled in a pile at Mary's feet, the sounds seeming to pick up where Violet left off.
Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed.

“Mary is rising,” said August, her voice concentrated into a whisper. “She is rising to her heights.” The Daughters lifted their arms. Even Otis had his arms shot straight up in the air.

“Our Mother Mary will not be cast down and bound up,” said August. “And neither will her daughters. We will rise, Daughters. We…will…rise.”

June sliced her bow across the cello strings. I wanted to lift my arms with the rest of them, to hear a voice coming to me out of the sky, saying,
You will rise,
to feel that it was possible, but they hung limp by my sides. Inside, I felt small and contemptible, abandoned. Every time I closed my eyes, I still saw the Trailways bus.

The Daughters stayed with their arms reaching into the air, giving off the feeling they were rising with Mary. Then August picked up a jar of Black Madonna Honey from behind June's chair, and what she did with it brought everybody back to earth. She opened the lid and turned it upside down over Our Lady's head.

Honey oozed down Mary's face, across her shoulders, sliding down the folds of her dress. A wedge of honeycomb stuck in the crook of Our Lady's elbow.

I looked at Rosaleen as if to say,
Well, great, we spent all that time cleaning honey off her, and here they go putting it back on.

I decided nothing these women did would ever surprise me again, but that lasted about one second, because next the Daughters swarmed around Our Lady like a circle of bee attendants and rubbed the honey into the wood, working it into the top of her head, into her cheeks, her neck and shoulders and arms, across her breasts, her belly.

“Come on, Lily, and help us,” said Mabelee. Rosaleen had already dived in and was coating honey all over Our Lady's thighs. I hung back, but Cressie took my hands and dragged me over to Mary, slapped them down in the muck of sun-warmed honey, right on top of Our Lady's red heart.

I remembered how I'd visited Our Lady in the middle of the night, how I'd placed my hand on that same spot.
You are my mother,
I'd told her then.
You are the mother of thousands.

“I don't get why we're doing this,” I said.

“We always bathe her in honey,” said Cressie. “Every year.”

“But how come?”

August was working the honey into Our Lady's face. “The churches used to bathe their special statues in holy water as a way to honor them,” she said. “Especially statues of Our Lady. Sometimes they bathed her in wine. We settled on honey.” August moved down to Our Lady's neck. “See, Lily, honey is a preservative. It seals over the comb in the hives to keep it safe and pure so the bees can survive the winter. When we bathe Our Lady in it, I guess you'd say we're preserving her for another year, at least inside our hearts we're doing that.”

“I didn't know honey was a preservative,” I said, starting to like the feel of it under my fingers, how they glided as if oiled.

“Well, people don't think about honey like that, but it's so strong-acting people used to smear it on dead bodies to embalm them. Mothers buried their dead babies in it, and it would keep them fresh.”

This was a use for honey I hadn't considered. I could just see funeral homes selling big jars of honey for dead people, instead of coffins. I tried to picture
that
in the drive-through window at the funeral home.

I began to work my hands into the wood, almost embarrassed at the intimacy of what we were doing.

Once Mabelee leaned her head over too far and got honey all in her hair, but it was Lunelle who took the cake with honey dripping off the ends of her elbows. She kept trying to lick it off, but of course her tongue couldn't reach that far.

The ants started a single-file parade up the side of Our Lady, drawn by the honey, and not to be outdone, a handful of scout bees showed up and landed on Our Lady's head. Let somebody bring out the honey and the insect kingdom will be there in no time.

Queenie said, “Next I guess the honey bears will be joining us.” I actually laughed and, spotting a honey-free place near the base of the statue, worked to get it covered up.

Our Lady was covered with hands, every shade of brown and black, going in their own directions, but then the strangest thing started happening. Gradually all our hands fell into the same movement, sliding up and down the statue in long, slow strokes, then changing to a sideways motion, like a flock of birds that shifts direction in the sky at the same moment, and you're left wondering who gave the order.

This went on for I don't know how long, and we didn't ruin it by talking. We were preserving Our Lady, and I was content—for the first time since I'd learned about my mother—to be doing what I was doing.

Finally we all stepped back. Our Lady stood there with her chains spilled around her on the grass, absolutely golden with honey.

One by one the Daughters dipped their hands into a bucket of water and washed off the honey. I waited till the very last, wanting to keep the coating of honey on my skin as long as I could. It was like I was wearing a pair of gloves with magic properties. Like I could preserve whatever I touched.

 

We left Our Lady in the yard while we ate, then returned and washed her with water the same slow way we'd washed her with honey. After Neil and Zach carried her back to her place in the parlor, everyone left. August, June, and Rosaleen started doing the dishes, but I slipped off to the honey house. I lay down on my cot, trying not to think.

Have you noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get? While trying not to think, I spent twenty minutes on this fascinating question: if you could have one miracle from the Bible happen to you, what would it be? I eliminated the one about multiplying loaves and fishes, as I never wanted to see food again. I thought walking on water would be interesting, but what good was that? I mean, you walk on water, what's the point? I settled on getting raised from the dead, since a big part of me still felt dead as a doornail.

All this took place before I even realized I was thinking. I had just gone back to trying again
not
to think when August tapped on the door.

“Lily, can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, but I didn't bother to get up.
So much for not thinking.
Try to be five seconds around August and not think.

She breezed in holding a gold-and-white-striped hatbox. She stood a moment looking down at me, seeming unusually tall. The fan on the little wall shelf rotated around and blew her collar, making it flap around her neck.

She has brought me a hat,
I thought. Maybe she had gone down to the Amen Dollar and bought me a straw hat to cheer me up. But that didn't make a bit of sense, really. Why would a straw hat cheer me up? Then I thought for one second it might be the hat Lunelle had promised to make for me, but that didn't fit either. Lunelle wouldn't have had time to sew up a hat this soon.

August sat on Rosaleen's old cot and placed the box on her lap. “I've brought you some of your mother's belongings.”

I stared at the perfect roundness of the box. When I took a deep breath, it stuttered strangely as it came out.
My mother's belongings.

I didn't move. I smelled the air coming through the window, churned up by the fan. I could tell it had turned thick with afternoon rain, but the sky was holding back.

“Don't you want to see?” she said.

“Just
tell
me what's in it.”

She placed her hand on the lid and patted. “I'm not sure I can remember. I didn't even remember the box till this morning. I thought we'd open it together. But you don't have to look if you don't want to. It's just a handful of things your mother left here the day she went back to Sylvan to get you. I finally gave her clothes away to the Salvation Army, but I kept the rest of her stuff, what little there was. It's been in this box ten years, I guess.”

I sat up. I could hear my heart thudding. I wondered if August could hear it over there across the room.
Boom-boom. Boom-boom.
In spite of the panic that goes along with it, there's something familiar and strangely comforting about hearing your heart beat like that.

August set the box on the bed and removed the lid. I stretched up a little to see inside the box, unable to glimpse anything, though, but white tissue paper, turning yellow around the edges.

She lifted out a small bundle and peeled away the tissue. “Your mother's pocket mirror,” she said, holding it up. It was ovalshaped and surrounded by a tortoise frame, no bigger than the palm of my hand.

I eased off the bed and slid down onto the floor, where I rested my back against the bed. A little closer than before. August acted like she was waiting for me to reach out and take the mirror. I practically had to sit on my hands. Finally August lifted it up and peered inside it herself. Circles of light bounced around on the wall behind her. “If
you
look in here, you're gonna see your mother's face looking back at you,” she said.

I will never look in that mirror,
I thought.