The Secret Life of Bees (26 page)

Laying it on the bed, August reached into the hatbox and unwrapped a hairbrush with a wooden handle and offered it to me. Before I thought, I took it. The handle felt funny in my hand, cool and smooth-edged, like it had been worn down by excessive holding. I wondered if she'd brushed her hair a hundred strokes every day.

As I was about to hand the brush back to August, I saw a long, black, wavy hair threaded through the bristles. I brought the brush close to my face and stared at it, my mother's hair, a genuine part of her body.

“Well, I'll be,” August said.

I could not take my eyes off it. It had grown out of her head and now perched there like a thought she had left behind on the brush. I knew then that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how many jars of honey you threw, no matter how much you thought you could leave your mother behind, she would never disappear from the tender places in you. I pressed my back against the bed and felt tears coming. The brush and the hair belonging to Deborah Fontanel Owens swam in my vision.

I handed the brush back to August, who dropped a piece of jewelry into my hand. A gold pin shaped like a whale with a tiny black eye and a spout of rhinestone water coming from its blow-hole.

“She was wearing that pin on her sweater the day she got here,” August said.

I closed my fingers around it, then walked on my knees over to Rosaleen's bed and placed it alongside the pocket mirror and the brush, moving them around like I was working on a collage.

I used to lay out my Christmas presents on the bed the same way. There would usually be four whole things that T. Ray had gotten the lady at the Sylvan Mercantile to pick out for me—sweater, socks, pajamas, sack of oranges. Merry Christmas. You could bet your life on the gift list. I would arrange them for display in a vertical line, a square, a diagonal line, any kind of configuration to help me feel like they were a picture of love.

When I looked up at August, she was pulling a black book from the box. “I gave your mother this while she was here. English poetry.”

I took the book in my hand, leafing through the pages, noticing pencil marks in the margins, not words, but strange little doodles, spiraling tornadoes, a flock of Vs, squiggles with eyes, pots with lids, pots with faces, pots with curly things boiling out, little puddles that would suddenly give rise to a terrible wave. I was staring at my mother's private miseries, and it made me want to go outside and bury the book in the dirt.

Page forty-two. That's where I came to eight lines by William Blake that she'd underlined, some words twice.

I closed the book. I wanted the words to flow off me, but they had stuck. My mother was William Blake's rose. I wanted nothing so much as to tell her how sorry I was for being one of the invisible worms that flew in the night.

I placed the book on the bed with the other things, then turned back to August, while she reached down into the box again, causing the tissue paper to whisper. “One last thing,” she said, and she drew out a small oval picture frame of tarnished silver.

When she passed it to me, she held on to my hands for a second. The frame contained a picture of a woman in profile, her head bent toward a little girl who sat in a high chair with a smudge of baby food on the side of her mouth. The woman's hair curled in forty directions, beautiful, like it had just had its hundred strokes. She held a baby spoon in her right hand. Light glazed her face. The little girl wore a bib with a teddy bear on it. A sprig of hair on top of her head was tied with a bow. She lifted one hand toward the woman.

Me and my mother.

I didn't care about anything on this earth except the way her face was tipped toward mine, our noses just touching, how wide and gorgeous her smile was, like sparklers going off. She had fed me with a tiny spoon. She had rubbed her nose against mine and poured her light on my face.

Through the open window the air smelled like Carolina jasmine, which is the true smell of South Carolina. I walked over and propped my elbows on the sill and breathed as deeply as I could. Behind me I heard August shift on the cot, the legs squeak, then relax.

I looked down at the picture, then closed my eyes. I figured May must've made it to heaven and explained to my mother about the sign I wanted. The one that would let me know I was loved.

A
fter August and I went through the hatbox, I drew into myself and stayed there for a while. August and Zach tended to the bees and the honey, but I spent most of my time down by the river, alone. I just wanted to keep to myself.

The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled. I plucked leaves off the elephant ear plants and fanned my face, sat with my bare feet submerged in the trickling water, felt breezes lift off the river surface and sweep over me, and still everything about me was stunned and stupefied by the heat, everything except my heart. It sat like an ice sculpture in the center of my chest. Nothing could touch it.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's
that
hard. If God said in plain language, “I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die,” a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

I wrapped my mother's things in the falling-apart paper, tucked them back in the hatbox, and put the lid on it. Lying on my stomach on the floor, pushing the box under my cot, I found a tiny pile of mouse bones. I scooped them up and washed them in the sink. Every day I carried them around in my pocket and could not imagine why I was doing it.

When I woke up in the mornings, my first thought was the hatbox. It was almost like my mother herself was hiding under the bed. One night I had to get up and move it to the other side of the room. Then I had to strip off my pillowcase and stuff the box down inside it and tie it closed with one of my hair ribbons. All this just so I could sleep.

I would walk to the pink house to use the bathroom and think,
My mother sat on this same toilet,
and then I would hate myself for thinking it. Who cared where she sat to pee? She hadn't cared a whole lot about
my
bathroom habits when she abandoned me to Mrs. Watson and T. Ray.

I gave myself pep talks.
Don't think about her. It is over and done.
The next minute, I swear to God, I would be picturing her in the pink house, or out by the wailing wall, stuffing her burdens among the stones. I would've bet twenty dollars T. Ray's name was squashed into the cracks and crevices out there. Maybe the name Lily was out there, too. I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.

In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional. I was the girl abandoned by her mother. I was the girl who kneeled on grits. What a special case I was.

We were deep into mosquito season, so a lot of what I did by the river was swat at them. Sitting in the purple shadows, I pulled out the mouse bones and worked them between my fingers. I stared at things until I seemed to melt right into them. Sometimes I would forget lunch, and Rosaleen would come find me, bearing a tomato sandwich. After she left, I would throw it in the river.

At times I could not prevent myself from lying flat on the ground, pretending I was inside one of those beehive tombs. I felt the same way I did right after May died, only multiplied by a hundred.

August had said, “I guess you need to grieve a little while. So go ahead and do it.” But now that I was doing it, I couldn't seem to stop.

I knew that August must have explained everything to Zach, and June, too, because they tiptoed around me like I was a psychiatric case. Maybe I was. Maybe
I
was the one who belonged on Bull Street, not my mother. At least no one prodded, or asked questions, or said, “For Pete's sake, snap out of it.”

I wondered how much longer it would be before August had to act on the things I'd told her—me running away, helping Rosaleen escape. Rosaleen, a fugitive. August was giving me time for now, time to be by the river and do what I had to do, the same way she gave herself time there after May died. But it wouldn't last forever.

 

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening. June set a wedding date, Saturday, October
10.
Neil's brother, an African Methodist–Episcopal reverend from Albany, Georgia, was going to marry them in the backyard under the myrtle trees. June laid out all their plans one night at dinner. She would come walking down an aisle of rose petals, wearing a white rayon suit with frog closings that Mabelee was sewing for her. I could not picture frog closings. June drew a picture of one on a tablet, and afterward I still could not picture them. Lunelle had been commissioned to make her a wedding hat, which I thought was very courageous of June. There was no telling what she would end up with on her head.

Rosaleen offered to bake the wedding cake layers, and Violet and Queenie were going to decorate it with a “rainbow theme.” Again, all I can say is how brave June was.

One afternoon I went to the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon, nearly dying of thirst, wanting to fill a jug with water and take it back to the river, and found June and August clinging to each other in the middle of the floor.

I stood outside the door and watched, even though it was a private moment. June gripped August's back, and her hands trembled. “May would've loved this wedding,” she said. “She must've told me a hundred times I was being stubborn about Neil. Oh, God, August, why didn't I do it sooner, while she was still alive?”

August turned slightly and caught sight of me in the doorway. She held June, who was starting to cry, but she kept her eyes on mine. She said, “Regrets don't help anything, you know that.”

 

The next day I actually felt like eating. I wandered in for lunch to find Rosaleen wearing a new dress and her hair freshly plaited. She was poking tissues into her bosom for safekeeping.

“Where did you get that dress?” I said.

She turned a circle, modeling it, and when I smiled, she turned another one. It was what you would call a tent dress—yards of material falling from her shoulders without benefit of waistband and darts. It had a bright red background with giant white flowers all over it. I could see she was in love with it.

“August took me into town yesterday, and I bought it,” she said. I felt startled suddenly by the things that had been going on without me.

“Your dress is pretty,” I lied, noticing for the first time there were no lunch fixings anywhere.

She smoothed her hands down the front of it, looked at the clock on the stove, and reached for an old white vinyl purse of May's that she'd inherited.

“You going somewhere?” I said.

“She sure is,” said August, stepping into the room, smiling at Rosaleen.

“I'm gonna finish what I started,” Rosaleen said, lifting her chin. “I'm gonna register to vote.”

My arms dropped by my sides, and my mouth came open. “But what about—what about you being…you know?”

Rosaleen squinted at me.
“What?”

“A fugitive from justice,” I said. “What if they recognize your name? What if you get caught?”

I cut my eyes over at August.

“Oh, I don't think there'll be a problem,” August said, taking the truck keys off the brass nail by the door. “We're going to the voter drive at the Negro high school.”

“But—”

“For heaven's sake, all I'm doing is getting my voter's card,” said Rosaleen.

“That's what you said last time,” I told her.

She ignored that. She strapped May's purse on her arm. A split ran from the handle around onto the side.

“You wanna come, Lily?” said August.

I did and I didn't. I looked down at my feet, tanned and bare. “I'll just stay here and make some lunch.”

August lifted her eyebrows. “It's nice to see you're hungry for a change.”

They went onto the back porch, down the steps. I followed them to the truck. As Rosaleen got in, I said, “Don't spit on anybody's shoes, okay?”

She let out a laugh that made her whole body shake. It looked like all the flowers on her dress were bobbing in a gust of wind.

I went back inside, boiled two hot dogs, and ate them without buns. Then I headed back to the woods, where I picked a few bachelor buttons that grew wild in the plots of sunshine before getting bored and tossing them away.

I sat on the ground, expecting to sink down into my dark mood and think about my mother, but the only thoughts I had were for Rosaleen. I pictured her standing in a line of people. I could almost see her practicing writing her name. Getting it just right. Her big moment. Suddenly I wished I'd gone with them. I wished it more than anything. I wanted to see her face when they handed her her card. I wanted to say,
Rosaleen, you know what? I'm proud of you.

What was I doing sitting out here in the woods?

 

I got up and went inside. Passing the telephone in the hallway, I had an urge to call Zach. To become part of the world again. I dialed his number.

When he answered, I said, “So what's new?”

“Who's this?” he said.

“Very funny,” I told him.

“I'm sorry about…everything,” he said. “August told me what happened.” Silence floated between us a moment, and then he said, “Will you have to go back?”

“You mean back to my father?”

He hesitated. “Yeah.”

The minute he said it, I had the feeling that's exactly what would happen. Everything in my body felt it. “I suppose so,” I said. I coiled the phone cord around my finger and stared down the hall at the front door. For a few seconds I was unable to look away, imagining myself leaving through it and not coming back.

“I'll come see you,” he said, and I wanted to cry.

Zach knocking on the door of T. Ray Owens's house. It could never happen.

“I asked you what was new, remember?” I didn't expect anything was, but I needed to change the subject.

“Well, for starters, I'll be going to the white high school this year.”

I was speechless. I squeezed the phone in my hand. “Are you sure you wanna do that?” I said. I knew what those places were like.

“Somebody's got to,” he said. “Might as well be me.”

Both of us, it seemed like, were doomed to misery.

 

Rosaleen came home, a bona fide registered voter in the United States of America. We all sat around that evening, waiting to eat dinner, while she personally called every one of the Daughters on the telephone.

“I just wanted to tell you I'm a registered voter,” she said each time, and there would be a pause, and then she'd say, “President Johnson and Mr. Hubert Humphrey, that's who. I'm not voting for Mr. Pisswater.” She laughed every time, like this was the joke of jokes. She would say, “Goldwater, Pisswater, get it?”

This went on even after dinner. Just when we'd think she had it out of her system, out of the complete blue, she'd say, “I'll be casting my vote for Mr. Johnson.”

When she finally wound down and said good night, I watched her climb the stairs wearing her red-and-white voter-registration dress, and I wished again that I'd been there.

Regrets don't help anything,
August had told June,
you know that.

I ran up the stairs and grabbed Rosaleen from behind, stopping her with one foot poised in the air, searching for the next step. I wrapped my arms around her middle. “I love you,” I blurted out, not even knowing I was going to say this.

 

That night when the katydids and tree frogs and every other musical creature were wound up and going strong, I walked around the honey house, feeling like I had spring fever. It was ten o'clock at night, and I honestly felt like I could've scrubbed the floors and washed the windows.

I went over to the shelves and straightened all the mason jars, then took the broom and swept the floor, up under the holding tank and the generator, where nobody had swept for fifty years, it looked like. I still wasn't tired, so I stripped the sheets off my bed and went over to the pink house and got a set of clean ones, careful to tiptoe around and not wake anybody up. I got dust rags and Comet cleanser in case I needed them.

I came back, and before I knew it I was involved in a full-blown cleaning frenzy. By midnight I had the place shining.

I even went through my stuff and got rid of some things. Old pencils, a couple of stories I'd written that were too embarrassing for anybody to read, a torn pair of shorts, a comb with most of its teeth missing.

Next I gathered up the mouse bones that I'd kept in my pockets, realizing I didn't need to carry them around anymore. But I knew I couldn't throw them away either, so I tied them together with a red hair ribbon and set them on the shelf by the fan. I stared at them a minute, wondering how a person got attached to
mouse bones.
I decided sometimes you just need to nurse something, that's all.

By now I was starting to get tired, but I took my mother's things out of the hatbox—her tortoiseshell mirror, her brush, the poetry book, her whale pin, the picture of us with our faces together—and set them up on the shelf with the mouse bones. I have to say, it made the whole room look different.

Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

 

The next morning I showed up in the kitchen with the whale pin fastened to my favorite blue top. A Nat King Cole record was going. “Unforgettable, that's what you are.” I think it was on to drown out all the commotion the pink Lady Kenmore washer was making on the porch. It was a wondrous invention, but it sounded like a cement mixer. August sat with her elbows on the tabletop, drinking the last of her coffee and reading another book from the bookmobile.

When she lifted her eyes, they took in my face, then went straight to the whale pin. I saw her smile before she went back to her book.