The Secret Life of Bees (4 page)

My knees had been tortured like this enough times in my life that I'd stopped thinking of it as out of the ordinary; it was just something you had to put up with from time to time, like the common cold. But suddenly the look on Rosaleen's face cut through all that.
Look what he's done to you.

That's what I was doing—taking a good long look at my knees—when T. Ray stomped through the back door.

“Well, look who decided to get up.” He yanked the bread out of my hands and threw it into Snout's food bowl. “Would it be too much to ask you to get out to the peach stand and do some work? You're not Queen for a Day, you know.”

This will sound crazy, but up until then I thought T. Ray probably loved me some. I could never forget the time he smiled at me in church when I was singing with the hymnbook upside down.

Now I looked at his face. It was despising and full of anger.

“As long as you live under my roof, you'll do what I say!” he shouted.

Then I'll find another roof,
I thought.

“You understand me?” he said.

“Yes, sir, I understand,” I said, and I did, too. I understood that a new rooftop would do wonders for me.

 

Late that afternoon I caught two more bees. Lying on my stomach across the bed, I watched how they orbited the space in the jar, around and around like they'd missed the exit.

Rosaleen poked her head in the door. “You all right?”

“Yeah, I'm fine.”

“I'm leaving now. You tell your daddy I'm going into town tomorrow instead of coming here.”

“You're going to town? Take me,” I said.

“Why do you wanna go?”

“
Please,
Rosaleen.”

“You're gonna have to walk the whole way.”

“I don't care.”

“Ain't nothing much gonna be open but firecracker stands and the grocery store.”

“I don't care. I just wanna get out of the house some on my birthday.”

Rosaleen stared at me, sagged low on her big ankles. “All right, but you ask your daddy. I'll be by here first thing in the morning.”

She was out the door. I called after her. “How come you're going to town?”

She stayed with her back to me a moment, unmoving. When she turned, her face looked soft and changed, like a different Rosaleen. Her hand dipped into her pocket, where her fingers crawled around for something. She drew out a folded piece of notebook paper and came to sit beside me on the bed. I rubbed my knees while she smoothed out the paper across her lap.

Her name, Rosaleen Daise, was written twenty-five times at least down the page in large, careful cursive, like the first paper you turn in when school starts. “This is my practice sheet,” she said. “For the Fourth of July they're holding a voters' rally at the colored church. I'm registering myself to vote.”

An uneasy feeling settled in my stomach. Last night the television had said a man in Mississippi was killed for registering to vote, and I myself had overheard Mr. Bussey, one of the deacons, say to T. Ray, “Don't you worry, they're gonna make 'em write their names in perfect cursive and refuse them a card if they forget so much as to dot an i or make a loop in their y.”

I studied the curves of Rosaleen's R. “Does T. Ray know what you're doing?”

“T. Ray,” she said. “T. Ray don't know nothing.”

 

At sunset he shuffled up, sweaty from work. I met him at the kitchen door, my arms folded across the front of my blouse. “I thought I'd walk to town with Rosaleen tomorrow. I need to buy some sanitary supplies.”

He accepted this without comment. T. Ray hated female puberty worse than anything.

That night I looked at the jar of bees on my dresser. The poor creatures perched on the bottom barely moving, obviously pining away for flight. I remembered then the way they'd slipped from the cracks in my walls and flown for the sheer joy of it. I thought about the way my mother had built trails of graham-cracker crumbs and marshmallow to lure roaches from the house rather than step on them. I doubted she would've approved of keeping bees in a jar. I unscrewed the lid and set it aside.

“You can go,” I said.

But the bees remained there, like planes on a runway not knowing they'd been cleared for takeoff. They crawled on their stalk legs around the curved perimeters of the glass as if the world had shrunk to that jar. I tapped the glass, even laid the jar on its side, but those crazy bees stayed put.

 

The bees were still in there the next morning when Rosaleen showed up. She was bearing an angel food cake with fourteen candles.

“Here you go. Happy birthday,” she said. We sat down and ate two slices each with glasses of milk. The milk left a moon crescent on the darkness of her upper lip, which she didn't bother to wipe away. Later I would remember that, how she set out, a marked woman from the beginning.

Sylvan was miles away. We walked along the ledge of the highway, Rosaleen moving at the pace of a bank-vault door, her spit jug fastened on her finger. Haze hung under the trees, and every inch of air smelled overripe with peaches.

“You limping?” Rosaleen said.

My knees were aching to the point that I was struggling to keep up with her. “A little.”

“Well, why don't we sit down on the side of the road awhile?” she said.

“That's okay,” I told her. “I'll be fine.”

A car swept by, slinging scalded air and a layer of dust. Rosaleen was slick with heat. She mopped her face and breathed hard.

We were coming to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where T. Ray and I attended. The steeple jutted through a cluster of shade trees; below, the red bricks looked shadowy and cool.

“Come on,” I said, turning in the drive.

“Where're you going?”

“We can rest in the church.”

The air inside was dim and still, slanted with light from the side windows, not those pretty stained-glass windows but milky panes you can't really see through.

I led us down front and sat in the second pew, leaving room for Rosaleen. She plucked a paper fan from the hymnbook holder and studied the picture on it—a white church with a smiling white lady coming out the door.

Rosaleen fanned and I listened to little jets of air come off her hands. She never went to church herself, but on those few times T. Ray had let me walk to her house back in the woods, I'd seen her special shelf with a stub of candle, creek rocks, a reddish feather, and a piece of John the Conqueror root, and right in the center a picture of a woman, propped up without a frame.

The first time I saw it, I'd asked Rosaleen, “Is that you?” since I swear the woman looked exactly like her, with woolly braids, blue-black skin, narrow eyes, and most of her concentrated in her lower portion, like an eggplant.

“This is my mama,” she said.

The finish was rubbed off the sides of the picture where her thumbs had held it. Her shelf had to do with a religion she'd made up for herself, a mixture of nature and ancestor worship. She'd stopped going to the House of Prayer Full Gospel Holiness Church years ago because it started at ten in the morning and didn't end till three in the afternoon, which is enough religion to kill a full-grown person, she'd said.

T. Ray said Rosaleen's religion was plain wacko, and for me to stay out of it. But it drew me to her to think she loved water rocks and woodpecker feathers, that she had a single picture of her mother just like I did.

One of the church doors opened and Brother Gerald, our minister, stepped into the sanctuary.

“Well, for goodness' sake, Lily, what are you doing here?”

Then he saw Rosaleen and started to rub the bald space on his head with such agitation I thought he might rub down to the skull bone.

“We were walking to town and stopped in to cool off.”

His mouth formed the word “oh,” but he didn't actually say it; he was too busy looking at Rosaleen in his church, Rosaleen who chose this moment to spit into her snuff jug.

It's funny how you forget the rules. She was not supposed to be inside here. Every time a rumor got going about a group of Negroes coming to worship with us on Sunday morning, the deacons stood locked-arms across the church steps to turn them away. We loved them in the Lord, Brother Gerald said, but they had their own places.

“Today's my birthday,” I said, hoping to send his thoughts in a new direction.

“Is it? Well, happy birthday, Lily. So how old are you now?”

“Fourteen.”

“Ask him if we can have a couple of these fans for your birthday present,” said Rosaleen.

He made a thin sound, intended for a laugh. “Now, if we let everybody borrow a fan that wanted one, the church wouldn't have a fan left.”

“She was just kidding,” I said, and stood up. He smiled, satisfied, and walked beside me all the way to the door, with Rosaleen tagging behind.

Outside, the sky had whited over with clouds, and shine spilled across the surfaces, sending motes before my eyes. When we'd cut through the parsonage yard and were back on the highway, Rosaleen produced two church fans from the bosom of her dress, and, doing an impersonation of me gazing up sweet-faced, she said, “Oh, Brother Gerald, she was just kidding.”

 

We came into Sylvan on the worst side of town. Old houses set up on cinder blocks. Fans wedged in the windows. Dirt yards. Women in pink curlers. Collarless dogs.

After a few blocks we approached the Esso station on the corner of West Market and Park Street, generally recognized as a catchall place for men with too much time on their hands.

I noticed that not a single car was getting gas. Three men sat in dinette chairs beside the garage with a piece of plywood balanced on their knees. They were playing cards.

“Hit me,” one of them said, and the dealer, who wore a Seed and Feed cap, slapped a card down in front of him. He looked up and saw us, Rosaleen fanning and shuffling, swaying side to side. “Well, look what we got coming here,” he called out. “Where're you going, nigger?”

Firecrackers made a spattering sound in the distance. “Keep walking,” I whispered. “Don't pay any attention.”

But Rosaleen, who had less sense than I'd dreamed, said in this tone like she was explaining something real hard to a kindergarten student, “I'm going to register my name so I can vote, that's what.”

“We should hurry on,” I said, but she kept walking at her own slow pace.

The man next to the dealer, with hair combed straight back, put down his cards and said, “Did you hear that? We got ourselves a model citizen.”

I heard a slow song of wind drift ever so slightly in the street behind us and move along the gutter. We walked, and the men pushed back their makeshift table and came right down to the curb to wait for us, like they were spectators at a parade and we were the prize float.

“Did you ever see one that black?” said the dealer.

And the man with his combed-back hair said, “No, and I ain't seen one that big either.”

Naturally the third man felt obliged to say something, so he looked at Rosaleen sashaying along unperturbed, holding her white-lady fan, and he said, “Where'd you get that fan, nigger?”

“Stole it from a church,” she said. Just like that.

I had gone once in a raft down the Chattooga River with my church group, and the same feeling came to me now—of being lifted by currents, by a swirl of events I couldn't reverse.

Coming alongside the men, Rosaleen lifted her snuff jug, which was filled with black spit, and calmly poured it across the tops of the men's shoes, moving her hand in little loops like she was writing her name—Rosaleen Daise—just the way she'd practiced.

For a second they stared down at the juice, dribbled like car oil across their shoes. They blinked, trying to make it register. When they looked up, I watched their faces go from surprise to anger, then outright fury. They lunged at her, and everything started to spin. There was Rosaleen, grabbed and thrashing side to side, swinging the men like pocketbooks on her arms, and the men yelling for her to apologize and clean their shoes.

“Clean it off!” That's all I could hear, over and over. And then the cry of birds overhead, sharp as needles, sweeping from low-bough trees, stirring up the scent of pine, and even then I knew I would recoil all my life from the smell of it.

“Call the police,” yelled the dealer to a man inside.

By then Rosaleen lay sprawled on the ground, pinned, twisting her fingers around clumps of grass. Blood ran from a cut beneath her eye. It curved under her chin the way tears do.

When the policeman got there, he said we had to get into the back of his car.

“You're under arrest,” he told Rosaleen. “Assault, theft, and disturbing the peace.” Then he said to me, “When we get down to the station, I'll call your daddy and let him deal with you.”

Rosaleen climbed in, sliding over on the seat. I moved after her, sliding as she slid, sitting as she sat.

The door closed. So quiet it amounted to nothing but a snap of air, and that was the strangeness of it, how a small sound like that could fall across the whole world.

T
he policeman driving us to jail was Mr. Avery Gaston, but the men at the Esso station called him Shoe. A puzzling nickname since there was nothing remarkable about his shoes, or even his feet so far as I could see. The one thing about him was the smallness of his ears, the ears of a child, ears like little dried apricots. I fixed my eyes on them from the backseat and wondered why he wasn't called Ears.

The three men followed us in a green pickup with a gun rack inside. They drove close to our bumper and blew the horn every few seconds. I jumped each time, and Rosaleen gave my leg a pat. In front of the Western Auto the men started a game of pulling alongside us and yelling things out the window, mostly things we couldn't make out because our windows were rolled up. People in the back of police cars were not given the benefit of door handles or window cranks, I noticed, so we were blessed to be chauffeured to jail in smothering heat, watching the men mouth things we were glad not to know.

Rosaleen looked straight ahead and acted as if the men were insignificant houseflies buzzing at our screen door. I was the only one who could feel the way her thighs trembled, the whole backseat like a vibrating bed.

“Mr. Gaston,” I said, “those men aren't coming with us, are they?”

His smile appeared in the rearview mirror. “I can't say what men riled up like that will do.”

Before Main Street they tired of the amusement and sped off. I breathed easier, but when we pulled into the empty lot behind the police station, they were waiting on the back steps. The dealer tapped a flashlight against the palm of his hand. The other two held our church fans, waving them back and forth.

When we got out of the car, Mr. Gaston put handcuffs on Rosaleen, fastening her arms behind her back. I walked so close to her I felt heat vapor trailing off her skin.

She stopped ten yards short of the men and refused to budge. “Now, look here, don't make me get out my gun,” Mr. Gaston said. Usually the only time the police in Sylvan got to use their guns was when they got called out to shoot rattlesnakes in people's yards.

“Come on, Rosaleen,” I said. “What can they do to you with a policeman right here?”

That was when the dealer lifted the flashlight over his head, then down, smashing it into Rosaleen's forehead. She dropped to her knees.

I don't remember screaming, but the next thing I knew, Mr. Gaston had his hand clamped over my mouth. “Hush,” he said.

“Maybe now you feel like apologizing,” the dealer said. Rosaleen tried to get to her feet, but without her hands it was hopeless. It took me and Mr. Gaston both to pull her up.

“Your black ass is gonna apologize one way or another,” the dealer said, and he stepped toward Rosaleen.

“Hold on now, Franklin,” said Mr. Gaston, moving us toward the door. “Now's not the time.”

“I'm not resting till she apologizes.”

That's the last I heard him yell before we got inside, where I had an overpowering impulse to kneel down and kiss the jailhouse floor.

 

The only image I had for jails was from westerns at the movies, and this one was nothing like that. For one thing, it was painted pink and had flower-print curtains in the window. It turned out we'd come in through the jailer's living quarters. His wife stepped in from the kitchen, greasing a muffin tin.

“Got you two more mouths to feed,” Mr. Gaston said, and she went back to work without a smile of sympathy.

He led us around to the front, where there were two rows of jail cells, all of them empty. Mr. Gaston removed Rosaleen's handcuffs and handed her a towel from the bathroom. She pressed it against her head while he filled out papers at a desk, followed by a period of poking around for keys in a file drawer.

The jail cells smelled with the breath of drunk people. He put us in the first cell on the first row, where somebody had scratched the words “Shit Throne” across a bench attached to one wall. Nothing seemed quite real.
We're in jail,
I thought.
We're in
jail.

When Rosaleen pulled back the towel, I saw an inch-long gash across a puffy place high over her eyebrow. “Is it hurting bad?” I asked.

“Some,” she said. She circled the cell two or three times before sinking down onto the bench.

“T. Ray will get us out,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

She didn't speak another word till Mr. Gaston opened the cell door about a half hour later. “Come on,” he said. Rosaleen looked hopeful for a moment. She actually started to lift herself up. He shook his head. “You ain't going anywhere. Just the girl.”

At the door I held on to a cell bar like it was the long bone in Rosaleen's arm. “I'll be back. All right?…All right, Rosaleen?”

“You go on, I'll manage.”

The caved-in look of her face nearly did me in.

 

The speedometer needle on T. Ray's truck wiggled so badly I couldn't make out whether it pointed to seventy or eighty. Leaning into the steering wheel, he jammed his foot onto the accelerator, let off, then jammed it again. The poor truck was rattling to the point I expected the hood to fly off and decapitate a couple of pine trees.

I imagined that T. Ray was rushing home so he could start right away constructing pyramids of grits all through the house—a torture chamber of food staples, where I would go from one pile to the next, kneeling for hours on end with nothing but bathroom breaks. I didn't care. I couldn't think of anything but Rosaleen back there in jail.

I squinted at him sideways. “What about Rosaleen? You have to get her out—”

“You're lucky I got
you
out!” he yelled.

“But she can't stay there—”

“She dumped snuff juice on three white men! What the hell was she thinking? And on Franklin Posey, for Christ's sake. She couldn't pick somebody normal? He's the meanest nigger-hater in Sylvan. He'd as soon kill her as look at her.”

“But not really,” I said. “You don't mean he would
really
kill her.”

“What I mean is, I wouldn't be surprised if he flat-out killed her.”

My arms felt weak in their sockets. Franklin Posey was the man with the flashlight, and he was gonna kill Rosaleen. But then, hadn't I known this inside even before T. Ray ever said it?

He followed me up the stairs. I moved with deliberate slowness, anger suddenly building in me. How could he leave Rosaleen in jail like that?

As I stepped inside my room, he stopped at the doorway. “I have to go settle the payroll for the pickers,” he said. “Don't you leave this room. You understand me? You sit here and think about me coming back and dealing with you. Think about it real hard.”

“You don't scare me,” I said, mostly under my breath.

He'd already turned to leave, but now he whirled back. “What did you say?”

“You don't scare me,” I repeated, louder this time. A brazen feeling had broken loose in me, a daring
some
thing that had been locked up in my chest.

He stepped toward me, raising the back of his hand like he might bring it down across my face. “You better watch your mouth.”

“Go ahead, try and hit me!” I yelled.

When he swung, I turned my face. It was a clean miss.

I ran for the bed and scrambled onto the middle of it, breathing hard. “My mother will never let you touch me again!” I shouted.

“
Your mother?
” His face was bright red. “You think that goddamn woman gave a shit about you?”

“My mother loved me!” I cried.

He threw back his head and let out a forced, bitter laugh.

“It's—it's not funny,” I said.

He lunged toward the bed then, pressing his fists into the mattress, bringing his face so close I could see the tiny holes where his whiskers grew. I slid backward, toward the pillows, shoving my back into the headboard.

“Not funny?” he yelled. “
Not funny?
Why, it's the funniest goddamn thing I ever heard: you thinking your mother is your guardian angel.” He laughed again. “The woman could have cared less about you.”

“That's not true,” I said. “It's
not.
”

“And how would you know?” he said, still leaning toward me. A leftover smile pulled the corners of his mouth.

“I hate you!” I screamed.

That stopped his smiling instantly. He stiffened. “Why, you little bitch,” he said. The color faded from his lips.

Suddenly I felt ice cold, as if something dangerous had slipped into the room. I looked toward the window and felt a tremor slide along my spine.

“You listen to me,” he said, his voice deadly calm. “The truth is, your sorry mother ran off and left you. The day she died, she'd come back to get her things, that's all. You can hate me all you want, but
she's
the one who left you.”

The room turned absolutely silent.

He brushed at something on his shirtfront, then walked to the door.

After he left, I didn't move except to trace the bars of light on the bed with my finger. The sound of his boots banging down the stairs drifted away, and I took the pillows from underneath the bedspread and placed them around me like I was making an inner tube that might keep me afloat. I could understand her leaving him. But leaving
me
? This would sink me forever.

The bee jar sat on the bedside table, empty now. Sometime since this morning the bees had finally gotten around to flying off. I reached over and took the jar in my hands, and out came the tears I'd been holding on to, it seemed like for years.

Your sorry mother ran off and left you. The day she died, she'd come back to get her things, that's all.

God and Jesus, you make him take it back.

The memory settled over me. The suitcase on the floor. The way they'd fought. My shoulders began to shake in a strange, uncontrollable way. I held the jar pressed between my breasts, hoping it would steady me, but I couldn't stop shaking, couldn't stop crying, and it frightened me, as though I'd been struck by a car I hadn't seen coming and was lying on the side of the road, trying to understand what had happened.

I sat on the edge of the bed, replaying his words over and over. Each time there was a wrench in what felt like my heart.

I don't know how long I sat there feeling broken to pieces. Finally I walked to the window and gazed out at the peach trees stretching halfway to North Carolina, the way they held up their leafy arms in gestures of pure beseeching. The rest was sky and air and lonely space.

I looked down at the bee jar still clutched in my hand and saw a teaspoon of teardrops floating in the bottom. I unfastened the window screen and poured it out. The wind lifted it on her skirt tails and shook it over the blistered grass.
How could she have left me?
I stood there several minutes looking out on the world, trying to understand. Little birds were singing, so perfect.

That's when it came to me:
What if my mother leaving wasn't true? What if T. Ray had made it up to punish me?

I felt almost dizzy with relief. That was it. That had to be it. I mean, my father was Thomas Edison when it came to inventing punishments. Once after I'd back-talked him, he'd told me my rabbit, Mademoiselle, had died, and I'd cried all night before I discovered her the next morning healthy as anything in her pen. He had to be making this up, too. Some things were not possible in this world. Children did not have two parents who refused to love them. One, maybe, but for pity's sake, not two.

It had to be like he'd said before: she was cleaning out the closet the day of the accident. People cleaned out closets all the time.

I took a breath to steady myself.

You could say I'd never had a true religious moment, the kind where you know yourself spoken to by a voice that seems other than yourself, spoken to so genuinely you see the words shining on trees and clouds. But I had such a moment right then, standing in my own ordinary room. I heard a voice say,
Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open.

In a matter of seconds I knew exactly what I had to do—
leave.
I had to get away from T. Ray, who was probably on his way back this minute to do Lord-knows-what to me. Not to mention I had to get Rosaleen out of jail.

The clock read 2:40. I needed a solid plan, but I didn't have the luxury of sitting down to think one up. I grabbed my pink canvas duffel bag, the one I'd planned to use for overnights the minute anyone asked me. I took the thirty-eight dollars I'd earned selling peaches and stuffed it into the bag with my seven best pairs of panties, the ones that had the days of the week printed across the backside. I dumped in socks, five pairs of shorts, tops, a nightgown, shampoo, brush, toothpaste, toothbrush, rubber bands for my hair, all the time watching the window.
What else?
Catching sight of the map tacked on the wall, I snatched it down, not bothering to pry out the tacks.

I reached under the mattress and pulled out my mother's picture, the gloves, and the wooden picture of black Mary, and tucked them down in the bag, too.

Tearing a sheet of paper from last year's English notebook, I wrote a note, short and to the point: “Dear T. Ray, Don't bother looking for me. Lily. P.S. People who tell lies like you should rot in hell.”

When I checked the window, T. Ray was coming out of the orchard toward the house, fists balled, head plowed forward like a bull wanting to gore something.

I propped the note on my dresser and stood a moment in the center of the room, wondering if I'd ever see it again. “Good-bye,” I said, and there was a tiny sprig of sadness pushing up from my heart.

Outside, I spied the broken space in the latticework that wrapped around the foundation of the house. Squeezing through, I disappeared into violet light and cobwebbed air.