Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  Making sure their delicate branches weren’t smashed, Silva repositioned the bonsai, the bristlecone pine alone older than this place, at least in terms of colonial history. Pinus longaeva, the oldest non-clonal living organism on earth. Methuselah, a wild bristlecone and one of the oldest trees known, sported over five thousand growth rings, germinating somewhere around 3050 BCE in the wilds of the US, even before the Egyptians built their pyramids. A gnarled but diminutive tree that had outlasted everything else, including the American westward “progress” that had helped populate Two Rivers—something, like her driving need to find her long-lost runaway artist grandmother, Silva doubted the townspeople would appreciate.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Date: September 1, 1999

  Title: Baptism of the Virgins

  Subject: The Twelve Maidens of Almost Paradise & Len Dietz

  Setting: Larkins Beach, Snake River, Hells Canyon

  Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press

  Size: 12×12

  Dearest Eamon,

  It is September first. Our anniversary. Remember that dark drive, our headlights on water, the sound of Canadian geese flying over? Twenty years ago. A time like coming home.

  The grasses here are blond and brittle already, dry husks rustling with the canyon wind, the sky bleached pale, the sun’s power leaching color from everything it has touched as the season hardens, the nights grown cold, the air alive with the movements of birds flocking for fall. The river makes me think of you, this water winding its way past me. But everything makes me think of you: the water, the shoreline, the deep currents. And the trees, of course, though none are like yours. Is it ever possible to go back? To make something wrong right again?

  Let me try to explain: I have come here to pay witness. To record and capture for the rest of the world just what the depth of this female subjugation looks like. Desperation, despair, desolation, disempowerment. Patriarchal abuse. Though perhaps I have also come here to make sense of my past, to understand myself, to make amends for the wreckage of my own life. But this place is a poison spread. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And you know just what kind of “hard” that means, for me, even though it’s been decades since I left, since we last saw each other, since everything changed. But some things never do change, no matter that everything else around them does. You always knew everything I ever knew about anything.

  Today, the first of my commissioned Almost Paradise paintings is done, leading up to the grand finale: the Wedding of the Maidens, which will be held on the coming millennial, January 1, 2000—Y2K, The End of Everything, the Apocalypse, the beginning of Len Dietz’s reign, of his Holy Family of God, of his marriage to the Twelve Maidens. These child brides, these girls conscripted to his insanity.

  The painting of them is a pink light-wash that belies the torn heart pulsing in its center. Something you would still recognize, I think—all that beating pain, all those ragged edges peeled back, revealing that unfathomably dark and bleeding middle.

  I set up on the beach, as I have so many times before. I arranged each brush, each tube of color. I angled the easel. I settled my feet wide in the sand—a power stance. Ready, I thought. But there was no preparing for it. When I opened my eyes, when I looked up and breathed out, there was nothing but them—these girls, each one like a newly captured and injured self. When he lowered them, one by one, into the water, I couldn’t breathe, my heart like a broken bird beating against the bones of my chest. I thought I would faint, thought I would fall, too, just as they had, but instead I let my hands go free, and I painted face after face under those lace veils, under that silvered water, drowning themselves in their own mistaken faith. But what choice have they been given? What choice might they otherwise make? He is their lord and savior. He is their ruler and king. He is their master and their keeper. He is their father and their lover. He is their abuser, who dictates everything that will ever be done to them, for them, and against them.

  And I do nothing but paint.

  I never told you what I needed to, what I should have said right at the beginning: that what that man—my “father”—did to me would never be undone, no matter how long it has been, no matter how far I have run from him, from myself, from everything that has come. Where are the words for such things? How do you speak such things into the daylight, or even into night?

  I have never been able to face it except through my paints. And now, maybe, these letters, even though I will never send them. How could I do that to you? All these years gone, and only now can I speak it, laying down each word like a brick mortared into a wall we could never break through. Your trees, my paintings—our language of grief and longing, and love, too. Everything we wished we could be and say and do for each other, but didn’t.… I didn’t. You did. Every day. Do you know what that meant to me then? What it means to me now? There are some things that defy words, that defy images—your actions like the air I breathed, the water I drank, the food I ate. Except in the end, not one of them could sustain me. Nothing could. Not with the black hole inside of me forever sucking in all the light, voracious and insatiable.

  Now the darkness is on the outside, the small light of my soul like a candle held against the black expanse of this compound’s sky. I wish I could burn it all down. I wish I could grab the girls by their hands and pull them all to safety. I wish I could shelter them with you on the island, just as I found shelter there. But this storm is not yours to break. This storm belongs to the broken.

  And so I will carve their names into paper, I will sing my heart to yours, I will blot color until it bleeds truth. I will call their names out in my sleep until I can again find myself. Please keep them safe for me.

  My love to you always,

  Isabelle

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARCH 2001

  Silva brushed herself into a semblance of tidiness—her clothes limp and wrinkled, her hair a wind-blown mess—before pushing through Build It Best’s glass doors, wincing as a raucous cowbell attached to the inside handle announced her entry. Confronted by dozens of head mounts on every wall, she stopped. Black glass eyes gazed back at her with reproach: elk, mountain sheep, deer, moose, caribou, mountain goats. A dusty wolf and tattered mountain lion crouched, snarling. It looked like a horror movie set waiting for the unwitting protagonist to wander in.

  Nobody there, she went to the front counter, which was arranged with fishing tackle and ceramic Idaho potato penny banks next to bumper stickers that read Welcome to Idaho, Now Go Home. Liquor bottles stood stacked high on shelves behind the counter, a bright yellow sign declaring: We know who you are, so don’t even try! The newest warted-gourd postage stamps were lined up next to the cash register under the display-case glass, and various items of “moose-bead” jewelry were draped over blue velvet on the shelf below: shellacked moose pellets strung onto necklaces and bracelets. Objects that seemed purposefully adventitious in a place hostile to outsiders.

  Finally, a heavyset bottle-blonde with a nametag that read Becky with a smiley face came bustling from the back of the store, looking Silva over from head to toe in a sweep that landed on Silva’s hair and stayed there, wavering, as though she were taking in a strange beast.

  “Can I help you?” Becky asked uncertainly, as if worried Silva might demand more than she could provide.

  “I have a reservation?” Silva tried not to show her discomfort, being in this town, searching for a ghost.

  “Ah, Sylvia from Trawler Island?” Becky asked, her brows arched quizzically under curls that adhered to her forehead, her smell a mix of baby power and candy. “We don’t get many visitors. Not from a place like that. Sounds exotic.” Her tone hinted at accusation.

  “It’s no place special,” Silva said quickly, though it wasn’t true. The cabin, the water and salt air, the smell of kelp and damp sand. Already it seemed a place she’d left a long time ago—something that had happened anciently, alone again, fighting for herself. She felt as out of place as Eamon’
s bonsai on the Dodge’s front seat. As out of place as Isabelle’s painting of the honeysuckle. None of them with any kind of belonging in a place like this.

  “Come to see all the action?” Becky asked, some kind of deeper inquiry behind her forced small-town friendliness. She rubbed a small, newly inked tattoo on the top of her wrist—three small parallel lines inside a circle that she touched as carefully as a scabbed-over wound.

  “Just passing through.”

  Silva wondered if Becky had known Isabelle. A year wasn’t a long time, and Two Rivers was the kind of place where everybody knew everyone else—even those who were just passing through. The kind of place where a woman like Isabelle would have stood out, caused a stir.

  “Well, we’ll get you taken care of right away,” Becky said, bustling into action. “Town’s full up. You’re lucky to have a spot.” She glanced at Silva again in unspoken assessment as she pulled out a pad covered with names and dates. “Just sign here and we’ll get things in order.”

  As Silva signed the paper, Becky pawed under the counter for a key on a green plastic fob then picked up the phone intercom, her voice echoing hollowly throughout the store. “Rick, come to the front desk, Rick.” She shook her head at Silva. “He’s probably jawing with Delbert. I swear that man could talk the hind legs off a mule. We’ll get you all settled in just a minute, honey.” She uncapped a tube of ChapStick and applied a thick layer, the smell of chemical-cherry making Silva’s stomach lurch. “You be sure to let us know if there’s anything you need. We aim to please around here, no matter what they’re saying about us in the news.…”

  “I’ll get my things together,” Silva said before Becky could tell her why this tiny, dried-up town or its people would be in the news. Before Silva could question her own motives again.

  She knew what it was like to live in a place where everyone wanted to know everything about you, questions like a preprogrammed train circling into each stop: Where are you from? What do you do? Who’s your family? A line of inquiry meant to make sense of things of which there was no sense to be made. Everybody wanting reassuring stories, happy stories, stories that made you feel good about life. Not the truth of what each decision had cost. Slipping into dark waters and breathing in. Nobody wanted to talk about how things didn’t work out, even though that was life’s reality.

  Outside, despite what she’d told Becky, Silva decided she wouldn’t unload until everyone was gone for the night. Who knew what kind of questions Eamon’s trees would precipitate—things so ancient that to look at them was to see your own mortality, your life as a blip in universal time. Instead, she walked to a tiny real estate office already closed for the day and looked at property photos taped to the front window. Acres and acres of emptiness—places where you could hide yourself away so well you might never be found. Even by your own family members.

  Farther down the street, a small log building’s carved wooden sign declared itself the Two Rivers Museum. A teenage girl wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes sat inside the propped-open door, reading just out of the sun’s reach, hardly glancing up as Silva went in. The log space contained some historical heirlooms but was mostly filled with pictures—old black-and-whites of stiff and solemn-faced ranchers and miners. Men with wide foreheads, piercing eyes, and rounded upper backs. Men who looked as if they’d grown carrying around too much weight.

  Silva hoped perhaps she might find some trace of Isabelle, or at least what thing or place she’d thought profound enough a “truth” to disappear into, but none in the sea of faces was familiar—certainly nobody resembling Isabelle with her redheaded wild-artist look. A woman Silva had always imagined belonged in expat Paris, drinking, smoking, and painting nudes.

  Like the hardware store, the museum’s back wall was covered with dead animals, captured in photographs instead of mounted. Men crouched over their kills, holding up animal heads proudly in display: cougar, elk, deer, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, clutches of sage grouse, and blood-streaked wolves stung upright to demonstrate their length and girth against the men who’d shot them as a trophy.

  Several of the kill photos featured the same big, stiff-faced, dark-haired, camo-wearing man, captions naming him Len Dietz. Seemingly the town’s most successful killer. He was there in an older display, as well, this time in a Vietnam uniform, hair shaved, rifle slung over his shoulder, baby-faced but holding the same stiff, threatening posture. One of those men who’d never been able to leave combat behind.

  Already this place was somewhere Silva didn’t want to be. Maybe that was what had driven Isabelle, too. A need to escape the inescapable.

  When Silva braved Build It Best’s cowbells again, hoping Rick had done whatever needed doing for her room to be ready, Becky was in the back helping someone else. While she waited, Silva glanced at a stack of newspapers on the counter featuring a front-page picture of a snarling wolf and the bolded headline PREDATOR AT LARGE. The picture matched the wolf in the front window, the same threatening expression taxidermied onto its face. A plaque underneath the mounted wolf read, Canadian Gray Wolf. Shot by Len Dietz. It seemed the locals weren’t fond of any predator besides themselves. She’d heard about the wolf wars being waged in the interior west, an old fury reignited with the animal’s successful reintroduction, but it had always felt far removed from the island.

  When she heard Becky coming, Silva readied herself for the friendly onslaught, but this time Becky’s face was serious, preoccupied. She went behind the counter to ring up a bundle of wire and two dozen boxes of ammunition, which she pulled out of a locked cabinet beside her.

  The man who’d followed her to the counter pulled a wad of cash from his wallet and counted out stacks of twenties. He was dressed for combat: Vietnam-era camo pants tucked into military-style boots and a large pistol in a tactical holster. Everything was part of a uniform except the pristine white shirt he wore—so clean and starched it looked as if it’d just come from the ironing board, sharp creases running down each sleeve, its collar stiff and open. His long hair hung loose, silver streaked and carefully manicured, a leather-strung pendant around his neck—a pyramid with a circle and an eye engraved in its center. Everything about him a strange mix of military and dandy.

  “Is that all you have?” he asked, gesturing to the ammo, his voice commanding, his posture upright, his hair rippling on his white shirt like the pelt of an animal.

  Silva looked away. Another open-carry asshole. Even if he was just a flamboyantly dressed rancher or hunter, even if this was just another small, bloodthirsty western town in a parched wilderness where guns probably outnumbered people a hundred to one, the man seemed like someone with way too much to prove. Someone who liked attention and intimidation.

  “Might be able to get another shipment in next week, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they shut that down, too,” Becky said, giving the man a guarded look before glancing over at Silva.

  On Becky’s cue, the man looked at Silva, too, staring at her as if he’d recognized a ghost, his gaze at first startled, then sharp and focused—forceful enough that she wanted to step away, as disconcerted by his response to her as she was by her own recognition. A half hour in this place and she already knew who he was. The museum’s photographs a prelude to the real thing: a self-fashioned Samsonite who killed wolves instead of lions. She wondered if along with his pistol he kept the jawbone of an ass handy for all his slaying purposes.

  “This is Sylvia from Trawler Island,” Becky said.

  “Silva,” she corrected automatically, before she thought better of it, her name out there in between them. To make up for it, she squared herself off, radiating unfriendliness. The last thing she wanted was an introduction to a man like him.

  “Silva,” Becky said, as if it were something foreign and unsavory. Then Becky turned to him and said, “She’s staying here with us a while, renting the room upstairs.” No regard whatsoever to Silva’s right to privacy or safety. A woman on her own in strange territory. A woman with
nothing and nobody but herself for protection.

  Len Dietz stepped closer to her, and Silva again fought the urge to back away, her adrenaline pumping for fight or flight no matter how calm she willed herself to be. Something in the way he looked at her—as if he already knew who she was and why she’d come. She’d seen that look in men’s eyes before. She understood what it meant, what kind of darkness it could lead to.

  “Nice to meet you, Silva,” he said, drawing out her name, studying her carefully.

  Deep instinct told her to retreat, to gain distance as quickly as possible, but she wouldn’t give into it. She held herself steady, meeting his gaze, challenging whatever question he was asking of her, whatever recognition he thought he’d had, whatever power he thought he wielded.

  But then he looked down and studied her abdomen, his eyes flickering with a kind of interest—a sudden intimate knowledge that took her breath away.

  She crossed her arms quickly over her stomach and stepped backward with a protective instinct she couldn’t override. There was no way he could know. She wasn’t even close to showing yet, and she’d told no one.

  Everything turned silent. Becky’s eyes darted back and forth between Len and Silva. The surrounding animal eyes looked on, as though they were all aware something was happening.