Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  Nick had left a note on the kitchen table, the same tidy block print as the writing on the map she’d found: Off to Sheep Lake. Left you Tiko in case you need to leave. I hope you find everything you’ve been looking for. —N

  Her heart beat like a startled bird in her chest. Had he guessed what she was looking for? Did he know what she meant to do? Reading her like a horoscope, all her stars in disarray. She wondered what he’d think if he came back and found Isabelle staying in the Larkins cabin, too.

  She went out to the barn, nails holding the tack Nick had left for her, a smell like sulfur still in the air. She picked up a halter, inhaling its horse scent as she looked in at the empty extraction room, striated with hay dust and light, the day’s budding heat.

  Mack was due up with the mail, and then she would be alone, nobody to question her, to stop her when she saddled Tiko and followed the Larkins Ranch trail to its end. But already the ranch seemed altered in Nick’s absence—lesser than what it’d become with him there, weed heads already rising above the lawn she’d mown as he’d ridden in.

  She took Tiko grain, Juniper eating grass alongside them. “It’s just the three of us now,” she said, trying to reassure herself as well as the twitchy horse. The morning was bright and muggy, the sky turned from its warning crimson to brilliant blue, the only thing left of the storm a rim of darkened clouds hovering at the canyon’s edge, the same shifting colors as melted lead. She wondered if the storm would regather on Nick in the mountains, wind and hail battering against thin tent walls.

  She walked to the trailhead, following the storm’s path. An elm lay broken across the creek, split halfway down the middle, its splintered shock of wood white as bone. Below it, the creek trickled dark, its rank mud banks teeming with insects. She bent to splash her face, then followed the creek’s mineral-whitened boulders that shifted and clanked under her feet like bones. She dared not look up for more than a fraction of a second for fear of falling face-first into the creek’s memory. She pushed through brush and stooped into a hidden void, toeing the flotsam that’d washed up like a child’s junk treasure collection: old dirt-crusted bottles, a rusted hoe head, a glistening tangle of fishing line. Then, beneath a heap of sticks, she saw pink skin.

  She held her breath as she uncovered it: a naked baby missing one arm, one blue eye askew, the other a black hole. A child’s doll. For a moment, she’d thought it was real. She backed out of the brush quickly, bile rising in her throat.

  As a child, she and Eamon had driven past a Trawler funeral—a black-clad mother keening over her lost child in a high, thin, wavering sound held aloft by the wind. Silva had plugged her ears and closed her eyes against it, but it had carried forth, becoming the sound of Silva’s mother calling to her from underneath the waters. In desperation to escape it, Silva had tried to open the Dodge’s door and jump from the moving truck. Eamon had swerved to a stop and held onto her until the keening was finally silenced. That night, he’d told her stories of baobab trees, the cavernous space inside their massive trunks used throughout the centuries for burial crypts, offering solace and strength to those entering into the afterlife. He’d brought his oldest bonsai—the bristlecone pine—into her room and left it with her overnight, saying that such ancient wisdom would always watch over her, that both bristlecones and baobabs had magical abilities to survive adverse growing conditions—that their secret to longevity was in fact the harsh environment in which they grew, making them true survivors. Just as she was.

  Finally, she braved the garden, walking its soft perimeter, the soil pocked and covered in debris, her carefully sown seeds battered and displaced. They would be lucky to sprout and take root at all, lucky to escape a slow rotting.

  She raked piles of leaves and sticks onto a tarp she dragged by the corners, emptying load after load into the burn-pile heaps. Come fall, the Larkins Ranch would look like some medieval village, surrounded by burning pyres. An appropriate representation of the coming battle—Nick’s fight to reclaim his rights.

  She leaned her rake against a tree as the mail-boat surged into sight, navigating the last rapids and then slowing into the docking. Juniper ran ahead as they walked down to meet Mack.

  “Last stop is always the best,” Mack said, climbing stiffly out of the boat to hand Silva an assortment of junk mail strangely juxtaposed with the canyon’s isolation: movie rental coupons, discount pizza, and two-for-one manicures. Things of another world, of no use in hers. “The crew already head out?” he asked, glancing up toward the house and barn.

  “Bright and early,” she said. The cheerful caretaker. Not a worry in the world.

  He bent down and patted Juniper’s head roughly. “Well, at least you’ve got this fella’s company,” he said, wincing as he straightened. “I’m getting too old for all this river running. Speaking of, did you know you’ve got company on the way? The Hells Canyon River Runners. Why anybody would run in this canyon is beyond me. Miles of hills, not to mention the snakes. Dens full of dozens slithering out, all hungry and testy. Can you imagine running into that?”

  She thought of her own run down the canyon, the rattlesnake stretched across the trail. “When will they be here?” she asked, frowning and scanning downriver, translating how much she didn’t welcome the intrusion, even if she was being paid for it.

  “Anytime now. The speedy ones are just a few miles down. Started out from Pittsburg Landing this morning. Tents and tarps all battened down. I bet they had a good time riding out the storm. Never know what the canyon’s going to dish out, especially this time of year. In fact, I better get going—don’t want to have to take on any snake-bitten hitchhikers unless I have to!”

  She helped him get out a few bags of groceries, wishing it had kept storming, kept the runners from being able to make it to the ranch at all. But after he left, it took her only a moment to spot the blobs of color bobbing along the shore trail. He’d been right to leave quickly. The canyon’s distances took her by surprise—things so much closer than she realized and others far enough it seemed the land stretched forever, covering centuries, eons.

  In this case, she didn’t have to wait long. In a half hour the Larkins’ lawn was replete with dozens of people clad in high-tech sneakers and brightly colored nylon and spandex, stretching and bouncing as if their legs were full of springs. An invasion of colors and sounds, as though a flock of migrating tropical birds had blown off course to alight on the ranch’s storm-bruised ground, squawking and fluttering in their confused and exhausted amazement.

  Several of the runners wore snake chaps over their running tights—a good precaution in theory but overkill with all the racket of vibrations they’d already set off, thundering along in their vivid throngs. Any self-respecting snake would have taken cover as fast as its cold-blooded body could. She wanted to take cover, too, but she went to greet them instead, shaking hands and welcoming them to the Larkins Ranch as if she were a B&B host. Unlike her, Juniper greeted each new person enthusiastically as they came in, all dog smiles and friendly licks, his white tail wagging like a welcome flag, making up for Silva’s reticence.

  A mother-daughter duo stood apart from the rest of the group, both long-legged in their black running tights, the daughter a rangy teen who moved with surprising assurance and grace. They bent over Juniper, gushing and sweet-talking him, asking Silva if he was a wolf hybrid. Silva tried to imagine a world where you grew up with a mother who ran alongside you, encouraging you onward with each stride. What kind of difference that might make.

  A last straggler jogged in, sweaty and panting—a man in his sixties, dressed in camo cargo shorts with a tucked-in work shirt and white tube socks and hiking boots, a pistol in a hard-plastic case strapped on top of his daypack.

  “Have to show these people how it’s done,” he said, winking at Silva as he heaved into a cooldown walk around the ranch yard, his pistol rattling on his back. She kept a wary eye on him, wondering if he were a part of the Lenites or a paramilitary survivalist of a differe
nt breed.

  But it was one of the first runners to arrive—not the survivalist man or the mother-daughter duo—who shook Silva. A tall pregnant woman, near-term but running in an effortless lope that looked as if it would eat up the miles, her legs and arms sporting defined muscles their whole length. She smiled at Silva as she stretched, lifting her arms over her head, her belly a taut round ball seemingly grafted onto the long pole of her body, like a burl growing out of the middle of a sapling. Not even breathing hard, she looked as if she would finish the remaining fifteen miles back at the lead of the pack, a fully developed fetus sloshing around inside her.

  “Have you seen any snakes out?” the pregnant woman asked, looking serene as she ran her hand around the perfect orb of her stomach.

  “One, a week ago. Downcanyon,” Silva answered, speaking in staccato. How fooled she’d been, thinking how alone she was. She made herself breathe deep and exhale slowly, filling her lungs with oxygen as if she were the one who’d been running, the one out of breath, trying to create distance between herself and her own future.

  Seven and a half weeks. Heart divided into four chambers, eyes fused shut.

  The hubbub was brief, all the runners heading out again within the hour. Silva climbed to a spot where she could see downriver, watching as the bright neon dotting the trail dispersed, the pregnant woman and the mother-daughter duo in the front ranks, the camo man bringing up the rear. Silva wondered if the pregnant woman would keep the pace she’d set, the rhythm of her feet entering the baby’s blood, wondered if they would still be together years from now like the mother-daughter duo, running as if they’d never been apart.

  The weight of the thought was the same as the undertow of current hidden beneath the surface. “Keepers,” Eamon called them—rapids that curled backward onto themselves, so full of tumultuous power that if you got caught in them, you might never make it out, kept churning in their death hold. Rip currents, shore breaks, broaching, strainers, sweeping you in and pinning you, trapping you in unrelenting pressure until you gave in.

  Finally, Silva went inside to put away groceries and read the week’s worth of newspapers Mack had brought up, each with their own occupation headline. She read each article carefully, assessing between the lines where Len and Isabelle might be—analyses of laws and criminal charges along with the pandering to local politicians. Members of the Nez Perce tribe, fearing that the occupiers would further damage important spiritual artifacts at the visitor center, had asked law officials to clamp down on the occupiers, but so far there was no real enforcement, the Lenites coming and going whenever they wanted. The county sheriff had organized a meeting with the occupiers, urging them to leave peacefully, but Dietz publicly declined, putting out a video of his men dismantling fences. Idaho Fish and Game condemned “the fence removal by militants occupying the public’s property,” while the FBI continued to take no action, saying that if the occupiers couldn’t get the standoff they wanted, they would eventually get worn out and hungry, and disperse on their own.

  There’d been a small protest outside the FBI’s makeshift headquarters in the Yellow-Pine Motel in town, a handful of people advocating for the occupiers. Silva pictured Sherry and Becky marching around with their matching tattoos, had feared she might even see Isabelle marching, too, but the only picture of the protest published was of a scruffy, heavyset man in a baseball cap and camo shirt sitting in the back of his pickup with two full-size American flags and chip-board signs that read, in spray-painted, red-white-and-blue letters, Go Home FBI and Two Rivers will not be run by the FEDS.

  Suddenly exhausted and left with the clinging nausea that came whenever she thought of Len Dietz, Silva put the newspapers aside and sank into the living room chair. Juniper curled at her feet, and Tiko paced the fence line as if he were plotting his own escape, the ranch reverted to its previous wild loneliness. She fell asleep, everything so quiet it seemed as if the runners had been a figment, Nick somewhere deep in the mountains, camp set up, waiting for nightfall.

  * * *

  When she woke, it was early evening. She walked to Nick’s open bedroom door and reached in fast, flicking on the light, hesitating a moment before walking in. She stood looking at his folded clothes, then went to the nightstand, picked up the jar, and turned it in her hands. What kind of man packed around a jar of honey? She examined the wrinkled label decorated with bees, careful to put the jar back in the same position as she’d found it before paging through a beekeeping book until she got to the center photo insert: piñata-size swarms hanging from tree branches and close-ups of hive interiors. Diagrams of bee anatomy; differences of wing pattern, body size, and antennae placement; bees classified according to type: Apis mellifera ligustica, the Italian honeybee, or Apis mellifera carnica, the Carniolan honeybee. Pictures of the queen and the drones and the workers, pictures of the eggs, the pollen cells and wax caps. Illustrations and captions on nectar collection, propolis storage, egg rearing, honey production, and hive health.

  Flipping to a chapter titled “The Trials and Tribulations of Beekeeping,” she stopped to read. It said the beekeeper must be patient. Building the hives was slow, painstaking work—battling diseases, mites and viruses, frosts, wax moths, mice, skunks, bears, yellow jackets. Unknown pestilence. Colony collapse. Keeping bees was a way of life, a lost art. She read terms common to her—order, family, tribe, genus, species—immersing herself in the world of bees: nectar and honey, breeding and rearing, broods and queens. The queen’s calls of sovereignty, of mating, everything somehow imbued with sex, full and pulsating.

  The author was photographed in front of flowering honeysuckle, serenely bearded with bees. Bees clustered on his cheeks, on his neck, on his lips. Beads of bees dangling from his ears. She imagined exposing herself like that—bees all over her body, buzzing her skin.

  The house creaked, and she jumped. She closed the books hastily and put them back in place, then walked quickly out and shut the door behind her.

  Safely in her own bedroom, she opened the window, warm night air gusting in, the river a murmuring backdrop, a family of coyotes singing to one another. Silva pulled off her clothes and lay on her bed in the dark, the bonsai silhouetted against the bedroom walls. Nick’s lingering presence just across the hall. Close enough almost to reach. She imagined the heavy portent of all those swarming wings—her body entombed with crawling insects and dripping with honey. The words of beekeeping a litany running through her subconscious: brood nest, beemilk, deep super, nurse bees, virgin queen, royal jelly. She imagined herself with delicate hands breaking open a honeycomb’s seal and sucking honey from chambers of wax, her skin and mouth sticky and ripe.

  When she reached for herself, she sucked in her breath at the shock of it, her hands on her skin, on her stomach, on her breasts, her body alive with a kind of longing that took her by surprise. She ran her hands over the bones of her hips, the smooth skin of her upper thighs, found the soft receiving warmth of her center, each thing more demanding and ravenous than the last. The softness of her hidden body, her transformed flesh. An aching release encompassed her, cresting swells that broke and overtook her completely, radiating in electric waves, pulsing from her center outward. She arched her back and buried her face into the folds of wool blanket, crying out into its wet-animal smell, her breath as ragged as if she’d been sobbing. And perhaps she had been—the first time she’d allowed herself to be touched since the night on the mainland.

  She rolled to her back and placed her hands on her stomach, felt it raise and lower, felt the place of growth just under the skin. A part of her that felt as if it had been there forever—a rising tide pushing her to the surface, gasping for air.

  * * *

  She awoke lying on top of her bedcovers, the windows still open, night-cool air coming in. It took her several minutes to become aware that something besides her dream—bees covering her body like a mantle—had pulled her to consciousness. At first, she couldn’t make sense out of anything—it was as if s
he’d come to in the sea’s dark, caught in its depths. But next to her, Juniper was alert and listening, too, staring out the window.

  When she finally recognized unfamiliar sounds outside, she sat up, the stir in the air pricking her arms in alarm. She hushed Juniper from his growling and listened, finally making out the quiet idle of a boat motor farther up the shore than she’d ever heard Mack’s boat. Her heart picked up its pace. The time in the canyon had already taught her to differentiate the sounds of the few boats that made it this far upriver, and it wasn’t one she recognized—all the warnings she’d gotten taking shape.

  She wrapped herself in the blanket and got up carefully, peering out the dark window, but she could see nothing. She heard other faint noises—a horse’s snort, a man’s voice—and for a moment she thought perhaps Nick had come home early, pushed back to the canyon by an accident or a storm, but then the noises became jumbled into things she wasn’t sure she was imagining or actually hearing. A bright beam swept up from shore before dissipating somewhere below, and finally she could clearly hear men’s voices—voices that didn’t belong to Nick. There was no doubt now.

  She pulled her clothes on quickly, wishing she’d taken the shotgun Mack had offered to bring to her—“The Equalizer,” he’d called it. Instead, she armed herself with her tiny pocketknife and went to the kitchen, where she could see farther down shore. From the different vantage point, the lights shone bright enough to blind her night vision for a moment, but when her eyes adjusted, she could make out dark figures—several people moving objects from a boat to shore and then transferring the bulk to horses tethered to the side.