Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  She lay there, her legs bent as though she’d been struck down, as though she’d fallen from a great height, her eyes closed against the sky’s bright glare, her brain refusing to budge from its iteration: Isabelle is gone, everyone is gone, and you are gone, too. A subconscious incantation she couldn’t undo. A family that had never been meant to exist in the first place.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Date: December 1, 1999

  Title: Conjoining Ceremony

  Subject: The Twelve Maidens & Len Dietz

  Setting: Almost Paradise Maidens’ Quarters

  Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press

  Size: 12×14

  Dearest Eamon,

  We are one month away, a feeling like pending doom. Perhaps they have gotten in my head with all their End Times talk. I try to keep to myself, try to keep grounded in reality as they spin their dark-world prophecies. My bunker room has become the only way I can survive here—that and my few private moments in the greenhouse, listening to the elk moan and call from their pens. It feels like the end of something, although I’m not sure what. Perhaps it’s the end of me. I remember tossing in our shared sheets, crying out in my sleep from the dreams of the past that never left me—guttural whimpers full of both remembered panic and a lifetime of mourning.

  The conjoining training has been a private matter, and for that I am grateful, if only for my own selfish need to hide from the reality of it. There are moments, out of sheer self-preservation, when I hold my breath and stick my head in the sand, close my eyes and plug my ears, pretend I can’t see or hear or feel what is happening all around me, pretend I’m not here, stuck in the middle of this compound, paying witness to it all.

  Only Delores and a few other senior Almost Paradise women have been allowed with the maidens for this stage of preparation. I shudder to think of it—these acolyte women teaching Dietz’s child brides what’s expected of them in bed, how to serve their master’s most intimate carnal desires. You know how we always said that you can be sure whenever you hear a preacher or politician rail on one particular subject over and over again that that subject is a personal problem for them? How surprising is it, then, that Len Dietz is obsessed with preaching about “the carnality of the flesh,” the “sins of the body,” the “traps of impurity,” the requirement that “a woman bow to a man’s will?” There is one goal here with the maidens, with the upcoming wedding, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the “End Times.”

  The maidens’ communal living quarters have been completed, off-limits to everyone else, walled off like any proper concubine compound. The Conjoining Ceremony painting was the only exception, and that only allowed in one sitting, “for posterity’s sake.” Len positioned in the middle of the maidens’ communal center, all of them kneeling around him like fallen petals, the openings to their surrounding bedrooms covered in thick, heavy drapes meant only for Len to part. I shook so much as I painted them there that their shapes blurred into indistinct forms, and maybe that’s as it should be—the overtaking of each of them, their bodies, their very being.

  I’m afraid I, too, have been lost, sucked under by all the trauma of the past flooding back. What did I think I could achieve, coming here, trying to face down my own demons, make something new of the past? Did I think that I alone could save them? That I alone might be able to make a difference, break through into the light? I have always known the depths of this darkness, the power of this particular chokehold. I have always known what this place has proven over and over again: we the girls, we the women, we the females, are the prey, and all it takes is for one man to be the predator. It is clear who that man is, who that man always has been.

  The night has come in as heavy as my heart and mind and spirit. I lay down my pen. I lay down my brush. I cover my head. I am buried alive in this place. I reach for you, imagining your body real next to mine. What that used to feel like, lying next to you, listening to the hum of insects moving through the night, the lap of tide on beach, nighthawks calling, herons leaving the imprints of tracks behind in the dark, your name in my mouth like water.

  Forgive me, Eamon. Forgive me.

  All my love,

  Isabelle

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JUNE 2001

  When Nick and his outfitting group rode in—dust streaked and disheveled, looking as if they’d been doing hard labor instead of on a mountain-lake fly-fishing trip—Silva wondered if he had noticed the tracks coming from the Almost Paradise trail, Len’s presence still lingering along with her bodily failure. She wondered if her pain and loss were palpable in the canyon’s harsh air, her body and mind and spirit emptied shells, scraped raw and wounded. Everything she’d thought she had now gone blank. A wiped slate.

  Nick sent the men to rest in the shade, where they wilted into wrinkled lumps as he unsaddled the stock and refilled the water trough. The unfettered stock rolled up clouds of dust that settled into saddle shadows on their sweaty backs, Tiko the only one that looked fresh for a change. He ran, whinnying, as if to tell everything that had happened while they’d been gone.

  Silva waited until the outfitting boat had picked up the men and left, growling a deep, underwater rumble, before walking out slowly to the barn where Nick was cleaning dirty tack. Her tender insides jarred with each step, blood still seeping from inside her, the intestinal and uterine cramps still a near-constant presence despite all the time she’d spent in bed, her nightmares fueled by fevered sleep, something gone wrong inside her, something that wouldn’t let go, gnawing and gnawing until it went all the way through her, until it consumed her wholly.

  It’d been all she could do to force herself out of bed that afternoon, knowing that Nick would be coming back to the ranch. Knowing that all she’d come to find was irrevocably lost—Isabelle and the baby inextricably wound together, as if they had just been different versions of each other. Just like her dream: the three of them as one. The three of them now gone.

  “Hello there,” Nick said when he saw Silva, his smile white against the dusty tan of his face. “Babysitting duty’s finally over. I just wish the Bull-Gang was still around. Would have taught that lazy group a thing or two.”

  So that’s what it’d been about—Nick versus the town softies. An uneven matchup in every way. He and the Larkins men before him looked as if they could survive just about anything nature dished out. Unlike Silva, seemingly as susceptible to colony collapse as the bees.

  He glanced around the grounds, looking pleased. “You got the storm mess cleaned up fast. Too bad you haven’t always been the caretaker, whipping things into shape while I get my sorry ass in gear.” He rubbed a hand over his face, his beard a lighter shade than his hair, golden whiskers that made him look younger, more vulnerable. “It’s about time I got going, maybe bring the bees down early, in between outfitting trips—if you don’t mind hanging out with us a little more. I have an order coming in any day now—a new extractor, along with everything else we should need to get the honey flowing,” he said.

  We. As if they were a team. Sharing the same isolated space together, bent on rebuilding what they’d lost. Banishing their combined host of familial ghosts. But Nick didn’t know what Silva had just lost.

  He was cheerful, optimistic. Different than before he’d left, the night he’d found the pendant. Before Len and his men had come to pick up their load of guns and ammo. Before her ride to Almost Paradise, everything spiraling out of control. She’d gone out to tell him about Len, about Faith and Isabelle, but instead her guts cramped again, the nausea rising so fast she fought to hold herself still, to not let her anguish show on her face, to act as though her body hadn’t already violently voided itself.

  Nick frowned in concern, looking at her closely. “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  Her throat tight, she nodded. “I’m just tired.” Her voice and emotions both threatening to break, her intestines roiling, as distended as the dead sheep’s.

  “Well, that makes
two of us,” Nick said. “Let me just get this dirt washed off and then I’ll make us dinner and we can call it an early night?” he asked, watching her face closely, trying to pick up the same routine they’d had before, as though nothing had happened in the in-between.

  The night she’d gone into his room and looked through his bee books hadn’t been that long ago, but the space between then and now was filled with so much she could hardly find her way back to the memory, the emotions she’d felt, studying the photographs of the bee-bearded man and the brood chamber, the diagramed intricacies of the queen’s mating dance.

  She let Juniper go with Nick to the river to wash up, waiting until they came back, both happily dripping wet, before she told Nick she was too tired to eat, to stay up. Since he’d left, she hadn’t eaten anything more than a few bites, her body reverting to its previous, grief-stricken despair: bones sharp enough to sever her from the inside out, her stomach a sunken valley below her ribs, everything grown strangely distinct—bones and sinew, muscles twining tight to bone, like choke-weeds grown desperate for water.

  She crawled into bed, but she couldn’t sleep any better than she had the nights before, her guts’ rumbling movements keeping her awake well after Nick had gone to bed himself, the house silent and dark. When she finally fell asleep, she had another nightmare—a mother keening like the one in Trawler’s graveyard, but then the mourning cry became a pregnant girl calling out, clutching her swollen stomach before she suddenly burst open, blooming red, the flesh of her stomach pealing back like flower petals in the sun, exposing her red, pulsing center—a lifeless baby, its limbs like sticks, its face shriveled and gray.

  She woke herself crying out, cramping pangs like jaws eating her from the inside out. She got up and walked like a drunken sleepwalker for the kitchen, disoriented and nauseated. She splashed icy water on her face at the sink, trying to shock the nausea and stomach cramps away. Then she pawed through the back of the pantry where she’d seen a bottle of ancient pink liquid antacid and took a long, gulping guzzle, hoping maybe that would help her stomach’s distress, but as soon as it hit, her guts let out a series of foreboding squeals and gurgles. Trying to hold herself up, she knocked a jar over on the kitchen counter, sending it clattering, and Juniper let out a startled bark from the bedroom, both he and Nick coming to the kitchen alarmed.

  “What’s wrong?” Nick asked. Bed-rumpled, he looked like a child who’d been awakened by a fire alarm—all guileless, sleep-blurred worry.

  “Just a bad dream,” she said, clutching her stomach, filled with foreboding, a taste like metal in the back of her throat.

  “I used to have terrible dreams after we moved to town,” he said. “Woke up yelling night after night. My mother was convinced it was a sign of parasites. Used this thick, yellow wormer she got in syringes from our vet, who insisted it was safe—that he used it regularly himself. I can still remember the sickly sweet aftertaste. I’ve always wondered what kind of damage that might have done.”

  Silva’s guts lurched at the thought, and she grimaced at the pain of another cramp.

  “Is your stomach bothering you?” Nick asked.

  There was no use in trying to hide it, her guts seething in audible distress.

  His brow creased, Nick got up and went to his room, came back with the honey jar. “Another of my mother’s remedies—a good one, though. Worth trying. Helps calm things down sometimes,” he said, scooping out a thick, granulated spoonful of honey and handing it to her.

  She took the spoon from him and put it in her mouth as he filled the kettle and put tea in mugs. Eamon had always cared for her when she was sick—brought her crackers and cool washcloths. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed that, too, along with everything else. If only she could lie down, his hands resting on her forehead, stroking her hair back from her face.

  “Did your nightmares ever stop?” she asked as Nick handed her a steaming mug.

  He shook his head. “Len’s mother, Delores, prayed over me for a year, castigating the weakness of my flesh, demanding deliverance from familiar spirits, speaking in tongues and then exclaiming, ‘The hand of God on this child, yes Jesus, the hand of God,’ but the nightmares only got worse. Finally, she gave up, said it marked me as a suffering prophet, which I thought made me sound like Jesus, sort of.” He smiled wryly. “Even though I don’t believe in anything anymore besides the ground under my feet, I’ll admit I’ve wondered if the bees were indeed a gift of vision. I sure hope so. I could use one about now.”

  Silva pictured Nick as a boy locked in a house full of nightmares and praying women. She could imagine it too well now. She’d already seen enough that she was afraid she’d never be able to purge the real nightmare from her mind.

  “I ordered some new queens, a new strain. They should be arriving soon,” Nick said.

  “The bees will be okay with that—stranger-queens coming in?” Silva asked.

  “They come in little boxes with candy plugs. You put the box in the hive, and if the bees like the new queen’s smell, they eat through the candy plug to free her,” Nick said.

  “What if they don’t like her?” Silva asked, looking over at him.

  “Then she stays trapped. Or they cuddle her to death—surround her in a ball of workers until she overheats and dies. But new blood is always a good thing. Otherwise they stagnate, become less viable. Queens from some of the newer strains will lay better workers. The bees know that instinctively. They do what it takes to survive, just like us,” Nick said.

  His words seized her breath. Both of them trying to fight their way forward, make progress toward some future that wasn’t predicated on the strata of trauma.

  “I’ve already arranged things with Mack. I’ll drive the hives down to Pittsburg Landing, load everything in the jet boat, and come upriver. A lot easier than trying to get ranch equipment up. The extractor is the only sizable thing, but even that’s a lot smaller than farm implements… and then we’ll begin.” He smiled at Silva. “Honeybees in Hells Canyon. It’s a nice fit, don’t you think?” But everything had changed, even if he didn’t know that yet.

  “I think I need some fresh air,” Silva said, putting a hand to her stomach.

  Nick deserved to know what had happened, but even more than that, she wanted to tell him what had happened—Len’s visit to the ranch, her own visit to Almost Paradise, the miscarriage—but she couldn’t see a way to tell him one thing without telling him everything else, all of it like a weight hanging around her neck, pulling her down into the depths. She struggled against the powerful urge to free herself from it, tell Nick everything, from the beginning. She and Eamon had always shared every part of their lives with each other, but since he’d been gone, she’d felt locked within herself with no way out, paralyzed by her inability to say what was really going on, trapped in her aloneness and the wreckage of her life.

  Nick made her want to empty herself the same way Eamon had—all his concern, all his quiet care. But she told herself that her burdens weren’t for Nick to share. That he had plenty enough of his own. That they were just cabinmates, anyway—although she knew it was already much more than that. Each of them riding the same waters, floating downriver just as Juniper had, rapids and current sweeping them toward their own demise.

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t just rest?” Nick asked, frowning as she pushed herself up.

  “My guts and stomach have been bothering me for the last few weeks, but they’ve gotten worse. Maybe getting out and moving a little will help?” she said, trying not to show her real physical weakness any more than she already had. And it was true—her gut troubles had started not long after she’d arrived at the ranch; she was just leaving out that in the time in between then and now, she’d also lost an embryo that she’d thought was a part of her future.

  Nick’s face remained troubled as she and Juniper left. He walked to the porch and watched them cross the creek bridge, Juniper running ahead of Silva, happy to be on the move.

/>   A half mile up, they took a fork away from the main trail and angled into the hillsides, following the narrow game trail Silva had found the first days she was there, a mining cave nestled in the hills above with an overlook of the river. When she’d first discovered the cave, she’d wondered if the miner who’d dug it out of the cliffside had had an eye for aesthetics or if such lovely placement was just an accident of design. It was farther than she wanted to go, but she needed the expanse of its view to give her distance from her own suffering.

  She hiked the steep path, climbing in elevation. Even though it was early enough that the sun wasn’t yet scorching, she had to stop several times, sweating with the pain of the unrelenting cramps. Below her, the river receded into a winding line—a tracing at the bottom of the canyon.

  By the time she got to the top of the hill, her hair was hanging heavy and wet on the back of her neck. The morning was clear, both the river and the hills glinting with golden light. She pushed the ten extra minutes up to where the mining cave lay, where she might sit and reshape her own direction—although if she left the canyon now, escaping everything she’d come to find, she had nowhere to go but Trawler, and she already knew what kind of future lay there.

  She scanned the grass ahead, hoping the rattlesnakes would be holed up in their morning-cool dens. She’d come across another one the other day at the creek. It wasn’t big, but there was no reassurance in that—the young ones could be all the deadlier with their unpracticed injections. In the canyon books, there were pictures of dead coyotes, their muzzles swollen with the “death-tattoo,” working to paralyze and rot the flesh from the inside out.

  On the hillside below her, Juniper was distracted, sniffing something out. He gave no warning as Silva rounded the knob and came face-to-face with a man dressed in desert camo, the same color as the hills. There was no mistaking his look: a rifle slung over his shoulder, a pistol and long knife snug at his hip, a silver pendant hanging from his neck. The Lenite uniform.