Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  Silva stood up so fast, her head swam. A warning? A sign—the only one Faith could give—that Isabelle was still there, still on the compound, still waiting to be found?

  She hastily got out the other paintings she kept buried under Eamon’s journals and studied each one for further clues on Isabelle’s journey and disappearance into the abyss of Almost Paradise, but there was nothing there to give her any more than she already understood: Isabelle had painted things so intimate to the Lenites it took Silva’s breath away. A part of the inside circle, it would seem. Faith and Isabelle and Len—all connected in one scene, even if Isabelle was an invisible observer.

  Silva put the new painting with the others. Faith’s cryptic words were a puzzle for Silva to solve, even if Isabelle was just another grave dug under their palaver tree, even if it felt as if Silva had been doing nothing but seeking Isabelle her whole life.

  * * *

  “Come get the bees with me,” Nick said, the two of them sitting on the shore later that afternoon, Nick throwing sticks for Juniper, Mack’s contraband antibiotics finally having helped both of them after all, even if Silva’s guts still rumbled threateningly every time she ate.

  Juniper’s ear had crusted over the bullet hole’s raw edges, the wound healing itself closed like bark growing over a severed limb. Her uterus shrinking, its seep drying, her stomach a shrunken plane under her ribs as if nothing had occupied it. It just takes time. A presence come and gone.

  “It’ll just be a quick trip downriver once I’m back from the next outfitting trip. I’d like you to be a part of it,” Nick said, his voice sincere, as though summer were still stretched out peacefully in front of them instead of everything being turned upside down, shaken, and spun.

  Silva felt like she was reeling, trying to understand what other sacrifices might be demanded of her before it was all over.

  Nick planned out loud, said he’d leave Sage and Tiko at the ranch, ride the pack-string back up to his truck after the outfitting trip, then pick up the beekeeping equipment and drive it down to the landing where they could meet, get the bees, and then boat up Hells Canyon to the ranch—a new piece of the canyon’s history. Another hope for survival, everyone bent on demonstrating their own measures of self-sufficiency. Her stomach rumbled loudly and she pressed her hand against it.

  Warm air rushed down the slopes to the river, its silvery surface flowing like molten metal. In the wake of her failures, Silva was glad for Nick’s order—a checklist to mark off, one thing at a time. She felt as if she were a passenger in a boat without a rudder, without paddles, spinning dizzying circles on the surface, nothing to direct her other than the vagrancies of wind or current. Was. Is. Past Present Future. The whole world changing with each designation, each repetition, each difference of categorization.

  “Okay,” she said finally. A giving in, a giving up. A surrender. She was exhausted by her own pain and sorrow. Tired of her own head, her own wash of emotions and unanswerable questions. She needed to mark a passage, find a clear line, a new sense of direction—one that didn’t end in disaster, even if the canyon were always threatening otherwise.

  “Great,” Nick said, smiling widely.

  * * *

  He spent the following days getting ready, clearing a spot for the apiary behind the house, sheltered in the lee of the hills, and completing all the extraction-room preparations. Each evening he cooked dinner after patrolling the ranch’s perimeters, keeping watch for trespassers just as Mack had warned Silva to do, even if it had always been too late to stop Len’s trespasses.

  The night before Nick was to ride the pack-string out, he was in the kitchen for hours, making a feast to celebrate the bees’ coming arrival, he said, as well as get some meat back on Silva’s bones.

  “I’d like to take you to the Morgans’, meet Dean and Kay—my surrogate family,” he said as he laid out their plates, the tiny kitchen table already heaped with food. “Show you where I live when I’m not with you in the canyon. Kay’s got the best barn and arena around. Used to be a barrel racer. Doesn’t compete anymore, but in her early days she ran pro. All the girls in the area still look up to her, bring her their horses to train.” His pride was clear, everything that had defined his life, right there within reach.

  Silva fiddled with her fork, smoothed the napkin on her lap. She wasn’t sure how to navigate her own expectations, let alone others’—especially Nick’s surrogate family’s. When she was young, Silva’s quiet introversion had always made people think she was judging them, adding up their deficiencies, noting their failures. She just thinks she’s better than everyone else. But the irony was that her own failures muted her more keenly than anyone knew.

  “What’s happening with the occupation?” she asked, trying to separate the known from the unknown. Figure out her next steps.

  “The FBI has started putting more pressure on—set up a perimeter around the visitor center, blocking road access so the Lenites can’t come and go. In retaliation, Len released footage of him and his men shooting the big, wooden welcome sign to splinters with a fully automatic machine gun. It was supposed to be a warning, but they just look like petty bullies,” Nick said. “Charges are in motion to try to shut them down, but we don’t know when yet.”

  “What are the charges for that—for all of it?” Silva asked. Holding a place captive, claiming one woman and girl after another, calling himself the chosen one.

  “There are plenty to choose from: possession of firearms and dangerous weapons in federal facilities, depredation, theft, destruction of government property, felony conspiracy to impede officers of the US from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats—just to name a few. But if Len fights the feds, which he promises to do, it could get ugly really fast,” Nick said. “Nobody wants that outcome.”

  “It seems like that’s exactly what they want,” Silva said, then asked carefully, “Are the same people you knew at the compound still living there?”

  She was thinking of Faith and Isaac in particular, Faith somewhere around Nick’s same age. Silva imagined them as early teens before Nick escaped. They would have made a pretty couple. Silva could imagine them finding comfort in each other’s arms, even if they’d only been children; obviously being a child on the Almost Paradise compound had spared no one from anything. The boy, Isaac, was a crippled captive. He would have just been born when Nick escaped the compound, Silva realized, time like a vise pressing in, compressing reality into something else, endings and beginnings blended together.

  “Some, yes, but there’s been a new surge of people joining in the last few years, everyone stocking up on guns and conspiracy theories along with their religion,” he said. “They’ve gotten more militant since I was there, more extreme. Always in combat gear, running around playing soldier, ‘training’ by blowing human-shaped targets to smithereens.”

  “Like the guy who shot Juniper.”

  “Yes,” Nick said, looking at her, the frown on his face joining the old scar tissue.

  “Is that what happened to your face—that scar?” Silva finally asked.

  He kept his eyes on his plate. “I was angry for a long time when I was young, fought a lot,” he said, as if he weren’t still, rage bubbling there under his calm-willed surface. Silva imagined blood and blades. A lifetime of being locked in battle, Nick and Len circling each other like dogs readying for the kill.

  “I’m glad you found a surrogate family,” she said, and he looked over at her quickly.

  “They must have done something right,” she went on. “You seem to have turned out all right.…” She smiled and put her hand on his for a quick moment.

  “Well, we’ll see what the bees think about that. The proof’s in the pudding… or, in this case, the honey, I guess,” Nick said, smiling back at her.

  Silva imagined Eli’s rainbow-colored hive boxes in the canyon, his worker bees deciding the fate of Nick’s new queens as they all moved into their new home, f
raught as it might be.

  Outside, a flicker winged by the window, the orange-red of its undertail flashing. It landed on a ponderosa and scuttled to the backside, where it hammered against a dead branch, the ringing knocks echoing in the quiet air. Deadwood and live wood. Bonsai and bees. Like twin skins, like a mother tongue, like home—wherever and whatever that proved to be.

  She’d been reading Eamon’s notes about talking trees—their symbiotic relationship with fungi a kind of deep, hidden intelligence. Mycorrhizae—a vast network nobody had known existed until now, even if for millennia people like Eamon, like Silva, had understood trees’ communication, each one a speaking entity to itself. Each one a lost DNA connection when it was gone. The forest’s hub trees sharing their resources with the understory nursery, using the network—the “wood-wide web”—to identify and nurture seedlings as well as trees in distress, communicating need and excess through a mass of fungal threads. The mycelium fed the hub tree soil nutrients in exchange for the photosynthesis sugar it lacked. Each thing worked together to sustain the whole, each thing affected when the other was gone. Everything a part of a larger, unseen rhythm.

  Silva just hoped that like the bristlecones, she might be able to outsurvive herself, find rootedness on the other side of her own calamity—Nick’s garden that she’d planted leafing into tidy green rows, Eamon’s bonsai sprouting new buds, even her newly formed hackberry bonsai unfurling tender new leaves toward the sun, transforming itself into the new shape she hoped it would take. Isabelle sending her honeysuckle bonsai painting out into the world but leaving Len’s pregnant girls tucked away—bellies taut and round with new life, their faces too young for their bodies’ biological maturity, each thing contradicting the other. The sins of loving and leaving, of enacting your own fate.

  “I lived on a commune when I was young, before my mother died,” she said suddenly, looking out the window. “I don’t remember much about that time except the giant community garden and always being with my mother. I played in the dirt and ran barefoot through the fields, listening to her sing as she gardened.” She glanced over at Nick. “I’ve never been able to stop thinking about her or the life we had then. Do you think it ever goes away—those previous things we’ve lived, the people who once made up our whole world? Sometimes I wish it’d all just disappear, so I could stop always trying to figure out what went wrong and dreaming up alternate realities with new, better outcomes.”

  Nick’s face flashed with compassion as he reached out and put his hand on Silva’s. “I think maybe everyone’s always just searching for answers no matter what. No matter what’s happened to them. I’m sorry about your mom, and your grandfather. I’m sorry you were left alone. I know what that feels like.”

  She wrapped her fingers into his. “I know you do.”

  She looked at their hands, intertwined together, the warmth of his touch like a balm.

  “What was she like, your mother?” Nick asked.

  It was a question most people usually steered clear of, not wanting to cause pain, but the real pain came from not being able to talk about your loved one after they were gone—a disappearance more agonizing than the first. Though she’d just said she wished all the memories would disappear, it was the remembering that held everything together.

  “She was beautiful and strong,” Silva said. “She loved being outside, loved her plants. Everyone always asked her how to do everything. I remember thinking she was the smartest person alive, that she could do anything. Maybe because that’s what she always told me about myself. With her, I was never afraid. I think that’s what I noticed the most when I finally understood she was gone—how frightening the world was without her.”

  “It doesn’t ever leave, does it? All that maternal love and security,” Nick said. “My mom was everything to me, too. We were friends—coconspirators, really. We did everything together. Sometimes I still feel like I could just call her up, tell her what’s happened. She’s still the only person I want to tell a lot of things to. I wish I could tell her about you.…”

  Silva shook her head. “I’m nothing but a mess. But I wish we could both tell our moms about each other, too. Tell them about our lives. It sounds like they would have known all the right things to do.”

  “It seems like you’re doing okay to me.” Nick squeezed Silva’s hand in his. “You just have to give it a little more time. Things always make more sense after a while. Or at least, life seems to find its own path, whether we try or not.”

  “I hope that’s true,” Silva said, thinking about Isabelle, thinking about the lost baby, thinking about what her life would be now, but she couldn’t see beyond it, beyond this moment.

  “So your life on the island with your grandfather, it was good?” Nick asked.

  Silva relaxed a little, leaned back in her chair. That past, she could handle.

  “Yes, it was good,” she said. “We were like partners in crime, living out in our little cabin in the woods, tending trees, rowing on the Sound, keeping to ourselves. Everyone called us ‘the Tree People.’ I always liked that—being a tree person. Still do, obviously,” she said as Nick laughed.

  “I can see you like that, as a little tree girl.”

  “I was convinced it was my superpower—being able to talk to trees and have them talk back. You can imagine what the other kids thought about that.”

  “I don’t know—seems like a pretty good superpower to me,” Nick said. “I just thought I should be able to fly like Superman, and we all know how that goes. Jumping off the barn roof with a red polyester cape on and landing in the manure pile with a giant splat. My mom had to scrub me down with the hose outside after that one. She sent me to bed early, said the smell alone should teach me a lesson.”

  “I guess we’ve both had to learn a few lessons about the limitations of our superpowers,” Silva said, smiling.

  Nick nodded toward the bonsai sitting out on the porch. “Looks like you’ve done a pretty good job of keeping yours intact.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Date: December 31, 1999

  Title: Cleansing Ceremony

  Subject: The Twelve Maidens

  Setting: Almost Paradise Sanctuary

  Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press

  Size: 10×12

  Dearest Eamon,

  We have gone through the last Christmas before the End of the World, according to Almost Paradise and Len Dietz. We have held solemn, candlelit daily vigils for the last week, marking this end time, the “last of Christ’s followers” worshipping his virgin birth, preparing for their own twisted version with the Wedding of the Maidens tomorrow—Y2K, the new millennium, The End, the apocalypse. All of our voices, according to Dietz’s edict, have been lowered to whispers, and all of the women’s face’s—including mine—have been veiled, everyone dressed in black, no electric lights used, no singing, no talking except to whisper-chant the series of scriptures and prayers Len has chosen. You couldn’t tell me apart from one of his wives now. I blend in seamlessly in my long frock, my full-covering veil, my quietude, my bent head. But underneath it all—all these trappings of the Lenites—my heart cries out, my mind whirling with grief and pain and rage, my body grown cracked and pale. I have become now a husk of myself.

  Today the maidens have been gathered for their final preparation, the Cleansing Ceremony, where Mother Delores, Faith, and a few of the other wives will ceremonially bathe each of the girls, grooming their private parts, brushing and braiding their waist-long hair, powdering their skin white, and otherwise preparing them for the wedding tomorrow. I have been summoned to paint them on their pre-wedding night—this last night of the known world, their eyes glowing dark against their pallid chalk skin, each one of them lost to society, to each other, to themselves.

  What have I been doing these last twenty years? Where have I been? How have I disappeared so fully? Since I left you, since I left the island, it both feels as though no time at all has passed, and as though a whole life
time has come and gone. Which it has. All those drifting years. A haze of memories made and left, one after the other. I thought I was finding myself, but instead I was just getting more and more lost. Going further and further away from myself, from you, from the life I was meant to live.

  You remember how much I was always obsessing over alternate realities—those branching moments of choice or happenstance leading one way or another, changing a life’s trajectory completely? It feels that way now—if only I would have made that one different choice, the choice to stay with you, to stay on the island and make our life together last forever, everything else would have been righted, resolved, healed, made whole. Instead, I seem to be enacting my own ending. This place, these people, trapped fully in my own snare, trapped by my own naive beliefs that I might find my way through this life’s losses by descending into the dark.

  I have done this to myself. Just like everything else. I am my own worst enemy. Handing over my own autonomy to someone like Len Dietz, someone like Mother Delores. Thinking that by painting them, by recording what they have done and what they are doing, I might be able to change anything. I have realized the full, unending futility of my own life. Nothing kept. Not my child from so long ago. Not you. Not the island or my life on it. Nothing that has ever mattered. I wish I had let you come for me, bring me back. Even now I wish for rescue. How pathetic is that?

  Someday—perhaps in another life—I will learn to rescue myself. Learn what it means to make my way in a world bereft of anything but death and loss and lostness. I only hope that I can make my way to you again someday. In this life, or another. Find what it means to lay down my burdens from the past and make something new. Something with meaning that lasts.

  I hope you make it through the end. I hope we all do.