Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  * * *

  Your fingers are five and ten, your toes are ten and five; twenty nails and nailbeds; teeth: twenty-eight, like appendage knuckles of the hands and feet; the big joints: twelve; ribs: twenty-four; and all the two-by-twos: eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, nostrils, ears, shoulders, clavicles, breasts, elbows, wrists, hands, hips, knees, ankles, heels, arches, balls of feet. Your spine, thirty-three. Your skull, twenty-two. Your hands, twenty-seven. Your feet, twenty-six. Your legs, thirty. Two hundred and six bones. You are mine body, mine self, mine skeleton, and mine flesh. Bone of my bone, blood of my blood, skin of my skin, flesh of my flesh. You are mine, and I am yours. You are me, and I am you. We are thee we are me we are you we are I we are bones and flesh and spirit and life and death.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  JULY 2001

  Silva spent the next days in a haze, doing nothing but the stumbling motions of living: sleeping, getting dressed, trying to eat and then pushing the food away, her stomach rejecting everything she put in it. A place deep in her abdomen pulsed like a smashed hand, and she wondered how much damage a body could sustain before it was broken beyond repair.

  One evening, she took Juniper to the river to cool down and clambered onto a boulder above the water. She sat, her eyes unfocused, startled by the strange luminescence of the moment: cool pebbles pressed into palms, dust motes dancing in light, inches of surface water rendered clear, her hands clutching the boulder’s bulk in anchoring entreaty as the mountains redeemed themselves, the river turning into the sea, rivulets of sand and rock baked hard as earthenware, ribbed like roots leading down to the Straights. In her mind, she slipped and fell, washboarding down, funneled into the cold, cobalt water.

  The river swirling below her, she tried to press back her own rising emotion. She wanted to raise her fists, cry out, Why did you leave me? But she knew there would be only silence in reply, everyone gone now but her. Everything some version of lost—a darkness that stretched all the way though the layers of grieving.

  She’d kept Isabelle’s paintings boxed up, but the girls were always there, beseeching her, calling for recognition. The girls, Faith, Isabelle. How had she thought it was going to end—taking herself to Almost Paradise? She had already seen too much, been through too much, to believe there was any way for any of them to escape the life they’d been born into. Isabelle hadn’t been able to save them or herself either. How could Silva hope for any different outcome?

  Gnats swarmed in the dusk, bats swooping in for the kill, darkness pooling and shifting in the shape of people no longer there.

  And perhaps it really was that simple—things just ending up this way. Her mother gone, Eamon gone, Isabelle gone, the baby gone. Acts of happenstance. Silva’s life a seed blown by the wind, ending up wherever and however the breeze dropped her, when all she’d ever wanted was to set roots that resisted the forces intent on shaping her into something else. This terrain she’d tread into, everything some version of trespass.

  * * *

  Mack came for her midweek, before the sun was up, boating her downriver the way she’d come only a few months ago, the trip down twice as fast as the trip up, no rushing currents to force their way through, carried along by the water’s flow like just another piece of flotsam.

  Nick was at the landing waiting for them when they docked, the hills shifting in shadow underneath a bright patchwork of clouds. He told Mack they’d be no more than a couple of hours; then, all pertinacious energy, he turned to Silva and asked, “You ready for this?” smiling as if they were about to embark on some wild adventure. And in a way, she supposed they were. Nothing now but this.

  Juniper ran up the dock ahead of them, Nick’s enthusiasm catching. When they got to the parking area, Nick pointed to the Dodge and said, “That yours? A ’70, right? I’ve never seen one like it—the oak flatbed and all. Fire-engine red. It’s a beauty.”

  But coated in a thick layer of dust, the pickup looked as though it’d been parked at the landing a year instead of a few months, time both compressed and extended until there was no beginning or ending, just a continual loop.

  “My grandfather and I overhauled it together,” Silva said. She could still remember the grit under her fingernails as they finished, Eamon donning his paint mask and miming Darth Vader—“Silva, I am your grandfather”—the two of them sparring with brooms as lightsabers until they’d collapsed, breathless with laughter.

  “He must have meant a lot to you,” Nick said.

  Her throat tightened. “He did.”

  Nick’s truck, despite its patchwork appearance, was tidy inside and smelled of leather and oats. He loaded Juniper in the back and shifted into granny gear to power up the steep incline out of the canyon, winding the switchbacks just as she’d done on the trail to Almost Paradise.

  Halfway up, they turned and drove to an open field where Eli’s field hives stood, sunrise pinking the pale blue sky, the clouds casting dappled light, the morning a soft wash of pastels. The boxes were shaded enough that the foragers would still be inside. Any later and they would head out for nectar gathering and come back to find themselves displaced—no colony, no brood, no queen.

  They left Juniper in the cab and leaned against the truck’s grille, listening to the bees’ quiet humming, heat from the ticking engine against their backs. Silva closed her eyes and tipped her head back, breathed in deeply. When she opened her eyes, Nick was looking at her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his tone quiet, full of something beyond concern.

  “I hope so. I’m trying to be,” she said, meeting his eyes, the words she wanted to tell him forming in her.

  But he went around to the back of the truck and came back with a bulky package.

  “What’s this?” she asked, turning it over in her hands.

  “Open it—you’ll see,” he said, his face eager with anticipation, everything washed fresh with a new day, a new start.

  She tore the bag and shook out a length of white material and immediately thought of Len’s maidens’ shared wedding dress stored waiting in the Almost Paradise dowry room.

  She held it to her shoulders, kicked her feet out beneath the too-long legs. “A bee suit?”

  “I know Eli said we could work naked with his bees, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. For one, I’d be way too distracted to get anything done,” Nick said, his grin crooked.

  She pulled it on, and he taped up her wrists and ankles before adjusting the helmet and veil. She felt ridiculous, the helmet flopping over her eyes or bobbing to the side whenever she moved, threatening to tumble off and drag her veil with it; she had to constantly readjust in order to see where she was going. Heat built underneath the suit despite the cool air, her skin crawling with moisture, her face flushed under the veil—a blushing bee bride. Claustrophobic, she wanted to strip everything off, no matter what Nick thought.

  The steady drone of buzzing built as they walked to the hives. A few foragers were positioned on the hive entrances, testing the early-morning air for new scents of nectar, their front legs held out, bodies swaying as they memorized their surroundings—the pattern of hive boxes, the rise of the hills, the dark swath of trees. They didn’t seem alarmed by the sudden human presence. A few flew without notice around Silva’s head, but when Nick lifted a hive cover, exposing the frames inside, a small cloud of bodies buzzed around their faces, landing on the mesh in front of her eyes, walking the nylon, their abdomens throbbing. Instead of fear, Silva felt herself pulsing with them—a deep, musical kind of answering that she let herself enter into. She wanted to feel what it would be like to have the bees humming against her skin. Perhaps Eli had been right—perhaps she did carry the pheromones of a queen.

  Nick packed the smoker with straw and lit it, drifting smoke in front of a hive entrance. He waited for a moment, then removed the roof board, smoked the inside, and lifted out one of the nine frames filled with hexagons of wax-capped honey and larvae cells, the brood n
estled in the middle of the frames surrounded by cells full of deposited nectar, fast becoming honey. He pulled each frame, examining them closely. He held one out for Silva to see, pointed out the honey cells, the elongated queen cells, and the copper patterns of pollen. One frame had a dozen elongated pods like tiny elephant trunks, the colony already raising new queens of their own.

  As they moved through the supers, Nick smoking the bees into a stupor, Silva helped staple covers and place screens over the entrances, all Nick’s dreams wrapped up in each hive full of brood and honey chambers, each frame of wax and pollen. They carried the supers together, each on an end of the hive lifter, the boxes heavy with ripening honey. They stacked them in the back of Nick’s truck until the leaf springs flattened, the bed only an inch or two from the tires. It was slow work, the morning fully in by the time they finished loading.

  With all the hives secured in Nick’s truck, they stripped down to their regular clothes, wadding the bee suits, helmets, veils, and gloves on the floorboards, Juniper asleep on the passenger seat. They drove back down the landing thigh to thigh, Silva straddling the stick shift, close enough she could smell Nick’s skin—baked leather, sand, and salt. She snuck a glance at the smooth stretch of tanned neck below his ear, and as they eased over ruts and washboards she thought of the queens huddled in the center of the hives, attended by the guards, the drones, the workers—all of them making this journey together. Honey and nectar, candy cages and queens, everything some version of sweetness.

  Mack was waiting for them at the dock, the “fishing sled” cleared and ready. Nick backed the truck down, and they all worked to load. By the time they were done—all the hives secured, Juniper loaded in the prow—they were sweating and exhausted.

  “It’s no wonder nobody lasted long in this damn canyon,” Mack said, arching his back. “Everything’s twice as hard as it should be.”

  They powered upriver, heading back to the Larkins Ranch—a jet boat loaded full of bee boxes and bee-keeping equipment, a wolf-dog perched in the prow, the canyon walls rising sharply at their sides, the Snake winding ahead of them like its namesake—and everything felt suddenly different, new, even if they had to brace themselves for the jar of whitewater.

  As the boat slammed over the rapids, pitching from the tops of the whitecaps, sprays of water shooting up, Silva worried about the colonies, what kind of havoc the move could wreak upon them, exposed as they were to the river, the baking sun. Still, with the water and wind, the canyon air reminded her of Trawler’s damp permeation. With her own acclimation to the canyons’ temperatures and aridity, the island weather would probably now chill her to the bone, each point of change marking the next in a line until where she’d started seemed like another lifetime so far removed, she didn’t recognize her own beginnings anymore.

  * * *

  Hours later, when the Larkins house finally came into view, it looked insignificant—a small brown blot, barely noticeable. Not at all how it figured in her mind. At last she’d found something in the canyon: the spiny leaves of coyote mint, the fresh earth tang of sage, the newborn sweet of willow scrub, the yellow blooms of rabbit brush, the surprise red scatter of rosehips, the rattler’s black diamonds, the lone canyon wren’s grace note, the cliffside eagle cave’s smoke-dark maw, the murder of crows rustling by, cawing their dry-feather calls—and now, the bees.

  Isabelle had flown from one lover to the next, always craving more light, more air, until they’d both been extinguished. A woman disquieted by her own restless need, trying to find everything she thought she’d been missing when it was right within her grasp all along. Silva shuddered at the thought of how close she herself had come to an alternate future—her body drifting downriver, carried by the currents.

  After they got the boat secured and the hives unloaded to shore, Mack looked around and shook his head. “Look at you two—like Adam and Eve in your little Eden.”

  Getting the bees finally up the canyon to the ranch seemed to have released something in Nick, a long-held breath. He winked at Silva, his boyish impishness coming out. There was something appealing about the thought of their own Eden, even if it was one obfuscated and thorny. Even if it hadn’t been what she’d come there to find.

  Mack left as the sun sank behind the hills, everything in sudden shadow. A few escaped worker bees flew around the hives, their bodies dark against the boxes, everything cast golden. Silva and Nick suited up again and wheeled and stacked the bee boxes in the lee of the hill behind the house, pulling staples and unscreening the colonies in the quiet of the evening’s gloaming, the last of the day’s heat dissipating, the bees humming with their own expectations of this new place. They came out of the hive entrances and crawled along the boxes, scenting the canyon air, the sky turning golden over the new horseshoe of hives, as if in benediction.

  When Nick went inside the house to wash up and change, Silva stayed outside, wanting to trace the evening’s movements, watch the bees explore their new home. She dumped off her helmet and veil, stripped her gloves, and massaged the hardened lump of her neck muscles. Her body pulsed with heat. Swallows swooped and dove in evening flight and the crickets were in full song. The ground was dry, soft with needles that stuck to her feet. She sifted through them and brought a handful to her nose, breathing in the smell of resin—something that reminded her of her early years, that golden time of memory, her mother as lithe and sinuous and alive as the plants with which she’d surrounded herself.

  Silva walked over to the hives and stood watching the bees for several moments before she shed her sweaty shirt and pants, draped her bra and underwear over the old plow.

  She sat down among the hives naked, knees to chest, waiting. The buzzing reverberated in her ears until it became the sound of quiet, bees moving around her without noise, without motion. They waggled in the air in front of her face, crawled down her forehead, her neck, her shoulders, like an anointing, like the fingers of a lover tracing over her skin. She closed her eyes and felt the probing electricity from their bodies, the pulse of them like her own.

  When she rose, the bees flew away from her hands, her arms, her breasts, like pieces of confetti. She was breathless, full of something she couldn’t name. The air covered her like a mantle. She held her breath as if she were underwater, her arms floating at her sides. She felt weightless, drifting without touching anything but air, at one with the bees—a part of this new colony just as Eli said she would be.

  The sky ignited where the sun dropped over the horizon, burnished from pink to orange until everything was dyed some tint of crimson, the hills reflecting the color, sky meeting earth in intimate touch. She followed the path of a blinking satellite and watched clouds move in, covering the moon just rising over the hills.

  When Nick came out, called her name, she stepped from the hives, waited for him to see her. When he fell silent and still, she knew he had.

  Electricity ran along her body as he came to her, stopping just before he got to her, taking in her naked body. She sniffed the air like an animal, scenting him as he covered the rest of the distance between them.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice husky.

  She reached out and let her hand trail down his chest. “It’s a nice night for a swim,” she said, momentum charging the air. There would be no going back. Whatever it was, whatever it came to.

  She walked to the river, and at the shore, she knelt and cupped water over her arms and chest, the copper of her hair reflected on the river’s surface, drifting about her shoulders like a wild thing, the same color as the sky and her sunburned skin. She felt febrile. A wild, alive being. She stood, her skin damp, the air a warm touch against her, reminding her of the intimacy of her own flesh, the way her skin had turned electric at her own caress.

  On the beach, Nick shed his clothes and stood before her naked, his arms and neck shades darker than anywhere else, the exposed skin of his torso washed pale in the soft evening light.

  So this was how it began.


  He came to her, pulled her into him. She put her face to his neck and started licking the smooth skin just below his ear, humming her lips against his neck, tasting his salt skin. She ran her tongue along the stubbly line of his jaw, held his earlobes between her front teeth and bit down, his breath a hitch in her ear. She kissed him, running her hands along the planes of his body until he tipped back his head in agony, and then she ran for the water, diving in, the cold embrace of it contracting her skin, streaming from her face as she surfaced, her breath rippling in front of her. As she smoothed back her hair, Nick dove in next to her, coming up several feet away, his arms and feet scissoring white underwater.

  “The water’s nice,” he said, his voice close and musical.

  Gnats touched down delicately on the surface of the water between them, flirting with the skin of the river until the water caught their infinitesimal wings and seized them in a wet embrace. They flailed, then submitted, a part of the river’s offerings, swirling down current, catching in pools where fish jumped, their bodies taut with muscle and hunger.

  The side eddy drifted them toward the shore, the river’s green washing pale against Silva’s chest and shoulders, lapping against her collarbone, cupping in the hollow place behind it.

  Nick’s feet edged the bottom first. He reached for her, and she let him pull her to him again, her body floating through the water without resistance. He wrapped his fingers in her hair, kissed her, the taste of river on his mouth, his skin cool and wet against hers. He cupped his hands behind her, pulling her tight against his body. She wrapped her legs around his hips and held on to his neck as he stepped streaming from the water, carrying her to shore.