After days of her nocturnal battling, Nick had surprised her with a boatload of peeler cores and rolls of wire. They’d put the fence up in a weekend and without the deer eating it, the garden had seemed to grow inches overnight—rows of tall plants from one end to the other that she walked through, dreaming of fresh ears of corn and ripe tomatoes.
She misted the plants as she watched two redtail hawks soar overlapping ellipses, one above the other, coasting on air currents, their undersides gilded in early-morning sun. She imagined the tracings of their flight, a looping gold contrail against her eyelids even when she closed her eyes. This had always been her favorite time of year on Trawler, everything screaming with lush growth and beauty. In the canyon, the heat sucked the breath out of her. She had to water every morning to combat it, but just as she had hoped, the plants were thriving with all the sun and heat. Nick jokingly named her “Granger,” said she was growing a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk garden.
She set the sprinkler so it would reach the corners, then took the wheelbarrow to the back to dump her weeds and noticed that the corner wire was rumpled again. A few determined deer still found their way into the garden, the back fence low enough they could leap over. Whenever Juniper saw them, he would charge in barking. The first time that happened, the startled deer had trampled the garden’s back section before finding their way back out again. She went back to see what damage they’d managed this time.
She didn’t see the doe until she walked all the way to the back. Blond and flawless, white belly taut with a late-term pregnancy, lying askew, neck broken. Her eyes were black and open, still unclouded—not long dead.
Silva stood a long time before bending down. She stroked her hand over the curves of the doe’s spine and belly, the velvet of her nose, the delicate boning of slender legs, the tiny, black, polished hooves. Perfect. She tried not to imagine the fawn still enfolded inside.
When Silva tried to lift the doe, its head flopped into the dirt, dust filming the still-open eyes. Silva heaved her into the wheelbarrow, wheeled her to the bone pile, dug a shallow hole, and dumped her in, dirt cascading into the hole, legs askew and pointing, just as Sunchero’s had been all those years ago. Silva looked away from the hole as she shoveled the dirt back in.
She coiled the hose, closed up the fence, and called Juniper back inside. As Nick slept, she went to her bedroom and buried herself in Eamon’s bonsai journals, trying to push away the aching, keep the past where it had to stay. More than she could ever purge in a lifetime of telling.
When she heard Nick stirring in the bedroom, she wiped her face and put her work away.
“Extraction day,” Nick said in a groggy singsong when he came in to greet her.
“And you slept in. What will the bees think?” Silva said, turning and tsking at him.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. You don’t want Jack to turn into a dull boy, do you?” he said as he kissed her collarbone, his hands drifting toward her breasts.
In the yard, robins flitted from the birdbath to the trees, the young fledglings still calling for their mother. “There was a dead doe in the garden,” Silva said, broaching it carefully, Nick’s concerned eyes on hers. “She was pregnant. I buried her in the bone pile.”
“You should have woken me—I would have taken care of it. You didn’t need to deal with that,” he said. He didn’t know that it was too late for her to be spared from much of anything.
“I’m sorry about your brother, your mom,” she said, her words rushing out, taking her as much by surprise as they did Nick. “My grandmother gave my mother up when she was born. She had good reasons—she was fifteen, and there was abuse involved—but I always wondered how different life would have turned out if we’d been able to be together, be a family.”
Nick bent down and kissed the side of her face. “Sometimes you just have to make your own family,” he said.
* * *
When Mack came later, bringing up a week’s worth of newspapers and mail, his face was sober. “The occupation has gotten more serious,” he said, handing them the papers. “The FBI organized a town-hall meeting, and Len and his men went in unannounced, stood armed in the back of the room. Said there would be no negotiations, said they wouldn’t be leaving until the government relinquished control of all federal lands to the states, which of course will never happen.…”
“So, it’s getting worse, not better,” Silva said flatly, looking at front-page pictures of Len speaking in front of cameras, his long hair lying loose on his shoulders, his silver all-seeing eye hanging from his neck, his pistol on his side. In these, he looked like some kind of ’70s rogue TV cop, not the leader of a militant religious-survivalist cult full of pregnant girls.
“Well, it’s not all bad news,” Mack said, turning to Nick. “They finally got a court order for the elk ranch. Ted sent word, invited you to come with him when he goes in to examine Len’s elk since they’re above this place, affect the creek.”
“Ted knows what to do. There’s no use in me going along. It’d just stir everything back up again,” Nick said, and Silva breathed a sigh of relief. With Nick staying at the ranch and Len staying with the occupation, you could almost forget that they were inextricably joined together, that nothing was resolved.
A few nights before, Nick had come across a rattler stretched along the upriver trail like a root in the grass, its jaws unhinged, a rump and long tail sticking out of its mouth like a tongue, the systolic movement of it working the rodent farther into its throat. Silva had panicked, looking for Juniper behind her, but Nick had picked up a rock the size of a baby’s skull and the snake must have sensed danger because it tried to make it to a tumble of boulders, its half-swallowed meal still stuck in its throat, rattles shaking. Nick pounded it with the rock over and over again until he was sweating. By the time he’d stopped, the snake had been smashed into an oozing mass, rattles still twitching. He’d thrown the rock into the bushes, wiped his hands on his pants, and kicked away what had been left of the snake, saying they had to keep their place safe.
“I’m glad you’re staying,” Silva said, gauging the stress lines in Nick’s expression. “I don’t want either of us to leave again.”
Nick leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Well, then, we won’t. We’ll just stay here in our little Eden. We’ve got everything we need right here—all the honey one man could need,” he said, turning to Silva and grinning at her quick blush. But she already knew that Edens had a way of disappearing, that most didn’t last far beyond conception.
“Come on. I’ll show you the setup,” Nick said to Mack. “The bees have settled in, made themselves at home.”
Silva loved sitting out by the garden and apiary, watching the bees fly back and forth, carrying their loads of pollen and nectar. So industrious. So untiring. So willing to believe in a steady future full of plenty.
Mack whistled appreciatively when they went in the extraction room. “Fancy,” he said, and it was—the gleaming extractor a smooth, polished convex of stainless steel, and all the empty jars waiting for their load of honey, gallons and quarts and pints that would soon glow golden.
“Fifty-two-inch diameter, sixteen-gallon tank, sixty-frame reel, and DC motor,” Nick recited, his hand on the extractor. “At least yellow star thistle will be good for something. By the end of summer we ought to have quadrupled what’s here. Then it’ll be time to pay this place off. Settle in.”
He looked at Silva, their future prospects growing more believable each day. She’d let herself imagine it, what it would be like to stay in the canyon with Nick, a pantry filled with their own home-canned garden produce and honey, the barn stacked with hay. But there was more to consider, things far outside their control.
“That’s good,” Mack said. “Real good. The place is looking like a real canyon homestead again instead of an outfitter’s stopover spot.”
“Well, it’s still that, too,” Nick said. “I’ve got a few more horse groups scheduled and we�
�ve got a raft group coming down in a couple of days, going to park here, stay overnight.”
In preparation, Silva had mowed the flat across the creek, hoping the rafting group would stay there instead of on the backpackers’ flat closer to the house, although it wasn’t really up to either her or Nick to decide. The outfitters still had the lease of the Larkins Ranch, which meant she and even Nick were there to serve their needs, as much as it seemed it should be the other way around.
“It’ll be over soon, with this heat,” Mack said. “Set another record-high yesterday. A hundred-plus will run most of the visitors off.” He glanced around, then back to them, and said, “I’m happy for you two.”
“Why don’t you stay overnight?” Silva asked in a sudden rush of tenderness, wanting to offer all they had to give, even if it wasn’t really hers for the offering.
He shook his head. “Gotta get back to work, even if this is a little oasis. Nice place to land, that’s for sure,” he said, tipping his hat.
After she walked down to wave him off, Silva went to help Nick wheel the supers from the apiary to the barn. Although it was still early in the honey season, the hives had plenty for a trial run, and she was glad to get more. Nick said he was going to have to get more hives to keep up with her consumption, devouring all the profits, but she could tell he was happy about it, too.
When she joined him, he gestured at her cutoffs and tank top, asked, “Where’s your bee suit?” He frowned as she helped guide his loaded handcart into the extraction room.
She brushed a bee gently out of her face, replied, “Don’t worry, the bees and I have our ways of communicating.”
The extraction room was stifling, a propane heater running on high along with a fan to circulate the waves of heat. Coupled with the sun streaming through the window, it felt as though they’d walked into a furnace blast that took Silva’s breath away. She waved her hand in front of her face, panting, “It’s too hot to breathe,” sweat running from under her breasts.
“The honey flows better, easier to extract,” Nick said.
“Well, it ought to flow like water,” she said, her skin flushing as Nick laid out tools like a doctor’s surgery table, uncapping knives, scrapers, putty knives.
He pulled off the lid of the top super. “Did you know for a hive to produce eighty-five quarts of honey, the bees have to visit enough wildflowers to gather and carry home 765 quarts, or 2,295 pounds, of nectar?”
“I didn’t know that,” Silva said, smiling. She liked it when Nick got into his bee-data-reciting mode, his face pulled serious, his voice as formal as any nature-documentary host’s.
“A Roman soldier came up with the Honeybee Conjecture two thousand years ago. He thought hexagons would hold more honey than other shapes, or required less building wax. They’ve proven he was right—mathematically hexagons are the most efficient way of making cells, storing honey,” he said, looking into the hive. “It seems that there is almost always a reason for things—a hidden logic putting order to the random.”
She wiped sweat from her face and looked into an exposed hive. A few bees flew by, bumping into the ceiling, buzzing against the windows, and one landed on Silva, stiff-walking over her shoulders and chest until it tumbled and flew off.
“I feel like a thief, robbing them blind—all their hard labor,” she said, imagining the workers inside walking the empty cells, having to rebuild all they’d lost.
“We’ll feed them through the lean times, keep the mites eradicated, protect them from the elements, keep the colony strong. They need us as much as we need them,” Nick said.
But the bees didn’t seem to need anything, though they all knew what dangers were out there, what could befall them without so much as a warning. Colony collapse was something she understood only too well.
Nick worked the hive tool, loosening the frames and pulling them out one at a time. He held them up for her to see, hexagons full of honey, pounds and pounds of it.
“The food of gods,” he said, pulling another frame, this one filled with multicolored hexagons of propolis instead—a metallic rainbow of copper and gold and pink. With a corner prong of his scraper he broke off a small chunk and gave it to Silva. “I guess that means we’re immortal now,” he said, chewing his own piece. And she wouldn’t have minded things staying the way they were, like this, forever.
The fan blew hot, and the air was heavy, sticky, as if already imbued with honey. It smelled of honey, wax, and something else animal and organic, something slightly rotten and sweet at the same time, a smell that clung to their skin and hair like a wet blanket.
Nick set the frames on the parallel rails he’d fashioned, suspending the frames’ outer lips on the rails. Avoiding the brood and propolis cells, he used a tool to scratch through the wax caps in the corners of the frames, and then Silva used the heated uncapping knife over the rest of the wax-capped honey cells. With the first swipe of the knife, the wax melted, and the exposed honey dripped golden, running from the frame to the table’s steel surface, then to the buckets.
One after another, Nick cracked open the supers and pulled frames full of honey, the two of them working side by side. They worked until they had a surplus of uncapped frames; then Nick loaded them into the extractor. “Here we go,” he said, and plugged it in, the whir of the extractor’s motor immediate and overpowering. It picked up speed until the centrifugal force pulled out strands of honey, threads that caught and built until there was a thick sludge in the catch basin that slowly moved down to the drain and dripped into a five-gallon bucket.
Both of them stood entranced. They couldn’t take their eyes from the honey, spinning load after load, the empty frames hanging from the rails, still dripping, honey everywhere—the very air redolent with it, impregnated with its sweet animal stickiness. Thick umber globs, along with wax, smashed bees, and chunks of propolis stuck to the table, to their fingers, to the floor. With each step, it grabbed their feet like glue.
While the extractor spun out the last load, the honey flow slowing from a steady flow to a trickle, Silva used a wide putty knife to scrape the honey that had dripped onto the uncapping table, not wanting to waste any. Nick shut off the extractor, the fan, and the heater, and the sudden cessation of noise made Silva feel off-balance.
Nick pulled the last bucket from under the extractor and held it out. “Our first harvest. A damn fine thing,” he said.
Silva nodded, her skin flushed. “A fine thing indeed,” she said.
She opened her fingers, and honey stretched between them, threads suspended like spider webs. Nick lifted her hands to his mouth and sucked the honey from her fingers, working over each knuckle, each fingertip. They undressed one another slowly and when they kissed, their mouths were sticky, their skin adhering wherever they touched, as if they were of one skin, one body.
It was late afternoon when they finally pulled away from one another and closed the extraction room, leaving jars full of amber honey lined up on the shelves and table. They washed up at the hand pump in the barn corridor, both of them standing naked, honeyed rivulets of water running down their legs and pooling in the dust.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
* * *
Oh Jesus, bless this child, you, bless this, your broken heart, oh Jesus Jesus, deliver this child, you, Lord Jesus, deliver this child, you, from the clutch of the devil, you, from the claws of the flesh, you, the temptations known in your heart, you, your body, your weakness, conquer, you, conquer, oh yes Jesus, if you will just believe, if you will just receive, are you ready to repent, to receive God’s punishment? Oh, child of sin, you, child of carnality, you, child of flesh, you, here this is your chance of forgiveness, oh Lord, deliver us from the powers of evil, the darkness that has covered us, rebuke you, this stronghold of deception, of the flesh. Lord, cover us with your holiness, Lord deliver us from this yourself, cast out these spirits of carnality, you, Lord, in your name, command they go—GO! Oh Jesus, you, lift you, lift you this woman out of the pit of ca
rnality, of this, your fleshly desire, oh Jesus, cleanse you with your holy love. Oh Lord, cover you with your grace, your holiness, your beacon of chastity. Oh lord Jesus, oh Jesus, Jesus, oh dear father Jesus, forgive you the sins of your carnality, forgive you the evils of your flesh, forgive you the weakness of your flesh, the wantonness of your flesh, oh Jesus, Jesus, cleanse your flesh in thy holy wrath, cleanse your flesh in the wake of devil’s touch, oh lord, thy holy will be done, the fires of your wrath a consuming flame touched to the candle of your flesh.
PART FOUR
Prodigious nuptials these, the most fairylike that can be conceived, azure and tragic, raised high above life by the impetus of desire; imperishable and terrible, unique and bewildering, solitary and infinite. An admirable ecstasy, wherein death supervening in all that our sphere has of most limpid and loveliest, in virginal, limitless space, stamps the instant of happiness in the sublime transparence of the great sky; purifying in that immaculate light the something of wretchedness that always hovers around love, rendering the kiss one that can never be forgotten; and content this time with moderate tithe, proceeding herself, with hands that are almost maternal, to introduce and unite, in one body, for a long and inseparable future, two little fragile lives.
—THE LIFE OF THE BEE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
AUGUST 2001
Sins of the Bees Page 25
