The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  “Well, all right, then,” she said. “Tell me how to help you get up and I’ll drive you home.”

  Jake explained how to position the wheelchair with the brake on and then he pulled himself up into it. Alice moved to help him but stopped when she saw that he was clearly able to manage it. He lifted his rear into the seat and then used both hands to lift each leg and place his feet on the foot rail. He looked down at the dark, uneven ground and hesitated. Alice sensed his embarrassment.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m going to push you over to the truck. Humor a nervous lady, okay?”

  He gave a shrug of acquiescence but didn’t meet her gaze.

  Alice maneuvered him next to the truck and opened the door. Her cab, as usual, was a mess. Flustered, she threw a pile of papers and books into the back seat to make room. Then she stood aside and watched the boy evaluate the space. When she asked if she could help, he shook his head. Jake maneuvered knees first into the truck door. He lifted his feet, one at a time, onto the floor of the cab. Then, with the precision of a rock climber, he reached in and gained opposing handholds on the seat and the door handle and pulled himself up and in.

  Jake sat back, and Alice could see he was sweating from the effort. She handed him his backpack, and he explained how to fold the chair. It was lighter than she expected, and she secured it in the back of the truck with a strap. She slid behind the wheel and glanced over at Jake, who was scanning the dark sky.

  “Looks like you were right. I don’t see any more out there.”

  Alice nodded but didn’t say anything. She thought about the still, golden bodies she’d seen strewn alongside the road.

  “Okay, then. Where to?”

  “Greenwood Court. Over behind NAPA Auto,” he said.

  “Are you kidding me? Good Lord! Just out on a ten-mile spin?” She shook her head with admiration and saw him hide a smile.

  She turned the key, and Bruce Springsteen’s voice roared through the cab: “Oh, oh, oh, oh! Thunder Road!”

  “Jesus!” she yelled, and snapped off the stereo. She felt a cold sweat spring up on her face and hands.

  The boy threw back his head and hooted with laughter. “No wonder you didn’t see me, Alice,” he said. “Rocking out to the Boss! And you have a tape deck! That is so awesome!”

  He clapped his hands together, and Alice let herself smile, catching her breath. He spotted her collection of tapes in the center console.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Knock yourself out,” she said, and drove toward town as he dug through the cassettes. She turned the stereo back on with the volume down low.

  “Let’s see . . . Bob Dylan. Classic. The Fixx. Passable. Of course, their only good album was Reach the Beach. And here we have— Holy hell, Alice. Phil Collins? This is criminal. Too tragic! You’d better just let me out here.”

  They were at a stoplight, and he pretended to open the door.

  “Genesis is perfectly respectable!” she protested. “I don’t know how his solo stuff got in here!”

  “Really. I’m embarrassed for you, Alice.”

  What a little smartass! She leaned against the steering wheel and laughed. When was the last time she had laughed?

  He was accusing her of harboring a secret cache of Madonna as she turned onto Greenwood Court, but then his smile disappeared. She slowed down on the bumpy driveway and passed a ceramic donkey with crumbling legs and a basket of tattered plastic flowers. The ruined donkey depressed Alice for some reason.

  “You can just let me out here,” Jake said in a low voice.

  In front of a blue manufactured home, Alice’s headlights lit upon a woman’s legs and then her crossed arms and anxious face. She turned off the engine. “That must be Mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll go explain,” she said, and jumped out of the truck.

  “No, Alice. Wait!”

  The boy’s mother marched across the gravel drive, closing the gap between them and pulling her gray cardigan tight around her. Before Alice could fully explain what had happened, she’d moved swiftly toward the truck.

  “Jacob, honey! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” the boy said. “And it wasn’t Alice’s fault. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Wait. What?” His mother whirled on Alice. “You said you found him. You hit my son?”

  She pointed a finger in Alice’s face. “Have you been drinking? What kind of irresponsible—”

  “No, that’s not—”

  Jake’s mother started yelling then, and Alice raised her voice trying to be heard.

  “Ma’am! If you could just calm down, I can—”

  The door banged open on the house, and a man strode toward them, his sunburned face clenched with anger.

  “What in the hell is going on out here?!” he yelled.

  Jake’s mother was now struggling to open the truck tailgate and weeping audibly.

  Jake leaned out the window and called back at her. “Mom! Just calm down!”

  Alice turned toward the father to reassure him that his son was all right but quickly realized he was simply upset about having his evening interrupted. He leaned down, jabbing a finger in Alice’s face, and said a series of unrepeatable things. Suddenly the kid was right next to her.

  “Ed! Shut up!” he yelled. The man sneered down at the boy, spat on the driveway at Alice’s feet, and walked back inside.

  “Alice—” Jake said.

  She looked at him and didn’t speak. She spun on her heel and strode to the truck.

  “Wait!” the kid called.

  She climbed behind the wheel and watched Jake pull away from his mother and move toward her. She was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was abandoning him. Ridiculous. She didn’t even know him. She shook off the thought as she drove away. She flew toward home like an errant worker bee trying to find her way to the safety of the hive as darkness took hold of the valley.

  6

  Hive Siting

  A hive of the simplest possible construction, is a close imitation of the abode of bees in a state of nature; being a mere hollow receptacle, where, protected from the weather, they can lay up their stores.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  The wind banged around the house all night like it was looking for something it had lost. It stole under the windowsills and crept into corners, rattling doorknobs and whistling along the hallway. Alice lay in bed listening. Living there in the valley between the old volcano and the river gorge was to live with the wind. She’d grown up with the near constant westerlies that whipped the river into a froth all summer and pummeled the forests with snow in winter. When she was a girl, she thought of the wind as a live thing like some enormous winged creature galloping across the valley. Some days it danced above the orchards with its voluminous skirts flying about. Other times it was arrow-thin and dove between the storefronts and tight alleyways of the town core. Tonight, the wind was small and fretful, buzzing around like a stray honeybee caught in the corner of the room. It was like a memory, a wish, or a forgotten dream.

  She heard the throbbing call of an owl, a sign that dawn was distant and night was still holding sway. She dozed until she awakened to the cooing of the mourning doves that descended in a gray flurry to the chickens’ water trough around 5:00 a.m. Then Red Head Ned, her ever-faithful bantam, began his predawn shouting. It was the wind, the birds, and the chickens that kept her up, she told herself as she came fully awake. Not the boy. She surrendered to wakefulness when that thought arrived and sat squarely on her chest, like a stubborn cat, unwilling to leave. The boy. She swung her feet out of bed and sat up sighing. Of course it was the boy. She’d thought about him all day yesterday at work too.

  Alice made coffee and sat, her elbows on the Formica table, looking out across the yard. The kid was clearly fine. The chair was p
robably okay too, but she hadn’t had time to talk about it before all the yelling had started two nights ago. She understood his mother was just worried about him. She wasn’t even bothered by what the kid’s moronic father had said to her. But she wondered about his well-being. What did Jake do all day? Did he have a job? Go to school? She thought he said he’d graduated from high school. But what did he have to fill up his life? What was life like with a father like that?

  “Alice, dearie. What could you do for the boy, anyway?”

  She could almost hear her own father’s voice—the quick cadence and the remnants of a German lilt.

  “He’s not your responsibility. He has people.”

  That was what Al would say. He was one to talk, though. For all his insistence that people should mind their business, Al Holtzman had been a serial philanthropist. He hadn’t gotten involved in people’s problems. He had gotten involved in their solutions. That was what he said. Alice grew to understand that he’d always asked that question—what could you do, anyway?—because if he could see some specific way to help, he would. He assisted in his quiet way, not wanting to draw attention. He paid for Mrs. Travis’s groceries when he was far enough ahead of her white, curly head in line at Little Bit that she wouldn’t hear him, because he knew she was living on a widow’s pension. He dropped off a cord of wood at Tom Connolly’s drafty house one cold fall day, complaining it wouldn’t burn worth a damn. He paid off a lien on Juan Garcia’s auto repair shop. Marina hit the roof about that one. But Al just said Garcia was a nice man and he had four little kids. He’d been in the hospital with a herniated disk. How Al learned these things was a mystery. Her unassuming father knew the intricacies of so many lives.

  “What can you do for the boy, anyway, Alice my dear?”

  Unless there was a clear answer, there was no reason to consider the question any further. That was Al’s clear counsel, even from the grave.

  Alice sighed. “Nothing I can think of, Dad.”

  She shook some Raisin Bran into a bowl and ate standing over the sink. She spooned sugar into another cup of coffee. She knew her eating habits were terrible, but she didn’t care. She’d finished off the Chips Ahoy! the night before, one by one, like it was work. She knew the emptiness she felt all the time was not hunger, but sugar was a short-term solution.

  Alice took her notebook out to the bee yard to plan her day, grateful that it was Saturday and she didn’t have to go into the office. The wind had ceased scuttling, and the morning was glorious. Sunlight streamed through the branches of the cottonwoods by the creek. It warmed the white sides of her hives so that the girls were out in full force, their golden bodies flitting over the clover and into Doug Ransom’s orchard, then beyond that to who knew where. They could forage more than three miles. Alice wished there was a way to follow them and learn their bee secrets. Little web cams, she thought, which made her think about Jake’s joke about the tiny cattle dogs and lassoes.

  She sat on a stump and looked at her notes from yesterday, when she had installed the nucs early before going into work.

  Friday, April 11, 2014 Sunrise: 6:27 a.m., Temp: 63F/43F, Wind speeds 10–18 MPH, Precipitation: 0 inches, Sunset: 7:47 p.m. Hive totals to date: 24. Notes: Installed 12 Russian nucs in northeast side of the bee yard. Each hive with five frames of brood, pollen, and honey. Hives dated and marked No. 13–24. Transition without incident.

  She smiled wryly at that last part. The nuc transfer had gone fine, but she felt there should be some way to note the unusual episode of running a teenager in a wheelchair off the road the night before she installed the bees. She put an asterisk after the word “incident” and wrote “(Jake Stevenson*)” as a footnote at the bottom of the page and then turned to the work for this day.

  “Saturday, April 12, 2014,” she wrote. She jotted down the time of sunrise, the forecast high and low temperatures, and wind speeds. Then she wrote, “Tasks: complete regular inspection of hives No. 1–12.” That would keep her busy for hours.

  Alice donned her veiled hat and gloves and began the careful work of inspecting her original twelve hives, which were each two brood boxes tall. She cracked the first top open with her hive tool, set it aside, and removed the inner cover. She loosened a frame and eased it out. Holding it up she looked for eggs, larvae, and capped brood. She checked for pollen and honey stores. She set that frame aside and pulled out the next one. As the sun climbed in the sky, she completed this action for all ten frames in the top and bottom brood boxes of the twelve hives. Only two weren’t thriving. Probably their queens hadn’t made it through the winter. In those she saw lots of drone brood, which was the sign of a laying worker, but no queen cells had been created. Alice decided to add frames from healthier hives to give them a boost.

  She looked through her notes and identified two of the strongest hives. In the first she found frames ringed with capped honey, bands of golden and orange pollen under that, and row after row of healthy brood cells. Alice breathed in the sweet scent of wax and honey. This would do quite nicely. If the queens in the ailing hives had died, robust workers like these could produce another one within three weeks. She made a note to check for queen cells in five days and then set to work, humming to herself, transferring healthy frames into the two fragile hives.

  Alice had always enjoyed the problem-solving part of beekeeping. Each hive was a living organism with different needs. The bees fascinated her, these single-minded creatures that each worked tirelessly for the whole. And they created such beauty—the honey stores, yes, but also the wax foundation and the brilliant caches of pollen, which ranged in color from lemon to pumpkin to ruby. She marveled that her simple hobby had grown from one hive to twenty-four. She stood in the sunlight with bees buzzing around her veiled head as the number sank in. Twenty-four was almost halfway to fifty. It felt like a tipping point. She pulled off her hat, sat in the noon shade, and looked out at the bee yard, chewing on her pencil. There was plenty of room to grow here. She could get to fifty hives by the end of the summer if she was methodical about splits and capturing swarms.

  The idea excited her in a way she couldn’t remember being excited in a very long time. Practical by nature, and prone to consider obstacles first, now she just thought, Why not? She paged back through her notebook to last summer, where she had noted the details from the honey harvest that had yielded seven to ten gallons from each of the twelve hives. She’d sold it for $20 per quart at the fair and netted $6,000 after expenses. A tidy little sum. Her excitement grew. What might she do with more hives, more honey? The thought came immediately: she could afford to put in an orchard. She scanned her field where the land was flat and sunny. Something small, nothing like the historic Holtzman family orchard. But hers. Yes. Why not?

  She would need help. That was certain. The August harvest alone would be massive, and then she’d need help with tree planting in the fall. But she could afford to hire someone, especially with the anticipation of honey sales and maybe even raising queens. She paced the apiary to determine how many hives would fit, and her enthusiasm grew.

  Back at the house, she pulled up the farmer’s market page on her computer and scanned the classified ads. People weren’t offering that much. Ten to fifteen dollars an hour or less for WWOOFers. Alice scoffed.

  “You can keep your WWOOFers,” she said aloud.

  Volunteers from Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. She saw them, youngsters from Australia lately, running the booths at the farmer’s market. Dirty hair and hippy clothes, like Joyful. They worked in exchange for room and board. No thank you, she thought. She didn’t want to be a tour guide, and she wasn’t keen on having someone live at her place. Alice liked being alone down here in the dell. The phrase “communal living” made her skin crawl. Ever since she was a little kid, she had enjoyed her solitude. Alice Island, her mother teased her. Alice All Alone. Her father understood. His parents had been solitary people too. It suited her just fin
e. Most days, anyway.

  She opened the ad-posting form and typed: “Help Wanted: Part-time summer worker for bee farm. No experience necessary. Must be able to lift up to 100 pounds. Light construction skills a plus. $13–$15 per hour, negotiable. Call 541-555-2337 for info or email al.holtzman @gorge.net.”

  She figured she’d get a high school kid for that much, and the bulk of the work would be completed by the time school rolled around.

  That afternoon Alice ran errands—Ace Hardware for sandpaper and paintbrushes, and, as much as she dreaded it, the damn grocery store for something other than cereal. She dreaded going to Little Bit, and not just because of the panic attack. Hood River’s single grocery store was like the town square, and Alice hated small talk. Old people shopped in the mornings and young families in the afternoons. Both of those times she was liable to run into some friend of her mom’s or someone she knew from high school. She did her shopping at night and never on the weekends. Weeknights it was just young men and Latino families. They didn’t want to stop and chat either, at least not to her. But the fridge was empty, so she’d just have to cope.

  Outside Ace, she jumped in the truck and slung the paper bag of supplies onto the floor. She tossed her windbreaker aside to make room. Then she saw the small backpack. Already knowing it must be Jake’s, she opened it and pulled out a wallet. There was the kid’s big grin and that crazy hair disappearing out of the top of the frame. Jacob Todd Stevenson, born February 2, 1996. Hazel eyes, black hair. Height: five feet ten; weight: 145 pounds. Sure, kid. Maybe if you were wearing a weight belt. Boys and women lied about their weight in opposite directions, apparently. I’ll have to drop it off, she thought, and for some reason her heart brightened.

  Alice suffered through the grocery store, where she ran into Mary Condon. Mary had been close to Alice’s mom and told Alice about her recent hip surgery. Alice didn’t really mind listening. It was easier than talking to her own old friends, who would get that sad look on their faces and touch her arm.