The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  Harry hung his head. “It was just community college,” he mumbled.

  Anthony folded his hands and glowered at Harry. “Mr. Stokes, most of the guys in here didn’t get past the eighth grade. Do you know what it’s like looking for work with no diploma? And then a record on top of that? And brown skin?”

  Harry shook his head, reddening.

  “No, you don’t. That’s right. Remember that. Don’t take your advantages for granted. Be grateful you’ve got that education, okay, Harry?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Now what skills do you have, then? Let’s see. You’ve done some landscaping. Looks like that was for your folks’ company. What else? You worked at a restaurant for a little while. What did you do there?”

  Harry shrugged, and the chair tipped. He saw Anthony frown, and he sat up straight.

  “Um, I did a little bit of everything? Busboy, dishwasher, prep cook, stock boy, delivery driver. All those things,” Harry said. “It was a small place.”

  That about captured Harry’s problem. He wasn’t good at anything in particular.

  Anthony looked disappointed when he saw that Harry hadn’t filled out his goal sheet. The older man slid it across the desk with one hand.

  “Take it back with you, Harry. Spend some time on it. You’d be surprised how it might help. We’ll talk it through next time.”

  He smiled briefly, and Harry left feeling encouraged. Unfortunately, there was no next time. The counselor at Harry’s second, and last, appointment was an impatient woman who was older than his mother and didn’t introduce herself. She looked irritated when he asked about Anthony and said it wasn’t her job to keep track of personnel. She didn’t ask about his goal sheet either. She slid a pile of forms across the desk for him to sign and worked on a crossword puzzle while he filled them out. She took them without a word when he was done and pointed at the door, signaling that he was ready to face the world of employment outside of jail.

  Harry consulted the email for directions to the farm and pedaled down the road. Tall fir trees grew close together here and curved overhead, forming a green tunnel. Harry sped down the hill, hoping he was going the right way so he wouldn’t have to backtrack. He saw the name “Holtzman” on a mailbox at the end of a driveway, hopped off his bike, and walked toward the neat blue house, tucking in his shirt as he went.

  He heard voices out by a large barn, and when he rounded the corner, he saw a short person up on a ladder under a tall pine. The woman wore a floppy white hat and had a cardboard box balanced between her hip and the ladder. She held a pair of loppers with one hand.

  A boy sat at the foot of the ladder in a wheelchair. He leaned back and called up to the woman, who murmured back. Harry couldn’t hear what they said.

  Sal had taught him never to surprise anyone on a ladder, so he stood back and watched as the woman dropped the loppers, held the box up, and broke off a branch. A great black clump fell into the box. Harry watched as she shut the box, lost her balance, fumbled, and dropped it. The box seemed to hang in the air for a long second as she grabbed for it and missed. Then it bounced off the ladder and landed in the lap of the kid in the wheelchair.

  Harry could hear everything the woman said after that. The string of swear words that carried loud and clear would have bested his cellmate at the Stonybrook Correctional Facility. Harry watched her clamber down the ladder to the boy in the wheelchair, who sat in a buzzing cloud of what Harry realized were bees, laughing his head off.

  12

  Disruption

  As the extremity of the sting is barbed like an arrow, the bee can seldom withdraw it, if the subject into which she darts it is at all tenacious. In losing her sting she parts with a portion of her intestines, and of necessity soon perishes.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  While swarming honeybees can be heartbreaking for their beekeeper, a swarm is actually the sign of a healthy, productive hive. The older daughters decide the colony is overcrowded and, leaving half their sisters with healthy virgin queen cells, abscond with their mother to greener pastures. If those greener pastures happen to belong to another beekeeper, that loss is transformed into an opportune gift. That was how Alice had viewed the swarm in the fir tree, at least before she had bungled it so badly.

  She grasped the last barb with a tweezer and eased the stinger from her hot forearm, which had swelled like a ham hock. She saw the young man’s faint mustache twitch as she plucked it out.

  “Well, that’s done,” she said, and rubbed her hands over her arms.

  “Does it hurt?” Harry asked.

  “No. Just a little itchy.”

  She wanted to downplay the entire embarrassing episode with the swarm, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been rushing. Every mistake she’d ever made with the bees she’d made in a hurry. Today she’d come home at lunch to interview Harry and spotted the fat swarm while she was waiting for him. She was sure these bees were not hers and couldn’t pass up the chance to grab a feral swarm. In hindsight it was a terrible idea—going after the bunched-up bees without a second pair of hands. Not to mention dropping the box on Jake.

  What a marvel the kid hadn’t been stung. He was still laughing when Alice reached him and pulled the box off his lap.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” she swore under her breath. “Well, that was a damn stupid idea.”

  The docility of a swarm had its limits, and this one rose to guard their queen as Alice pushed Jake’s chair away. She’d been stung three times, but Jake was untouched.

  Jake clutched his stomach and gasped for breath. “Oh, Alice! Your face! You were so surprised, like now how did that happen?”

  Though Alice felt for the three workers who died in their stinging, Jake’s ribbing had finally made her laugh, especially once she understood he was not hurt. Jake vowed to refer to the event ever after as his bee baptism. Not many people, he said, could claim they’d had an entire swarm of bees dropped in their lap. As he wiped the tears out of his eyes, he noticed Harry frozen at the edge of the field.

  “I think your interview is here, boss,” Jake said.

  The young man glanced over his shoulder as if considering a run in the other direction, then raised a tentative hand in greeting and walked toward them.

  Alice introduced herself and then Jake. The young guy, who said his name was Harry, looked past her like he was expecting someone else.

  “Um, and Mr. Holtzman, ma’am? Al Holtzman?” Harry asked.

  Alice chuckled. “Oh, my email address? I’m Al Holtzman. Al for Alice. There’s no Mr. Holtzman. That okay with you?”

  Harry blushed and stammered, “No, ma’am, I mean, yes, ma’am,” and managed, “Thank you for the interview.”

  Alice watched him struggle, amused. He hesitated and then asked if the thing with the ladder was a regular part of the job.

  “No, no. That was what you might call a bad decision,” she said dryly. “It was more irregular than regular.”

  This statement renewed Jake’s mirth, and he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. Harry looked at him worriedly as Jake rolled himself up toward the house.

  Harry and Alice sat at the picnic table, and after she’d dealt with the stingers, Alice opened her laptop to glance through Harry’s résumé again. She asked him where he was living, and he said BZ, that little nothing town high up in the woods. She ventured that must be boring compared to New York. Harry shrugged and mumbled it was fine.

  Not a talker, then, Alice thought. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and gestured out at the bee yard. “I have twenty-four hives now, and by the end of the summer I would like to be up to fifty. My goal is to have one hundred by next summer.”

  The job was pretty simple, she explained. She wanted someone who could follow directions, lift up to one hundred pounds, and take initiative in seeing what else needed to be done. She needed new hi
ves built as part of the expansion process. Besides the beekeeping, there was the field to mow, fences to mend, and a few apple and pear trees to tend to. There was no end of small projects, she realized, looking around. Things had gotten away from her in the past year.

  “So, a little carpentry, some heavy lifting, and help keeping the place shipshape,” she said in summary.

  Harry nodded.

  Alice waited for him to say something, realized he wasn’t going to, and glanced back down at the computer screen, searching for something else to ask.

  The back door banged open, and Jake rolled toward them with a tray of iced tea and glasses balanced on his lap, whistling.

  Harry glanced at him and back to Alice. “Is your son, I mean. Is he . . . sick?” Harry asked in a low voice.

  Alice felt a flare of anger on Jake’s behalf.

  “He’s not sick. He’s paraplegic,” she said flatly. “And he’s not my son. He’s—”

  She stopped, flummoxed, not knowing how to explain Jake. “He’s a friend of the family,” she finished.

  Harry reddened and mumbled an apology.

  Jake lifted the tray onto the table. “Okay if I sit in, boss?” he asked.

  Alice nodded and turned back to the computer. “So—light construction skills. What can you tell me about that?”

  She saw Harry take a deep breath and sit up straight.

  “I’m good with a table saw, planer, jointer, sander—the basics. I learned to use all that stuff working for my mom and stepdad. That’s Romano Landscaping,” he said, gesturing toward his résumé on her screen. “We worked small commercial and residential jobs on Long Island. A little bit of everything.”

  Landscaping, irrigation systems, and pruning, Alice read. That could all come in handy with the future orchard, she thought.

  Alice nodded with approval. “You worked for your mom. Trustworthy, I guess?” she said.

  Harry said nothing. There was a long pause. Alice shut her laptop and suggested they all have a look at the bees.

  From outside the apiary, Alice explained the basics of the hive setup and the orientation of the yard. The air was full of darting golden bodies. The untrained eye would see only random motion, but if you watched the flight patterns as she did, you could see that each group was working its way to a specific destination and back again. The yard hummed; a breeze stirred the grass and then the branches of the big fir trees. A flicker called, “Cheer!” from the shadowy woods. Alice swung the gate open and eyed the closest hive. She grabbed a pair of clippers from the toolbox and trimmed the grass down in a few quick snips. The mower couldn’t get this close, and the ladies didn’t like the noisy weed eater. This was the kind of random task she needed help with, she explained. Proper ventilation was key to hive survival. That meant keeping entrances clear of grass in summer and snow in winter. She leaned down to trim another entrance as she talked.

  The three of them moved along the perimeter of the bee yard, and Alice pointed out the difference between the brood boxes and the honey supers. She explained how they became heavy with honey and brood later in the summer. That was why she needed a strong back. A full honey super could weigh up to one hundred pounds.

  She talked briefly about how she could increase the number of hives with splits and swarms but didn’t want to go into too much detail. She gestured at the fallen ladder and the cluster of bees that had regathered in a buzzing clump in the same tree.

  “That was a swarm capture gone wrong,” she said. “It’s usually fairly easy.”

  Harry nodded, looking unconvinced, and Jake snorted. Alice eyed the swarm and considered asking the young man to help her capture it as a kind of test. A glance at her watch on her still-throbbing arm told her she needed to get back to the office. So she walked Harry to the barn, where she showed him an empty hive, pulling out the frames so he could understand where the bees built the wax, laid the eggs, and stored the honey. Jake sat listening, his face intent.

  “I can teach you everything you need to know. I’d probably start you on yard maintenance and grass cutting. Like I was saying, ventilation is pretty important as it gets hotter, so grass is a daily chore.”

  Was she offering him the job? The idea of interviewing more people tired her, and he seemed fine. Still, she wished he would say something. Harry was silent, pulling apart the empty hive and peering in at the frames. He lifted the cover on and off, turned it around in his hands. The seconds ticked by. Alice was impatient to get back to work and annoyed that he didn’t seem to be listening. She cleared her throat.

  “So? Any questions about the job, Harry? I imagine it seems fairly—”

  “Why don’t you make the entrance at the top?” he interrupted. “It’s like their front door, right? If the grass and the snow blocking the entrance is a big problem, then it seems like you should just move the front door to the top. That one over there has a top door. Why don’t the rest of them?”

  Alice followed his gaze to one of the new splits she’d created and returned to the apiary. The front entrance, she realized in exasperation, was choked with crabgrass. The bees were flying in and out of a gap in the top where the brood box was cracked and the cover hadn’t seated properly.

  “What the hell—” she grumbled.

  Alice grabbed her hat and veil, pulled on her gloves, and opened the hive, drawing out a middle frame. It looked just like it should—layered with brood nest and honey and pollen. She put it back, careful to leave the cover tipped to keep that entrance open. Her thoughts whirred. She’d never heard of anyone doing a top entrance on a Langstroth hive, but she couldn’t think of a reason it wouldn’t work. And if it did work, the kid had just eliminated countless hours of maintenance.

  She walked back over to the boys, as she was already calling them in her mind, and smiled.

  “When can you start?” she asked.

  That evening after work she sat at the kitchen table going over the hive calendar and looking at her banking statement as she willed herself not to scratch her itchy forearms. Her budget would be tight, but she’d only be paying Harry for twenty hours a week. She shook her head. He was an odd duck—either silent or blurting paragraphs. She had to laugh at herself. Alice Holtzman with an awkward part-time employee and teenage roommate. Who’d have thought?

  Alice opened a bag of Nutter Butters and looked out the window at Jake, who was slowly rolling the perimeter of the yard. With his black hair back in its crazy spikes, he resembled a Roman sentry. She sighed and munched a cookie. She had a teenager living with her. Alice the introvert. Alice Island. He and his friends had managed to convince her to let him stay for a while. She smiled, recalling how she’d barreled through the door ready to battle Ed Stevenson and instead found three teenagers and a pot of burned rice.

  After the smoke had cleared and Alice had stopped yelling, she’d met Jake’s two young friends—Noah and Celia—who’d rearranged her furniture, which was disorienting. But they’d also made her dinner. It would have been impolite to refuse, she knew. She sat down to eat with them, begrudgingly, and told Jake they had things to discuss after dinner. Alice’s dark mood settled over the table. The silence was broken only by the sounds of forks on plates and chewing.

  “These young people are guests in your home, Alice!” she could hear her father’s voice hissing in her ear. She sighed and put down her fork.

  “This is really delicious,” she said, forcing a smile. “Thank you, Celia.”

  Celia jumped in like she’d been waiting for an opening.

  “Actually, Mrs. Holtzman, Jake made dinner. I just helped him with the recipe. He did all the work.”

  She looked at Jake, who looked down at the table.

  “I asked them to help me organize your kitchen so I could reach the cooking stuff,” Jake said. “We’ll put it all back. Don’t worry.”

  Alice glanced at her rearranged living ro
om, understanding. She took another bite of the chicken enchiladas, which were quite good. So were the beans. The kid had made a salad, for God’s sake. Alice couldn’t remember the last time she had a home-cooked meal or a dinner she hadn’t eaten over the sink. When she was finished, she wiped her mouth on her napkin and stood.

  “Show me,” she said.

  Jake explained Celia’s thoughtful reorganization of the cooking and baking utensils. Tentative at first, his confidence grew as he saw Alice was intrigued. His friends stood behind the counter, interjecting like his cheerleading squad.

  “Show her the pantry stuff,” Noah said. “And how we hung the skillets so you could reach them.”

  “And the ice cream maker is way up high there with the canning stuff, Mrs. Holtzman,” Celia said.

  Alice nodded, impressed. After all, Holtzmans admired initiative and organization. She was also won over by their teenage enthusiasm, which was unfamiliar to her. There it was, a force to be reckoned with.

  “Well,” she said. “Nice work. I’m impressed. Thank you for dinner. Now I have a little work to do. Can you three handle the dishes before Noah and Celia head home?” she asked Jake.

  She excused herself and went to her room so she could pretend not to see them high-fiving each other and celebrating. That had been two weeks ago, and she was surprised by how she had grown accustomed to having him there.

  Hiring Harry had solved her labor problem. As for Jake, he would be her guest for the time being. From the kitchen table, Alice watched him pause at one of the new hives. After his friends had left that night, she talked to him frankly about the physical demands of the job she was hiring for, and he agreed it was more than he could do. His face had fallen, and Alice felt her stomach plummet.

  “I’m sorry, Jake,” she said. “I should’ve been clearer about it.”

  He shook his head and tried to smile, saying he knew she was just trying to help. Sitting there looking into his young face, she could not bring herself to send him home. She suggested he stay for a while until he could figure out his next move. That idea seemed to cheer him, and he thanked her. Her heart sank a little as she realized she had backed herself into a corner, but it wouldn’t be forever. Besides, she was surprised by how much she liked this funny, smart kid. She had always liked being alone. She’d preferred it, really. Being around other people made her feel tired, almost lonelier. But then Bud changed things, she thought.