The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  Harry Stokes was a man transformed. At the dinner table Alice observed that his customary reticence and stammering had disappeared as he evangelized about his newfound religion of kiteboarding. Usually the first to finish his food—bent over his plate and shoveling with an eye out for seconds—he now let his dinner grow cold as he sketched the physics of kiteboarding on a napkin. He explained the wind window, the layout of the kite, the power of the lines, and the movement of the board across the water. To Harry, it was nothing short of magical, she could see.

  Alice watched him, amused, this usually bumbling young man who’d found confidence in such an unlikely place. Jake smiled at him and shook his head. Harry was as surprised as they were. He relayed how his hands had been shaking as he walked away from Jake and out onto the sandbar behind Yogi.

  “I thought I was going to hurl, dude!”

  Jake laughed and banged his fist on the table. Alice frowned, and Harry ducked his head.

  “Sorry, Alice! But man, I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of all those kids. Yogi said he can have me staying upwind and tacking in two more sessions,” he told them, beaming. “He said I’m a fast learner.”

  Alice, who had watched the kiteboarding craze unfold in recent years, said, “Well, I think you’re all nuts. Don’t you get all tangled up out there? It looks like chaos.”

  Harry grinned. “Yeah, it is sort of chaotic. But you just have to hold your line. And people are cool about making room for newbies. It’s a generous crowd.”

  Alice noted that she had never heard so many words come tumbling out of Harry’s mouth at once.

  “Don’t let me dampen your enthusiasm, Harry. I just don’t want to call your mom when you break a leg,” she teased.

  Harry’s smile dimmed.

  “Hey! I was just kidding. I’m not the fun police.”

  Harry shrugged. “No. It’s just that I haven’t called her in a while. I missed her birthday last week. I feel bad, but I haven’t bought a phone yet, and there aren’t any pay phones in the valley.”

  Alice sighed with exasperation and scraped her chair back from the table. She reached across the kitchen counter and plunked the cordless phone down in front of him.

  “Call your mother, Mr. Stokes. Any time. Consider it an employee benefit. That thing works out in the barn too.”

  She stood with her plate and silverware and glanced down at Jake. “You might want to call your mother too, Jake.”

  She set her dishes in the sink. “Thanks for dinner, guys. I’ve got some work to do, so you boys will have to excuse me.”

  In her bedroom, Alice took off her shoes and lay on the bed. The tension of the day had settled into her shoulders, and her head pounded. She hadn’t said anything to Jake or Harry about quitting her job. It hadn’t been the right time, with Harry over the moon about kiteboarding and both of them so excited about the hives—especially Jake, who had completed the transfer almost on his own. She could see how much it meant to him. And Harry was proud of how he’d figured out how to reverse the brood boxes.

  They had grown on her, those two. But the hive expansion, the plan for planting an orchard—that all seemed impossible right now. First she had to find a new job, which, in a town this size, would be no easy feat. She didn’t regret walking out of Rich Carlson’s office. Not one bit. But the county job had been a bridge to her dreams. Now that she’d burned it, she needed to build something new. She wouldn’t be able to afford to keep Harry on, which was a shame. Maybe she could let Jake stay for a while.

  Alice sat up, opened her laptop, and tried to log into the county system. Her access was denied, and she smiled grimly. Rich must have finally called tech support. At least she’d had time to get in and download the spraying schedule for Stan’s group.

  She looked at the list of farms she’d pledged to visit and divided them up by address over the next fourteen days. They had two weeks from tomorrow before the spraying began. That was a lot of ground to cover. But she was ready for it. Boy was she ever. Her face burned when she thought about Bill, about Nancy, about Rich.

  She scrolled through the other cache of information, which had come to her in such a surprising turn after the meeting at the watershed offices.

  Stan had walked her outside. They stood on the sidewalk in the spring sunshine. Stan clasped his hands behind his back and smiled down at her. Alice noticed again that he had nice eyes.

  “We really appreciate your help, Alice. We have a really strong case. That county info was a huge help. Huge! The noxious-weed program on top of the orchardists network is a double whammy. Parks, schools, public roadways. Every parent in this town is going to listen now. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  Alice shifted her computer bag higher on her shoulder. “Buy me a beer at pFriem when this is over, how about?” she said.

  “You’re on,” he said, smiling.

  Walking away, she was happy, she realized, happier than she’d been in months. Quitting her job made her feel free, reckless, and excited. She’d screwed up her pension and references by walking out. So what? She would worry about that later. She’d always been so careful, the reliable one, such a worker bee. Where had that gotten her? For once, she was going to enjoy the moment.

  Alice walked toward the county parking lot, hoping she wouldn’t run into any of her coworkers. It was just before 2 p.m. and the lot was still full. She walked swiftly to her blue pickup, opened the door, and threw her bag across the seat.

  As she moved to climb in, she felt a hand tap her elbow. The blood rushed into her ears, and she wheeled around to face Rich Carlson and whatever venom he was going to throw at her this time. But it wasn’t Rich. It was the intern, the young carrot-haired student from OSU. He jumped back from Alice with his hands up.

  “Oh! I’m s-sorry, Ms. Holtzman! I didn’t mean to startle you,” he stammered, and reddened.

  “Jesus, Casey!” she said, putting her hands on her knees and lowering her head, breathing deeply. “You gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry! I’m sorry! I just—well, I’ve been waiting for you. I know you quit today. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone heard. We’re all on your side. I mean, they gave Nancy your job and everything—”

  Alice raised her head and looked at him, stone-faced, and he reddened again.

  “I know it’s none of my business. It’s just— I— You were always so nice to me—”

  Alice waved a hand. “No, it’s fine. It’s just been a rough day. Now, what can I do for you? Do you need me to sign your paperwork or something? Nancy can do that now since she is interim director. You won’t have any trouble finding old Nance, I’m sure.”

  Casey cringed. “No, I don’t need anything. I just— I wanted to warn you.”

  Alice frowned at him. “Warn me? What do you mean?”

  Casey took a deep breath and spoke in a rush. “I overheard Mr. Carlson talking about you in the server room.” He looked at the pavement. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop or anything. I was in the back working on the servers, and he came in and didn’t see me. By the time I heard what he was saying, I figured it was better to just stay quiet until he was gone.”

  Her stomach somersaulted. She blinked and saw Rich making a frowny face at her across his desk.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “He said you were a—” The young man reddened. “He was telling someone that it was personal, you quitting, that they really needed to stick it to you. He said he knew just what would get to you. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I figured it would make sense to you. It was about Evangelina Ryan.”

  When Casey said Evangelina’s name, Alice went cold, like someone had poured ice water over her. Evangelina. She stood very still as Casey told her the rest of what he had heard despicable Rich say about Bud’s sweet sister-in-law, Evangelina.

  “Thank you, Casey. I really appreciate
the information. I’m not going to explain it to you. I think it’s better that you don’t know the details.”

  He nodded.

  “There’s one more thing,” he said, and held up a small black object in his freckled fingers. It was a jump drive.

  “These are all the documents outlining the county’s agreement with SupraGro. They had me transfer everything from Mr. Chenowith’s computer to Nancy’s today, and, well, I made a copy. I saw your picture in the paper with the watershed people, and I thought, I don’t know, maybe someone should look at this.”

  Alice chuckled. “Well! Hood River’s Edward Snowden!”

  Then, her face somber, she said, “Thank you, Casey. If anyone finds out I have it, I’ll say I took it myself. I owe you one, kid.”

  Casey nodded and disappeared into the building.

  “Never a dull moment at the Hood River County Planning Department,” Alice muttered as she climbed into her truck.

  Now, sitting in her room, she scanned the master file and noted what documents might be useful to Stan’s group. Certainly, the details of the SupraGro contract and the authors of their so-called scientific study. They must have paid a pretty penny for the skewed data collected there. Then there were the details of Bill’s retirement package, seven figures, and his annual consulting fee, which was more than Alice had made in the last five years put together. Jesus. She thought of Bill’s eternal nag about the tight budget. She shut the laptop. She would begin talking to the orchardists tomorrow, starting with her neighbor Doug Ransom. Good old Doug. He would listen.

  But first, this thing with Evangelina.

  She wished she could have this conversation with Bud’s parents, instead of with Ron. It would be so much easier, despite the fact that Alice had not contacted them in over a year. But no, it was Ron she needed to talk to about the danger to his wife.

  She remembered Evangelina the day of Bud’s funeral. The Ryans were Catholic, so Buddy’s service was at Sacred Heart. Alice sat with Bud’s parents in the front. Evangelina, Ron, and their kids sat in the pew behind. At the cemetery, Evangelina moved close and put her arm around Alice’s waist. It was such a small gesture, but Alice felt immensely comforted as she leaned into her friend’s arm. At the rowdy, crowded Ryan family events, it was always Evangelina who drew her in. They enjoyed each other’s company, although there were significant gaps between Evangelina’s English and Alice’s high school Spanish. But in that moment, when there was no language for such loss, Evangelina must have understood better than anyone else how Alice felt losing her life partner too soon. She might have asked herself the same torturing questions Alice did: What was the last thing I said to him? Did I kiss him goodbye before he left for that last trip? Did I tell him I loved him? Was it enough?

  And yet Alice felt her own grief eclipsed by the sorrow of Bud’s elderly parents. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children. Somehow Alice felt she didn’t have a right to show her sadness in the face of their loss. At the house after the service, she hugged them and didn’t know what to say. She thought of her own parents’ funerals and how she’d had Bud at her side. It was too much to think about. She excused herself to grab a sweater out of her truck, fully intending to go back in the house. Standing in the driveway, she watched extended family and old friends gather around the Ryan family, and it felt like a circle that had closed to her. Before she knew it, she was behind the wheel and was halfway home.

  The family called, but Alice didn’t answer the phone. They sent young Ronnie down, and he banged on the door for a long time before giving up. They kept calling for weeks. She knew she should call back. Even with the ghosts of her parents shaming her, she couldn’t manage it. She was physically unable to get in the truck and drive to her in-laws’ house. When the numbness she’d felt wore off, it was replaced by a pain she hadn’t thought possible.

  She took a month off from work. When she went back, work was the only vestige of her old life. She stopped going to bee club meetings. She let her sailing club membership lapse. She didn’t return phone calls. She turned inward. That was when she started going to the grocery store after 9:00 p.m.—when she didn’t think she’d run into anyone she knew. It was a lonely crowd she joined there. She began recognizing their faces. Most of them were men, in line with beer and cigarettes or baskets full of frozen dinners. Once she saw Evangelina there with her daughter, the two of them poring over the cold medicines. She turned around at the sight of them and hid in the meat department until she thought they were gone. Coward, she thought now.

  She wished she could just talk to Evangelina, but she needed to make sure she communicated this information as clearly as possible. It had to be Ron. She grabbed her phone and texted him.

  “Meet me at Twin Peaks tomorrow,” she wrote. “You say when. Important. About Evangelina.”

  She hoped he would think twice before deleting her message. She fell asleep despite the pounding in her head.

  The next day she sat with Doug Ransom and mused that her dad would have been the same age now, if he were still alive. Doug was an old gentleman, cut from the same cloth as Al. The two men had been friends long before Alice bought her house next to Doug’s orchard. All this made Doug an easy person to start with in recruiting orchardists to boycott SupraGro.

  Doug insisted on making tea for Alice. His wife, Marilyn, had been dead for five years, Alice realized as she stood in the kitchen looking at the wallpaper—pigs in cowboy hats with piglets toddling along behind them. She remembered the first time Doug and Marilyn had had her and Bud over all those years ago. Time passed in a blink. She looked at the photographs on the refrigerator while Doug puttered around, gathering cups and spoons. Three kids, several grandkids. Doug smiled when he saw her looking.

  “Don’t see them as much as I would like. You know,” he said, shaking his white head and smiling. “Busy.”

  They sat on the porch and looked over Doug’s apple and pear trees. Alice had watched them blossom each spring with a kind of collaborative joy. She knew her girls were over there pollinating.

  Doug waved a hand at her. “You don’t have to try to talk me into anything, Alice. I know the bees are helping me. My yield has been better in the years since you and Bud put the bees in,” he said. “He was a good man, that Bud Ryan. I sure miss him.”

  Alice nodded and smiled. She felt moved, but not like she was going to fall to pieces. Buddy had liked Doug too. The two of them had shared a love of decrepit farming equipment. Vintage, Buddy liked to say. Salvage, Alice had responded.

  Doug gestured at the petition Alice had brought with her. “I’ll sign that. Whatever you want. I’m damn sorry I used the stuff in the first place. I should have done my own research first. I’ve been in this business long enough to know better.”

  He passed a hand over his wrinkled face. “Truth is, I’m about done here, Alice. The kids don’t want the orchard. They all went west. Tech jobs in Portland and Seattle. They want me to move out there, sell the place.”

  He raised his wooly eyebrows. “Me in the city. Can you imagine?”

  They both laughed. Doug often drove his ATV to the grocery store, backing up traffic as he poked along in the shoulder of the road.

  When Alice left, she walked back to her place through Doug’s trees. It made her sad to think of Doug selling his orchard. He was one of the old guard, one of the last small orchardists of her dad’s generation. She stood between two rows of pear trees and gazed at the blossoms exploding in white clouds on either side of her. She heard the hum above her, a roof of sound, and looked up to see hundreds of honeybees at work.

  She wondered if Doug would harvest that fall or if he would have sold his place by then. Properties sold fast in the county. A place like this would be snapped up, and not by a farmer. It was the perfect setting for the kind of country living development that had ruined her parents’ place. She tried to imagine what the land around her
would look like cleared of trees and crowded with identical boxlike vacation homes. Doug’s orchard was bigger, too—at least eighty acres. She sighed. Townhomes for tourists, the little country road clogged with cars, the quiet broken by loud music from drunken bachelorette parties. She couldn’t do anything about that, but she could finish this fight.

  Her hand closed around the list in her pocket, drawn out in Doug’s elegant spidery script. It was a tally of allies—their phone numbers and addresses too, all of which Doug had known by heart. He had handed it to her after he walked her to the end of the driveway. She stuck out her hand for him to shake, but he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, then tapped her shoulder with his thin hand.

  “You go get ’em, Alice Holtzman. You make your parents proud.”

  23

  Guarding

  The defence of the colony against enemies, the construction of the cells, and storing of them with honey and beebread, the rearing of the young and, in short, the whole work of the hive, the laying of eggs excepted, is carried on by the industrious little workers.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  Harry understood that the physics of kiteboarding had to do with Newton’s laws of motion. The combination of lift and drag kept the kite in the air, and the tension between the kite and a person’s body weight was a carefully calibrated feat of aerodynamics. It was a tenuous relationship, never a sure thing. Even so, it gave Harry a newfound sense of possibility to have personally felt the embodiment of those principles.

  He sat with Jake at the picnic table under the big cottonwood, which snowed fluff down on their heads. A scree of clouds smeared the pale blue sky and the morning wind had picked up, tossing the branches of Doug Ransom’s orchard. Harry sketched the mechanics of the leading edge lines and their role in the process of relaunching the kite. Jake was cleaning the disassembled pieces of his trumpet as he listened, and nodded at the diagram Harry drew in his notebook.

  “Pretty rad, man,” Jake said. “Are you heading down there later today?”