Telling the Bees

by Peggy Hesketh

  “How dare you, Albert,” she said, lowering her voice to a hot whisper. “How dare you presume to know what’s best for me or anyone else with a drop of human blood still flowing in his veins.”

  “Please, Claire,” I urged, “this could be a blessing in disguise. It can’t have been easy for you to live with a lie like this for all these years.”

  “How would you know what I’ve had to live with?” she hissed without giving me the opportunity to answer. “You have no right to judge me. None of you do.”

  She began to rage at me in earnest as David Gilbert, clearly reeling from the unexpected revelation, made a futile attempt to put the conversation back on track.

  “Is what he said true?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” Claire snapped.

  David Gilbert pressed the indelicate issue further than even I cared to see it pressed. “Who was he?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Claire said curtly. “He’s dead.”

  “But how? How did he die?”

  “Unexpectedly,” she replied, softening her tone for an instant. “For no good reason.”

  “Tell me about him,” David persisted. “Please.”

  “Why?”

  “It changes who I am,” he insisted.

  “Your father’s dead,” she repeated coolly. “Nothing Albert or I can say will change that.”

  Perhaps it was impolitic, but I attempted to intercede one last time on David Gilbert’s behalf.

  “But, Claire,” I said, “can’t you see this isn’t about me or you?”

  “The hell it isn’t,” she said quietly—so quietly, in fact, that I’m not sure anyone but me heard her.

  “This means a lot to me,” David Gilbert said.

  “To you?” she retorted, her anger rising again to full volume. “For God’s sake, can’t any of you understand that nothing good can come of this?”

  “Please . . . Mother,” David Gilbert practically begged, addressing Claire by this endearing sobriquet for the first—and likely the only—time in his life. He was rewarded with the startled stare of a wounded deer.

  “Do not call me that!”

  “Please, I just want . . .” David Gilbert began, but he was not permitted the courtesy of finishing his request.

  “You want what? What if I can’t give you what you want?” Claire said, presumably to David Gilbert though her eyes remained locked on mine. And then to his wife she turned and said, “Tell him. Tell him he should be thankful for the family he has. Tell him to stop chasing after ghosts.”

  While, as I said, I did not put much stock in Claire’s outburst as I am certain it arose more from shame than anger, David Gilbert was not nearly as forgiving. Crushed by her denials, he stormed out of the room and returned a few moments later with his little girl and Hilda trailing swiftly behind him. Unaware of all that had transpired, the child ran straight to her mother, her tiny fists crammed full of silver coins.

  “¡Mira mira!” the little girl crowed as her mother smiled nervously and put her finger to her lips.

  “Look at the honey money!” the little girl squealed.

  “Tini!” the mother said sharply. “Shhhh!”

  If only Claire had heeded her command as well as the child did. Blessedly, only a few more words were spoken in anger, and then it was all over.

  Cursing God under her breath, Claire looked to Hilda, to me, to David Gilbert, the child, the child’s mother, and back to Hilda.

  It was as if thirty years had melted away in an instant. David Gilbert’s face grew as sullen and hard as the last time we’d heard her curse as he wordlessly gathered up his family’s belongings and shepherded his wife and little daughter out the front door and into their station wagon while Claire stared at them from the front porch.

  “Goddamn it,” she whispered again as David Gilbert pulled the car away from the curb.

  Thirty-two

  THE EGG: It has been written that to the human eye, the Apis mellifera egg resembles a cross between a tiny bit of sausage and a poppy seed. All female honeybees start out as fertilized eggs undifferentiated in purpose or hierarchal rank. All males, or drones, come from unfertilized eggs.

  There is a particularly malignant aberration of the general rule of bee nature that is known as the laying worker. Though not common, neither is it unheard of to find a normally sterile female who fancies herself a queen and in the full manifestation of the charade can hoodwink an entire colony into participating in this tragically melancholy form of self-delusion.

  While the process is not completely understood, apiarists believe that the normally functioning queen produces, in addition to the millions of eggs she deposits in prepared cells throughout her long life, a special pheromone known as queen substance, which during the height of her fertility prevents rival queens from developing and at the same time inhibits the underdeveloped ovaries of her naturally chaste daughters from producing eggs. In the normal cycle of the hive, it is the gradual reduction of this queen substance that is part of the natural aging process which triggers the raising of a new queen to take the old one’s place. But if that cycle is disrupted and a reigning queen in her prime suddenly ceases to function before another can be produced, an upstart worker will occasionally step in to fill the void.

  As I said, the laying worker is not the norm. Ordinarily, if a queen dies unexpectedly and there are yet fresh eggs in the hive, the deceased queen’s entourage begins at once to feed a select few larvae as soon as they hatch from their cells the royal jelly that will transform one of these anointed few into a new queen to take the old one’s place. If there are no fresh eggs ready to replace the old queen when she ceases to function, however, a beekeeper may have to intervene with the introduction of a new queen from outside the colony. This is crucial, for if the hive is unable to produce a new queen and the beekeeper is negligent in his caretaking duties, the hive becomes vulnerable to the insinuation of a fraudulent queen, which, to my way of thinking, is the most pitiable of all situations. For if there is no true queen, there can be no new brood produced to replace the workers, who will all expire in due time. In such moments of crisis, the will to survive is sometimes so great that one bee—if not several—may begin to exhibit the uncharacteristic behavior of laying eggs. And while their intentions are certainly noble, the results are most often disastrous.

  Unlike a bona fide queen, who adheres to the orderly, circular egg-laying pattern of purposeful groupings designed to facilitate the eggs’ care, the laying worker is both physically and temperamentally unsuited to the task of reproduction and she deposits her eggs haphazardly, some high on the edge of a cell, or two or three in a pile, according to no particular sequence or strategy, as she wanders willy-nilly about the hive in an amateurish mimicry of her prematurely deceased liege. And even more damning to the laying worker and the hive, she has not had the benefit of the traditional nuptial rites of passage and can lay only unfertilized eggs, which in turn can produce only drones—and undersized drones at that. Without fertilization, no more worker bees can be born to replace their rapidly aging sisters. The circle is broken, the order of the hive abrogated, and, for all the best intentions in the world, the colony dies.

  But it does so slowly and insidiously. To the human eye, the laying worker looks no different than her sisters, and so even after her existence has been detected through the telltale increase of random drone cells she is next to impossible for the beekeeper to root out of the hive. Once a laying worker has sufficiently established her royal command, even the introduction of a proper fertile queen is rarely successful, as the charlatan’s loyal entourage, with suicidal zeal, will surround and suffocate the rightful queen to protect the false sovereign.

  Without a proper queen, the doomed hive falls into what can only be described as a state of deep despair. As fewer and fewer new drones are hatched and no new workers mature and sally forth to forage for the nectar and pollen that is the lifeblood of the hive, those who are left to grow old and die, alon
e and unmourned, take to standing about the entrance of the hive and staring lethargically out at the world they no longer care to partake of on any significant level. They are, for all intents and purposes, dead long before their wings stop beating.

  Thirty-three

  ELECTRICITY: Bees do not operate efficiently near electrical currents and so should not be placed underneath high-tension wires. While honeybees may survive, their numbers will not increase and their honey production will go down.

  Perhaps it was the shock of the discovery—the absolute and unflagging shock and horror of seeing Claire’s lifeless body so cruelly defiled and discarded—and the niggling parade of questions and intrusions into the most intimate details of my personal life and Claire’s following in the wake of her death that sealed my lips for so long. Or it may have been nothing more than the forgetfulness of an old man. But after all was said and done, after the tragic manner of Claire’s and Hilda’s deaths had been explored and analyzed and exposed to the indiscriminate eye of public scrutiny the truth of the matter was, I had somehow never gotten around to telling the bees. And what is perhaps even more inexcusable is that for far too many years before, I had told the bees nothing else about Claire.

  Nothing at all. At first, I suppose I told myself that my bees could see for themselves that she had stopped coming around, and they could not help but know the reason why. And by that I do not mean her brutal murder, though certainly I should have said something about it, but here I am referring to the eleven years of nullity that came before her death when she went about her business and I went about mine as if nothing had happened between us. Nothing ever. I regret this now, just as I regret the irrevocable words I spoke that severed all friendly intercourse between us, erasing the history of decades of camaraderie and leaving an unforgivable silence in the breach.

  As I’ve said many times, bees are sensitive creatures by design. They know, for example, by the slightest shift in my gait, gesture, or intake of breath, when something is troubling me, and so for this very reason I try to keep my emotions on an even keel when I am in their presence.

  I know now that I should have told the bees of her tragic passing the moment I discovered that Claire had died. But I should have told them other things, too. Long ago I should have told them that I, like Claire, had been dead longer than I have been alive. I should have told them that I had died a thousand times since the night I chanced to follow Claire out into the groves and nothing was ever the same again.

  But I didn’t. I went about my business as if nothing had happened. As if I had not seen with my own eyes what Claire was. What she had become. That was the first unforgivable sin. Not that she had done what she had done but that I had seen what I was never meant to see. And that I had spoken the truth. Rather that I had been torn to pieces by wild dogs than to have broken my silence. That was the second, far greater sin, but I could not help myself. In my heart, I was afraid her heart had already grown as cold as her mother’s had before her. I could see it in her eyes when she looked at David Gilbert. As if there was no flow of common blood beating in their veins. I could see the same flitter of hurt pass across his face that used to dart about her eyes when Claire’s mother had spoken to her in that chilling way she had of speaking about, around, but never directly to her.

  I saw it just as clearly when we were still young and I could not respond in kind to what I perceived to be Claire’s rudderless initiation into womanhood. Not that there weren’t times in my own clumsy youth when I wasn’t sorely tempted to offer her more than simple words of guidance.

  That is when I most often found my own guidance in the ancient wisdom of Saint Augustine, who had found peace in the contemplation of the divine after suffering through his own temptations of the flesh. Augustine wrote that there is this fundamental difference between the temporal and the eternal: A temporal thing is loved more before we have it because when we do it does not satisfy the soul.

  Though Claire steadfastly refused to see me after our final falling-out when David Gilbert brought his family to visit her in the autumn of 1981, I never stopped caring about her welfare. While David Gilbert had made it quite clear that he wanted no more to do with either her or Hilda after the terrible things Claire had said to him in the heat of her anger—and she made it just as clear that I had become persona non grata in her eyes—I knew she had no one else to look after her but Hilda. And given her fierce reclusiveness, Hilda was scarcely better than no one at all.

  One evening, not long after David Gilbert’s disastrous visit, I left my own dog-eared copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions on the Straussman sisters’ doorstep with a personal note to Claire rubber-banded around it, urging her to take comfort in Augustine’s words as I once had in my own times of trial.

  I found the book back on my own doorstep the following evening. My note was tucked within the book’s worn pages, with an addendum penned in Claire’s distinctive cursive script:

  I liked him better as a pagan, she had written. He was honest enough to say that while he wanted chastity and continence, he didn’t want it right away. You should take a lesson from your precious saint, Albert. At least old Auggie lived a little before he decided to turn all holier than thou.

  I of course felt anything but holy as the silence between us continued unabated through the following decade. I am sure the silence between the Straussman sisters was nearly as absolute, as it was as much a part of Hilda’s daily habit as breathing, and even though Claire was certainly a savant at bee communication, I am not sure she ever managed to draw much true verbal communication from her sister. But I could be wrong, since I had seldom been privy to what went on behind closed doors in the Straussman household—and I suppose that is as it should be.

  But please do not mistake estrangement for indifference. I continued to run into Claire and Hilda from time to time at the Harmony Park Ballroom. Of course it wasn’t called the Harmony by this time. The dance hall had been shut down by the city fathers sometime in the early eighties and reopened as a community marketplace called the Peppertree Faire, where booths were laid out like an old English square, and every Saturday through Tuesday we all set up our wares beneath the ballroom’s great yawning hulk. As an established local merchant, I was awarded an enviable table near the front of the building. A few months after the Peppertree opened, Claire and Hilda managed to acquire a table near the back.

  It was not a prime spot. I feared the Straussman sisters would soon founder without some assistance and so I began to make a habit of paying several of my regular honey customers on the sly to purchase a dozen or so of the Bee Ladies’ beeswax candles that they also sold every Thursday from their front porch. I thought it was the least I could do for them under the circumstances.

  I believe the candles were Hilda’s handiwork. They had a certain clumsy charm to them that seemed far too ingenuous for Claire to have produced. The jars of bee pollen and royal jelly they sold along with their honey and candles were all affixed with a pen-and-ink Bee Ladies label in Claire’s familiar cursive script, a quaint sobriquet that the Straussman sisters had apparently adopted without irony. I had not realized how popular ancillary bee products such as those the Straussman sisters sold had become with the public and so was quite surprised to learn during the course of their murder investigation and subsequent trial that they had been able to stash away even a few meager dollars from their labor.

  But that is hardly the point. In the lingering aftermath of our estrangement, even the bees in my own keeping seemed to lose a little more heart each year.

  I believe it was Maurice Maeterlinck who said that it matters little whether we think of the remarkable nature of bees as a product of instinct or intelligence for either is only another way of revealing our own ignorance in this regard. Maeterlinck believed that what we call instinct is perhaps cosmic in nature, an emanation of the universal soul. It is what Virgil referred to as mens divina, divine thought, the divine spirit.

  Which I suppose is as c
lose to anything as the root of the ancients’ belief that a bee is a corporeal manifestation of the soul on earth and to fail to tell the bees about a soul’s departing is to deny that soul its due. Certainly in this modern age there are many people, like my new neighbors, who would scoff at such seemingly superstitious beliefs.

  To such self-assured skeptics, I can only echo Montaigne’s admonition to beware of absolute certainty. Even the certainty of doubt. “Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known,” he warned.

  I believe this is something of the gist of Harry Junior’s message, and it is why I suppose he felt compelled to visit me a final time.

  He was clearly recognizable, and by this time I greeted him as I would an old friend, as he stood some distance away cloaked like a forlorn sentry in the shade of the remaining eucalyptus stand that borders the north side of my property. As before, he didn’t speak at first, preferring to hang back in the shadows, watching as I attempted to introduce a new queen to my number fourteen hive.

  I should have realized weeks earlier that the hive had gone queenless, but I’m not as young as I used to be and when the mornings are overly damp it takes my knees a good hour or more to limber up and then I can’t always walk, except on the best of days, all the way out to check on my outlying hives as often as I should. Sadly, by the time I got around to noticing something was amiss with my number fourteen it was already too late. The hive was deep in the thrall of a laying worker. I knew in my heart of hearts that it was a terminal situation.

  I told Harry I didn’t hold out much hope that the new queen would be able to overthrow her lowborn pretender, but for the sake of the hive I had to let her try. Harry moved a little closer then, smiling that sad-child smile of his that melted away as quickly as it was formed.