It seems odd to me now how we went on standing there another minute, me waiting for August to say something, but she didn’t speak, just stood, soaking up that last moment. A wind rose up, raking its sound along the tree branches, hitting our faces like an oven blast, like the sudden breezes of hell. August looked at me, then moved her flashlight beam out to the water.
The light swept across the surface, making a spatter of ink-gold splotches before it stopped, abruptly. May lay in the river, just beneath the surface. Her eyes were wide open and unblinking, and the skirt of her dress fanned out and swayed in the current.
I heard a noise come from August’s lips, a soft moan.
I clutched frantically at August’s arm, but she pulled free of me, threw down her flashlight, and waded into the river.
I splashed in after her. Water surged around my legs, causing me to fall once on the slippery bottom. I grabbed for August’s skirt, just missing. I came up sputtering.
When I reached her, August was staring down at her baby sister. “June,” she shouted. “June!”
May lay in two feet of water with a huge river stone on top of her chest. It weighted her body, holding it on the bottom. Looking at her, I thought, She will get up now. August will roll away the stone, and May will come up for air, and we will go back to the house and get her dry. I wanted to reach down and touch her, shake her shoulder a little. She couldn’t have died out here in the river. That would be impossible.
The only parts of her not submerged were her hands. They floated, her palms little ragged cups bobbing on the surface, the water weaving in and out of her fingers. Even now that’s the picture that will wake me up in the night, not May’s eyes, open and staring, or the stone resting on her like a grave slab. Her hands.
June came thrashing into the water. When she reached May, she stood beside August, panting, her arms dangling beside her body. “Oh, May,” she whispered and looked away, squeezing her eyes closed.
Glancing toward the bank, I saw Rosaleen standing ankle deep in the river, her whole body shaking.
August knelt down in the water and shoved the stone off May’s chest. Grabbing May by the shoulders, she pulled her up. Her body made an awful sucking sound as it broke the surface. Her head rolled back, and I saw that her mouth was partially open and her teeth were rimmed with mud. River reeds clung to her hair braids. I looked away. I knew then. May was dead.
August knew, too, but she put her ear to May’s chest, listening. After a minute, though, she drew back and pulled May’s head to her breast, and it almost seemed like she wanted May to listen now for her heart.
“We’ve lost her,” August said.
I started to shiver. I could hear my teeth in my mouth, crashing against each other. August and June scooped their arms under May’s body and struggled to carry her to the bank. She was saturated, bulging. I grabbed her ankles and tried to steady them. The river, it seemed, had carried away her shoes.
When they laid her down on the bank, water gushed from her mouth and nostrils. I thought, This is the way Our Lady came washing up on the river near Charleston. I thought, Look at her fingers, her hands. They are so precious.
I imagined how May had rolled the rock from the bank out into the river, then lay down, pulling it on top of her. She had held it tight, like a baby, and waited for her lungs to fill. I wondered if she had flailed and jerked toward the surface at the last second, or did she go without fighting, embracing the rock, letting it soak up all the pain she felt? I wondered about the creatures that had swum by while she died.
June and August, sopping wet, stooped on either side of her, while mosquitoes sang in our ears and the river went on about its business, coiling off into the darkness. I was sure they’d pictured May’s last moments, too, but I did not see horror on their faces now, just a heartbroken acceptance. This had been the thing they’d been waiting for half their lives without even realizing it.
August tried to close May’s eyes with her fingers, but they would only stay half shut. “It’s just like April,” June said.
“Hold the flashlight on May for me,” August said to her. The words came out quiet and steady. I could barely hear them over the bamming of my heart.
By the small beam of light, August plucked out the tiny green leaves stuck in the plaits in May’s hair and tucked each one into her pocket.
August and June scraped off every piece of river debris there was from May’s skin and clothes, and Rosaleen, poor Rosaleen, who I realized had lost her new best friend, stood, not making a sound, but with her chin shaking so awful I wanted to reach up and hold it for her.
Then a sound I will never forget whooshed out of May’s mouth—a long, bubbling sigh, and we all looked at each other, confused, with a second of actual hope, as if the miracle of miracles was about to take place after all, but it was only a pocket of swallowed air that had suddenly been released. It swept across my face, smelling like the river, like a piece of old wood that had gone moldy.
I looked down at May’s face and felt a wave of nausea. Stumbling off into the trees, I bent over and vomited.
Afterward, as I wiped my mouth on the hem of my shirt, I heard a sound break through the darkness, a cry so piercing it made the bottom of my heart drop. Looking back, I saw August framed in the light of June’s flashlight, the sound coming from deep in her throat. When it faded away, she dropped her head straight down onto May’s soggy chest.
I reached for the limb of a small cedar and held tight, as though everything I had was about to slip from my hands.
“So you’re an orphan?” the policeman said. It was that tall, crew-cut Eddie Hazelwurst who’d escorted August and me in to see Zach in jail.
Rosaleen and I sat in the rocking chairs in the parlor, while he stood before us holding a small notebook, ready to capture every word. The other policeman was outside searching around the wailing wall, for what I couldn’t imagine.
My chair rocked so fast I was in danger of being pitched out of it. Rosaleen’s, however, remained motionless—her face closed down.
When we’d first gotten back to the house after finding May, August had met both policemen and then sent me and Rosaleen upstairs. “Go on up there and get dried off,” she’d said to me.
I’d peeled off my shoes and rubbed myself with a towel while we stood at the upstairs window. We’d watched the men from the ambulance bring May back from the woods on a stretcher, then listened as the two policemen asked August and June all sorts of questions. Their voices had floated up the stairwell. Yes, she’s been depressed lately. Well, actually, she was depressed on and off all the time. She had a condition. She couldn’t seem to distinguish other people’s suffering from her own. No, we didn’t find a note. An autopsy? All right, we understand.
Mr. Hazelwurst had wanted to talk to everyone, so here we were. I’d told him exactly what happened from the time May answered the telephone to the moment we found her in the river. Then he started with the personal questions. Wasn’t I that girl who came to the jail last week to see one of the colored boys? What was I doing staying here? Who was Rosaleen?
I explained everything about my mother dying when I was small, my father going to his Maker earlier this summer after a tractor accident, which was the story I was sticking with. Rosaleen, I said, was my nanny.
“I guess you could say I’m an orphan,” I told him. “But I’ve got family in Virginia. It was my father’s dying wish for me to go live with my aunt Bernie. She’s expecting me and Rosaleen both. She’ll be sending us bus fare or driving down here and picking us up herself. She keeps saying, ‘Lily, I can’t wait for you to get here.’ I tell her, ‘Just so we’re there before school starts.’ I’ll be a sophomore, which I cannot believe.”
He narrowed his eyes like he was trying to follow all this. I was breaking every rule of successful lying. Do not talk so much, I told myself, but I couldn’t seem to stop.
“I am so happy about going to live with her up there. She is real nice. You wouldn’t
believe all the stuff she has sent me over the years. Especially costume jewelry and teddy bears. One bear after another.”
I was only glad August and June were not present to hear this. They had left to follow the ambulance in the honey wagon, wanting to see May’s body delivered safe and sound to wherever it was going. It was bad enough Rosaleen was in the room. I was afraid she was going to give us away, say something like Actually we came here right after Lily broke me out of jail. But she sat drawn into herself, a complete mute.
“Now, what was your last name again?” he said.
“Williams,” I said. I had told him this twice already, so I had to wonder what kind of educational requirements they had for policemen in Tiburon. It looked like the same ones as Sylvan.
He drew up even taller. “Well, what I don’t understand is, if you’re going to live with your aunt in Virginia, what are you doing here?”
Here is the translation: I am completely confused what a white girl like you is doing staying in a colored house.
I took a breath. “Well, see, my aunt Bernie had to have an operation. It was female trouble. So Rosaleen over there said, ‘Why don’t me and you stay with my friend August Boatwright in Tiburon till Aunt Bernie gets on her feet again?’ It was no sense in us going up there while she was in the hospital.”
He was actually writing this down. Why? I wanted to yell at him, This is not about me and Rosaleen and Aunt Bernie’s operation. This is about May. She is dead, or haven’t you noticed?
I should’ve been in my room right then crying my eyeballs out, and here I was having the stupidest conversation of my life.
“Didn’t you have any white people back in Spartanburg you could stay with?”
Translation: Anything would be better than you staying in a colored house.
“No, sir, not really. I didn’t have that many friends. For some reason I didn’t fit in that well with the crowd. I think it was because I made such good grades. One lady at church said I could stay there till Aunt Bernie got well, but then she got shingles, and there went that.”
Lord God, somebody stop me.
He looked at Rosaleen. “So how did you know August?”
I held my breath, aware that my rocking chair had come to a standstill.
“She’s my husband’s first cousin,” Rosaleen said. “Me and her kept up after my husband left me. August was the only one of his family who knew what a sorry jackass he was.” She cut her eyes at me as if to say, See? You aren’t the only one who can concoct lies at the drop of a hat.
He flipped his notebook shut and, crooking his finger at me, motioned me to follow him to the door. After he stepped outside, he said, “Take my advice and call your aunt and tell her to come on and get you, even if she isn’t a hundred percent well. These are colored people here. You understand what I’m saying?”
I wrinkled up my forehead. “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I’m just saying it’s not natural, that you shouldn’t be…well, lowering yourself.”
“Oh.”
“I’m gonna come back soon, and I better not find you still here. Okay?” He smiled and put his gigantic hand on my head like we were two white people with a secret understanding.
“Okay.”
I closed the door behind him. Whatever glue had kept me together throughout all that cracked then. I walked back into the parlor, already starting to sob. Rosaleen put her arm around me, and I saw tears coming down her face, too.
We walked up the stairs to the room she’d shared with May. Rosaleen pulled down the sheets on her bed. “Go on, get in,” she told me.
“But where will you sleep?”
“Right over here,” she answered, pulling back the covers on May’s bed, the pink-and-brown afghan May had crocheted with popcorn stitches. Rosaleen climbed in and pushed her face into the creases of the pillow. I knew she was smelling for May’s scent.
You’d think I would have dreamed about May, but when I fell asleep, it was Zach who came. I can’t even tell you what was happening in the dream. I woke up, my breath panting a little, and I knew it had been about him. He seemed close and real, like I could sit up and touch my fingertips to his cheek. Then I remembered where he was, and an unbearable heaviness came over me. I pictured his cot with his shoes sitting under it, how he was probably lying awake this very moment watching the ceiling, listening to the other boys breathe.
Across the room a rustling noise startled me, and I had one of those strange moments where you don’t know quite where you are. Only half awake, I’d thought I was in the honey house, but it came to me now that the sound was Rosaleen turning over in bed. And then, then I remembered May. I remembered her in the river.
I had to get up, slip into the bathroom, and throw water on my face. I was standing there with the night-light casting its small brightness when I looked down and saw the claw-footed tub wearing the red socks May had put on its porcelain feet. I smiled then; I couldn’t help it. It was the side of May I never wanted to forget.
I closed my eyes, and all the best pictures of her came to me. I saw her corkscrew braids glistening in the sprinkler, her fingers arranging the graham-cracker crumbs, working so hard on behalf of a single roach’s life. And that hat she wore the day she danced the conga line with the Daughters of Mary. Mostly, though, I saw the blaze of love and anguish that had come so often into her face.
In the end it had burned her up.
After the autopsy, after the police made her suicide official, after the funeral home had fixed May up as pretty as they could, she came home to the pink house. First thing Wednesday morning, August 5, a black hearse pulled up in the driveway, and four men in dark suits lifted out May’s casket and brought it right into the parlor. When I asked August why May was coming through the front door in her coffin, she said, “We’re going to sit with her till she’s buried.”
I hadn’t expected this, as all the people I knew in Sylvan had their dead loved ones go straight from the funeral home to the graveyard.
August said, “We sit with her so we can tell her good-bye. It’s called a vigil. Sometimes people have a hard time letting death sink in, they can’t say good-bye. A vigil helps us do that.”
If the dead person is right there in your living room, it would certainly make things sink in better. It was strange to think about a dead person in the house, but if it helped us say good-bye better, then okay, I could see the point of it.
“It helps May, too,” August said.
“Helps May?”
“You know we all have a spirit, Lily, and when we die, it goes back to God, but nobody really knows how long that takes. Maybe it takes a split second, and maybe it takes a week or two. Anyway, when we sit with May, we’re saying, ‘It’s okay, May, we know this is your home, but you can go now. It’ll be all right.’”
August had them roll the coffin, which sat on its own table with wheels, in front of Our Lady of Chains and then open it up. After the funeral home men drove away, August and Rosaleen walked up to the coffin and stared down at May, but I hung back. I was walking around, inspecting myself in the various mirrors, when June came down with her cello and began to play. She played “Oh! Susanna,” which made all of us smile. There is nothing like a small joke at a vigil to help you relax. I walked up to the coffin and stood between August and Rosaleen.
It was the same old May, except her skin was pulled tight across her face bones. The lamplight spilling into the coffin gave her a kind of glow. They had her wearing a royal blue dress I had never seen, with pearl buttons and a boat-neck collar, and her blue hat. She looked like any second she would pop open her eyes and grin at us.
This was the woman who’d taught my mother everything there was to know about getting rid of roaches in a nice way. I counted on my fingers the days since May had told me about my mother staying here. Six. It seemed like six months. I still wanted so badly to tell August what I knew. I guess I could’ve told Rosaleen, but it was really August I wanted to tell. She wa
s the only one who knew what any of it meant.
Standing at the coffin, looking up at August, I had a powerful urge to tell her right then. Just blurt it out. I’m not Lily Williams, I’m Lily Owens, and it was my mother who stayed here. May told me. And then it would all come out. Whatever terrible things might happen, would. When I peered up at her, though, she was brushing tears off her face, looking for a handkerchief in her pocket, and I knew it would be selfish to pour this into her cup when it was already to the brim with grief for May.
June played with her eyes closed, as if May’s spirit getting into heaven depended solely on her. You have never heard such music, how it made us believe death was nothing but a doorway.
August and Rosaleen finally sat down, but once I was up at the coffin, I found I couldn’t leave. May’s arms were crossed over her chest, wings folded in on themselves, a pose I did not find flattering. I reached in and held her hand. It was waxy-cool, but I didn’t care. I hope you will be happier in heaven, I told her. I hope you will not need any kind of wall up there. And if you see Mary, Our Lady, tell her we know Jesus is the main one down here, but we’re doing our best to keep her memory going. For some reason I felt exactly like May’s spirit was hovering in a corner of the ceiling hearing every word, even though I wasn’t speaking out loud.
And I wish you would look up my mother, I said. Tell her you saw me, that I’m at least away from T. Ray for the time being. Say this to her: “Lily would appreciate a sign letting her know that you love her. It doesn’t have to be anything big, but please send something.”
I let out a long breath, still holding her dead hand, thinking how big her fingers felt in mine. So I guess this is good-bye, I told her. A shudder went through me, a burning along my eyelashes. Tears fell off my cheeks and spotted her dress.
Before I left her, though, I rearranged her a little. I folded her hands together and tucked them under her chin like she was thinking seriously about the future.
The Secret Life of Bees Page 19
