The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  It’s the rhythms of this life that, more than anything, have been wearing on me lately. The purest and best-tasting honey in the world comes from bees working the blossoms of the tupelo trees that grow in the Apalachicola River basin. But it doesn’t come easy. I’m married to our bees. For the spring bloom I load my boat and station close to four hundred hives on remote docks all along the river. If I’m lucky and the weather stays right, nectar flows for about two or three bust-ass weeks and then that’s it—tupelo season’s over. By the end of May I move all our hives off the river and up to Georgia. Some farmers over around Lake Seminole let me run yards on their land, so through the summer our bees pollinate watermelon and cotton crops—produce a red, baker’s-grade honey that keeps them healthy and helps pay the bills. After the first cold snap and the end of the cotton harvest, I’ll collect the bees a second time, move them to the back pasture of our farm in Wewahitchka. I use the off-season to give them their mite treatments, and—since nothing’s really blooming—I also put out corn syrup to help a bit, feed them like any other farm animal until the red maples blossom in January and the hives are ready to go back onto the river.

  I reckon it was the corn syrup that brought that skinny bear. She needed to get herself fattened up for winter, and a sweet whiff of that sugar must have been more than she could resist. It’s a real shame because it wasn’t her fault. A bear’s a slave to its nature same as us all. Still, she was messing with my rhythms, and messing with my rhythms just won’t do.

  At dark, Randall brings the Vietnamese man by the house to see the dead bear. Quan’s about our age—thirty or so—and we’ve met a couple times down at the shrimp docks. I shake his thin hand, and he follows me out back to our cinder-block honey house. He’s taller than me; hell, everybody’s taller than me.

  I’ve slid a steel swivel hook through a cut in the bear’s hind leg, used a chain hoist to lift her off the ground. She hangs suspended from an I-beam as an empty seed sack collects the thick blood slowly dripping from her mouth. Quan sets down a small ice chest and approaches the bear, making a back-of-the-throat clucking sound as he runs his hands through her dense black fur. He turns to me and smiles. “I’ll give you a thousand,” he says.

  I don’t have a clue what a bear might be worth, but my brother—that’s exactly the type of thing I’d expect him to know. I glance over at Randall standing in the shadows, see him flash three fingers. “Three thousand” I counter.

  Quan frowns. “I only brought a grand.”

  “That’s too bad,” I say, knowing better than to bid against myself. “Sorry we couldn’t work something out.” I’m walking out the door when Quan stops me.

  “Meet me at the docks tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll have another thousand.”

  Again I look to my brother, and he gives a split-the-difference shrug. Two thousand dollars ain’t gonna change my life but I don’t throw away money in any form. I nod and the deal is done.

  Quan borrows a hacksaw, and I hold the bear steady while he cuts off all four paws. Blade meets bone with a sound like a zipper scratching. He seals the paws in plastic bags and places them in his ice chest. I spin the bear, and Quan pulls a knife from his belt, makes a small, bloodless slit along the abdomen. Rolling up his sleeve, he wiggles a hand under the rib cage and slides his arm elbow-deep into the bear. He closes his eyes as he feels around, then gives a quick twist and smiles. I hear something wet tearing inside the bear, and when Quan withdraws his bloody arm he’s holding the pink gallbladder. He slices the pear-shaped gall free. “Very good,” he says. “Very, very good.”

  I’m fetching another Ziploc when I look up and spot Daddy. Randall left the door cracked, and our father has wandered into the honey house. The fly of his pajama bottoms is unbuttoned, and I can see his shriveled penis. He’s watching us work and grinning. Quan steps away from the bear, and I wince as he gives our father a deep bow.

  Daddy was in Vietnam. When I was a kid, the battery in our truck exploded and he didn’t speak for two days. So to see him standing there—docile as a dairy cow, smiling at the bloodstained Vietnamese stranger—that’s painful, reminds me just how far gone he is from the Alzheimer’s. His lips move but no real words come out. Frustrated, he stamps his bare foot down on the cold concrete.

  “Randall” I say. “Go bring Daddy back to the house.”

  My brother looks up and notices him standing there for the first time. “Sir, yessir,” he says, taking our silent father by the arm. Daddy shuffles outside, and it’s not until he’s left that I realize Quan’s watching me with sort of a heartbroken look on his face. He pats me on the shoulder with his clean hand, and I open the plastic bag wide. He slips the gallbladder in.

  After Quan leaves, Randall cuts the tenderloins out of the bear and wraps them in butcher paper for the freezer. I gather some shovels and we use the four-wheeler to take the carcass off our property, bouncing down a skidder trail until we reach an old briar-choked cutover. I’ve given Randall a couple of the hundreds, so he helps me scratch out a hole in the sandy soil without complaining any more than usual. For the most part we work in silence.

  Randall and I have the same brown hair, flat face, and gray eyes. Other than that, we’re about as different as a pair of identical twins can be. And I don’t only mean on the inside. During high school, I just stopped growing for some reason. Daddy used to say it happened because I thought too much—that was his way of making me feel better when Randall called me his little brother. Whatever the cause, fact is I turned out a size smaller. Five feet to his six. I was the one stuck inside our mother when she died. I think we all wonder sometimes whether that had anything to do with it.

  I reckon Randall suspects that I’m considering selling out—he jokes around the subject enough—but it’s not something that we’ve ever really discussed. I take care of Daddy and the bees, and Randall goes on taking care of Randall. I doubt that he cares one way or the other what I do. It’s all the same to him. My brother’s always said he wouldn’t spend his life farming bees. He’s been true to his word on that one point.

  I flip my shovel and toss another measure of dirt across the mutilated bear. “What do you want with that greasy meat anyway?” I ask.

  “You never ate bear?”

  “No, you?”

  “Oh man, best thing in the world.” Randall winks at me. “Tastes just like bald eagle,” he says, stealing the punch line of the old poacher’s joke.

  From the front porch I can see the flicker of the television through our living room window. Shedding my muddy work boots, I step inside and find Daddy asleep on the couch. I cover him with a quilt and sit down by his feet, start watching this show about dating.

  They’ve set an L.A. fellow up with four women all at the same time. They’re at dinner, they’re out dancing, they’re drinking champagne in a steaming hot tub. He sends the girls packing one by one until finally the credits roll and it’s just him and the winner. The new couple closes a door in the cameraman’s face and I guess that means they fuck. What an easy world they live in. I can’t imagine what my daddy would think about a show like this.

  I kill the television and he sits up with a gasp, like the silence has somehow surprised him. “It’s okay,” I say as he pulls at his hair. “You wanna go to bed?”

  Daddy shakes his head, and I watch him stare at that dead television. I swear, looking at him, you’d almost think he’s trying to remember something important to tell me before he goes on back to dreaming.

  I have some bear-busted hives to repair before I meet Quan, so I wake up early the next morning, leave the house carrying a hammer and a paper sack of tack nails. The frost on the field melts with the sunrise, and soon the cuffs of my jeans are soaking wet from walking through the slick green ryegrass.

  One of the hives has been ripped in half. I smoke the angry bees to keep them calm, then sort through loose frames searching for the queen. I mark all my girls with a little dab of paint on the thorax and so I find her soon enough, stu
mbling across the cold grass like a lost drunk. I’m helping her back into the box when one of her attendants takes flight. She finds her way under my veil and stings me on the cheek. That’s a tender spot so it hurts like hell. Just one more cost of doing business. I finish up with the hives and head back to the house.

  Randall’s in the backyard breaking up sections of dry pecan with the log splitter. He can’t hear me over the motor, so I wave until he sees that I’m leaving. He’s pretty good about keeping an eye on Daddy when I’m not around. I start up my truck and he shoots me the bird as a joke. That’s his way of saying goodbye.

  It takes me over an hour to drive down to Apalach. Easing along Water Street, I spot Quan scrubbing the deck of a fiberglass trawler. I figure that he needs some time to finish up so I make the block, stop at the Gibson Inn for a cup of coffee.

  Some sport fishermen are drinking bloody marys on the wraparound porch of the Gibson. They say hello as I pass and I smile at their outfits: the identical pairs of polarized sunglasses, flats gear from Orvis and Columbia worth more than all the clothes in my closet.

  It’s turned into a nice crisp day, so I take my coffee back outside and sit down on the wooden steps. The four fishermen are lined up in rocking chairs behind me, and I listen as they argue over the perfect tarpon fly, the best way to spot a tailing redfish.

  “Here he comes,” says one of the fishermen. I look up and see Archie rounding the corner. The old black man showed up in town a few days after the storm flooded New Orleans; people say he has a sister here, living somewhere near the tracks. He stops at the pay phone across the street and checks the coin return for change. This is something Archie does maybe two or three times an hour as he makes his wandering rounds through town. The fishermen have picked up on the rhythm of his routine and are laughing at him. “Watch this,” the heaviest one says after Archie ambles off.

  The fat man jogs across the street, and the sun flaps that are on the back of his long-billed cap bounce like a beagle’s ears. He stops at the pay phone and makes a big show of opening his wallet. I see him tuck a few bills into the change slot before he turns back around. The other fishermen are roaring with laughter as their buddy waddles up the porch steps.

  “Gonna make that old boy’s day,” he says, a little out of breath from the effort.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m finishing up my coffee when Archie comes around again. The fishermen giggle as he shuffles down the sidewalk. He’s drinking a brown-bagged beer and already there’s a wobble to his walk. Archie approaches the pay phone, and someone behind me says that this oughtta be good.

  The old man does a funny thing when he finds the money. I guess his first thought is that someone has gone and stuffed trash into the pay phone because he throws the bills down on the concrete. He’s starting to walk away when something clicks and he stops. He kneels down for a better look, and the fat fisherman says, “Well, looky here,” in a fake deep voice.

  Standing, Archie sees us white men sitting on the porch and freezes. “This y’all’s money?” he hollers. I look away as Archie takes a long pull from his beer.

  “What money?” two of the fishermen say at once.

  Archie wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt and studies us for a bit. We stay quiet as he shrugs and pockets the cash. The fishermen keep their poker faces until he disappears around the corner, then the fat one says, “This y’all’s money?” and they all start cackling as if pissing away money is the funniest thing that a man could ever do.

  I leave the truck parked at the Gibson while I walk over to the shrimp docks to see Quan. He’s finished washing the trawler, and I find him sitting alone on the trunk of a Nissan, smoking a cigarette. He looks so happy and relaxed that I almost hate to bother him.

  He smiles when he spots me crossing the street. “Hey, Jake,” he says, hopping to his feet like a gymnast. We shake hands and he removes a folded bank envelope from the front pocket of his shirt. “More hundreds,” he says. “Figured that’d be easier for you to count.”

  “Yeah, sure.” I check the envelope before cramming it into my torn canvas wallet. “Guess I’ll see you around.”

  “Wait.” Quan pulls a tiny vial from his sock and places it in my palm. “Here,” he says.

  I study the dark green fluid trapped in the glass cylinder. “This what I think it is?”

  “Pure bear bile,” he whispers. “Grandfather extracted a tiny bit last night after I told him about Mr. George.”

  “Jesus.” I shoot a nervous glance down Water Street. “All I need is to get caught with this shit.”

  “It’s a gift,” says Quan. “He said you should try giving some to your father.”

  “The hell I will.”

  “It might help him,” he says, stepping away. “Please take it.”

  Quan drives off before I can change my mind, so I put the vial in my pocket and stroll on back to the Gibson. I’m crossing the street when I see that the fishermen have placed an open bottle of wine on top of Archie’s pay phone. The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off.

  I back my truck across the road and onto the sidewalk. It’s a struggle, but I’m able to stretch my short arm out of the open window just far enough to grab the bottle off the pay phone. Angry fishermen howl from the porch, and I switch into first, roll past them trailing red wine like blood from an open wound. The bottle empties and I toss it into the bed of my truck.

  All of this makes me feel a little better, but I’m pretty sure I know what old Archie would say if he’d seen the show. He’d say, Don’t do me any more favors, son—I’ve never even had a sip of decent wine.

  I pass Glen Morgan’s place on my way back to Wewa and pull off the highway. The brand-new Dodge dually parked in his yard is painted Cat yellow and sports happy-honeybee decals on both doors. I can’t help but laugh. Morgan’s not a bad guy at all, but I swear he farms bees like he’s some kind of oil man.

  Tupelo Gold, Incorporated, accounts for about half of the five hundred barrels of commercial tupelo honey harvested every spring. That makes Morgan’s operation around ten times bigger than mine. He’s forever wanting more, and I imagine that’s what all his phone calls have been about. I figure it’s high time that I talked to the man—no harm in hearing him out.

  My old man and Morgan used to be pretty good friends, but Daddy would still badmouth him behind his back just a bit, say that he didn’t have enough pride in his product. And it’s true, Morgan does take a few shortcuts here and there. I go through the trouble to haul our hives into the swamp for a reason. Out on the river, the waterlocked bees don’t have anything to drink but blooming tupelo. But Morgan won’t fool with boats. His yards are on the high-ground edges of the swamp, and sure, his bees find plenty of tupelo—but they’re also sucking on the gallberries blooming over in the hardwoods about that same time of year. His honey suffers for that.

  Morgan comes out onto the porch just as I’m parking next to his ridiculous truck. He’s holding a picture book and has a granddaughter cradled in his big arms. When he sees that it’s me, he smiles and sets the girl down carefully like he’s releasing a bass. She runs back into the house with her book, and he comes down the steps to meet me.

  “Hello there, Jake,” he says. “Tried calling you the other day.”

  “I thought it might be better if I just came by.” We shake hands, and I see my fingers are stained red from the spilled wine. “Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of anything.”

  “No, course not,” he says. “How’s Georgie getting along?”

  “About the same, I guess.”

  “Well, y’all are in our prayers.”

  “Yessir. Thank you.”

  Morgan nods and scratches his neck. “Let’s take a walk,” he says. “I’ll show you my latest hobby.”

  I follow him around the house to an old goat pen that runs alongside his barn. There’s a little tin shelter in the corner. Morgan claps his hands, and I hear a sharp bark as two hound-size deer c
ome bouncing on out. They crowd up against the hog-wire fence, and I see the male has tiny forked antlers, the tusks of a wild hog.

  “What the hell are those?” I ask.

  “Muntjacs,” says Morgan. “From India or Asia or something. I went to buy peacocks off a fellow in Alabama and ended up with these guys. I just love ‘em.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “I’m hoping to breed this pair.” Morgan tears a handful of clover from the ground and sprinkles it over the fence for the muntjacs. “They’ll eat meat too, you know.”

  “Come on.”

  “No kidding. Wait here.”

  Morgan disappears into the barn, then returns wearing mule-skin work gloves and carrying a trap-killed rat. “Watch this,” he says, tossing the dead rat into the pen.

  The buck muntjac is the first to reach the rat. He snatches it into his mouth and does a victory lap around the pen with the doe trailing behind him. “Holy shit,” I say.

  Morgan chuckles as he shakes off his rat gloves. I watch the muntjacs fight over the rat for a long while before I realize that he is staring at me. “Here’s the deal,” he says. “Go ahead and make an inventory of all your equipment, all your bee leases, whatever else you can think of. I’ll make a real good offer if you’ll sign a no-compete.”

  “What, you gonna start working the river?”

  He shakes his head. “Oh no, not me,” he says, spitting over the fence. “Look, Jake, there’s only a handful of people left in the world that know how to make tupelo honey, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “My father taught me—and your father, God bless him, he taught you.” Morgan waves a hand across the sky. ”Ain’t nobody gonna just move down here and start doing this for a living.”

  I nod so he’ll know that I’m listening, but I’m also still watching the muntjacs. They’re tugging at the dead rat, and its hide has begun to tear. The doe jerks her head, and the rat’s ropy gray intestines spill out onto the dust of the goat pen.