The Job of the Wasp

by Colin Winnette

  Fry let the knife fall. Other boys clung to one another. A few sat stunned at the scattered tables. There was no thunder or lightning. Had the rain really stopped? I wondered. I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear anything.

  “Untie him,” said Nick, pointing at me, finally without malice, “and let’s go bury the Headmaster.”

  The decision was made to bury him in the garden. It was still dark out, but there were lanterns in the hallway closets of the dormitory, and we sent a group to collect them. We would bury the Headmaster and Hannan together, in the loose dirt, and maybe one day we would eat a pumpkin in their honor. It made us smile, but it was not a joke.

  No one was friendly after they untied me, but they were no longer trying to kill me, which I considered progress. We didn’t speak as we made our way down the hill to the garden, the Headmaster in the wheelbarrow and Hannan wrapped in a sheet, carried by several boys at each end.

  We took turns digging, and I kept looking to the horizon, expecting the sun to appear one moment after the next. But it didn’t. I had no sense of what our plan for the future would be. Our plan for the facility. It wasn’t the right time to ask. It all seemed to make sense to the other boys, so I let it go, taking my turn with the shovel and trying to act as agreeable as possible. It was clear to me that unity could never truly be achieved if everyone wanted to lead the unification process. I had gone about the project all wrong, storming in and demanding respect. I had expected it and accepted nothing less. It was no wonder they’d wanted to open me up.

  The boy who could not keep his glasses on spoke over the graves after we were done with them.

  “I have a poem to read,” he said, taking a lantern and holding it up as he withdrew a bit of paper from his pocket. “I’ve only just written it,” he said, “and it’s not very good.”

  Each of us found some part of the earth to watch as he read.

  “I am a little bug,” he said. “Maybe not one of the ones that stings, but one people still bat away or crush with a book. Maybe one that people aren’t afraid of, but one they don’t necessarily want to look at. I once had a fold of fabric under which I was protected. To which I could comfortably cling and where I felt safe, which is important because a bug is always in danger. But it is the nature of cloth to move and unfold. It is the nature of weird little bugs to move too, though cloth is never afraid, as we bugs can be. Today I am shaken from my fold and falling. That’s all I’ve got so far.”

  He was right. It wasn’t good. We applauded his efforts and began our silent ascent of the hill.

  In the morning, maybe some of us would go for help. Or maybe we would live out the rest of the summer alone at the facility, placing orders with the grocer and the tailor on the Headmaster’s behalf. I had no sense of how the other boys would want to handle the situation. I released the notion that I should be the one figuring it out. I released the notion that it would need to be figured out at all. Since my arrival, I had been moved through a series of events with very little control over what happened from one moment to the next. I saw my mistake as that of the nervous man in quicksand. All along I had been struggling, sinking faster and wearing myself out. But here was a second chance, an opportunity to amend any errors of judgment and action. I would listen to my brothers at the facility and I would try to be calm. I would try to rest. Surely there was a sound mind among them.

  I looked to the others as we moved up the hill. I hardly recognized their faces, as I hadn’t taken the time to get to know them. Each was unfamiliar to me, or only recently and tenuously made familiar. It was as if I had just arrived at the facility, though I had been there for months, living with these boys whose faces I had failed to even register. I was disgusted with myself in that moment. Or disappointed. I was melancholy on our walk back up to the facility. I thought of all there is in life that goes unnoticed. All that I had failed to absorb in my self-centered and steadfast barreling. I could start living for others, I realized, when we began our new life together. Not every plan had to be one that I agreed with, or even one I understood. Not every plan had to be designed to move me forward. Those rarely panned out besides. I could celebrate and learn from the individualities of my cohort. I could do what they asked, when they asked it, and we might one day find some common humanity. One that had nothing at all to do with understanding or rationality but was based solely on service and collaboration. I didn’t have to understand my brother to help him. And which of these boys could not use help?

  I’d failed to see it before. I hadn’t allowed myself. It was the same with the Headmaster. All he had ever done was try to help me, and I’d spent all my time trying to pick apart his every move. Wrenching every good intention into a talon. Our poor Headmaster, who had been nothing but patient, who had packed up and come to stay with us during a thunderstorm out of love and fear for our safety, who had left his wife and warm fire and steaming cup back at home and come to serve a group of boys, the newest member of which was an ungrateful paranoid, suffering from conspiratorial delusions that had left him friendless, without sympathy, and so distanced from reality as to make him hardly lament the numerous deaths he’d witnessed over a period of a few days, not to mention the one death he had actively participated in, had in fact caused. So many corpses piling up, so many severances and so much suffering, and this new boy, fat with greed and anxiety, had only thought to work out how it all related to him, how every incident seemed part of a constellation that ultimately came together to form the image of his own grubby face. Yes, a grand conspiracy directed at me. Of course that was it. How sensible and astute.

  On our brief trek up the hill, I couldn’t understand how I had been so stupid and yet felt so smart. It was astonishing to think of how right I could feel while being so incredibly wrong. In my mind, every piece had fit together, whether or not I’d had to force it. Of course it was all an overly complicated plot to cover up the murder of our beloved Ms. Klein, rather than a twist in the natural chaos of living, a simple, tragic expression of the one wholesale truth of our corporeal existence, that it one day, comically, accidentally, suddenly, horrifically, comes to an end. A truth that had nothing at all to do with me or my life in the facility. Confronted with the unexpected death of Ms. Klein, the Headmaster had perhaps meant to respond quietly and privately, out of kindness, so that he might spare those of us in our youth more grief. It had simply been an accident, my discovering her body in the garden. I’d had nothing to do with it at all until I inserted myself.

  I felt a deep connection with those now dead, as none of us had ended up where we’d expected. That connection then extended to the other boys as well, who were alive and swarming around me on our way up the hill, like wasps knocked from their nest. We were starting over. Working back toward some semblance of normalcy yet again. Only this time, I would meet them in the swarm. I would join the others, and our life together would unfold as it saw fit. And, armored as we now were by our shared experience of the recent and life-altering events at the facility, we could more easily face the undeniable challenges of any human life head-on. As we each inevitably fell away in the years to come—as humans have always done and will always do—we might say our final farewells in whatever fashion we preferred, nodding or waving or smiling or wailing as our strange family, one by one, vanished through a braided door. I imagined myself on my back in bed, some day in the distant future, and a much older Nick rushing to my side to tell me that one of the other boys was approaching his end. The group of us would gather around that sick boy’s bed, intermittently holding his hand or his arm, telling jokes and stories about our early years together, until he was gone. It was beautiful to imagine, however far away it felt.

  Moved as I was by the thought of Nick one day rushing to my side, I also felt a twitch of something in the back of my mind that would not yet present itself in full, so successfully had I surrendered to the spirit of the group. I climbed on, up the hill, but the itch did not pas
s, so I made one last effort to focus on the idea, to see what was there and to understand its relationship to the comforting thoughts I’d only just been having. One last effort to think through whatever was bubbling up in the back of my brain so that I might release it, as I had done with all my other impulses toward heroics.

  And, after a moment, it came to me, just as the storm had set on, or as the wasps had lifted from their nest when it split, that the Headmaster’s wife was still at home, anticipating her husband’s return. There was no knowing at this point how long it had been since he left. How many days she imagined he would be sleeping at the facility with us. She would have been pacing around the house that night, ignorant to his new resting place in the garden and to the situation of his heart. It grieved me to think of it. I couldn’t have spoken if someone had asked me to in that moment, so choked was I then by the image of his dog, coiled in the seat his master usually occupied, grateful in that rare comfort for the Headmaster’s absence but also eager for his rapid return. What kind of woman was she? I wondered. Was she made anxious by the storm? Probably not, if he’d been so willing to depart during the crisis of it. I imagined she was fairly independent. Our Headmaster was too soft around the waist and kind in the eye to have married someone who needed a ballast. On the contrary, I imagined she’d supported him in times of emotional strife. As Nick would one day rush to my side, I understood that one of us must now rush to hers. It would be too cruel to just leave her as she was: home, alone, no doubt enjoying the peace but still eagerly anticipating the return of a loved one. Her only family. Her doting husband. And how he must have doted on her! Our kind and beloved Headmaster.

  Once again, I was confronted with the need to take action. While I wanted desperately to drift into the background of our new life together at the facility, I could never truly give myself over to it now, not with the thought of the Headmaster’s wife still scraping at the back of my skull. Every moment that passed without her knowing the truth added to her inevitable suffering. To realize that we had known and not told her. That we’d buried her husband without her, said our goodbyes without her, then moved on, back toward a new life on the hill, without saying a word. It was too much to bear. I would go down immediately, and I would tell her outright what had happened. I would do my best to console her in the face of her new tragic situation, and then I could rejoin my brothers at the facility. I could ease into the background after that—as I had already started to do, and as I so longed to do—and allow things to come as they may.

  I dropped my pace and let the slower boys move around me. It wasn’t a complicated plan, and it wouldn’t take long, just a single conversation on the subject, along with whatever explanations she might need plus however many repetitions she might request when it came to the stranger details. In her distant way, the Headmaster’s wife was still a part of our family there at the facility, and I would be providing her a necessary service, however difficult it would be, just as I’d been celebrating the importance of doing only moments before.

  I watched the other boys drift slowly homeward, certain it was better in all respects not to alert them of my departure. Why burden them with this final grim task? Why force them to confront the thoughts I was now having, of the Headmaster’s wife wrapped in an enormous green shawl, huddled by the fire and glancing up every so often to view a picture of our deceased Headmaster, radiant with love for him, grateful to have him in her life, though maybe they did not always get along, it was true, but still he was hers and she was his, and their life together must have been fairly good, as far as lives went. Why add to the night’s collective suffering? How much could these boys take? And why run the risk of a debate? No. I would slip away without their noticing, as I’d done so many times before, and head down the hill to her small home. I would tell her on my own. Then we would be done with it. Then I would be done. I could tell the boys after, and they would be grateful to have it over with. Grateful even to me, maybe, for having taken it on myself. The last thing the new widow needed was twenty-five or so boys showing up at her door in the middle of the night, scrambling to tell her that two of their cohort had possibly murdered her husband then vanished through the braided wooden door of our dining hall. That wouldn’t do. Alone, I could be casual in my presentation but sympathetic. I could focus on her and her loss, and make room for her suffering. I would hardly be there at all. I had never done anything like it before, but I was fully confident in my ability to perform this final task as it needed to be done.

  the widow and death

  The walk down to the Headmaster’s home was a solemn one. I first had to pass back by the garden, where the dirt was freshly turned, and by extension the lake, which sat like an abyss on the horizon. The earth was wet with rain. Branches and leaves were scattered over the hill and in the grass. Everything was still, as it tends to be after a storm, but somehow radiant, as if the lightning had left in all of it some small bit of its charge. I could not remember the last time I’d wandered outside after a storm, so I took in the scene as if it were my final opportunity.

  Above me there were no stars granting definition to the infinite mass that envelops us. I thought for a moment of our insignificance, then cast aside the idea. If we were truly insignificant, then there was nothing more trivial than pondering insignificance. There were bodies in the garden, in the lake, and I had been saved by a brother, who had, in order to do so, sacrificed not only his own family but himself. Insignificance seemed hardly to matter at all.

  I imagined myself collapsing on the hill and letting the sun rise up around me, warming the dew from my body and blocking out the starless dark. Yes, I was cultivating poetic impulses. I was in search of an elegant phrase or thought. I wanted to somehow acknowledge this occasion, my final solitary excursion before I returned to the facility of orphaned boys, and a celebration of my life thus far. Our lives thus far. It was remarkable to me, and so I searched for my remarks.

  I spotted smoke in the distance, and then the dark roof of the Headmaster’s home. The lake was just out of view now, which was lucky for me, I realized, though unlucky, I felt, for the Headmaster and his wife. Still, when I finally set my eyes on it, their home seemed like the best any of us could hope for in this life, view or no. It was a small house on a green hill, privately owned, with smoke leaving the chimney and no one banging at the door. It was theirs, their small part of the world, like a burrow carved directly into the earth by hand, and the two of them had lived there in accordance with their hearts, quietly making do for as long as they could.

  I’m not sure why I felt so confident the conversation would go well. For days, my actions and encounters had led only to more distress, more danger. Nothing I’d attempted turned out as I intended. Even so, I was pleased to find myself nonetheless compelled toward a final act of kindness before falling in with my brothers at the facility. Simply having made it down the hill without question or trouble brought to boil in me an inexplicable self-assurance that refused to cool no matter what worry I blew its way.

  When I arrived, I raised the knocker and let it fall. Their walkway was made of large stones lined up like lily pads. A metal vase full of flowers had been tipped off the porch by the rain, and I was bending to set it right as the black door groaned open.

  “Ashley,” said an old woman in an enormous green shawl. Her eyes were nearly white, as if a tablecloth had been placed over them, but I could still see their former blue beneath the transfiguration of old age, as well as the quick movements they made when she examined me.

  “No,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m new to the facility. Or relatively new, and I’ve come with some delicate information. I think we should sit down inside, if you have a set of chairs we might be able to use.”

  “It’s very late,” she said.

  There was something labored in the way she spoke, as if she held something in her mouth. I would have worried I’d interrupted her at dinner, but as she’d just reminded me,
it was late.

  “I know,” I said. “I can’t begin to tell you how long the night has been for me. But I’ve arrived with something you’ll want to hear, and the sooner we get to it, the better for both of us. You’ll have to trust me.”

  “Always so urgent, Ashley,” she said. “But of course, if you want to talk, yes, let’s talk.”

  I righted the vase, but it tipped again the moment I let go, dumping more of the flowers off the porch and into the mud. The sound of it hitting the stone at our feet echoed a sound I’d heard before but could not place.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “The flowers don’t mind,” she said.

  She stepped aside, making room for me to move past her and into the house, which smelled so intensely of pumpkin pie I nearly vomited. It’s possible I’d felt like vomiting for some time and my body had only finally found its excuse. Either way, I was still for a moment as I choked it back, and when she looked at me I was able to conjure a smile.

  “What is that smell?” I said, as she signaled for me to follow her to the hearth, where two chairs sat on either side of a small fireplace, in which a low fire was burning.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m not sure. The rain sometimes gets into the support beams under the roof, which can make the place feel like an old cave. Is that what you’re smelling?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I assure you it’s not.”

  “It might be the chair you’re sitting in,” she said. “I can’t say I remember the last time it was washed, and Henry never showers without sitting down for a few minutes in front of the fire after work. It’s thick with his must, I’m sure.”