Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  Today, though, he was reluctant to come. He was done with classes by afternoon, but he had to pass chemistry and sociology—”No thanks to Donna,” he said pointedly—or his father would “kill” him. But when she said, “Okay, Tilden, we’ll find someone else,” he changed his mind.

  He’d be over in twenty minutes, he said, and he was, looking as though he, too, had a fever, he was so red-nosed and mad-looking. He’d had an argument with his father over his grades, was trying to calm down. He adored his father—or feared him— she didn’t know which. The sad thing was that Harvey, a little martinet, seemed to favor the older two sons over Tilden. He just wanted Tilden to “achieve” so he could brag that he had a son who’d “graduated college.”

  Feeling sorry for the boy, she spent extra time showing him what to do, where to mow; and finally, around three o’clock, she went alone to the Willmarth farm, donned her gloves and bee veil, and inspected the dozen hives she’d left there. They appeared to have wintered well, but the hives were crowded, and there was always the worry about swarming. Bees wanted plenty of space in the hives, and since the queen liked to move upward to lay her eggs, the best way to give her more space was to rotate the hive bodies throughout the springtime, putting the full upper hive body on the bottom and the empty bottom hive body on the top. By May the top body would be filled with brood, pollen, and golden nectar—food for any queen.

  When she opened the first hive, though, she found the bees in a defensive posture, their abdomens raised in the air in the sting position. Hungry, she decided, and defending their honey, of course—a metaphor for her own life. “Right?” she said aloud. But the bees only purred. She puffed smoke along the frame tops to quiet them, then medicated the brood against disease and closed the hive.

  Would she be able to nurture her own daughter’s life so easily? She’d hardly had a wink of sleep the night before, worrying about the college boy’s death, about the oddities of the situation. Russell, too, claimed on the phone that he hadn’t seen or heard a motorcycle when he left that morning. “You better go out and pull up that damn nightshade,” he’d said. “Could have been our own kids got in it. And get rid of some of those hives while you’re at it.”

  Russell was always complaining about her bees—he’d been stung once too often. You didn’t keep bees, he argued, bees were wild creatures; let them inhabit the tree hollows, gather pollen where they would. His ancestors, he said (although he had almost as much French blood as Abenaki), never kept bees.

  She sighed. She wasn’t trying to own the bees, she was just caring for them. Surely an Abenaki man would understand that.

  “Oh, well,” she said aloud.

  The hives checked and rotated, and a few of them fed with sugar syrup, she went back to the cow barn to report. She was surprised to find not only Emily there, but Donna, both girls squatting on upturned pails, in deep conversation with Emily’s mother, Ruth. When Gwen started to back out, Ruth called her in. “We’re talking about that boy’s death. Emily thought it might help your daughter to talk.”

  Ruth got up, looking flushed and fit in her jeans and denim work shirt. “Let’s all go in the kitchen. I’m done here anyway. Tim—he’s the hired man—will finish up.” She waved away Gwen’s I-don’t-want-to-impose plea and led the way to the house.

  When they reached the house, Donna put her hand on Gwen’s arm to stop her. “Mother, I told her everything,” she said, looking weary, her hair shoved back behind her ears, in need of a wash—it looked stringy, Gwen thought. “She’s helped people before. Emily brought me here. I told about this. It was under Emily’s door at the dorm last night.”

  She pulled a rumpled piece of paper out of her pocket. Gwen read it and paled.

  “And there’s more. I didn’t think so much of this. I mean, I thought it was Emily’s roommate who wrote it—she’s a bitch. But then this morning, on my voice mail at school—there was another message.”

  Gwen gripped her daughter’s arm. She felt a little faint, needing and yet not wanting to hear. The thick fragrance of hyacinths came from the house garden; she had to steady herself on the porch railing.

  Donna couldn’t say the words. She pulled away from her mother, ran up the steps and into the Willmarth kitchen. Gwen followed; the smell of strong coffee strengthened her. Ruth put a steaming mug in her hand.

  “I know how you feel,” Ruth said. “I’ve had my share of these hate calls. Sick people, you have to realize that. Most of the people around here are okay. Full of the old fears and prejudices, maybe, but usually they don’t interfere.”

  Gwen drank the coffee gratefully, tried to compose herself, to catch Donna’s eye to show her support, but the girl wouldn’t look at her. “I don’t know what anyone can do,” Gwen said, hearing her voice hoarse. “We don’t have all the facts yet, the blood tests. Olen Ashley—he’s a policeman, a friend—is sympathetic; he’s working on the case.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Ruth said, breathing in the hot coffee as though it were life-giving. “He’s a good cop, my friend Colm Hanna says. Colm will keep me posted. His father’s a mortician. He must already have the body. Or is it—”

  “The coroner, yes.” Gwen explained about the nightshade. “They said there were bruises, like somebody’d hit him. But I’m sure they came from contact with the plant.”

  “My son-in-law, Jack Sweeney’s, an ethnobotanist—if you need him.” Ruth leaned her elbows on the table, looked into Gwen’s face. “He’s my Sharon’s husband.”

  “Oh, I’ll remember that. Those parents, I understand from Olen, are litigious.”

  “It is their son,” Ruth murmured. Her eyes had a faraway look. Gwen recalled something about Ruth’s son, Vic, kidnapped at the age of ten. She couldn’t imagine it. What if it had been Brownie in that college boy’s place? What would she have done? She knocked her mug with an elbow, spilling the coffee. Ruth sponged it up, smiling, and poured a refill.

  Not sue, no, Gwen could never do that. Money couldn’t make up for a death. She didn’t want to meet the parents, but they had her sympathy. Her eyes filled, and Ruth reached over to put a hand on hers. She heard the girls murmuring at the far end of the, table.

  Changing the subject, Gwen told Ruth what she’d done with the bees. Ruth seemed delighted with the idea of bees making honey on her land. They would make it in her stead, she said jokingly, her honey days were over. She herself was diversifying, she said, she was growing hemp—”if illegally.” She was growing Christmas trees, she made maple syrup—although it hadn’t been a good season, too dry, too few cold nights. “Vic has chickens,” she added, “he brings in a little pocket money from the eggs. We’re getting by.”

  Gwen had heard about Ruth’s troubles, about how she was having to buy out her ex-husband’s share of the farm. Milk prices were low, she’d read in the papers. She was thankful she owned her bee farm fair and clear. The profit from the honey went for food and clothing, not for loan repayments.

  “I love to hear the bees,” Ruth said, pushing back a sheaf of gray-brown hair. She had a broad-cheeked face, clear brown eyes, dark curving brows. She looked, well, open, compassionate; Gwen was glad she’d come. “They’re in love with the wildflowers. I think the cows like them, too. They bring in the spring. They bring in life.”

  Gwen nodded; she felt it was true. About life, that is. But death was always there, that shadow across the land. It revisited on cloudy days when the bees were less active. And when she thought about Shep Noble.

  Donna was standing up now, she needed a ride back to class; she had a conference with her sociology professor. She seemed obsessed with her studies, as though hard work and routine would get her through this trauma. Gwen stood up, too; she and Donna said their good-byes and drove off down Cow Hill Road toward the college. It was a lovely April day: sun out finally, gleaming on the yellow rocket that bloomed happily in the ditch. The bees would be ecstatic. Sometimes Gwen imagined how it would feel to be a bee, to visit the flowers, suck up the swee
t warm pollen. Make honey. Such a richness! Her own life seemed drab by comparison.

  There was something wasteful, though, destructive, in the air—the opposite of making honey. It lay in Donna’s mood, something unspoken. Gwen was determined to bring it out into the light.

  “All right, tell me, Donna. What was the message on your voice mail?”

  Donna still couldn’t say the words. She fished in her jacket pocket, thrust a note at her mother: Go back to your teepee. You don’t belong.

  Enraged, Gwen shoved her foot down on the gas pedal, shot the truck forward.

  “Slow down, Mom,” Donna cried out. “There’s a dog in the road!”

  Gwen swerved and the dog, a scrawny black Lab mix, dashed across in front of the truck.

  “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that,” she shouted at her daughter. “That you don’t belong. It’s the Alyces who don’t belong, the hate people—not you!”

  But Donna was shaking her head; her thick unwashed hair fell across her eyes, making a shadow on the dashboard. “Not in that college, Mom. I’m the one who doesn’t belong there. And it wasn’t Alyce. It wasn’t her voice. It was a male voice.”

  “Be right with you, Donna.” Professor Camille Wimmet looked up briefly and then back at her computer. She was frowning into it.

  “I’ll come back another time. You’re busy.”

  Donna backed toward the door, but the teacher said, “No, no, sit down. We had an appointment, didn’t we? I was just working on something.” She quickly saved her work, then exited the screen.

  “Just a project,” she said when she saw Donna looking at the blank screen. “Nothing to do with our class. A somewhat controversial project, something people might not like to read.” She smiled. She had a nice smile, a little crooked. A light-colored mole to the right of her lips added mystery to a rather plain but cheerful face. “Sit down, Donna, please. Tell me how I can help you.”

  Donna drew up a chair, “Professor Wimmet—” she began.

  “Call me Ms. I don’t have tenure—not yet. I may never have. Not unless ...” She waved a hand at the computer again. “Well, it’s all right.” She laughed softly and fluttered her hands. Her fingers were long and slender—Grandpop would say she should make baskets, Donna thought. “Who really wants to be in that rat race?” the teacher went on. “This is a male-dominated faculty.”

  Donna felt uncomfortable. She didn’t want to hear about her teacher’s personal life. Nor would she tell the professor—Ms. Wimmet—about her own troubles. She just needed a subject for her paper, that was all.

  Ms. Wimmet was looking at her, waiting for her to speak up. She took off her gold-rimmed glasses. The violet-colored sweater she wore was the exact color of her eyes.

  Donna took a deep breath. “It’s about my paper. I was thinking of writing about the early settlers coming into this state. Why they came, who they were, what they did when they got here. What problems they might have faced. Still do, um, face.”

  Ms. Wimmet was looking intently at her. Donna felt herself blush. Her own skin had a cinnamon cast, her eyes almost a blue-black. She didn’t look like the progeny of Anglo-Saxon Vermont settlers. She felt she had to explain herself.

  “My ancestor on my mother’s side was captured by the—the Abenaki people,” she said. “In a Massachusetts raid. Her name was Elizabeth Jackson. Her daughter who was also captured, was separated from her. The daughter married an Abenaki man and even when she later had the chance refused to come home. My mother has a journal Elizabeth wrote later in life.”

  The teacher looked interested. Her lips parted in an 0. “I’d love to read that,” she said. “Is it published anywhere?”

  “Oh, no, my mother just has it.”

  “So you want to trace that history? Know more about your ancestors? The Abenaki side, I mean? You’d have to study the Indians of the period, as well. That is, if you want to bring in the capture, and then the reasons why the daughter refused to come home. You could use the journal for part of your research.”

  Ms. Wimmet seemed excited now; she looked as though she would really like to know about the journal. “But your paper is for a sociology class. You’ll have to focus on the structure of the world your ancestor lived in, the structure of the Abenaki society. Where was she taken to? St. Francis? I know many of the captives were.”

  “Odanak,” Donna said, using the Indian word for the St. Francis Reservation that was just north of Vermont, in Canada. Her grandfather could help her with some of that history. He had come originally from Odanak. He still had relatives there on the reservation. You had to be at least one-quarter Abenaki to live there.

  The teacher was leaning on the desk now, her elbows like lavender wings. Her violet eyes bore into Donna’s. “I think this will be an absolutely fascinating paper. I’ll learn from it, too. You see, I’ve been interested myself in, well, the Abenaki culture. Not just the Abenaki, but the Franco-American connection. There has been a lot of intermarriage, I know. I have French-Canadian blood myself.”

  “Really? But you don’t look—”

  “It’s the Scandinavian in me, on my grandmother’s side, some recessive gene. Strange the way genes work.” She was smiling at Donna now, like she really cared about Donna, like she wanted Donna to write a really good paper. Then she looked back at her computer, as though she longed to get back to the paper she was writing, the one she was calling “controversial.”

  It seemed the interview was over. Donna stood up. “Well, then,” she said, “I’ll get going on it. And if you want to read the whole of my ancestor’s journal—I’m sure my mother would be glad to have you read it.”

  The teacher sounded interested, like she might really come up and read it. “Where do you live?” she asked.

  When Donna told her, she cried, “Oh! Where Leroy Boulanger works? I knew he had something to do with bees. I keep meaning to go up and see him. He’s a cousin—on my mother’s side.” Her mother’s sister had married a Boulanger, she explained, then divorced him. Leroy was the child of that brief marriage, and her only cousin. “A bit of a black sheep, my mother used to say.” She laughed a little as she said this. The distance between a college teacher and Leroy Boulanger was vast. Donna had to smile, too. Leroy wasn’t dumb, but he certainly wasn’t a college type.

  Anyway, Donna was feeling at peace for the first time since Saturday night. She felt as though things might work out after all. Ms. Wimmet was on her side. She stood up, too. They were both smiling. Shep Noble had said there was something “funny” about the teacher—Donna had no idea what he’d meant. And she didn’t care. She liked Ms. Wimmet.

  Outside in the corridor. Donna drew a deep breath and hurried to the main door. She would have to ride her bike home today, her mother needed the pickup. Leroy was always willing to come when “,he called, but she didn’t want to see Leroy, even if he was Ms. Wimmet’s cousin. She didn’t like the way he’d been looking at her since that awful night. He acted like he was her guardian; he was far too possessive. She didn’t want anyone possessing her.

  She walked outside to unlock her bike. She hadn’t used it since yesterday; she’d gotten a ride to school. There were students moving about the campus in different directions. She thought she saw heads turn, fingers point. It had to be her imagination, she told herself, not everyone could be watching. A girl had come up to her just that morning, to say, “How awful it must have been for you, Donna.”

  Her green bike was in its usual spot, but it wasn’t wholly green anymore. Someone had painted words on it in red. SQUAWS FUCK, the red paint shrieked at her. And on the other side, SQUAWS KILL. She saw two ZKE boys in a doorway, grinning at her; they went back inside when they saw her looking at them.

  She rode home in a daze. She wanted to get as far away from Branbury College as she could. She wanted to get her bike in the barn, paint out the cruel words. She couldn’t find any green paint, so she slapped on black over the red. When Tilden Ball appeared in her driveway with a mower,
she held her breath to keep from screaming at him.

  “I need your help with my paper,” he said, stalking up behind her on his long skinny legs. “I don’t know what to write about. I could fail the course! Dad will kill me.”

  “Let him kill you, then,” she shouted, exasperated. “What do I care?”

  Chapter Four

  The hate notes could have been someone from the fraternity. Shep was popular there,” Emily told her mother when she came home to do a wash. “Most kids wouldn’t blame Donna. But some asshole evidently has. Donna’s a basket case.”

  “Can you blame her?” Ruth said. She’d had the experience herself, the implication that she didn’t belong—not in the college world, but in the cocktail world of the new arrivals from downcountry. As area farms failed, Ruth had felt her psyche shrinking; hers was one of a handful of small dairy farms left in the town of Branbury. Her ex-husband, Pete, wanted $100,000 for his share of the farm; she’d paid off a quarter through loans from the bank, from friends like Colm Hanna. Now Colm was offering to buy up Pete’s share himself, become her partner.

  But Colm wanted more than just a share of the land. He wanted her, Ruth—as a bed as well as business partner. Did she really want that—was she ready for it? She had to decide. If she didn’t, it wouldn’t be fair to Colm; to take his money, but withhold herself. Did one ever know an answer to a question like that?

  Emily was talking again. “I feel like that myself, Mom, rooming with Alyce Worthington. She makes me feel like a dumb little farm kid. Which I am, I suppose. I’ve never even been to New York City, where she goes at least once a month. She talks about the Met and the MoMA, and the Park Avenue apartments where her friends live. Her father’s a big-time architect. Her mother spends her afternoons pouring tea at the charity gigs. I can’t stand it, Mother. I can’t! I might... stab her one day. With a pitchfork. I’ve been thinking of taking one to school.”

  “Stop that talk. The year’s almost over. You can cope. Then you can change roommates. Or live at home.”