The Beekeeper's Bullet

by Lance Hawvermale

  “Here we are, then,” he said, indicating the drawing. “This is how air passes through the engine and mixes with the petrol…” He kept it as simple as possible, not because Ellenor couldn’t understand it—indeed, she was as astute as anyone he’d ever met—but because his life might depend on the petrol igniting on the first try; it was important they got it right. That done, he discussed the correct form to use when swinging the prop. He took her out of the shed and pantomimed it several times. “Now you try.”

  She gave him a critical look. “You’re certain there’s no other way.”

  “Quite. I’m running out of time. The bombers arrive at Metz in four days.”

  “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Even if you get your sister out of the city in time, others will die.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about that.”

  “Those are factory workers, not soldiers.”

  “I didn’t authorize the attack. Those decisions are made far above my rank.”

  “So you’ll whisk your sister away and allow everyone else to be killed?”

  Alec rubbed his face. He needed a shave. He needed a shave and a fast plane and a ticket for two on a steamer back home. “Look, it’s like this. I’m no proponent of killing anyone, but if killing has to be done, then we might as well do it to the Boche. They started this infernal war, remember? So if the Allied Powers say we’ve got to kill Germans to defend France and Belgium, then I’m not going to ask them to call off an aerial raid that will save the lives of our boys by cutting off supplies to the enemy. That raid is going to happen, regardless of what I say or do. And maybe Sarah will get lucky and be at home or at the market when those nasty Breguet bombers dump their payload, but maybe not. Do I feel bad for the factory workers? I suppose I do. But they are not Sarah. They’re not my sister. So bugger them.”

  If he’d expected a dramatic reaction from Ellenor, she again surprised him. Instead of arguing, instead of challenging him with those emerald eyes of hers, she glanced back in the direction of the drawing just inside the shed door. “This plane is capable of doing what you need it to do?”

  “They call it a Rumpler. There’s a seat for an observer or gunner directly behind the pilot, and that means I’ve got a chance. I can’t get Sarah out of Germany in a car or smuggle her out in the back of a lorry, and we damn sure can’t make it on foot. It may be an ungainly beast, but the Rumpler has enough range to get me to Metz and then carry the two of us back across the Hindenburg Line.”

  “What if the gas tank isn’t full?”

  “Gas?”

  “Fuel. Petrol. How do you know there’ll be enough?”

  He hadn’t considered it, and that made him chuckle grimly. “Damn.” He shook his head at his own folly, then shrugged. “Let’s just hope those Hun flyboys keep their crates topped off, shall we?” He waited for her response. What was she thinking? She was the key to the entire half-baked operation, but if he hoped to see commitment in her eyes, he was disappointed. He had a sudden, curious desire to sit down on the grass and talk to her, because after tomorrow morning in the pre-dawn hours, he’d never see her again. He’d fly away, deeper into Germany, and then—God willing—back to France. He would never know if the German officers believed Ellenor’s false explanation for the theft. He’d never know if she ever discovered what ill had befallen her poor bees.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I wonder about you.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Why you’ve agreed to help me.”

  “It’s not too late for me to change my mind. I still might, you know.”

  “I don’t think you will.”

  Ellenor moved her hand in a way that said, You never know. “I hope this sister of yours is worth it. You tell her that Ellenor from New Mexico says hello.”

  “I certainly shall.”

  “Now show me again what I’m supposed to do so I don’t get my head cut off by this damned propeller. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, now, would you?”

  Smiling, he showed her.

  Chapter Nine

  Ellenor returned to the estate just before dinner and took her place at the expansive table, seated directly across from Hauptmann Gustov Voss. Between them was a beef rouladen in thick brown gravy, local chanterelle mushrooms, and a tureen of fatty vegetable broth and bread for dipping into it. The table was set with some of the expensive china; nothing but the best for their guests.

  Father stood and prayed.

  Ellenor wasn’t Lutheran. In fact, she wasn’t much of anything, as least as far as religion was concerned. Her papa had taught her to depend on herself. Salvation, he said, could be found first in your own two hands. As a girl, Ellenor and her family lived miles away from the nearest church, and her papa wasn’t about to load them all into a buckboard and snap the reins every Sunday just to hear an overeducated preacher from back east talk about the wisdom of Solomon, who supposedly had seven hundred wives.

  Solomon sounds like he couldn’t keep his privates in his pants, she recalled Papa saying.

  Ellenor bit down on her smile as Father concluded saying grace and took his seat with a pop of the crisp linen napkin in his lap.

  Everyone spoke at once, carrying on conversations around the table. Ellenor loved this about Father; he didn’t glower; he didn’t bolt his children to rigid manners; he didn’t impose his will on anyone, at least not with any great amount of pressure. He adored his family and the life he’d made. He valued robust friendship and found the idea of a quiet dinner table to be terrifying. So everyone, young and old, enjoyed each other and the food.

  Ellenor glanced at the grandfather clock with its massive pendulum. In less than twelve hours, she would touch the plane’s propeller for real and execute the movement she’d been taught. And with that, Lieutenant Alec Corbin-Dawes of the Royal Flying Corps would be on his way, a dream she would occasionally have years from now until the memory faded.

  “…unless Miss Jantz is still armed with her butcher’s knife.”

  She blinked and saw Voss smiling at her playfully. “I’m sorry. I was—”

  “Woolgathering? Yes, I’m prone to that myself. I was telling Father that I’d discovered his cache of wine but was swearing to abide by the rules of its guardian.” He tipped his glass of 1898 Fiano at her.

  “I’m afraid I make for a poor guardian. I’m more concerned with teaching Karl and Truda to conjugate verbs.”

  “A skill that some of my squad have yet to master.”

  He said this loudly enough that the other members of the Jasta, seated around the table among the family and staff, grunted in agreement or gave him a thumbs-up. They were a well-mannered and impeccably groomed lot of boys who thought they were men. The one seated next to Karl could barely eat for all the questions he was asked about his aircraft and his missions. He seemed happy to tell his stories to such an eager listener.

  “Personally, I enjoyed my language studies,” Voss continued, spearing a slice of beef. “I didn’t mind the Latin lessons, nor the Greek, but the little bit of Russian they wanted me to learn was akin to torture. They said it was important to read Tolstoy in the man’s original tongue. I’d rather muck out stables all day and spend all night cleaning the shovels.”

  Father nodded his agreement. “Russian can be challenging. It is the language of a cold and calculating people. And since their emperor abdicated a few months ago, the entire country is one wiggle away from anarchy.” He gestured with his fork. “Miss Jantz here is quite adept at languages herself.”

  “Is she?”

  Ellenor shrugged with one shoulder as she sipped her soup.

  Father looked at Voss. “Where would you place her accent?” He turned to Ellenor. “Mind providing a sample, Miss Jantz?”

  An uncomfortable warmth spread across Ellenor’s back. Her dress suddenly felt sticky. This was not where she wante
d the conversation to dwell. “I, um…” She quoted her favorite line from the philosopher Kant: “‘Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.’”

  “Hmmm. Do I detect a bit of a Lorraine patois?”

  Father laughed, his infectious baritone ringing out across the marbled hall. “She has you fooled, sir. Ellenor Jantz is a Yankee, born and bred.”

  Voss blinked as if he’d misheard. “You’re American?”

  “Guilty as charged,” she said in English. She switched back to German and added, “I hope you don’t hold that against me.”

  “You’ve no accent at all. You sound like a native.”

  “I seem to have a knack for the language.”

  “To say the least.” He put down his drink and laced his fingers in front of him. “How did an American woman come to be all the way over here in these humble farmlands?”

  “You’re not the first person to ask that. But the answer isn’t very exciting, I’m afraid.” She didn’t tell him about the dandelion; she didn’t relate the story she’d told to Alec. Instead she said, “I had few opportunities back home. A woman in the American West is often expected to perform a role to which I am not particularly well suited.”

  This seemed to please him. “You surprise me, Miss Jantz. My men refer to me as the Grizzled in part because I’m not often surprised.”

  My surprises have only just begun, she thought, avoiding another peek at the clock.

  Voss was about to say something else when little Truda started singing at the request of one of the airmen, and seconds later the entire table was clapping along, in between bites of beef-wrapped bacon and mustard sauce.

  Ellenor didn’t allow herself the luxury of relaxing, though she felt like slumping back in her chair. The last thing she wanted was the undue attention of Gustov Voss, as shrewd a fox hunter as they came. She’d sat down to dinner with the intention of passing the time as invisibly as possible, like a woman near the exit door at the back of a crowded theater, yet somehow she’d tumbled into the center of the scene.

  Things got better after that. Voss apparently forgot about her. He and Father fell into a complex discussion of the latest war offensive and how it was impacted by the increasing use of radio signals as a means of communicating across the battlefield. Observers in floating dirigibles were now able to relay troop movements to artillery emplacements on the ground. The other men of the Jasta, immaculate in their uniforms of dark gray with red piping, got up from the table and demonstrated flying maneuvers, much to the delight of the children. Ellenor watched them. They seemed too fit and full of good manners and jubilation to face death so often as they did. They spoke reverently of fallen Oswald Boelcke, the Saxon ace with forty kills who’d died last autumn when his Albatros collided with one of his own squadron members over Bapaume. He was only twenty-five.

  Ellenor, a virtual spinster at twenty-seven, felt ancient among them. What had she done in her life that would ever be a tale by which to entertain children when she was gone? Other than mastering a foreign language, she was nothing but a displaced American, an adequate teacher, and a mediocre beekeeper.

  And a virtuoso propeller-turner.

  Well, that remained to be seen.

  When one of the fearless young flyers asked for a tour of the residence and offered his arm, she surprised the hell out of herself by saying yes.

  ****

  Alec waited for nightfall doing something he’d never imagined: he sat among bees.

  Donning the pith helmet and its protective veil, along with a pair of gloves slightly too small for him, he walked up the hill from his hideout in the shed. Ellenor had told him that honey bees meant no harm.

  What about the harm they intend when they sting the shit out of you? he’d asked.

  That’s done only in self-defense.

  So if I don’t jostle them or swat at them or look at them funny, they’ll leave me alone?

  When a bee stings you, she dies. So yes, they’ll leave you alone.

  Alec thought about that as he shifted a bit on the grass, ten feet from the two remaining colonies. Bees formed a cloud around their stacked boxes, alighting on the landing boards with colored puffs of pollen stuck to their legs. Stinging was suicide, the last defense to protect the clan. Knowing that, Alec felt at peace, much as he did when patrolling the clouds at ten thousand feet. He thought of his fearsome S.E.5, which he’d dubbed The Dragon. When he was safe inside her belly and the ground so far away, it looked pretend, and he entered a kind of meditative state. He understood how the bees could do that for Ellenor. You learned to be the calm core in the middle of a storm.

  Darkness dropped its cloak across the sky.

  Alec lifted the veil over the brim of his helmet. He watched the bees disappear into the narrow slot that was the portal to their hot, dark world. Ellenor had told him the bees used the vibration of their bodies to keep the interior temperature at a constant ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, a deep, murky heat. Nighttime forced them inside. Soon it was too dark for both Alec and the bees, and the only thing visible was starlight.

  He sat and thought and waited for the hours to pass. He lay on his back and stared at all the silver shapes in the sky.

  When it was time, he stood up and took one long, emancipating piss before leaving the shed behind forever. He picked up a full canteen along the way, as well as a small tin of dried venison and nuts—a light meal to enjoy during his hopefully uneventful flight to Metz. He would be flying a German bomber in German skies and anticipated no trouble.

  He made his way in the dark, careful to remain on the path.

  Halfway down the hill, with a mile to go before he reached the villa and its support buildings, he realized he still wore the pith helmet. He took it off and studied it as he continued his hike, his eyes fully adjusted and making the most of the meager moon. Fashioned of Indian cork covered in khaki-colored canvas, it was the kind of lid worn when slicing through jungles or shooting at tigers from afar. Ellenor had looked charming in it, the heroine of her own dime store novel, The Girl in the Pith Helmet. Except she was no girl. She drove automobiles and shot fallen pilots with bolt-action rifles. She was a woman, make no mistake.

  Alec tapped the helmet against his leg as he walked. He’d give it back to her soon, though he would ask to keep the gloves so that his fingers wouldn’t freeze on the stick. He had no bees to keep the cockpit warm.

  The middle of his left hand was still a bright circle of pain. A little something to remember her by.

  He quickened his pace. The ache had left his muscles. Bruises remained, but his body came alive, rejuvenated by the task before him. He felt the tingle in his gut again, the very feeling he experienced before taking The Dragon out on patrol. That tingle meant you could be killed. It kept you on edge, kept you sharp, kept your head panning left and right to catch an ambush before it was sprung. That tingle was the combination of excitement and fear, and it was what made airmen on either side of the Front so different from the mud-crunching infantry below. A soldier on the ground charged a machine-gun nest to beat the devil at his own game; a pilot wanted to know what it felt like to be a devil himself.

  A hundred yards from the barley field where the Fokkers waited, flanking that lone bomber, Alec dropped into a crouch, half-smiling as he went.

  Chapter Ten

  In the summer of 1917, whether one lived in Germany or in any other civilized nation, the height of women’s fashion was decidedly not a coarse black sweater and Wellington boots.

  Ellenor examined herself in the looking glass. The sweater’s sleeves were long enough to cover most of her hands, exposing only her fingers, and its rolled neckline cupped her face just below her chin. It was made of sheep’s wool and stained black with plant dyes. She’d bound her hair behind her back; God forbid it got caught up in the propeller.

  Sure about this? she asked herself.

  “Not at all, thanks.” Certain highbrows claimed that women should not be seen in tr
ousers, but Ellenor had always found them far more practical when working outdoors. You certainly didn’t want bees hunting forage under your skirt. Her calf-high leather boots were years out of style but weatherproof, dependable, and—most importantly—comfortable. Her ensemble was utilitarian, but it fit her well, conforming to the natural curves of her body.

  She checked the porcelain-faced clock on the mantel in her room.

  Working by the light of a beeswax candle she’d made herself, she packed a small satchel for Alec. She’d washed his clothing—he’d been wearing Josef’s shirt and pants since that first day in the barn—and now folded it neatly at the bottom of the bag. She followed this with his flight goggles, a package of Nil cigarettes, a blanket, a few red phosphorus matches, and his blood-stained blue scarf. She’d wanted to include a flask of whiskey but had been afraid of being seen sneaking into the wine cellar.

  That done, she waited and paced.

  The entire house was asleep. She’d spent a good hour in light conversation with one of the German flyers, a nineteen-year-old from Cologne named Otto. He clearly wanted to seduce her, and in these pursuits he wasn’t entirely inept but certainly inexperienced. Ellenor didn’t hold it against him. Airmen were spontaneous and eloquent and exquisitely aware of death. They made women feel good for a night or two, and then they went off and died by the hundreds, many of them still smelling of perfume.

  “We’ll chat again tomorrow,” Ellenor had told him, and Otto played the part of the gentleman so well that she found it remarkable that he was fighting in the same war as men who ate cold beets in a muddy trench and shaved their heads to rid themselves of lice.

  It was time.

  She reviewed her assignment one last time in her mind, the lifting of her arms, the bending of her back, the straining of her muscles as she pulled. Alec depended on her to help him save his sister from the bombs, and that dependence was exhilarating; she had value beyond teaching Karl and Truda to speak English. She could rescue someone—at least indirectly. Maybe one day Alec would be able to write to her on clean British stationary and let her know that he and Sarah had made it home.