In the Garden of Rusting Gods

by Patrick Freivald

  The boy gasped as she leapt on him, long black thorns piercing his lungs and throat and limbs. He shuddered and gasped out a last, gargling breath, hot and wet. When he lay still, she wrapped the body in blankets and carried it outside, past endless rows of homes and paved dirt and electric lights, into the starving remains of the forest.

  Her glade had disappeared, replaced by tortured bones and oil and stone. She would create a new one.

  Singing under the susurrus of a bright moon, she scraped leaves from the ground and dug into the soil beneath. Deep enough, she unwrapped the body, stripped it, and stuffed it into the hole. First leaves, then a little soil.

  With trembling hands, she plucked the acorn from her temple, cooed and sang to it, breathed herself into that beautiful potential, and placed it into the bloody mass. The fawn’s life would meld with the remnants of hers and produce a new beginning, a sapling. The rest of the soil went on top, then a scattering of leaves.

  She couldn’t let them find the acorn, so she carried the blankets deep into the woods and stuffed them into a crevasse in the ravine. Unable to contain herself, she scampered back to sing to her spirit, to infuse it with life so that she might grow again. As darkness turned to dawn, she crept back to the house to wait.

  Men dressed in blue came in white steeds with angry red, flashing eyes. They banged through her halls and stone roots, they searched the forest. They brought dogs, but she sang to them and told them of her sorrow and pain, and they defied their masters and found nothing.

  The days within filled with weeping and rage, with somber gatherings of humans she did not know. She cared nothing for them, only for the acorn and what it would become. Each night she crept to the glade and sang and cooed and cajoled, and its tiny voice joined with hers in the sweetest harmony.

  A month passed. Two. Spring turned to summer as they sang together. Summer became fall. The humans left, and took their boxes and furniture and scent with them. The house fell dark with no one to light it, and worry crept into her songs. As the first chill of frost bit the air, she dug in the glade.

  She lifted the crumbling, rotten acorn in her hand, disbelief and loneliness her only thoughts, and the forest quaked with her despair. Had she not sung? Did it not have rain and sun and rich soil? Had she imagined its tiny voice, calling to her as she sang, entwining with hers in the harmony of new life?

  She fled to the house, cold and unfeeling and empty, and ran to the attic. She found the beam and dove into it, melding and becoming one with her prison. Her loss consumed her through the frigid winter months, cold but not cold enough.

  In the darkness of February, humans visited. A few at a time, always with the same woman, with hair the color of beech bark. They talked, a cacophony of goose sounds, and toured the empty home. A family moved in, a man and a woman with a small boy fawn, and filled her with noise and life.

  As maples pumped sap into their boughs and the willows budded, she realized the truth. She stood in the attic and fingered the acorn on her elbow, tiny and green and full of promise and joy. No longer a tree, she didn’t have the strength to breathe into it, couldn’t give it what it needed.

  One hadn’t been enough. Not enough life, not enough blood. She’d need them all.

  In the attic darkness she sat and cooed and whispered, and waited for night.

  EARL PRUITT’S SMOKER

  “Earl Pruitt died.”

  Jamie Schwaeble froze, forkful of hash browns halfway to her mouth, ears pricked to catch the rest of the old man’s pronouncement. A mainstay at church each Sunday, Pruitt and his wife had kept to themselves despite generous annual donations to the congregation.

  “His wife found him last evening, next to some of those hives of his.”

  “Was he allergic?” His companion, the square-jawed man who worked the counter at the auto parts store, darted a glance at Jamie, from her face to her chest and back up. She turned away, flushing, and buttoned the top of her blouse to hide the glimpse of white T-shirt beneath.

  “No,” the older man continued. “Been stung a million times and never had a problem. Must have been his heart, or his brain.”

  “At his age? Could have been anything.”

  Their conversation wandered from the weather to plans for Vacation Bible School but came back to Pruitt, and the auction his widow planned to make up for their lack of life insurance.

  Goosebumps shot up Jamie’s arms, a tingle of excitement she shared with, she was sure, a hundred other people. The reclusive old beekeeper never let anyone on his property, a fenced-off farm on the far edge of town that boasted who knew how many bee hives scattered around the barns and outbuildings just visible from the road. The thought of getting a taste of what he kept inside, maybe even picking up a little something, brought a flush of heat to her cheeks.

  Pastor Carr would have something to say about such feelings, as he did about any feelings that didn’t keep a soul on the narrow, straight path to Heaven. She’d trembled under the weight of his words, one with the hundreds of sinners to bow down at his church each Sunday, and if he were here he’d see the excitement on her face and ask her, and she’d tell him, and he’d admonish her for her sinful desires. She turned back to her food, grateful for her corner booth where the old men and young men couldn’t tempt her with their knowing looks and their lustful smiles. She wanted those smiles, and the promises behind them, and knew that wanting them was as wrong at twenty-two as it had been at fourteen.

  She paid her bill and fled home to her lonely single-wide, all she could afford on a retail salary but enough to escape the stifling attentions of her stepfather and his son.

  Guilt knotted her insides, twisted and pulled at her conscience the rest of the week, castigating her for her weaknesses. But the next week she drove to Pruitt’s farm, through the main gate and onto the parcel of lawn now dedicated to parking. Her turtleneck and loose-fitting jeans hid her body from leering eyes, so she hoped the Lord would forgive her a touch of eyeshadow, a tiny rose of blush. Pastor Carr had called beekeeping a vocation suitable for a young woman who had not yet found a husband, a holy calling as old as the New Covenant itself.

  Hundreds of people milled around, most of them old bearded beekeepers in denim and fraying flannel. License plates on their vehicles said everything from Georgia to Montana to Maine, but they talked like neighbors as they surveyed the equipment, slapping their hands with battered, wrinkled checkbooks. Some had brought flatbed trucks and forklifts in anticipation of going home with something worth the trip, while others spoke of U-Hauls should the need arise. She hovered around them, another group she could join but never quite become a part of.

  Jamie had read of the dangers of used woodware, most especially the specter of American Foulbrood destroying her girls and every honeybee colony within flying distance, so she avoided even the so-called “nuc boxes”—half-sized chipboard containers built to hold starter colonies. Cost and practicality kept her from bidding on the larger equipment—centrifugal extractors, chain uncappers, and other esoteric machines of great use to large commercial operations but far too much for a clerk with one hobby colony she’d owned for less than a season. Even if she could have afforded them, a lack of time and space prevented her from considering the live colonies, grouped as they were in five-pallet blocks, four hives on each, each lot starting at two thousand dollars.

  She stopped cold, frozen in place by a table heaped with Pruitt’s personal equipment. A dozen beekeeping books, including a first edition Richard Taylor with a reserve of $100, hive tools and other widgets and bobbins piled into musty cardboard boxes held together with little more than duct tape and hope. She fingered through several of the books, interesting for their historical perspective but of little use in the age of varroa mites, GMO crops, and neonicotinoid pesticides; she’d have bought them all if she’d had the money.

  Someone cleared their throat, drawing Jamie’s gaze.
r />   Mrs. Pruitt sat off to the side as strangers poked through her late husband’s things, modestly dressed in a New York Giants sweatshirt, faded jeans, and dusty brown cowboy boots. Her white hair shone almost blue under the summer sun, and webs of old, dark blood crackled under her papery, liver-spotted skin. The childless widow wore a tight-lipped, mirthless smile, a mask of propriety against the lonely cruelty of a life ended, a seventy-three-year marriage that wouldn’t see seventy-four. The ancient woman watched for a while, then retired behind the hard wood of her farmhouse door to let her lawyer and the auctioneer handle the rest.

  Jamie rummaged, and an electric thrill jolted up her spine at the ancient hive smoker buried beneath a pile of comb-cutting equipment. Just smaller than a coffee can, the weathered tin sported a small dent near the bottom, but otherwise appeared to be in good shape. Several layers of metal reinforced the crimp holding the cylindrical body in place. In lieu of rivets, hot-bent pegs held the polished wood handle and supple leather bellows to the fire chamber, a soot-crusted cylinder that smelled faintly of pine sap and char. The wire cage around the fire chamber had black flecks around the soldered joinings, but held firm when she tapped it with a finger. A single Phillips-head screw held the perforated metal an inch above the air chamber, the only nod to post-1920 technology, an unwelcome stainless-steel concession to the ravages of time and entropy.

  It hummed in her hands, a beautiful example of late-nineteenth century metalwork, solid and practical like the country folk it had been built to serve. She entertained the possibly that Moses Quinby himself may have made it hundreds of miles to the east in the Hudson Valley, a personal tool for personal use before his invention spread across the world.

  She searched for a maker’s mark, and found none.

  Jamie glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed, then stuffed the smoker back under the junk in the box and joined the crowd waiting to bid on each lot. The auctioneer started small to milk the most he could out of the cheaper items. She passed on the initial lots, but perked up at the first of the cardboard boxes. Bidding started at two dollars. Her heart leaped into her throat when she took it for nine.

  She rushed home with her prize, not quite able to outrun a twinge of guilt at the score.

  Dumping the comb-cutting equipment onto the picnic table, she scooped up the smoker. With a little dryer lint for kindling and a few twigs, she pumped the bellows until a rich gray puff launched from the nozzle, then popped it open and added a handful of small twigs. It shut with a satisfying snap, the fit still perfect after so many years. She went back to pump it a few more times while dressing in her crisp white bee suit and mesh veil, until a heavy white cloud rose over her home.

  A trail of wood smoke followed her to her single colony. An earthy mélange like cloves and allspice mingled with the sharp tang of the smoldering twigs, a heady mixture reminiscent of fresh cookies baking on a cool spring day. She breathed it in, held it, savored the faint burn in her lungs, the warm, homey taste on her tongue. She’d always loved the smell of smoke, another tally Pastor Carr put against her soul.

  Worker bees took off from the landing board at twenty miles an hour and came back heavy with nectar, or with their legs laden with pollen in bright forsythia yellow and pale jasmine violet. A few guard bees peered at her from the long, narrow slit of the bottom entrance, and a few more from the hole drilled halfway up the top super. Vigilant, watchful, but not yet hostile. She sent a light whisper of smoke to the hole, scattering them, then leaned down and doused the entrance with a heavy trio of puffs.

  The billowing cloud enveloped her, a hundred times more intense. A hot rush enveloped her like the dark throes of the Passion, and her vision blurred. The world became indistinct, her body light as a feather under the warmth of the summer sun. Head swimming, she put a hand out to steady herself on the hive’s metal outer cover, and it vanished in the smoke.

  The acrid tang of burning wood gave way to the warm beeswax scents of vanilla and honey and a million summer flowers, intermingled with the chemical communication of tens of thousands of honeybees. A gasp escaped her lips, the noise drowned by the hum of countless wings. A myriad of insects made into one glorious whole, Jamie rose up, out of the garden, her consciousness expanding with the whirling storm of pheromones to where the drones darted and raced in their ceaseless quest to end their lives in a coital explosion with a virgin queen. Everywhere at once, she flitted from blossom to blossom, sucking up sweet nectar into her honey stomachs, or stuffing precious pollen into the baskets on her legs. She foraged water to cool the hive, extending her proboscises to lap dew from fallen leaves on the forest floor or the drips from the leaky sprinklers in the vegetable garden next door.

  In the hive she raised larvae, feeding nectar and pollen and just the right amount of royal jelly to make them strong enough to serve the hive but keep them forever juveniles so that they might never challenge the queen. She dragged the dead out the front entrance, larvae or workers who succumbed to the constant threats of bacteria, viruses, poison, mites. She built comb, reaching down to countless abdomens to pull from the glands there, white wax as pure as snow and not yet stained by the tracks of her million feet. She fed and groomed the queen as she lay the next generation of workers, the nexus and life’s blood of a superorganism. Despite what humans called her, she did not rule, as much a slave to the pheromone cloud as the least of her daughters.

  Following the sun, she soared out and away from the hive, laughing in pure joy at the speed and grace of her new neurons, her ultraviolet-seeing eyes and delicate, hypersensitive olfactory antennae. A field of buckwheat drew much of her attention, but she suppressed it to the back of her distributed mind to gaze with fascination at the panoply of flowers scattered around the village. On Lake Street she drew pollen from bright purple Russian sage while a bevy of boys taunted a little girl out on her pink bicycle. In the supermarket parking lot she flitted between spirea while Jim Hanks loaded canned goods from his pockets into the driver’s seat of his rusty farm truck. Behind the church she pulled paralytic nectar from a rhododendron, and caught her breath at a naked man writhing on the couch with a middle-aged blonde in red lingerie.

  She knew those hands, firm but gentle as they gripped the pulpit, now buried in the deepest of perversions. She knew that black hair, short but unkempt, as a man of God had no need for frivolous vanities. She knew those lips, spewing filth where on Sundays they spoke of abstinence and righteousness.

  She tried to flit closer, to catch a glimpse of the woman’s face.

  But the foragers darted among the flowers, drinking deep of the sweet, tingling liquid, and ignored her commands, her requests, her desires. Another fleeting pass by the window showed her a flash of gold—a wedding ring. Blonde, athletic but not too young, married; it could have been anyone.

  Carr’s Sunday voice thundered through her, each pronouncement a condemnation of sin and temptation, the “natural urges” sent by Lucifer to bring man to the level of dogs and then cast them out of the House Eternal to wallow in the cold and darkness outside of God’s grace. His baritone had terrified her through her whole life, the promise of eternal damnation a weight on her soul as she tried dating, an ever-present judgment that thrust her into a gibbering panic the first and only time a boy had unbuttoned the top of her blouse, the Valentine’s Dance six years earlier. His righteous fire consumed her in guilt when she touched herself, the only hands she’d ever felt.

  Frustration bubbled as the foragers retreated, flowing back in waves to the colony as the sun went down. Her world closed in as the last of the field bees crawled inside, joining their brethren in quarters so cramped she couldn’t move without brushing legs, body, or wings against her sisters. The foragers took no breaks, but instead fanned nectar to pull out the water and convert it to honey for the long cruel winter, filling the colony with an all-consuming buzz while the nurse bees fed and cared for the larvae as they had all day. Finally a par
t of something she understood, even so claustrophobia crushed Jamie’s chest, buried her under infinite bodies, too close, far too close, a smothering darkness from which she might never escape. She struggled against the confinement, reaching desperately toward something, anything.

  Gasping, Jamie bolted upright, eyes wide to take in the light of the quarter moon illuminating the small yard behind her trailer. Sucking in sweet air, she gulped down the taste of the night. Her body weighed her down, unable to fly, to spread itself throughout the town and become one with the bounties offered there. The sense of choking confinement shuddered through her, squeezed her throat shut, ravaged her bones and organs with utter desperation.

  The iron grip softened and she focused on a lump in the grass. Earl Pruitt’s smoker lay on its side next to the hive. Omnipresent crickets overwhelmed the buzz from the colony, joined by the high-pitched peeping of frogs from the unkempt pond across the street. Snatching up the smoker, she popped the lid to reveal nothing but cold ash.

  It smudged her fingers, made them slippery. Holding it to her nose through her veil, she breathed in deep and smelled only char—no exotic spice, no wax or vanilla, only the harsh incense of dark, pagan sacraments.

  A desperate loneliness squeezed her heart. Her whole life she’d wanted something, something less stifling, some way to escape, something more to belong to. A taste of that smothering freedom had left her mouth dry in desperate anticipation to feel it again. Scrambling, she found enough small sticks and dried grass to fill the fire chamber, sparked a flame with her lighter, and pumped the bellows to build up a thick cloud of shimmering phantoms that glistened in the moonlight. She blasted the entrance, and the buzz lowered to a dull thrumming … but otherwise nothing happened.