Telling the Bees (17 page)

Twenty-five

H
EAVING UP THE HIVE:
A traditional practice sometimes performed in addition to “telling the bees,” it requires that both hive and coffin be lifted at the same moment as the funeral party prepares to leave the house.

A
lexander the Great was said to have been buried in a coffin filled with honey. This was in accordance with the oldest beliefs of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who like the Egyptians and the Babylonians before them ascribed certain divine properties to the industrious honeybee and the golden ambrosia she produced. The ancients believed that once earthly existence passed, a human soul remained near men, living underground. That is why a soul could not rest until its human remains were buried in the soil and the rites of sepulture observed. No less than Virgil concluded his account of the funeral of Polydorus with these words: “We enclose the soul in the grave.”

The ancients believed such rituals were necessary to confine the soul to its subterranean abode. So, too, it was necessary to call the soul of the deceased three times by the name with which it had been born and to wish it a happy life underground.

“Fare thee well,” Ovid recorded, “
Sit tibi terra levis.
May the earth rest lightly upon thee.”

To fail to perform these rituals properly was to risk the soul’s unhappy return to the earth above.

Though my good Christian father was, as far as I know, devoutly ignorant of the seed of these pagan rites and beliefs, he did hold to a similar custom, one that many old beekeepers I know still observe upon the death of a friend or family member. They call this ritual telling the bees.

My father learned the practice from his own father, who as a boy had performed the rite when a loved one died just as his father had before him. I was six years old when my turn came to perform this traditional rite of passage for our neighbor Mrs. Lupitas, who until her departure from this earth at the ripe age of ninety-two had come by our house once a month without fail to purchase honey from my parents’ stock. It had been Mrs. Lupitas who had first welcomed my parents to their new home with a basket of fresh-baked bread and garden vegetables, and in the absence of any other nearby blood relatives, my sister and I had come to think of her as a surrogate grandmother.

On the morning of her funeral, my father called me to his side and handed me the ring of keys that he always carried in the right front pocket of his dungarees.

“Albert, I’m afraid dear Mrs. Lupitas has breathed her last,” he said, glancing at the gold watch he had removed from his pocket along with his keys. “It’s time to go tell the bees.”

With that simple pronouncement, my father proceeded to explain to me that after a death in the family it was customary for the youngest member of the household to visit the hives and tell the bees of the death. And while acknowledging that Mrs. Lupitas was not a true blood relative, he said she had shown our family and our bees genuine affection over the years. Anything we could do to ease her passage into heaven seemed a small favor in return for all her many kindnesses.

To perform the ceremony properly, my father instructed that I was to go to each and every hive in our family compound and to rattle the keys he had given me as I tapped on the hive and whispered three times:

Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

Then I was to tie a piece of funeral crepe, which my father also produced, to each of our hives. And finally, he said, I was to bring sweets to the hives for the bees to feed upon and to invite the bees to her funeral.

“On a number of occasions in my memory,” he added with a mysterious wink, “the bees have seen fit to attend.”

“What should I tell them?” I remember asking my father.

“Whatever you think will best ease that dear lady’s passage to the Promised Land,” he replied.

Laden thus with keys, black crepe, a basket of sugar cookies my mother had prepared for the occasion, and what I believed to be the full weight of Mrs. Lupitas’s salvation resting upon my young shoulders, I was left alone to perform the ritual as my father had instructed.

That morning was gray and damp, and our honeybees had been slow to rise to face the chill of the day. Loath to disturb them, I stopped at the first hive I came to and, setting my bundles of funeral crepe and cookies upon it, I shook my father’s keys softly and began to whisper the words of the chant he had just taught me. “Little brownies, little brownies,” I said, “your mistress is dead.”

I thought I heard a stirring inside the hive as I repeated my lines a little louder the second time and louder still the third. By then there was no mistaking that the hum inside the hive had grown in force, and I felt compelled to add that Mrs. Lupitas was a very old woman and that I was sure she would be happier communing with Jesus in heaven than she had been living all alone in her big house with no one to talk to but her old dog Tavish. The words just tumbled out. And then so did the bees, tumbling out in a big black swarm and up into the air, where they gathered in a swirling mass fifty feet above my head. Not knowing what else to say, I took a ribbon of black crepe and wrapped it around the top of the hive and then I placed one of my mother’s sugar cookies on the landing board. Finally, with only a single glance overhead, I carried my bundles to the next hive.

I believe it may have been something about the rhythmic jangling of the keys that drove the bees to quit their hives that morning, or perhaps it was the high-pitched rasp of my small voice, because, as truly as I live and breathe, something stirred the bees that day. One by one, I stopped in front of each of our sixteen hives, and from each, as I began to shake my father’s keys and repeat the words he’d taught me, a cloud of bees poured forth to join the growing cloud overhead. Soon, the roar of the bees had overwhelmed the sound of my small voice, and I found myself shaking the keys with both hands as I danced in a feverish circle beneath the swarming bees and shouted my childish prayers for Mrs. Lupitas’s safe passage to heaven.

“Little brownies, little brownies,” I sang out to each hive in turn, and above each in turn the heavens turned dark with bees, “your mistress is dead.”

When I returned from my funerary duties later that morning, I was drenched with sweat. My father, who was sitting on the front porch sipping a cool glass of lemonade, dug his bandanna out from his pocket and handed it to me. I wiped my face and hands as clean as I could manage and handed it back to him.

“Have you done as you were told?” he inquired, replacing the muddied bandanna in his pocket as I clambered up onto the porch swing to sit next to him. I nodded, and though I wanted to tell him what had happened and to ask him if anything as wondrous had ever happened to him, I could see from the distant look on his face that he preferred to keep his own counsel. We sat together like that for a spell, rocking back and forth in the late-morning breeze. Then, setting his empty glass down on the wicker table next to the swing, my father asked me if I would sit with him for a while longer.

I settled back in the swing and placed my folded hands upon my lap.

“Bees do not thrive in a quarrelsome family,” he said. “They dislike bad language. And they should never, ever be bought or sold for money.

“Bees should be given without compensation, but if such compensation is essential, barter or trade is greatly preferable to cold cash. And you must always be sure to tell the bees when they have changed hands,” he said.

My father then told me of a woman who had come to his father shortly after moving to the farm next door to theirs many, many years ago. She complained to him of the incessant swarming of the bees that had come part and parcel with the place she and her husband had recently purchased. My father said my grandfather asked his new neighbor whether she had bothered to tell the bees they had a new mistress. The puzzled woman averred that she had not, and so my grandfather accompanied her back to her farm and proceeded to visit each of her hives.

“She watched silently as my father walked up and down in front of the hives, talking quietly and calmly all the while, and when he was done the bees settled down and gave her no more trouble,” my father explained.

My father then fell into a private reverie that was only broken when a large black crow that had been pecking at seeds in the yard abruptly took to the air in a flurry of flapping wings and dust.

“Mark my words, young Albert,” my father said after the bird disappeared from view, “among those who know them well, bees are understood to be quiet and sober beings that disapprove of lying, cheating, and wanton women.”

My father then rose from the swing and, out of respect for Mrs. Lupitas, he adjourned to his room for the remainder of the morning. My mother and sister, meanwhile, were busy in the kitchen, preparing the afternoon meal, and I was left alone to ponder my father’s words.

Many years later, I would sit on that same porch swing with my mother as she taught me how to sew.

“Draw the stitch forward, now back by half, then forward by half again,” she would remind me as we sat together, her sewing basket nestled between us.

“This loop stitch will not win you any contests at a sewing bee,” she pronounced just the week before she died, “but it will hold.”

But what if there is nothing of substance left to hold?

Only a handful of hardy workers took to the skies the dark day it fell upon me to tell the bees of my dear mother’s sudden passing. The rest seemed content enough to pick and crawl about the stale offering of leftover scones I dutifully set in front of each hive I visited on my mournful funereal rounds.

Thirteen years later, when my father followed my mother to the grave, I had nothing sweeter than a packet of stale graham crackers to offer the bees, and so the morning after his passing I dipped just as many crackers in honey as it would take to lay one out in front of each of our twenty hives that day. The bees seemed satisfied enough, I suppose, sensing somehow it was all I had to give. And as had been the case with my mother’s rites, few if any of our bees rose to greet me when I came to tell them of my father’s demise. I did detect a deep, soft hum that emanated from within each of the hives that resembled, as much as anything, a funeral dirge, so low and melodic in its own way, bringing me a certain measure of comfort in my hour of bereavement.

Twenty-six

S
KEP:
An old-fashioned, fixed-frame hive made from woven coils of straw or grass that cannot be opened for inspection or honey harvesting without destroying the colony within. It is illegal to use in many countries, including the United States.

A
row of condominiums the color of sand and dirty clouds stands now on the spot where the Straussman sisters lived and died.

It didn’t happen all at once. There were probate orders and newspaper postings and planning commission hearings and all manner of official documents filed and appealed by a well-meaning neighborhood committee that had saved several other historic homes from demolition through their civic efforts before the Straussmans’ meager estate was finally settled and the bulldozers arrived to plow under the house that had stood on that spot for close to a century.

I considered attending the final city council hearing when the fate of the house was sealed, but since I could not swear to the exact date when it was built, nor could I testify to any particular contribution the family had made to the civic or philanthropic development of the city, I chose to hold my peace.

And, truth be told, the Straussman house had little to recommend it save an old man’s bittersweet memories.

Memory is a strange thing. It does not always come bidden on command. It seldom travels in a straight line. I know with empirical certainty that it has been nearly twenty years since Claire and Hilda have passed from this life, and almost fifteen since their family’s home was razed to make way for my new crop of neighbors, all nestled cozy as you please into their stacks of homes that look each one just like the one in front of it, and behind it, up and below and on either side of it.

And yet early in the evening when the gray mist has just begun to roll in from the ocean, if I turn my head quickly to the left, I swear I can still see Claire, though just for an instant, standing on her back porch, hands on her narrow hips, wordlessly signaling for me to meet her out in the grove, and it’s 1936 all over again.

“Do you know what day it is?” Claire says to me.

“June twentieth?” I stammer.

It was an uncharacteristically warm evening in late June. Claire knew that I knew she would be turning sweet sixteen in just three days. I had already set aside a jar of prized eucalyptus honey for her in honor of this special occasion, and I’d found a scrap of cloth in my mother’s sewing basket and a bit of string out in the honey shed in which to wrap it.

“What do you think it’s like inside?”

“Inside what?”

“Why, the Harmony, you silly goose!” Claire laughed, slapping my arm lightly. “The music is so inviting, don’t you think?”

“It does seem loud,” I agreed. I attempted to compare the spacious domelike design of the Harmony Park Ballroom to the interior architecture of a primitive skep. She argued that it looked more like a marvelous shipwreck washed ashore on Treasure Island.

“A boat? Here?”

“Yes, a boat, silly. Overturned and stuck in the sand,” she said, crinkling her eyes as if to show me how to see what was clearly not there. “Use your imagination, Albert.”

I squinted my eyes.

I must have looked very comical because Claire collapsed in a gale of laughter that was suddenly echoed by more laughter bursting through the open door of the dance hall.

It was unusual for the Harmony’s doors to remain open, but the weather was unseasonably warm and humid that long-ago June night. From our vantage along the eastern border of my family’s orange grove, we could observe flashes of color and movement as lively pairs of dancers whirled and glided past the ballroom’s side door, which had been propped open with a concrete block.

“Will you look, just look at those dresses?” Claire’s eyes followed the madly spinning figure of a dark-haired woman clad in a formfitting red dress slit scandalously up the trail of her thigh. We watched as the woman spun and spun in a giddy circle in front of the open doorway, her arms extended out from her sides and her hair flying wildly about her head until, dizzy and out of breath, she fell into the arms of another woman, dressed in a low-cut black sheath, who stood laughing and clapping at the edge of the crowd that had gathered to urge the dancing woman on. After a brief pause, and much to the disappointment of the crowd, the dancing woman whispered something into the ear of the black sheath–clad woman, and then the two of them walked slowly, arm in arm, out the side door of the ballroom and onto a small cement landing, where they stood for a moment, the woman in the red dress laughing and breathing heavily as the woman in black fanned her companion’s flush face with her open hands.

“Just look at those dresses,” Claire said again, her own hand fluttering for an instant in front of her face, and I admit I was at a loss as how to respond. Claire seemed to me a different person altogether that night. For as long as I’d known her, she had shown a propensity for wearing the simplest of styles and materials: light cotton smocks and blouses in the summer, dark woolen trousers or skirts and bulky sweaters when the weather turned cool.

I had always viewed Claire as a practical girl, levelheaded and not overly concerned with the modes of the day. There is no denying that she had developed into a slender but shapely young woman with fine, well-defined features just like her father’s, and thick, dark wavy hair much like her mother’s, or at least as her mother’s had appeared in the old sepia-toned photographs that crowded the family’s mantle. Unlike Hilda, who seemed to have inherited the worst of both her parents’ features, I am sure Claire could have turned a head or two at that time had she chosen to follow fashion’s whimsy, but she had never shown the slightest inclination to do so. All that would come later: the frills and flounces and flocks of earnest young suitors.

“Have you ever felt real satin?” Claire asked me that night, looking hard into my eyes as if searching for something she knew she would not find.

“Of course not,” I had stammered. My mother, bless her heart, was not the type to go in for fancy clothes or fripperies, and she had never dressed herself or my sister in anything so impractical or ostentatious as satin or silk.

“What a shame, Albert,” Claire said. She smiled shyly and took my hand and patted it. Then she turned it over to stroke the palm softly, drawing tiny circles on it with her fingertips. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

Something in her manner troubled me. “And you do?” I said, pulling my hand from hers.

“I certainly do,” she replied, matching my gesture with a petulant toss of her hair, which I only noticed at that moment had been loosed from its customary ponytail to tumble in soft curls about her shoulders. Claire closed her eyes and opened them again, the barest hint of that shy smile returning to her lips.

“My mother used to belong to a lodge,” she said. “The Daughters of Scotia. We’re part Scottish, you know, on my Grandmother Galt’s side.”

Only a week before, Claire had been in her attic, storing away the family’s winter clothes for the season. There, she had come across an old steamer trunk that contained the bulk of her mother’s former apparel culled from her more slender years. Tucked between the stylish suits and dresses of that bygone era were several white satin lodge gowns wrapped in mothballs and tissue paper. Claire told me her mother had stopped attending the monthly meetings of her Scottish lodge sisters during the mourning period after Harry Junior’s sudden death and she had never seen fit to return. In fact, her mother had grown increasingly housebound after young Harry’s untimely demise, shunning all manner of social and civic gatherings, school assemblies, and even church services.

“My mother never seemed to get over the loss of Harry,” Claire said. “My father either.”

I could only nod sympathetically and wonder at the absolute transformation that grief had worked over time on the minds and bodies of the once handsome young couple of which irrefutable evidence remained only in the Straussmans’ faded family portraits.

Claire confessed to me that she took one of her mother’s white silk lodge dresses out of its tissue paper and had held it up in front of her. It was sleeveless, elegant in its simplicity, with a slightly scooped neckline and a high, close-fitting bodice. The skirt was straight and long, she said, with a flare at the bottom.

Claire leaned close and whispered to me that, all alone in the attic that balmy afternoon, she had undressed herself completely and, pardon me, but she said she had stood stark naked in front of a dusty full-length mirror that leaned against one of the rafters and that she had slipped her mother’s dress over her head and let it fall like ice water over her exposed skin.

“I had to wiggle a little to fit into it,” Claire told me, an odd smile playing briefly on her lips. “I know it’s hard for people to believe it now, but my mother was really quite slender and beautiful when she was young.”

Not knowing how to respond, I forced a wan smile.

“When Father returned home last Friday, I caught him staring at Mother when she wasn’t looking,” Claire whispered. She told me that she couldn’t help but wonder if her father was trying to rekindle in his mind, if not his heart, the image of that beautiful young girl he had married.

“They met on a train,” Claire said. “Did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“Of course you didn’t,” she said, tossing her hair once again in that most disconcerting manner. “Father was a conductor on the Saint Louis–to–Chicago train line back then.”

Claire explained how her mother had chanced to visit her Aunt Maud in Detroit the summer following her seventeenth birthday and that her father had remarked, while punching her ticket, that he, too, had relatives in that same city, and from this common familial geography the spark of romance had been ignited.

“Believe it or not, my father proposed to my mother for the first time just outside of Bloomington, and again at the station in Joliet,” Claire told me. “Of course she turned him down both times. After she switched trains in Chicago, they both thought that would be the end of that.”

But as fate would have it, Claire said, her parents met again on the return trip, and somewhere south of Springfield her mother agreed to allow Mr. Straussman to come calling on her once she returned to her parents’ home in St. Louis.

“My father says that I remind him of Mother when they first met,” Claire told me, her voice deadened curiously no doubt by the length of the tale. “He used to say the same thing about Hilda.”

I found it difficult to reconcile my image of the moribund Mrs. Straussman with the daring young girl who’d traveled unaccompanied to Detroit and back so many years before. And I was likewise skeptical of Mr. Straussman’s sentimentality, given the remoteness of all interaction that I had witnessed between him and his family on the rare occasions I had come in close contact with him. There had always been a distinct austerity to all his words and gestures that could not be ascribed entirely to his—or any—line of work. So, too, did I notice that a certain chill seemed to fall across Claire whenever she spoke of her mother and father as if the shadow that had long ago engulfed the parents had begun to overtake the child.

“Can I tell you a secret, Albert?” Claire whispered, and she again leaned close to my ear. I could feel her breath, warm and moist on my neck, as she spoke. “I didn’t put my mother’s lodge dress back in the trunk. I have it hidden in my room at this very moment.”

I pulled back to stare at her face. Her funny smile was back again, bolder than ever, and full of something like mischief, only darker. This was not the same innocent young girl with whom I’d spent so many hours tending our honeybees and gathering the sweet harvest of their unselfish labors. I found the transformation unsettling.

“Would you like to see it sometime? The gown, I mean,” she said. “I’ll even let you touch it if you promise not to get it dirty.”

I declined her invitation with all due respect. I believe I conveyed as best I could my desire to return to my house earlier than was my custom, telling Claire that I wished to complete my reading of Plato’s
Symposium
that evening before I retired. I then detailed my systematic plan for reading what I considered to be the fundamental pillars of Western thought.

“After Plato, I plan to tackle Aristotle, Horace, and of course Saint Augustine,” I said.

“You know, I read quite a bit myself,” Claire said rather defensively to my ear. “But I read for pleasure.”

I asked her what type of books gave her pleasure. “Books about romance and adventure,” she said. “Have you ever read any D. H. Lawrence? Or Elizabeth Bowen, or Ford Maddox Ford, or Hemingway or Fitzgerald?”

“You mean fiction?” I said.

“I mean flesh-and-blood stories about what happens outside your head, Albert. Stories that touch your heart.”

With that, she placed her hand squarely on my chest, which felt as though it were entombed in lead beneath her magnetic touch.

“Your heart is pounding, Albert,” she said. But, thankfully, that is all she said. When I offered no response, she slowly let her hand drop to her side. I took advantage of her welcome silence to bid her good night, though, in truth, the night suddenly felt anything but good.

Claire made no further mention of her mother’s dress the next time I saw her. Our evening rendezvous grew increasingly sporadic over the next few months, which I suppose was as much my fault as hers. As I became ever more engrossed in my studies, which would progress through the early Christian theologians and on into the Age of Enlightenment by summer’s end, I generally retired to my room directly after supper to pore over the pages of my books rather than to my back porch to contemplate the passage of stars across the heavens as had been my previous custom.

It was Kant, I believe, who said that objective reality is knowable only through the mind that seeks its knowledge and that anything beyond the realm of one’s own experience is unknowable. Which is to say, I could not know what Claire was going through during this turbulent time because I was not privy to what was beyond the realm of my own understanding. Nonetheless, I sensed something slipping away that summer, though I did not realize exactly how far it had slipped until, glancing out my window one evening in late August, I thought I saw a figure in white racing through our orchard. Some time later, and to my everlasting regret, I would follow that pale ghost. But not then. Not that night.