This is based on an actual superstition that bees must always be informed if the master of the house has died.
There was a girl who died every morning, and it would not have been a problem except that she kept bees.
When her heart had shuddered back to life and she had clawed her way back from the lands beneath, she sat up and drew a long sucking breath into the silent caverns of her lungs. Her first breath was always very loud in the little cottage, but there was no one there to hear it.
She wrapped her robe around her. It was a dressing gown in the morning and winding sheet at night. Then she swung her feet over onto the floor and the cold tiles were no colder than the palms of the newly dead.
She stumped out to the beehives and tapped each one with the key to her cottage, three times each. "The old master is dead," she said, as the hives buzzed and the bees swirled around her. "I am the new master." And she said her name, three times each over every hive.
Sometimes a bee would land on her wrist and wiggle its antennae at her. Sometimes it wouldn't. There was a bit of blue embroidery on the collar of her dressing gown, and the bees had to investigate it thoroughly some mornings, while other mornings they ignored it entirely.
When the hives had been advised of her passing, she went back into her cottage. Her feet left dark tracks in the silver grass. She made tea and ate honey scraped over black bread. That was all she ever ate. She had given the garden over to flowers, because it is hard for the dead to eat parsnips. The bees liked the flowers, and the bees were her best company.
She did not mind the bread, if there was honey. And even the dead will drink tea if they can.
She worked all day, weeding the garden and patching the cottage and tending the bees, and then at night, because she did not sleep, she would stay awake and watch the stars. They were old friends now, the bright beads of Orion and the Great Bear. They turned and turned about, as the seasons changed, but like her, they were always fundamentally the same.
There were no constellations that represented bees. This was a grave oversight. She had mentioned it to those in the lands beneath, but they looked at her with their gray faces and their sewn-shut mouths and few of them could remember things like "bees" or "stars."
Possibly she was not dead long enough. If she had stayed dead for more than a few hours, perhaps she could have found someone with authority. A person who understood about bees might understand other important things.
Slightly before dawn each day, she died.
Sleep like death and death like sleep are common curses. It is inevitable that they become tangled. Fair folk and wicked queens are not always precise in their diction.
There are consequences for imprecision, and it is always someone else who has to pay.
The important thing is not to dwell on it.
The bees had to be told, though. Bees are conscious of their dignity, and if you do not tell them of a death, they will stream away from the hive in a thrumming ribbon, going away, away, to someone who will respect them. It does not matter that the name of the living may be the name of the dead. They must be told.
It had been a long winter of dry black bread before she learned, with only the stars and the dead for company. She preferred the living hives and then, when the queens slept, the memory of wings and sweetness.
Surely there was a place where the bees went, under the earth. She had begun to look for them in the hours of her death, for the dead queens arrayed in black and gold. Sometimes when she woke, before her first breath, she could hear their buzzing and thought I am getting closer.
Surely they would help her, if only she could find them.
Even if it meant getting up now, every morning, with her blood still oozing sluggish in the chambers of her heart, and walking through the meadow with the house key in her hand, to go and tell the bees her name.
THE TOMATO THIEF
Grandma Harken lived on the edge of town, in a house with its back to the desert.
Some people said that she lived out there because she liked her privacy, and some said that it was because she did black magic in secret. Some said that she just didn’t care for other people, and they were probably the closest to the truth.
When her daughter Eva asked her to move into town, to be a little closer, Grandma Harken refused. It got to be a regular ritual with them—“Mother, won’t you move in a little closer? I worry about you out there alone.”
“What’s going to bother me out here?”
“You could step on a rattlesnake,” said Eva.
“I’d rather get bit by a rattlesnake than the neighbors,” said Grandma Harken. “I get enough people coming whining to me as it is. As it is, some of ‘em get tired and turn around. A twenty minute walk has its advantages.” She held up a needle and threaded it on the first try. “Besides, I can still see what I’m doing. Talk to me when I’ve gone blind.”
Eva sighed, the way she always did, and said, “If you won’t come in closer, you could have someone come out and live with you. Hire a girl, maybe.”
“Garden only feeds one,” said Grandma, which was at least three-quarters of a lie. Eva knew this, but didn’t possess the sort of steel that would allow her to call her mother out on it.
“You could at least get a dog.”
“Can’t get a dog. It’ll offend Spook-cat.”
(Spook-cat was a tiny ginger tomcat who lived in perpetual terror of loud noises, sudden movements, and unexpected shadows. He lived under Grandma Harken’s bed and would occasionally consent to sleep on her pillow, despite her snoring. He was deeply intimidated by the jackrabbits that lived in the desert, so trips outside to do his business lasted less than two minutes, followed by immediate retreat back under the bed.
He had seen a mouse once and it had frightened him so badly that he had not come out from behind the stove for a week.)
Eva sighed again.
It was debatable whether she knew the real reason that Grandma Harken lived so far out of town. Her mother kept a lot of secrets.
In fact, it was because of the tomatoes.
Tomatoes are thirsty plants and they don’t always want to grow in a desert. You have to give them criminal amounts of water and they’ll only set fruit in spring and autumn. Summer heat is too much for them and if they don’t die outright, you’re pouring gallons of water a day into the sand just to keep them alive.
Grandma Harken had spent the better part of fifty years growing tomatoes and she had a spot in her garden that held water just a fraction longer than anywhere else. It got shade in the worst of the afternoon and sun in the earliest part of the morning.
Her tomatoes were the biggest and the juiciest in town. She started them on the windowsill on New Year’s Day and she planted them out in February. They ripened in spring and she pulled the plants up as soon as the last one had been picked.
The same people in town who muttered about black magic swore that she was using unholy powers on her tomatoes. This was a little more plausible than general black magic, because obviously if you had unholy powers, you’d want to use them on your tomatoes. But Grandma Harken was extremely useful to have around and knew more about dangerous desert spirits than anyone else, so people shushed their whispering neighbors and smiled politely when Grandma passed.
Also, if you were very polite, you might be able to beg a few tomato seeds from her. The resulting plant wouldn’t be up to her standards, but it would still bear a damn fine tomato.
Grandma Harken had been watching her tomatoes very closely for the last few days, and not just to catch the hornworm caterpillars.
One of the smaller ones was starting to come ripe, and she was looking forward to it more than a little.
She’d been feeling worn out and overly responsible lately. It had been a long, long year, and there’d been that business with her grandson and the jackalope wife. It had all worked out as well as could be expected, but it had been a worrisome mess while it lasted. Her grandson had gone back east on th
e train, and good riddance to him. Boy had no business in the desert. But she worried anyway, partly for him and partly for his mother and partly because a foolish young man with brooding eyes can cause no end of heartbreak in the world.
Worrying didn’t do any good, but somehow that never stops anybody. Mostly it made her tired.
She didn’t look any older, so far as she could tell from the mirror, but her heart felt like somebody had been scraping the last bits out with a spoon.
If she could just sit down at the table with a knife and salt and some good white bread, maybe a little mayonnaise … well, it seemed like that’d put the world back into the right sort of shape around her. Sometimes the best cure for life was a ripe tomato.
She got up the morning after Eva visited and went out to the garden. The air was still cool and the porch steps creaked as she walked down them.
The tomato was gone.
Grandma Harken knew right away that it was missing, but she looked around the plants anyway. There were three of them, planted in a triangle, covered in heavy green balls. A few were turning red, but the tomato she’d kept her eye on, the one that had been right there …
Gone.
It had been there last night. She’d looked at it in sunset and thought that it’d be ripe this morning.
“I ain’t losing my mind,” she said firmly. “That tomato was here.”
The tomato continued to be absent. There were no seeds on the ground or tracks in the dirt to indicate where it had gone.
The rest of the garden was large and dusty, like desert gardens often are. Jackrabbits liked to come lie in the shade under the beans. Jackrabbits aren’t known for eating tomatoes off the vine.
Strange things happen in the desert. Grandma Harken looked around suspiciously and went back inside to make tea.
Two days later, there were two fine tomatoes almost ready to split. Grandma Harken stroked their scarlet skins. “Tomorrow,” she said, with satisfaction. She had almost succeeded in putting the previous tomato out of her mind.
But tomorrow came and Grandma Harken beheld a distinct absence of ripe tomatoes.
This time she went over the garden practically on her hands and knees, but she could not figure out where the tomatoes might have gone. Jackrabbits didn’t steal tomatoes, and javelinas, which might, would have made a fine mess of the garden. It was too high up for a box turtle, unless somebody was outfitting box turtles with stepladders these days.
“It ain’t a kid from in town,” she muttered. “They know better than to try, and anyway there’s no footprints.” The only marks on the dusty ground were from Grandma Harken’s own sandals.
She prowled around the edge of the garden and found nothing. The fence was undisturbed.
She was crouched in front of the plants, staring at them, when she saw it.
She breathed in sharply. It was easy to miss, but if she looked in exactly the right place, she could see what looked like a single human footprint in the dirt between the three tomato plants.
She was so still for so long that Spook-cat came up and twined around her, making small mrrrrp? noises. She rubbed him under the chin automatically, barely noticing.
A thrasher called from the palo verde at the end of the garden. The noise sent Spook-cat skittering inside, and woke Grandma from her reverie.
The footprint had five clear toes. The owner had been barefoot.
“Thief,” hissed Grandma Harken, and stomped back indoors in a bitter state of mind.
She wrapped herself up in a quilt that night and sat in the rocking chair on the back porch. “We’ll see what kind of rat bastard steals an old lady’s tomatoes,” she grumbled.
(Grandma Harken thought of herself as an old lady, because she was one. That she was tougher than tree roots and barbed wire did not matter. You did not steal an old lady’s tomatoes. It was rude, and also, she would destroy you.)
She leaned her shotgun up against the porch railing in easy reach. Probably she wouldn’t need it, but there was no telling how low a body would sink once they’d started down the road of tomato theft. Murder was not out of the question.
Though I’ll try to aim for the legs, she thought, and grinned fiercely to herself.
The sun sank and the sky blazed redder than a ripe tomato. The herb leaves rustled and the bean plants whispered to each other farther down in the garden. The great sprawling squash had not yet set fruit, but they were sending questioning tendrils out in all directions, and the peppers were the size of Grandma’s thumb. All around her, the garden whispered, a slow exhale after the heat of the day.
Grandma Harken leaned back in the rocking chair and fixed her eyes on her tomatoes.
She woke in the morning with dew collecting on the quilt. Her back was stiff and two more tomatoes were missing.
She shot out of the rocking chair fast enough to knock it over on its runners and cussed the air briefly blue.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said, when she’d run out of swear words and turned back to religion. “This ain’t funny anymore!”
She stomped down and found a nearly ripe tomato, which she yanked off the vine and took inside. It sat on the counter. A day or two and it would be almost as good as the others.
Almost.
She was angry now at herself as well as the thief. Falling asleep when she was supposed to be standing guard—what was that? Was she really that doddering an old woman?
“Not tonight,” she said grimly. “Not tonight.”
She watered the garden by hand and did the laundry, just to keep herself moving. She napped all afternoon, which Spook-cat quite enjoyed.
Then, as evening fell, she brewed herself up a pot of cowboy coffee, with the grounds still in the pot.
It cost more than blood these days, but that was life. Salt, flour, coffee, and sugar were the only things Grandma Harken bought at the store, and the store could only get them in because Father Gutierrez was on good terms with the train-priests.
It didn’t matter how good the terms you were on, though, they were expensive as the devil. Most of the time she got by with tea and honey and cornmeal, same as everybody else.
Still, didn’t matter how strong you brewed it, tea was no substitute for coffee.
“I’ll be up half the night drinking and the other half peeing,” she said. “Not a chance I’ll fall asleep this time.”
She sat down in the rocking chair with the coffee mug in one hand and prepared to wait.
In the small hours of the night, Grandma Harken woke up because her bladder was killing her.
Her first thought was that she’d fallen asleep again, and damnit, she wasn’t that old.
Her second was that the thief was less than ten feet away.
It was a mockingbird.
Grandma Harken stared.
It glowed like silver under the moon—really glowed, every feather edged in white fire. When it shifted, it threw light across the prickly tomato leaves and left sharp-edged shadows across the ground.
The bird perched on top of the tomato cage for nearly a minute. Occasionally it would flick its tail and set the shadows dancing.
It might have sat there all night, except that Grandma Harken’s bladder was making its displeasure known. She squirmed in her chair and the rockers creaked on the porch.
The white patches on the mockingbird’s wings blazed up and it flew.
She shot out of her chair, bladder be damned, and charged down the steps. She could see the mockingbird flying, the sagebrush casting fantastic shadows, the saguaros briefly silver instead of black—and then it was a distant spark dwindling into the desert.
Grandma Harken watched it vanish against the sky.
“Mockingbirds,” she said aloud, stomping toward the outhouse. “Mockingbirds stealing my damn tomatoes.”
She knew mockingbirds eat fruit if they can get it, but she had to admit, she would not have expected one to make off with a full-sized tomato. Cherry or grape tomatoes, sure, but one of my big o
nes?
She was up and down three more times that night, as the cowboy coffee made itself felt, but she was hardly sleeping anyway.
Mockingbirds also don’t leave human footprints. And generally they do not glow like foxfire.
“Shapechanger,” she said to Spook-cat, who slept in a small orange puddle atop the pillow. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Again.”
The next night, she didn’t bother with coffee. She cleaned up the house and shooed Eva off when she looked inclined to stay late.
“I don’t need you fussing over me,” she told her daughter. “I ain’t gonna change and it’s just gonna make us both snappish.”
Eva was weak-eyed, mild-mannered, and had a disposition as yielding as a featherbed. It was hard to imagine her being snappish about anything.
But she’d also known her mother for a very long time, and she recognized make us both snappish as an olive branch. She stood looking down at the dishcloth in her hands, and said finally, “I’m worried about Brandon, that’s all.”
“He’s back east,” said Grandma Harken. “With your father’s kin. He’ll be fine.”
“Do you think so?” asked Eva.
Grandma Harken was sharpening her garden shears. Her hands slowed on the file and she said finally, “He’ll get in trouble and he’ll figure it out. Best to do it without us standing over him. It’s the only way anybody ever learns to clean up after themselves.”
“He’s been so upset since the girl—”
Grandma Harken threw down the shears. “He did a damn fool thing, and I cleaned up the mess for him. He should be upset. I’d be more afraid if he wasn’t.”
She exhaled and picked up the shears again. There was a burr in the edge of one blade and she set to work on it with the file. “Not your fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t yell. But see what I mean? I’m not fit for company now.”
Eva looked at her.
“I ain’t been sleeping well.” Grandma held that out like a peace offering, because her daughter was sweet, not stupid.
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 14