Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  “I’m sorry?” Silva asked, her mind skipping as she tried to put the name in context.

  “A place nobody should go,” Eli said. He gestured vehemently, the sudden anger coming off him visceral enough that Silva’s heart clenched. “Dietz ought to be hung for what he’s done. People looking to him for safety, for security, but he’s not offering anything but a damn cult—taking over the visitor center now, convincing everyone he’s the chosen one come to lead them.”

  “Is she still… ,” Silva began, unable to finish the sentence. Unable to voice even the word there. She felt light-headed. Each fact repelled the other like magnets held face-to-face. Isabelle a part of something so vile Silva couldn’t even name it.

  “Once they enter, all ties are cut. There’s no way of knowing. It’s been a long time now.”

  Everything breaking along the old fault lines of familiar sorrow, fracturing anew. As surreal as waking from a nightmare—the wailing woman swimming underwater with her gray fish body—only this one didn’t recede. Instead Silva saw Isabelle on her knees, worshipfully washing Len Dietz’s feet before moving upward.

  He had known who she was, Silva realized, her heart thudding heavy. He had recognized her, looking at her as if he’d seen a ghost. Isabelle’s ghost. He hadn’t been divining at all, had just made a connection handed to him by a freak of genetic code cloning grandmother to granddaughter. Nothing more than a lucky guess. All the mothers, whom he supposedly cared for—except Isabelle had never been a mother to anyone. And despite the steady march of her own body’s growth, Silva didn’t know if she could be either.

  She wanted to lie down and weep, but there was no escaping it, nowhere left for her to run. She was trapped in this moment, the irrefutable fact of Isabelle’s last act. Almost Paradise. A mockery of all Silva had let herself imagine her life might be.

  Seeming to recognize her distress, Eli laid a gnarled hand over hers. “I’m sorry, lass,” he said. “Isabelle came and left and took this old man’s heart with her. It looks like she did the same to you.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Date: September 15, 1999

  Title(s): Maiden 1–Maiden 12

  Subject: Maidens before marriage

  Setting: Almost Paradise Grounds

  Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press

  Size(s): 8×8

  Dearest Eamon,

  The Baptism of the Virgins done, they prepare now for the main event—the Wedding Ceremony, a series of synchronized proceedings, each of the maidens going through the same preparation:

  1) Baptism of the Virgins 2) Servant-heart Ceremony 3) Religious-training Ceremony 4) Childbearing Ceremony 5) Dowry Ceremony 6) Conjoining Ceremony 7) Cleansing Ceremony. Then, the wedding, and, of course, the subsequent births. The main goal seems to be for Len to not only have his twelve virgin-child concubines, but also for them to bear his fruit, prolifically.

  I have gotten myself here, but I don’t know if I can make it through this project’s completion—even though I keep telling myself that’s all it is: a project, work, a commissioned series. But I sit in my small, windowless, concrete-block bunker room in the compound each night, alone with my paints, questioning myself. What it is that I think I can accomplish, taking part in this, even if my part is to play witness to the atrocity? The war correspondent, sending back images that tell more of the true story than any words can. But you know how much this could be anything but detached and objective “work” to me. How setting myself at this means nothing more than a protracted battle between self-preservation and self-flagellation. Perhaps penance and recompense are just lies that we tell ourselves. Perhaps they can never be achieved, no matter how hard and long we try. Perhaps I, too, will be swallowed (again) by the darkness.

  I have spent the last weeks painting each child bride’s portrait before she is taken, before she is gone forever to Dietz, which won’t be long now—a pendulum tick, tick, ticking. Each of them has already been given over, trapped in his well-spun web, encased and immobilized by him before they realize their final outcome has already been determined. They don’t need the end of the world, the millennium, Y2K, to bring about their own ending. It’s already here.

  Faith has been my guide—Faith, a woman, not a pattern of belief. I have none of that left, no belief in a higher power, in some guiding force that can direct our lives, give reason for our existence. Faith is the one who authorized my presence and work within the compound, invited me in. Not that I didn’t know ahead of time what I was getting into. I knew (I’ve always known) exactly what that means—being a woman, a girl, conscribed to a man, a “father,” who takes your body and your mind and your spirit as his own. But how can you really be prepared for that reality, even if you’ve already known it yourself? Even if your own body has born the results of it?

  Faith arranges the girls for me to paint. She attends to them, prepares them, moves them, tilts their faces for me, as though they were wooden art models, the figure of a body meant to be manipulated. Meant to be traced into lines and then filled in, fleshed into imitation. Shadows of light and dark. Twelve paintings in replicate. Blues and grays and browns. The color of mourning. The color of heaviness. The color of my impossibly weighty but still beating heart.

  I sit here, pouring out my soul, wishing for the comfort of you. Of the time before I left, water washing on shore, pebbles tinking against themselves in its ebb and flow. Where have I been? Where did I go?

  Maybe the only way out of the dark is to descend all the way into it.

  My love,

  Isabelle

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MARCH 2001

  At the sound of a rumbling engine downshifting, its low-gear rev approaching Eli’s house, Silva panicked, thinking Len Dietz had followed her after all, had come to take her captive just as he had somehow taken Isabelle. Silva looked wildly around Eli’s kitchen for a place of exit, but instead of Len’s war truck, a rusty patchwork of a pickup in primer-gray and turquoise drove up and parked next to her Dodge, a cloud of dust drifting and settling as a tall, lanky man jumped out, walking purposefully toward Eli’s front porch. A few strides and he was at the door, knocking in sharp announcement he didn’t need, the hens clucking their displeasure at being disturbed again, Eli bracing both hands on the table and pushing himself up to answer.

  Silva tensed, ready to spring up and run away, hide herself from any other Two Rivers men, but Eli ushered the man through the living-room maze and into the kitchen with her. There was nowhere she could go to escape.

  “Nick Larkins,” the man said, holding out his hand, close enough Silva could smell weeds and leather and something warm—sunbaked denim, fresh cotton. A smell that reminded her with startling force of Eamon.

  “Didn’t mean to break in on you,” he said, hesitating, looking at her as if worried she might be the one to break.

  “Silva Merigal,” she said, letting go of his hand quickly, the warmth of his palm disconcerting—the sudden connection of physicality a jolt that put her whole body on edge.

  “Silva. Unusual name,” he said. There was a pale scar on the side of his face that connected dimple to chin. Sun-streaked hair, tanned face, and light blue eyes, he looked like the men in the museum’s oldest black-and-white photographs, their work-worn bodies and faces forever marked by hard physical labor.

  She was surprised he’d gotten it right the first try. Everyone always called her Sylvia no matter how much she corrected them. Sometimes she recited her whole hippie earth name—Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal—just to throw people off-balance. She wished she would have now, if only for a brief distraction, her seemingly the only one discomposed.

  “I’ve come to convince Eli to part with his field bees,” Nick said, smiling.

  The person Eli had been expecting instead of her.

  Eli glanced back and forth between them and seemed to arrive at some sort of conclusion. “First, we must eat,” he declared, pointing to a dusty wall clock as if it had just issue
d a mandate. “ ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’ ” The same quote Eamon had used. Something Isabelle must have said. A mantra she’d probably recited for Len Dietz, too.

  “I don’t want to intrude,” Nick said in question, looking at Silva.

  “I’m not hungry,” Silva said, her stomach twisting at the mental image of Isabelle with Len, but Eli was deaf to their objections, rummaging around inside his tiny, ancient fridge.

  “Honeybee soufflé,” Eli announced, pulling out a dish and cutting thick yellow wedges.

  He served each of them a plate, and when Silva hesitated, her fork hovering, he scowled and motioned impatiently, commanding, “Eat, eat.”

  She could tell there was no choice in the matter, even if Nick was close enough their elbows were hitting. Even if the last thing she wanted was honeybee soufflé.

  She took a small, careful bite, hoping she could stomach it, especially after Eli started naming off ingredients that included “marinated bees”—bee larvae he’d marinated in whiskey, garlic, hot pepper, and ginger. At first, she thought he was kidding, and she chewed cautiously, expecting something caustic and juicy to pop in her mouth, trying not to imagine the softened bodies of bee larvae floating in eggs, but instead it was delicious—a gustatory delight, spicy and rich with a deep complexity of flavors. She thought she could even taste a hint of honey. She ate the whole piece, finishing before Nick, who kept up a steady conversation like a child adept at distracting an overbearing adult bent on force-feeding.

  “You’ve got to keep the colony healthy and strong, keep them together as a family,” Eli was saying—the same thing he’d told Silva earlier when she’d wondered if he was really talking about Isabelle, “colony collapse” a code for everything that had ever happened in her life.

  “I plan on it,” Nick said, but Eli shook his head.

  “Lad, there is no planning. There is only doing. But I think maybe you already know that.” He regarded Nick, the two of them sharing some kind of understanding.

  “What do you do?” Nick asked, turning to Silva with a smile.

  “I’m an arborist—have a business on Trawler Island,” she answered quickly. “So you’re from Two Rivers?”

  She hoped to change the subject, make polite conversation through the buzzing in her mind: Isabelle painting pregnant girls in a wedding dress, living in a walled city, like something out of the Dark Ages. It was everything she could do not to grab the newspaper and start reading the article on the occupation that she had just seen in person. She needed to know everything about them—these people Isabelle had joined. No matter that the Isabelle Silva had in her head would have never joined a group—a cult—run by someone like Len Dietz. Silva realized that she’d been wrong all along. Despite their shared DNA, their clone-like resemblance, Isabelle wasn’t anyone she would be able to recognize.

  “Grew up not far from here, really, as the crow flies. Down in the canyon on the Snake, a ranch my great-great-grandfather Eldridge homesteaded in the early 1900s,” Nick said, pointing somewhere behind their heads. “Two Rivers is the closest town, though. Have to either boat, hike, or ride to get to the ranch. Big, rugged, wild country, what’s left of it.”

  “Prettiest country there is,” Eli said.

  Silva hadn’t thought of it that way. Austere, yes. Isolated and harsh and unforgiving. Threatening. Nothing as soft as what “pretty” connoted—swells of silver water shapeshifting like mercury under her outstretched palm, lapping on the shore like the breath after a first kiss.

  But Nick was off, talking about his family’s place, where he’d grown up, describing every ravine, every outcropping. He used the table’s plank top to delineate the once-expansive property: a knot as the house site, a whorl the pasture ground, the narrow grain lines as the property’s far reaches, and the wide swath of lighter grain as the river. He described how the summer grasses rolled and heaved like an ocean, the way the pines grew gnarled and mammoth on the tops of the hills, the way the land was full of hidden life. Then he glanced at the newspaper Eli had pushed away, his face changing enough that Silva could see the headline and photo had bothered him, too.

  “But that’s all in the past,” Nick said. “Things are different now. They’ve been different for a long time.” His voice was tinged with anger and regret.

  “You still live there?” Silva asked. “At the ranch?”

  “Not since I was twelve,” Nick said, fiddling with his fork. “But I will again soon. Once the outfitting lease expires and I pay off the back taxes. Only fifteen acres left out of twenty-five hundred, but it’s enough. It’ll have to be.” His face changed. Something sorrowful yet hopeful. Something Silva recognized—an outline of her own emotion. The doomed and their sinking.

  “The outfitters still using the cabin?” Eli asked.

  “Jet boaters, mostly. I’m meeting a group in a few days, pack-stringing them into the Seven Devils. Hopefully the last time I’ll be a boarder on my own place. Then it’ll be just me and the bees, starting fresh, reclaiming the homestead.” He was trying to be glib, but his body belied him. Silva could feel the tension radiating off him. It was clear how much stake he’d put into the plan, a kind of desperation she knew too well.

  “Has the drought hit hard down there?” Eli asked, gesturing outside even though everything was still green, trees leafed so heavily you couldn’t see through them to the hills.

  “Record low snowpack, record low water levels, record high temperatures. Worst fire danger in a century—all the dry years adding up. It’s only green by the river, even this time of year.” Nick looked out the window. “It’s just a matter of time before the whole place ignites.”

  Silva hadn’t considered this risk. Fire, too, along with everything else. She imagined trees sapped of moisture, flames climbing limb to limb, crown to crown. In Trawler, the moss was like a sponge, everything dripping with moisture. She’d never needed to trim the ladder fuels on the island, surrounded by enough moisture and water to drown out the rest of the world’s woes and leave enough for the end of the world, too.

  “Does it burn here often?” she asked.

  “We’re due,” Nick said, as if wildfire were a scheduled event. “The last summer I lived in the canyon, everything downriver burned. There was a plague of grasshoppers that year, too. They popped like popcorn when the fire came. Everything—houses, barns, fences—gone in minutes, nothing left of entire ranches but a few smoldering heaps. You can still find old pieces of charred tin if you know where to look—bedframes grown up with weeds, old plows left standing in the fields, rock foundations with nothing left on top. The Larkins Ranch is well situated, though. Creek on the side, river on the front. Others aren’t so lucky. Almost Paradise, the property above, nearly burned a few years ago. Would have been fitting, too. Almost Hell…” He glanced at Silva. “People you don’t want to ever meet,” he added, as if she needed the warning. Somebody yelling fire after the flames had already consumed everything.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Your ranch’s river access is a hot commodity,” Eli said. “Dietz will bid high at the tax auction when it comes up, you can be sure of that. He has the funds to go as high as he needs. He was nearly successful with a land-grab above Pittsburg Landing, too, where the field bees are.”

  “I’m prepared for that,” Nick said, his posture stiff with hostility. Jaw muscles clenched, hands curled into fists on his lap, enough threat in his voice and body, Silva believed him. A person backed into a corner was a dangerous enemy, even if only to themselves.

  “Why does Len Dietz want your land?” Silva asked, trying to shake the memory of Len standing over her, saying he knew why she’d come. He was omnipresent, something that couldn’t be purged from the air, a handprint she couldn’t wash off. Had that been a warning, too?

  “Already has most of it. My mother signed everything over to him before she died. Would have given him all of it, but the house, barn, and fifteen
acres were protected by the outfitting lease that’s just going back up for auction. He wants the last piece.”

  “So, they’re a religious group?” Silva asked carefully, trying not to show any emotion—Len’s hand on her as he whispered scripture like pillow talk. There was bad blood between him and Nick, that much was clear. Nick’s mother involved with Len Dietz, too, along with Isabelle. Nick and Eli and Mr. Cheema seemingly the only ones on the other side of the town’s alliance.

  “More like a cult,” Nick replied, using Eli’s exact word. “You can spot them a mile away—bearded men in camo and long-haired women in pilgrim dresses, a dozen children apiece. Proselytizing, procreating, and preparing for the apocalypse. The three p’s. It’s no accident that Dietz owns more property in the canyon than anyone else and has claimed more women for himself than any polygamist ever dreamed of. A while back, they started an elk ranch to fund their enterprise. When the rut’s on, elk bugling reverberates down-canyon like a blood call.”

  Silva’s skin prickled in goose bumps, all of it something otherworldly, something as old as the beginning. A man taking dominion over women and beasts alike. The town’s secret. All the mothers. Nick’s mother. Isabelle’s pregnant girls. Bonsai roots cradling the unborn. Everything had been about Almost Paradise and Len Dietz from the moment she’d found Isabelle’s packet.

  “Last week they rallied into full mobilization,” Nick continued. “Shot at a government plane flying over the compound, broke out C&C’s windows, and took over the visitor center. There’ve been enough other things. Len’s already been suspected of poisoning Ted’s dogs and lighting the Updahls’ place on fire when they wouldn’t sell to him. Nothing’s been proven of course, but it’s all been ratcheting up for a long time—especially going into Y2K, although that seemed like a big disappointment to them all. With all the media attention now, though, it’s bound to get worse. Everyone knows how these things end. Waco. Ruby Ridge. The Lenites won’t go down easily.”