Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  Silva couldn’t remember anyone taking pictures. She glanced quickly away, scanning the other news as she steadied her breathing. Charts demonstrating record low water tables and the worst drought the area had seen in years; an article detailing a tractor-trailer wreck on Highway 95; a boxed piece giving advice on how to save water in your garden. Only when she’d collected herself did she read the article on the raft wreck, but there was nothing about the woman’s body becoming fluid, stripped by the river. Nothing about the knowledge in her gray eyes, the images imprinted into them—a reckoning of her union with the river. Nothing about her swimming upriver, her mouth open in a silent cry. Silva had seen into the woman’s eyes. Felt her skin. She couldn’t let it go. She folded the paper and put it next to the stove, the news of this place something she wished to burn until it all disintegrated into ash.

  “It’s got to be taken care of right away,” Mack said, Silva catching the end of what he’d been saying to Nick. “The outfitters are worried about getting sued. There’s a lot of paperwork to complete.” He looked at Silva and shook his head. “That’s some hard business you two had.”

  “They want both of us to come down?” Nick asked.

  “No. They said they need Silva to stay here to field anything that might come up. They’re going up to blow out the jam today. They may need something or have more questions. I’m sure sorry,” he said, looking at Silva as he stood up. “I’ll try to get him back to you right away.”

  “I’ve got Juniper. I’ll be okay,” Silva said, trying to reassure Nick as well as Mack, both of them frowning and troubled. She only wished she could believe herself.

  Nick gathered his things, then hesitated. “Be careful. Don’t go anywhere,” he said.

  “I won’t,” she replied, her insides as heavy as lead. Places she’d already been.

  She stayed inside as they left, the radio crackling with traffic as leaves on the locust next to the house twisted loose, drifting down the tin roof with a quick slide. Hot air pushed against the heat-weary hills, blowing the pines above the house, needles shaken loose and scattering over the grass in hot dusty gusts. Another layer of drying out, another degree of drought.

  She went out to the burn pile she’d made in her first weeks at the ranch: grayed driftwood heaped next to the door she’d found washed up. She pulled the door from where she’d leaned it against the elm and carried it to the river. In the water, the door bobbed and twirled, as if the river was indecisive, settling on which way to carry it. Finally, it caught a bit of current and started downriver, slowly at first, catching in some shallows before gathering speed. Silva walked alongside on the shore, picking up large rocks that she threw until she’d landed several on the door’s top. She wanted to sink it, settle it somewhere on the river’s bottom—an exit from the world above, entry to some other place, some other life. She wanted to leave it for the woman to find, but it floated just past her reach, heading where she couldn’t follow.

  She stayed in the house the rest of the day, curled up in bed in the full light like an invalid—a reminder of where she’d been not long ago. She heard a boat surge upriver sometime early midday, heading for the rapids that had taken the woman, going to blast away the jam even though it was too late to do any good now. She paged through the bee books, stopping to read a section about queens. The queen will not crave for air, or the light of the sun; she will die without even once having tasted a flower.… Not even twice, it may be, in her life shall she look on the light… and on one occasion only will she make use of her wings… to fly to her lover.

  When Juniper woke Silva with his barking the next morning, she jerked upright, thinking of Len and his men, of Nick gone again, but everything was stilled and silent. Then the radio crackled to life in the kitchen. A woman’s voice, disembodied and tinny, “Larkins Ranch, repeat, do you read?” followed by a rustling crackle.

  Silva got up and rushed to the kitchen, sure that there’d been another accident, another fight, another disaster. She keyed the mic quickly. “This is Larkins Ranch, go on,” she said, her heart racing, her breath heaving as she waited for the response, for whatever was coming.

  Hesitation, static feed, then, “Larkins Ranch, this is Almost Paradise. We have a large bee swarm on the premises.” Static. “Do you copy?” A slight accent lilting over the radio’s static—a hesitant voice too close to the microphone. Someone unused to speaking on the radio.

  Silva stared at the radio. “Faith?” she finally asked, her own voice thin and questioning.

  “This is Faith.” Static. “Your bees have come to us.”

  Silva dropped the mic and sprinted outside.

  A few workers flew around the apiary, but when she opened the top boards of the first hives, instead of a buzzing horde, there were only a few forlorn drones crawling along the hexagons of wax. She pulled top after top, her throat tight, her pulse hammering through her limbs. The bees gone. The reality of it took her breath away.

  She ran back to the house. “Almost Paradise, do you copy?” she called, trying to control the wavering timbre of her voice, planning as she spoke.

  “We copy,” Faith said, her sunken voice coming as if from underwater.

  “I’m on my way,” Silva said.

  A hesitation of static, then a reply: “We’re expecting you.”

  Silva ran back to Nick’s books, paging through until she found the sections on swarming—what to do, how to gather and transport the swarm—but there was nothing on how to do it in the wild, some burlap bags and a horse your only available tools.

  She threw on boots and locked Juniper in the house. She thought about trying to raise Mack on the radio, but it would only cause more agitation. Nick wouldn’t be back for hours, and swarms were unpredictable—they might fly farther, fly where she couldn’t find them at all. She knew what could happen, what Nick might do if he found the bees absconded to Almost Paradise. Eli had said that the bees wouldn’t abandon her as they had the others, but they’d flown to Len Dietz as though he were a Pied Piper singing them forward to their certain death.

  She saddled Tiko, grabbed several burlap bags and Nick’s smoker, and stuffed them into the knapsack, Juniper barking from inside the house as Tiko took off at a full gallop toward the trail she thought she would never ascend again. This time, she let Tiko go as fast as he wanted, his coat quickly darkening with sweat, his lungs working like bellows underneath her as they climbed. He didn’t ease his speed until Silva saw the boundary fence ahead and pulled back. There was someone standing at the wire gate, waiting for her.

  When she got close enough, she saw it was Isaac, the bulky leg brace encasing his right leg. Wordlessly, he unhooked the fence and pulled it open for her to ride through, then secured it behind her as she dismounted. She swallowed hard against her fear. It felt like a trap, even if the bees had swarmed to Almost Paradise on their own accord—just as Isabelle had, just as Nick’s mother had.

  “I’ve come for the bees, the swarm—” she said to Isaac, glancing around as if she might spot the bees on her own. He looked at her as though she were an apostate, as though she were the one threatening to take everything away when really it was Len who had been robbing everybody, plundering and pilfering, taking what he desired.

  Isaac hobbled past her, following the brush line that edged the canyon and backed the Almost Paradise cemetery ahead. The large handheld radio clipped to his front pocket crackled with static as a man’s distant voice called out helicopter flight coordinates—a pilot en route somewhere. Silva wondered if the Lenites had been listening in on the raft accident radio correspondence, too, and all her radio correspondence since she’d been in the canyon. No wonder they seemed to know everything.

  Isaac led her straight toward the cemetery, dozens of weathered crosses standing solemn in morning shadow, sheltered under the towering palaver tree, its massive roots anchoring all the graves full of women and babies—a meeting spot for conversations of the dead. All the females fallen from paradise. A c
ircle of babies clutched in its roots.

  Silva finally saw it—a black, undulating, U-shaped curtain of bees draped from the ponderosa’s lower branch, low enough that they almost brushed the graves. Honeybees massed by the thousands, buzzing in unison as though they’d come to speak for the dead.

  Isaac stopped at the cemetery’s border, and Silva held herself straight, trying to maintain her equanimity, uneasy with the possibilities—this place where Isabelle was likely interred, along with Nick’s mother and baby brother. But there was no time to look for them.

  Glancing toward the compound and then back to her, his eyes the same startling ice-blue as Nick’s, Isaac said, “You should hurry.”

  She wanted to take his hand, tell him there was more, so much more than this. A future that wasn’t shaped by devastation. But his face was as guarded and shuttered as Faith’s had been.

  “The Larkins Ranch—you’re staying there?” he asked as she unbundled the burlap bags.

  “Yes. I’m the caretaker,” she said, modulating her voice. Some disquieting thing in Isaac’s tone started her heart thumping with dread.

  “You shouldn’t stay—” he blurted, just as his radio squawked to life again. This time the voice was clear and close, a deep, commanding voice Silva knew well.

  “Almost Paradise, all hands ready.” Len Dietz’s voice repeated the phrase twice before the radio went silent.

  “You must be fast,” Isaac said, before hobbling back toward the whitewashed buildings, his bad leg dragging sideways with each step, leaving a skid-line in the path’s dust.

  Her body alive and pulsing with Isaac’s and Len’s words—some communication she wasn’t a part of, some kind of energy in the air, a feeling of impending disaster—she quickly led Tiko to the brush line and tied him off out of sight from the compound, then gathered the smoker with shaking hands. She lit it and blew on the dry grass until it smoldered, smudging the air with smoke. She walked to the cemetery, stepping cautiously between the graves, scanning for names, but the crosses were blank—nothing to say whose body lay beneath the soil.

  When Silva reached the swarm, the sound of buzzing was so loud it took over the air—an electric, humming vibration she could feel in the cavity of her chest. The hair on her arms rose as if she were in a storm, the air charged with current. She sat the smoker on the ground, smoke drifting like graveyard fog around her feet, then offered her hand to the bees. They crawled over and around and under one another, their wings translucent, their antennae waving as they communicated in their unknown language. They swarmed her, shrouding her arm up to the elbow, drawing her into the warmth of their center, humming over her skin with thousands of pulsing abdomens as if she were a part of the swarm herself.

  She opened a burlap bag, held it under the swarm, and slowly encased the bottom bees. With gentle movements, she swept in the first tumble of hundreds, tied the top of the bag, and then carefully set it in the tree’s shade, where the burlap moved like a shifting shadow. She repeated the same motions again and again, the bees docile, letting themselves be shaken loose. But then those remaining—over half the swarm—suddenly took to the air. They were so thick she couldn’t see anything but their bodies hovering around her. They landed on her, covering her head and face, arms, and neck, thousands of wings brushing her skin. They crawled over her lips, along her eyebrows, hung from her earlobes, the weight and warmth of them surprisingly heavy, as if she’d been suddenly anchored. She felt her body respond to theirs—a sonorous humming from deep inside her. Then, one by one, they lifted, the dark mass of them passing overhead, swirling upward until they finally gathered farther up the pine, weighing its upper branches down, massing too high to reach.

  A rumble of men’s voices came from the compound, and Silva’s heart jumped, remembering Isaac’s watchful edginess, his warning to hurry. She grabbed the smoker and bags of bees and ran back to Tiko, keeping herself as much out of sight as possible. She looked back and spotted the source of the voices: two dozen or more heavily armed men in head-to-toe camo holding stiff, military poses, a quarter mile away, their backs to her.

  Her ears thundering with the rush of her own blood, she led Tiko along the fence back to the gate. Whatever the Lenites were preparing for, she knew Len and his men would stop at nothing. The storm Delores had warned of was coming.

  Looking over her shoulder to make sure nobody had spotted her, she mounted Tiko and kicked her heels into his withers until he was streaking downhill, the air rushing past them knife-hot, the sun beating hard into her skin, her sweat running like water. She gripped the bags full of bees, hunkered low as Tiko thundered through the rise and fall of the hills. Flush with heat and surging adrenaline, Silva felt loose limbed, as if she and the bees might take off flying together at any moment, the ground wavering with heat waves until it seemed they weren’t running, but floating, gliding through the air without effort.

  Backed by sky, the trail swung sharply down and Tiko stumbled, Silva grabbing his mane as he knocked rocks into the abyss, the trail turning to air. He heaved himself to safety at the last minute, skidding through the lower switchbacks, his muscles twitching as finally they broke out onto the Larkins Ranch grounds. A gust of wind hit Silva hard in the face, a hot blast peppering her skin like a swarm of insects as Juniper came sprinting from the house, Nick on his heels.

  He grabbed Tiko’s reins as she slid off, the burlap sacks clutched in her hands. “The bees,” she said breathlessly, still gripping them.

  Uncomprehending, Nick looked from the bags back to Silva.

  “Faith radioed in early this morning. They swarmed—went to Almost Paradise. I didn’t want to lose them. I tried to get as many as I could,” she said in a gulping rush.

  Nick’s face flickered from one emotion to the next as he looked from Silva to the apiary, taking in the weight of the loss. A punch to the gut. She was consumed with shame, as though it’d been her doing—all the things she’d left unsaid, all the things she’d kept from him. He deserved the truth, but it was too late now, everything verging on disaster.

  He dropped Tiko’s reins, strode quickly to the apiary, and pulled off a hive cover, looking inside in disbelief just as Silva had, going from one hive to the next. She wanted to weep at the look on his face as he took in all the empty interiors—all of his plans gone in one fell swoop.

  Her arms quivering, she held out the bags. An offering, a dissolution of her sins.

  He took them from her hands, the look in his eyes wild and unseeing. “You shouldn’t have risked yourself like that,” he said. But he opened the bags as carefully as a lover, pinning open the burlap and releasing the captured bees back to the hives they’d just abandoned. “Where were the rest?” he asked, turning to her.

  “At the cemetery, in the ponderosa.” She didn’t want to say it, make him have to think about his mother, his brother, too, the bees there speaking for them all—all the voices of the lost.

  He strode to the house, the screen catching against the porch as he yanked it open. The movement knocked over a vase of flowers Silva had set on the porch railing, shattering it into a mess of water, glass, and petals. She ran to brush the broken pieces into a pile before Juniper could step in them, but a shard lodged in a crack and sliced her palm, a line of blood instantly welling up and dripping from her wrist. She pinched the cut tight, tried to keep from crying, but all of it was right at the surface, threatening to overtake her entirely, everything unraveling at the seams. A deep, gulping pain rose in her chest. She couldn’t speak past it, couldn’t say or do anything except watch as Nick mounted Sage and rode toward Almost Paradise, where dozens of armed men would be waiting, their anger as sure as his own.

  But before he was off the grounds, the sound of a motor reverberated off the canyon walls, and Nick pulled up, watching a helicopter suddenly appear from over the hills downriver, angling up the canyon toward the ranch.

  At first Silva thought it was the same search-and-rescue helicopter from the raft wreck, but th
en she saw it was different—green and white with a Fish and Game emblem, its front a bubble of glass. She remembered Isaac’s radio, a pilot calling in flight coordinates.

  It flew in low over them and landed on the flat she’d mown for the rafting group; then a man in an olive-green uniform came running from it across the bridge as Nick rode Sage back to the house. Silva could only assume it was Ted, the Fish and Game warden Nick and Mack had discussed.

  Over the helicopter’s high-pitched whir, the man yelled, “There’s been a breach—the Paradise elk have escaped. If we don’t get it under control quickly, it could wipe out the whole region’s population—elk, deer, and sheep,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I could use your aim.”

  Nick glanced toward the apiary for a split-second, then at Silva.

  Ted waved them on, said, “We have room for both of you. There’s no time to waste.”

  Silva locked Juniper back in the house again as Nick stalled Sage and Tiko. They ran together to the helicopter, shielding their faces against the rotor-wash. Salt edged the corners of Silva’s mouth. She closed her eyes a moment, breathing through her nose, trying to brace herself for the onslaught of what she’d always feared was coming. A vise pressing in until there was no space left to inhabit.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  * * *

  What comes of love when it is lost, when it circles around you and then flies away, disappearing into the gray sky? What comes of lostness when it is no longer lost, your feet finding their way over and over again to the same spot, resting on ground that was once unbeknownst to you, burial ground of the broken, the sound of wings returning as you look out over the canyon walls into air like breath, rising and dissipating like your own blood? You bury them here, these the lost, these the songs, these the holy buds of life, each like a tiny curled seedpod cradled in the roots of the mother tree. You would save them all if you could—all the words, all the songs, all the lost love winging forever away. You raise your arms, and you cry out into the wind. It takes each word and spreads them until they fall echoing from the cliffsides into the rushing water—birds and leaves and seeds and bees diving and disappearing, following the echoing voices of love lost.