The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  Harry’s heart leapt at the idea, and he started to check the wind forecast again, but then Alice walked across the yard to sit with them, and what she had to say brought everything crashing down.

  Harry could tell that her resignation was not “two-weeks’ notice and thanks for the memories.” This was “fuck you, I’m outta here.” And although she didn’t say so, he figured her quitting was related to this other thing—this protest against the county and the big ag company.

  “You two shouldn’t get involved in this,” she said, turning her coffee cup around in her hands. “Your folks would probably want you to steer clear.”

  She brought the cup to her mouth and spilled coffee down the front of her overalls. She brushed it off with her hand, and Jake handed her a tea towel. Harry liked Alice, this slightly grumpy bee lady who was almost as old as his mom and unlike any woman he had known—teachers, aunts, and various neighbors. She wasn’t a coddler or a disciplinarian or phony-friendly. Even his own mother had a way of overpoliteness with people that Harry noticed. Alice was different. Alice was just, well, Alice.

  “My mom does have an opinion about you,” Jake was saying.

  Alice raised an eyebrow. “Oh?” she said.

  “She wanted me to tell you she is praying for you at church. Not just on Sundays. Every day. Her whole prayer group too.”

  Alice chuckled, saying she was unaccustomed to being remembered in prayers and to please say thank you for her. Her face grew serious again.

  “Look, I’ve lived here my whole life, and I know this town. Things could get ugly. You really should distance yourself from this, from me.”

  It dawned on Harry that she was concerned about them, about him. Other than his parents, Harry couldn’t recall the last time someone had worried about his well-being. Alice told Jake he could stay with her for now, but she didn’t know what the future held.

  She smiled at Harry, and her eyes looked sad. “I can pay you through the month, Harry, but then— Well, I’m not sure what I’m going to do for work myself. I’ll give you a great reference, kid.”

  Harry felt those familiar twins—worry and self-doubt—settle back onto his shoulders then.

  “I hate to let you go, Harry. You can stay here as long as you need to while you’re looking,” Alice said.

  Harry wanted to say he would work for room and board. But he needed the money. He still owed his mom for his legal fees. He groaned inside thinking of his mom. He had to call her. But not until he had Uncle H’s ashes.

  Alice braced her hands on her knees. “I’m going to start visiting farmers today about the watershed petition. Why don’t you two work on the next phase of our hive project here? Jake, check on Eight and Nine to see how close they are to swarming. Harry, I’ll need hive stands for all the new hives you put together. Same height as the rest of them, okay?”

  Alice stood and zipped her windbreaker. “I’ll check in later.”

  They watched her walk away past the apiary and into Doug Ransom’s orchard.

  Harry could feel Jake’s eyes on him. The boy popped a wheelie in his chair and spun in a circle, whistling.

  “Holy shit! Wish I’d been there to watch Alice blow the doors off the planning department,” Jake said. “Boom! That just happened!”

  Harry mustered a smile.

  Jake punched him lightly in the shoulder. “C’mon, man. Don’t worry about it. You’ll find something. There’s loads of jobs you can do around here.”

  Harry shrugged, feeling defeated, and watched Jake slide the pieces of his trumpet together. He held the instrument against his mouth and pursed his lips.

  “As for me, I’m going to start a marching band, work all the weddings and quinceañeras around here. Going to put Hood River on the map, yo!”

  He put the trumpet to his mouth again, played a couple of lines of “La Cucaracha,” and grinned at Harry. “Too creepy?”

  Harry could see his friend was trying to cheer him up. It dawned on him that this uncertain future was even worse for Jake, who faced the same problems but with fewer options. Harry could drive. Harry could use his legs. He could get another job doing manual labor pretty easily. He felt like a jackass for sulking when Jake had obstacles he didn’t.

  “I don’t know, man. With that head, you already look like a creeper,” Harry said.

  “Oh, snap!” Jake laughed. “Just for that, I’ll make you second breakfast before we get to work.”

  Up in the house, Jake rolled into the kitchen and began pulling food out of the refrigerator, singing to himself.

  “La cucaracha, la cucaracha. Ya no puede caminar.”

  Harry grabbed the phone book. He glanced at Jake, started to explain, and then didn’t. He called the morgue.

  “Hello. Um, my name is Harry Stokes. Yeah. I, um, need to come pick up my uncle. Harold Goodwin. Yes, that’s right. His remains?”

  Jake jerked his head up from the cutting board where he was grating cheese.

  “Right. ID and five hundred dollars. Great. Okay. Thanks.”

  He hung up and put his hands over his face.

  “Dude?” Jake said.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” Harry said.

  He started at the beginning, well, almost the beginning, and told Jake about Seattle, the trailer, his uncle’s frailty, and the hospital. He didn’t say anything about jail.

  “Man, when you said your uncle had died, you made it sound like it was a while ago. Does Alice know?”

  “Hell no!” Harry said. “I mean, what was I supposed to say? ‘Thanks for the job! Can I borrow the truck to go pick up my dead uncle?’ I thought I’d have a chance to slip by there on an errand, but it’s all the way over in Bingen. I just kept putting it off . . .”

  “Wait,” Jake said. “When did he die?”

  Harry looked up at the ceiling.

  “April twenty-ninth? I think.”

  “The day of your interview?”

  Harry sighed and nodded.

  “Jesus, Harry! Why didn’t you say something?”

  Harry shoved his hands into his hair and shrugged. “You don’t talk about yourself much either, man,” he mumbled.

  Jake scoffed. “There’s not much to tell, Harry. I mean, you know my story. I was a loser in high school, and I fucked up my legs at a stupid party.”

  Harry looked at him and didn’t say anything. Jake held his gaze.

  “I don’t blame anyone else. It was just a stupid accident, but I’m the one who was screwing around on the roof. I’m responsible, man.”

  Jake stared out across the yard, his lips pressed into a thin line. He shook his head and looked back at Harry.

  “Look, Harry. I know it sounds fucked up, but I feel like I got another chance here. I mean, look, walking would be way easier than using this chair, right? But the weird thing is, there’s a lot about my life that I like way better than before.”

  He paused. “I like myself better,” he said. “I like other people more.”

  Harry nodded.

  Jake ran his hands across the stubble on his head and looked out the window. Harry followed his eyes to the apiary, the air full of golden bullets.

  “It’s like the bees saved me or something. I mean, so much of my life is still a fucking mess, but when I’m out in the apiary . . . Man, I just feel like I belong there, like I am part of it.”

  Harry heard the younger boy say this without embarrassment. He was impressed and not a little jealous.

  Jake met his eyes. “I want to stay here if I can. I’m going to help Alice. Whatever that means.”

  Jake’s courage was contagious. What did he have to lose, anyway?

  “Me too,” Harry said.

  They were in this together. The thought fired him up, and then his enthusiasm dipped a notch. First things first.

  “I’m goi
ng to the morgue before Alice gets back. Want to come?”

  “Hells yeah! Road trip to the morgue!”

  After breakfast they took the little pickup and let Cheney ride in the cab, his big body flopped across Jake’s lap with his nose smearing the window. The little engine puttered up the long driveway, through the orchards, and into town.

  As they headed toward the bridge, Harry peered out the window at the sandbar.

  “Kites up! I see two, three, maybe four. Oh, man! It wasn’t supposed to blow today. I told Yogi I would be there tomorrow.”

  Jake laughed. “You’re obsessed, dude.”

  Harry grinned and banged on the steering wheel with his palm. He felt like the new Harry again. “There’s nothing like it, man! I mean, I was a shit-show, flailing around in the water. But when I got up and rode? It was like the sickest longboard ride, but a hundred times better. So smooth. And watching those guys get big air? I can’t wait.”

  Traffic slowed to a crawl behind a logging truck, and Harry gawked out at the river below, scanning the water for the big pink kite. The car behind him honked, and he jumped.

  The morgue was located in a decrepit building in Bingen, a small town across the bridge from Hood River. One building housed every major civic office—mayor, police, taxes, health department, and the morgue—and was situated right next to the railroad tracks. Harry parked the truck as a train thundered by. Under the noise, Jake gestured that he would wait outside.

  The dim hallway was lit by a dirty yellow light and smelled like wet matches. Harry peered at the directory and saw that the morgue was in the basement. He stepped into the narrow elevator, which jumped when the doors closed and creaked downward. Harry said a small prayer that he wouldn’t get trapped. After several long seconds, the elevator paused, bounced, and groaned open.

  Harry saw a woman of indeterminate age sitting behind a low counter. The overhead light gave her skin a greenish cast. Her frizzy hair was the color of tuna fish salad. Her broad shoulders filled out a gray medical scrub top.

  She glared at a computer screen and banged on a keyboard with her index fingers and didn’t look up as Harry approached. He waited, and the seconds stretched out as she continued to type. Harry leaned forward and cleared his throat.

  “Excuse me, I—”

  Without looking at him, the woman held up one finger and kept typing.

  Harry glanced around, looking for something to read, and found nothing. He shifted from foot to foot and listened to the clack of the keys and the hum of the lights. After a long minute, the woman let out a great sigh, pushed her wheeled chair back from the keyboard, and folded her pale arms over her chest. She narrowed her eyes at Harry. “Yes?”

  “I— Um. I’m here to pick up my uncle. I mean his re-remains,” he stammered. “The name is Goodwin. Harold Goodwin?”

  The woman exhaled through her nose, then looked back to the screen. Without a word, she rolled back to the desk and banged away at the keyboard.

  Harry waited.

  “ID,” she said tersely.

  He jumped. “What?”

  “Iden-ti-fi-cation,” she said, drawing the word out like she was speaking to a child. “Do you have your iden-ti-fi-cation?”

  Harry struggled to pull out his wallet and dropped it on the floor. He fumbled for his driver’s license. She glanced down at it and pushed it back at him.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Sorry?” Harry said. “It’s a New York license, but it’s current. See. The expiration date is right here.”

  The woman shook her head. “You are not authorized to pick up Mr. Goodwin’s remains.”

  “But, I called and they said I just needed ID and five hundred dollars?”

  “Yes, and ‘they’ was me, but you are not authorized to pick up Mr. Goodwin’s remains.”

  “Well—I mean. Who authorizes that?”

  “Mr. Goodwin does,” she said, barely moving her lips.

  “But—he’s dead,” Harry sputtered.

  “Yes. I know. This is the morgue,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry that we can’t help you.”

  She didn’t sound sorry at all.

  “Why?”

  “We can only release remains to authorized persons.”

  She said “persons” like it had a “z” on the end.

  “Who is authorized, then? Can you tell me that?”

  The woman exhaled through her nose and glanced at the screen. “Lydia Romano.”

  Harry brightened. “Oh, good! That’s my mom. But she lives in Florida. You can call her. Or I can call her.”

  He cursed himself for not having a phone but knew he could borrow Jake’s.

  “I’ll just grab my phone,” he said.

  The woman wagged her head from side to side. “Authorized. Persons. Only.”

  Harry felt his courage wilt. He just wanted to take care of this one simple thing for his mom. It was always like this when he hit a dead end. He couldn’t move ahead in the way he had planned, and that was that. His shoulders slumped, and he started to turn away. But then he thought of what Yogi had said to Autumn about relaunching the kite. Attitude is everything, he’d said. You gotta believe you can make it happen.

  Harry turned back toward the clerk and smiled tentatively. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m sorry to inconvenience you.”

  He explained he’d been living with Mr. Goodwin, who was his great-uncle. He was picking up the ashes for his mother because she was in Florida. Maybe he could call Dr. Chimosky at Skyline and ask him to confirm all this for her. Would that work? Or was there a form he could email to his mom to have her release the ashes to Harry?

  There must be some process, he thought. He just needed to be patient and follow through.

  As he spoke, the woman’s face softened. “Chimosky was his doc, huh? Yeah, I think that could work.”

  Harry produced the number he’d been carrying around in his wallet. She picked up the phone, peered at the paper, and punched the number.

  “Thanks,” she said, sounding almost friendly.

  A few minutes later, she was handing him a small plastic container. Harry signed the release she gave him and thanked her. She smiled, and Harry realized whatever made her so grouchy had nothing to do with him.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “And for your family.”

  He nodded and thanked her again. He left feeling tremendously pleased with himself. He had honored his uncle. He would call his mother. Harry Stokes was a man who could solve his own problems. He walked out into the May sunshine and back to the truck, where his new friend Jake waited for him. Whatever was coming next, Harry was ready.

  24

  Hive Splitting

  The plan of multiplying colonies by dividing a full hive into two parts, and adding an empty half to each, will be found to require a degree of skill and knowledge, far in advance of what can be expected of ordinary bee-keepers.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  The Schmidt sting pain index was first published in the 1980s by the entomologist Justin Schmidt in an attempt to catalog and compare the pain inflicted by various stinging insects. The Western honeybee rated level 2 out of a possible 4 and with a typical duration of ten minutes. Alice could not have said for certain where the honeybee sting landed on the scale (somewhere between the tropical fire ant and the red paper wasp), but she did know that the usually gentle Apis mellifera only stung as a last resort because it was a fatal act. Once a honeybee inserted her tiny barbed lancet under the skin of an offending creature, she was unable to withdraw it without tearing her body apart in the process. As she released the apitoxin venom through the stinger, she simultaneously emitted a pheromone to raise the alarm among her sisters. More bees would join the fight and bombard the enemy with increasing fury as their own suicidal stings ratcheted up the message that the colony wa
s under attack.

  Later, Alice would recall that she smelled the classic banana fragrance of the pheromone that acted as a call to arms. But Jake told her that the thing he noticed was the sound. He heard the contented murmur of the colony shoot up into a pitch of defense. And a moment later, he felt the first of those level 2 stings.

  Alice could tell he didn’t take it personally. She had run to the farthest edge of the apiary as the bees descended in an angry cloud. She watched Jake slowly turn his chair around and move calmly out of the apiary. By the time he reached the house, he was enveloped in a swirl of buzzing bodies but never once swatted at them. He just took it. She’d never seen anything like it.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, Alice dug gingerly at the soft skin under his eye with a tweezer. The area had swelled up considerably while she’d been busy pulling stingers out of his scalp. She swore under her breath as she grasped the tiny barb and finally eased it out. “I think that’s the last one.”

  She handed him an ice pack and sat back to look at him. “Dammit, Jake. I’m so sorry. That was a stupid mistake.”

  Jake prodded the puffy area under his eye with his index finger. “No, it’s all good, Alice. At least now I know I’m not allergic.”

  She glanced at her watch. “We’re not out of the woods yet. I pulled at least twenty stingers out of you. You just sit tight and let me know if you’re feeling dizzy or having trouble breathing. You took that Benadryl, right?”

  He nodded.

  She had wanted to use the EpiPen, but he insisted the ice pack and Benadryl were enough.

  They had managed to split two hives before things fell apart. As they started the third, Jake sat, bareheaded and unveiled as usual, waiting for Alice to hand him a full frame. It was swollen with capped brood and loaded with bees. Alice extended it to him, lost her grip, and dropped it next to the wheelchair. It hit the ground, and the bees exploded upward.

  Looking at the kid’s swollen face, she felt a wave of anger at herself. She felt terrible for hurting the bees and for getting Jake stung. She knew better than to work the hives when she was distracted. She’d been thinking about what Fred Paris said. Arrogant, pink-faced Fred. What had she expected? Even her father hadn’t had anything nice to say about Fred Paris, and Al Holtzman had liked almost everyone.