Ilse gasps.
“Yup, that’s right.” His tone is cheerfully sympathetic. Really a charming young man. Perhaps attended the local community college for two years, like Brian, Ilse thinks, found he was not academically inclined, though bright enough, and looked for any old job till he could decide what he wanted. He would make a nice tennis instructor. “They’re honeybees. There’s most likely a lot of honey in the wall.”
“Oh, can we get it out?” Ilse loves honey.
“Well, once we spray, it won’t be good anymore.” He sounds genuinely regretful. “You see, the bees take turns fanning the honey with their wings to keep it at sixty-five degrees. But now with the warm weather it’ll melt pretty fast. You might even have to break though the wall and get rid of it. It could smell or stain, it’s hard to say.”
She envisions forty thousand bees frantically fanning, protecting their product and livelihood, their treasure and birthright. That is the terrifying demented noise she hears at night.
“Will you get them all?”
“Oh sure.” He laughs. “No problem. We guarantee. Any that don’t die just fly away—with the hive gone, you won’t be seeing them around. Except if you have holes in the wall some might try to get back in and start all over.”
“I don’t think there are any holes.”
“Could you just sign this paper, please?” He holds out the clipboard.
Ilse is always careful about what she signs. Robbie taught her that when she first came to America. “What is it?”
“Just routine. That we’re not responsible for any damage to property, the terms of payment, the guarantee, and so on. Go ahead, read it. Take your time.”
Feeling rather foolish, she scans the document. It is merely what he said, as far as she can see, and seems excessively formal for so simple a transaction. The undersigned is to pay half now and half on completion of the service, but since this case will probably require only one visit, the young man says, she can pay all at once. A hundred dollars for forty thousand bees. A quarter of a cent per bee, Ilse rapidly calculates, though it is a meaningless statistic. She signs and hands the document back.
“How long will it take?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes at the most.”
“No, I mean before they’re all gone.”
“Oh,” He chuckles at his little error. “The stuff works gradually, like, in stages. You might still hear something this evening, but then, during the night”—and he grins so ingenuously that she realizes he is just a boy, after all—“baaad things will happen to them.”
He pauses, but Ilse has no ready response.
“Okay, I’ll do the inside first.” He fetches several cans and a small toolbox from the van and follows her up to the bedroom, where she shows him the makeshift cardboard patch. He nods as if he has seen it all before, and asks her to leave the room and close the door. Although she again has a secret hankering to stay and watch, Ilse obeys. So she never gets to see exactly what is done, but sits at the kitchen table, writes out a check, and waits. The girls have vanished for the moment, leaving their assigned vegetables ably chopped. In a few minutes the Ban-the-Bug man reappears and goes outside to do the hive. After she thanks him and watches him drive away, Ilse scrubs her hands at the sink before returning to the food—why, she does not know, for she has touched nothing alien except his pen and paper.
Mitch, when he comes home, is pleased at what she has accomplished, and listens respectfully as she relates all the pertinent facts. The dinner is excellent and lavishly praised, and the girls seem to be reconciled. Mary Beth is not such a thoroughgoing prig, as it turns out—she can be highly amusing on the subject of her family’s foibles and idiosyncrasies. Later, in bed, Mitch wants to make love, but Ilse cannot summon the spirit to do it. He is disappointed, even a trifle irked, but it will pass. There will be other nights. She lies awake listening. The sound is feebler, and intermittent. She trusts it will stop for good very soon, as she was promised.
The next day, after work, she returns home and finds Cathy stretched out on a lawn chair, Walkman on, eyes closed. She calls to get her attention and Cathy unplugs. Ilse asks her to gather up and dispose of the corpses, which are so numerous they look like a thick, lush black and gold carpet. Shaking her head morosely at her fate, Cathy fetches a broom and dustpan. Ilse remains there as if turned to a salt block, watching her daughter work.
“Do we really need to go to all this trouble?” Cathy grumbles. “I mean, maybe you could use them for fertilizer or something.”
She darts two giant steps to Cathy, grabs her shoulder, and shakes her hard. “How dare you say such a thing!” Her other hand is lifted, in a fist, as if to deliver a killing blow. “How dare you!”
Cathy, pale, shrinks back from her mother. “What did I say? Just tell me, what on God’s green earth did I say?”
Drowning
MARY BUCCI BUSH
After the week-long rain, it was too wet for working in the cotton fields, and there were too many snakes for clearing the swamp of stumps and branches. Isola’s mother saw that look come onto her daughter’s face. “Don’t you go to the levee,” she told her. “You stay here and fix the clothes with me.”
The water came from everywhere. The river swelled and, once, came within inches of the top of the levee, powerful and deep and dangerous. Puddles formed in the woods, the bosc’ her family called it, big puddles like ponds, and fish swam in the water, fish from nowhere. The land itself turned into a patchwork of streams and ponds and puddles. Even stepping on what looked like dry land became a risk: put your foot on a grassy spot and you might find yourself in water over your ankles.
“Where do you think you’re going?” her mother said.
“Nowhere. I got to pee.”
“You gotta work, that’s what you gotta do.” She took the dress from her daughter’s hand and shook it out. “Look at this,” she said. “What’s gonna happen to you when you try to get a husband and he sees you do a mess like this with your sewing?”
“Mamma,” she pleaded. “Maybe I’m not gonna get a husband.”
Her mother made a sound like she was spitting coffee grounds from her mouth. Then she crossed herself. “I pray for you, dear God, what’s gonna happen if you gotta be like this?”
Isola rubbed her foot back and forth along the floor, scratching the ball of her foot on a rough spot on the wood. Oswaldo was out hunting frogs with their father for their supper. Angelina was outside in the sun stringing tomatoes to dry. They had picked as many as they could before the rain came and ruined them. Everyone else was outside doing something, and here she was stuck in the house with her mother’s prayers and a needle and thread.
Her mother stood and went for a candle and her statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Isola groaned to herself as she watched. Her mother placed the statue on the floor, then lit the candle in front of the statue. She pointed to the floor. “Get down there and pray before the devil takes you to go live with him for good,” she said. Isola got down on her knees next to her mother and they prayed: Hail Mary, Our Father, Hail Holy Queen. Then they were quiet for a long time. Isola watched the flame flicker in front of Mary’s chipped blue robe. Mary’s face was like a little doll’s face, and she looked like a girl, maybe a girl Isola’s age, with an expression that made Isola think that Mary’s mother must have yelled at her all the time, too.
The Italians worked like animals, her father said, scrounging for a penny every minute of the day. When they weren’t working off their shares for Mr. Gracey they were hiring out to chop weeds for other farmers, or they were selling tomatoes or eggs house to house or patching people’s clothes or washing them or fixing a wagon for them. A penny here, a penny there, and it all got saved. The black people didn’t seem to be as crazy about working and making money as the Italians were, even though they got yelled at more for not working enough, and punished in other ways. Most of the time Isola wished she was a black girl so she could play with Birdie more, or sing with
her while they worked in the fields.
Isola’s mother reached over and snuffed out the candle with her fingers.
“Can I go pee now?” Isola said.
“Go pee. And then you stop and see why the chickens are so quiet, maybe they got drowned out there. Bring the eggs in.”
Isola moved toward the door, relieved.
Everything was happening outside. The sun was already beginning to dry the land, and old Step Hall was bringing a mule and wagon down the road, going somewhere for the boss. He raised his hand to her and waved. She moved past Angelina with her strings of tomatoes, down near the road. Birdie was following behind her father on foot, trailing a branch in the dirt.
“Mornin’, Miss Isola,” Step said as he drove by. “Glad to see you out and about.”
Birdie stopped alongside Isola, dragging the branch in the dirt. “Lookit the designs I’m making,” she said.
Isola looked at the swirls in the muddy dirt. “My Papa’s at the swamp catching frogs,” she told Birdie.
Birdie shuddered, dropping the branch. “Frogs,” she said. “I don’t know how you can eat ‘em.”
“Just sometimes,” Isola said.
Step was nearly down the road. He turned and called out to Birdie, “Don’t you be dawdling here. Git back home.”
Birdie watched her father ride away. Then she told Isola, “Daddy say a man drowned in the lake. Say his boat got turned over.”
“Drowned?” Isola said. She stared at Birdie, wide-eyed.
Isola walked toward the back of the chicken shed so Angelina wouldn’t be able to see or hear them.
“Daddy ‘spec he was drunk,” Birdie told her, “trying to cross the lake to see his gal. He goin’ to see now.”
“He’s going to see a drowned man?” Isola said.
“Got to see who he is, bring him back to bury him if he from here. Nobody know yet. I’m mad he won’t take me.”
Isola tried to imagine a drowned man. She knew the river was dangerous: nobody ever went in the river, not even with a boat unless it was one of the big river boats. But the lake. Everybody went fishing in the lake, and swimming sometimes too, and they all crossed the lake on Primo’s ferry, or in the priest’s rowboat.
“If we was in the woods,” Birdie said, “we could see when Daddy brung him back.”
“My Mamma told me I have to stay away from the levee,” Isola said. “She told me to check the chickens and get the eggs.”
“Woods ain’t no levee,” Birdie said. “Your dumb chickens okay.”
They listened to the quiet clucking coming from inside the shed.
“She told me to get the eggs. And I have to sew.” But even as she said the words to Birdie she saw a big dark figure in her mind, the swollen shape of a man being pulled from the lake and then him lying on the ground, his wet clothes plastered to his bloated body while she moved closer and closer to get a look at his drowned face. But all she could see was a man sleeping, and she saw his puffy closed eyes and his puffy black cheeks and the diamonds of water glistening in his black hair.
They cut through the damp weeds and over across to where the road picked up again. The road was muddy and warm. Heat rose up, like heat from the stove when the fire was just starting to burn—warm, but not too hot.
Besides Birdie, the water was about the only good thing about living on the plantation. Back home they’d had the ocean, but it was different. Even though the tides made the water move, it always moved in the same way. Here, the water was wild. One day it was quiet and sweet and low; the next day it was pulling down houses and carrying mules away, or it was crashing from the sky in sudden, terrifying thunder and lightning storms, or it was seeping into everything through the ground that wasn’t the solid ground it seemed to be; or like with the puddles in the bosc’ a lake would form overnight where there’d only been dry land before. Even the air was full of water, humid, stifling in the summer. You could choke just breathing it, Isola’s father said.
The girls slowed down when they reached the SanAngelo house. Nina was their friend. Her mother had the fever and her father had gone off with some other men to try to find work in a mill while Nina and the rest of the family ran the farm. Mr. Gracey’s men from the store had gone after Mr. SanAngelo and the others to bring the men back. Everybody on the plantation was talking about it, wondering if they’d be shot, like the black ones who ran away, and wondering too what would happen to their families once the fathers were shot.
“You see her?” Isola whispered.
“I don’t see nobody,” Birdie told her. They walked slowly, craning their necks to see. The house was closed. The door was closed, and the window panes were closed, like you do when somebody dies. “I wonder if they’re inside,” Birdie said.
They stopped for a minute and peered at the house, listening. Maybe they were gone out in the fields working, since the land was starting to dry up, and they’d been working even harder than usual since the men from the store went looking for Mr. SanAngelo. Nobody had thought it was a bad idea to go away to look for work to pay off the bills. But once the boss sent his men out, it seemed like a terrible idea. Going away meant you were trying to cheat the boss.
The SanAngelo house was a little shack, like everybody else’s, weathered boards built up on tree stumps in case of floods or snakes, not that it kept the snakes from getting in. Two windows and a door, no screens. A stove pipe jutted out of the roof, the stove inside used to cook on and to heat all three rooms in the winter. A tree stump served as a step.
Near the house, the SanAngelos’ little vegetable garden lay flattened from the rain. Sticks that had held the tomato plants stood upright, twine still tied to them, while the plants lay on their sides in the sandy dirt. A few smashed red tomatoes lay in the heap.
They hadn’t seen Nina in a few days now, and they missed her. But it would be strange to see her, Isola thought, knowing her father had run off and that he was being hunted like an animal and that maybe he would be shot, too.
“Stay away from her,” Isola’s mother and father had told her. “Maybe the Americans will make trouble for us, too, if they see you playing with her.”
But her father wasn’t staying away from the SanAngelos. He’d gone to the priest to try to get help for Mrs. SanAngelo and to keep Mr. SanAngelo from going to jail or getting in worse trouble. But so far the priest hadn’t done anything. It was a secret. Isola wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, or else maybe the men would do something bad to her father if they found out. She couldn’t even tell Birdie.
“My Papa says we all have to watch out now,” Isola told Birdie.
“What for?”
Isola looked around. She moved closer to Birdie and lowered her voice. “That if we play with Nina the Americans will shoot us. Or maybe burn down our house.”
Birdie took a step back and looked at Isola. “Where you got such a crazy idea?”
“That’s what the Gracey men do,” Isola said. “That’s what my Papa told me.”
Birdie put her hands on her hips. “You dumb or something? White folks don’t shoot white folks.” She walked faster, so that Isola had to trot to catch up with her.
“But we’re not white,” Isola told her. “We’re Italian.”
They reached the corner field where, despite the recent rain, a few people were out working. It was the Titus land, Birdie’s cousins. The black people waded through the tall green plants checking for damage and chopping weeds. The plants that had been broken or knocked down had to be pulled out. Lud Titus called out to Birdie to get home, her Mamma wanted her to work. Birdie waved back to Lud, and then the two of them started running, not down the road that went to Birdie’s house but straight ahead toward the woods. They giggled as they ran, over the sight of fat Lud with hardly any hair on her head, and no teeth at all.
The woods was on the way to the lake. The road ran right past the woods, and if a wagon came, especially a wagon carrying a drowned man, they’d be able to run out to see. The water was
up in the woods, and the ponds were back. A few fallen limbs, cracked from the storm, their white insides shining, dangled from the trees or lay strewn in the weeds and low grass. The girls ran to the big pond just inside the trees. The ground was spongy under their feet, and mud squished through their toes.
“I wonder if the fish is back this time,” Birdie said. She splashed her feet at the edge of the pond. Isola followed her, stepping into the water. It was cool. She rubbed her feet along the grass under the water and watched the mud swirl up, both from the earth and from the dirt on her feet. They found sticks to poke into the water to test its depth. Isola held the hem of her dress bunched in her hands as she poked with her stick in the shallow water.
“See any?” Birdie said. She waded a little farther and bent over, letting her dress get wet.
“There’s something,” Isola said, pointing. She jumped, but then stood still again. She was afraid of snakes, ever since she’d felt in one of the chicken nests for eggs only to find a big snake slithering through her fingers.
Birdie slapped at the fish with her stick and the fish disappeared. They were small, only a few inches long. Isola’s mother said the fish swam in the earth, in water underground, to get to the puddles in the bosc‘. But her father said they came out of the river and walked across the land at night and jumped into whatever water they found. Isola wondered why she never saw fish walking, since she’d been outside at night lots of times. Or why they never found dead fish on land, the ones that couldn’t make it to a piece of water. And how did they walk, since they didn’t have any legs? The fish looked like ordinary fish: thin and silvery and covered with scales. Pesce di bosc‘, the old people called them, though they said there was nothing like them back home, they’d only seen such things here in this strange country.
“I’m gonna catch one,” Birdie said. She was already walking through the water crouched forward, her dress dragging below the surface, plastered against her legs. She held her arms out, ready to grab the first thing that moved.
Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American Page 14