Maurice Maeterlinck
1
When Stan Baker of Stan’s Water Divining and Swarm Removal Services Inc. drove up in his small brown Honda, Tess was out checking an empty hive – the honey super, the brood box, the tiny bee door – not one insect left. She imagined the black clan soaring over their neighbour’s house, above the green creek and along Fox’s Lane though it was too early for swarming season, and there were no signs of what Tucker called pestilence.
Now Stan sits with their father on the back porch, stretching out his dicky leg, the good one propped on a rickety chair. He’s come to help solve the mystery of the bees. Tess perches nearby, swinging her feet in the mid-morning sun. From inside the house, the sound of her sister’s practice, the ladder-notes of her scales and arpeggios, the deep full boil of the sonata. Tess is not musical and Meg’s playing fills her with an awe purified of envy. Meg, all grace, full of unaccountable artistry.
A lyrebird dashes out of the bush, its bum wagging. Tess makes a note in her journal, logging the path of nearby animals, their behaviour, their sounds. What if wilderness is just an idea? her teacher had asked. What if there’s no such thing? And Tess had wondered if any inch of the earth remained untouched by human industry. Fifty-five butterfly wings found on the forest path. Each wombat she’s seen lately afflicted with mange. For three days the roos have not come down at dawn or dusk. Are they moving to higher ground? On the radio the other day, a woman yelling at the local member. Stop refining nature’s obituary! Do something, just please do something!
You’re not the only beek around town with a problem, Stan’s saying to Stefan.
Five prime swarms, six secondaries and one absconding colony just this week, Stan continues. Maybe this fracking? It’s upset the water table. You seen George’s place, on the rise? The company finished their drilling and left. He’s got wells on his land you can light with a match. Gas coming out the ground, out the kitchen spigot. Orange-coloured, smell of old socks, says Jean. Three of his palominos got sick from the water. His cabbages grow rotten from inside out.
Ah, Stefan says. But George is coming richer for it, so they say?
Rich from the gas company? Stan asks, scratching an ear, looking doubtful. Maybe, for your bees, try magnets. One at the front, one at the rear of your hives. Bees like a strong field. Or, move your boxes.
Tess watches her father stand, twisting his stiff chest left to right. She thinks of his face above the opened hives, radiant with bee-light, and how he’d taught her to detect the sound of piping. A high, repeated G sharp. That’s the queen, he’d say, his green eyes shining, signalling to her rivals.
What’s this rumpus with the police? Stan is asking now.
Stefan freezes, looks away.
It had been in the paper. The car wreck and the unidentified person who’d died right there on their land. The body there for more than a year. A police hotline to call with information.
Any ideas, Stan asks, who it could be?
They’re just bones, says Stefan, tucking his workshirt into his trousers.
How about the chassis number? That ought to do it, Stan says.
Stefan holds out the veil, the helmet, asking, You want to suit up?
Stan pulls his hat over his long earlobes and says, No thanks – I ain’t getting that close.
He levers himself from the chair, his tanned legs below grey work shorts, thick as timber. The lined backs of his knees like cuts in the grain. He gropes in a pocket, clunks his battered phone on the table.
Stefan doesn’t believe in divining – it’s Evangeline who’d phoned Stan for help. But Stefan hadn’t protested; he’d indulge her everything if it brought her happiness. Anyway he approved of Stan’s holistic methods. Stan, who speaks at town meetings about over-farming, mite pressure, eutrophication. Stan, who’s bequeathed his land for conservation to make sure it won’t be cleared when he’s gone.
As the sun dips behind the mountains the whole family wanders out to watch Stan dowse. They stop in the bee yard in a line that still seems one person short. But as Stan works, this feeling shimmers, then fades.
Evangeline’s in a worn summer dress, her skin still pale from being indoors, her body filling out after the hard years. Tess looks at those strong legs, at her mother’s broad, sandalled feet. It’s as if she’s finally returned to earth. Around her neck, that pearly incisor on a thin silver chain. Stefan touches her lightly on the shoulder.
She smiles, but keeps her gaze on Stan, saying, He can detect water sources to two hundred and seventy-five metres.
There’s something about the way her mother speaks, and how she gets mesmerised watching Stan work. She prefers the old ways, Tess thinks, because of her childhood in The Hive. Though sometimes she’ll say it was primitive, the way they treated injuries or ailments, how some women gave birth with only Jack Hodgins attending, their screams resounding across the valley. She blamed the old ways for Tom’s deafness, for the death of June Peterson’s mother who ought to have been treated at St Catherine’s. She’ll say the old ways are a load of fucking rot, that only men like Jack could believe in them. They’d strived up there for purity through nature, but this had cost the women and children most, she said.
Stan uses L-rods for divining, held out from his body. Some use forked sticks. Others, like Ken Baines, use a pendulum. Baines made his from a gold bullet and witched five wells on the Johnsons’ farm, his bullet swaying over the site of potable water. But Baines got the fever. Works for a mining company now, mapping gold in the ground.
Stan slaloms across their fields, transfigured through his work into grace, despite his gammy leg. But it’s not water he’s divining, it’s ley lines. Bees are happiest on intersecting lines, slower to swarm, less aggressive, the varroa mites stay away.
At some point, approaching the hives, Stan calls, I’ll keep my distance, don’t worry!
Stefan holds up questioning hands.
I have very powerful electromagnetic fields, Stan shouts. Too much for bees!
Meg starts to snigger. With his back to them Stan adds, Ask the wife!
The girls erupt, hands over mouths.
Shush, says their mother, but even she is smiling. It’s true, she says, Marjorie’s told me all about it. Guess how many wristwatches Stan’s destroyed?
*
Later that afternoon Meg curls up in the wingback chair with Peter Pan, though she’s already read it twice. A boy with all his baby teeth, a boy clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that flow from trees. They loved hearing their mother read this, on those sleepless nights when Pip had first come home. She’d spent so many hours with them then that this block of time, though layered with grief, was cherished. It was only later, when their mother receded, that Meg and Tess realised that time had been for Pip alone – and after, when she had nothing left for any of them, they blamed themselves for not knowing how to lure her back.
Peter Pan. Sometimes their mother’s voice had stumbled and cracked in the reading: To die will be an awfully big adventure.
Another expert with his theories, says Stefan, walking sock-footed through the kitchen. He quarters an orange, jams a wedge in his mouth.
You don’t believe him? Evangeline asks.
Stan says we should flush the hives, get rid of the remaining bees in case they’re infected, Stefan says, spitting seeds into his hand.
Hany had a lens-cleaning company radiate his boxes. Either that, or burn them, start over again.
Evangeline stands with the spoon from the pot. Passata dripping to the floor.
But, she says, he isn’t saying you should … ? Radiation, Stefan? I don’t understand. Her face is red and filmy.
The girls grow alert at their mother’s tone; at this word, radiation, which takes them back, again, to Pip.
Their mother has always believed the bees were delicate. She says you’ve no business getting close when you aren’t in the right temper. Now she’s rummaging by the stove. She whips out a brochure, Clear Energ
y, a letter with Stefan’s name typed on, and waves it in the air.
Did you tell Stan what you’ve agreed to?
Meg, trying to ignore the rising timbre of her mother’s voice, sketches a picture of Stan and his dowsing rod. Hands it to Tess.
He’s so magnetic, whispers Meg.
Tess laughs, covering her mouth. Then below the picture writes, Just ask his wife!
Stefan says, They only have an exploration licence. I haven’t promised anything.
Your famous promises, Evangeline says. When were you going to tell me?
Tess and Meg look up, and their parents gaze back with slight awe, as if they’ve forgotten them. Tess thinks of her teacher’s house down the lane, the patched roof, the knee-high weedy garden. Through the doors she’s glimpsed a worrying lack of furniture. Is this what it is to be poor? Without the bees, without their cattle, how will the family survive?
And what about the car crash? their mother is saying. Is there news?
Their father stomps from the room.
Evangeline unlatches a window above the sink; her eyes follow Stefan over the paddocks. In the far corner of the top field Tess can see the depressed heifer, its head bent. Since her calf died of paralysis tick she had not stopped lowing.
Once her father’s safely gone Tess can read this week’s Survival Report. She leans against her bed, legs crossed, flicking the pages with a damp finger. In his report Tom Tucker tells how to keep meat in waxed calico tepees, what goods to lay in for your doomsday bunker. There’s an alphabetised list of Preparedness Tasks:
B is for Barter. C is for Combat Skills, CB Radio and Command.
All because of the approaching Greater Depression, which is something to do with weather, and also, Tess knows, an atmosphere surrounding her mother.
She reads the tips on building shelters, tracking, hunting, making clothes and tools. At least our family has land, Tess thinks. Though this might make them a target of what Tucker calls Pre-parasites – people who’ll prey on the more organised when their own resources run out.
I sincerely believe in charity, Tucker writes. We should not just Prepare for our families, but make sure we can distribute to the less Prudent, the Doubters, the Lazy.
Tess feels a heady chill. Who are the Doubters? Maybe it’s us, she thinks, with their leaning, termity barn and the back acreage left bald and unplanted, their meagre tinned supplies and mouse-chewed bags of local grain, with the infested fruit trees, the old bantams their father can never bring himself to kill, his gentle hands making beeswax candles and, lately, a silly peacock topiary from the pittosporum, designed to buoy their mother up. But perhaps this makes them the Lazy. Beef, eggs, honey, how long would that last in an End of Days Scenario?
Mountain House freeze-dried entrées, Security Seeds (open-pollinated), KIO3 Anti-Radiation tablets (medical grade). Five-hundred-round case of Federal 5.56mm-grain FMJ ammo.
But Tess knows there’s more than all this to surviving. You can sit in a cold hospital ward and lose nearly everything that matters. You can watch your mother cross lawn and paddock till she’s a sinuous shape by the wall of pines that hold the forest back from the fields. Your mother way off. Your sister sketching bare winter trees. Your father, burying cow horns on a day determined by the stars, out in hard rain, not properly dressed for the weather.
When the foraging season has finished, the worker bees will kill the drones to spare them from starvation.
Tom Tucker has too much time on his hands, Tess thinks. They’ve already survived the indescribable: named the stars to distract a sister, stood very still as her coffin hovered. They’d lost Pip and a fellow feeling. They’d lost the mother who’d once been fearless, who’d led them to the sea each summer and, gripping their hands in her own, pulled them through the glassy water. I’ve got you, she’d say to each girl as they kicked, their small heads glistered with brine, and turning them on to their backs she’d ask, do you think this must be how it feels to lie down on the moon? Later, she would bake them in a pie, covering Meg and Tess to the neck in hot sand while Pip built moats and trenches. Then she’d ignore them, idly reading a magazine as they writhed. You’re only medium rare, she’d say, I’d prefer you all very well done.
Tess looks back at Survival, its shivery italic font. Throbbing most urgently beneath Tucker’s reports is something unspoken. What is it, Tess wonders, that we are preparing for?
2
Today the air is clear of everything. It has no knowledge except of nothingness. And it flows over us without meanings …
Evangeline reads aloud. Wallace Stevens, the book flat on the table. The long, sturdy bones of her arms. Her neck bent in concentration.
Jim pulls her towards him.
And there’s another problem, he says. I like your husband too much.
What? she laughs, a saddening sound. More than me? And she takes her blue dress off in one movement, clear over her head.
Jim looks at her heavy breasts, the squarish hips and round belly. The feeling of her body beneath his in every way opposite to compact, nimble Sylvie. Her earthy solidity and drifty air, how she appears to abide by some other, more urgent frequency.
Outside, all the forms are trimmed with final light. But in here the cabin lamps project a woolly, dispersing glow.
She lies down in a sturdy-limbed way. Oddly meek, but sullen. He feels flushed with power. She’s cut herself off – from the town, from the daily routines that might bring about contact – in order to live, and now the consequences. Tess, refusing speech. The townspeople, she claims, cool towards her. Some woman she’d known from The Hive, and wronged, still pursuing her; some dodgy men out to ruin her family. This history of vengeance is so biblical-sounding he thinks it must be partly delusional. At night he watches the mists descend around her house. At night, from afar, it seems to possess its own private climate.
It’s been more than two weeks since she’s come around, but now her husband is off, trucking his bees towards a fiercer heat, following the honey flow. Sometimes on her visits, the hour passes in near silence. She’s a lesson in now and this and yes. Their bodies working boldly because of their futurelessness, because both want, just there, and like that, and ah this, to forget. A pragmatism in how she is with him – so direct, so unenthused by any romantic, delaying gesture. They’re snatching time, they are grabby.
After, he crosses to ashtray and papers. Rolls a joint in that residual, sexual quiet. She’s saying the poem over again. She’s on her stomach, one leg crooked at the knee. Her ashy, falling hair. Her hipbone. Her frank nudity clashing with how she hides her self. Sometimes she calls their meetings her tutorials, then utters a short, unhappy laugh and he sees how unpractised she is, at inhabiting a place she does not belong.
I used to be really good, she’d said, the third time they were alone together, at being what other people wanted me to be.
And what was that? he asked.
In The Hive I was this little know-it-all until maybe thirteen. Once I started up with local boys they called me a wildcat – but I knew what they wanted and I liked knowing it. And, well, you don’t want to hear what they called me later.
He was thinking on this started up. Then he said, Ah, the free-love ethos.
But you were only free to love within The Hive, she said. Not to just sleep around. Unless you were a man. Women paid the price. I didn’t understand how you could be what the boys wanted, then hated for it after.
What was the price? he asked.
She looked up, confused, and said, Well, pregnancy. The oldest story in the world.
Then bent down, quickly strapped her sandals, and left.
So he made her promise to make demands of him and not squander or undermine them. He said, Be honest when you’re here or how else will I know who you really are? She thought this was hilarious, she fell back on the bed silently shaking and clutching herself until he continued. For example, he’d said, do you like this? How about that? And here?
Yo
u’re one of the good ones, she said, very fondly to him once. He turned red then, and restless. Wasn’t he the mysterious stranger, riding through town with his own intriguing secrets? All the more macho since he’d removed the jaunty plastic basket on his Malvern Star. He hadn’t fancied himself as the mild neighbour, doing her bidding. Sometimes, he thought, there are only two choices – you’re Hemingway, or Derwood from Bewitched whose woman masters all the spells. You are your father – corporately priestly and aloof – or his louche, unravelling opposite.
Now she’s holding a palm up as he offers the joint. No. She doesn’t like marijuana’s dislocating effect, she’s already floating off from everything rooted, she says. Even the scent makes her uneasy. There’d been a time when she’d smoked it a lot, she said, a time after Pip. But she’d grown suspicious of everything she’d once been certain of. She began to white-ant every relationship, she picked at all the strained seams of her marriage. She’d fallen out with her only friend, who’d had it coming, but enough about Nora, although, I suppose she’s your supplier? she asks.
Jim stays quiet so she says, Anyway, there are other ways to slow time, and runs a hand across his chest.
Jim likes being suspended, he likes staving off the emptiness that will furrow through his cabin, after, his forehead against the window, his eyes following her path back across the lane and fields and further out until she’s a blue chimera vaporising by her white front door. In the distance, the cattle drift, clockwise around the Müllers’ farm; even corralled they’re governed by some primeval trait, Bos indicus tracking sun or shade, ley lines below the dirt.
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle
After she’s gone it’s rekindled. The poem she’d recited, each line driving through his head. And it amazes him, how a woman so resolutely stuck has transfigured his world so completely.
No thoughts of people now dead,
As they were fifty years ago,
The World Without Us Page 9