The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

  I dragged myself out of bed and went to see her anyway. I decided that even Mary did not need to be one hundred percent capable all the time. The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, You poor thing, I know how you feel. Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that’s just me.

  Right off I smelled the chain, its thick, rusty odor. I had the urge to unwrap her, but of course that would have ruined the whole reenactment August and the Daughters had going.

  The red candle flickered at Mary’s feet. I plopped onto the floor and sat cross-legged in front of her. Outside, I heard wind high in the trees, a singsong voice that carried me back to long-ago times when I would wake in the night to the same sound and, muddled with sleep and wanting, would imagine it was my mother out there among the trees, singing her bottomless love. Once I flew into T. Ray’s room, yelling she was outside my window. He said three words: “Holy crap, Lily.”

  I hated when he was right. There had never been any voice in the wind. No mother out there singing. No bottomless love.

  The terrible thing, the really terrible thing, was the anger in me. It had started on the back porch when the story of my mother had collapsed, like the ground under my feet giving way. I didn’t want to be angry. I told myself, You’re not angry. You don’t have any right to be angry. What you did to your mother is a lot worse than what she did to you. But you can’t talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you’re not.

  The room was hot and still. In another minute I would not be able to breathe for the anger filling me up. My lungs went out only so far before they struck against it and closed back in.

  I got to my feet and paced in the darkness. Behind me on the worktable a half dozen jars of Black Madonna Honey waited for Zach to deliver them somewhere in town—to Clayton’s maybe, to the Frogmore Stew General Store, the Amen Dollar, or Divine Do’s, the colored beauty parlor.

  How dare she? How dare she leave me? I was her child.

  I looked toward the window, wanting to smash the panes out of it. I wanted to throw something all the way to heaven and knock God clean off his throne. I picked up one of the honey jars and hurled it as hard as I could. It missed black Mary’s head by inches and smashed against the back wall. I picked up another one and threw it, too. It crashed on the floor beside a stack of supers. I threw every last jar on the table, until honey was spattered everywhere, flung like cake batter from electric beaters. I stood in a gooey room full of broken glass, and I didn’t care. My mother had left me. Who cared about honey on the walls?

  I grabbed a tin bucket next and, letting out a grunt, threw it with so much force it left a dent in the wall. My throwing arm was nearly worn out, but I picked up a tray of candle molds and flung that, too.

  Then I stood still, watching the honey slide along the wall toward the floor. A trickle of bright blood wound down my left arm. I had no idea how it’d gotten there. My heart beat wildly. I felt like I’d unzipped my skin and momentarily stepped out of it, leaving a crazy person in charge.

  The room turned like a carousel, with my stomach gliding up and down. I felt a need to touch the wall with both hands to make it still again. I walked back toward the table where the honey jars had been and braced my hands against it. I couldn’t think what to do. I felt a powerful sadness, not because of what I’d done, as bad as that was, but because everything seemed emptied out—the feelings I’d had for her, the things I’d believed, all those stories about her I’d lived off of like they were food and water and air. Because I was the girl she’d left behind. That’s what it came down to.

  Looking around at the wreck I’d made, I wondered if someone in the pink house might have heard the honey jars hit the wall. I went to the window and stared across the gloom in the yard. The panes in August’s bedroom window were dark. I felt my heart in my chest. It hurt so badly. Like it had been stepped on.

  “How come you left me?” I whispered, watching my breath make a circle of fog on the glass.

  I stayed pressed against the window for a while, then went and cleared off a few pieces of glass from the floor in front of Our Lady. I lay down on my side, drawing my knees toward my chin. Above me, black Mary was flecked with honey and seemed not at all surprised. I lay in the emptiness, in the tiredness, with everything—even the hating—drained out. There was nothing left to do. No place to go. Just right here, right now, where the truth was.

  I told myself not to get up in the night and walk across the floor unless I wanted to cut my feet to smithereens. Then I closed my eyes and began to piece together the dream I wanted myself to have. How a little door in the black Mary statue would open up, just over her abdomen, and I would crawl inside to a hidden room. This was not all my imagination, as I had glimpsed an actual picture of this in August’s book—a statue of Mary with a wide-open door and, inside, all these people tucked away in the secret world of consolation.

  I woke to Rosaleen’s big hands shaking me and opened my eyes to a terrible brightness. Her face was bent over mine, the scent of coffee and grape jelly coming from her mouth. “Lily!” she yelled. “What in the Sam Hill happened in here?”

  I’d forgotten there would be dried blood caked across my arm. I looked at it, at a piece of glass, small as a stub of diamond, burrowed in a puckered setting of skin. Around me, jagged pieces of jars and puddles of honey. Blood dotted the floor.

  Rosaleen stared at me, waiting, bewildered-looking. I stared back, trying to make her face come into focus. Sunlight slanted across Our Lady and fell down around us.

  “Answer me,” Rosaleen said.

  I squinted in the light. My mouth couldn’t seem to open up and speak.

  “Look at you. You’ve been bleeding.”

  My head nodded, bobbed around on my neck. I looked at the wrecked room. I felt embarrassed, ridiculous, stupid.

  “I—I threw some jars of honey.”

  “You made this mess?” she said, like she couldn’t quite believe it, like what she’d expected me to say was that a roving band of house wreckers had come through during the night. She blew a puff of air over her face, so forceful it lifted her hair, which was not easy to do considering the amount of lacquer she kept smeared on it. “Lord God in heaven,” she said.

  I got to my feet, waiting for her to bawl me out, but she took her thick fingers and struggled to pluck the piece of glass from my arm. “You need some Mercurochrome on this before you get infected,” she told me. “Come on.” She sounded exasperated, like she wanted to take me by the shoulders and shake me till my teeth fell out.

  I sat on the side of the tub while Rosaleen dabbed my arm with a stinging icy swab. She plastered a Band-Aid across it and said, “There, you won’t die from blood poisoning at least.”

  She closed the medicine cabinet over the sink, then shut the bathroom door. I watched her take a seat on the commode, how her belly dropped down between her legs. When Rosaleen sat on a toilet, the whole thing disappeared under her. I perched on the side of the tub and thought how glad I was August and June were still in their rooms.

  “All right,” she said, “why did you throw all that honey?”

  I looked at the row of seashells on the window ledge, knowing how truly they belonged here even though we were a hundred miles from the ocean. August had said everybody needed a seashell in her bathroom to remind her the ocean was her home. Seashells, she’d said, are Our Lady’s favorite items, next to the moon.

  I went over and picked up one of the shells, a pretty white one, flat with yellow around the edges.

  Rosaleen sat there watching me. “Any time now,” she said.

  “T. Ray was right about my mother,” I said, hearing myself say the words, feeling sickened by them. “She left me. It was just like he said it was. She left me.” For a second the anger I’d felt the night before flared up, and it crossed my mind to slam the shell against the tub, but I took a br
eath instead. Throwing fits wasn’t that satisfying, I’d found out.

  Rosaleen shifted her weight, and the toilet lid squeaked and slid around on top of the seat. She raked her fingers over the top of her head. I looked away, at the pipe under the sink, at a smudge of rust on the linoleum.

  “So your mother did leave after all,” she said. “Lord, I was afraid of that.”

  I lifted my head. I remembered that first night after we ran away, down by the creek, when I’d told Rosaleen what T. Ray had said. I’d wanted her to laugh at the very idea of my mother leaving me, but she’d hesitated.

  “You knew already, didn’t you?” I said.

  “I didn’t know for sure,” she said. “I just heard things.”

  “What things?”

  She let out a sigh, really something more than a sigh. “After your mama died,” she said, “I heard T. Ray on the phone talking to that neighbor lady, Mrs. Watson. He was telling her he didn’t need her to watch after you, that he’d gotten one of the pickers out of the orchard. He was talking about me, so I listened.” Outside the window a crow flew past, filling the bathroom with a frantic caw-caw, and Rosaleen stopped, waiting for it to die down.

  I knew Mrs. Watson from church, from all the times she stopped to buy peaches from me. She was kind as she could be, but she’d always looked at me like there was something indescribably sad written across my forehead, like she wanted to come over and scrub it off.

  I clutched the side of the tub as Rosaleen went on, not sure I wanted her to. “I heard your daddy tell Mrs. Watson, ‘Janie, you’ve done more than your share, looking after Lily these past months. I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.’” Rosaleen looked at me and shook her head. “I always wondered what he meant by that. When you told me what T. Ray said about your mother leaving you, I guess I knew then.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” I said and folded my arms across my chest.

  “So how did you find out?” Rosaleen asked.

  “August told me,” I said. I thought of all that crying I’d done in her bedroom. Holding fistfuls of her dress in my hand. The monogram on her handkerchief, scratchy against my cheek.

  “August?” Rosaleen repeated. You don’t see Rosaleen looking dumbfounded that often, but that’s the look she had now.

  “She knew my mother back when she was a little girl in Virginia,” I explained. “August helped raise her.”

  I waited a few seconds, letting it soak it.

  “This is where my mother came when she left. When…Mrs. Watson took care of me,” I said. “She came right here to this house.”

  Rosaleen’s eyes grew even narrower, if such a thing was possible. “Your mother—” she said, then stopped. I could see that her brain was struggling to fit it all together. My mother leaving. Mrs. Watson watching me. My mother returning, only to get killed.

  “My mother stayed here three months before she went back to Sylvan,” I said. “I guess one day it finally dawned on her: Oh, yeah, that’s right, I’ve got a little girl at home. Gee, maybe I’ll go back and get her now.”

  I heard the bitter tone in my voice, and it came to me how I could lock that tone into my voice forever. From now on, every time I thought of my mother, I could, so easy, slip off into a cold place where meanness took over. I squeezed the shell and felt it dig into the pad of skin on my palm.

  Rosaleen got to her feet. I looked at her, how large she was in the little bathroom. I stood up, too, and for a second we were sandwiched together between the tub and the toilet, staring at each other.

  “I wish you’d told me what you knew about my mother,” I said. “How come you didn’t?”

  “Oh, Lily,” she said, and there was gentleness in her words, like they’d been rocked in a little hammock of tenderness down in her throat. “Why would I go and hurt you with something like that?”

  Rosaleen walked beside me to the honey house with a mop flung over her shoulder and a spatula in her hand. I carried a bucket of rags and the Spic and Span. We used the spatula to scrape honey off places you wouldn’t believe. Some of it had gotten all the way over onto August’s adding machine.

  We wiped off the floors and the walls, then went to work on Our Lady. We picked the place up and turned it back the way it was, and the entire time we didn’t speak a word.

  I worked with heaviness inside, with my spirit emptied out. There was my breath curling in hard puffs from my nostrils. There was Rosaleen’s heart so full toward me it broke through into her sweating face. There was Our Lady talking with her eyes, saying things I could not make out. And there was nothing else.

  The Daughters and Otis arrived at noon, lugging in all manner of potluck dishes, as if we hadn’t eaten ourselves sick the night before. They tucked them into the oven to keep warm and stood around in the kitchen sneaking bites of Rosaleen’s corn fritters, saying they were the finest fritters they’d ever had the pleasure of eating, which caused Rosaleen to swell up with pride.

  “Y’all stop eating up all Rosaleen’s fritters,” June said. “They’re for our lunch.”

  “Oh, let ’em eat,” said Rosaleen, which floored me, since she’d been known to smack my hand sideways for pinching a single crumb off her fritters before dinner. By the time Neil and Zach arrived, the fritters were nearly gone, and Rosaleen was in danger of floating off into the atmosphere.

  I stood numb and plaster stiff in the corner of the kitchen. I wanted to crawl on my knees back to the honey house and ball up in the bed. I wanted everybody to shut up and go home.

  Zach started toward me, but I turned away and stared down the sink drain. From the corner of my eye I grew aware of August watching me. Her mouth was bright and shiny, like she’d rubbed on Vaseline, so I knew she’d been dipping into the fritters, too. She walked over and touched her hand to my cheek. I didn’t think August knew about me turning the honey house into a disaster zone, but she had a way of figuring things out. Maybe she was letting me know it was okay.

  “I want you to tell Zach,” I said. “About me running away, about my mother, about everything.”

  “Don’t you want to tell him yourself?”

  My eyes started to fill up. “I can’t. Please, you do it.”

  She glanced in his direction. “All right then. I’ll tell him the first chance I get.”

  She led the group outside for the last of the Mary Day ceremony. We paraded into the backyard, all the Daughters with tiny smudges of grease clinging to their lips. June was out there waiting for us, sitting in an armless kitchen chair, playing her cello. We gathered around her while the lights of noontime bore down. The music she played was the kind that sawed through you, cutting into the secret chambers of your heart and setting the sadness free. Listening to it, I could see my mother sitting on a Trailways bus, riding out of Sylvan, while my four-year-old self napped on the bed, not yet knowing what I would wake to.

  June’s music turned into air, and the air into aching. I swayed on my feet and tried not to breathe it in.

  It was a relief when Neil and Zach stepped out of the honey house carrying Our Lady; it got my mind off the Trailways bus. They carried her under their arms like a tube of carpet, with the chains slapping back and forth against her body. You’d think they would use the wagon again, something a little more dignified than this. And if that wasn’t bad enough, when they set her down, they deposited her in the middle of an anthill, which started an ant stampede. We had to jump around, shaking them off our feet.

  Sugar-Girl’s wig, which for some reason she insisted on calling a “wig hat,” had slid down toward her eyebrows from the jumping around, so we had to have time out for her to go inside and adjust it. Otis yelled after her, “I told you not to wear that thing, it’s too hot for a wig. It’s sliding around on your head from the perspiration.”

  “If I wanna wear my wig hat, I’m gonna wear it,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Don’t we know it,” he snapped back, looking at us like we were all on his side,
when really we were backing Sugar-Girl one hundred percent. Not because we liked her wig—it was the worst-looking thing you ever saw—we just didn’t like Otis giving her orders.

  When all that finally settled down, August said, “Well, here we are, and here’s Our Lady.”

  I looked her over, proud of how clean she was.

  August read Mary’s words from the Bible: “‘For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed—’”

  “Blessed Mary,” Violet interrupted. “Blessed, blessed Mary.” She stared at the sky, and we all looked up, wondering if she’d caught a glimpse of Mary climbing through the clouds. “Blessed Mary,” she said one more time.

  “Today we’re celebrating the Assumption of Mary,” August said. “We’re celebrating how she woke from her sleep and rose into heaven. And we’re here to remember the story of Our Lady of Chains, to remind ourselves that those chains could never keep her down. Our Lady broke free of them every time.”

  August grabbed hold of the chain around black Mary and unwrapped a loop before handing it off to Sugar-Girl, who unwrapped it a little further. Every one of us got to join in taking off a loop of chain. What I remember is the clinking noise it made as it uncoiled in a pile at Mary’s feet, the sounds seeming to pick up where Violet left off. Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed.

  “Mary is rising,” said August, her voice concentrated into a whisper. “She is rising to her heights.” The Daughters lifted their arms. Even Otis had his arms shot straight up in the air.

  “Our Mother Mary will not be cast down and bound up,” said August. “And neither will her daughters. We will rise, Daughters. We…will…rise.”

  June sliced her bow across the cello strings. I wanted to lift my arms with the rest of them, to hear a voice coming to me out of the sky, saying, You will rise, to feel that it was possible, but they hung limp by my sides. Inside, I felt small and contemptible, abandoned. Every time I closed my eyes, I still saw the Trailways bus.