“Her job? How many farmers do you know who dress like that?” Silvia doesn’t respond, so Monique goes on. “Anyway, what’re you working on here?”
“Can I get to the sink, please?” Silvia speaks through the toothpaste in her cheeks.
Monique steps away. “All yours.” And then: “Pretty fucked that there’s no reception, too.”
“Maybe we’ll be able to concentrate on our work better.”
Monique stops what she’s doing and eyes Silvia’s reflection, her combed hair and cotton pyjama set buttoned right up to the collar. Monique takes her toothbrush in her fist. “Sleep tight.”
Silvia goes back to her room and falls asleep straightaway. No dreams.
XI
EVERYONE IS ON TIME for breakfast the next morning, sleepy but alert. Silvia notices how their clothes smell of their detergents from home. The table is laid, and an impressive selection of cereal, fruit, bread, milk, jams and honey, tea, and coffee is lined up on the kitchen counter. A note says “Serve Yourself.”
Silvia sees Ibrahim, and her first thought is that he looks nice in the morning. He’s talking to everyone and seems comfortable, relaxed. He’s standing by the serve-yourself station and just taking handfuls of random things as he chats. Shoving Shreddies into his mouth, he points to some suitcases by the door. “Whose are those?” he asks, mouth full.
Kate and Lauren, who had introduced themselves as the art-school students from Nova Scotia the night before, are standing at the end of the table drinking water. “Ours,” Kate says.
“Need help carrying them up?” he asks.
“No,” says Lauren. “We’re leaving.”
“Oh,” Ibrahim says. “Forever?”
The girls look at each other, then at their bags, then back at him.
“How come?”
“This is just not what we expected,” Kate replies, frankly. She applies lip gloss, slowly, without a mirror.
Ibrahim looks at the others. They don’t look at him; they look at the girls or at their food. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ve got family in Calgary,” Kate says. “We’ll take the train west and spend the summer there. You know, like actually working.”
“We’ve got school assignments and stuff,” Lauren elaborates. “I mean, we can’t just become beekeepers all of a sudden.”
“We’re going to go now,” Kate says. “Before they get here.”
“Will you tell them for us, please?” Lauren asks Ibrahim.
“Tell them what?”
“Tell them we . . . I don’t know. Just tell them we had to go,” Kate says, pushing air away with her hands.
“Okay,” says Ibrahim. “Safe travels.”
Then the girls are gone. They didn’t take any breakfast for the road.
Silvia looks into her cereal bowl. She’s sitting in the same place as yesterday; everyone else has taken the same spots too, leaving two empty seats to Ibrahim’s left. Everything is the same except for the tablecloth, which is gone, revealing the assortment of mismatched, water-stained tables.
Partly because it is early, partly because they haven’t yet formed an opinion about the whole thing, nobody talks except to exchange banal formalities.
Please pass the milk.
Please pass the honey.
It’s Cynthia who is late: she doesn’t show up until after 8:00. (Though she might not have been late, they realise afterwards. She never said she would be eating with them.)
“All done here?” Cynthia appears from behind them, from nowhere. “Where are the others?”
“Kate and Lauren?” Ibrahim asks.
Cynthia pauses. “Weren’t there ten?”
“Yeah. The two girls . . . aren’t here.”
“Right—are they coming?”
“Well, actually, they had to . . . leave.” Ibrahim swallows his last huge spoonful of Shreddies.
“Why?”
He empties his mouth, which takes a moment, then replies. “They . . . they couldn’t stay, they said. They left ten minutes ago. To Calgary,” he says, as though Calgary is the missing link.
“I see,” Cynthia says. “Let’s go into the garden then.”
Silvia doesn’t finish her breakfast, but she didn’t feel that hungry really.
XII
HARTFORD IS WAITING in the ineffectual shade of a very small tree. When everyone arrives he smirks into the sun, eyes closed, lips stretched across his teeth. His beige hat doesn’t do a very good job protecting him from the sun either; judging by his already glowing face, he’ll have a burn across his nose by midday.
“Good morning, everyone.” He speaks with the forced, formal cheer of a camp counsellor.
“Good morning,” they chorus.
“I trust you all slept well.” He pauses and looks around. No response. “So,” he continues, “I have here a rota for daily chores.” He taps his clipboard with a pencil Silvia can tell has been freshly sharpened. “We’ve done our very best to divide them fairly, and you’ll be paired with a partner.” While speaking, he makes the necessary modifications for Kate and Lauren. “Tasks are varied, and you’ll be supervised for some—for example, I’m sure you all know how to water plants and weed a garden, but I doubt very much that any of you have previous experience in requeening a hive or moving a swarm of wild bees.”
Silvia notices Cynthia lock eyes with him.
“Right,” Hartford says, following direction and shifting gears. “Silvia, you’re first up with Cynthia.”
Silvia is slightly taken aback: she’d expected her partner would be another resident. She looks over at Cynthia, standing placidly under a birch tree in her crisp white shirt. Ibrahim is on her other side, slightly apart from the rest of the group, his head bowed as if the weight of the sun has become a physical burden. Maybe it’s just because of the proximity of their rooms, but Silvia had somehow thought that she’d be working with him. She wonders if this is what he’s thinking too.
“Silvia?” Cynthia starts walking away, and Silvia is pulled, as if magnetically, to follow her.
Cynthia leads her round the back of the house to the greenhouse, where she retrieves pieces of white cotton from a trunk. “Here.” Cynthia hands her several separate items that make up a full beekeeper suit. There are zippers and pockets, veils and gloves, a hat and a carabiner. “No, put the suit on first,” she says as Silvia squashes the broad-rimmed white hat over her mushroom hair, adjusting the black netting that zips onto it.
“Sorry.” Silvia takes off the hat.
The material is thick but airy, the suit so large it doesn’t cling. She puts her legs into the leg holes—keeping her shoes on—and bends her knees. She zips up the middle and slides her arms into the long tubes, elastic at the wrists. Her hands look so tiny and pink down at the bottom of the white pipes. There are pockets at the hips, and a small gold-and-black bee embroidered on the left breast. “Pretty,” Silvia says, touching it gently.
“You like it?” Cynthia, bent over some metal tools, looks up. “I did that myself.”
Silvia looks at the bee again, closer this time.
“Don’t forget the gloves,” Cynthia says, closing the box of tools.
The gloves are on the countertop: rubberized like gardening gloves but long enough to cover her elbows; yellow leather palms and a ventilated panel above the wrist. “Do I put them over or under?” Silvia has the left one on.
“Here.” Cynthia comes over and pulls the elasticated top of the glove over the baggy cotton arm, snapping it tight at the elbow. “You have beautiful hands,” she says. “So delicate.”
Cynthia lets go of Silvia’s hand and turns away, and Silvia feels as though she’s been set adrift. “Don’t you need a suit too?” she asks.
Cynthia is walking towards the forest, away from the hives Silvia had noticed behind the vegetable patch. “Nope, no need. Bring the hat and veil—you can put them on once we get there.”
IT’S HOT in the suit, but as they walk into the forest, the shade of the scru
bby trees protects Silvia from the beating sun. She doesn’t know where they’re going but doesn’t want to ask, even though following in uncertainty makes her feel nervous. The bark of the trees is reddish and ragged, as though cheaply made; the trunks are spindly; and pine needles, dead as hay, carpet the ground.
“Nearly there.” Cynthia looks back at Silvia as she sidesteps a fallen, rotten log.
Silvia steps over the log a few paces later and notices that the wood has been tunnelled into a complicated home for ants, or termites; she has absolutely no idea what kind of bugs would live here.
Cynthia is wearing hiking boots, and Silvia is wishing she’d known to bring more suitable footwear: she’s wearing white Keds with no socks.
“Here.” Cynthia stops abruptly beneath a tall deciduous tree, and Silvia, having been looking at the ground to track her footfall, nearly walks right into her back. “Put your hat and veil on now,” Cynthia says, looking up at the sky.
Silvia cranes her neck to see what Cynthia is looking at and notices a droopy lung suspended on a branch at shoulder height. As soon as she sees it, she hears it—the way lightning always precedes thunder—and the dull buzz turns into a vacuuming roar. The shape moves with such smooth subtlety it seems like a single, complete organism. Then an individual bee separates itself from the rest and darts upwards, sideways, and disappears.
“My trap worked,” Cynthia whispers, more to herself than to Silvia.
“What trap?” Silvia’s voice too has become subdued.
“Your hat.” Cynthia turns around and watches until Silvia puts on the hat, and then the veil on top of it. “I’ll help you with that,” she says when she sees Silvia fumbling with the zip that attaches the veil to the neck of the suit.
“Thanks.” Silvia turns her head to feel the new pull of material connected to her, like a tendon.
Cynthia guides Silvia’s glance. “See the wooden plank?”
Silvia looks, and though her depth of vision is compromised by the black pixels of the netting—like the compound, mosaic eyes of a fly—she can see the plank Cynthia is pointing to.
“It’s part of a box, which is a swarm trap I set up for wild bees. Half my bees died this winter—it was an especially rough one all across Ontario—so I was hoping to catch a swarm that was looking for a new home. And here we are.”
“Why the trap, though?”
“So I could find them more easily,” she says. “Bees are expensive.”
“You have to buy them?”
“Unless you trap them.” Cynthia speaks with a logic that frustrates Silvia: she doesn’t understand, something about it bothers her, and Cynthia intuits this. “They don’t belong to me, no, but they also don’t belong to anyone else.”
Silvia squints, looking for the connecting thread.
“But the bees have a lot of nectar this time of year, and they want a new home to make their honey in. And I can give them that.”
Silvia can hear her breath amplified in the chamber created underneath her cotton hood. She doesn’t feel afraid.
“Right.” Cynthia steps forward and puts her bare hands into the buzzing mass of bees. “Here we go.”
“Won’t they sting you?”
Cynthia’s head swings around. “I’ll need you to be quiet for this, Silvia.” She turns away and moves her hands slowly, reminding Silvia of tai chi. “Can you bring me the box?”
Silvia notices the wooden box on the ground beneath the tree.
“Put it by my feet.” Cynthia pulls her hands out of the swarm. Her hands, cupped, are full of bees. “They’re so warm.” She speaks softly, maternally. “Now,” she says to them, “down you go.”
And with that, the bees flow off Cynthia’s hands and into the box. As the bees separate, the buzzing amplifies.
Cynthia’s focus on the job is so intense that Silvia feels as though she’s become invisible. Cynthia once again puts her naked hands into the bulging swarm, thinner now. Silvia holds her breath within her echo chamber. This time the bees seem to flow down from the wild hive and into Cynthia’s hands instinctively. Some clamber up her arms, making mechanical freckles all the way up to her elbow.
“There we go,” Cynthia says.
On command, the bees flow down into the box.
Still not looking at anything but the bees, her bees, Cynthia says, “The lid.”
Silvia passes Cynthia a flat piece of wood that Cynthia quickly slides over the box, closing the bees inside. She steps back, and Silvia lets out her breath. “That was amazing.”
Cynthia nods. She looks tired from the effort, the excitement.
“Did you get stung?” Silvia asks.
“They don’t want to fight.”
Silvia feels a tickle of sweat as it drips from her neck to the hollow of her lower back. “Do you ever wear a suit?”
“It’s just about confidence. Bees know when you’re frightened, so you have to keep calm. And this is a young swarm—they’re pretty easy to control.”
XIII
FINISHED WITH HER CHORES for the day, Silvia goes back to her room and lies on her mattress, staring at a single point on the sloping ceiling. Was that theft, or was it simply cunning? If the bees belonged to nobody, could they belong to anybody? Could things exist without being owned? Who does she belong to, now that she’s left home? Is it possible that she belongs to herself?
The way that Cynthia knew exactly what she was doing—and did so with a strength that seemed divinely appointed—created in Silvia a feeling of reverence. This was a woman who belonged to herself.
She opens up her empty notebook, hoping she’ll be able to translate her feelings into words. The way the bees moved under Cynthia’s direction. The way their buzzing came from all around, from within. The way she felt like a magnet, drawn to everything. Her pencil hovers over the blank page.
THAT NIGHT Dan and Ben are on the rota for preparing dinner. They had the day off and spent it “exploring.” The kitchen is old-fashioned but open plan. The cupboards are wooden and the room has a worn, scrubbed-clean look. The others are sitting round, not attempting to help. Silvia brought down her notebook, mostly as a prop.
Filling a copper pot with water, Ben speaks loudly, his back filled with all the emotion his face is hiding. “So Dan says to this woman we’re filming, ‘Yes, of course, ma’am, I swear I’ll never tell a soul about all the freaky things your secret Internet persona does, hand on my heart!’ but he didn’t mention that we were making a documentary on catfishing and we’d already signed a contract with a station!” He shakes his right hand until his fingers snap. “The rushes were going to the boss in real time.”
Monique, grubby from sodding the back fields, perks up, pushing a blond tuft behind her ear. “The documentary you made was on TV?”
Dan takes the pot from his brother and puts it on the stove to boil. “Yeah. Our stuff’s been on TV a bunch of times.”
“That’s awesome.” Monique, energy crackling off her body, crosses her legs the other way around.
MJ and JB arrive in the kitchen after having finished weeding for the afternoon, pulling their rubber boots off and kicking them onto the mat inside the screen door. They sit next to one another at the table. MJ’s hair is dyed bright red, and JB is bald. An attractive, stylish bald. Silvia is intrigued by them.
“And are you working on something here?” Monique continues, looking from one brother to the next, not sure which to address, or even which is which.
Ben and Dan look at each other. The awkward moment passes, and Ben winks at Monique. “Kind of,” he says.
“We’ve got some ideas,” says Dan, elusive.
Cynthia enters, and the atmosphere shifts—everyone stands to varying degrees of attention. “Hello,” she says.
There’s a murmur of greeting from the group.
“Ben, Dan, are you finding everything you need?” she asks, and they nod. “It’s past seven o’clock—is dinner nearly ready?”
“Ready in ten, Cyn. Sorry.”
Ben starts pulling plates from the cupboard and, with one arm full of crockery, fishes in the drawers looking for the cutlery.
“Right. I’ll be in my office, then.” She starts walking, then turns back around. “And it’s Cynthia.”
Silvia catches Ibrahim looking at her and quickly opens her empty notebook and flicks through it with false intention. She wants to tell him about the bees but doesn’t know where to begin. And how to get to beyond the bees to whatever it is that the swarm represented. Her words haven’t come yet.
XIV
THE NEXT MORNING, Hartford leads the way to the animal pens. The group walks towards the hedge-stitched fields about a hundred yards behind the farm. Wisps of morning cloud have already been burned away by the sun, and as Hartford walks, encumbered by the large bags of feed he carries, sweat pearls on his lip.
While his hair isn’t actually receding, if Silvia were to think back on Hartford years after having met him, she would remember him as being afflicted with a mild baldness. This is not the case, however—in fact, his hair is quite lush. The impression of being a little threadbare probably comes instead from his pallor. It’s difficult to distinguish Hartford’s hair from his skin except for where he’s sunburnt. His colourless eyebrows disappear into his forehead, and he seems to favour pinky-cream clothing just a few shades off his skin tone.
When they crest a hill, the animals appear: five pigs and about twice as many sheep. As it’s spring there are lambs, some with their bendy legs knitted up beneath them, others jumping in the ridiculous way that baby sheep jump.
“Cute!” Monique squeals. “Are there any little piglets?”
Hartford explains, “All the pigs are gilts.”
Monique looks blank.
“Lady pigs. Unmated. For food.”
“Oh.” A tinge of horror appears on her face.
“Here’s the bag of food,” Hartford says, handing a huge plastic sack to JB. “Just fill up the troughs.”
And here the group splits off as had been previously coordinated: Monique, Silvia, Ibrahim, and JB go to feed the pigs, while MJ, Alicia, Ben, and Dan stay with Hartford to shear the sheep.
The Honey Farm Page 5