Soon Silvia will join her, but for now she luxuriates in her two remaining minutes of stillness, closing her eyes in the pleasure of it, thinking of Ibrahim only in the most abstract of senses.
All the others have remained with the partners they’d been assigned initially, but since Ibrahim’s schedule has been adjusted, Silvia continues her partnership with Cynthia. Nobody envies or questions this position.
REQUEENING, CYNTHIA HAS EXPLAINED, is often necessary at the beginning of a new season. If a queen bee conks out, she must be replaced with a new one. Like light bulbs. Sometimes the queen dies; sometimes she disappears, often taking her hive with her in a swarm; sometimes she just gets old and unruly. Signs of a queenless (or just anarchic) hive include especially noisy bees, a steadily decreasing population, and wild and distracted drones.
Without a mother, the colony becomes aggressive; without a properly functioning queen, a hive is doomed.
Silvia has put on the same protective suit she wore for the swarm, and Cynthia is wearing her normal clothes, not even a sun hat anymore.
“So.” Cynthia hands Silvia a small cardboard box the size of a thick book. “Here’s our new queen. All the way from California.”
“FedEx? Crazy.” Silvia takes the box in her gloved hands.
“It only takes two days, and the bees don’t mind. The California ones are hardier than the Europeans. Must be all the kale.” Cynthia smiles, but Silvia doesn’t understand the joke. She nods seriously.
Cynthia continues: “Before you open the box and insert her in the hive, you must find and destroy the old queen.”
“The old queen?” Silvia asks. “I thought you said it was queenless.”
“That’s just the term for when a queen has stopped being useful. This one’s still there.”
“Why do we have to kill her?”
“Because you can’t have two queens at once.” Cynthia speaks calmly. “They’d fight each other to the death.”
Later Silvia will learn that it’s often the virgin queen who defeats the incumbent monarch, but not always.
“How do I even find her?” Silvia is understandably baffled.
“Put this”—Cynthia holds out a pipette—“in front of the entrance. It’s sugar water, and queens go mad for it. She’ll come right out.”
Silvia stares at the pipette. It looks fragile and impractical.
Cynthia opens the latch on the front of the hive, and a door the size of her palm flaps down on its hinge. Silvia squeezes three droplets onto the wood.
Almost immediately the old queen dodders out onto the drawbridge of the door. She’s enormous and unbalanced-looking. Her torso is so long. All yellow-gold, no black. Her wings don’t even go halfway down her body. (Most mature queens can’t fly. They’re used to having everything done for them.)
“Is that her?” Silvia asks.
“Yes!”
Silvia puts out her hand and the bee climbs onto her index finger. “She came right to me!” She brings her hand to her face and peers at the bee through her black veil. The queen does not flap around or struggle. She perches on the thick cotton of Silvia’s glove, calmly awaiting her fate.
“Great. Now kill her,” Cynthia says.
“Can’t we just put her somewhere else?”
“Just squish her. You’re wearing gloves, she can’t sting you.”
Silvia flashes back to ten days earlier, in her childhood bedroom surrounded by horse posters, and thinks about how she never would have imagined standing in a field in the middle of nowhere murdering a queen bee. She closes her fist and feels the plasticated crunch of wings.
“Done?” Cynthia plucks the broken queen from Silvia’s glove, examines her briefly, and tosses her off to the side.
“Shouldn’t we bury her or something?”
“If you want to, go ahead and make the hole.”
Silvia quickly, maniacally, digs a small fist-sized hole with her gloved hand. She retrieves the discarded queen’s carcass, her carapace holding whatever regal soul still lingers, and places it into the hole, keeping her hands there for a moment as if feeling for a heartbeat. She scoops back some of the dirt from the pile and smoothes it flat. Nobody would know this was the burial ground of a queen.
“Okay, quick now,” Cynthia says. “We only have a few minutes until the drones get cranky.”
Before opening the cardboard package in which this mail-order bride awaits, Cynthia explains that they have to spray it—box, queen, everything—with a vanilla-scented spray.
“Seriously?” Silvia asks.
“It makes them calm.” Cynthia pulls out a bottle of perfume. “Once we put her inside we have to spray it again, over the whole hive.” By the time the scent has disappeared, Cynthia explains, the new queen will be accepted.
Everything happens as it should. At least, as far as Silvia can tell. The virgin queen gets out of her box and shuffles into the hive. Gone. She looked just like the old queen. Just as long, just as yellow, wings just as stubby. They can’t yet tell if the others have accepted her, though. That will take another few hours.
“Good work,” Cynthia says as they walk back to the greenhouse to return Silvia’s suit.
“Thanks,” Silvia says, taking off her veil and hat. “It was sort of weird to kill the queen like that, but I get it.” She repeats what she’s learned: “For the good of the hive.”
Cynthia tilts her head and looks at Silvia as though she’s looking at a painting. “Can I show you something?”
Silvia replies lightly, “Sure.”
Cynthia smiles with her lips closed, then pivots, guiding Silvia in the opposite direction.
Silvia feels sweat liquefying her lower back and ringing the armholes of her tank top underneath the heavy cotton suit.
When they get to the top of a lowly rolling hill, Cynthia stops. The boundary of the lot is marked with a dried-up hedge where yellow dandelions sprout carelessly. Lion-yellow, bee-yellow.
“This is my favourite place on the farm,” Cynthia says. “On a clear day like today you can see all the way to the Quebec border there”—she points—“and the Abitibi reserve that way.” She looks at Silvia.
“It’s . . . it’s beautiful.” Silvia doesn’t know which way to look, or how she would tell the difference between here and there. It is stunning, though—there’s something perfect, complete, about it. “I see why you love it.”
“Here,” Cynthia says, pulling a slim book out of her pocket. “For you.”
Silvia takes the book and looks at the cover. It has Cynthia’s name on it, and an illustration of what looks like either a tree or a woman. “You wrote this?”
“Practically a lifetime ago. I thought it might interest you, as a fellow writer.”
“Thank you.” Silvia looks at the book, turning it around with reverence.
Clouds come from a corner of sky, tracing shadows as they pass over the fields. White, decorative, they hold no illusion of rain. Silvia blinks, and keeps her eyes closed a second longer than necessary.
“I want you to find your voice, Silvia.” Cynthia speaks with authority and kindness, like an elementary school principal. “I know you have a lot to say.”
Silvia is about to respond, but a humming sound starts rising from all the way down at the bottom of the hill, where the hives are; the buzz clouds her thoughts.
XXI
ON SUNDAYS THEY all sleep in, or not, and can come down for breakfast at their leisure. Supplies are laid out on the table; there’s no set time for anything. There are no chores. No weeding, no requeening, no cleaning, no mowing, no honey categorizing, paper filing, muck room demucking, honeycomb dewaxing. On the seventh day, everyone rests.
That second Sunday morning, dried and dressed, Silvia has gone down to fetch coffee and toast to bring back to her room, and now she wants to try to write. A poem. She wants to write a poem about . . . about everything. Splayed stomach-down on her mattress, she thinks.
She reaches for Shakespeare’s “Silvia,
” in the middle of the bedside pile, and looks at it. First at each word individually, then scanning it as a whole. She tries to think about what happens in poems, what they are about. She’d covered some medieval and Renaissance poetry in her English lit coursework, but it all felt pretty cursory. Lots were about love, lots were about God. Lots were about the love of God. She wrote a poem when she was little, but it was basically just copying the Silvia sonnet, so she’d decided it didn’t count. She’d written another poem when she was a teenager, but it was about nothing.
Instead of a poem, then, she starts a list about what a poem should be.
POEMS:
-
Distracted already, she starts looking at herself in the small mirror in her room. She turns her head one way, then the other, looking from the line of her jaw to the smooth curve of her hairline.
She shifts around on the bed, front to back. She looks around for answers as if they will be in the room with her.
She props her legs vertically against the wall and stares at the ceiling, then out the window, trying to get something moving in her bloodstream.
Then she remembers the book that Cynthia gave her. She opens it for the first time, taking a moment to appreciate the bookishness of it, noticing the details: publisher (Black Moss), date of publication (1990), and dedication (to Hilary and Leila).
Silvia flicks through the book. There are poems called things like “The Root of Things” and “Inner Heart,” lots more with words related to bees. “Comb,” “gold,” “hive,” “home.” Many have titles that are clearly about love. Cynthia knows so much about so much. The book feels like it’s a part of this place; the phrases and images Silvia picks out as she flicks through seem to perfectly capture the atmosphere and feeling of being here.
What does Silvia know about? What could she write about? The stories that come to mind are all related to God.
Active rebellion against anything incorporates that which one rebels against. That was her parents’ argument to invalidate atheism. Is that what being here is about? And if she is rebelling, will there be punishment?
Silvia wonders if this is the sort of thing she could talk to Cynthia about. Not the religious stuff, but maybe Cynthia could help her write poems, give her answers to more general questions. Her mind scans, a flashlight beaming through fog.
Then that feeling comes, and now she is able to give it a name: magnetism. She feels physically drawn to the next room, where Ibrahim is working. Maybe Ibrahim could help me find answers. But she knows this is not truly what draws her to him. It’s the effect, not the cause. Minutes pass and she wavers in indecision, trying to think of that beam of light in her mind, until she finally becomes so restless and annoyed with herself that she gets up and knocks on Ibrahim’s door.
XXII
BECAUSE SO MUCH of life on the farm is shared, their rooms have become private, sacred places. Everyone has been extremely careful not to cross any territorial lines. This is the first time Silvia has actually been inside Ibrahim’s room, and she’s floored: it looks more like a full-blown atelier than a bedroom. Cardboard canvases stretch all the way to the top of the ceiling and are propped on every surface. Colours, chaos. No pine—or nondescript faded wood panelling, whatever it is—is visible. There must be dozens of paintings, in varying states of completion. Or maybe they’re all done; she has no idea.
“So,” she says, her eyes moving quickly across all surfaces, “you’re definitely an artist, then.” She speaks with only the slightest undertone of envy. It’s more a tone of surprise, of admiration.
He nods at her, then at the room. It’s true that he works quickly: all these in the weeks since they’ve arrived. Since Cynthia let him have his mornings, Ibrahim’s been able to work through the night like he used to. Silvia can sometimes hear him—not the sounds of him working, specifically, but the sounds of him living. He’s a very loud person; he occupies a lot of space. He grunts, sighs; his joints creak. He doesn’t seem to snore, but as Silvia is such a deep sleeper, she can’t be sure of this. He talks when he eats, and at the dinner table, while she is efficiently mopping up her plate with bread, Ibrahim hardly takes two bites because he’s chatting to whomever he’s sitting near. His laugh is loud and liberal, whereas hers is perfunctory, succinct. The two of them must have very different backgrounds, she thinks.
Now his forearms are splattered with paint—cyan, magenta, cadmium yellow—and he’s got two spare paintbrushes, narrow ones, sticking out behind his ear, masked partly by his thick hair.
“None of these are finished yet,” he says, going up close to the painting he’s working on and, to her surprise, touching it with his fingers. “It’s all just the background work.”
But of course artists are allowed to touch their own paintings. That’s how they make them. She feels foolish. She’s self-conscious in front of him. She feels suddenly that she really doesn’t know anything about this, or him, or anything.
The canvases, which he calls “figurative but expressionist,” represent figures she can nearly recognize. “Who are all these people?”
“You’re not here, if that’s what you’re asking,” he says quickly, perhaps willfully misunderstanding her. “Most of them aren’t real people. But I’d be happy if you wanted to pose for me again one day.”
She blushes and goes to the window. It has the same view as the one in her bedroom. Almost.
“Get much writing done?”
“It’s more of a thinking morning.”
“Thinking is good, right?” He steps closer to her; she feels his breath on her right ear. “You must be getting good material just by being here too. Even if you’re not actually writing yet. It’s all valuable.”
He’s really being so kind, she thinks.
“What is your stuff about?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Just, no, nothing.”
There is silence for a moment. He smiles, playful. She wants to disappear—into the woodwork, into him. Then the sounds return: the hum of bees, the homely creak of wood, the muted muddle of speech in a distant part of the house.
“Hey, wanna go for a walk?” he asks.
“Aren’t you working?”
“I’d like to hang out with you, and I don’t think I’ll get much painting done now anyway.”
“Okay, sure. I’d like that too.”
They don’t lock their doors; they don’t tell anyone they’re going. It’s a difficult thing here, to balance public and private, spoken and unspoken. They were never told they weren’t allowed to leave, but do they have to ask?
They go straight down the gravel path until it forks and then walk out into the short grasses. Ibrahim has brought the Google map he printed out for the train journey. The lakes they are looking for are less than a kilometre away.
“How old are you?” He looks sideways at Silvia, guessing, unable to.
“Twenty-two. You?”
“Twenty-nine.”
No wonder he’s more in possession of his own body, she thinks—he’s had more time to grow, to fill his skin.
As they get farther from the property there are fewer paths tamped down amongst the grasses. Here, they make their own.
“These lakes aren’t named, far as I can tell.” He points to their destination on the printout. “Google doesn’t have names for them, at least.”
“We can name them ourselves, then,” she says, looking at the map.
“They look a bit like splatters of bird shit, don’t they?”
Silvia smiles. “Well, I don’t think we should call them that.”
A trough cuts through the valley; the path water once carved has left a muddy scar. They follow this path.
“There must have been a river running through here, feeding the lakes,” Ibrahim says, following the worn conduit. They listen to the wind in the trees.
The sludge slouches thickly through the reeds, through an obstacle course of fallen logs and thatched grass. Lost branches and upturned roots are tangled up lik
e Medusa’s hair. There’s not enough water to call it anything—not stream, not brook, not even rivulet. The damp dirt is the colour of rust.
“Doesn’t it look sort of like blood?” Silvia points with her whole hand. “Blood that’s gone all dry and scabby?”
“Yeah, it does, actually.”
“I will show you that I am the Lord. Look! I will strike the water of the Nile with this staff in my hand, and the river will turn to blood.”
“What?” Ibrahim looks baffled.
“Exodus. The story where God turns the river to blood—you know it?”
“No, but I’m impressed you do.”
“My family is Christian.”
“Full-on Christian or, like, regular Christian?”
“Full-on Christian.”
“Oh. And are you?”
“Um, I don’t know. That’s why I came here, really. I needed some space, I guess. They even sent me to a Christian camp every summer. I was a counsellor there.” She tries to laugh, but it comes out false.
“So were you allowed to have, like, boyfriends and stuff?”
“Not really, no.”
Ibrahim nods.
“But I’m not against the idea.”
He smiles sideways at her. “Good to know.”
She’s worried he’ll see her heart beating through her shirt, hear it beating in her ears, but if he does, he doesn’t comment.
On the trail she can see skeletons of fish that look like pencil drawings of themselves. Everything is halfway fossilized already. Silvia bends down to look more closely at the reddish muck, but something pulls her back. She looks up at Ibrahim.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says, “but maybe it’s best not to touch it.”
Quiet as they walk, they listen to the different lives playing out in the forest. They don’t see any animals other than flashes of flitting birds, but they know they’re there. Bears, foxes, wolves. Moose and caribou. There like your shadow on a cloudy day.
The first lake is bigger than they’d expected. Although the river, if there had even been a river, has all but dried up, the lake seems healthy, deep. The glaciers—limbless monsters—made footprints and left them full of water, still cold even now.
The Honey Farm Page 8