by Cole Alpaugh
“Did your mama tell Sarah stories?”
“Is that what loving mothers do?” he asked, knowing the answer. “I guess she would have if they’d spent more time together. My mom wanted a grandchild almost too much.”
He’d worried about his mother, how she’d grown increasingly distant from friends, doing things that crossed the line into full-fledged eccentricity. The store had looked less and less like an antique shop, and more like a stage set for a large, Victorian-era family. One with eight babies roughly the same age.
While her home was cluttered with trash bags spilling from the kitchen out onto the front porch, the shop was immaculate in the years following her husband’s death. White candles burned in each window. A fresh wreath hung on the front door year-round. The enormous dining room table had been cleared of inexpensive bric-a-brac, replaced with a fourteen-person China set, gold-plated silverware, hundred-year-old serving plates, and elegant stemware. Eight chairs held hand-crafted booster seats and porcelain baby dolls with fine linen bibs.
The dolls were her babies, and she showed them off to her friends when they came to the shop for tea. The women had smiled when his mother brought out an album, photos of the same babies in the same chairs. He’d been lugging boxes past the heartbreaking scene, wanted to interrupt his mother, make some excuse for her. But he allowed it to continue, letting her dote over the dolls while serving cookies and finger sandwiches to her uncomfortable lady friends who would soon stop their visits. Reputations slid fast in a small town, and he heard snippets regarding the poor widow who’d been getting loonier and loonier since the nasty business with her husband.
“Sarah said she wanted to get to know my mom. We were invited to dinner at the shop right after we were engaged.” Dash recalled the snowy roads on the way out to the store, how the town plow driver had seriously slacked off. “Every window was lit by a dancing flame, and even the old gas lamp at the end of the walkway burned. There was an antique sled with a green silk ribbon propped by the door. Mom had decorated the Christmas tree, hung evergreen wreathes across the doorways and mantle. It was beautiful.”
“It sounds like magic.”
“It was magic,” he said.
“A Christmas tree is the same as our Yule tree, but yours is named after Baby Jesus. I know that from the burned books.”
“That’s right. It’s the most important holiday in our culture, or at least used to be. It was once all about religion, but now it’s mostly about buying gifts.”
“Can kittens be gifts?”
“I’m sure lots of kids want a kitten for Christmas.”
“Did your mother give Sarah a kitten?”
“No, we were only there for dinner, the three of us and Mom’s eight baby dolls.”
“Baby dolls can eat?”
“You can pretend to feed them. Dolls are toys for little girls to practice being mothers.”
“I want a baby doll and a kitten.”
“My mom gave us an envelope.” Dash closed his eyes and saw the red paper with a card tucked inside. “It contained plane tickets, which were to be a wedding gift. Tickets for the airplane that brought me here.”
“She didn’t know the Volcano was going to make it crash,” Tiki said, reaching to touch his hand.
“My mom was wearing white makeup all over her face.” He remembered now what he’d dismissed at the time, mostly because Sarah had seemed to find it all so charming and normal, “and a hat with a stuffed parrot on top.”
“A stuffed parrot? You mean it was dead?” She looked back over her shoulder to where the small green birds darted among tree tops.
“The women from long ago wore hats with flowers and big feathers stuck into them. Some of the expensive ones had dead birds that had been cut open and filled with sawdust.”
Tiki scrunched up her face.
“Yeah, no kidding, but they eventually stopped doing it. My mom also wore a dress with puffy sleeves and a huge bustle in back. That’s bunched-up material.”
“To make it soft when she sat down,” she said, nodding.
“Sure, maybe. Sarah went around to each doll, asking its name and where it had come from. And my mother poured tea and went on and on about each of her precious babies. She had a harrowing story for each, how it had been orphaned by war or terrible famine.”
“It sounds nice. Scary, but nice.”
“They were just made-up stories, none of them true, of course. The dolls were nothing but playthings made out of baked clay and cotton stuffing. But Sarah kept asking questions, kept urging my mother on about this baby and the next. The more she asked, the more fantastic the stories became. I began to see how my mother had gotten totally lost in these possessions, the dresses, the furniture, the dolls.”
“Her friends shouldn’t have stopped liking her.”
“I should have stayed to take care of her,” he said. “Anyway, Mom finally announced it was time for dinner, went sweeping off into the kitchen in her grand dress, then came back with an empty serving platter. She dipped an invisible ladle into invisible bowls of nothing, and filled our plates with make-believe food. Sarah was all cooing and full of smiles, while I watched my poor crazy mother spoon-feed her children.”
“Your mother believed everything was real.”
“She was lonely. My father had left her alone and she couldn’t deal with it.”
Tiki’s eyes were wide as she fiddled with the stack of flat rocks. “I know what that’s like.”
“On the car ride home, Sarah told me she’d never go back, that my mother should be put in an asylum. Better yet, she should be put out of her misery, maybe stuffed and displayed on her front porch like one of her freak-show parrots.”
“When you go back home you should give your mom a Christmas present that will keep her from being lonely.”
Dash laughed. He snatched one of the bottom row stones that toppled her pyramid, and then got to his feet. “Let me guess what you have in mind. Something that meows and chases balls of yarn?”
“No,” said Tiki. “You should give her a kitten.”
Chapter 22
“My mama would have been nice to yours. She would have stayed friends if their huts were close.”
They were trudging back up to the village side by side, Tiki full of chatter and wearing the water bucket as a hat.
“You call it a house,” she said. “Hut and house start with the same letter. In my language the word is tabu, and that’s almost the same as tabua, but means something really different.”
She turned and pulled her upper lip back to show her teeth. “A tabua is a whale tooth. I can teach you all our words. The missioners said our language came from the animals, so we should learn English.”
“That was a rotten thing for them to say. Your language is music, even when I’m getting yelled at.”
“Books are in your language, so they were probably right. I want to make books with pictures of my favorite things. I’ll write stories about my pictures, but not like in the Bible. The Bible is too scary. And a lot of the words were hard even for missioners. Sometimes we asked what a word meant and they pretended not to hear.”
Dash used the back of his hand to wipe the sweat streaming over his brow and stinging his eyes. They were in the tunnel’s final stretch; the opening was a white-hot, lopsided circle directly ahead.
“I need more candles,” he said, chest heaving as though he’d been sprinting.
“The missioners said heathens live in darkness. That’s why they taught us to make them.”
Tiki had pulled ahead, was talking over her shoulder as they emerged into the blinding sun. He followed with his chin to his chest, trying not to be seen. He’d been using the ocean for his business instead of the outhouse, but couldn’t survive without fresh water. She didn’t stop to dip the bucket at the cistern, kept walking through a group of women busy weaving the palm fronds used for walls and the open lean-tos for hanging fish over smoky fires to make their leathery jerky.
> They continued down an open path behind the chief’s hut and into a clearing he hadn’t known existed. Beyond was a lush field of taro.
“The missioners said welcoming Jesus into your heart was lifting a heavy shade. But I don’t understood how shade can be heavy. I try to pick it up but it makes you part of it.”
“I suppose they meant light was knowledge,” said Dash. “And you were in the dark until you saw things their way. I’ve also heard that sermon from teachers.”
“They built these so we would have light.” She stepped aside for him to see the four paint-chipped, wooden bee boxes standing on low stone piles. She skipped over to a woman tending a metal pot over smoldering coals and threw her arms across her shoulders for a hug from behind. The woman was pushing and pulling a bamboo stick to stir heavy liquid. She paused to listen to the girl, and then nodded. He peeked over the rim of another pot to see a smaller pot inside, three quarters filled with a simmering brown mixture that smelled of warm honey.
Tiki danced back to where he was relishing the sweet scent. “The water boils in the big pot. It heats the smaller one that holds the wax. It gets hot enough to melt, but not burn. I know all about it,” she said.
Candles hung in pairs by uncut wicks, suspended over thin vines tied into a maze in branches of a heavily pruned puka tree. A second woman was recycling the fancier coconut shell candles, scraping out the remaining singed wax and polishing the interiors.
“Come see.” Tiki led him to one of the bee boxes swarming with busy workers. A steady stream flew in from over his shoulders, buzzing past his face to land on the box and scurry inside. He guessed they were back from collecting pollen.
“It’s pretty cool.” He watched her lift a metal handle to slide a wooden frame section from the top of the box. Attached was a perfect honeycomb manned by hundreds of bees, golden honey dripping back into the open slot. She caught some of the thick cascade in her other palm, took a taste, and replaced the frame. The box hummed with the sound of their collaboration.
“Are there bees at your house?”
“I’m pretty sure bees are everywhere. But I’ve never seen a bee box up close. Our neighbors made syrup rather than raise honey bees. Syrup is from a tree, the same as what you used to make my Yule present.”
“Is it sweet?”
“A different kind of sweet, but used in the same ways.”
“Do they make candles?”
“No, just the syrup. They drill a small hole in the tree and it slowly drips into a bucket. Then it gets boiled down until it’s really thick.”
“The honeycombs are what make the candles.” She pointed to a grass mat stacked with tiny connected hexagons. “Mama was a candle maker before she was killed. I was little, but I remember washing the honeycombs with her. The bees make them to hold honey and also their eggs. She let me dip the candles until they got too heavy.”
“Families in Vermont make candles together, too. I’ve seen the wax in stores, big blocks to melt in kitchen pots.”
“But you have lights that turn on without fire. And the metal tubes you hold and point.”
“Flashlights.”
“The missioners had them to find the outhouse at night. The also had them on their boats, but took them away when they left.”
“People like my mother burn candles because they’re pretty. And they come in handy when your batteries wear out. We get storms called nor’easters that knock over trees and bring snow that’s almost as deep as you are tall. Our lights stop working for days after those storms.”
“Maybe there will be storms like that where I go.”
He brushed at a bee that tried landing on his face. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
She lifted some of the empty honeycombs and dropped them into a bucket half-filled with water. She squatted and rubbed at the combs one by one, picking out and flicking away dead bees that floated to the surface.
“I’ll turn on every light when I’m in the city,” she said. “I’ll make it like daytime. I won’t want candles.”
He watched bees circle the girl’s thick hair. Some landed on her bare shoulder and she chased them with a shrug. “I’ll still like honey, though,” she said, grabbing more honeycombs to scrub.
Dash felt a tickle on top of his ear, the buzz of a bee exploring his own waxy cavity.
“Don’t swat them,” she said, just as he began to swat. “They get mad really easy.”
“Hey!”
He weaved and ducked, was a boxer avoiding a roundhouse punch from an invisible opponent. Then there was something electric—a sharp pain that took his breath. It froze him for a moment and gave the bees an easy place to land. The first sting was on his neck, beneath the hinge of his jaw. The second was at the top of his scalp, and the third was in the middle of his back, where his hands couldn’t reach. He slapped and slapped as the swarm fell on him, Tiki’s voice drowned out by their angry noise. He remembered old instructions he’d gotten as a kid about stopping, dropping, and rolling when you caught on fire. And the sudden burning pain all over his body sure felt like fire. The screaming hadn’t been part of the lesson, was his addition to the emergency drill. He’d been a Cub Scout in a blue uniform and yellow scarf, laughing with his friends as his den mother made them take turns extinguishing an imaginary fire by rolling around on her living room carpet.
It went quiet when his throat closed. Instead of screaming, he used the energy trying to pull air into his lungs through an impossibly tiny slit. The bees were in his nose and mouth, plugging both ears, and some even tried burrowing under his eyelids. He swiped at his eyes with hands that had become fat clubs, useless for any more swatting. Every movement became an enormous effort, his muscles numbing from poison, the Earth’s gravity tripling. The ground turned slow circles as he lay spent on his back, chest heaving as he gasped for breath.
There were worried female voices, and Tiki was crying. But at least the bees had begun their victorious retreat. He tried spitting out the ones that had turned his tongue into a useless lump, but they weren’t leaving until they were good and ready, emerging from between swollen lips to take flight one by one. Did honey bees die after using their stingers? He hoped so, and he made a mental note to tell Tiki that syrup making was a thousand times safer than this honey and candle stuff. Sure, maybe a maple tree fell on your house in one of those nor’easters, but there was none of this crawling up your nose and trying to sting your brains shit.
His vision went black as he willed himself toward a dark place, away from the burning stingers and the lingerers burrowed in his tangled hair, delivering final volleys. He was stirred back when he was lifted by his wrists and ankles, tried twisting free in a sudden panic, certain the bees had returned with burlier reinforcements.
“Looks like a pig,” said one of the bees attached to a wrist. “Pink skin all fat, like it gonna pop.”
Another bee laughed, made its own joke in the island language, then grunted when it latched onto his ankles and worked for a solid hold on his greasy skin.
He surrendered and managed to relax in their grip. He allowed himself to be carried away with no further fight, dreamed he was a balloon swaying on the wind over a forest of sharp tree limbs.
* * *
The bees were back. He tried getting up, to move from the noise, only to bang his head. He lifted a hand to the rock wall, reached down to the familiar mat beneath his thighs. Something was wrong with his fingers, as though he’d stuck them in a pair of boxing gloves. His thumbs seemed to wiggle, but the other fingers were squeezed together, so bloated there was no separation. He touched his face, but it was a distant feeling, pins and needles, as though his fingers and face had fallen asleep.
The swarm raged. Their anger was carried by the onshore breeze that occasionally caused the flame of his candles to flinch. He listened, lying trapped in his cave with no hiding spots for anything larger than a spider. There was a bubbling to the drone, and he remembered the bees wanting into his mouth, his inability
to spit them out. Now his mouth was dry, tongue a solid block against the back of his teeth.
He waited for their arrival, for them to round the corner into his dark home to finish him off. Heat radiated from his core, a pulsing fever that brought flashes of red to his black world, but he was otherwise numb. More stings wouldn’t hurt, at least not as bad. One last flourish of barbs would take him away, would save him.
The droning sound veered, changed pitch, as if the bees had suddenly zeroed in on someone or something else. He felt regret for their new target, hoped it had speedy legs or wings. But doubt blossomed, made him wonder if it really was the sound of a hunting swarm. There was something mechanical about the noise, something familiar, as though it came from Dash’s world and not from some jungle clearing. Maybe it was a motor, the kind attached to a boat. And it made sense of the wet bubbling and lowered pitch, a craft swinging around the tip of the reef, powering down to maneuver in the shallow water. A boat meant he was going home, that his rescuers had arrived to deliver him from this hell on earth. Adrenaline rushed through his body, tensed his muscles, and stirred the poison in his blood.
“Help,” he tried saying, but his tongue was too far gone. The fever swept away his consciousness, took him to a place without dreams.
* * *
Dash was wrenched from sleep when the word ‘help’ was repeated, a plaintive cry from a voice he knew.
He tried calling Tiki’s name, but not enough healing time had passed since the motor sound. It might take days or weeks, or maybe his tongue would never work again, as forever numb and useless as his penis. His bones ached from shivering, the fever wicking the last of his liquid through burning skin. His lips felt like they were turned inside out.
“My eyes,” he tried saying, touching a bloated hand to his swollen brow. The bees had gotten into the softest parts, had jabbed their barbed weapons into the most fragile surfaces.