by Leah Weiss
The two women get in the back seat of Mr. Brown’s car, and they head to the doctor. Lu and me carry the vegetables inside, wash dishes, sweep the floor, and give order to the little house. We don’t look at the pie plate in the yard. Before we shut the door, I get my treasure box from under the bed and wrap it in my extra shirt. I ain’t ready to explain it yet. We start walking and I say, “Wonder where he is? I never caught a whiff of him cept his leftover Dapper Dan pomade.”
“I don’t know, Bert. Your aunt isn’t herself. You told me she talked to Larry like he was there but wasn’t. I think we could use some help, and I know where we might find it.”
We don’t head to the Brown farm. We cross land Lu says is the Mosby farm, into a different woods and cross a wide creek with a deep pool and flat rocks. Lu points to a snail and says, “Do you know snails sleep up to three years? They’re really in hibernation, but they’re sleeping all the same,” then she runs and I follow till she stops and whispers, “We’re here.”
Here is a white painted house as little as Aunt Violet’s place but pretty and clean. It sits under tall trees with the yard swept. The windows sparkle, and flowers in a pot are outside the open red door. A yellow dog is by the red door. A voice inside calls out, “He named Biscuit.” The dog thumps his tail, raises his square head to look at us, then lowers it with a sigh.
“Come in, come in,” the woman says like she was waiting on us. We step into a room the late sunlight spun to gold. A shelf holds a line of fragile cups, and fabric hangs at the window and puddles on the floor. A fat jar of sunflowers sits on a black round table with fancy legs. Three cups and a teapot is on the table with napkins and cookies. I smell lemons and pipe tobacco. A glass bowl on a shelf is filled with marbles. Green marbles. The green of the old lady’s eyes.
Lu says, “It’s good to see you again, Miz Trula. May I present my best friend, Bert Tucker. Bert, this is Trula Freed.” I hear in her voice that this lady is special.
“You Violet Crumbie’s niece who come to help with the birthing,” Miz Trula says so matter-of-fact like she already knows my sad situation. I hold out my hand, and she takes it with fingers as strong as grapevine. They wrap round my fingers and won’t let go. A shock of current runs through my arms and out the bottoms of my feet. I can’t move if I want to. Is one of her green eyes bigger than the other?
When she lets go, I’m dizzy.
She moves to her polished table and pours peppermint tea in the cups. “Come. Sit,” she orders, and we sit at her fine table. The cookies are perfect circles with smooth yellow icing. Because they’re sitting right there looking at me, I pick one up and eat it.
“Bert,” Lu says, “where’s your manners?”
“What?” I say, confused, cause I am.
Trula Freed says, “Cookies for you.”
“For us? But you didn’t know we were coming. We didn’t know we were coming until a bit ago, so how can the cookies be for us?”
“Every thought rise into universe” is the strange words she says as she raises her willowy bangled arms, opens them wide, and chuckles. “I listen good.”
Sounds like foolishness she’s talking bout, so to be sassy, I say, “What am I thinking right now?” and keep my face calm and eyes on hers so as I don’t give nothing away.
“Tis easy,” she shrugs. “Dat box.”
“What box?” Lu says.
Trula Freed keeps her green eyes locked on me while she drops a sugar cube in her tea, stirs it with a spoon, and takes a long, noisy sip.
“What box?” Lu says again, and I nod to the treasure box under my spare shirt sitting on the floor beside my chair. The witchy woman would have seen it when I come in.
But then she say, “We eat, drink tea, then talk about dat di-lemma what’s bothering you girls.”
“Dilemma?” Lucy asks and picks up a cookie and licks off the icing.
“Bout Larry Crumbie. He not go fishin’. He go nowhere.”
Chapter 13
Lucy: Purple Honey
We close the red door on our way out like Trula Freed instructs, and in the lengthening shadows, we head home, utterly perplexed. When we’re barely out of earshot, Bert starts. “What in tarnation happened back there? How’d she know them things bout me, bout my treasure box and that no-good Larry Crumbie? And if that no-good man’s gone nowhere, where’s he been hiding his sorry self? Who’s been feeding him and getting his Dapper Dan? Want a cookie?”
I glance over at Bert holding out two lemon cookies.
“You took cookies from Trula Freed without asking?”
“She made em for us.”
“You should have asked first,” I say weakly and reach for one. “That’s only proper manners.” We walk and eat cookies, and I pull conversation back to Larry. “A good mystery always has more questions at the start than answers. And if Miz Trula’s right about Larry going nowhere, I was thinking maybe Irene can put a notice in the newspaper asking folks to be on the lookout for him. Everybody who’s anybody reads the Mercer County Reporter.”
“Think she’d do that?”
“Don’t know. I might ask her boss, Drake Cunningham, instead. He’s easier to talk to.” I don’t tell Bert that sometimes I wonder if Irene’s heart is too small. She isn’t very amiable, and she’s stingy with kind words, like she’s scared she’s going to run out. It must be tiresome being Irene.
We get home, but I don’t see Daddy’s car, so they must not be back from taking Miz Violet to the doctor. Irene’s car isn’t parked beside the pickup truck either, and Grady isn’t in sight. I tell Bert to wait in the barn, and I sneak in the parlor for one of Mama’s sewing needles, careful that Helen and the little ones don’t hear me. Then Bert and I climb to the hayloft. There, in the waning light, I say, “Hold up your right hand, Bert,” and she does. “Do you, Bert Tucker, promise to never tell Mama what we witnessed today? About Miz Trula reading minds, knowing a person’s coming before they know it themselves, and saying with certitude that a missing man did not leave town?” When she doesn’t answer, I say, “Say I promise.”
“I promise.”
“Now you ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“The do you promise oath.”
“The whole thing? That’s too many words.”
“Oh shoot, Bert. I’ll do it myself. Do I, Lucy Brown, promise to never tell Mama what I witnessed today…” and I say, “I do.”
“Now we make it official—hold out your finger,” and I prick our index fingers, and we squish our blood together. Now my best friend and I are blood sisters with a secret we’ll take to our grave.
As we climb down from the loft, I say, “What’s in your treasure box?”
She says, “It’s got bits and pieces that glue me together when I’m coming apart. For now, it belongs to me.”
There goes Bert confounding me again.
The next morning after breakfast, we head to the barn where Bert will begin her beekeeping lessons in earnest. Daddy’s already in the barn and has rubbed Vicks on his hands to ward off the bees. Tiny Junior is mucking out a stall without being told, and Yancy has already filled giant pots with water for today’s sugar syrup. Yancy’s putting Assassin’s bridle on. My mule’s pitiful tail hairs never have grown back. We catch the end of a conversation.
“...gonna hire you some?”
“May not have a choice. Being shorthanded this long is wearing on us. And now with the beeswax demands… How do you think the other men would take it?”
“Don’t rightly know. This world’s done turned upside down crazy. Never thought I’d hear talk bout Nazis walking on Carolina dirt when our boys is off fighting the devils. No sir. Never did.” Yancy and Assassin head to the fields.
What’s Daddy saying? “You talking about Nazis? Coming to Riverton?”
He strikes a match on the bottom of his boot and lights
dry pine needles in the smoker that will calm the bees. “Maybe so, maybe no. They’re already in Scotland Neck.”
“That’s only forty miles from here. What in the world are Nazis doing there?”
“Working tobacco and peanuts and cotton.”
“Out in the field? Right alongside free men?”
Daddy nods while he tests the smoker.
“Does Mama know?”
“She knows but doesn’t believe it’ll come to pass. We’ll see, but if I get the chance to hire some, I’ll probably take it.”
“I can’t believe it, Daddy. You’d bring evil Germans here? The kind of Germans Oma was scared of? They’re like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein who created an abomination. Why would you do something like that?”
“You sound like your mama,” he says. “Life’s turned hard these war years. You know that. Everybody’s stretched too thin. Too many things don’t get done. It’s mostly children and old people doing too much, when young’uns should be playing and the old ones should be rocking. Thank the Lord for the beeswax deal to help carry us through.”
Daddy heads to the hives, and I feel ashamed for not trusting him. In quiet, I help Bert get into a bee suit too big for her. With one leg in the pants, she says, “They got horns on their heads, you know,” without saying who. “Like devil men.” The other leg goes in. “They keep em outta sight under their hats.”
“Who would say such a thing?” I roll up the sleeves so her hands come through.
“An old man on the bus sitting catty-corner to me. He was quiet for the longest time, then got moved by the spirit and started preaching to the air. He said, ‘Them murdering Nazis are birthed from Satan himself and wear his horns on their heads as a sign. They eat babies and steal souls.’ He preached for a minute then stopped as quick as he started.”
“What horrible things to say,” I begin—
—but Daddy yells, “What the devil,” and we run outside carrying our gloves and veils. Tiny Junior and Gertie come, too, hearing the worry in Daddy’s voice. He holds a frame packed with honey. Not the usual amber honey. Purple honey.
“What the devil,” I repeat. We’ve seen honey turn different shades of gold, depending on where the bees find nectar, but purple is not in the honey spectrum. I don’t even remember purple honey in Miz Trula’s collection.
“In all my born days…” Daddy says more to the bees than to us. Then he moves to the next hive, smokes it, and reaches in to discover the same odd thing in the center frame. Worry clouds his face. “What did you get into, little buddies? Where could you have been?”
“What could have happened? You’ve got the best hives in the county,” I say.
“This is a new one on me. One time, I heard talk about purple honey but thought it was a tall tale. Maybe since it’s been drier than usual… Maybe the bees have been drinking from elderberries.” Daddy takes off his hat and scratches his head, standing beside a hive holding eighty thousand worker bees who have created a mystery.
Gertie has backed away from the opened hive for fear of stings. She calls out, “Is it the government sugar what’s doing it?”
“No. We just started feeding them syrup. This honey took time to make, and I can’t believe I overlooked it. Girls, put some in a jar so I can take a closer look. I’m going to check the books.” Daddy places the lids back on the hives and the two racks on the table. Some of the bees follow their racks into the barn, so Bert and I quickly finish suiting up so we don’t get stung. Daddy heads to the house hoping to find answers.
A rack holds seven or eight pounds of beeswax and honey. This honey is warm from the sun, and it flows easy as I cut a piece of wax comb out of each frame and drop the blocks into a jar. It’s runnier than regular, and some has dripped on the counter. Tiny Junior has been inching closer, but no bees sting him. He reaches over to dip his finger in it, and I say, “No, don’t eat that. It might be bad,” because we don’t know. We take the honey in a jar to the house to study on a conundrum as perplexing as the missing Larry Crumbie.
As usual, Mama has the radio on, and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” is playing on low. Daddy reads at the kitchen table, thumbing through his favorite reference books. One is written by the Reverend L. L. Langstroth, the apiarist from Pennsylvania who revolutionized the industry a hundred years back. The other is by Mr. Walter T. Kelley. If anybody knows anything about purple honey, one of these men should.
Mama wipes her hands on the dish towel, reaches for the jar, and holds it up to the light. “It looks like thin grape jelly, doesn’t it?”
Daddy rubs his hands over his face and closes the books. “It’s not here. If either of them saw it, they didn’t write about it. At least not in these books.” He holds out his hand for the jar, unscrews the lid, sniffs it, then dips his finger in and tastes.
“David,” Mama cries in alarm.
“Tastes good. Like honey should.”
Mama snaps, “And that’s proof you’re not going to get sick? Because it tastes good?”
He says, “Minnie, this honey might look different, but it comes from the almighty honeybee. If it wasn’t any good, the bees would have suffered, and they’re as sassy as ever.” Daddy stands, hugs Mama, kisses her temple, and turns up the radio. They dance, and Mama’s tired face softens and she even giggles. He adds, “Girls, let’s harvest some honey. I want to see how much is purple.”
Over the next week, we find grape-colored honey scattered in a quarter of the hives and it almost fills a fifty-gallon barrel. We don’t sell this honey to the government. We don’t sell it to our regulars. Daddy sells it to moonshiners in case something’s off. He tells Bert and me, “There’s going to be some gentlemen, white and colored alike, coming from over Bear Grass way. They’ll ask for this special honey, and you sell it to them. Full price. They’ll bring their own jars. You collect the money.”
“Does Mama know?”
Daddy doesn’t say, but he adds on his way out, “Put one jar aside for us and six jars for Trula Freed.”
“Does Mama know that?” I say.
He doesn’t answer outright but adds, “It’s business. All business.”
“We’ll be happy to take it to Miz Trula,” I shout as an afterthought, hoping.
But he says, “Y’all stay away from there,” and he cheats us out of a legitimate reason for another visit.
Bootleggers start coming right away. Polite men in rusty pickup trucks with hats in hands tap on our screen door. Mama ignores them, so Bert or I go to the barn and fill jugs that smell of corn liquor. The men don’t seem put off by girls serving them. We always ask if they know the whereabouts of Larry Crumbie. Some say they know of him but nobody’s seen him lately. At day’s end, we hand Daddy a stack of money. Sometimes two hundred dollars. Then the honey is gone.
Chapter 14
Bert: Good For Something
Aunt Violet don’t go back to her farm after that Cherry Pie Day. She stays at the crazy house and births a boy. Miz Brown hears he’s claimed by a distant cousin in Tennessee, close to my mountains. Nobody knows what name they put on the baby, but I bet it ain’t Larry.
“Would you like to go see your aunt?” Miz Brown says in the heart of July, after breakfast while Lu and me do dishes. “We can see how she’s doing and let her know she’s not forgotten.” She adds, “Then you can write a letter to your pa so he knows what’s happened.”
Truth is I don’t think much bout Aunt Violet cept to say good riddance. I don’t miss her stinky house or her spiteful ways. And I don’t think on Pa much neither, since I never hear hide nor hair from him. To be polite, I nod about the visiting part—but not about the writing part. I’m not good with letters.
“We’ll go this afternoon, the three of us, after chores.”
We leave in sunshine and ride through two towns and into hard rain when we get to Primrose Mental Hospital and no
primrose in sight. The outside of the building is red brick, and the inside stinks of bleach and lost souls. Nurses wear starched uniforms with white caps held on with bobby pins the color of their hair. They walk down hallways in rubber shoes that squeak, going in and out of rooms in a flutter, never looking anybody in the eye. The barred windows are tall and narrow. These windows don’t open to the outside to let in hope.
A sour-faced woman takes us up gloomy stairs to the third floor. Iron beds line each side of a long room, and some of the women moan or cry out or stare at the wall. They got on hospital gowns and not a scrap of dignity. It won’t a place to heal a body or a mind. Lu whispers, “Remind me not to go crazy.”
My aunt’s got all the fight taken outta her. She sits on the edge of a narrow bed. Her bare feet dangle off the floor, and her hands stay in her lap. “Hello, Violet, dear.” Miz Brown gently touches my aunt’s shoulder. “We’ve come to pay you a visit. Bert and Lucy are here with me.”
Aunt Violet looks confused and don’t recognize us. She says, “You seen my baby? I come in with my baby, but he ain’t here and nobody’s saying” are her odd words. “He’s supposed to be right in here”—she pats her tummy—“but it don’t feel like nothing’s in there no more.”
Miz Brown clutches her heart, and Lu’s mouth drops open. All my hate for Aunt Violet’s meanness dries up, and I wanna cry cause nobody should be this alone. Somebody shoulda told her she had that baby and it’s a boy staying with her cousin in Tennessee. Told her that if she gets well, she can hold her baby boy. She looks pitiful sitting on the edge of that bed with its dingy sheets and flat pillow and not a piece of personal anywhere. Her hair is stringy, and her toenails is long. Her skin is the color of fish gone bad.
Miz Brown sits next to her, and the mattress springs creaks. She takes my aunt’s hand and tells her what happened. When she’s done, Aunt Violet say, “You seen my baby? I come in with my baby, but he ain’t here…” and we know she’s gone round the bend to where we can’t go.