F*ckface

by Leah Hampton

  She asked after her mother, and Dale shrugged again, this time with more resolve.

  “She’s still in that damn jar, Maisy,” he muttered, “right where you left her.” He spat into the grass and sighed heavily through his nose.

  “All right,” she said. “Let me go see what I can figure out.”

  Dale looked out toward the road and rubbed the dirt from his hands onto his T-shirt. His fingers were thick and calloused. “What the hell,” he said as Maisy eased past him. “I’m not gonna scatter her in the bushes. You want her, take it home with you.”

  She squinted hard, reminded herself to be patient, and trudged up to the house. For all ten years they were together, Dale had made breakfast for Maisy’s mother every morning. When the cancer took her appetite, he brought her green tea instead and waited patiently as she agonized over each sip, all the while aching to get downstairs and have his own first drink of the day. Through it all, and even now after her mother’s passing, Dale still kept the lawn mowed, still fixed the pipes when they dripped. He knew it wasn’t his house, so Maisy let him stay on for now. It was easier than keeping up two houses by herself. She figured he’d move out soon, maybe go live with his ex-wife in Sevierville. In the meantime, she tried to remind herself she would be lucky to find a man so devoted, drink or no drink, someday when her own children left her.

  She paused on the porch to move Dale’s cooler off the top step, then went inside to find the apiary handbook.

  Maisy didn’t know anything about bees, either, not really. What little she remembered she had learned only by watching her mother, who rarely talked of how or why with any of her garden work. Even those few scraps of knowing were long distant acquisitions, all earned over a decade ago. When her kids were still little, Maisy had moved back home for a year. She finished her GED, then her accounting certificate, riding out the ravages of her divorce and pushing back against whoever tried to stop her. She moved out again as soon as she could afford to, but her mother still liked to tell people Maisy grew up in this house—twice. She gritted her teeth whenever her mother said things like that. All her mother’s friends thought Maisy had a square jaw.

  The bees had arrived during that year Maisy and the kids lived with her mother. Ever since then, the bees had been part of the landscape. Maisy knew just enough now to suspect the hive was dying. There was nothing to be done, but she hunted in the kitchen cabinets for the book just the same.

  * * *

  “I want to get some bees,” her mother had said to her. She cuddled Baby Girl in her arms; they were making faces and giggling at each other.

  “Momma,” Maisy replied, waving at the paper wasps idling under the side porch, “you’ve already got plenty.”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said from the side of her mouth. Hunter ran past them, aiming his water pistol at his old tricycle. Her mother touched Hunter’s skinny shoulder as he doubled back to growl a militaristic oath at one of his other toys.

  “I didn’t do it when you were little,” she said as Hunter disappeared behind the house. “You were always getting into a mess. Didn’t want to listen.” Maisy tightened her lips as her mother bounced Baby Girl a time or two. “But these two … My grandchildren need to make some honey.”

  And so they drove out to Murphy. She knew an organic farmer whose uncle raised bees way out there, just shy of the state line. “Good bees,” her mother said. “No chemicals. He’s got them so they don’t give a damn about anything but making comb.”

  How the woman knew this, Maisy never thought to ask. They borrowed June’s new truck and drove down 74, following the map her mother had drawn on the back of last month’s propane bill. June lived next door; she and Maisy’s mother had known each other decades, husbands, bodies ago. They talked together like old thieves almost every day and even wore their hair in the same long, gray braids.

  Maisy didn’t remember how long they all stayed there or what prices or logistics were negotiated for buying and transporting the hive. That memory was a dozen years old. Perhaps she was told to sit on the porch with her children while the business was conducted, but she preferred to think she chose to do so.

  “You keep the queen, Maisy,” her mother said. “But for heaven’s sake, be careful with it.”

  She handed over a little cardboard jewelry box and marched back to the truck. Maisy’s mother’s arms stretched down like old wires. They hung from her like afterthoughts while she plowed on to wherever she was headed. That’s how Maisy remembered it: a long arm depositing the queen with her from a distance, then whizzing past. Maisy fumbled with the box, stuffed it deep in the pocket of her favorite hoodie, and trudged along behind.

  On the ride home, her mother drove and chatted, mostly to herself. The hive sat in the bed of the truck, and Hunter and Baby Girl napped on the tiny backseat in the cab. The engine revved all the way back up the mountain while her mother went on and on.

  “No chemicals, the man said. I’ll just use a little menthol and thyme when I need to.” She looked in the rearview mirror at Maisy’s kids. “We’ll smoke them out when they’re good and ready,” she chirped, “and have us a little treat for those grandbabies soon.”

  Maisy looked out the window and watched the mountains darken around her. She felt small, like she could fit into the backseat with her children, and she could think only of the queen in her hand. Rarely were such important items entrusted to her. She wanted to look at the queen so badly, to study it while it was alone, away from the colony, but she didn’t. Her mother would kill her if it flew away, so Maisy kept her hand inside her pocket, holding the box close to her. The whole thing felt like it mattered somehow, so for all the things she forgot, she remembered that part.

  Her mother dithered and fretted over the hive for a few days, and then it was like they had always been there. Maisy’s kids never feared the bees or ran from them. They were just always around, hovering and tending to their own concerns. “They sure have settled right in, haven’t they?” her mother beamed one morning as she watched a fat worker stagger out of a peony.

  * * *

  A few months later, after the weather started staying hot even into the early morning, her mother called June over from next door, and the two women worked out a plan for harvesting the honey. They had no centrifuge or fancy equipment, so instead they drank scuppernong wine and remembered their childhoods until they settled on the best method they knew. June had a mask and an ancient smoker, so they fetched those and told Maisy to keep the children inside, inside no matter what. Maisy had no idea what they were doing out there; she could only see so much from the house.

  Soon the kitchen came alive with giggles and movement. Her mother put a huge sieve and a clean plastic bucket in the sink. She grabbed some kind of putty knife and told Hunter to help her scrape the comb off the frames. Hunter quickly took to being trusted with such a grown-up-looking job, and soon the sieve was overflowing as the honey drained into the bucket.

  “Now,” her mother said to her son and Baby Girl with great portent, “now, we squish!”

  The children took turns squeezing the comb and squealing. Maisy took over when Baby Girl tried to put her head in the bucket. The warm ooze of wax and honey on Maisy’s hands felt like some old, fine thing she knew well, even though her mother had never allowed her such pleasures when she was little. She continued to squish, dimly registering June’s reminders to save the beeswax for her.

  When Maisy turned from the bucket to wipe her hands, she saw her mother handing down a bit of comb to Baby Girl. The toddler stood, wide-eyed and enraptured, one hand almost entirely in her mouth while the other hand reached up, the rest of her as still as earth, for that scrap of sweet. Every inch of Baby Girl was covered in honey. In her hair, down her back, between her toes—it was as if she had rolled in the stuff. June laughed and hooted as she leaned against the doorframe, egging everyone on. Maisy could only think of getting both children into the bathtub as quickly as possible.

&
nbsp; All told, the sticky chaos of their first harvest yielded barely a gallon. The following year, her mother and June refined their technique. The honey came just after Maisy moved with the kids into a new duplex in Waynesville. Maisy liked her job, and the children could go to a good school, one with computer labs and a real football team. Her mother dropped off four big jars as a housewarming gift, and for months the kids insisted on putting “goo”—butter and honey stirred together—on their toast every morning.

  Dale showed up a little while later. He built a new shed, made her mother laugh, and settled into the deck chair on the porch. The bees continued as ever. For the next few summers, Hunter would ask to go over the mountain and help his grandmother with the hive. Maisy usually just dropped him off. His first year at Haywood Middle, Hunter went to Vacation Bible School camp and missed the honey harvest. After that, the bees rarely caught his attention. When he made the high school varsity football team and had to practice through the summers, he stopped visiting his grandmother’s house altogether. All he wanted was a football scholarship, a ticket out of town.

  * * *

  Last year, right after her mother’s diagnosis, Hunter packed off to college in Georgia, and two of June’s four hives died. The frames came up empty, light as anything when she lifted them out. Maisy’s mother comforted her old friend and offered her a jar from her own stores. She did not mention her illness. Maisy brought them both a glass of iced tea and sat down nearby to sort through a pile of doctor bills while they talked. June kept worrying aloud, her voice high pitched and endless.

  “Oh, what is it, I wonder?” June keened. “What’s making them leave the queen? Do they just … do they get lost?”

  She kept staring out the kitchen windows, red-eyed, bobbing her graying head as if hoping to see a swarm of familiar faces. June wrapped her arms around herself inside a worn blue button-down shirt that had belonged to some husband or another. Then she started quoting Shakespeare, something about sitting on the ground and telling sad stories about dead kings. Maisy had to chew her pencil to keep from getting up and swatting her.

  “There, now,” her mother had said. “I’m sure none of it’s your doing, honey.”

  * * *

  This year, in all the bother and confusion of watching her mother die, Maisy had forgotten to ask how June’s remaining hives were faring. It was spring, and she had had bigger things on her mind. Taxes would soon be overdue on her mother’s house, and no one could find the insurance policy for the car. The apiary guide had apparently disappeared, too. Besides, Dale said June hadn’t been stopping by so often like she used to. Neither had Maisy, but Dale didn’t say anything about that.

  As Maisy rifled through the kitchen cabinets for the beekeeper’s book, she glanced into the dining room at the pewter urn sitting on the mantel. Her face reddened. Maisy lowered her hands and looked away, out a window into the side yard.

  “Momma,” she whispered, “you’ve got to tell me where you keep things.”

  Maisy thought she’d better go up and check on her mother’s room. Perhaps the book was there, and she could tidy up a little, water the plants. The upstairs hall was a long series of doors. All the bedrooms were tiny and hot; in the summer, half the doors swelled in the heat and sealed themselves shut.

  On the stairs, a weight overtook her. Lately, Maisy had made it her job to check the progress of the seedlings on the bedroom sill during her visits. But she found today she was ready to let them go. Whether there were tomatoes to plant this year didn’t matter. Dale would forget to tend them or accidentally mow them, and she had little time for canning even if they did survive until their fruit ripened. Maisy shook her head. Only six weeks since her mother’s funeral, and already the whole house had been abandoned.

  She rested her hand on the banister, smoothed it up and down slowly, and decided to leave things as they were. She needed to get home. Her daughter was supposed to cook a “traditional” family dinner this week and document the process for English class. So far the preparations had been disastrous, with Baby Girl huffing and brooding in a cloud of corn flour and angst.

  She returned to the kitchen and puttered through the cabinets, hoping her son would come home from college for spring break. She paused in the breakfast nook and looked out the big window to watch Dale unlocking the shed. Maisy figured he kept working on the yard for the same reason she still changed the sheets on Hunter’s bed every week. It was something to do, a muscle memory. Just like whenever Maisy drove to Asheville and got scared in all that traffic. With every near miss and honked horn, she’d reach her hand out to the empty seat beside her, just in case, to protect phantom children long gone from the passenger seat.

  In between the panes as she looked out, Maisy spotted a shriveled drone pawing meekly at the glass. Her eyes focused on the sills and screens all along the big window. Scores of drunken, half-dead insects lay writhing alongside the curled husks of their comrades who had already succumbed. Maisy stared for a long while and wondered where the thousands of others had gone, whether they were sick, or dead, or just forgot where home was. She blinked and thought about the sound they used to make when all was in bloom.

  Tomorrow, or maybe the next day, if she remembered to, she would ask June about her hives. If the rest of June’s bees are dying, too, Maisy thought, if they’ve got the same sickness, well, I guess I’ll take it as some kind of a sign.

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She reached for it, read a text from her daughter. Barely looking at the keypad, Maisy let her fingers click and dance their reply: Yes, Baby Girl. Forget cooking. I’ll take us into town for supper.

  Outside, Dale fired up the lawn mower. The house filled with a low, angry buzz. Maisy glided through the house and out onto the porch, closed her eyes, and waited for the smell of fresh-cut grass to come to her. She hovered in that moment alone and familiar, and almost forgot her plans to leave.

  MEAT

  The receiving line snaked through the chapel, its center aisle a corpus of grief, clutched purses, dark jackets. Miss Florence had insisted on cremation and a rented casket, had made her nieces promise only minimal fuss, because why spend good money on old bones? But then everyone showed up to pay respect because they or their children had all spent time under Miss Florence’s care at the early childhood center. After forty years of wiping noses, Miss Florence always liked to say, everyone in town was her baby. Even the pastor had been one of her babies, a long time ago.

  The service had been packed, and now hundreds pressed together in the best of gluts, waiting to offer condolences to Miss Florence’s family. It was early autumn, that hushed, forthright season, and the chapel hummed with good, clean, true grief.

  Samuel Ammons brought his eldest granddaughter, Alison, who had not been one of Miss Florence’s babies. Alison was only visiting, and she was not a churchgoer. She wore a borrowed dress, collared and polka-dotted, which aged her considerably. The dress clung to her back, and sweat dampened the dark curls on her neck. Alison looked feeble compared to everyone else—a mountain girl startled and shied by the flatland’s October heat, the only unsmiling mourner.

  “No, this is my granddaughter. This is Bryce’s girl,” Samuel said to the small knot of people around him in the receiving line. “Down from the hills.” He touched his fingers to Alison’s narrow shoulders. “We sure like having her visit with us. She’s all grown now.”

  Everyone nearby in line nodded.

  Well now, young lady, the mourners said, I expect you’re in school.

  “She’s studying agriculture,” said her grandfather.

  Everyone approved. There were still farms in this town.

  “Alison works in the university dairy,” Samuel said. “Bet you didn’t know App State owns that outfit over in Statesville? Milks a-hundred-sixty cows every morning, don’t you, Alison?”

  Alison’s mouth felt sticky; she kept her lips shut and nodded. Everyone approved again.

  The front of the church was cluttered with
lilies, ribbon-bright bouquets, an ornate easel with a photograph of Miss Florence, mementos, the sleek casket. Someone had parked an ancient, rusty tricycle under the easel.

  “They switched her out from the hog farm this summer,” Samuel said. “She had to go back home a while to rest.”

  Oh, was it the heat? the mourners asked. You won’t be used to that, they said. Poor thing.

  People here did not think of the Blue Ridge Mountains as the South or of Alison as anything but a stranger. She came from a wet, unknowable labyrinth of hollers, and she had been confused by the order of hymns during the service. The mourners peered at her as if they were thinking of snow or of wildcats slinking low to the ground.

  Samuel shook his head, lowered his voice. “She didn’t like the slaughterhouse.”

  Everyone sighed. Ah. They wrinkled their noses compassionately. They knew the industrial hog facility just a few miles from here. They knew its smells, its lagoons of dung and chemical runoff that festered in the sun. They knew the cages, the livestock trucks rattling down the cracked county highway every day, each one packed with terrified, pink bodies.

  Alison crossed her arms and dipped one hip toward the casket, which loomed nearer as the receiving line inched forward.

  For a whole month, she had worked in the main hog farrowing barn. The barn was the largest of five metal tubes at the end of the facility. Its ceilings were thirty feet high, rounded. Metal. Metal walls, metal roof, metal gestation cages. Metal fans whirred constantly above, but the barn stayed hot. The air was thick with sweat and shit and the tang of aluminum and scalding summer humidity. Everything echoed and reeked.