The Secret Life of Bees Read online

  Up until Mrs. Henry came along, I’d believed beauty college would be the upper limit of my career. Once, studying her face, I told her if she was my customer, I would give her a French twist that would do wonders for her, and she said—and I quote—“Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are? You could be a professor or a writer with actual books to your credit. Beauty school. Please.”

  It took me a month to get over the shock of having life possibilities. You know how adults love to ask, “So…what are you going to be when you grow up?” I can’t tell you how much I’d hated that question, but suddenly I was going around volunteering to people, people who didn’t even want to know, that I planned to be a professor and a writer of actual books.

  I kept a collection of my writings. For a while everything I wrote had a horse in it. After we read Ralph Waldo Emerson in class, I wrote “My Philosophy of Life,” which I intended for the start of a book but could get only three pages out of it. Mrs. Henry said I needed to live past fourteen years old before I would have a philosophy.

  She said a scholarship was my only hope for a future and lent me her private books for the summer. Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, “Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?” The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by.

  Without books in the peach stand, I often passed the time making up poems, but that slow afternoon I didn’t have the patience for rhyming words. I just sat out there and thought about how much I hated the peach stand, how completely and absolutely I hated it.

  The day before I’d gone to first grade, T. Ray had found me in the peach stand sticking a nail into one of his peaches.

  He walked toward me with his thumbs jammed into his pockets and his eyes squinted half shut from the glare. I watched his shadow slide over the dirt and weeds and thought he had come to punish me for stabbing a peach. I didn’t even know why I was doing it.

  Instead he said, “Lily, you’re starting school tomorrow, so there are things you need to know. About your mother.”

  For a moment everything got still and quiet, as if the wind had died and the birds had stopped flying. When he squatted down in front of me, I felt caught in a hot dark I could not break free of.

  “It’s time you knew what happened to her, and I want you to hear it from me. Not from people out there talking.”

  We had never spoken of this, and I felt a shiver pass over me. The memory of that day would come back to me at odd moments. The stuck window. The smell of her. The clink of hangers. The suitcase. The way they’d fought and shouted. Most of all the gun on the floor, the heaviness when I’d lifted it.

  I knew that the explosion I’d heard that day had killed her. The sound still sneaked into my head once in a while and surprised me. Sometimes it seemed that when I’d held the gun there hadn’t been any noise at all, that it had come later, but other times, sitting alone on the back steps, bored and wishing for something to do, or pent up in my room on a rainy day, I felt I had caused it, that when I’d lifted the gun, the sound had torn through the room and gouged out our hearts.

  It was a secret knowledge that would slip up and overwhelm me, and I would take off running—even if it was raining out, I ran—straight down the hill to my special place in the peach orchard. I’d lie right down on the ground and it would calm me.

  Now, T. Ray scooped up a handful of dirt and let if fall out of his hands. “The day she died, she was cleaning out the closet,” he said. I could not account for the strange tone of his voice, an unnatural sound, how it was almost, but not quite, kind.

  Cleaning the closet. I had never considered what she was doing those last minutes of her life, why she was in the closet, what they had fought about.

  “I remember,” I said. My voice sounded small and faraway to me, like it was coming from an ant hole in the ground.

  His eyebrows lifted, and he brought his face closer to me. Only his eyes showed confusion. “You what?”

  “I remember,” I said again. “You were yelling at each other.”

  A tightening came into his face. “Is that right?” he said. His lips had started to turn pale, which was the thing I always watched for. I took a step backward.

  “Goddamn it, you were four years old!” he shouted. “You don’t know what you remember.”

  In the silence that followed, I considered lying to him, saying, I take it back. I don’t remember anything. Tell me what happened, but there was such a powerful need in me, pent up for so long, to speak about it, to say the words.

  I looked down at my shoes, at the nail I’d dropped when I’d seen him coming. “There was a gun.”

  “Christ,” he said.

  He looked at me a long time, then walked over to the bushel baskets stacked at the back of the stand. He stood there a minute with his hands balled up before he turned around and came back.

  “What else?” he said. “You tell me right now what you know.”

  “The gun was on the floor—”

  “And you picked it up,” he said. “I guess you remember that.”

  The exploding sound had started to echo around in my head. I looked off in the direction of the orchard, wanting to break and run.

  “I remember picking it up,” I said. “But that’s all.”

  He leaned down and held me by the shoulders, gave me a little shake. “You don’t remember anything else? You’re sure? Now, think.”

  I paused so long he cocked his head, looking at me, suspicious.

  “No, sir, that’s all.”

  “Listen to me,” he said, his fingers squeezing into my arms. “We were arguing like you said. We didn’t see you at first. Then we turned around and you were standing there holding the gun. You’d picked it up off the floor. Then it just went off.”

  He let me go and rammed his hands into his pockets. I could hear his hands jingling keys and nickels and pennies. I wanted so much to grab on to his leg, to feel him reach down and lift me to his chest, but I couldn’t move, and neither did he. He stared at a place over my head. A place he was being very careful to study.

  “The police asked lots of questions, but it was just one of those terrible things. You didn’t mean to do it,” he said softly. “But if anybody wants to know, that’s what happened.”

  Then he left, walking back toward the house. He’d gone only a little way when he looked back. “And don’t stick that nail into my peaches again.”

  It was after 6:00 P.M. when I wandered back to the house from the peach stand, having sold nothing, not one peach, and found Rosaleen in the living room. Usually she would’ve gone home by now, but she was wrestling with the rabbit ears on top of the TV, trying to fix the snow on the screen. President Johnson faded in and out, lost in the blizzard. I’d never seen Rosaleen so interested in a TV show that she would exert physical energy over it.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did they drop the atom bomb?” Ever since we’d started bomb drills at school, I couldn’t help thinking my days were numbered. Everybody was putting fallout shelters in their backyards, canning tap water, getting ready for the end of time. Thirteen students in my class made fallout-shelter models for their science project, which shows it was not just me worried about it. We were obsessed with Mr. Khrushchev and his missiles.

  “No, the bomb hasn’t gone off,” she said. “Just come here and see if you can fix the TV.” Her fists were burrowed so deep into her hips they seemed to disappear.

  I twisted tin foil around the antennae. Things cleared up enough to make out President Johnson taking his seat at a desk, people all around. I didn’t care much for the president because of the way he held his beagles by the ears. I did admire his wife, Lady Bird, though, who always looked like she wanted nothing more
than to sprout wings and fly away.

  Rosaleen dragged the footstool in front of the set and sat down, so the whole thing vanished under her. She leaned toward the set, holding a piece of her skirt and winding it around in her hands.

  “What is going on?” I said, but she was so caught up in whatever was happening she didn’t even answer me. On the screen the president signed his name on a piece of paper, using about ten ink pens to get it done.

  “Rosaleen—”

  “Shhh,” she said, waving her hand.

  I had to get the news from the TV man. “Today, July second, 1964,” he said, “the president of the United States signed the Civil Rights Act into law in the East Room of the White House….”

  I looked over at Rosaleen, who sat there shaking her head, mumbling, “Lord have mercy,” just looking so disbelieving and happy, like people on television when they answered the 64,000 Question.

  I didn’t know whether to be excited for her or worried. All people ever talked about after church were the Negroes and whether they’d get their civil rights. Who was winning—the white people’s team or the colored people’s team? Like it was a do-or-die contest. When that minister from Alabama, Reverend Martin Luther King, got arrested last month in Florida for wanting to eat in a restaurant, the men at church acted like the white people’s team had won the pennant race. I knew they would not take this news lying down, not in one million years.

  “Hallelujah, Jesus,” Rosaleen was saying over there on her stool. Oblivious.

  Rosaleen had left dinner on the stove top, her famous smothered chicken. As I fixed T. Ray’s plate, I considered how to bring up the delicate matter of my birthday, something T. Ray had never paid attention to in all the years of my life, but every year, like a dope, I got my hopes up thinking this year would be the one.

  I had the same birthday as the country, which made it even harder to get noticed. When I was little, I thought people were sending up rockets and cherry bombs because of me—hurray, Lily was born! Then reality set in, like it always did.

  I wanted to tell T. Ray that any girl would love a silver charm bracelet, that in fact last year I’d been the only girl at Sylvan Junior High without one, that the whole point of lunchtime was to stand in the cafeteria line jangling your wrist, giving people a guided tour of your charm collection.

  “So,” I said, sliding his plate in front of him, “my birthday is this Saturday.”

  I watched him pull the chicken meat from around the bone with his fork.

  “I was just thinking I would love to have one of those silver charm bracelets they have down at the mercantile.”

  The house creaked like it did once in a while. Outside the door Snout gave a low bark, and then the air grew so quiet I could hear the food being ground up in T. Ray’s mouth.

  He ate his chicken breast and started on the thigh, looking at me now and then in his hard way.

  I started to say, So then, what about the bracelet? but I could see he’d already given his answer, and it caused a kind of sorrow to rise in me that felt fresh and tender and had nothing, really, to do with the bracelet. I think now it was sorrow for the sound of his fork scraping the plate, the way it swelled in the distance between us, how I was not even in the room.

  That night I lay in bed listening to the flicks and twitters and thrums inside the bee jar, waiting till it was late enough so I could slip out to the orchard and dig up the tin box that held my mother’s things. I wanted to lie down in the orchard and let it hold me.

  When the darkness had pulled the moon to the top of the sky, I got out of bed, put on my shorts and sleeveless blouse, and glided past T. Ray’s room in silence, sliding my arms and legs like a skater on ice. I didn’t see his boots, how he’d parked them in the middle of the hall. When I fell, the clatter startled the air so badly T. Ray’s snore changed rhythm. At first it ceased altogether, but then the snore started back with three piglet snorts.

  I crept down the stairs, through the kitchen. When the night hit my face, I felt like laughing. The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.

  To reach my spot I had to go to the eighth row left of the tractor shed, then walk along it, counting trees till I got to thirty-two. The tin box was buried in the soft dirt beneath the tree, shallow enough that I could dig it up with my hands.

  When I brushed the dirt from the lid and opened it, I saw first the whiteness of her gloves, then the photograph wrapped in waxed paper, just as I’d left it. And finally the funny wooden picture of Mary with the dark face. I took everything out, and, stretching out among the fallen peaches, I rested them across my abdomen.

  When I looked up through the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it wide, just wanting the night to settle on my skin, and that’s how I fell asleep, lying there with my mother’s things, with the air making moisture on my chest and the sky puckering with light.

  I woke to the sound of someone thrashing through the trees. T. Ray! I sat up, panicked, buttoning my shirt. I heard his footsteps, the fast, heavy pant of his breathing. Looking down, I saw my mother’s gloves and the two pictures. I stopped buttoning and grabbed them up, fumbling with them, unable to think what to do, how to hide them. I had dropped the tin box back in its hole, too far away to reach.

  “Lileeee!” he shouted, and I saw his shadow plunge toward me across the ground.

  I jammed the gloves and pictures under the waistband of my shorts, then reached for the rest of the buttons with shaking fingers.

  Before I could fasten them, light poured down on me and there he was without a shirt, holding a flashlight. The beam swept and zagged, blinding me when it swung across my eyes.

  “Who were you out here with?” he shouted, aiming the light on my half-buttoned top.

  “N-no one,” I said, gathering my knees in my arms, startled by what he was thinking. I couldn’t look long at his face, how large and blazing it was, like the face of God.

  He flung the beam of light into the darkness. “Who’s out there?” he yelled.

  “Please, T. Ray, no one was here but me.”

  “Get up from there,” he yelled.

  I followed him back to the house. His feet struck the ground so hard I felt sorry for the black earth. He didn’t speak till we reached the kitchen and he pulled the Martha White grits from the pantry. “I expect this out of boys, Lily—you can’t blame them—but I expect more out of you. You act no better than a slut.”

  He poured a mound of grits the size of an anthill onto the pine floor. “Get over here and kneel down.”

  I’d been kneeling on grits since I was six, but still I never got used to that powdered-glass feeling beneath my skin. I walked toward them with those tiny feather steps you expect of a girl in Japan, and lowered myself to the floor, determined not to cry, but the sting was already gathering in my eyes.

  T. Ray sat in a chair and cleaned his nails with a pocketknife. I swayed from knee to knee, hoping for a second or two of relief, but the pain cut deep into my skin. I bit down on my lip, and it was then I felt the wooden picture of black Mary underneath my waistband. I felt the waxed paper with my mother’s picture inside and her gloves stuck to my belly, and it seemed all of a sudden like my mother was there, up against my body, like she was bits and pieces of insulation molded against my skin, helping me absorb all his meanness.

  The next morning I woke up late. The moment my feet touched the floor, I checked under my mattress where I’d tucked my mother’s things—just a temporary hiding place till I could bury them back in the orchard.

  Satisfied they were safe, I strolled into the kitchen, where I found Rosaleen sweeping up grits.

  I buttered a piece of Sunbeam bread.


  She jerked the broom as she swept, raising a wind. “What happened?” she said.

  “I went out to the orchard last night. T. Ray thinks I met some boy.”

  “Did you?”

  I rolled my eyes at her. “No.”

  “How long did he keep you on these grits?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe an hour.”

  She looked down at my knees and stopped sweeping. They were swollen with hundreds of red welts, pinprick bruises that would grow into a blue stubble across my skin. “Look at you, child. Look what he’s done to you,” she said.

  My knees had been tortured like this enough times in my life that I’d stopped thinking of it as out of the ordinary; it was just something you had to put up with from time to time, like the common cold. But suddenly the look on Rosaleen’s face cut through all that. Look what he’s done to you.

  That’s what I was doing—taking a good long look at my knees—when T. Ray stomped through the back door.

  “Well, look who decided to get up.” He yanked the bread out of my hands and threw it into Snout’s food bowl. “Would it be too much to ask you to get out to the peach stand and do some work? You’re not Queen for a Day, you know.”

  This will sound crazy, but up until then I thought T. Ray probably loved me some. I could never forget the time he smiled at me in church when I was singing with the hymnbook upside down.

  Now I looked at his face. It was despising and full of anger.

  “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do what I say!” he shouted.

  Then I’ll find another roof, I thought.

  “You understand me?” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I understand,” I said, and I did, too. I understood that a new rooftop would do wonders for me.

  Late that afternoon I caught two more bees. Lying on my stomach across the bed, I watched how they orbited the space in the jar, around and around like they’d missed the exit.

  Rosaleen poked her head in the door. “You all right?”