Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Such Rage of Honey by Cheryl Rogers

Since Cheryl Rogers last appeared in EQMM she has won the 2006 Henry Lawson Award and sold stories to several Australian and U.K. magazines. Some terms that might be unfamiliar to U.S. readers in this tale set in the gold-mining country of New South Wales are “mullock heaps”: the debris from gold mines; “Metters No .2”: a type of wood stove; and “humpy”: a settler’s hut.

Forrester hadn’t expected the sight of a bit of rust and red dirt to bring a lump to his throat. He thought he’d prepared himself, spending the best part of three weeks circling the vineyards and the timbered hinterland before homing in on the old gold-mining town. It was the wagon step in the ringlock fence that threw him.

“Leave it, boy.” His father’s warning flew at him out of the mullock heaps, across the nodding heads of wild oat. Through time. “You want to leave a bit of past for them that come after us.”

The words bit sharp as the sting of the wild bees whose hives Forrester raided. In the woodland outside Mudgee he’d stirred up a swarm of robber workers. They’d been tucked up in a chimney, in an abandoned rabbiter’s hut. He’d heard the mud bricks rattle with their rage. But he’d stayed calm. Reached for the smoker and topped up its burner with dry pine needles. Gently puffed in the cool and fragrant suggestion of burning pine to soothe their troubled souls.

Yet now the apiarist found his hand reaching for the step, rubbing at the rust with the flat of his thumb. He wondered at the leather — work boots, moccasins, the odd feminine heel — that had dished out the forged iron. Wondered at the prospectors, fortune hunters, and downright gold diggers who’d hitched a ride in the wagon, now reduced to one rusted step hung in ringlock in a fenceline jagged as a bushman’s smile.

And as the flakes peeled away, Forrester felt the years slip away too. He was a boy again, scooping armloads of autumn leaves from the avenue flanking the road into town, pretending to bury the youngest of his screaming herd of sisters. Trapping crayfish in Tambaroora dam. Blackberrying the snarl of thicket skirting the hills and selling the pickings in punnets from a trestle table at the edge of the road.

Remembering his father’s warning, he stopped rubbing as abruptly as he’d started.

“...leave a bit of past for them that come after us...”

The words rang clear as the inland sky on a summer morning, yet Forrester couldn’t have been higher than his father’s gun belt when he’d first heard them. Couldn’t have realized that he’d be one of those “... that come after us...”

But now he understood why he’d spent the past twenty days circling loops around the heart of his boyhood.

Like a bee.

Dancing.

Every Friday night old man Kelly followed the same ritual. He’d eat tea — he didn’t hold with calling the evening meal “dinner” — early.

Then he’d let the fire in his Metters No. 2 burn down to nothing. And when the heat had all but gone and the chimney was cool enough to touch, he’d turn the key in the lock of the only door on the weatherboard humpy others tried to pretend was something it wasn’t.

“Your cottage really should have a back door, Mr. Kelly.” The pretty little Welsh nurse who came every day to dress his leg ulcer had been a picture of concern on her first visit. Thirty something, homely, running away from a broken marriage. “What if there was a fire?”

“Then I’d fry,” he’d informed her, and congratulated himself when her frown deepened.

“Don’t want you frying now, do we, Mr. Kelly?” She’d at least had the optimism to give his arm a playful slap before raising her blond curls and taking a hard look around her. Oil lamps, enamel mugs, hunting knives, a bedroll neatly folded on a low camp stretcher.

She’d pretended not to notice, or perhaps, he wondered later, she had genuinely found nothing remarkable in his austerity, for all she’d said in her lilting accent was: “Besides, with fittings like these you must be heritage listed.”

It was only when he was sure the lock was safe that he’d allow himself to reach up into the breast of the chimney and remove the loose brick.

On this particular Friday he stood the brick as he always did, on the side of the hob next to the pan of potatoes, carrots, and peas he’d cook up as bubble and squeak for breakfast.

Then, using both hands, he reached up again and pulled a faded khaki satchel from the dark hole. The weight of it brought a smattering of soot and dust down on the remains of his hair.

Kelly’s hands, weathered brown by his passion for working dirt, shook a little as he brushed cobwebs from the bag and loosened the drawstring. He tipped the contents onto a scrubbed pine table and smiled.

Like a schoolboy poring over a particularly pleasing collection of cats, jacks, and queenies, he picked up each piece of gold-veined quartz and each gleaming nugget in turn. He held the treasure up to the late-afternoon sun streaming through the dust-smeared window in the humpy’s west wall and turned it until threads of gold danced in the light.

He left until last a godfather of a nugget, four times as big as the tombolas he’d nicked as a kid. The weight alone told him it must be almost solid. The main body was in the shape of a bird, with enough of a fan rearing up behind it for him to call it The Peacock.

Kelly could only ever use this name in his head, which, as anyone in town would tell you, was addled by too many years on the turps until he’d settled into semi-sobriety. The Peacock was the king of his pickings, his prize for spending thirty years chasing the remains of alluvial gold that the earlier waves of prospectors had failed to find.

Had he been honest with himself, he would have admitted that the nugget had brought him about as much luck as the bird it represented.

But honesty had never been Kelly’s strength.

He’d even let an innocent mate take the blame when he’d poached the nugget from the front seat of the ute belonging to the prospector who’d unearthed it.

And as greed succumbed to reason he’d realised that he had a gold piece too distinctive to cash in, yet way too valuable to conveniently “lose” down one of the abandoned mine shafts that pocked the landscape.

Kelly kissed the big lump before packing it away with the rest and returning the satchel, with some difficulty, to its hidey hole inside the chimney.

With the brick too replaced, he shaved, using a dish of water and a manual razor. He didn’t believe in wasting electricity to cut hair, even if his humpy had been connected to the mains. Which it wasn’t, because he’d be damned before paying money to a state institution!

He closed the ritual by lifting a tan leather dog collar and lead from a nail behind the door. The dog tack was stiffened with fencing wire so that the lead and collar held firm when he gripped the loop of leather in his right hand, even without a dog in the collar.

“Come on, Ben.” Kelly gave a sharp whistle. “Show yourself, boyo, pub time!”

Anyone who heard him would think him mad, he knew that. Half the town said so already, and the other half thought it but was either too kind or too timid to say so. Not to his face. But he rather liked the idea of a dog called Ben.

Ben Hall. After the bushranger who’d plundered the nearby hills until felled by police gunfire at Billabong Creek.

“Ned Kelly and Ben Hall,” he said aloud, then laughed before whistling up the dog again. “Ah, there you are at last, you mullocky mongrel...”

Kelly stooped and fastened the collar, then, lead in hand, he unlocked the door and set out for his regular Friday night pint of lager in the public bar at the Hargreaves.

Ben Hall was a popular figure in the bar, and Kelly knew he’d receive his fair share of comments on the state of the dog. Except, of course, the collar was empty because there was no dog and never had been. You had to wonder, sometimes, who was madder, the pub patrons or the wild-eyed old man who conned them into seeing a dog that wasn’t there.

A faded mustard Land Rover pulled into the angled parking outside the Hargreaves Hotel. Publican Eleanor Parry stopped restocking the bar fridge to study the vehicle.

The mirror over the public bar caught her — back straight as a ramrod despite a birth certificate that put her age the other side of sixty. She disguised the years with pancake, mascara, and a slick of scarlet lipstick she considered totally appropriate for an ex-cop who’d taken on a run-down pub and pulled it up by its bootstraps.

Yet there was enough country copper still kicking in Parry to justify keeping the snap-locks on her handcuffs lubricated with machine oil.

Her ice-blue eyes widened as the lean, dark figure slammed the door as hard as one does when a vehicle reaches that precarious state between sentimentality and the scrap heap.

The former police sergeant made a quick assessment — she couldn’t stop herself, even after ten years out of the force. Caucasian, male, thirties, tanned — suggesting a job outdoors or enough money to spend a lot of time on the coast. Probably the former, given the clapped-out state of the Land Rover.

“Holy hell,” she murmured as the stranger removed his Akubra and pushed open the heavy pub door with his right forearm. In his left hand was what looked like a small thermos flask, wrapped in a cloth.

The lines in Parry’s life-honed face set as the visitor peeled off a pair of wrap-around lenses. The big woman’s flint eyes narrowed. “You the Forrester kid?” She shook her mane of bottle-burgundy hair in disbelief. “For a minute there, I thought you were your old man.”

Forrester held the look, read the mistrust, returned it. “That’d be hard.”

Parry picked up a chewed biro and scribbled something illegible in an invoice book. “Your dad still... away?”

“Nope.” Forrester surveyed the premises. He’d heard Eleanor had introduced some brassy class to the old pub. There were panning dishes hung on hooks fastened over a low-slung beam, sepia photographs of the gold rush, local produce arranged on a dresser. “Did his time and got out.”

“So...” Parry summoned a wary smile, felt it flicker and let it die. “What’s he up to now?”

“Not a lot.” Forrester pulled the cloth away from the container and put it on the counter. “He’s in there. Only been out six weeks when he died.”

Parry shifted her weight from one black patent killer heel to the other, and back again. She stared at the urn. It hadn’t been easy, watching her bent senior sergeant arresting the father with the mother already dead.

Harder still when he claimed all the credit. She’d spoken up only to see her chance at promotion permanently shelved.

Welfare authorities wearing well-meaning smiles had stepped in to deal with the Forrester kids. The girls had been fostered out back in Sydney. The boy had been just old enough to slip into the shadows of the outside world.

Now Parry felt her glance darting between the urn that contained the senior Forrester’s ashes and the coolly seething face of the son.

“Is that what your dad wanted?” Parry grabbed a tea towel and began drying glasses with undue vigour. “To be laid to rest, here!”

“At the old cemetery.” Forrester picked up the urn and wrapped it again in the cloth. “You got a law against it?”

The convicted thief’s son didn’t wait for an answer, and Parry’s copper training told her not to attempt one. But the change of direction with the next question surprised the woman who’d once claimed she’d heard everything.

“Want to buy some honey? On commission? It’s local.”

“Where’d you get it?”

Forrester didn’t rise. “Mudgee, Sofala, far north as the Burrendong. I’m an apiarist. It’s what I do.”

The retired copper’s relief was such that she heard herself gushing. Hadn’t the father kept bees? To supplement the meagre living he’d made as a prospector who did a bit of rabbiting on the side.

If only he hadn’t been fool enough to get greedy.

And to get caught with evidence linking him with the theft of one of the biggest gold nuggets west of the Great Dividing Range.

Parry shook her head, rejecting the memory. If the boy had made good, then that was some sort of atonement.

“Show me what you’ve got,” she said, opening the till.

It took Forrester the best part of a warm afternoon to track the bees to the orchard surrounding Kelly’s hut.

He’d seeded a small wooden box with honeycomb and brushed the cork from a bottle of anise oil lightly across the lid. Then he lured four workers from a patch of Paterson’s Curse, fluoro mauve in the syrupy heat, into the bee box and felt it throb with their wrath.

“It doesn’t take long for their greed to overcome their outrage...” His father’s homily carried to him on the wind. Across the purple flower heads. From an afternoon in a long-ago September when the earth surrendered the scent of dust and pollen to him. In that moment he’d realised his destiny would be inextricably linked with the annual honey trail.

Within minutes, the angry buzzing gave way to silence and he knew the bees had begun gorging themselves on the sweet liquid.

Soon, the first had returned to the hive and within thirty minutes one bee line was established. He tracked the line through a stand of red gums, down into Kelly’s land. Then he pulled a contour map from his backpack, plotted the course, packed up the box of bees, and moved to another paddock one kilometer west.

The move took Forrester across the Mudgee road. He parked his Land Rover near a crumbling chimney stack and repeated the tracking. When he finished, he made sure there were still a half-dozen workers feasting inside the bee box, then he locked it.

The sun was sinking low by the time he discovered the hive. It was humming in the belly of a Bramley apple, not one hundred metres from the humpy belching a twisted curl of smoke.

The bees began their assault on him when he was a good five meters from their cache.

But Forrester had been stung four times before it registered.

Gwynneth Davies found herself stopping yet again on the way back from nursing a client to read the headstones in the Protestant cemetery. It was in a clearing amongst stringybarks, just off the Mudgee road, a million miles from Caernarfon, where Dafydd had decided he’d been too young for marriage. After they’d been married eight wasted years.

There was a fascination about the inscriptions that lured her there. Week after week. “George Griffiths, who was killed through carelessness in the Newcastle Co. Claim, Tambaroora, October 4, 1872...” She couldn’t help saying the words aloud, savouring every syllable, even though she’d recited them a dozen times before. “...Sacred to the memory of Thomas William Anderson, who was accidentally killed whilst working in Rawsthorne’s Mine, Hawkins Hill...”

“Keep that up and they’ll lock you away.”

Gwynneth jumped. She hadn’t seen the tall stranger, clutching a thermos and paper cup, looking for all intents and purposes like a tourist searching for a good spot for a picnic.

“You scared me!” Hadn’t Dafydd always said she had an irritating habit of stating the bleeding obvious.

“Did not. You scared yourself.”

He was Australian. That was certain. Since the cave man, there’d surely been no race of male more infuriatingly direct. She fumbled in her holdall, finally extracting a mobile phone.

He laughed. “Reception out here stinks.”

Gwynneth glared. She’d plenty of experience with difficult patients. And at maintaining a diplomatic silence. But the inland heat laced with fear caused a rush of blood to her head. She waved the useless phone. “What gives you the right to go skulking about headstones, scaring innocent women?”

The man moved off the path to walk around her. Then paused and looked back. “I’m saying goodbye to my father,” he said. And suddenly she realised the thermos wasn’t a thermos after all and felt herself start to apologise. Until the stranger cast his unfathomable eyes over the pillars of sandstone and added: “Where’re the innocent women?”

And then, partly due to nerves and heat and partly because the situation was so ridiculous, she started to giggle.

Forrester felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth as the pert blonde he apparently had the capacity to incense just by breathing the same air failed to contain her laughter.

The music that bubbled from her lips both refreshed and saddened him. It’d been a long time since he’d heard laughter like that. It reminded him of his youngest sister. Adie. The giggler. The thought of Adie’s bruised body killed the smile on his lips.

Gwynneth misinterpreted the stranger’s melancholic look and felt suddenly contrite. “You’ll be wanting to scatter the ashes.” She slid the mobile back into her holdall, immediately businesslike. “There’s a clearing amongst the stringybarks up the back, filled with the most stunning purple flowers...”

“Paterson’s Curse.” The man’s voice flickered with interest. “Salvation Jane. Echium plantagineum...” He was gazing off into the distance, looking past her white rayon uniform and sensible shoes, and the hair she’d washed that morning in lavender-scented rainwater. “A lot of folk say it’s a weed, but my dad always said it made some of the best honey.”

He looked at Gwynneth, as if seeing something in her for the first time. “It’d be right to rest him there.”

She held the paper cup while he poured out the ashes. They were clumped into balls, like something from the bottom of a kettle barbecue.

“Do you have a prayer?” she asked.

For a moment he looked as lost as an unprepared little boy invited to say Grace at his first meal away from home.

“No, I...” He turned to her, at last taking in the uniform, the white stockings, and the nametag that announced “Gwynneth Davies, R.N.”

“If you’d like me to, I could say a few words?”

Assuming his nod to be a sign of assent, she continued. “...As we return to the earth from whence we came... even though the spirit is already with you, we ask that you receive these ashes of the one that you created, that you might create again from them life anew.”

Her somber words carried through the airless heat and the scattered ashes, craving a breeze, stuck fast in the purple flower heads and on the taut, hairy stems.

“We need some spring rain,” she said, then hurriedly added. “To freshen up the place, put a bit of life back into the soil.”

“Bees need water,” Forrester volunteered, startling her until he noticed the look she was giving him. “Josh Forrester’s the name. I’m an apiarist. I collect wild honey.”

She liked the way the stranger’s name rolled around on itself, like desert tumbleweed, yet with enough strength in it to have substance.

She quite fancied writing home to Mother, telling her about the lean, dark Aussie she’d met scattering his father’s ashes, about the sadness behind his smile.

And she particularly fancied the knowledge that her mother would be around to Dafydd’s drapery business quicker than a ferret after a rat to broadcast the news.

“The Hargreaves does a fine pub meal,” she ventured. “Would you like to meet up there tonight?”

“Sorry, got to sort out my ‘comb boxes.”

She genuinely believed at first it was some sort of joke, lopsided as this infuriating Aussie’s grin.

But then he added: “Got a big day tomorrow, raiding wild honey.”

She managed, under the circumstances, to hide her incredulity remarkably well.

“Tomorrow night, then. Seven o’clock.”

Gwynneth had decided.

Even Forrester had no answer to that.

Forrester could smell vegetables frying as he lifted his hand to knock on the humpy door. Paterson’s Curse cast a purple haze through the derelict orchard surrounding the weatherboard and iron hut.

“Settle down, Ben!” he heard an elderly male voice growl. There was shuffling inside, towards the door. Then it opened.

“Holy Mary, mother of God!” Kelly clawed at his chest, and leaned into the doorframe.

Forrester was at a loss what to do. Last thing he wanted was the old geezer dying on him. Not now. Not like this!

“Sorry, I...” he began, but Kelly raised a hand to silence him.

“You shocked me, that’s all.” He lifted rheumy eyes to take a hard look at the younger man. “God, but you’re like your dad.” The eyes narrowed. “What brings you back?”

Forrester’s gaze shifted away from the face etched with lines he didn’t remember. Lines earned from a life of freedom in the sun. It suddenly struck him how different the face was from his father’s, skin pale as a baby’s thanks to the protection of prison.

“Dad...” He almost faltered. “...died. Wanted his ashes scattered. He had some good times here, before...”

Kelly tut-tutted and shook his head. His gaze dropped to the curling verandah boards. “Heard last night in the pub that he’d gone.” Kelly crossed himself.

“He considered you a friend, Ned.”

Kelly’s face twisted. He wasn’t good with words at the best of times, particularly when it came to comforting the bereaved or accepting a compliment. To be landed with the job of doing both at once threatened to swamp him.

But there was no stopping Forrester, with his father’s candid eyes and his unsettling honesty.

“He asked me to come and tell you that. That he considered you a mate.”

Kelly could only shrug. He’d been thirty years in the same place. In all that time he’d never felt the need to cross a state border, let alone explore the edges of a comfort zone.

Relief surged through him when Forrester changed tack.

“Enjoying the simple life, Ned?” The interior design of Kelly’s humpy seemed to Forrester like a snapshot from the Edwardian era. Wood fire, kero lamps, the pervading smell of soot.

Kelly didn’t waver. “Don’t need a lot to make me happy.”

Forrester misread the awkwardness as offence.

“I wasn’t suggesting...”

“And I wasn’t suggesting that you were. Now, I’d invite you in, except the dog don’t take too well to strangers.”

Forrester turned to go. Then stopped, as if suddenly remembering something.

“You’ve a hive of wild bees in one of your Bramley stumps.”

Kelly hadn’t been prepared for this. Small talk wasn’t one of his strengths either. “Mad as hell, they are. What of it?”

“I could get rid of them for you. I’m an apiarist. If you’d let me have the honey.”

The old man shrugged again.

“Honey’s no good to me,” he said and turned inside, locking the door.

Forrester lost no time attacking the hive.

Usually, he’d stand and observe awhile, reading the behaviour, planning his approach. But these girls were wild as a coachload of spurned wives.

And he’d waited long enough.

He rushed at the tree with a block splitter, making chips of apple wood fly into the rapidly warming morning.

Attack was his best means of defence, and the wilder the bees the stronger the attack needed.

“Bad bees are like rogue dogs...” His father was speaking to him again, so sharp he almost stopped chopping to look for him. “Show no fear and you’ve less chance of being stung or bitten...”

Sweat beaded his brow and stained the back of his shirt.

He swung the block splitter back and forth, back and forth, until the stump cracked and split.

The cavity was bigger than he expected, occupying the central core of the tree. Forrester estimated it must have been home to generation upon savage generation of bees.

By now the bees that were left in the hive were too busy salvaging what honey they could from his dreadful assault. They had neither the time nor the inclination to sting the wild beast attacking their treasure.

Forrester heard the air humming with their furious endeavour as he smeared his hands with a protective layer of honey and plunged them into the hollow.

He managed to pull out the comb intact, with little damage to the symmetry that still made him marvel, and placed it carefully in his honey bucket.

Back at the Land Rover, he carved off a wedge of comb, pushed it into a clean jar, and topped it with the golden liquid.

Then, with his forceps and scalpel glinting under a livid inland sun, he unlocked the bee box and took out the first of the six workers he’d chosen to sacrifice in the name of rough justice.

From the commotion inside, it seemed there was more trouble with old Ned’s dog.

“A token of thanks...” Forrester held out the jar to a startled Kelly when he finally pulled open the door. “...for the honey, I mean.”

Despite his best intentions, Kelly found himself taking the jar.

“Thought those bees’d eat you alive,” he said. “Haven’t been able to walk that bit of ground in years.”

“Bad bees are like rogue dogs...” Forrester heard himself repeating his father’s advice.

Then he looked into the room Kelly was so intent on guarding. “...Where exactly is your dog, Ned?”

It was after eight o’clock in the public bar at the Hargreaves before Forrester decided he’d been stood up.

“Story of my life...” he began.

He was, after all, familiar with deceit. He’d been introduced to it as a kid. When his old man had taken the rap for a missing find of gold in the shape of a peacock. Then been arrested by his best mate, Senior Sergeant Ned Kelly.

“Give the girl a call...” Eleanor Parry was a good listener. She’d heard her share of confidences traded for the price of a beer. But after over an hour of Forrester’s heady anticipation for “the sweet Welsh nurse with the heart of gold,” even she finally cracked.

“She didn’t give me her phone number.” Two too many whiskies on an empty stomach had started to slur the visitor’s words.

Parry tossed her blazing halo of hair back from her shoulders. “Since when did that ever stop a man!”

She’d intended to provoke him, but Forrester’s thoughts ran deeper. “Gwynneth’s a sensitive soul...”

Parry snorted. “Have a few more drinks, Josh. Next you’ll be quoting poetry.”

Forrester was packing to leave town when Eleanor Parry caught up with him. Her deadpan expression told him immediately that something was dreadfully wrong.

Adrenaline pumped through him.

But he willed himself to stay cool.

Anticipating the news about Kelly.

“Gwynneth Davies.” Parry didn’t bother to clothe the words in sympathy. She spoke in short, sharp sentences. “Found her this morning. Dead.”

Forrester felt the suspension of belief. Shock sucked at his breath.

“Are you sure?” The question was ridiculous. He knew it. Didn’t care.

“Ned Kelly phoned to say she hadn’t turned up to do his leg.” Parry’s words came faster now. “You thought she’d stood you up last night. So I went round...”

Forrester’s head throbbed. He felt weightless. He had to slump against the running board to stop himself falling.

His head fell forwards, then jerked up again at Parry’s next words.

“Looks like she found a stinger in that wild comb honey of yours. Had the jar open, place crawling with ants. Caught it right at the back of the tongue. Throat puffed up like a robber’s dog.”

Sweat beaded on Forrester’s upper lip. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His mind spun cartwheels. Could Parry hear the hammering in his chest?

“I didn’t give her any wild honey.”

The ex-copper grimaced.

“No, but Ned did. Old coot’s so shaken up he’s even starting to sound half sane.”

Parry’s cool eyes surveyed Forrester.

“Said he couldn’t eat the stuff you gave him. Being diabetic. So he passed it on to his nurse. Then, he produced this...”

Parry extracted a faded khaki satchel from the floor of her Landcruiser, opened the drawstring, and extracted The Peacock.

“Kelly’s fessed up enough to guarantee your dad a pardon, posthumous though it is.”

The news was infinitely satisfying to the ex-copper. Taking her old adversary of a senior sergeant into custody had given her a buzz she hadn’t felt in years.

But it was little comfort to Forrester. The earth was tilting. He couldn’t stop it.

“Honey’s been sent off to pathology...”

Parry frowned as she looked again at the bee man, pale with shock, starting to rock.

And reached for her cuffs.

© 2008 by Cheryl Rogers