The History of Bees

Chapter 60 GEORGE

Emma was crying again. She stood with her back to me, peeling potatoes and crying. She let her tears flow freely, made no attempt to stop them, regularly releasing small sobs. The tears came often these days. She cried as if she were at a funeral, anywhere and at any time, over washtubs, while making dinner or brushing her teeth. Every time it happened, I just wanted to get away. I couldn’t handle it, tried to find excuses to leave.

Luckily I wasn’t inside very often. I worked from morning till night. I had hired Rick and Jimmy full-time. The money, the loan, poured out of the account. Eventually I couldn’t be bothered to check. Couldn’t bear to see the ever-diminishing bank balance. It was a matter of working now. Just working. Without work, no income. I could still save some of the harvest. Make enough money to service the loan.

The pounds melted off my body, ounce after ounce. Day after day. And night after night, because I was sleeping poorly. Emma looked after me, served me, decorating my food with cucumber slices and strips of carrots, but it didn’t help. There was no taste to it; it hit my palate like sawdust. I ate only because I had to, to get the strength to go out again. I knew Emma would have liked to prepare steak every day, but she, too, was trying to save money. We didn’t talk about it, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one observing the shrinking bank balance.

In fact we didn’t say anything about anything these days. I didn’t know what had happened to us. I missed my wife. She was there, but at the same time, she wasn’t. Or maybe it was actually me who wasn’t there.

She sniffled. I wanted to hold her, the way I always had. But my body resisted. All of her tears collected in this huge pond that separated us.

I backed out of the kitchen, hoped she wouldn’t notice.

But she turned around. “You do see that I’m crying.”

I didn’t answer.

“Come here, won’t you?” she said quietly.

It was the first time she’d asked me. I remained standing where I was all the same.

She waited, still holding the potato peeler in the one hand, a potato in the other. I waited, too. Hoping, I guess, that I could wait the whole thing out. But not this time.

She whimpered softly. “You don’t care.”

“Of course I care,” I said, but couldn’t bear to meet her gaze.

She raised her arms a little more.

“Crying doesn’t help,” I said.

“It doesn’t help that we don’t comfort each other, either.”

She twisted my words around, as she often did.

“We won’t get more hives by my standing here and comforting you,” I said. “No more queens, no more bees. No more honey.”

Her arms dropped. She turned around. “Go and work, then.”

But I just stood there.

“Go and work!” she repeated.

I took a step towards her. And another. I could put a hand on her shoulder. I could. That would definitely help. Help both of us.

I reached out my hand, towards her back. She didn’t see it, was busy peeling, took another potato out of the dirty water in the sink. Scraped off the peel with quick movements, as she had done hundreds of times before.

My hand was suspended in midair, but didn’t reach her.

At that moment the phone rang.

My arm fell. I turned around, went out into the hallway and answered it.

The voice was young, almost girlish, and was asking for me.

“I got your name from Lee,” she said. “We went to school together.”

“Right.” In other words, she couldn’t be as young as she sounded.

She talked quickly, was good with words. She worked for a television channel, they were making a movie, she explained.

“It’s about CCD.”

“Yes?”

“Colony Collapse Disorder.” She pronounced the words slowly and with exaggerated clarity.

“I know what CCD is.”

“We’re making a documentary about the dying bees and the ramifications. I understand you’ve faced this issue on your farm.”

“Did Lee tell you?”

“We’d like to make it personal,” she said.

“Personal. Right,” I said.

“Could we spend a day with you? Would you let us go out with you, so we could hear about your experience of the whole thing?”

“My experience. That can’t be very interesting.”

“Oh yes, to us it is. That’s precisely what we want to show. How this has an impact on each and every one of us. How it can destroy people’s livelihoods. Is that how you’ve experienced it? Has it been rough on you?”

“Well, it hasn’t exactly destroyed my livelihood,” I said. Suddenly I didn’t like her tone. Like she was talking to an injured dog.

“No? Because my understanding was that you’ve lost almost all of your bees?”

“Yes. But now I’ve replaced many of them.”

“Oh.”

She fell silent.

“Worker bees only live for a few weeks in the summer,” I said. “It doesn’t take very long to get new hives up and running.”

“Right. So is that what you’re working on now, getting new hives up and running?”

“That’s right.”

“Great!” she said.

“Really?”

“We can use that. Terrific! Would it be convenient if we came next week?”

I hung up after we arranged a time. The receiver was all sweaty. I was going to be on TV. I’d become someone they “could use.” It was apparently not possible to get out of it. I tried, but she’d talked me into it. Was worse than Emma.

National television. The whole country would be able to see it. Geez Louise.

Emma had come into the room. She was drying her hands on a towel. Her eyes were red, but fortunately also dry.

“Who was that?”

I explained to her who had called.

“Interview us about the bees? Why do we have to?”

“Not we. They’re just going to talk to me.”

“But why did you say yes?”

“It can help influence things. Maybe the authorities will do something,” I said and caught myself copying the words of the woman who had called.

“But why us?”

“Me,” I said severely and turned away from her. Couldn’t take any more questions, any more crying, any more nagging. All of a sudden it came over me again. The fatigue. I hadn’t felt it through all of these weeks. Not since Tom was home last winter. But now it was back. I could have lain down and slept there and then, on the floor in the hallway. The worn wood floor looked tempting. I thought of the teddy bear thermometer, the peeping sound it made. I wished it would show a high temperature, a powerful fever. Then I could lie in bed. Soft pillow, warm quilt, like a lid covering me up. Take the temperature of a fever that never went down.

But I couldn’t go to bed. Couldn’t even sit down.

Because the hives were out there. Empty and gray. Way too light. They had to be filled. And there was nobody else who could do it. And now I was apparently going to be on television. I had to demonstrate that I was hard at work. That I hadn’t allowed CCD to break me.

My coveralls hung limply from their hook. The veil and the hat were directly above them. Underneath were my boots. It looked like a flat man had hidden inside the wall. I took down the suit and started to change. I pulled up the zipper, made sure everything was closed up, battened down the hatches.

“It’s almost dinnertime,” Emma said. She stood there with her empty hands, her empty arms.

“I can eat later.”

“But it’s meat loaf. I’ve made meat loaf.”

“We have a microwave.”

Her bottom lip trembled, but she didn’t say anything. Just stood there like that, completely silent, while I put on my hat, hung the veil in front of my face and went outside.

I went to the pasture by the Alabast River and stayed there the rest of the day. First I worked. The weather was annoyingly good. It shouldn’t be this good. It didn’t fit. The sun hung large in the sky to the west, above the blossoming field. As beautiful as a picture in a calendar.

But the work became cumbersome. My arms felt almost paralyzed, the fatigue took hold of me. I was unable to do anything but walk. In circles around the new hives. Empty. Gray, a giant mountain.

I stayed there until the bees began to come in. Nature fell silent.

It was only then that I walked across the field. To the other end. My legs just took me there. Towards the old, carnival-colored hives, the ones that still had life in them.

Why had these been spared? Who had decided that these particular bees should be allowed to live? I was breathing heavily and stopped beside a yellow hive. Every single time I was going to check a hive, I sort of cringed inside. Every time I expected to find the same thing. Could already picture the lethargic bees whirring around at the bottom of the hive, the emptiness, the queen alone with a small handful of young bees.

And there was something wrong with this one, too. It was way too quiet. There was something wrong, for sure. I checked the flight board. Just a few bees. Not enough.

I couldn’t bear it.

I had to.

With my eyes closed I grasped the lid. Then I opened the hive. It rushed up at me immediately, the buzzing sound, the whirring. How could I not have heard it? That everything was normal. Completely normal, 100 percent as it should be. The bees buzzing around down there. Some were dancing. I caught a glimpse of the queen, the turquoise mark on her back. I saw the brood. Clear, golden honey. They were working, they were alive. And they were here.

My head spun. I was so tired. I sank down onto the ground and stayed there. The ground was warm, the grass was soft. My eyes slid shut.

But I didn’t fall asleep. Because there was such a tightness in my chest. Emma’s pond of tears had reached me. The water was rising. It splashed against my feet.

I swallowed and swallowed. Couldn’t breathe. Drowning. But I fought back. Got to my feet again. Just stood there looking at the bees, who were also fighting down there. Fighting the ordinary, daily struggle for their offspring, for enough pollen, for honey.

They were going to die, too. It wasn’t viable, what I was doing. Every single time I opened a hive, it would be like this. The same feeling, whether they were alive or gone. There was no point.

There was no point!

All the muscles in my body tensed. All my strength gathered in one of my legs, in my foot, and all of a sudden I kicked.

The hive fell to the ground with a crash and a swarm of bees rose up.

I shook the boards loose. The bees were everywhere now. Furious and terrified. They wanted to get me, to avenge themselves. I stomped on them, on the brood, on their babies. But the sound was muffled, barely audible. Not like broken glass. I continued all the same. Destroy them. Crush them. Tear their wings off. Because they had destroyed me.

And then it hit me. How simple it was.

We could destroy each other.

I was standing in the midst of a cloud of furious bees, raging around me.

It was so simple.

I lifted my hand to the zipper, to the veil.

All I had to do was lift it up.

Take off the hat.

Off with the gloves.

Pull down the zipper quickly—squirm out of the suit.

Kick off the boots.

And just stand here and let them do the job.

They would sting me in self-defense. Pierce me, sacrificing their lives to take mine. And this time my father wouldn’t be here to take me in his arms and run off with me, while the cloud of bees stormed above us and followed us all the way to the river, where he pulled us under and held us down until the attack was over.

This time I would fall down. Stay down. The poison would run through my veins. Let them keep stinging, and if they stopped, I’d kick them with bare toes, step on them so they continued, kept stinging until I was beyond recognition.

They should have their revenge. They deserved it.

And then everything would be over.

I’d do it now.

Now.

My fingers clutched the veil. The thin fabric against the heavy gloves.

Lifted it.

Now!

But then…

Footsteps crossing the field. Someone shouting.

Heading towards me.

At first calmly, and then stronger. Louder.

Wearing a white suit. Hat, veil. Fully dressed, ready to work. Once again he’d come without a warning. Or perhaps Emma had known.

He’d come. For good?

He was running now. Did he see me? What was happening?

The cries became louder, piercing through the air.

“Dad? Dad!”