Saint had found the Langstroth hive the day they moved into the tall house on Pinehill Cemetery Road, buried beneath dwarf shrubs and succulents and bulbs. She picked a rusting hatchet from the woodshed and hacked a path, her grandmother busy with the movers, a couple of distant cousins with a U-Haul that leaned when they turned because the suspension was shot.
She stared at the boxes, the faded grain of the ten-frame, the three-quarter-inch lumber, each cut so neat she ran her fingers across the sawn edge. The summer unruly, they’d driven through a Burlington storm before the heat of Jefferson City, the windows open to a flat wall of air and the promise of something new. She’d been lured with talk of a backyard, room for her toys, a neighborhood where you didn’t have to leave the street as the sun dropped.
She had dragged her grandmother into the yard while her bare-chested cousins heaved her bed frame up to the attic room.
“It’s a hive,” Norma said, then turned and left her.
“Can I—”
“No.”
It took Saint the best part of that first year in Monta Clare to convince her grandmother that keeping bees was a good idea. She borrowed a book from the library, spoke of honey each morning and smacked her lips, chased bees around the yard to convince Norma she was entirely unafraid, and even managed to stem her tears when a worker reared on her and planted its tail in the lobe of her ear.
“Are you happy now?” Norma said, balancing Saint on her knee as she tweezed the stinger out.
“Very,” Saint sniffed.
She saved her allowance and ordered in copies of The Hive and the Honey Bee, but fell short of the five dollars a year needed to subscribe to the American Bee Journal.
Saint was methodical in the breakdown of her grandmother, each Saturday morning riding Norma’s bus route and perching herself on the seat just behind, her mouth level with Norma’s ear so she might bend it with dazzling bee facts. Saint told her one out of three mouthfuls of food she consumed depended on pollinators. That the buff-tailed bumblebee had a brain the size of a poppy seed. That she had already planted primrose and buddleia and marigold to encourage nectaration, which she wasn’t entirely sure was a real word, but Norma didn’t question it.
And then she brought her A game. The waggle dance. Maybe it was a communication technique, maybe it was a celebration of bee life—scientists weren’t entirely sure—but Saint took to the center aisle as Norma crested Parade Hill, crouched a little and shook her ass while buzzing at the mouth.
“Jesus,” Norma said, and she was not one to blaspheme.
The following weekend, under promise that it would be Saint’s Christmas and birthday gift for the following two hundred years, Norma called a supplier over in Boonville and the order was placed.
They spent their summer in the yard. Saint watched intently as Norma wired the frame, handed her cigar box nails before she could ask, fetched iced tea when she began to sweat. Saint read from the limited instructions as she went about the repair, strengthening the comb, replacing the gunnysack, cursing at the goddamn pollen trap.
“How come you can do so much?” Saint said, as her grandmother fetched a block plane to smooth a wavelet.
“You ever ask that question to your grandfather when he was alive?”
Saint shook her head.
Norma went on.
Saint stood on their driveway waiting for three hours then screeched when she saw the white of the van on its approach.
“They’re here,” she screamed as she ran into the house and dragged her grandmother by the hand.
Norma did not sleep the night after the bees arrived, walking through the night garden to check on them, waking Saint because of the hum.
“Why aren’t they sleeping?” Norma said.
Saint stood in the dark in her shorts and vest and rubbed at her eyes. “They’re cooling the hive. They flap their wings at the same time and it sounds like an electric fan.”
“I thought they were dying.”
Saint clutched her hand as they walked back toward the house. “I’m glad you care about the bees, Grandma.”
“Twenty bucks. I want my honey.”
Norma looped a small cloth canopy over the tree beside the hive, and Saint did her schoolwork beneath it, watching the workers, and sometimes singing, “Be Thou My Vision” and “Abide with Me.”
Saint did not make friends, though she aimed her smiles, did not raise her hand too much even though she knew the answers, and invited each girl in her class to come see the hive, spending an hour fashioning each invitation, dotting hand-drawn bees with glitter glue and crepe paper.
She finessed the drone escape and was stung two dozen times, appearing at the breakfast table with swellings and a smile.
The season was good. August rains kept the dry from total, and in September of 1973, as her grandmother mourned Jim Croce, she caught the final nectar flow. The honey capped, two supers primed. She could not afford a bee brush, so with Norma watching from the safety of the kitchen window she shook the bees free, remembering to release the stragglers the next morning from the old store, which her grandmother had repaired and turned into her honey house.
In early fall, after a procession of trial and error, of extraction dismay and filtration concerns, she jarred her first batch. They kept a little for themselves. She gave a few out to girls who had shown passing interest in her produce and potential friendship, and the rest she placed on a gingham tablecloth upon a folding table in the center of Main Street.
Sammy the drunk emerged from Monta Clare Fine Art and demanded to see her vendor permit, till Norma threatened to go fetch her Colt Python from their garage.
Saint grinned at locals and offered samples on graham crackers, stopped short of the waggle dance, and sold five jars.
“I’ll reinvest the profit. Perhaps pick up a tank, a new brood box, maybe even a third super. Think of the yield. Honey money.”
Norma frowned. “Technically you’ve realized a considerable loss.”
It was on the last day of summer break, as Saint lay on her stomach in the soft grass, her feet kicked up behind her, that she noticed the boy standing by the side gate and staring at her.
She knew him from school, hard to miss with the patch covering his eye.
He wore jeans and a T-shirt, and when he yawned and stretched she noticed a hole beneath each arm.
Saint stood and glared and was about to see him off when she saw the small card in his hand. One of hers, handmade with a dashed glitter bee trail and dotted with cotton wool. Though as she neared she noticed he had crudely crossed out the name of the girl it was intended for and replaced it with his own.
“I’m here about the honey,” he said, and stared past her as if he were seeking out a jar for himself.
“Oh.”
“I received this invitation, which I believe is good for a sample, and perhaps a tour of the facility.”
He was clearly an imbecile.
He noticed the hive and let out a long whistle. “Manuka, right?”
“Manuka honey is produced in Australia and New Zealand.”
He closed his solitary eye and nodded, as if he were testing her.
His arms were more bone than flesh, and his hair long. He smelled faintly of mud and candy and carried grazes across his knuckles like he’d been pulled from a fight, and he wore a leather belt looped twice at his waist, and in it was tucked a wooden cutlass.
She might have told him to leave, but then he smiled. And it was the first time another kid had smiled her way since she had arrived in Monta Clare. And it was a good smile. Dimples. Neat teeth.
“I’ve heard it’s the finest honey this side of…”
“I worked a whole six months on the hive,” she said. Though clearly afflicted, he was the first kid to show real interest, and so she grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the Langstroth, took her moment and shone, dazzling him with bee facts he quickly claimed to already be aware of. Sometimes he chimed in with absolute nonsense.
“And these are pure bees?” he said.
She pretended not to hear.
When they came to the honey house his eye widened at the shelves. Two dozen jars, some glowed golden.
She handed him one, told him to wait as she headed into the kitchen to fetch a spoon, some crackers, a stack of napkins, and her honey apron.
Saint returned to find him sitting beneath a butterfly bush, the jar half-empty and his hand caked in honey.
She marched toward him, placed her hands on her small hips and glowered.
He looked up at her as honey ran from his chin. “Tell you what, I’d say this is the sweetest thing I ever saw…and then I saw you, Becky.”
“Who the hell is Becky?”
He scratched his head, leaving a deposit of honey at his hairline. Then he reached for the invitation.
“Becky Thomas is the girl that invite was meant for,” she said.
“Well…then who put my name on it? Maybe fate intervened. Cupid aimed his bow.” Patch made an O with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, before penetrating it with the index finger of his right.
“What was that?” Saint said.
“I see the older kids doing it. I believe it’s cupid’s arrow sticking right into my heart.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You could smear this on chicken. Or maybe pork ribs. We should go into business together. Honey hustlers. Regional, then national. Maybe Latin America. It’s highly addictive.” He licked his entire hand, like a grooming cat.
Both looked up when they were cast into the forbidding shadow of Norma.
“The bus driver,” Patch said, and offered her a sticky hand.
Norma turned to glare at Saint for an explanation.
Saint shrugged. “Apparently Cupid sent him.”
Once again Patch made an O with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, before penetrating it with the index finger of his right.
“Get off my property,” Norma said.