The Bee Woman
I met a man who told me very shyly that his name was Kermit. “Of course” , he said “there were no gabby green frogs around when I was born, and I am really OK with my name once I am over the first introductions.” But what, I thought, if your given name had darker connections? And so I imagined this old lady sitting our on her porch in the fading evening light, talking about her life.
“Is my favourite time for sitting out here on the porch, in the evening, fading light. It’s been a hot August my seventy fourth August, but I don’t keep to birthdays no more. Tomfool notion at my age.
Oh I recall some fine birthdays when I was a child. White gold hair I had then, all tied up in a shiny bow. Neat. Everybody fussed and petted me, gave me nickels. Daddy was still in the Air Force then, and we’d all go down to the Club for the barbeque. But Mamma wouldn’t let me eat the meat with my fingers,’ case I made grease marks on my pretty dress. Mamma must sure have loved my dresses, she took a deal of care of them. And my Daddy would lift me up high and call me his angel, his baby-doll, his darlin’.
These humming birds just never cease. Only sound I can hear out here is the racket of them wings. The air is heavy tonight, plenty thunder bugs. Maybe a storm comin’. George’d better bring in the young cattle.
It was a long time before I knew. Mamma left when I was but eight years old. Daddy didn’t come home in his smart uniform no more, and he took to driving trucks, long ways off, so we’d have been left on our own but for Grandma, who kinda took us in. And when he did come home he’d smell funny. I got to not liking it much when he’d come home.
I heard teacher say it first. I can still feel the sun in the schoolyard, and taste the dust. And I can hear that sharp knife voice saying what a crime it was to name a child for such a wicked thing. It shouldn’t be allowed, really it shouldn’t. There ought to be a law against it. Somehow I knew she was talking about me. I ran, I just ran.
I asked my Grandma what the teacher had meant and she said it was nothing at all and the teacher was very likely a Commie. I wanted to ask her what was a Commie, but she had made her mouth into that thin red line, and I knew she wasn’t saying no more. So that was that.
We had a teacher at the Sunday School then who was young and pretty and wore white gloves, so I didn’t think she could be a ‘Commie’, and I asked her. She asked me how much I knew, and I told her that I was named after one of the big shiny planes on my daddy’s Base – is all.
War is wicked, she said, and an instrument of the Devil, she said, but some bad things had to be done in that war to save lives, and make it so our boys could come home, she said. Maybe it would be better, she said, to tell new people that my name was Gaye. That was a nice enough name she said.
I never met no new people. My Mamma and Daddy were both born and brung up here in these mountains. Everybody knew us. Everybody must have known what was the thing my Daddy did. But nobody said.
Later on in school we learned some about that war, but not much. Our soldiers were brave and good it seems, and the Japanese so wicked to destroy our ships, and not fight fair. I remember too around that time I had a lot of bad dreams about Joe Greaves’s cattle barn that had burned to the ground. It was a terrible thing, some of the cattle burned and all inside it. And in my dreams I heard them again, crying out.
I never could ask my Daddy any questions. He didn’t talk no more about the war, and he was bad with drink mostly. Tell the truth, I didn’t like him coming near me then, and also to tell the truth none of us was much sorry when he died. They found him in a ditch with his truck on top of him. Stone dead. He was liquored up I reckon, but the Sheriff didn’t look too close ‘cos of Grandma and the share of pork he got from our pigs when they was slaughtered. And the honey.
See I got this thing for bees. School was never much for me. I couldn’t get them things, history, geography to stick somehow. But bees was interesting, and they liked me fine, and I liked them. And they know it, oh yes, I think so.
I never could put my finger on when it happened but somehow Grandma and me kinda overtook each other. She so big and fierce, scare the Hell out of anybody, and then somehow she was this little stick of a woman that you’d think the wind would snap. And it was me now, me and my bees was bringing in the money. Me that was in charge. Lucky, George started coming around pretty regular at that time, and giving us a hand.
So we sat out on the porch one night, just such a one as this, and she said as how George ‘Had a right to know’ what my Daddy did. And I didn’t know why she said that. What a dumb thing I was then. Well, somebody had to load the bombs onto the planes, and my daddy it seemed had helped load the special bomb on that particular plane. The Enola Gay. And he was pretty proud of what he done, and called his new baby girl by that name he liked it so much. Me.
Nobody knew then what a terrible thing it would be when the bomb fell, my Grandma said, and terrible things have to be done in times of war. Anyways George said that Daddy was a Serviceman and had to do what he was told so he wasn’t to blame, and that he thought that Enola Gay was the prettiest name. I looked at him, and I knew then why he had been coming around all this time. So that was that.
So I kept my name. Folks around here don’t think nothing of it, but strangers I meet – they come from all over the State now to ask my advice about the bees, and the weather, and the crops – strangers I meet I see the flicker in their eyes, just quick, then it’s over and done. Maybe if George and me had ‘a had children I might have changed it. For them.
Humming birds are sure heavy on the honey. I need to fill the feeders again already, and I believe I hear the first rumblings of thunder. George needs to bring in them cattle. The bees don’t like the storm weather neither. They start coming home to their hives early on a heavy day like this.
You know, some of the old folks hereabouts used to say that the bees know when there’s going to be a death. I’ve sometimes wondered what they knew on that day, in that place. But truthfully, I have to say; I think it’s a tomfool notion.”
