The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

That about captured Harry’s problem. He wasn’t good at anything in particular.

Anthony looked disappointed when he saw that Harry hadn’t filled out his goal sheet. The older man slid it across the desk with one hand.

“Take it back with you, Harry. Spend some time on it. You’d be surprised how it might help. We’ll talk it through next time.”

He smiled briefly, and Harry left feeling encouraged. Unfortunately, there was no next time. The counselor at Harry’s second, and last, appointment was an impatient woman who was older than his mother and didn’t introduce herself. She looked irritated when he asked about Anthony and said it wasn’t her job to keep track of personnel. She didn’t ask about his goal sheet either. She slid a pile of forms across the desk for him to sign and worked on a crossword puzzle while he filled them out. She took them without a word when he was done and pointed at the door, signaling that he was ready to face the world of employment outside of jail.

Harry consulted the email for directions to the farm and pedaled down the road. Tall fir trees grew close together here and curved overhead, forming a green tunnel. Harry sped down the hill, hoping he was going the right way so he wouldn’t have to backtrack. He saw the name “Holtzman” on a mailbox at the end of a driveway, hopped off his bike, and walked toward the neat blue house, tucking in his shirt as he went.

He heard voices out by a large barn, and when he rounded the corner, he saw a short person up on a ladder under a tall pine. The woman wore a floppy white hat and had a cardboard box balanced between her hip and the ladder. She held a pair of loppers with one hand.

A boy sat at the foot of the ladder in a wheelchair. He leaned back and called up to the woman, who murmured back. Harry couldn’t hear what they said.

Sal had taught him never to surprise anyone on a ladder, so he stood back and watched as the woman dropped the loppers, held the box up, and broke off a branch. A great black clump fell into the box. Harry watched as she shut the box, lost her balance, fumbled, and dropped it. The box seemed to hang in the air for a long second as she grabbed for it and missed. Then it bounced off the ladder and landed in the lap of the kid in the wheelchair.

Harry could hear everything the woman said after that. The string of swear words that carried loud and clear would have bested his cellmate at the Stonybrook Correctional Facility. Harry watched her clamber down the ladder to the boy in the wheelchair, who sat in a buzzing cloud of what Harry realized were bees, laughing his head off.

12 Disruption

As the extremity of the sting is barbed like an arrow, the bee can seldom withdraw it, if the subject into which she darts it is at all tenacious. In losing her sting she parts with a portion of her intestines, and of necessity soon perishes.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

While swarming honeybees can be heartbreaking for their beekeeper, a swarm is actually the sign of a healthy, productive hive. The older daughters decide the colony is overcrowded and, leaving half their sisters with healthy virgin queen cells, abscond with their mother to greener pastures. If those greener pastures happen to belong to another beekeeper, that loss is transformed into an opportune gift. That was how Alice had viewed the swarm in the fir tree, at least before she had bungled it so badly.

She grasped the last barb with a tweezer and eased the stinger from her hot forearm, which had swelled like a ham hock. She saw the young man’s faint mustache twitch as she plucked it out.

“Well, that’s done,” she said, and rubbed her hands over her arms.

“Does it hurt?” Harry asked.

“No. Just a little itchy.”

She wanted to downplay the entire embarrassing episode with the swarm, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been rushing. Every mistake she’d ever made with the bees she’d made in a hurry. Today she’d come home at lunch to interview Harry and spotted the fat swarm while she was waiting for him. She was sure these bees were not hers and couldn’t pass up the chance to grab a feral swarm. In hindsight it was a terrible idea—going after the bunched-up bees without a second pair of hands. Not to mention dropping the box on Jake.

What a marvel the kid hadn’t been stung. He was still laughing when Alice reached him and pulled the box off his lap.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she swore under her breath. “Well, that was a damn stupid idea.”

The docility of a swarm had its limits, and this one rose to guard their queen as Alice pushed Jake’s chair away. She’d been stung three times, but Jake was untouched.

Jake clutched his stomach and gasped for breath. “Oh, Alice! Your face! You were so surprised, like now how did that happen?”

Though Alice felt for the three workers who died in their stinging, Jake’s ribbing had finally made her laugh, especially once she understood he was not hurt. Jake vowed to refer to the event ever after as his bee baptism. Not many people, he said, could claim they’d had an entire swarm of bees dropped in their lap. As he wiped the tears out of his eyes, he noticed Harry frozen at the edge of the field.

“I think your interview is here, boss,” Jake said.

The young man glanced over his shoulder as if considering a run in the other direction, then raised a tentative hand in greeting and walked toward them.

Alice introduced herself and then Jake. The young guy, who said his name was Harry, looked past