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

Place yourself before a hive, and see the indefatigable energy of these industrious veterans, toiling along with their heavy burdens, side by side with their more youthful compeers . . . Let the cheerful hum of their busy old age inspire you with better resolutions, and teach you how much nobler it is to die with harness on, in the active discharge of the duties of life.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

Jake jolted awake to the sound of someone yelling. He looked at the ceiling, unsure of where he was and feeling a tightness in his throat. In the dream, he’d been skating along the waterfront with Cheney running alongside him. The dog had cantered into the road and been hit by a car. Relief flooded him then. He was at Alice’s, and Cheney was alive. Cheney was right there, stuffing his big wet nose into Jake’s hand.

The dream had felt so real, the sensation of speed and movement as he flowed along on his board. He could almost feel the warm spring air on his bare arms and the swing of his hips as he shifted his weight to carve a line. He’d felt so free. As the dream receded, he remembered things were different now. He didn’t longboard anymore. He used a wheelchair. His eyes settled on the chair next to his bed, waiting for him like his forever escort. This was who he was now. Instead of a boy with limitless possibility, he was a person with very specific limitations.

But this morning, perhaps for the first time, he understood distinctly that an entirely new world had opened itself to him. In the weeks since he’d landed at Alice’s, his sense of who he was and how he operated in the world had shifted, imperceptibly at first but undeniably now. Yes, there were things he couldn’t do anymore and he would never walk again. But he had something precious he had never even imagined before—this life with honeybees. He lived with hundreds of thousands of bees. He was learning to be a beekeeper, and he was good at it, better than average. Most amazing of all, he could do something most beekeepers could not. For some reason he had been gifted with the ability to distinguish the bell-like tone of the lovely queen bees, the uber mothers. It rushed into him, the color and texture of his new life. He stretched his arms over his head and smiled.

Cheney thumped his front paws on the bed and pushed himself up in a slow-motion stretch. Then he cocked his ears and wiggled his rump as he eyed the mattress next to the boy.

Jake sat up, grabbed his big ears, and laughed. “Don’t push your luck, dude.”

Jake shoved the big dog off the bed, transferred into his chair, and rolled into the bathroom. He used a new single-use catheter to empty his bladder, flushed, and washed his hands and his face. The dream still hung over him—the joy of movement and the devastation of losing Cheney again. He shook it off. It was just a dream.

Jake looked at himself in the mirror. He had showered the night before, and his hair hung loose over his shoulders. The blue-black color was fading, and he could see his natural brown bleeding through. It reminded him of those first days in the hospital, when the nurse had tried to cut his hair and he threw a fit. He was all doped up, but conscious enough to fight for it, and his mom backed him up.

The nurse sighed and narrowed her eyes. “Really, Mrs. Stevenson. It’s going to be hard enough to manage his care. It’s just easier this way.”

His mother had insisted, politely but firmly, Jake recalled, and pulled it back in a ponytail. It was a matted and tangled mess. When he was finally able to sit up, it took hours to comb out, and he wouldn’t let his mother or the nurses help. He yanked a comb through the snarls an inch at a time. It was weeks before he’d been able to dye it again and months before he could style it upright into that sixteen-and-a-half-inch record-breaking mast.

Now he grabbed the new bottle of Midnight Blue #47. He glanced at the clock and turned on the faucet. He had time to let the dye set before breakfast. He held one hand under the stream of water, waiting for it to warm, and read the ingredients, which he had never noticed before: ammonia, lead acetate, bismuth citrate, intermediate p-phenylenediamine. Jake opened the bottle and sniffed, and the bitter tang of ammonia hit the back of his throat. He’d always loved the smell, which was part of the ritual of his hairstyle. But now it made him think of the days they sprayed out in the orchard, that metallic taste of chemicals in the air.

In his studying, Jake had learned all kinds of things about bees. He’d come across many interesting and archaic traditions in his reading—like if you got married, you had to introduce the bride to the hives. And if a beekeeper died, his friends had to tell the bees. One thing that really struck him was this idea of tending to the bees “absent of vice.” He read that they didn’t like the smell of onions or garlic. Beekeepers were urged not be “rude or drunken.” He’d jotted down, “Tend the hives with cleanliness and sobriety.” He noticed that Alice always washed her hands before putting on her gloves and veil, and he suspected she brushed her teeth too.

She wouldn’t give him a straight answer when he asked. “Everyone has their own rituals, kid. You’ll have yours.”

He looked at the ingredients on the back of the bottle again. Whatever intermediate p-phenylenediamine was, it probably wasn’t free of vice. Jake screwed the cap back on the bottle and dropped it in the trash.

Just like that, he was done with his hair, his record-breaking mohawk, his