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

Doug Ransom and mused that her dad would have been the same age now, if he were still alive. Doug was an old gentleman, cut from the same cloth as Al. The two men had been friends long before Alice bought her house next to Doug’s orchard. All this made Doug an easy person to start with in recruiting orchardists to boycott SupraGro.

Doug insisted on making tea for Alice. His wife, Marilyn, had been dead for five years, Alice realized as she stood in the kitchen looking at the wallpaper—pigs in cowboy hats with piglets toddling along behind them. She remembered the first time Doug and Marilyn had had her and Bud over all those years ago. Time passed in a blink. She looked at the photographs on the refrigerator while Doug puttered around, gathering cups and spoons. Three kids, several grandkids. Doug smiled when he saw her looking.

“Don’t see them as much as I would like. You know,” he said, shaking his white head and smiling. “Busy.”

They sat on the porch and looked over Doug’s apple and pear trees. Alice had watched them blossom each spring with a kind of collaborative joy. She knew her girls were over there pollinating.

Doug waved a hand at her. “You don’t have to try to talk me into anything, Alice. I know the bees are helping me. My yield has been better in the years since you and Bud put the bees in,” he said. “He was a good man, that Bud Ryan. I sure miss him.”

Alice nodded and smiled. She felt moved, but not like she was going to fall to pieces. Buddy had liked Doug too. The two of them had shared a love of decrepit farming equipment. Vintage, Buddy liked to say. Salvage, Alice had responded.

Doug gestured at the petition Alice had brought with her. “I’ll sign that. Whatever you want. I’m damn sorry I used the stuff in the first place. I should have done my own research first. I’ve been in this business long enough to know better.”

He passed a hand over his wrinkled face. “Truth is, I’m about done here, Alice. The kids don’t want the orchard. They all went west. Tech jobs in Portland and Seattle. They want me to move out there, sell the place.”

He raised his wooly eyebrows. “Me in the city. Can you imagine?”

They both laughed. Doug often drove his ATV to the grocery store, backing up traffic as he poked along in the shoulder of the road.

When Alice left, she walked back to her place through Doug’s trees. It made her sad to think of Doug selling his orchard. He was one of the old guard, one of the last small orchardists of her dad’s generation. She stood between two rows of pear trees and gazed at the blossoms exploding in white clouds on either side of her. She heard the hum above her, a roof of sound, and looked up to see hundreds of honeybees at work.

She wondered if Doug would harvest that fall or if he would have sold his place by then. Properties sold fast in the county. A place like this would be snapped up, and not by a farmer. It was the perfect setting for the kind of country living development that had ruined her parents’ place. She tried to imagine what the land around her would look like cleared of trees and crowded with identical boxlike vacation homes. Doug’s orchard was bigger, too—at least eighty acres. She sighed. Townhomes for tourists, the little country road clogged with cars, the quiet broken by loud music from drunken bachelorette parties. She couldn’t do anything about that, but she could finish this fight.

Her hand closed around the list in her pocket, drawn out in Doug’s elegant spidery script. It was a tally of allies—their phone numbers and addresses too, all of which Doug had known by heart. He had handed it to her after he walked her to the end of the driveway. She stuck out her hand for him to shake, but he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, then tapped her shoulder with his thin hand.

“You go get ’em, Alice Holtzman. You make your parents proud.”

23 Guarding

The defence of the colony against enemies, the construction of the cells, and storing of them with honey and beebread, the rearing of the young and, in short, the whole work of the hive, the laying of eggs excepted, is carried on by the industrious little workers.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

Harry understood that the physics of kiteboarding had to do with Newton’s laws of motion. The combination of lift and drag kept the kite in the air, and the tension between the kite and a person’s body weight was a carefully calibrated feat of aerodynamics. It was a tenuous relationship, never a sure thing. Even so, it gave Harry a newfound sense of possibility to have personally felt the embodiment of those principles.

He sat with Jake at the picnic table under the big cottonwood, which snowed fluff down on their heads. A scree of clouds smeared the pale blue sky and the morning wind had picked up, tossing the branches of Doug Ransom’s orchard. Harry sketched the mechanics of the leading edge lines and their role in the process of relaunching the kite. Jake was cleaning the disassembled pieces of his trumpet as he listened, and nodded at the diagram Harry drew in his notebook.

“Pretty rad, man,” Jake said. “Are you heading down there later today?”

Harry’s heart leapt at the idea, and he started to check the wind forecast again, but then Alice walked across the yard to sit with them, and what she had to say brought everything crashing down.

Harry could tell that her resignation was not “two-weeks’ notice and thanks for the memories.” This was “fuck you, I’m outta here.” And although she didn’t say so, he figured her