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

would consider applying for Bill’s job. When Bill’s crimes emerged, he’d had a change of heart, he wrote. He hadn’t appreciated what a fine job she’d been doing. He sincerely hoped she would consider coming back, and either way, her pension plan would pay out as planned starting next year. Alice had deleted the email without replying.

Now she walked outside and onto the porch. Automatically, she looked toward the barn, expecting to see Harry. She felt a small jolt whenever she did so and saw the bunkroom door closed firmly like a sleeping eye. She missed that bumbling boy.

She glanced at her watch and saw she had some time before she had to be at the courthouse. She walked down the steps and headed toward where the bee yard used to be—that fenced perimeter that had grown from those first few hives to fifty last year, when Jake had come to stay. She smiled. Last year had been quite a time. She stood at the edge of the fence and looked at the broad expanse where the hives once sat. Now, instead of the painted white boxes set high on their stands, the yard was full of flowers—early bloomers like heather, foxglove, and heliotrope—that stood out in splashes of pink, lavender, and blue. The air was full of the scent of it, a heavy bouquet of bee-friendly plants. She closed her eyes, breathing it in. Summer would bring salvia, hyssop, lavender, Russian sage, and sunflowers. The flower garden had been Jake’s idea. He thought it would be another great tool for teaching the May Street kids.

The air around her was alive with the zinging golden bodies of the honeybees coming across the field to light upon the flowers. By late summer of last year, Alice had understood that one hundred hives was not an impossible goal, despite the losses early in the spring. But she didn’t have room for that many in the old bee yard, so she moved them to the Ransom orchard, where there was more space. All hives but one had survived the winter. Now she had the space and the resources to grow as big as she wanted to. With good luck and splits she could have as many as one hundred and fifty hives by July.

Alice gazed out toward the orchard. The trees held tight blossoms that would soon surrender to the warming spring days and explode in a white blanket that would toss around like froth in the west wind. Then those bees would be especially busy. And Alice would too, as she was now doubly blessed in honey and fruit.

Alice had bought the old orchard from Doug at the end of last summer. He suggested it one August day when he and Alice sat drinking tea on his porch. They were talking about the county board of commissioners meeting where Stan had presented a proposal for banning some pesticides in the orchards and limiting others. It wasn’t a complete reversal, but it was a start.

“Old habits die hard,” she mused.

Doug nodded. “But people can change, Alice. These fellas are good old boys, but they love their trees. Give it time. Now what about you? What’s next?”

Alice told Doug she didn’t know. She was looking at jobs in Portland, which would all involve a commute, but she hadn’t found anything. That was when he made his proposal about the orchard.

“You know my kids don’t want the orchard, Alice. And I don’t want to move to Seattle. Me in the city? Impossible.”

Doug insisted on holding the note so she wouldn’t have to take out a loan. Alice tried to refuse this generous offer, but her heart wouldn’t let her. Of course she wanted the orchard. It was what she’d always wanted since she had been that fourth-grade girl in Miss Tooksbury’s class. Yes, she said, absolutely. Doug would stay in the house as long as he wanted to, as long as he could and rent-free. As part of the deal Alice promised his children she would check on him every day and help him with shopping and errands. And spending time with Doug, well, that was no hardship. He made her miss her folks less.

Alice Holtzman was now an orchardist and a beekeeper. She would have her first crop of pears and apples that fall along with another enormous harvest of honey. It all felt so right, like things had just fallen into place. That was what she’d told Dr. Zimmerman at her final session, when they both agreed that Alice seemed to be healing and moving on.

“Steering your own ship again,” she heard her mother’s voice say.

“Tough as a two-dollar steak. That’s my girl,” her father said.

Alice heard a loud yawp and saw the brown body of Cheney streaking across the field from Doug’s house. Cheney and Doug were great pals now. The big dog wolfed down the breakfast Jake poured into his bowl and then ambled over to Doug’s for whatever tidbit Doug saved for him.

Alice let Cheney into the house. “You behave, big boy. Stay off the bed.”

He banged his tail on the floor and trotted down the hall to Jake’s room.

Jake was an equal partner in the beekeeping business, which had officially outgrown hobby status last summer when they harvested four hundred gallons of honey at the end of the season. It had taken them the better part of a week, with help from Amri, Noah, and Celia, to harvest and bottle the crop. The shop had been converted into an assembly line where they took turns using the heat knife to cut the creamy wax cappings off the honey frames. They worked together loading the dripping frames into the extractor, monitoring the flow, and straining the thick golden syrup that poured forth. It was sticky, wonderful work. Celia had strained the wax cappings and made candles out of them. The honey sold for $20 a quart at the Hood River County Fair in the fall. After that, they had recruited