The Keeper of the Bees, page 7
“When I got back to the Bee Master, I was shaking like I had a chill and I bet enough salt water was running down my face to make a good soup spoon full of salt. Because the Bee Master says every bucket of water you take from the ocean is three and a half per cent salt, but I bet two bits I’m saltier ’an that. If I’d a-died I couldn’t a-kept my salt water back. The Master said it was rotten, and he held me tight and rubbed off the stingers, ’cause that’s the way you must; if you pull ’em it makes them worse. And then he turned the hose on a clayey place and mixed a cool poultice of mud and spread on the stings, and he said he ought to be booted for letting me go among the bees when I was all smelly of dogs and horses.
“So I wiped up my eyes and I said I reckoned that was the trouble. What I ought to a-done was to put on his old bee coat and rubbed some lilies on my head and some cinnamon pinks on my britches. So I went to the back porch and got his coat and when I commenced putting it on, he asked me what I was going to do. And I told him I was going to get my scent right and ‘try, try again.’ He just sat there looking at me, and I never saw his eyes get so big and black and I never saw his face get whiter when the pain was hurting him the worst, and away back under his breath, so I could barely hear, he whispered, ‘Before God, you wouldn’t do it, little Scout?’
“And I said, ‘God ain’t got nothing to do with this. It’s between you and me, and I’m going!’
“And so I buttoned up the coat and I went down to the cinnamon pink bed and I just about rolled in it. I don’t know but I treated the pinks rougher than the Master liked, but you’ll understand if you ever get stung by a Black German why I was anxious to get plenty of cinnamon on. And then I smashed the sweetest lily I could find and I rubbed it in all over my hair. And then I started down the east walk. I thought I’d try the Italian bees first. They’re a lot decenter than the Germans. I ain’t much of a whistler, but I whistled ‘Highland Mary’ the best I could, and I went along, soft and easy, and I ain’t right sure but I carried the last lily in my hands, and keeping serene—around bees you just naturally got to keep serene; no rough stuff goes, but I wasn’t oozing certainty so’s you could notice it—I stopped by the door of every last Italian and they never done a thing to me. So the Master was right. I took my medicine because my scent was wrong. So I rubbed up the lily a little when I headed for the Black Germans and I went and stood in front of them and counted ten.
Then I double dared ’em to come on and sting me. They sort of fussed around a little and two of ’em came pretty close, but when they got the flowers strong, they went away again. Anyway, I faced ’em down. And when I went back to the Bee Master, he took me up in his arms and he said he wished to God he’d lived to see the day when his little Mary would’ve showed spirit like that, and he hugged me so tight he nearly cracked every bone in my body, and he gave me the first kiss I ever got off him. And I ain’t had half a dozen since. Believe you me, he’s no necker! And he said that I could be his partner and help him about keeping the bees.
Let me tell you, you’ll get on your uppers and you’ll do something worth while, you’ll stir your think-tank posolutely to the bottom, before the Bee Master comes across! His coat’s hanging on the back porch and there’s flowers a-plenty here in the garden. Any time you want to find out how the bees feel about your soul, you can soon get it over with, including war tax. But, oh, boy! lemme tell you this! Before you go near the hives of the Black Germans, get your scent right!” “But how do I get my scent right?” asked Jamie. “Well, for one thing, I’ll show you the right coat. Put that on and then go and stick your head in the cinnamon pinks and rub it all around like I did, and then take a Madonna lily and smash it and rub it all over your hands, and maybe you better go down by the water tap where there is a little spongy place and pull a handful of mint and rub that all over your britches. Whatever you do, don’t weaken! You better whistle the right tune. Can you whistle, slow and easy, ‘Highland Mary’? That’s the one the bees like best. Her name was Mary. And if you can whistle it real soft and easy, and lots of love, and lots of coaxing, and lots of lonesomeness, if you can work it up just right—you are about his height—the bees might not know the difference. Yes, I guess they would, too. You probably never heard of such eyes as bees have got. A worker after you has got six thousand eyes on each side of its head, and a male—’cause on account of the Queen again, when she flies clear nearly to Heaven, way above the birds and everything—a male has got thirteen thousand eyes on each side of its head. So you better believe, if one got roused up about you, he’d see that your head wasn’t white. All the bees would miss the Bee Master’s white head. It was always bare. And they’d miss his beard and his big, dark eyes. Ain’t he wonderful?” ‘Yes, I have an idea, from the few minutes I saw him and from his home and his library and his profession, yes, I’ve an idea that he is rather wonderful.”
“He’s just the only wonder of his kind,” said the small person with the wide-spread downward gesture that was becoming familiar to Jamie.
Then the question came abruptly: “Was he awful sick?”
Jamie looked into the wide eyes of comprehension before him and thought of neither lie nor evasion.
“Yes,” he said. “He was the sickest man I ever saw, and I’ve certainly seen some sick ones!”
“You can’t tell me much about him,” said the small person. “I’ve helped him up the back walk and to the davenport and gotten the ammonia a few times when I didn’t ever think I’d pull him through. I’ve seen him suffer until the sweat would run right down and drop off the tip of his nose, just a drop at a time, slow, and fall on his shirt front, splat! splat!—and I’ll tell the world, it’s pretty awful! If he’s sick like that again, maybe he’d better go on and die.”
At the casual tone in which the suggestion was uttered, Jamie reeled back on the seat and stared hard at the impersonal face of the youngster before him. He had been under the impression that this child adored the Bee Master. At that minute he felt that he was facing a little pagan who did not adore anything, or even have a fair conception of what the word might mean. Yet there had been considerable conception of what the word might mean in the instructions as to how he was to whistle
“Highland Mary,” so Jamie, through narrowed eyes, looked steadily at the little Scout and then he said tentatively: “I thought you liked him.”
“Liked him?” said the Little Scout. “Say, look here!”
Before Jamie’s eyes was thrust a grimy right hand. Smash down like the blade of a knife came the left across the wrist. Slowly the fingers of the right hand opened and closed.
“I need that in my business,” said the little Scout. “I couldn’t ride Queen; I couldn’t be leader of the Scouts;
I couldn’t paddle my canoe; I couldn’t be the Bee Master’s partner without it, but if it would take that pain out of the Bee Master’s side, I’d give it to him, just like that!”
The right hand was severed and discarded in mighty effective pantomime.
A great big lump rose up in Jamie’s throat, threatening very nearly to choke him.
The small person stood on one foot and set the other on the bench and clasped a pair of grimy hands around the bended knee and leaned toward Jamie.
“I guess you got me wrong,” was the surmise that fell on his astounded ears. Then suddenly that position was relinquished and Jamie felt a small body beside him and a small head leaning precariously near the wound that made red stains on his breast, and one little abused hand lay down on one of his hands, and a small face was lifted to his, and a voice, low and mellow and exceedingly sweet of tone, said to Jamie, softly: “Do you know how beautiful dying can be?”
Perhaps that hit Jamie the hardest of all, because he had not been contemplating Death as a beautiful thing, and he had been contemplating it day and night for other men for more years than he liked to enumerate. In his own case, two was plenty. He could not speak, so he shook his head.
“Just like me,” said the small person. “I didn’t know anything at all about it, but Nannette did. Nannette’s my big sister. She had the rottenest luck. At the lake where we went last summer, a man got drowned and next day Nannette was playing along the shore with some other kids and ran right into him just as they got him out of the water, and he had been in long a-plenty and the turtles hadn’t done a thing to him. And she came home and Mother said she had the hysterics, and she kept on having ’em in the night in her sleep until I got so I saw about what she’d seen. So not long ago, my mother’s little old Aunt Beth went to Heaven and first Mother said we couldn’t go and say good-bye to her. She went in the night, you know, in her sleep, with her hands folded on her breast and the strangest little mysterious smile on her face. It was like she knew a beautiful secret that she’d love to tell, and she was smiling over it while she decided whether she would tell or not. Dad said maybe it’d be a good thing to let us go. Maybe Nannette would see something that would make her feel better. Nannette didn’t want to go, but after Dad said that, Mother made her. So we went after dinner when we had come home from school. Mother washed us up and put on our Sunday clothes and Dad took us in the car, and right at the front door the beautiful part started.
“There was a big wreath that nearly covered the door and it began in little blue forget-me-nots and violets and heliotrope, and it ran into white hyacinths and gold hyacinths and blue ones, and there were sprays of lavender heather and white roses and pale pink roses, and at the bottom where it was tied with lavender chiffon that hung clear to the porch floor, the loveliest white lilies. I never saw anything that was so beautiful.”
The small face lifted to Jamie’s.
“Did you ever see anything as lovely as that?” he was asked.
Jamie shook his head.
“In the living room, where, ever since I’d known her, Aunt Beth had sat in a wheel chair, it was just flowers everywhere. All our family sent them, and all the neighbors sent them, and her church sent them, and people we’d never heard of sent them, because everybody loved Aunt Beth. Mother said she was the biggest little liar in the whole world. Days when you could see she was twisty with pain, she’d look you straight in the eye and say she was better. She was always better. And she had the funniest house. You never went to it that from somewhere she couldn’t pull out a cooky with candy on it, or red peppermint sticks, and she always had the best raisins. My! you never tasted such raisins as she always had! Or sometimes popcorn, or donut’s, and the last time I had been there, the spiciest gingerbread—it smelled like the geography of India sounds!
“We went back into Aunt Beth’s bedroom, and over her bed there was a lavender satin spread, and she was lying upon her pillow and her hair was soft and wavy—she had a big roll of hair and it was bright brown. She was eighty-seven and you couldn’t hardly find a gray hair on her head. It was in soft, silky coils and it waved so pretty.
“And Death had gone and magicked her. There wasn’t a line in her face, and her throat was round, and her lips were smiley. My! she was the prettiest thing! And her dress was like it was cut from soft gray clouds and the sleeves and down the front was all cobwebby lace, and at her wrists it tied in perky little bows.
“Nannette stood and looked at her and she kept creeping closer to her and she looked and she looked and then she grabbed me and she said, ‘Why, I thought she’d be like the man I saw!’
“And then Dad and all of us found out for the first time that Nannette thought all the dead people everywhere looked like the man that had been in the water among the turtles and everything; and I’ll tell you, we were glad then that we’d brought Nannette to see Aunt Beth! She was so pretty—Nannette wanted to untie the ribbons in her sleeves and fix ’em the way she wanted ’em, and that made me want to do something for her, and so
I asked what I might do, and they said that I might put her slippers on her. They turned back the lacy spread with the lavender lining that covered her and I got to put on her feet her little gray slippers with white fur on ’em. They were the prettiest little things! And then I fixed her skirts, her gray sarin petty and her lacy dress; and Nannette fixed her sleeves and we covered her up and kissed her good-bye, and we came away, and you can’t scare us with being dead any more!
“Nannette hasn’t jumped in the night since, not once. We know now that there are several kinds of being dead. There’s the kind where you’ve had a bad heart and you haven’t told true and you’ve taken things that didn’t belong to you, and you haven’t played the game square with God, and you haven’t had any respect for your government, and, of course, you ain’t going to look very well whether you’re dead or alive if you’ve got things like that inside you. And then, added to that, there’s accidents that might happen to anybody—lying in the water a long time and turtles is one thing, or being burned in a fire or blown up in a factory. That’s your hard luck. But if you get to die at home, just to go to sleep softly in your own bed in the night, so softly that you never lift your hands off your breast, and when you see God a little sweet smile creeps over your face. Gee! I bet God and all the angels were tickled to pieces to see Aunt Beth when she came walking in, all slender and straight and young in her softy cloud dress! Nannette put forget-me-nots and Parma violets and heliotrope in her hands when she got her sleeves tied right. If she still carried them when she got to Heaven, all around her would be smelly with flowers. None of us wanted her to go. We all liked to take care of her. We all liked to take her fruits and flowers and books and papers. Every one of us saved every funny story we found to tell her, but at that we were all kind of glad when she went, ’cause her bones must have hurt her, and she couldn’t have told true when she always said she was better, because she had to give up and have the doctor sometimes, bad as she hated it.”
The little Scout stood up with out flung hands in a gesture of finality.
“After I’ve told you that, you can see how the Bee Master might look if God decided that he should go to sleep in the night, and there wouldn’t be any more pain in his side or any more sweat dripping off his nose. I bet all the harps and all the trumpets in Heaven would go ‘Zoom! Zoom!’ and all the angels would come flocking if the Bee Master went through the gates! I bet God Himself would stand up when the Bee Master came up so straight and tall to salute Him, because sometimes, somewhere he’d been in a war. He’s got a bully uniform and he can pull off the snappiest salutes! He’s been a soldier and I bet you’ve been a soldier, too, ’cause you look like a soldier and you move like a soldier, and I think it’s punk that you ain’t got your uniform on. I just love uniforms!”
And then Jamie’s mouth fell open and his eyes widened, A cautioning hand was thrust backward toward him, A sibilant hiss that was intended for a warning to silence struck his ears. Leaning forward, softly, a step at a time, one hand thrust outward for balance, one thrust back for caution, the little Scout crept in a crouching attitude down the walk, eyes fixed straight ahead. Leaning over to get the alignment, Jamie saw a big bumble bee clambering over the entrance petal to the horn of a trumpet flower. He saw the little Scout measure off a certain distance, crouch, and then quick, quicker almost than he could sense what was happening, a stream of saliva shot straight and hit the bee, knocking it off its moorings. The little Scout sprang into the air and uttered a whoop that would have startled an Apache on the war path. Wildly whirling and shouting, with beating hands, the child, in a shrill, boyish voice, cried, “Hit him! By Golly! I hit him! Knocked him ping!”
Then, turning, the small figure made a rush toward Jamie and a hand gripped each of his knees.
“Say, if I bring Fat Old Bill and the Nice Child and Angel Face, will you tell ’em? Will you say I did it? We got a bet. I’m two bits to the good. I’ll lick the hide off ’em if they don’t take my word, but I could put up a heap bigger swank if you’d tell ’em you saw me.”
Jamie finally got his mouth arranged in a position in which it would speak recognizable English.
Then he said, “Surely! Any day you want me to, I’ll meet your pals and I’ll testify that fairly and squarely you hit the bee.”
“I’ve been practicing on that for a week,” boasted the small person, proudly. ‘I’ve been trying and I bet a quarter that I’d do it, and two bits is some bet, lemme tell you! There’s lots of things you can do with two bits!”
Jamie thought of times when he had contemplated less than two bits in an open palm during the past few days, and admitted the truth of the assertion. Talking of money evidently started a new train of thought. With inquiring eyes the youngster studied him.
“Will you go to the hospital to see the Bee Master any time soon?”
“I’m waiting for a telephone call,” said Jamie. “Doctor Grayson told me that he would call and report progress and as soon as the Master is able to see me, of course.
The little Scout dipped in a breeches pocket and brought to light a handful of numerous things, and from strings and buttons and buckles and pebbles, with the left hand, selected a dime and two nickels and held them over to Jamie.
“When you go, will you stop at the nearest lunch counter and get a hot dog and a bottle of strawberry pop for him and give ’em to him from me with a tight hug and a kiss?”
Jamie accepted the money with a sober face.
“Surely,” he said, enthusiastically.
“I’ll give you the kiss for him right now,” said the small person, and without any preliminaries Jamie had pasted fairly on his lips the hardest, hottest, sweetest little kiss of all his experience. He found his hands on the shoulders of the small person and his eyes intent on the face.
