![]() I could not hear myself think for all the bee hum. They lapsed around my body, making me the perfect center of a whirlwind cloud. The sound swelled in the dark till the entire room was pulsating, till the air itself became alive and matted with bees. Moments later shadows moved like spatter paint along the walls, catching the light when they passed the window so I could see the outline of wings. Every minute I looked at the clock on my dresser and wondered what was keeping them.įinally, sometime close to midnight, when my eyelids had nearly given up the strain of staying open, a purring noise started over in the corner, low and vibrating, a sound you could almost mistake for a cat. The room sat in perfect stillness, not one bee anywhere. It seemed like this should tell God something. He’d gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. I had asked God repeatedly to do something about T. Ray’s boot and it not get a rise out of him. His only kindness was for Snout, his bird dog, who slept in his bed and got her stomach scratched anytime she rolled onto her wiry back. He had an orneryness year-round, but especially in the summer, when he worked his peach orchards daylight to dusk. I decided I would take four or five centuries to tell her about the special misery of living with T. I was always having to choose between decent hair and a good night’s sleep. Ray, naturally, refused to buy me bristle rollers, so all year I’d have to roll it on Welch’s grape juice cans, which had nearly turned me into an insomniac. My hair was constantly going off in eleven wrong directions, and T. You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair. She would brush it into such a tower of beauty, people all over heaven would drop their harps just to admire it. The next ten thousand years she would fix my hair. She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years. Please forgive,” and she would kiss my skin till it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame. I would meet her saying, “Mother, forgive. ![]() That night I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise. ![]() Once in a while, though, some caring soul would say, “Just put it out of your head, Lily. It was a fact of life, but if I brought it up, people would suddenly get interested in their hangnails and cuticles, or else distant places in the sky, and seem not to hear me. My mother died when I was four years old. People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life. Every one of those bees could have descended on me like a flock of angels and stung me till I died, and it wouldn’t have been the worst thing to happen. Honestly, I wasn’t that disturbed by the idea. She was full of crazy ideas that I ignored, but I lay there thinking about his one, wondering if the bees had come with my death in mind. Rosaleen had never had a child herself, so for the last ten years I’d been her pet guinea pig.īees swarm before death. She lived alone in a little house tucked back in the woods, not far from us, and came every day to cook, clean, and be my stand-in mother. She had a big round face and a body that sloped out from her neck like a pup tent, and she was so black that night seemed to seep from her skin. Ray because “Daddy” never fit him – had pulled her out of the peach orchard, where she’d worked as one of his pickers. Rosaleen had worked for us since my mother died. July 1, 1964, I lay in bed, waiting for the bees to show up, thinking of what Rosaleen had said when I told her about their nightly visitations.
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