The Daughters stayed with their arms reaching into the air, giving off the feeling they were rising with Mary. Then August picked up a jar of Black Madonna Honey from behind June’s chair, and what she did with it brought everybody back to earth. She opened the lid and turned it upside down over Our Lady’s head.
Honey oozed down Mary’s face, across her shoulders, sliding down the folds of her dress. A wedge of honeycomb stuck in the crook of Our Lady’s elbow.
I looked at Rosaleen as if to say, Well, great, we spent all that time cleaning honey off her, and here they go putting it back on.
I decided nothing these women did would ever surprise me again, but that lasted about one second, because next the Daughters swarmed around Our Lady like a circle of bee attendants and rubbed the honey into the wood, working it into the top of her head, into her cheeks, her neck and shoulders and arms, across her breasts, her belly.
“Come on, Lily, and help us,” said Mabelee. Rosaleen had already dived in and was coating honey all over Our Lady’s thighs. I hung back, but Cressie took my hands and dragged me over to Mary, slapped them down in the muck of sun-warmed honey, right on top of Our Lady’s red heart.
I remembered how I’d visited Our Lady in the middle of the night, how I’d placed my hand on that same spot. You are my mother, I’d told her then. You are the mother of thousands.
“I don’t get why we’re doing this,” I said.
“We always bathe her in honey,” said Cressie. “Every year.”
“But how come?”
August was working the honey into Our Lady’s face. “The churches used to bathe their special statues in holy water as a way to honor them,” she said. “Especially statues of Our Lady. Sometimes they bathed her in wine. We settled on honey.” August moved down to Our Lady’s neck. “See, Lily, honey is a preservative. It seals over the comb in the hives to keep it safe and pure so the bees can survive the winter. When we bathe Our Lady in it, I guess you’d say we’re preserving her for another year, at least inside our hearts we’re doing that.”
“I didn’t know honey was a preservative,” I said, starting to like the feel of it under my fingers, how they glided as if oiled.
“Well, people don’t think about honey like that, but it’s so strong-acting people used to smear it on dead bodies to embalm them. Mothers buried their dead babies in it, and it would keep them fresh.”
This was a use for honey I hadn’t considered. I could just see funeral homes selling big jars of honey for dead people, instead of coffins. I tried to picture that in the drive-through window at the funeral home.
I began to work my hands into the wood, almost embarrassed at the intimacy of what we were doing.
Once Mabelee leaned her head over too far and got honey all in her hair, but it was Lunelle who took the cake with honey dripping off the ends of her elbows. She kept trying to lick it off, but of course her tongue couldn’t reach that far.
The ants started a single-file parade up the side of Our Lady, drawn by the honey, and not to be outdone, a handful of scout bees showed up and landed on Our Lady’s head. Let somebody bring out the honey and the insect kingdom will be there in no time.
Queenie said, “Next I guess the honey bears will be joining us.” I actually laughed and, spotting a honey-free place near the base of the statue, worked to get it covered up.
Our Lady was covered with hands, every shade of brown and black, going in their own directions, but then the strangest thing started happening. Gradually all our hands fell into the same movement, sliding up and down the statue in long, slow strokes, then changing to a sideways motion, like a flock of birds that shifts direction in the sky at the same moment, and you’re left wondering who gave the order.
This went on for I don’t know how long, and we didn’t ruin it by talking. We were preserving Our Lady, and I was content—for the first time since I’d learned about my mother—to be doing what I was doing.
Finally we all stepped back. Our Lady stood there with her chains spilled around her on the grass, absolutely golden with honey.
One by one the Daughters dipped their hands into a bucket of water and washed off the honey. I waited till the very last, wanting to keep the coating of honey on my skin as long as I could. It was like I was wearing a pair of gloves with magic properties. Like I could preserve whatever I touched.
We left Our Lady in the yard while we ate, then returned and washed her with water the same slow way we’d washed her with honey. After Neil and Zach carried her back to her place in the parlor, everyone left. August, June, and Rosaleen started doing the dishes, but I slipped off to the honey house. I lay down on my cot, trying not to think.
Have you noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get? While trying not to think, I spent twenty minutes on this fascinating question: if you could have one miracle from the Bible happen to you, what would it be? I eliminated the one about multiplying loaves and fishes, as I never wanted to see food again. I thought walking on water would be interesting, but what good was that? I mean, you walk on water, what’s the point? I settled on getting raised from the dead, since a big part of me still felt dead as a doornail.
All this took place before I even realized I was thinking. I had just gone back to trying again not to think when August tapped on the door.
“Lily, can I come in?”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t bother to get up. So much for not thinking. Try to be five seconds around August and not think.
She breezed in holding a gold-and-white-striped hatbox. She stood a moment looking down at me, seeming unusually tall. The fan on the little wall shelf rotated around and blew her collar, making it flap around her neck.
She has brought me a hat, I thought. Maybe she had gone down to the Amen Dollar and bought me a straw hat to cheer me up. But that didn’t make a bit of sense, really. Why would a straw hat cheer me up? Then I thought for one second it might be the hat Lunelle had promised to make for me, but that didn’t fit either. Lunelle wouldn’t have had time to sew up a hat this soon.
August sat on Rosaleen’s old cot and placed the box on her lap. “I’ve brought you some of your mother’s belongings.”
I stared at the perfect roundness of the box. When I took a deep breath, it stuttered strangely as it came out. My mother’s belongings.
I didn’t move. I smelled the air coming through the window, churned up by the fan. I could tell it had turned thick with afternoon rain, but the sky was holding back.
“Don’t you want to see?” she said.
“Just tell me what’s in it.”
She placed her hand on the lid and patted. “I’m not sure I can remember. I didn’t even remember the box till this morning. I thought we’d open it together. But you don’t have to look if you don’t want to. It’s just a handful of things your mother left here the day she went back to Sylvan to get you. I finally gave her clothes away to the Salvation Army, but I kept the rest of her stuff, what little there was. It’s been in this box ten years, I guess.”
I sat up. I could hear my heart thudding. I wondered if August could hear it over there across the room. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. In spite of the panic that goes along with it, there’s something familiar and strangely comforting about hearing your heart beat like that.
August set the box on the bed and removed the lid. I stretched up a little to see inside the box, unable to glimpse anything, though, but white tissue paper, turning yellow around the edges.
She lifted out a small bundle and peeled away the tissue. “Your mother’s pocket mirror,” she said, holding it up. It was ovalshaped and surrounded by a tortoise frame, no bigger than the palm of my hand.
I eased off the bed and slid down onto the floor, where I rested my back against the bed. A little closer than before. August acted like she was waiting for me to reach out and take the mirror. I practically had to sit on my hands. Finally August lifted it up and peered inside it herself. Circles of light bou
nced around on the wall behind her. “If you look in here, you’re gonna see your mother’s face looking back at you,” she said.
I will never look in that mirror, I thought.
Laying it on the bed, August reached into the hatbox and unwrapped a hairbrush with a wooden handle and offered it to me. Before I thought, I took it. The handle felt funny in my hand, cool and smooth-edged, like it had been worn down by excessive holding. I wondered if she’d brushed her hair a hundred strokes every day.
As I was about to hand the brush back to August, I saw a long, black, wavy hair threaded through the bristles. I brought the brush close to my face and stared at it, my mother’s hair, a genuine part of her body.
“Well, I’ll be,” August said.
I could not take my eyes off it. It had grown out of her head and now perched there like a thought she had left behind on the brush. I knew then that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how many jars of honey you threw, no matter how much you thought you could leave your mother behind, she would never disappear from the tender places in you. I pressed my back against the bed and felt tears coming. The brush and the hair belonging to Deborah Fontanel Owens swam in my vision.
I handed the brush back to August, who dropped a piece of jewelry into my hand. A gold pin shaped like a whale with a tiny black eye and a spout of rhinestone water coming from its blow-hole.
“She was wearing that pin on her sweater the day she got here,” August said.
I closed my fingers around it, then walked on my knees over to Rosaleen’s bed and placed it alongside the pocket mirror and the brush, moving them around like I was working on a collage.
I used to lay out my Christmas presents on the bed the same way. There would usually be four whole things that T. Ray had gotten the lady at the Sylvan Mercantile to pick out for me—sweater, socks, pajamas, sack of oranges. Merry Christmas. You could bet your life on the gift list. I would arrange them for display in a vertical line, a square, a diagonal line, any kind of configuration to help me feel like they were a picture of love.
When I looked up at August, she was pulling a black book from the box. “I gave your mother this while she was here. English poetry.”
I took the book in my hand, leafing through the pages, noticing pencil marks in the margins, not words, but strange little doodles, spiraling tornadoes, a flock of Vs, squiggles with eyes, pots with lids, pots with faces, pots with curly things boiling out, little puddles that would suddenly give rise to a terrible wave. I was staring at my mother’s private miseries, and it made me want to go outside and bury the book in the dirt.
Page forty-two. That’s where I came to eight lines by William Blake that she’d underlined, some words twice.
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
I closed the book. I wanted the words to flow off me, but they had stuck. My mother was William Blake’s rose. I wanted nothing so much as to tell her how sorry I was for being one of the invisible worms that flew in the night.
I placed the book on the bed with the other things, then turned back to August, while she reached down into the box again, causing the tissue paper to whisper. “One last thing,” she said, and she drew out a small oval picture frame of tarnished silver.
When she passed it to me, she held on to my hands for a second. The frame contained a picture of a woman in profile, her head bent toward a little girl who sat in a high chair with a smudge of baby food on the side of her mouth. The woman’s hair curled in forty directions, beautiful, like it had just had its hundred strokes. She held a baby spoon in her right hand. Light glazed her face. The little girl wore a bib with a teddy bear on it. A sprig of hair on top of her head was tied with a bow. She lifted one hand toward the woman.
Me and my mother.
I didn’t care about anything on this earth except the way her face was tipped toward mine, our noses just touching, how wide and gorgeous her smile was, like sparklers going off. She had fed me with a tiny spoon. She had rubbed her nose against mine and poured her light on my face.
Through the open window the air smelled like Carolina jasmine, which is the true smell of South Carolina. I walked over and propped my elbows on the sill and breathed as deeply as I could. Behind me I heard August shift on the cot, the legs squeak, then relax.
I looked down at the picture, then closed my eyes. I figured May must’ve made it to heaven and explained to my mother about the sign I wanted. The one that would let me know I was loved.
A queenless colony is a pitiful and melancholy community; there may be a mournful wail or lament from within…. Without intervention, the colony will die. But introduce a new queen and the most extravagant change takes place.
—The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men
Chapter Fourteen
After August and I went through the hatbox, I drew into myself and stayed there for a while. August and Zach tended to the bees and the honey, but I spent most of my time down by the river, alone. I just wanted to keep to myself.
The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled. I plucked leaves off the elephant ear plants and fanned my face, sat with my bare feet submerged in the trickling water, felt breezes lift off the river surface and sweep over me, and still everything about me was stunned and stupefied by the heat, everything except my heart. It sat like an ice sculpture in the center of my chest. Nothing could touch it.
People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard. If God said in plain language, “I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,” a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.
I wrapped my mother’s things in the falling-apart paper, tucked them back in the hatbox, and put the lid on it. Lying on my stomach on the floor, pushing the box under my cot, I found a tiny pile of mouse bones. I scooped them up and washed them in the sink. Every day I carried them around in my pocket and could not imagine why I was doing it.
When I woke up in the mornings, my first thought was the hatbox. It was almost like my mother herself was hiding under the bed. One night I had to get up and move it to the other side of the room. Then I had to strip off my pillowcase and stuff the box down inside it and tie it closed with one of my hair ribbons. All this just so I could sleep.
I would walk to the pink house to use the bathroom and think, My mother sat on this same toilet, and then I would hate myself for thinking it. Who cared where she sat to pee? She hadn’t cared a whole lot about my bathroom habits when she abandoned me to Mrs. Watson and T. Ray.
I gave myself pep talks. Don’t think about her. It is over and done. The next minute, I swear to God, I would be picturing her in the pink house, or out by the wailing wall, stuffing her burdens among the stones. I would’ve bet twenty dollars T. Ray’s name was squashed into the cracks and crevices out there. Maybe the name Lily was out there, too. I wished she’d been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don’t give up their children.
In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional. I was the girl abandoned by her mother. I was the girl who kneeled on grits. What a special case I was.
We were deep into mosquito season, so a lot of what I did by the river was swat at them. Sitting in the purple shadows, I pulled out the mouse bones and worked them between my fingers. I stared at things until I seemed to melt right into them. Sometimes I would forget lunch, and Rosaleen would come find me, bearing a tomato sandwich. After she left, I would throw it in the river.
At times I could not prevent myself from lying flat on the ground, pretending I was inside one of those beehive tombs. I felt the same way I did right after
May died, only multiplied by a hundred.
August had said, “I guess you need to grieve a little while. So go ahead and do it.” But now that I was doing it, I couldn’t seem to stop.
I knew that August must have explained everything to Zach, and June, too, because they tiptoed around me like I was a psychiatric case. Maybe I was. Maybe I was the one who belonged on Bull Street, not my mother. At least no one prodded, or asked questions, or said, “For Pete’s sake, snap out of it.”
I wondered how much longer it would be before August had to act on the things I’d told her—me running away, helping Rosaleen escape. Rosaleen, a fugitive. August was giving me time for now, time to be by the river and do what I had to do, the same way she gave herself time there after May died. But it wouldn’t last forever.
It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening. June set a wedding date, Saturday, October 10. Neil’s brother, an African Methodist–Episcopal reverend from Albany, Georgia, was going to marry them in the backyard under the myrtle trees. June laid out all their plans one night at dinner. She would come walking down an aisle of rose petals, wearing a white rayon suit with frog closings that Mabelee was sewing for her. I could not picture frog closings. June drew a picture of one on a tablet, and afterward I still could not picture them. Lunelle had been commissioned to make her a wedding hat, which I thought was very courageous of June. There was no telling what she would end up with on her head.
Rosaleen offered to bake the wedding cake layers, and Violet and Queenie were going to decorate it with a “rainbow theme.” Again, all I can say is how brave June was.
One afternoon I went to the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon, nearly dying of thirst, wanting to fill a jug with water and take it back to the river, and found June and August clinging to each other in the middle of the floor.