Grandpa had proven to me that I could get close to a honeybee without getting stung. I was coming around to the opinion that fearsome animals and insects rarely live up to the reputations foisted on them by circuses and monster movies. Grandpa was teaching Matthew and me that all creatures were sacred, with their own inner emotional lives. As part of our education, after dinner each night we climbed into the recliner with Grandpa to watch his favorite nature shows. I’d been astonished to watch male lions play with their cubs, aquarium octopuses reach from the water to embrace their human handlers, or elephants dig stairs leading out of a deep mudhole so a drowning baby could clamber to safety. So it made me wonder, what if bees were compassionate like that, and what if I could teach myself how to see it? As a girl needing to know that love existed naturally all around her, it was thrilling to realize that I didn’t have to wait for Wild Kingdom or Jacques Cousteau to be reassured. The mysteries of the animal kingdom were within my reach, anytime I wanted. That night when I went to bed, the confines of our small room expanded ever so slightly. I had found one good thing—a reason how California might make me happy.
I awoke to the percolator bubbling on top of the stove, so I knew my grandparents were up. I tiptoed down the hall and pushed open their bedroom door. Granny was reading aloud to Grandpa from the Monterey Herald while he looked at the photos in a beekeeping magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. On weekends, they liked to ease into the day. I climbed onto their small four-poster bed, wedged myself in between them and asked Grandpa if he could show me his beehives.
“Whoa, Nelly,” Grandpa said, putting down his magazine. “I haven’t had my think-juice yet.”
“Excellent point,” Granny said. “Sounds like the coffee’s done, Franklin.”
Grandpa dutifully threw back the covers and slid his feet into slippers, and I heard his joints crack as he pushed himself upright. I sighed dramatically, but nobody acknowledged it. I was in for a long wait. On Saturdays and Sundays they savored several cups of coffee in bed, as Granny curated the newspaper front to back, reading aloud particularly important paragraphs to Grandpa, enhanced by her commentary. Grandpa would often get weary at a certain point, but he never complained. Instead, he would distract her by gripping sections of the paper with his strong toes and dropping the pages on her lap. Granny thought it was repulsive; Grandpa thought it was a riot.
I wandered outside and spotted Matthew lifting his chubby leg and stomping on something near the vegetable garden. When I got closer, I could see that he was killing snails. He smiled when he saw me approach, and lifted his shoe to display the slimy puddle he’d made on the ground. He was helping Grandpa, who’d shown him how to hunt the marauders who ate his crops. Snails and gophers were the only exceptions to Grandpa’s no-kill rule.
“Gross,” I said, slightly unnerved by how much my brother was enjoying himself.
He held a snail between a thumb and forefinger and dropped it on the ground.
“You do it,” he commanded.
I reached for his hand instead. “Come on, I have another job for you.”
His eyes widened, and he bounced alongside me as I walked him toward the honey bus. There was about a foot and a half of clearance under the chassis. If we crawled underneath, we could hopefully find a rusted-out hole or some type of entry and maybe climb through to get inside the bus. I’d already tried pushing all the windows, and had inserted all manner of sticks and screwdrivers and butter knives inside the opening where the back door handle used to be, hoping to pop the lock. This was my last idea. I figured I’d need Matthew if we found an opening too small for me.
I slid under first on my back, as it was more Matthew’s nature to see if something was safe before trying it. He watched my legs disappear and waited for my report. A tangle of weeds blocked my view of the undercarriage, so I used a snow angel technique to knock them down. I pressed here and there on the bus floor with my foot to test for weak spots. The metal was rusty, but solid. I kicked at the exhaust pipe, and it rattled some, showering me in fine dirt. I scooted toward the front of the bus, and bumped into a discarded tire. Other than that, the only thing I found under the bus was a graveyard of corroded five-gallon Wesson Oil cans.
I gave up searching and rested for a moment on my back, trying to think. There had to be a solution that I was overlooking. Matthew called out to me, and when I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw him on his hands and knees peering under the bus. Then two legs appeared and framed my brother.
“What’s so interesting under there?” I heard Grandpa ask my brother.
“Mare-miss,” my brother said, pointing. His tongue still hadn’t mastered my three-syllable name.
Grandpa got down on his belly next to Matthew, and now both of them were staring. I held still because I felt like I had just been caught doing something, not anything bad, just something slightly embarrassing.
“Whatcha doing under there?”
“Trying to get in.”
“Don’t you know the door’s up here?”
“It’s locked.”
“To keep little kids out.”
Grandpa reached under the bus and crooked his finger, signaling me to come to him. I scrabbled out, and as he helped me to my feet, he brushed the dirt from my back and plucked off the burrs. Whatever was in the bus would have to wait. Until I got bigger, whenever that was. The only people admitted entry were Grandpa’s friends, so I imagined I would have to wait until I was an adult, which might as well be never.
“I thought you wanted to see the bees,” Grandpa said.
His counteroffer was exquisitely played, and I perked up immediately. As my part of the deal, I had to come inside for breakfast first.
Belly properly filled with pancakes, I followed Grandpa to the back fence, where he kept a row of six beehives. The sun was shining on the slit entrances at the base of the hives, illuminating the landing boards where the bees were flitting in and out. A small cloud of bees hovered before each hive, all the foragers waiting for a clear shot to get back inside. I noticed that the bees were buzzing in a different way than the one we caught in the house; their sound didn’t have the urgency of a shout, it was more contented and calm like a person humming a song. I stood in front of the right-most hive, about a foot away from the entrance so I could watch them. I felt Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t stand there,” he said. “See what’s happening behind you?”
I turned and saw a traffic jam of bees jiggling in the air, unwilling to go around me to get into the hive. The backup was growing by the second.
“You’re in their flight path,” he said, guiding me to the side of the hive. As soon as I stepped out of the way, the clot of waiting bees whooshed in a comet back to their hive. I knelt down next to the hive so I was eye level with the bees. One by one they marched to the entrance, cleaned their antennae, then crouched and launched like a jet fighter.
“What do you see?”
“Lots of bees coming and going,” I said.
“Look closer.”
I did, and saw the same thing. Bees flying in. Bees flying out. So many it was hard to keep my eye on one bee at a time. Grandpa took a comb out of his back pocket and whisked it through his hair in three practiced swipes, top and sides, waiting for me to see whatever it was I was supposed to see. Then he pointed at the landing board. “Yellow!” he announced.
All I saw were bees.
“There’s orange! Gray! Yellow again!”
And