The Hive Beside His Garden

It was covered. Bees shoulder to shoulder, capped brood in a tight oval, a band of honey across the top. I tipped it toward the light and saw eggs standing in the bottom of the cells like tiny grains of rice.

That meant the queen had been laying that very morning. Somewhere in that box she was alive.

I knelt there in the grass beside the crushed boxes and the skid steer tracks, holding that one good frame, and I let myself breathe for the first time since I got out of the Jeep.

It took me an hour to put the survivor back together properly. I found the queen on the fourth frame, long and calm, walking like nothing had happened. I closed the hive, leveled it on two flat stones, and sat down on the bank.

Darrel got there a little after five. My husband works at the co-op elevator in Eldora, and in June he runs the scale and keeps the grain dryer crews on schedule. He came down through the grass in his work boots and stopped where I had stopped.

He did not say anything for a while. He took his cap off and held it against his leg, the way he does at funerals.

“Joel,” he finally said.

“There’s only one skid steer on this road,” I said. “And he’s been talking about that shop for three years.”

Joel is Darrel’s older brother. He was thirty-nine that summer. He fixes diesel engines, mostly semis and farm trucks, out of a rented bay on the edge of town, and every Thanksgiving for three years he had talked about building his own shop.

Darrel looked at the little survivor sitting on its stones, then back at the eleven wrecks. “Did you call him?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t trust what I’d say.”

“I’ll go talk to him.” He put his cap back on. “Brother to brother. You stay with your bees.”

I want to be fair to Darrel, because people always want to know where the husband was. He was at work, forty minutes from that creek, and the minute he saw it he went to find his brother. He did not make me ask.

I stayed on the bank until the light started going. The loose bees were clustering on what was left of the boxes. Most of them would die in a day or two without a queen or a home, and there was nothing I could do about that.

Darrel came back after dark. He sat down next to me in the grass and was quiet long enough that I knew it had not gone well.

“He says it had to go somewhere,” Darrel said.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Mom told him last month he could put the shop on this corner. He says he figured you’d moved them.” He shook his head. “He didn’t figure that. He knew. He wouldn’t look at me, Gretchen. Something’s wrong with him.”

“Something’s wrong with a man who runs over twelve beehives,” I said, and then I was sorry I said it, because Darrel’s face looked like I had hit him.

We drove home in separate vehicles. I sat at the end of our lane for a while with the engine running and thought about what I could do.