The Hive Beside His Garden

“I know you wouldn’t,” I said.

“Come by the house when you get off,” she said. “I have something of Ray’s I want you to have.”

I sat with her on her front porch steps that evening while the swallows worked the yard. She had on Ray’s old green work shirt over her blouse, the sleeves rolled up, and she held a dented metal can with a bellows on the side.

“He kept two hives behind the machine shed when the boys were little,” she said. “Back in the eighties. He let them go when the mites came through and everybody lost theirs. This was his smoker.”

I turned it over in my hands. The bellows leather was cracked but still soft. There was old burlap ash in the bottom, gray as dust.

“Joel used to follow him out there,” she said. “Six years old with a dish towel tied over his face for a veil. I’d forgotten that until today.”

She looked out across the yard toward the road. “Something’s wrong with that boy, Gretchen. He’s been quiet since spring. Lauren says he’s not sleeping.”

Saturday morning, Joel’s daughter came down the gravel on her bike.

Mindy was eleven that summer, all elbows and freckles, with her dad’s dark eyes. Since April she had been coming down to the creek on Saturdays to help me. I had an extra veil that fit her, and she had learned to work the smoker and hold a frame without flinching.

She stopped her bike at the edge of the grass and did not get off. She looked at the row of broken boxes for a long time.

“Did Dad kill all of them?” she asked.

Her voice was very small. I set down my hive tool and walked over to her, because that was not a question a child should have to ask from a bicycle seat.

“Not all of them,” I said. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

She left the bike in the grass and came with me. I helped her into her veil and opened up the survivor, and I lifted out the frame where the queen was walking.

“See her? Longer than the rest. See how they all turn and face her?”

Mindy looked. Her eyes filled up under the veil and she cried anyway, quiet, the way kids cry when they are trying not to.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You hear me? Nothing about this is your fault.”

“He’s not mean,” she said. “He’s just been sad. He sits out in the truck at night.”

I put the frame back and closed the hive. Then I knelt down in the grass so I was looking up at her.

“I’m going to make this one strong,” I said. “Strong enough to split. And when I do, you’re going to help me, and you’re going to have bees of your own. I promise.”

She wiped her face with the back of her glove and nodded.

I did not know yet where I was going to put them. I only knew I had made a promise to a child, and I keep those.