The Swarms We Caught for Mom

The Phone Call I Didn’t Make

I am a rural carrier. I know what a label says, because half the farmers on my route leave their chemical jugs in the shop where I drop the mail, and I have read more of them than I ever meant to.

The label on most of what they spray on beans for aphids says, plain as day, not to apply it while bees are out working the field or the weeds next to it. Noon on a hot July day is the busiest hour a bee has.

The label also says not to spray when the wind will carry it off the field. That afternoon, the wind was carrying everything straight onto Mom’s place, toward the hives.

I had my phone out of my pocket before we got back to the house. I knew the state department of agriculture takes reports on bee kills. I had read about it in the paper once.

Mom saw what I was doing. She reached over and put her hand flat over the screen of my phone.

“No,” she said.

“Mom, he can’t just do that. There are rules.”

“I know there are rules.” She took her hand away and sat down hard on the porch step. “I will not put a neighbor of thirty years in front of the state. We start over.”

I wanted to argue. I am fifty-two years old and I still wanted to stamp my foot. But I knew my mother, and I knew that tone. That tone had ended every argument in that house since 1974.

There is history with the Bahrs. Lowell’s father and my dad traded work for twenty years, shelling corn and baling hay. When Dad died, Lowell was one of the six men who carried him out of the church.

None of that excused what he did. Mom knew that better than I did. But she was not going to be the one to make it into a state file with his name on it.

“Then what do we do?” I asked her.

She looked out toward the windbreak for a long time.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “Help me clean up.”