The Swarms We Caught for Mom

What He Said

He turned the jar around in his hand. He looked at the tape on the lid.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I knew it when I said it. I knew it before Curtis ever got there. I knew what the wind was doing.”

Mom did not say anything. She let him keep going.

“The aphids were the worst I ever saw,” he said. “I was scared I was going to lose the field. Curtis said noon or next week. I told myself your bees would be all right.”

“They weren’t,” Mom said.

“No.” He looked down the row of white boxes, all nine of them, humming. “No, they weren’t. And then I said what I said to you. And I’ve been ashamed of it for a year.”

He looked up at her. And I saw something on his face I had not seen on Lowell Bahr in my whole life. He looked old. He looked like a man who had been lying awake.

“My dad would have taken me out behind the shed for talking to you like that,” he said. “He’d have been right to.”

“Your dad was a good man,” Mom said.

“He was.” Lowell swallowed. “I should have called you that night. I should have called the state on myself. I should have done a lot of things.”

He held the jar up a little. “And you sent me honey.”

“Your beans made it,” Mom said. “Same as my bees did. Seemed only fair.”

The Fence

Lowell stood at the wire a long time after that. Nobody said anything. The bees went back and forth over the fence between the hives and his beans like the fence was not there at all.

Then he said, “I’d like to pay for them. The thirty. Whatever they cost.”

Mom shook her head. “I don’t want your money, Lowell.”

“Then what do you want?”

She thought about it. She took her time. That is my mother.

“I want you to call me the night before,” she said. “Every time. And I want you to put your fields on that map, the one where the sprayers check for hives. And I want you to tell Curtis yourself.”

He nodded slowly. “I can do that.”

“And there’s a 4-H bee project this fall,” Mom said. “Lacy wants to do it. She’ll need a hive of her own and the boxes for it.”

Lowell looked at Lacy, standing there in that old veil. Lacy looked straight back at him. She did not smile, and she did not look away.

“I’ll buy whatever she needs,” he said.

“You’ll ask her what she needs,” Mom said. “She’s the beekeeper.”

And Lowell Bahr, who farms eight hundred acres and has never asked a fifteen-year-old girl for anything in his life, said, “Lacy. What do you need?”

Lacy told him. She had a list. She had been making it in her head since May.

The Co-op

I did not see the next part. Gertrude told me, and then three other people on my route told me the same thing the same week, so I believe it.

Lowell went into the co-op the next morning for coffee. He sat down at the table where the men sit. It went quiet, the way it had been going quiet since June.

And Lowell said, out loud, to the whole table, “I sprayed Ione Hask’s bees last July. In the wind. At noon. I knew better. I told her so yesterday.”

Then he drank his coffee.

Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Emmitt, who has sat at that table longer than anybody, passed him the sugar.

That was all. That is how it is done out here. But the next morning the table was talking again, and Lowell was talking with it.