The Telling of the Bees
A haunting tale of human hearts, and the tragic trail of a woman’s outlawed love
Helen R. Hull
Liberty, vol. 18, Jan. 4, 1941, pp. 22-27.
When Marcia woke, she thought at first that the week-long spring rain still beat against the roof. But her eyes opened to brilliant sunlight on the unpainted wooden partition which divided the cabin into two rooms. It was wind she had heard, a gay wind out of the north, running a rough hand over the new green of larches and birches, making a fragrant snowstorm of petals from the apple trees. She drew a deep breath of delight, shaking back dark hair from her full throat, straining the cotton nightdress over her firm deep breasts. She was in haste to be out, watching the wind dry the sodden furrows of the garden.
She laid a fire in the kitchen stove; she drew a bucket of water from the well just outside the door, her toes curling against the cool granite well curb. She was dressed before the kettle boiled, in a man’s shirt, the sleeves rolled above her elbows, and faded denim overalls, above which her heavy-lashed eyes looked almost purple. Standing in the doorway she ate her breakfast, coffee with condensed milk, a thick slice of bread.
Spring had been late this year, when her longing for it had been toxic in her blood, so that time was a barred window against which she bruised herself in vain. In spring, Stan had said. When the blueberries are in flower again. It wouldn’t be decent sooner. That much I owe Dolly. That was the day after Dolly had been buried.
Sitting in her kitchen that night, forgetting to build up the fire, so that the cold crept up to her knees, to her heart, she had gone over his words. Had he meant anything, about the blueberries? Oh, only that he remembered, as she did, last spring! And now, standing in her doorway, the north wind lifting her hair, the sun tingling at its roots, she remembered last spring as she had remembered it since then, invoking it deliberately, drifting into it in dreams, drinking it like wine.
She had gone up to the blueberry fields—it was in May, last year—to try to spray the blossoms. She wanted to sell the fruit to the canning factory, and the inspector condemned all unsprayed fruit. She had not known how to work the blower. Bill, her husband, had been lazy enough, but he had taken care of the berries. Only, Bill wasn’t taking care of anything any more, having driven his truck into a ditch and smashed his drunken skull on the way home from a New Year’s spree.
Marcia had sat down on a rock with the can between her knees, struggling to free the pump, when she felt a shadow between her and the sun. There was Stanley Douglas, grinning down at her, his long lean body relaxed, his eyes amused. Had she been cursing out loud? She jumped to her feet, indignant.
Stan was their neighbor. When Bill had moved her out here, into the shack he had built on the site of the burned homestead, Stan had been friendly. But Bill had resented him, feeling the contempt which a mean man feels for an upright man, and Stan had stopped coming over. As his wife, Dolly, never went out anywhere—Marcia didn’t know what ailed her—the two families might have had an ocean between them instead of only a mile of pasture and woods.
Marcia had thought about Stan, his easy graceful stride, his body with its broad shoulders and slim flat thighs; his proud steady eyes, very blue in his tanned thin face. What did a man like that do with a sick wife, anyway? Bill was flabby and white like a mushroom. What had seemed strength when he courted her had turned out to be pure meanness. Marcia was bored, restless. (The night they brought Bill home, that doctor from the town had said, “Well, are you satisfied now?” Had Bill lived long enough to say anything? What could he say, anyway? She had told him he was too drunk to drive. Bill wasn’t smart enough to guess she had known that would send him off! The doctor, for all he was so smart, couldn’t guess.)
After Bill’s death, Stan had come over a few times. He had offered to do the spring plowing. Marcia had driven, Stan following, guiding the plowshare, easy deft strength in every movement of his body, the smell of the damp earth strong in her nostrils. It was a rite binding them together, sweat, fatigue, the earth, the rhythm of the work. At the end of the morning Stan had thrown the plow into the wagon, had backed the horse into the shafts, adjusted a buckle or two, smiling at her as he vaulted into the seat. Marcia had leaned against the wheel, her heart beating urgently.
“Stan!” she had said, and reached a hand to his knee. He had looked at it and lifted the reins.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “Glad to help you out.” He had driven off with a great clatter.
He hadn’t come again, until that last spring morning when he laughed at her ineptness with the blower. “Here, let me show you.”
“You needn’t laugh!” she had cried. “I can fix it myself!” Then they were wrestling over the pump; he pried her arms apart, bent back her fingers, the can rattled over the stones, and Marcia was in his arms, her breasts pressed close under the strong arch of his chest, her mouth on his, the earth whirling, her blood humming loud—or was it the steady, monotonously sweet vibrations of the bees? He pulled away from her, and when she moved toward him, made a barrier of his hands.
“No!” he had said. “No more of that.”
“Oh, love me, Stan! Love me!”
“I won’t. Dolly—”
“She needn’t know.”
“I would know.” His face had an ashy hue under its tan. “No more of that. You hear?” He strode away, not once looking back.
* * * * *
That had been last spring. A year ago. Summer, fall, winter, and now another spring. Today, tomorrow, Stan would come! The summer would be rich in delight and fulfillment. He had done his duty to the thin sharp woman he had married; he could forget her now, and Marcia need no longer dull her hunger for him with a dream. She, too, could forget the past year; she need never think of it again. And yet, as she walked toward the cleared slopes above the house, fragments of it darted across her mind.
That day in November, for instance, when Stan’s housekeeper had come to her door. (His wife never lifted a hand, so people said.) Her daughter was sick, the housekeeper said, and she must go to town. Mis’ Douglas thought maybe Mrs. Barrows, being a widow and having no one to do for, she might be willing to come in for a few hours in the middle of the day, when Mr. Douglas was away. Chopping pulpwood, he was. Mr. Douglas thought she wouldn’t have time, the woman went on, but Mis’ Douglas said just till they found some one else, maybe.
Marcia’s eyes grew bright. A way to see Stan! To learn things about him! To see this ailing wife who held him away from her! “I’ll be glad to help out,” she had said. “I don’t mind a few hours a day.”
If Dolly had been a different kind of woman—Marcia stopped, hands inert at her sides, her nostrils pinched, her body caught in a web of recollection so intricate, so intense that movement, except into the past, was impossible. If she would walk, she might escape Dolly’s sallow face, with the large hazel eyes, the petulant mouth; her voice, with its queer overemphasis, its reiterations; her odor, perfume, orris root she brushed into her hair, warm woolen smell from huddling near the stove, heated rubber of the water bag she held always to an ache in her side or her stomach or her shoulder.
Marcia drew a long shuddering breath. How had she held her tongue all those days and weeks, simulating sympathy, listening to symptoms, scalding her fingers as she filled the water bag, stifling as she piled more wood into the stove? At first she had thought Dolly must have wind of something, she boasted so of Stan’s devotion.
“You must always go home before he comes,” Dolly had said that first day. “He doesn’t like any one in the house except me. He’s that way. Mrs. Peasley always stayed in the kitchen.”
Presently Marcia had understood that Dolly had a consuming jealousy of Stanley which included even the livestock on the place, and that her boasting about his devotion covered her fear, and that Marcia was just any female under eighty to be kept out of his sight.
Dolly’s bedroom was on the ground floor, opening from the dining room. The door into the parlor was kept shut. Marcia moved from kitchen through the dining room, into Dolly’s room, carrying wood for the stoves, seeing tokens of Stan. Felt slippers under the range. The way he whittled curls on sticks of kindling. The way he rinsed and stacked the breakfast dishes. She began to leave tokens. A spray of orange bittersweet berries over the kitchen clock. Scarlet-black alder branches in a blue glass vase on the dining-room mantel above the sealed-up fireplace. Even a clumsy darn in the thumb of a woolen glove dropped in the woodshed.
The first week Dolly had talked incessantly about her people, her childhood. Showing off, thought Marcia. How fine she is! She’d never been strong; her father always said, “Some one must always take care of my little Doll.” Why, she’d never even washed a dish until she married!