“
The women from long ago wore hats
with flowers and big feathers stuck into them. Some of the
expensive ones had dead birds that had been cut open and filled
with sawdust.”
Tiki scrunched up her face.
“
Yeah, no kidding, but they
eventually stopped doing it. My mom also wore a dress with puffy
sleeves and a huge bustle in back. That’s bunched-up
material.”
“
To make it soft when she sat down,”
she said, nodding.
“
Sure, maybe. Sarah went around to
each doll, asking its name and where it had come from. And my
mother poured tea and went on and on about each of her precious
babies. She had a harrowing story for each, how it had been
orphaned by war or terrible famine.”
“
It sounds nice. Scary, but
nice.”
“
They were just made-up stories,
none of them true, of course. The dolls were nothing but playthings
made out of baked clay and cotton stuffing. But Sarah kept asking
questions, kept urging my mother on about this baby and the next.
The more she asked, the more fantastic the stories became. I began
to see how my mother had gotten totally lost in these possessions,
the dresses, the furniture, the dolls.”
“
Her friends shouldn’t have stopped
liking her.”
“
I should have stayed to take care
of her,” he said. “Anyway, Mom finally announced it was time for
dinner, went sweeping off into the kitchen in her grand dress, then
came back with an empty serving platter. She dipped an invisible
ladle into invisible bowls of nothing, and filled our plates with
make-believe food. Sarah was all cooing and full of smiles, while I
watched my poor crazy mother spoon-feed her children.”
“
Your mother believed everything was
real.”
“
She was lonely. My father had left
her alone and she couldn’t deal with it.”
Tiki’s eyes were wide as she fiddled with the
stack of flat rocks. “I know what that’s like.”
“
On the car ride home, Sarah told me
she’d never go back, that my mother should be put in an asylum.
Better yet, she should be put out of her misery, maybe stuffed and
displayed on her front porch like one of her freak-show
parrots.”
“
When you go back home you should
give your mom a Christmas present that will keep her from being
lonely.”
Dash laughed. He snatched one of the bottom row
stones that toppled her pyramid, and then got to his feet. “Let me
guess what you have in mind. Something that meows and chases balls
of yarn?”
“
No,” said Tiki. “You should give
her a kitten.”
“
M
y mama
would have been nice to yours. She would have stayed friends if
their huts were close.”
They were trudging back up to the village side
by side, Tiki full of chatter and wearing the water bucket as a
hat.
“
You call it a house,” she said.
“Hut and house start with the same letter. In my language the word
is
tabu
, and that’s almost the same as
tabua
, but
means something really different.”
She turned and pulled her upper lip back to
show her teeth. “A
tabua
is a whale tooth. I can teach you
all our words. The missioners said our language came from the
animals, so we should learn English.”
“
That was a rotten thing for them to
say. Your language is music, even when I’m getting yelled
at.”
“
Books are in your language, so they
were probably right. I want to make books with pictures of my
favorite things. I’ll write stories about my pictures, but not like
in the Bible. The Bible is too scary. And a lot of the words were
hard even for missioners. Sometimes we asked what a word meant and
they pretended not to hear.”
Dash used the back of his hand to wipe the
sweat streaming over his brow and stinging his eyes. They were in
the tunnel’s final stretch; the opening was a white-hot, lopsided
circle directly ahead.
“
I need more candles,” he said,
chest heaving as though he’d been sprinting.
“
The missioners said heathens live
in darkness. That’s why they taught us to make them.”
Tiki had pulled ahead, was talking over her
shoulder as they emerged into the blinding sun. He followed with
his chin to his chest, trying not to be seen. He’d been using the
ocean for his business instead of the outhouse, but couldn’t
survive without fresh water. She didn’t stop to dip the bucket at
the cistern, kept walking through a group of women busy weaving the
palm fronds used for walls and the open lean-tos for hanging fish
over smoky fires to make their leathery jerky.
They continued down an open path behind the
chief’s hut and into a clearing he hadn’t known existed. Beyond was
a lush field of taro.
“
The missioners said welcoming Jesus
into your heart was lifting a heavy shade. But I don’t understood
how shade can be heavy. I try to pick it up but it makes you part
of it.”
“
I suppose they meant light was
knowledge,” said Dash. “And you were in the dark until you saw
things their way. I’ve also heard that sermon from
teachers.”
“
They built these so we would have
light.” She stepped aside for him to see the four paint-chipped,
wooden bee boxes standing on low stone piles. She skipped over to a
woman tending a metal pot over smoldering coals and threw her arms
across her shoulders for a hug from behind. The woman was pushing
and pulling a bamboo stick to stir heavy liquid. She paused to
listen to the girl, and then nodded. He peeked over the rim of
another pot to see a smaller pot inside, three quarters filled with
a simmering brown mixture that smelled of warm honey.
Tiki danced back to where he was relishing the
sweet scent. “The water boils in the big pot. It heats the smaller
one that holds the wax. It gets hot enough to melt, but not burn. I
know all about it,” she said.
Candles hung in pairs by uncut wicks, suspended
over thin vines tied into a maze in branches of a heavily pruned
puka tree. A second woman was recycling the fancier coconut shell
candles, scraping out the remaining singed wax and polishing the
interiors.
“
Come see.” Tiki led him to one of
the bee boxes swarming with busy workers. A steady stream flew in
from over his shoulders, buzzing past his face to land on the box
and scurry inside. He guessed they were back from collecting
pollen.
“
It’s pretty cool.” He watched her
lift a metal handle to slide a wooden frame section from the top of
the box. Attached was a perfect honeycomb manned by hundreds of
bees, golden honey dripping back into the open slot. She caught
some of the thick cascade in her other palm, took a taste, and
replaced the frame. The box hummed with the sound of their
collaboration.
“
Are there bees at your
house?”
“
I’m pretty sure bees are
everywhere. But I’ve never seen a bee box up close. Our neighbors
made syrup rather than raise honey bees. Syrup is from a tree, the
same as what you used to make my Yule present.”
“
Is it sweet?”
“
A different kind of sweet, but used
in the same ways.”
“
Do they make candles?”
“
No, just the syrup. They drill a
small hole in the tree and it slowly drips into a bucket. Then it
gets boiled down until it’s really thick.”
“
The honeycombs are what make the
candles.” She pointed to a grass mat stacked with tiny connected
hexagons. “Mama was a candle maker before she was killed. I was
little, but I remember washing the honeycombs with her. The bees
make them to hold honey and also their eggs. She let me dip the
candles until they got too heavy.”
“
Families in Vermont make candles
together, too. I’ve seen the wax in stores, big blocks to melt in
kitchen pots.”
“
But you have lights that turn on
without fire. And the metal tubes you hold and point.”
“
Flashlights.”
“
The missioners had them to find the
outhouse at night. The also had them on their boats, but took them
away when they left.”
“
People like my mother burn candles
because they’re pretty. And they come in handy when your batteries
wear out. We get storms called nor’easters that knock over trees
and bring snow that’s almost as deep as you are tall. Our lights
stop working for days after those storms.”
“
Maybe there will be storms like
that where I go.”
He brushed at a bee that tried landing on his
face. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
She lifted some of the empty honeycombs and
dropped them into a bucket half-filled with water. She squatted and
rubbed at the combs one by one, picking out and flicking away dead
bees that floated to the surface.
“
I’ll turn on every light when I’m
in the city,” she said. “I’ll make it like daytime. I won’t want
candles.”
He watched bees circle the girl’s thick hair.
Some landed on her bare shoulder and she chased them with a shrug.
“I’ll still like honey, though,” she said, grabbing more honeycombs
to scrub.
Dash felt a tickle on top of his ear, the buzz
of a bee exploring his own waxy cavity.
“
Don’t swat them,” she said, just as
he began to swat. “They get mad really easy.”
“
Hey!”
He weaved and ducked, was a boxer avoiding a
roundhouse punch from an invisible opponent. Then there was
something electric—a sharp pain that took his breath. It froze him
for a moment and gave the bees an easy place to land. The first
sting was on his neck, beneath the hinge of his jaw. The second was
at the top of his scalp, and the third was in the middle of his
back, where his hands couldn’t reach. He slapped and slapped as the
swarm fell on him, Tiki’s voice drowned out by their angry noise.
He remembered old instructions he’d gotten as a kid about stopping,
dropping, and rolling when you caught on fire. And the sudden
burning pain all over his body sure felt like fire. The screaming
hadn’t been part of the lesson, was his addition to the emergency
drill. He’d been a Cub Scout in a blue uniform and yellow scarf,
laughing with his friends as his den mother made them take turns
extinguishing an imaginary fire by rolling around on her living
room carpet.
It went quiet when his throat closed. Instead
of screaming, he used the energy trying to pull air into his lungs
through an impossibly tiny slit. The bees were in his nose and
mouth, plugging both ears, and some even tried burrowing under his
eyelids. He swiped at his eyes with hands that had become fat
clubs, useless for any more swatting. Every movement became an
enormous effort, his muscles numbing from poison, the Earth’s
gravity tripling. The ground turned slow circles as he lay spent on
his back, chest heaving as he gasped for breath.
There were worried female voices, and Tiki was
crying. But at least the bees had begun their victorious retreat.
He tried spitting out the ones that had turned his tongue into a
useless lump, but they weren’t leaving until they were good and
ready, emerging from between swollen lips to take flight one by
one. Did honey bees die after using their stingers? He hoped so,
and he made a mental note to tell Tiki that syrup making was a
thousand times safer than this honey and candle stuff. Sure, maybe
a maple tree fell on your house in one of those nor’easters, but
there was none of this crawling up your nose and trying to sting
your brains shit.
His vision went black as he willed himself
toward a dark place, away from the burning stingers and the
lingerers burrowed in his tangled hair, delivering final volleys.
He was stirred back when he was lifted by his wrists and ankles,
tried twisting free in a sudden panic, certain the bees had
returned with burlier reinforcements.
“
Looks like a pig,” said one of the
bees attached to a wrist. “Pink skin all fat, like it gonna
pop.”
Another bee laughed, made its own joke in the
island language, then grunted when it latched onto his ankles and
worked for a solid hold on his greasy skin.
He surrendered and managed to relax in their
grip. He allowed himself to be carried away with no further fight,
dreamed he was a balloon swaying on the wind over a forest of sharp
tree limbs.
* * *
The bees were back. He tried getting up, to
move from the noise, only to bang his head. He lifted a hand to the
rock wall, reached down to the familiar mat beneath his thighs.
Something was wrong with his fingers, as though he’d stuck them in
a pair of boxing gloves. His thumbs seemed to wiggle, but the other
fingers were squeezed together, so bloated there was no separation.
He touched his face, but it was a distant feeling, pins and
needles, as though his fingers and face had fallen
asleep.
The swarm raged. Their anger was carried by the
onshore breeze that occasionally caused the flame of his candles to
flinch. He listened, lying trapped in his cave with no hiding spots
for anything larger than a spider. There was a bubbling to the
drone, and he remembered the bees wanting into his mouth, his
inability to spit them out. Now his mouth was dry, tongue a solid
block against the back of his teeth.