A brief, violent shudder went through me as I thought of the beehives in my old garden—knocked over by the flight of a murderer, the scent of honey from the broken combs mingling with crushed leaves and the sweet, butcher-thick smell of spilled blood.
This time, though, the only foreign body inside the fence was John Quincy Myers, tall and ragged as a scarecrow, and looking quite at home among the red-flowered bean vines and sprouting turnips.
“There you be, Missus Fraser!” he said, smiling widely at sight of me. “You’re well come in your time, as the Good Book says.”
“It does?” I had some vague notion that the Bible might include some mention of bees—perhaps John Quincy’s blessing came from the Psalms or something? “Er … Brianna said that I should come and … bless the bees?”
“Fine-lookin’ woman, your daughter,” Myers said, shaking his head in admiration. “Seen precious few women that size, and none of ’em what you’d call handsome. All pretty lively, though. How did she come to wed a preacher? You wouldn’t think a prayin’ man would be able to do right by her—I mean, in the ways of the flesh, as you might—”
“The bees,” I said, somewhat louder. “Do you know what I should be saying to them?”
“Oh, to be sure.” Recalled to the matter at hand, he turned toward the western edge of the garden, where the battered bee skep had been placed on a board atop a rickety stool. To my surprise, he reached into his bulging knapsack and withdrew four shallow pottery bowls made of the soft white glazed porcelain called creamware, which lent a disconcertingly formal note to the occasion.
“For the ants,” he said, handing me the bowls. “Now, there’s a mort o’ folk what keep bees,” he explained. “The Cherokee do, and the Creek and Choctaw and doubtless some kinds of Indian I don’t know the names of, too. But there’s the Moravians, down to Salem—that’s where I got the ant bowls and the skep. And they got their own ways, too.”
I had a vision of John Quincy Myers, clad in a buzzing blanket of bees, strolling down the streets of Salem, and smiled.
“Wait,” I said. “You surely didn’t carry those bees all the way from Salem!”
“Why, no,” he said, looking mildly surprised. “Found ’em in a tree just a mile or so from your house. But when I heard you ’n’ Jamie was back in your place, I had it in mind to bring you some bees, so I was a-looking out for ’em, see?”
“That was a very kind thought,” I assured him, with great sincerity. It was, but a small, disquieting question popped up in the back of my mind. John Quincy was a law unto himself, and if we were being biblical today, one might easily call him a brother to owls. He roamed the mountains, and if anyone knew where he went or why, they hadn’t told me.
But from what he’d said, he’d been coming to Fraser’s Ridge on purpose, knowing that Jamie and I were here. There were the letters he’d brought, to be sure … but the way the backcountry post worked was for letters to be passed from hand to hand, friend or stranger carrying them on, so long as the letters’ direction lay in their own path—and handing them to someone else when it diverged. For John Quincy to come here with the specific intent of delivering letters implied that there was something rather special about them.
I had no time to worry about the possibilities, though: Myers was winding up a brief exegesis on Irish and Scottish beekeepers, and coming to the point at issue.
“I know a few of the blessings folk use for their hives,” he said. “Not that I’d call what them Germans say sounds much like my notion of a blessing.”
“What do they say?” I asked, intrigued.
His bushy gray brows drew together in the effort of recall.
“Well, it’s … what you may call abrupt. Let me see now …” He closed his eyes and tilted up his chin.
“Christ, the bee swarm is out here!
Now fly, you my animals, come.
In the Lord’s peace, in God’s protection,
come home in good health.
“Sit, sit, bees.
“The command to you from the Holy Mary.
You have no holiday; don’t fly into the woods;
Neither should you slip away from me.
Nor escape from me.
“Sit completely still.
“Do God’s will,” he finished, opening his eyes. He shook his head. “Don’t that beat all? Tellin’ one bee to sit still, let alone a thousand of ’em at once? Why would bees put up with something unmannerly like that, I ask you?”
“Well, it must work,” I said. “Jamie’s brought home honey from Salem, many times. Maybe they’re German bees. Do you know a more … mannerly blessing?”
His lips pursed dubiously, and I caught a glimpse of one or two ragged yellow fangs. Could he still chew meat? I wondered, revising the dinner menu slightly. I could dice the rabbit meat small and stir it into scrambled eggs with chopped onions …
“I suspect I remember most of this’n …
“O God, Creator of all critters, You bless the seed and make it profitable … is that right, profitable? Yes, I reckon that’s it … profitable to our use. By the intercession of … well, there’s a passel of saints or somesuch in there, but dang if I recall anybody but John the Baptist—though if anybody should know about honey, you’d think it’d be him, wouldn’t you? What with the locusts and livin’ in a bearskin—though why anybody’d do like that in a hot place like I hear the Holy Land is, I surely couldn’t say. Anyway …” His eyes closed again, and he stretched out his hand, almost unconsciously, toward the bee skep, wreathed in a slow-moving cloud of flying bees.
“By the intercession of whoever might want to intercede, will You be mercifully hearin’ our prayers. Bless and sanctify these here bees by Your compassion, that they might … Well,” he said, opening his eyes and frowning at me, “it says, abundantly bear fruit, though any damn fool knows it’s honey you want ’em to be abundant with. Still.” The wrinkled lids closed against the dying sunlight again, and he finished, “for the beauty and adornment of Your holy temple and for our humble use.
“They’s a bit more,” he added, dropping his hand and turning to me, “but that’s the meat of it. What it comes down to, I’d say, is you can bless your bees any way as seems fit to you. The only important thing—and you maybe know this already—is that you got to talk to ’em regular.”
“About anything in particular?” I asked warily, flexing my fingers and trying to recall if I’d ever had a conversation with my previous hives.
I probably had, but not consciously. I was, like most gardeners, in the habit of muttering to myself among the weeds and vegetables, execrating bugs and rabbits and exhorting the plants. God knew what I might have said to the bees along the way …
“Bees are real sociable,” Myers explained, and blew one of them gently off the back of his hand. “And they’re curious, which only makes sense, them goin’ back and forth and gatherin’ news with their pollen. So you tell ’em what’s happening—if someone’s come a-visitin’, if a new babe’s been born, if anybody new was to settle or a settler depart—or die. See, if somebody leaves or dies,” he explained, brushing a bee off my shoulder, “and you don’t tell the bees, they take offense, and the whole lot of ’em will fly right off.”