String of Excerpts # 12
Still, when August removed the lids, the bees poured out in thick black ropes, breaking into strands, a flurry of tiny wings moving around our faces. The air rained bees, and I sent them love, just like August said.
She pulled out a brood frame, a canvas of whirling blacks and grays, with rubbins of silver. "There she is, Lily, see her?" said August. "That's the queen, the large one."
I made a curtsy like people do for the queen of England, which made August laugh.
I wanted to make her love me so she would keep me forever. If I could make her love me, maybe she would forget about Beatrix the nun going home and let me stay.
When we walked back to the house, darkness had settled in and fireflies sparked around our shoulders. I could see Roaleen and May through the kitchen window finishing the dishes.
August and I sat in collapsible lawn chairs beside a crepe myrtle that kept dropping blossoms all over the ground. Cello music swelled out from the house, rising higher and higher until it lifted off the earth, sailing toward Venus.
I could see how such music drew the ghosts out of dying people, giving them a ride to the next life. I wished June's music could've seen my mother out.
I gazed at the stone wall that edged the backyard.
"There are pieces of paper in the wall out there," I said, as if August didn't know this.
"Yes, I know. It's May's wall. She made it herself."
"May did?" I tried to picture her mixing cement, carrying rocks around in her apron.
"She gets a lot of the stones from the river that runs through the woods back there. She's been working on it ten years or more."
So that's where she got her big muscles---rock lifting. "What are all those scraps of paper stuck in it?"
"Oh, it's a long story," August said. "I guess you've noticed--May is special."
"She sure does get upset easy," I said.
See Lily when you and I hear about some misery out there, it might make us feel bad for a while, but it doesn't wreck our whole world. It's like we have a built-in protection around our hearts that keeps the pain from overwhelming us. But May--she doesn't have that. Everything just comes into her--all the suffering out there--and she feels as if it's happening to her. She can't tell the difference."
Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray's mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother--that hearing it she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?
Rosaleen's voice drifted from the kitchen window, followed by May's laughter. May sounded so normal and happy right then, I couldn't imagine how she'd gotten the way she was--one minute laughing and the next overrun with everybody's misery. The last thing I wanted was to be like that, but I didn't want to be like T. Ray either, immune to everything but his own selfish life. I didn't know which was worse.
"Was she born like that?" I asked.
"No, she was a happy child at first."
"Then what happened to her?".......
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