Chapter 1 Lucy Bittersweet
Lucy: Bittersweet
The gray car with the faded white star slows at our mailbox, deliberates, then lumbers down our rutted road, raising dust. It interrupts my reading of The Hidden Staircase when Nancy Drew discovers rickety stairs leading to dark tunnels beneath mansions.
I slip the bookmark in place and watch the arrival from the hayloft, curious.
The car stops under the oak tree whose leaves are limp from summer heat.
The driver turns off the motor, and the cooling engine ticks like a clock marking odd time.
He sits wide and tall in the seat and hasn’t seen me studying him from on high, with my bare legs dangling over the edge of the loft.
He checks his teeth in the mirror, flattens a cowlick with spit, and opens the door.
The hinge creaks as he rolls out. If it’s grave news this government man brings, news that is going to alter our family tree, I thought it would be delivered with more decorum. My belly turns sour.
At the coming of the car, Mama steps on the porch, wiping her hands on her apron.
The screen door slaps behind, and she jumps.
These days she stays wound as tight as Oma’s cuckoo clock because of our men gone to war.
The not knowing is the hard part, Mama says—like my thirteen-year-old self doesn’t know that by now.
The government man is corpulent with flushed cheeks. He carries a battered briefcase and takes two steps while studying a scrap of paper. “I’m looking for David Brown,” he calls out with a voice abnormally high for a heavy man.
“Is it Everett Brown or Wade Sully?” Mama’s voice pinches, saying the names of my oldest brother and my sister Helen’s husband.
“Oh, Lordy, ma’am.” He clears his throat. “I’m sorry I scared you thinking that way, seeing this government car and all. No, ma’am. I bring good news.”
Mama’s body softens, and I turn curiouser.
She rings the dinner bell to call Daddy in from the tobacco field where the crop is already stunted from a dry spell this year.
I come down from the loft, tuck Nancy Drew between hay bales, slip on my bee suit like I was supposed to when I wanted to read instead.
I tie my sneakers and walk out of the barn in time to see the tractor chug this way on high.
Grady stands on the frame, his shirt billowing in the air.
When they get close, Daddy cuts the motor, and they jump down and move at a fast clip.
Mama yells, “It’s not our boys,” so they don’t race their hearts.
Daddy walks up to the stranger, sticks out his right hand mannerly, and slides his toothpick to the corner of his mouth. “I’m David Brown. My son, Grady.”
Juggling the briefcase in his left arm, the good-news man wipes his right hand on his trousers before he shakes Daddy’s hand, then Grady’s.
“I’m John T. Booker, sir, representing the United States government.
Mind me asking how many hives you got there?
” He nods toward the white boxes beyond the barn.
“Beehives?” Daddy was thinking bad news and is confused.
He glances at me holding my bee hat in one hand and the unlit smoker in the other when it should be smoldering.
I can’t help that I love books with a passion and they can interrupt tending bees, but Daddy’s forgiving.
His eyes settle back on the fat man. “Bout a hundred, last count.”
“Whew. That’s a nice operation. Does that come to about a thousand pounds of beeswax and eight thousand pounds of honey a year?” Mr. Booker throws out figures I’ve never heard before.
“Thereabouts…” Daddy answers, but he doesn’t elaborate on how often a hive absconds when the temperatures change, or the queen dies and throws the hive into a quandary, or their food source dries up in a drought like we had two summers back. It’s rare to have all our hives in working order.
“I’m here to talk bee business with you, Mr. Brown.”
“You want my honey?” Daddy frowns because with the war on and sugar scarce, honey is a prized commodity.
“It’s mostly beeswax we need, sir. Is there somewhere we can talk? I’ve got a proposition for you.”
Daddy nods to the table under the oak tree, where dinner is served at noon to field hands. “Here’ll do.”
Mr. John T. Booker brushes off twigs and leaves, sits on the bench, and plops his bulging briefcase on the table.
Grady leans against the tree, chews on his toothpick, and adroitly rolls three glass marbles between his fingers.
Mama sits between my little sisters, Lydia and Cora, shy on each side.
I sit, too, unzipping the bee suit for ventilation.
Unexpected company takes precedence over chores.
My older sister, Irene, is at her newspaper job in town, but she’s going to be sorry to hear a proposition secondhand.
And my oldest sister, Helen, stays inside the house like she’s prone to do.
Mama says it’s melancholy that’s taken hold of Helen since she got in the family way and her husband, Wade, is fighting in the Pacific.
Even a stranger coming and sitting at our table won’t bring her outside.
Mr. Booker looks nervous with so many eyes aimed at him. He is a rumpled mess, rifling through his muddled papers. He pulls out a wrinkled pamphlet, irons it out with his palm, and gives it to Daddy.
“This here will explain what I come to talk about.” He uses his index finger to wipe sweat off his upper lip, leans toward Mama, and speaks low.
“Ma’am, can I bother you for some water?
I’m mighty parched.” With a tilt of her head, she sends Cora to the well to fetch a cup.
Mr. Booker stares after the pale and frail of my sister who has often been mistaken for an apparition.
He takes the cup from her, but his hand trembles.
Still, he drinks the water and nods his thanks.
Daddy reads aloud, “Honeybees and Wartime,” then studies the brochure while we study the government man.
Mr. Booker wears a shirt straining at the buttons and a skinny black tie, like an encyclopedia salesman peddling knowledge a month at a time.
His belt is brown, but his shoes are black with scuffed tips that have never seen a lick of polish.
He has surprisingly tiny feet that don’t look able to keep him upright when the wind blows.
He squirms at the silence and starts talking before Daddy’s done.
“It pretty much says Worker Bees, Uncle Sam Needs You,” and he grins like he told a funny. He adds weakly, “We could use your help, sir,” then studies his chewed fingernails for somewhere to lay his eyes.
I’ve been holding back questions, so in the lull, I let loose in a polite way. “You a military man, Mr. Booker?” I say. I’ve never seen an unkempt military man.
“No, I can’t be a soldier cause I got flat feet,” he says and nods toward his briefcase. “I do paper stuff.”
“Where you from?”
“Greenville,” he says but not which Greenville.
“Did you know there are fifteen states that have towns called Greenville? Unless you’re from Greeneville, Tennessee. That’s different from all the others because of the extra e smack-dab in the middle. Which one are you?”
Mr. Booker mumbles, “North Carolina” without a crumb of interest in the insight I shared. He didn’t even want to know the names of the Greenville states I can list alphabetically. I change course.
“Do you know rubbing beeswax on a fishing line makes it float?”
“No, I do not,” he says.
“Do you like to fish?”
“No, I do not.”
“Who’s your favorite author? I love Carolyn Keene. She wrote the Nancy Drew books about a girl like me who solves mysteries and knows a lot about a lot of things. Do you like mystery books?”
Mama says quietly, “Enough, Lucy,” and cuts off my litany of questions. “Leave Mr. Booker alone.”
I comply, but I already know he’s a dolt who’s pitiful at conversation.
Daddy passes the brochure over to Mama and says, “Let me get this straight,” and shifts his toothpick to the other corner of his mouth, and Grady does the same. “You want some of my honey and all my beeswax.”
“Yes, sir, and we’ll pay good money for it.”
“And if we sell you beeswax, you’ll give us barrels of cane sugar so we can supplement the hives with sugar syrup and sugar cakes. All the sugar I need, no ration coupon needed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Say again what it’s used for?”
“The war effort uses a million pounds of beeswax a year to waterproof canvas tents and lubricate ammunition, drill bits, and cables, stuff like that.”
“You think it’ll last much longer?” Daddy asks.
“Beeswax, sir?”
“The war.”
“Don’t rightly know, but we gotta be ready for what comes.”
Daddy leans back on the chair legs. “Says on that piece of paper my boys won’t have to enlist if they work the hives.”
“Yes, sir… I mean, no, sir. They’ll be doing war duty working bees.
We know making sugar water to keep bees making wax will take a lot of man-hours.
A hundred hives might need twenty-five gallons of sugar water a day.
We’ll give you the sugar, the scale, boxes, paper dividers, cutting tools—everything you need, even the postage to ship the wax—and send you a check. ”
“Is my son-in-law exempt, too?”
“Yes, sir. That release option applies to all the men tied to your family. Well, those who want to stay home, that is. It’s kind of a sweet deal, don’t you think?”
Daddy looks at Mama.
Our bees sign up.