Lake of Sorrows

He tried to remember how he’d come to the conclusion that his mother was at least as odd as he in some ways. Some of it had come from watching her work with the sheep. She always had soft hands, from the lanolin in the wool. He’d seen her work around the clock at lambing time, her shirt and trousers sticky with blood and afterbirth, and he knew she felt much more than she ever gave away. Once he’d watched her chasing a carrion crow away from a lamb, the firstborn of a pair of twins. As the ewe struggled giving birth to the second lamb, the bird had settled beside the firstborn and plucked out one of its eyes. He remembered his mother running at the crow with a strange, strangled cry in her throat, flapping her arms like a madwoman, and taking the wounded lamb into her arms. They hadn’t been able to save it.

When he was fourteen, he had found out by accident that his mother wasn’t at home some days. He’d mitched from school one day and sneaked back to the house, only to find that there wasn’t any need for stealth; his mother wasn’t even in the house. She’d returned about two hours later with no parcels, no evidence of where she’d been all morning. The following week he’d mitched again and followed her, ducking behind hedges, using all the skills he’d acquired playing spies. It had been a warm October day, and she’d taken the same path he was taking now, up through the pasture behind the house and along the lane that led to an old orchard. He’d gone there occasionally as a child, but eventually the bees had kept him away. He hadn’t set foot in the place for years. He’d watched his mother wade through the tall weeds toward a small stone house with grass sprouting from its rotting thatched roof. No one else was about. He crouched by the roadside and watched, breathless with secret knowledge, as she pushed open the old door. There was no one else inside. Through the windows he could see her moving slowly around the small room, occasionally reaching out to touch an object on the windowsill or hanging from the wall. After a few minutes, she sat down on the cot against the wall opposite the door. She drew her legs up to her chest and sat like that in the ruined house for a solitary hour, in silence.

He’d had to keep shifting his weight so that his legs wouldn’t go to sleep, and he breathed silently, conscious of every sound and movement that might draw her attention. As he crouched there, he heard a sound, a faraway droning; he didn’t quite realize what it was until a single honeybee dropped onto the sleeve of his jacket. He held perfectly still as the bee clumsily traversed his coat’s brown canvas hills and valleys. After about a minute it had given up and flown away, and he’d looked up to see his mother’s face in profile through the door of the ruined cottage. Suddenly he remembered the feeling that had spread across his chest at that moment, the slow realization that every creature on earth had a secret interior life. The idea had filled him, traveled like electricity out to the ends of his fingertips. It felt enormous. And far from feeling betrayed, he remembered thinking it quite fantastic that his mother could be alone with her thoughts, away from him and away from his father, totally separate from them. He’d sunk down in the weeds and sat watching. He didn’t know what this place was to her, and he decided at that moment that he didn’t want to know.

After another thirty minutes, she’d risen from the cot and left the orchard, retracing the same path she’d taken earlier. This time he’d followed her only as far as the back fence. When he came into the house twenty minutes later, he searched for any sign that she’d seen him. But she was calmly laying the table for their dinner as usual, without a word, with no outward sign that she’d been out of the house all afternoon. His guilt about spying on her was assuaged somewhat by his gladness that she had another life.

He’d decided not to follow her again, but a few days later he had trod the narrow path up to the orchard, to explore the place. What he’d discovered was an apiary, a circle of nine rotting wooden hives half hidden beneath the nettles and buachalans that had nearly taken over the grove. The first hive he’d uncovered was tipped over and encrusted with granulated honey. There was an enormous hole in the side of the box where bees were coming and going. The keeper had obviously abandoned them, but the bees had carried on, unmindful of human indifference. He’d tried to lean in and see into the hole, but when he lost his balance and tried to steady himself on the hive, a stream of angry bees started pouring out of the opening. He’d had to make a run for it, ducking under whitethorn branches until he was safely out of their path.