Lake of Sorrows

After that encounter, the notion of the bees had kept at him. He was plagued with curiosity about what went on inside the hive, and he wondered how people ever managed to extract honey if the bees were such ferocious defenders. On his third visit, he’d found a musty old book about beekeeping in the ruined house; he brought it home to read, making sure it was well hidden beneath his stash of maps and school papers. The book, with its descriptions of queens, workers, drones, nurse bees, and undertakers, of their orderly existence and mysterious chemical communications, only whetted his appetite for more. He haunted the libraries in Birr and Tullamore, returning from each visit with another beekeeping book secreted under his jacket, hands clammy with excitement over the new knowledge it might impart.

Once he had read every book he could lay his hands on, he’d sent away for a white beekeeping suit and veil. When he’d finally assembled the equipment he needed to set about putting the apiary to rights, his work had started in earnest. It could have occurred to him that his presence might be ruining his mother’s place of solitude, but he was too caught up, and reasoned that she could simply go there when he was at school. He’d begun very gradually, using a scythe to clear away the tall weeds, setting up the tumbledown hives and repairing the holes in their sides. In doing so, he’d found one or two boards bearing the unmistakable impression of a sledgehammer. In the dozen years he’d been working at it, he’d turned the apiary into a haven. He hoped his mother still went there. If she did, she never acknowledged this thing they shared, not even when he brought her the first jar of honey from the hives.

He’d used the ruined house as his supply shed, just as the previous beekeeper had done. One day last autumn he’d found a small leather-bound book just inside the shed door, as though it had been left there for him. It was a beekeeper’s journal, unsigned, anonymous. There was nothing about the keeper’s own life; he wrote only about the bees. The pages contained a dutiful record of his daily work, the season’s cascade of flowering plants, the weather, and the honey that was the distillation of it all. Tucked inside the book he’d found a whole handful of sketches by someone trained in technical drawing, as he himself had been. They were precise, detailed drawings of swords and daggers, mostly, but there were also strange Y-shaped objects, like old-fashioned hardware. Looking at them pleased him, and he had tacked them up in neat rows on the walls of his beekeeping shed. It was still a mystery where they had come from, and not one he was likely to solve.

This place was his sanctuary, away from the demands of the farm and the job, a place where he didn’t have to measure time. He was nearing the apiary, wading through tall grass and wildflowers, aware of their scent and of the faint buzz in the air. Bees had moods, the same as people; the temperature and the weather and the light all affected them in different ways. He had spent time studying the ways they moved, from a swarm’s quivering mass to the delicate, individual dances that spelled out the location of a clover patch somewhere close by. He’d studied the bees’ tiny bodies, marveling at the detail, the perfection of their transparent wings and striped raiment.

The feeling came over him again, the anticipation of a third strange event yet to happen today. There was something unfinished about two of anything. He wouldn’t feel right until it was settled. He could hear the bees’ steady, collective hum as he approached, the reassuring, almost lazy vibration of more than a hundred thousand insects, their legs laden with the gold dust of pollen to be transformed into their precious hoard of sweetness. Bees were not good fliers; sometimes, especially in cold weather, he could sense the effort it took for them to become airborne.

Charlie pushed through the tangle of thistles and blackberry brambles and tall grass that was beginning to invade his small apiary meadow from the edges. He trailed his hands over the fragrant bearded grasses and sweet globes of clover. The bees would be getting their fill. He loved this protected place above the lake, nestled below the hill’s crest, cut off from strong wind and heavy weather. He’d set his hives exactly where the old ones had stood, in an arc around the center of a small depression ringed by whitethorn bushes and apple trees. When the light was right, a person could mistake it for a stone circle, a holy place.