Finding Honey
Daniel Reiss
To find honey, I must first find a bee. It’s not that hard to find a bee. I just wander the woods till I find a source of water. If I come to a creek or a river, I’ll nearly always find bees. (Like little sponges, honeybees soak themselves in water then carry it home for their larvae to drink. The only job of some worker bees is to carry water all day long.) Once I find a bee, all I have to do is follow it back to the nest. That’s where I find my honey.
Some honey seekers, like my Uncle Hebbins, use bait to lure bees. They’ll crush up dry tansy leaves and sprinkle the residue in a pan of sugar water, then set the pan outside in the yard. On warm, breezy days, bees whiff the tansy and zoom in from the hills and meadows. But I don’t believe in baiting bees. It removes the sport from the hunt and bitters the sweetness of the prize.
Today, the first bee I follow is plump, lazy, loping in high circles above the creek. It soars ten feet above my squinting eyes, till I’m knocked blind by the afternoon sun. When I spot the bee again, it’s heading toward the opposite bank. I wade across the shin-deep creek, stepping over two salamanders—each black with yellow spots—sunbathing on a mossy rock. My guide buzzes like a chainsaw and flies at a relaxed pace, easy to track. I chase the bee uphill into the woods, a small wooden pail banging against my hip. My leather shoes track smoothly over the rocks and roots. I cobbled the brogans and cut the shoestrings myself, just like every other pair of shoes I’ve owned.
The bee twists a path up the steep southern face of Revelation Ridge. Summertime in East Tennessee often feels like drowning in a bowl of soup. Sweat burns the corners of my eyes. The fire in my lungs invigorates me. After two years in jail, I’m lucky to be free again, wandering these hills, home at last.
The only friend I made in jail was the librarian, a long-necked old Melungeon named Ron Collins, who was from a mining hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, a place not much larger than Lost Dog Valley, where I hail from. Ron made his rounds every Wednesday morning at nine, pushing his squeaky cart of books. I’d hear him coming before the cell’s steel door unbolted. Everyone in jail was a reader with Ron as librarian.
I hadn’t read a book in years before I got locked up, then plowed through four in my first month. I’d line up behind my cellmates in my rubber sandals waiting my turn. I knew Ron would have something special stashed for me. He was an English teacher in his past life, now doing time for vehicular manslaughter. He spent hours each week writing letters to local nonprofits, asking for donations to our jail library. From Ron, I read Hemingway, Dickens, Morrison, and Welty. I read books about outer space and sharks and Ancient Egypt. But my favorite book of all was Buzzed: An Encyclopedia of Bees, which I talked Ron into letting me keep after I ripped the covers off with use. I read about bees till I remembered every word on every page.
It was all I could do to keep from going insane, really.
The bee I’m tracking flutters slowly uphill. I’m relieved. On such a steep incline, every step feels like three. For a quarter mile, I’m able to wander beneath its shadow. The bee stops to pollinate the daylilies and the black-eyed Susans and the early clusters of goldenrod tipped with tiny, yellow flowers. It then buzzes over a dense thorn thicket, too wide to walk around, and I’m forced to chop through the tangle of vines with my hatchet. When I emerge on the other side, my arms are gashed and bloody. The bee has left me behind, risen like Christ into the ancient pines.
A lot of people think bees fly in straight lines (hence the commonly misused term beeline, meaning straight as a bullet.) Not true. I’ve seen bees flying in figure-eight patterns for hours while collecting nectar from milkweed and zinnias, pollinating entire meadows. They are not aimless or lazy creatures. They are single-minded in their tasks. They float freely without bounds, yet they always return home.
I open a small canteen and splash rotgut on my scratched arms, taking two pulls for myself. The whiskey tastes like smoldered firewood, gritty with sediment. Before I went to jail, Roe Butler gave me six jars of homebrew to build his mama’s coffin. I finished it in two days, sturdy and simple. I told Roe the cedar box would last long after humans are extinct: Till the sun turns to darkness and the moon to blood. And all that remains on earth is dust. He nodded uneasily—like I was a crazy person—as I mangled the few lines of Old Testament I thought I knew. Then he replied, “As long as it keeps the rats from gettin’ at her.”
Now that I’m out of jail, Roe won’t talk to me. He calls me a murderer.
Licking whiskey from my lips, I check my bearings and see I’m over halfway up Revelation Ridge. The narrow mountain is named after an old chapel that was built on the ridgetop by the first long hunters who settled in Lost Dog Valley, crossing over the Blue Ridge Mountains from Virginia in the early 1800s. Long before I was born, as legend has it, the church was struck by lightning and burned down. Strong winds and drought conditions raked the fire down the north side of the mountain, torching everything in its path while sparing Revelation’s southern face. Today it’s easy to see that the trees on the northern half of the ridge are much younger than the old-growth forest looming over Lost Dog Valley. Papaw Rich told me once that, had the winds been blowing differently the night lightning struck the chapel, Lost Dog would’ve been reduced to ash: “Mercy, sometimes I wish it would have been,” he cackled.
I wait for another bee to fly up from the creek. I smell a dead animal nearby, a carcass rotting in the sun. Before he died, Papaw Rich used to spin yarns of hard times, of rancid critters he found dead in the woods or on the road that he ate raw, his belly empty. “Folks these days don’t know what hard times is,” he used to gripe, clucking his tongue against his gums. Papaw Rich was the one who taught me how to track bees and hunt honey when I was a boy. He said I was built for it. I could scurry up any tree, dangle off any branch, wedge myself into any crack, reach any nest. I always got my honey. He made me feel special for never getting stung. He talked me up like I had some sort of superpower, called me a kindred spirit of the bees. He used to say, “There must be honey in your blood somewhere down the line, son,” and I reckon, after all these years, he was right. I’ve never been stung.
Papaw Rich was a proud grandpappy. He was also a braggart. He told everyone in Lost Dog there wasn’t a honeybee alive who’d sting his grandson. He jabbered so much that it finally aggravated his longtime nemesis, Billy Peck, enough that Peck wrangled a nest of five hundred bees off Revelation Ridge and brought them back to Lost Dog in a cardboard box. He showed the bees to Papaw Rich, then asked him if I was still unstingable. Papaw Rich came and fetched me from my best friend Curtis’s house without telling me what he was fetching me for. By the time we got back to Billy Peck’s place, the whole community had congregated to watch. Billy smiled ear-to-ear as he showed me the box. I could hear the bees roaring inside. When the lid opened, Billy jumped back, but I stood my ground as the bees swarmed me. I asked someone to bring me a bottle of honey, and Myra Peck went inside her house and came back with a plastic bottle shaped like a teddy bear. I caught it with one hand, then rubbed the honey on my face like I meant to shave with it. “What the hell is he doing?” someone whispered. “The freak is even crazier than I thought.” I giggled as hundreds of bees bearded my face. After their feast, the bees flew back into the box without herding on my part. I shut the lid, wiped the honey crusts off my face with a wet rag. Billy Peck told me to take my shirt off. Everyone got quiet while he checked me for stingers. After a while, he told me to put my arms down.
“Y’ain’t lyin’, Rich,” Billy said, then handed Papaw a twenty-dollar bill. “The freak really is unstingable.” The neighbors started applauding me, cheering my name. My friends Curtis, Jaron, and Beak lifted me on their shoulders, and for a moment, I was taller than every building in Lost Dog. High above the crowd I could almost see the blue sky beyond the ridgeline. It felt like I was flying.
Two years ago, it was alleged that I shot and killed a man at the Texaco station in Jellico.
I’d never seen police cars in Lost Dog till those four cruisers blazed in to pick me up one Sunday after church, cherries flashing. The officers claimed a gun was found in Jellico Creek near the Texaco station; they said it was registered to me. I told the cops the truth: the Smith & Wesson had been stolen out of my duffel bag over a year ago in Indian Mountain State Park, but they didn’t believe me. They said I should’ve reported it. All of Lost Dog rubbernecked as they hauled my ass to jail. The neighbors ducked their heads and whispered on their porches, as if they were ashamed to know me.
“Don’t y’all get worked up!” I hollered. “I’m an innocent man!”
No one said a word.
I festered for twenty-two months in the Campbell County Jail before trial. They locked me in a pod with the other violent offenders and left me there to rot. The pod was designed to hold eight inmates, but there were never fewer than fifteen. The sheriff’s office rented out beds to overcrowded state prisons, receiving a per-diem rate for each inmate they brought in to help fill gaps in the county budget. They packed us together like caged chickens in box trucks taking them to slaughter.
The first public defender appointed to me encouraged me to take a plea deal, but I told him no; the innocent don’t plead guilty. After a few months working on my case, the young lawyer threw a tantrum and told me to expect life without parole. I had a new lawyer two days later. She was a lot higher on my chances. She’d graduated from a law school up north, and I could tell it was a good one by the way she said its name, making it sound like an expensive, foreign dessert. I was surprised to learn she was a local, impressed by her lack of accent. She’d recently left a big law firm in Boston and returned to her Tennessee roots. “Because my people need me,” she said, when I asked her why she came home.
The trial lasted eight days. I’d never worn a suit before. My lawyer’s law degree was worth every penny she’d spent on it. She sounded brilliant, bringing up the lack of fingerprints at the crime scene, the absence of any physical evidence at all other than the gun and the bullet and some grainy security footage. She made it seem like small potatoes that my alibi didn’t line up. She spoke to the jurors like they were her friends, and at one point, she asked the judge to stop calling her sweetheart. My leg didn’t stop jittering the whole time, my knee thumping under the table.
The jurors took a long time deliberating my fate. The whole case hinged on whether or not one of them believed it was possible that the gun was stolen from me and then used without my knowing. These are the people who are going to decide your life, I thought, after two hours on the witness stand. All twelve jurors looked ready to throw the book at me. As the judge read the verdict, I had to hold my lawyer’s arm to keep from passing out. She hugged me when the judge read, “Not guilty.”
Behind us, there was a roar of disapproval from the galley. The dead Texaco attendant had deep roots in Campbell County. He wasn’t from Lost Dog, but he wasn’t far from it. He knew folks in Lost Dog, for sure—Roe Butler being one of them. Nobody wanted to believe I was innocent. Nobody from home came to support me. Not even Curtis or my parents.
I heard threats on my life shouted like bids at a cattle auction. A retired Sunday School teacher told me to “await Satan’s raping.” A little girl with kittens on her shirt spit on my shoes as I walked down the courthouse steps. I smiled and shook my head at the angry drone of voices.
It was late spring, the air sweet with mulch. Dandelions bloomed out of cracks in the sidewalk. The bees will be buzzing when I get home, I thought. And they are much kinder than people.
Behind me, the mouth of a small cave opens like the rigid yawn of a dead man, fuzzed with moss and drooling gray water. I’m sitting on a ledge in a shrubby patch of yellow grass. The ridge is so steep that the trees around me grow horizontally instead of vertically. Looking down, I can see all of Lost Dog Valley, the rusty buildings spread out like a town of forgotten toys; the overfarmed cornfields shriveled up in soil that resembles brown ash; steel-lattice transmission towers running power to towns I’ve never seen before, places with traffic lights and grocery stores.
Another bee floats up from the creek. It’s smaller and faster than the first bee—too fast, and I quickly surrender pursuit. But another one soon arrives, and this bee, I feel, is the one: my shepherd to the nest. It stops and waits for me when I lag behind, flying back to greet me every time I feel abandoned. As we reach an outcrop where the land levels out, the bee drops down like a plane on a runway, the way a plane descends in my dreams.
I was eight years old the first time I saw a plane. It soared over Lost Dog Valley so fast I couldn’t tell if it was going up or coming down.
I went to school over in Jellico and had to walk a mile down Pistol Creek Road with the other Lost Dog kids just to catch a bus. The plane was all Curtis, Jaron, Beak, and I could talk about for days after we saw it, imagining the freedom of flight, the ability to go anywhere. The plane almost didn’t seem real in our tiny, simplistic bubble.
Fourteen years later, I don’t even want to think about any of them, my old friends. It makes me too sad. To this day, none of us have flown. Two of us are dead. It’s been a year since Beak lost his battle with Oxy, several years since Jaron hung himself over an ex. Neither of them saw a clean path out of Lost Dog. Few do. The hollow has a gravity all its own.
I feel as though I’ve been sucked back through a straw.
Curtis, my best bud since we were babies, lives in a two-bedroom shack in Lost Dog with his wife, Laney, and three toddlers whose names all start with J. He has his own truck and works on the production line at Smithfield Foods, a better job than anyone else I know in the hollow. I was surprised when, last night, over beers, he told me we couldn’t be friends anymore. It was two weeks after my release, the first time I’d been alone with him. We met in secret so no one would know he was talking to me, sitting in his truck under Coulter’s Bridge. “It’s Laney,” Curtis said, his voice unlike anything I’d ever heard. Crueler. “She just don’t want people getting the wrong idea, me associating with you and all.”
“I understand,” I said. I just wanted to go home. I’d been staying in Papaw Rich’s old cabin since my release, the one he left me in his will while I was in jail. Curtis laughed and shook his head, the way a rich man might if he caught a poor friend stealing from him.
“You did it though, didn’t you, Freak?” he asked, jamming the keys in the ignition. He never called me Freak before then. Not like everyone else in Lost Dog. Not once. “You killed that kid?”
I heard something buzzing overhead, lights twinkling in the dark night sky. “Curtis, look.” I pointed out the truck window. “It’s a plane.”
“Who gives a shit?”
It hurts me to know that he is right. Even if I could fly away from here, where the hell would I go?
There are three types of honeybees: workers, queens, and drones.
The workers are the bees I follow back from the creek. They are females, providers, wanderlust gatherers who pollinate the world, the muscled engine sustaining every colony.
The queen is, well, exactly as her title indicates. Her power is singular and her presence essential, a god in her honeycomb domain.
The drones, meanwhile, are nothing but “old roosters,” as Papaw Rich used to call them. Moochers and deadbeats: male bees who hunker inside the nest, fertilizing the queen and gorging on the limited food the workers bring home. It’s not uncommon for the drones to become so numerous that it irritates the workers. When this happens, the larger worker bees will drag the drones out of the nest and either cut off their wings or sting them to death.
I’ve witnessed this savage phenomenon many times in the late summer and early fall, and it always makes me wonder: Am I a drone?
The old white oak is swarming with bees: a tall, sturdy tree with long, swooping branches that rake the nearby hemlocks. There used to be a time when landowners sued people for stealing honey out of a tree if the landowner could prove the tree grew on their private property. Those days are long gone. Not because the laws have changed, just the people who break them. People in this day and age, even in the backwoods where I live, don’t know how to forage their own honey. They don’t know how to rebottom a chair or disembowel an animal or even tie a proper knot: skills taught to me as a boy. They’ve forgotten the old subsistence arts of our ancestors, shrugged them off as boring, nonessential. They’re too busy fiddling on their smart pads and cell phones. Even Papaw Rich broke down before he died and got himself a little burner.
What I’m getting at is this: If any of my neighbors—never mind their opinions of me—saw this massive tree swarming with bees, they would not be interested. They would consider it dangerous, cower away from it, seeing little value in such a beautiful tree. And although modern technology is not solely to blame for this ignorance, I bet many of my neighbors are staring at the screens on their cell phones right now. And they will never know how sweet honey can taste or, more importantly, the pride that comes with knowing.
About twenty feet up the tree, the bees fly in and out of a gourd-shaped hole. A thick branch flexes out like a bicep muscle directly above the hole, forming a little nook. The end of the branch stretches thirty feet into a dead hemlock, the trunk of which has been severed by strong winds and rot. The withered hemlock slants sideways up the mountain, its weight supported by the oak branch. The geometry of the two trees creates a natural bridge to the honey hole. It feels like a good omen.
I scale the fallen tree, then scrabble across the oak branch on my stomach to reach the nest. Hundreds of bees cloud around me. The hissing whir of wings is therapeutic. To them, I’m just another warm, fuzzy body amid the swarm. Family. The branch wobbles gently under my weight, but I don’t fear falling. I’ve never fallen from a tree before. One curious honeybee lands on my eye, and when I blink, it flies away.
Close to the hole, I saddle the branch and chisel the oak hollow gently with my hatchet till it’s wide enough to reach my arm inside. I try to be courteous and not disturb the bees as they fly in and out. Before I get to the honey, I must sift through the trash—the sticky brown resin not fit for eating. Once that’s done, I unfasten the bucket from my belt and use my hands to scoop out the first load of honey. There must be a gallon in there! The golden goo oozes through my fingers. It has a charred smell, a floral sweetness, the prettiest honey I’ve ever seen.
The pinch on my neck is so sudden that I wonder if I’ve imagined it—though the electric pain is entirely real. Is this what a shot at the doctor’s office feels like? I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to a doctor before, only a nurse in county jail. I slap the sore spot on the back of my neck and crush a bee between sticky fingers. The texture of its smeared innards makes me want to gag and weep. Then I yelp, wounded by another pinch. I jerk a stinger out of my calf. It looks so small and harmless that it makes me grin. I say, “That’s no worse than a horsefly.” And although I’m disappointed that my stingless streak has ended, I find solace in the fact that the only person who will ever know the truth is me.
I continue pillaging the nest, drippy fistfuls of honey. As I prepare for my descent, another bee stings my elbow, then another tags my collarbone. The pain jolts me, unzips my sweaty fingers, I drop the bucket, watch it bounce between branches and bang off a rock thirty feet below. The honey seeps onto the dirt. The sight hardens my throat, and I lose my temper, beating the oak branch with my hatchet. When I look up, dozens of bees are zooming out of the tree, turning my face into a dartboard. I swat blindly, whiffing the air, swearing like a baptized demon. The hatchet clatters through the branches, as a bee spirals down my throat, stinging my windpipe. I try to retch it up, but it’s stuck. The earth spins and shakes, my grip on the branch loosens. Which way is up? Which is down? I’ve lost all control. I feel myself falling, the forest floor rising up to meet me.
A fevered sense of doom as I open my eyes.
How long have I been here, lying unconscious? Orange dusk slants through the trees. Is my skin on fire? Why does it feel on fire? I see blurry lips ballooning in the front of my face, as my thoughts fuzz pathetically. My eyeballs leak sticky fluids. I try to swallow, but it’s impossible. Where has all my saliva gone? Have my lungs been replaced with deflated footballs? I look down at the splintered bone jutting out of my forearm. I can barely feel it. Above me, I see the tree branch I fell from, the honey hole, the cloud of bees. They are oblivious to my suffering, as merciless as my neighbors in Lost Dog. The capsized bucket rests next to me, empty. I can almost touch it with my broken arm. The honey has formed a puddle on the dead leaves.
As I struggle to my feet, I’m rocked by waves of dizziness and nausea. The world fades around me in strobes of light and shadow, my eyelids swollen together. In perfect health, it might take forty-five minutes to get home from here. I stumble through the woods, spitting sour foam. Then my foot snags a root, and I somersault down the mountain. When I finally stop rolling, I’m pancaked against a mushroom-ridden stump.
Anticipating the worst, I try to make myself comfortable, resting my head against the stump’s soft wood. The bone protruding out of my arm snapped off during the fall. Exposed nerves quiver in the wind. I can barely breathe now. My lungs feel cemented, my throat functioning like a clogged pipe. The blurry edges of my vision burn a brilliant haze of orange, channeling the gloam. I sense something beckoning me towards the fading sun.
Coming up from the creek, I see a bee corkscrew through the air. It flies up to me and lands on the fleshy webspace between my thumb and first finger. The bee does not sting me, its fuzzy legs tickling my skin. It bows its tiny head to nibble at the honey dried on my hand—the last thing I see, the last thing I feel, before shuttering my eyes.