Gretchen stands in the back yard, surveying the clothesline, the garden, and the cherry tree. She has just finished hanging her father’s laundry out to dry, and the line sags under the weight of his wet work clothes. The knees of his coveralls are stained with axle grease, which Gretchen has long since stopped trying to get out in the wash. Above her, the sky is hazy with humidity, more white than blue. Cumulus clouds build and threaten on the horizon, their underbellies pink, their caps rimmed in gold. Gretchen knows this type of summer sky rarely delivers on its promise of rain. She is 16, dark-eyed and pale even though she spends her afternoons working out in the garden, sweating under the close Midwestern sun. The rhubarb and asparagus have gone to seed, and the first planting of lettuce is getting ready to bolt. Tomorrow, Gretchen thinks, she will weed the new rows of green beans and dig the radishes. Today she’ll pick cherries before the birds get them all. If she can wash and pit and freeze most of the cherries by early afternoon, she will have time to make a pie for this evening’s dessert. Her father has a sweet tooth she likes to feed. If there’s no time to cut the lard and salt and water into flour for a pie crust, she’ll make a cherry cobbler with Bisquick instead.
If she makes a pie, her father will tell her that her crusts are as light and flaky as her mother’s always were, and though her mother died some 10 years ago — long before Gretchen could have learned to cook — she might say, “It’s the best thing I got from her.” Her father will say, “That and your good looks.” Gretchen remembers little of her mother, and rarely consults old photo albums to verify whether what her father says is true. Perhaps she cannot remember her mother because in many ways she’s had to take her mother’s place. For years now, she’s played the tricky double role of daughter-wife. Her father never asked her to cook or keep the house, but by the time she was 10, Gretchen knew if she didn’t do it, no one would. She spends more time thinking about a grocery budget than about boys at school. Now, at 16, she’s begun to consider what kind of man her father really is. He is fat, though she does nothing to mitigate this, and easily angered, but very rarely by her. He displays a decal of the black flag of POWs in the back window of his station wagon. He has a bumper sticker of a bald eagle superimposed on the Stars and Stripes. He has recently added a magnetic yellow ribbon. Earlier in the spring, he started a fistfight in the parking lot of a grocery store over bumper stickers. Some kid came out to find Gretchen’s father trying to remove a sticker from the kid’s Subaru that read, “George W. Bush is a Punk Chump.” Her father does not deny throwing the first punch. Though he refuses to discuss it with her, Gretchen knows there’s litigation pending about the incident.
“You don’t have to like the man,” her father had said the evening after the fight, his face still red with anger, sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her to put supper on, “but I’ll be damned if some snot-nosed college kid is going to disrespect the office like that. What does that bumper sticker say about him, Gretchen?” her father asked.
“I don’t know,” Gretchen said, setting a bowl of fried potatoes on the table. She pulled the pork chops from under the broiler and plopped one on her father’s plate. “Beer?” she asked.
“It says he doesn’t have a brain in his head,” her father said. “And he’s a coward. And yes, I’d like a beer. People like that make me sick.”
“Dad, eat,” Gretchen said, and her father did.
Now, searching in the garage for the aluminum ladder to drag out to the cherry tree, it occurs to Gretchen that she and her father rarely converse. She cooks and listens; he works and talks. She suspects other fathers and daughters do it differently. There are some nights when — after the dishes are done — she watches her father sitting at the kitchen table, his shaggy, bearded head bent over the day’s paper. He has no one other than her, and sometimes, she secretly wishes he had her mother instead.
Three miles away, across a field of winter wheat that has already begun to dry and turn in the heat, Marcus extracts honey in his father’s basement. It is too early to harvest the honey in earnest, but Marcus has been restless and nervous since he returned to his father’s house, and this morning he swiped a couple of supers from a flourishing hive just to give himself something to do. The basement is cool and damp, the cement floor clammy with condensation. Sunlight filters in from two small windows up near the bare rafters. He stands a sticky, gold-black frame of honeycomb on its end and slices the caps off with a sharp fillet knife. He turns the frame and slices the caps off the other side. The waxy covers that seal in the honey fall free of the frame in gooey sheets. He places the frame in the extractor and repeats the process until the extractor is full. Then he seals the lid and turns the crank by hand so the frames whirl around inside like a carnival ride, and a thin ribbon of golden honey rolls down the tap.
Before returning to his father’s house, Marcus spent 18 months sick on adrenaline, his mouth dry with sand, his nose full of smoke. He went weeks without showering and months without a decent night’s sleep. He came to love his rifle so feverishly, his hands hurt when he wasn’t holding it. He began to have strange fantasies about which he has spoken to no one. Since coming home, he has dreamed only of manning checkpoints. He wakes sometimes with his clenched fist in the air, signaling a phantom car to stop. In his dreams he can smell burning tires and hear the pop of small arms fire in the distance. In the worst dreams, he hears an engine gunning, gravel flying, the confused shouting of men. He feels his assault rifle leaping and kicking, alive in his hands. When it is over, he examines the bullet-pocked hulk of the car, the blood and motor oil trickling out onto the ground, the mangled body of a boy in the back seat. He wakes shouting and swearing in the dark. He doesn’t remember what it feels like to go through his day unaware of his heart in his chest. Near the end of his tour, after tracking down rumors on the Internet of other soldiers who’d done so successfully, he applied for a change of status.
When he came home on leave, his paperwork still pending, his application moving so slowly from one desk to the next, he called his dad. Marcus has lived with his mother since his parents split in 1996, but from a pay phone on base, he asked, “Any chance of shacking up at your place for a while, Pops?”
“Come on home, Marcus,” his father had said.
Their paths have crossed before, Marcus and Gretchen’s, though neither has any reason to think of it this afternoon. They shared the same bus route back before Marcus and his mother moved to Tennessee. Marcus was 12 and Gretchen just 7. He sat in the first seat rather than in the back with all the other middle-school kids. He never spoke to anyone, just sat and watched out the window as if the weeds along the side of the road might one day change. At the time, Gretchen liked watching Marcus, his profile sharp against the frosted glass of the bus window in winter. Now, if someone happened to mention his name, she might remember him vaguely. She might recall him as the beekeeper’s son. Her name would not bring a light of recognition to Marcus’s face. She was just a girl back then, a child who sat quietly on the bus with a book open in her lap.
Gretchen visited the honey farm with her science class when she was 13, but by then Marcus’s father had been living alone for quite some time. She loved the beekeeper’s gentle voice and the way he explained everything about his protective gear — the white jumpsuit, the leather gloves, the wire-mesh veil. He explained the construction of a beehive, showed the students the empty supers — large, wooden rectangles designed to hold the narrow frames of wax honeycomb — and demonstrated how they stack, one on top of another, to form the hive. Gretchen had asked if he had to kill the bees when he harvested the honey and the beekeeper said no. She watched in awe as he pumped smoke into a buzzing hive and then lifted off the lid and pulled out a frame still crawling with bees. He held it up, and the frame seemed to glow in his gloved hand. The beekeeper talked at length about the elaborate social order of bees, about their masterful ability to collaborate. He told of how they dance this way and that to communicate the location of a field rich with clover. He made bees sound like magic.
When she told her father about her field trip, he said, “Oh, yeah? What did that guy have to teach you?”
“Nothing, Dad,” she’d said. “Just some stuff about bees.”
Standing on the stepladder, only Gretchen’s bare legs and the frayed bottom of her cutoff jeans are visible beneath the lowest branches of the cherry tree. She was wearing a pair of rubber flip-flops, but she kicked them off before climbing the ladder, and they lie in the ankle-deep grass at the base of the tree. She stretches her long arms for the bright fruit on the highest branches, and the juice runs in sticky little rivers down her wrists. She likes the way the sun glows through the cherries, turning them into little orbs of light. She likes the way the seed sometimes cleaves to the stem so that the cherry pulls free, a slight tug of suction, and then nothing but soft flesh between her fingers. Their color makes the fruit look poisonous, red like original sin. She’s not sure what that means — red like original sin — but the phrase sticks in her head and she turns the words over as she drops the cherries into the plastic ice-cream bucket she holds on her hip. She is preoccupied with the thought, which must be why she fails to notice the swarm of bees clinging to a branch on the other side of the tree. There are thousands of them, a football-shaped mass of tiny, furry bodies and humming wings. The bees seem to drip from the branch like melting wax. Gretchen climbs down and moves the ladder. As she climbs back into the tree, she pulls a branch out of her way and nearly reaches her hand straight into the buzzing swarm.
She screams and jerks her hand away, and the branch snaps back, shaking the tree. A thin scrim of bees lifts itself from the body of the swarm, and Gretchen screams again. The bees’ hum intensifies. One bee flies straight into her face, and she can feel another caught in her hair. Her ladder tips, the ground suddenly at a precarious tilt. She flails against the bees, dropping her bucket. A half-gallon of cherries spills out in the grass, but Gretchen is off and running toward the house. The first bee she steps on feels like a hot needle stabbed into the unprotected arch of her foot. A penetrating, razor-sharp burst of pain nearly brings her to her knees, but she keeps running. Within seconds her foot is swelling. Each new step makes it feel as if the skin of her instep is likely to split. The second bee she steps on sends another burning needle into the already spreading, throbbing ache. She wants to run blindly, ignoring the splitting pain in her foot, but she limps slowly instead, carefully watching the grass.
Once in the kitchen, her hands trembling, she pulls out the phone book. After a moment of racking her brain for his last name, she dials the beekeeper’s number. The phone rings three times before someone picks it up.
“There’s a swarm of angry bees in my cherry tree,” Gretchen says, once the soft voice on the other end of the line says hello. She wants to add, “you idiot,” as her father might, but she doesn’t. She’s trying to keep the tremor of tears out of her voice.
“That’s a misconception,” the voice says.
There is a long pause before Gretchen says, “No it’s not. I’ve just been stung. Twice on the same foot.”
“The angry part is a misconception. Swarming bees aren’t angry — they’re just displaced. They’re so full of honey they can hardly fly straight. Swarming bees are far more docile than most people think.”
Marcus is standing in his kitchen, leaning over the counter, curling the telephone cord around his finger. Through the open back door he can see rows and rows of hives, each hive stacked six supers deep. He wonders which colony has raised a new queen. His father is usually careful to split hives if he needs to, before the bees swarm.
Gretchen stands at the kitchen table with her swelling foot propped up so she can see her instep. The stingers are tiny flecks of black buried deep in the flesh. She cannot fathom how she is supposed to answer this person on the other end of her telephone line.
“I’ve been stung. Twice on the same foot,” she repeats. “It hurts like crazy.”
“Tell me where you’re at,” Marcus says, then, “Hold tight. I’m on my way.”
Gretchen waits for the beekeeper on the back porch. She props up her injured foot on her opposite knee, and she’s picking at the stingers when Marcus arrives. Each time she thinks she has a stinger between her fingernails, a new jolt of pain makes her gasp and pull her hand away. She looks up when tires crunch the gravel in the drive. The young man who emerges from the Festiva is not who she’d been expecting, but she feels a flash of recognition and surprise. Her brow furrows.
Marcus smiles. The girl sitting on the steps of the porch is stunning in her discomfort, her leg twisted around so she can see the bottom of her dirty foot. She tucks her long hair behind her ears. Marcus stands still, one hand on the open car door.
“You’re not the beekeeper,” Gretchen says.
“I’m his son,” Marcus says. “My name’s Marcus.”
“What the hell are those bees doing in my tree?” she asks. She rarely swears — certainly would never in her father’s presence — but the mild expletive feels good. If he’s just going to stand there staring at her like an imbecile, he might as well go home.
“Would you stop that?” Marcus asks, indicating the way she keeps picking at her foot. “You’re only making it worse.”
“The stingers are still in,” Gretchen says, “and they hurt.”
“Give me your foot.”
Marcus kneels in front of Gretchen and, taking her foot in his hand, pulls her leg straight so he can get a closer look. This tips Gretchen onto her elbows. He presses her toes back to flex the foot, sending a jolt of pain through her instep. With his free hand, he takes a pocketknife from his jeans and opens the blade with his teeth.
“Hold still,” Marcus says. “The venom is in sacks at the base of a bee’s stinger. Picking at them just squeezes more poison right into your foot. Relax for a second, OK?”
Gretchen leans her head back and closes her eyes. She doesn’t know it, but she’s holding her breath. Marcus sets the sharp blade perpendicular to her skin. There is a thin line of cool contact. He draws the blade toward himself, his thumb steady behind her heel. Gretchen waits for the knife to hurt, but it doesn’t. There is only a prick as the blade catches the barbed stingers and lifts them out, and then Marcus wipes the knife on his jeans and runs a thumb across the swollen arch of her foot. Gretchen opens her eyes and begins to breathe.
Marcus is thinking about snakebites, about the way some people say to cut the wound in an open X and suck the venom out with your mouth. He has treated many bee stings, but he’s never cut a snakebite open with a knife. And then he’s thinking of other wounds and injuries, and then he’s thinking of how small and hot this girl’s foot feels in his hand. He brings Gretchen’s instep to his lips. He knows it’s ridiculous, but he kisses her swollen foot. He opens his lips and her skin is bitter with crushed grass and dirt.
“Ow,” Gretchen says, but she doesn’t pull away.
“Baking soda,” Marcus says. “Baking soda and water will help with the pain.”
Marcus helps Gretchen stand and hobble toward the door. In the kitchen, Gretchen tells Marcus where to find the baking soda and a bowl in the cabinet. He runs the tap until the water is cold and then mixes the poultice with his fingers. The baking soda, when Marcus smoothes it on, is cool against her skin.
“Sneakers,” Marcus says.
“Would you please talk in sentences,” Gretchen says.
“You should put sneakers on to protect your foot.”
Gretchen tries to stand.
“You can’t walk on that barefoot,” Marcus says. “You’ll knock all the baking soda off.”
“My sneakers are upstairs,” Gretchen says. “Would you stop telling me what to do?” But she sinks back into her chair at the table.
“I’ll get them,” Marcus says. “I’m serious. Let me help you.”
“They’re in my bedroom,” Gretchen says. She looks at him as if deciding something.
“I won’t touch anything,” Marcus says. “I’ll just get your shoes.”
“First door on the right,” Gretchen says.
“What’s your name?” Marcus asks, but before she can answer, he has disappeared up the stairs.
“Gretchen,” she says, casting her voice after him.
“That’s nice,” he calls down. “I like the way the consonants crash together in the middle.”
“It was my grandmother’s name,” Gretchen says. She closes her eyes and tries to think whether she put her pajamas under her pillow or left them out on her bed. She considers briefly what her father might do if he came home to find a strange boy in the house.
A rape and murder in a town on the other side of the state made the front page of the local paper a few years ago. After reading the article, her father refused to go into work the next day. He drove her to school in the morning and he picked her up at the end of the day. He stormed around the house cursing and slamming doors. “If anyone ever touched you, Gretchen,” he said, taking her face in his hands, “if anyone ever put one goddamn finger on you — ” He didn’t finish the threat. “Dad, cut it out,” Gretchen had said. “Go to work. I’m fine. I’m safe.” She slipped out of his grip. “I know,” her father had said. “It’s my job to keep you that way. I take care of mine.”
Marcus stands in Gretchen’s bedroom, suddenly struck by the stillness of the large, old house. The walls of the bedroom are covered in a fading floral paper. The room has a high ceiling and tall, wood-framed windows. The southern-facing window looks out across the land that separates her house from his. A breeze stirs the wheat in the field, as if an invisible hand has been drawn across the surface so that the texture and the color of the field shift. In the distance, he can see the peak of his father’s roof. Gretchen’s sneakers sit at the foot of her carefully made bed. Hers isn’t the bedroom of a teenage girl. The top of her dresser is bare save for two sets of barrettes, some loose change, a pair of sunglasses, and a thin, beaded necklace. There are no pictures or posters. There is no mirror.
“Socks?” he asks, leaning toward the door.
Gretchen is silent for a moment.
“Top drawer,” she calls up.
When he pulls the dresser drawer open, Marcus is careful not to disturb anything. He selects a pair of thick, white athletic socks, closes the drawer, and trots down the stairs.
“Come here,” he says, even though he is the one crossing the kitchen to her. “Let me.”
Gretchen’s foot feels as thick as a bear’s paw, but Marcus was right about the need for sneakers. When he goes out to hive the swarm in the cherry tree, Gretchen follows, limping mildly. Marcus pulls two supers, each full of clean, empty frames, from the hatchback of his car. He hands her the smoke can and a roll of newspaper. They walk together toward the fruit trees on the other side of the garage. Marcus wears no protective gear for this project, not even a pair of heavy gloves. He seems fearless with nothing between the bees and his body but a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
“Is this safe?” Gretchen asks, stopping 15 feet from the tree. Already the strange, vibrating hum is loud in her ears.
“Yes, fine,” Marcus says. He sets up the small hive beneath the tree, leaving the lid lying next to the hive in the grass. “Once they’re hived we’ll let them sit just a bit. Two days, maybe? Then I can tape the thing up and move it home.”
Gretchen nods. Marcus crouches to light some newspapers and dry grass in the base of the smoke can, and when he pumps smoke into the swarm, the pitch of the bees’ buzzing begins to rise.
“Watch this,” Marcus says.
He lays a hand on the bees’ branch and gives it a firm shake. Half the bees fall heavily from the tree and land in a wiggling mass on the open top of the hive. They quickly wriggle their way in between the frames. As he continues to shake the branch, the bees lift and lift from the tree like yards of unfurling fabric. He smiles at her, unfazed, even as bees land and hook their tiny feet into his shirt. Though some stray and buzz off in a wrong direction, most of the bees take to their new home as if the empty hive inhales them. Gretchen watches, mesmerized. When the locus of activity has shifted from the tree to the hive, Marcus lids the top super and walks toward Gretchen, brushing bees from his hair with bare hands.
“Would you like to see the other end of things?” he asks. “I was harvesting honey this morning.”
Gretchen looks past Marcus toward the bucket of spilled cherries in the grass. Her father would kill her.
“Yes,” she says. “Show me.”
Ten miles away, at his shop on Harrison Street, Gretchen’s father is bent over the engine of a Lincoln inspecting the spark plugs his new hire has just replaced. The young man stands next to the car, shifting his weight from one foot to the next. He’s anxious for a cigarette. On his breaks he stands behind the garage smoking one cigarette after another, dropping the butts into a coffee can half-filled with rainwater.
“That’ll do,” Gretchen’s father says, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Change the oil?” the young man asks.
Gretchen’s father nods, and the man climbs down the narrow ladder into the pit beneath the car. He acts nervous as a jack rabbit, but he’s a good worker. He’s only been at the garage for two weeks, and he seems unsure that Gretchen’s father will keep him on. He’s a felon — armed robbery — and has had trouble landing work since he’s been out. Gretchen’s father hired him without remarking on his incarceration. If anyone were to ask, Gretchen’s father would say the boy has paid his debt to society. That sometimes a fellow needs a second chance. That it’s better to have him working for a wage in this garage than to have him out on the streets.
“Ready,” the man calls, and Gretchen’s father snakes the hose from the oil reservoir to the engine of the car.
In the basement of his father’s house, Marcus guides Gretchen through a maze of sticky, empty supers and stacks of honeycomb frames. A set of wooden shelves along one wall is stacked high with glass gallon jars. Most are empty, but several jars on the bottom shelf are full of honey in varying stages of crystallization. The colors range from light amber to molasses to black.
“We always keep some to feed back to the bees in the winter,” Marcus says, following Gretchen’s glance. Marcus shows her how to slice the caps from the full frames, and then he loads and demonstrates the extractor, turning the crank until fresh honey flows from the spout. Gretchen tastes it with her finger. The honey is overwhelmingly sweet.
When Gretchen turns from the extractor, she discovers that the far wall is crowded with tacked-up photographs. They are mostly black-and-white snapshots, and at first they all appear to have been taken many years ago. Most are of war protests, girls with long, tangled hair, and what seems to be a draft card burning. Brazen, terrified young men raise their fists in the air. There is one of a man who must be Marcus’s father. He is bare-chested, his eyes fixed fiercely on the lens of the camera. He’s being handcuffed.
“Those are my dad’s,” Marcus says. He has come to stand so close behind Gretchen that she thinks she can feel the halo of heat around him, but when she tips back on her heels, their bodies do not touch. The photographs make her throat hurt. “These are mine,” Marcus says, leaning over her shoulder to point out a set of recent pictures to the right of the older ones. They are all of Marcus’s father, although the human figure hardly seems to be the focus of the frame. In one, the man is little more than a smudge in the upper-right corner. It is taken from inside the house, looking out through the screen door, across the back porch, across the rows of hives. Another photograph is dominated by a towering six-super hive shot from a low angle. In another, the beekeeper crouches, building a fire in his smoke can, his veil and gloves behind him on the ground.
“What’s all this about?” Gretchen asks.
“I’m trying to figure my father out,” Marcus says. “I don’t know how people get from point A to point B sometimes. He was a real radical back then — served time instead of joining up when his CO status kept being denied. I’ve always wished I’d known that guy.”
“What’s he like now?” Gretchen asks. “He seems nice enough.”
“He’s lonely. He’s messed up just like a vet, only worse since he doesn’t have buddies. Not even the crazy kind who go around with a dead man’s ear in their pocket. Crazy war buddies are better than nobody. There’s no VA for old radicals. All his friends from back then grew up and got fat and joined the middle class. His own damn son joined the Army two years out of high school for the signing bonus. We used to think the other one was the idiot. I came back here to try to figure stuff out, but we’re like foreigners to each other. I don’t think he’s the guy he used to be.”
“How long have you been here?” Gretchen asks.
“Since my tour was up,” Marcus says.
“How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know.”
They both stand for some time, studying the photographs.
“I’m in trouble,” Marcus says, “and I thought he could help.”
“What kind of trouble?” Gretchen asks.
“The government kind. The military kind. At least, I’m about to be.”
“And your dad can’t help?” Gretchen asks.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“What are you going to do?” Gretchen asks.
“I don’t know,” Marcus says. “Go see my grandfather? That’s what I’d planned to do this afternoon before you called.”
Marcus crosses back to the extractor and begins pulling frames out of the machine. He tosses them onto the cluttered top of a workbench. The wood frames clatter against each other, many of them still oozing honey.
“Do you want to go with me? Get out of here for a minute?” Marcus asks. “We could be there in an hour and a half.”
Gretchen is hit by the desire to reach out and gather Marcus into her arms, to push his head down on her shoulder and lay her cheek against his dark curls. He looks frightened in this dim basement. She thinks she’d do things for Marcus she’s never dreamed of doing for anyone. She feels as if she is standing at the edge of a precipice.
“Sure,” Gretchen says. She stuffs her hands in the pockets of her cutoffs.
Within half an hour, Marcus and Gretchen are speeding north on a state highway toward the interstate with the windows rolled down so they have to shout at each other to make themselves heard. The cracked vinyl seats of the Festiva are sticky with humidity. The wind beats against Gretchen, whipping her hair furiously around her face. The summer squall, which Gretchen had assumed would do nothing but threaten, blows up just after they merge onto I-69. The clouds that have been piling up on the horizon since morning roll across the sky and crash into one another, obscuring the sun. A flash of lightning rips from cloud to ground, so close that the air hisses and cracks. As the thunder echoes off, the sky splits open in a downpour. The rain falls in great sheets, and Gretchen and Marcus have to scramble to roll up the windows. He turns on the windshield wipers, and they slap back and forth, giving him half-second glimpses of the road ahead.
Gretchen thinks for a moment about the laundry on the line. In the back yard of her father’s house, all his clean overalls are getting soaked through and matted with twigs and leaves that blow out of the trees in the storm. The green plastic laundry basket blows over on its side and lies forgotten in the grass for her father to find. The ice-cream bucket she’d been using for the cherries tumbles across the yard and lands in the ditch. The wheat whips and rolls in the rain. It didn’t occur to Gretchen to shut the windows in the kitchen when she left with Marcus. The door to the back porch still stands open and the wind drives the rain in through the screen door. It soaks the kitchen counter and puddles on the linoleum floor. Gretchen chooses to put these images out of her mind as she and Marcus speed up I-69 in a deluge. She will handle the consequences of her actions when she gets back. Right now she watches Marcus’s profile. They are talking and talking and talking. It would be impossible to make out their faces through the cataracts of water coursing down the car windows. There is just the impression of motion, what might be Gretchen throwing her head back to laugh.
Before they arrive at their destination, Marcus tells Gretchen the story of his grandfather, a man who removed himself from the world some 30 years ago. He has lived since in a two-room cabin he built on a piece of land overlooking an abandoned limestone quarry. He keeps a post office box in a nearby town and a ham radio in the cabin. Marcus describes his grandfather as a man who never quite recovered from the two tragedies he suffered in the ’60s — the death of his wife and his only son’s spinning off into a world he could not understand. Even though his father and grandfather have not spoken in many years, the old man has written Marcus one letter a week since Marcus was a child old enough to read. His grandfather is a beekeeper, too, although he raises bees the old-fashioned way, in skeps — golden domes of braided straw. He harvests the honey with a short-handled knife, large chunks of amber, honeycomb and all. He traffics only with the Amish. They sell his honey in their stores along the highway where tourists lift the jelly jars to admire the color of the honeycomb when it’s held up to the light. In his last letter to Marcus, a response to Marcus’s mounting fears that his change-of-status application was going to be denied, he had suggested that the boy come visit him. He had said that the world had not turned out to be the place he’d expected it to be, and that neither he nor Marcus’s father had ever been right or wrong in their lives. He’d said, simply, if you’re ever in need, come talk to me.
The rain passes as quickly as it comes, and by the time Marcus turns down the long lane to his grandfather’s cabin, the sun has burned through the clouds and is shining with the brilliance that is particular to an orange sky after a thunderstorm. Light refracts through every drop of water so that the grass and trees sparkle like glass. The car bumps along in the stony, rutted road. The thin soil that covers the rock above the quarry supports little more than scrub brush, wispy grasses, and shallow-rooted evergreens. Marcus parks his car next to his grandfather’s small, shuttered cabin, and both he and Gretchen get out. The property seems abandoned save for the skeps scattered across the flat land on roughhewn tables. Gretchen can see that the wood of the closest table is beginning to rot and buckle. The screen door creaks, and Marcus’s grandfather steps out onto the porch, one hand shielding his eyes from the sudden light.
“Grandpop,” Marcus says.
Gretchen thinks the old man looks like a goat.
“Marcus,” he says. He doesn’t seem surprised, only happy to see his grandson. He climbs down the steps, one hand heavy on a splintered banister, and hugs Marcus, slapping him hard on the back. “Hello,” he says to Gretchen, and taking her face in his thin hands, kisses her on the cheek. He smells like a man who spends nearly all of his time outside.
“This is Gretchen,” Marcus says. “Gretchen, my granddad.”
“Hello,” Gretchen says.
“Yes, fine,” the old man says. “You didn’t tell me there was a girl. I thought your trouble was with Uncle Sam. Are you in the family way? Are you part of my grandson’s difficulties?” he asks Gretchen.
“Grandpop, please,” Marcus says. “She’s a friend. We just met.”
Marcus blushes fiercely, but the question makes Gretchen want to laugh. She wonders briefly what that would feel like — to be Marcus’s girlfriend, to be in trouble together like that. Would she tell her father and try to convince him to give his permission for her to marry, or would she write him a long letter once she and Marcus had skipped town?
“I see,” the old man says. He puts one hand on Marcus’s shoulder and one hand on Gretchen’s. “Come in.”
The cabin is close and hot and quite dark until the man opens the shutters at the two windows, which he’d drawn against the rain.
“See my pictures?” he asks, pointing Gretchen to a series of framed photographs mounted on the wall behind a sagging couch. All these men and their pictures, Gretchen thinks. There is a faded photograph of Marcus’s father as a little boy, and one of Marcus as a child, dwarfed in a cornfield. Below that is a studio portrait of an Army nurse, the woman gazing off into the soft-focused distance. “That’s my Darla,” the man says, patting Gretchen on the back. Gretchen wants to ask what happened to her, why it seems so possible, even now, for women to disappear into oblivion, but she doesn’t. Where have all the mothers and wives gone, Gretchen wonders. What have these men done with them? “Men and women weren’t friends back in my day,” Marcus’s grandfather says. “We fell in love like stark raving lunatics.”
“Is there another way?” Gretchen asks.
“Good girl,” the man says, his face breaking into a wicked grin. “I can see why you like her,” he says to Marcus.
“Leave it, Grandpop,” Marcus says, dropping heavily onto the couch.
Gretchen can see that he’s sweating in the heat of the small room. She counts, quickly, and discovers that she has known him now for all of five hours. He is little more than a stranger to her. He hasn’t touched her since he kissed the bottom of her foot. All the same, Gretchen feels sick with love. Love complicated by sympathy. She doesn’t know what Marcus feels.
“I need your advice or your help or something,” Marcus says.
“Swim,” his grandfather says, and Gretchen sees where Marcus learned the habit of boiling a sentence down to a noun or a verb. “Swim first and then we’ll talk. It’s too hot now for disaster.”
“Gramps,” Marcus says.
“I said swim. A swim can do a world of good. If we can’t fix what’s wrong in the next two hours, a swim isn’t going to hurt anything.”
Marcus looks from his grandfather to Gretchen. She lifts her shoulders, deferring.
“OK,” Marcus says.
“I’ve still got one of Darla’s suits in my dresser, ” the man says. He disappears into the next room for a moment. Gretchen and Marcus are silent together. She crosses to the couch and sits next to him. Marcus leans his head back and closes his eyes. She puts her hand on his knee and he jumps as if she’s delivered him an electric shock. Marcus’s grandfather returns. “Go on in the bedroom and get changed, dear,” he says.
In the next room Gretchen finds a low single bed, a three-legged stool, and a rickety dresser. A brown one-piece bathing suit is laid out on the bed. The legs are cut straight across the bottom, and a belt cinches around the middle. When Gretchen picks it up, she can feel that most of the elastic in the suit has disintegrated. She shivers as she strips out of her clothes and pulls on this decades-old bathing suit.
“Perfect,” Marcus’s grandfather says when she emerges from the bedroom, holding her shorts and T-shirt in front of her. Marcus stands with his arms crossed, wearing what must be his grandfather’s trunks. His clothes are draped across the back of the couch. He looks slender and pale, and Gretchen is surprised by a broad, pink birthmark splashed like a rash across his chest. Marcus tries to keep from looking at her body, but he can’t.
“Very good,” his grandfather says. “Though Gretchen, dear, Darla’s breasts were fuller than yours. I’m not trying to embarrass you, it’s just the truth. Please, both of you, go jump in the lake.”
Gretchen crosses her arms over her chest, and Marcus laughs for the first time since they arrived. He tries to stifle it, but he chokes and coughs, and trying not to only makes his laughing worse. Gretchen can feel her ears turning hot and pink, but with Marcus’s grandfather blinking at her goatishly, she finds herself laughing, too.
“I’m sorry,” Marcus says, but his laughter has broken something tense and strange between them, and Gretchen isn’t sorry in the least. “Come on,” he says, holding the screen door open with one hand and reaching out to her with the other. “Let’s go.”
It feels good to be out in the open, back out in the air. The grass rustles against their bare legs when they step down off the porch.
“He’s just an old kook,” Marcus says. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I know,” Gretchen says. “It’s OK.”
“I mean, you look nice,” Marcus says. When they reach the lip of the quarry Marcus says, “We can dive. It’s safe.”
As if to demonstrate, he does, disappearing into the dark water with a splash. This is a man-made lake with no shores, just a deep gully cut straight down into the rock. Gretchen hesitates for a moment before leaping in after Marcus. The sudden shock of cold knocks her breath away. The water feels coldest on her stung foot. The quarry smells of moss and minerals from the limestone. She dives down, measuring her depth in the change of temperature of the water against her skin, but she cannot dive deep enough to reach the bottom. The bottom might just as well not exist. Treading water thrills Gretchen, not knowing the distance between her feet and the smooth-cut bed of rock beneath. Marcus strikes out, swimming in long strokes toward the middle of the quarry. The water he churns up in his wake shimmers green in the sunlight.
Gretchen’s father returns home while she is swimming in the quarry — diving down beneath the surface, opening her eyes to watch the sun fracture the water as she kicks up for air, swimming past Marcus for the purpose of reaching out to touch him, his skin slick under her fingers — but he does not know this. He has never come home to find his daughter not there. He calls out for her as he pulls open the screen door, and he has to hold panic at bay when he discovers the wet mess of the kitchen floor, the curtains flapping at the windows, still damp from the rain. He takes the stairs two at a time to look for her in her bedroom, and then hurries back down to the kitchen. He swings open the back door and crosses the yard, the knife of fear in his chest growing sharper when he finds the laundry basket lying empty beside the clothesline and his work clothes soiled from the storm. Then he sees the spilled cherries and the foreign beehive beneath the tree. Someone has been on his property. Gretchen’s father is a man unaccustomed to running, but the cold, hard fear in his chest propels him back toward the house. His feet pound the ground. If there were anyone to see him, he would be a sorry sight, a man with his belly hanging down over his belt running heavily across his back yard in stiff work boots. He calls the sheriff’s department, and when the woman who answers says she’ll send someone by the beekeeper’s place, Gretchen’s father hangs up the phone and stalks back out to his station wagon. In minutes, he is parked in the driveway at the beekeeper’s, leaning on the horn. He honks until the other man comes tentatively out onto his screened-in porch. Gretchen’s father rolls down his window.
“Where’s my daughter?” he asks.
“Excuse me?” the beekeeper says.
“Where’s my daughter?” Gretchen’s father asks. “You been by my place today?”
“I’m sorry,” the beekeeper says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do I know you?”
“You’re about to,” Gretchen’s father says. He shuts off the engine and puts his hand on the lever to open his door. He has a sudden flash of his daughter as a toddler, giggling, running away from him, wanting to be chased. If this son of a bitch has done anything to her, he’s going to have hell to pay.
Gretchen sits on the steps to the cabin in the gathering dusk. She pulled her hair up into a tight bun when she and Marcus emerged from the quarry, and now, hours later, she lets it down. Her hair smells mossy and is still damp next to the scalp. She rakes her head with her fingers and wishes for a comb. Behind her, she can hear Marcus and his grandfather talking in the cabin.
“I’ve talked to everyone they sent me to, Grandpop,” Marcus is saying. “Shrinks and chaplains and officers. I have to prove I’m not crazy. They think I’m mentally defective or something. Or they think I’m just a plain old coward. That’s what the last clown said. ‘Cowardice is not enough to confer CO status.’ He said I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell since I don’t believe in God — that without some religious affiliation I can’t make a case for moral objection. Can you believe that? Our chaplain at boot camp said all this crap in the Middle East is the dawning of the end times. He went on and on about Jesus prophesying about these wars. Didn’t this president get elected by the Jesus freaks? And Christ’s supposed to be my ticket out of this mess? They’re the head cases, I’m telling you.” There is a long pause measured out by Marcus’s fingers drumming on a tabletop. “I’m scared, Gramps,” he eventually says.
“When are you supposed to be back on base?”
“Yesterday,” Marcus says.
“Oh, Marcus,” the old man says.
“I’ve thought about heading for Canada. Is that nuts? I could be there by morning if I left tonight.”
“What about your lady friend?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus says. “I wasn’t planning. She just called. I mean, it’s like she dropped out of the sky.”
“Do you like her?”
“Yeah, but does it matter? I stay put and I’m screwed. I take off and I’m screwed. It’s not like she’s going to run away with me to Canada.”
Gretchen lies down, the splintered planks of the porch rough against her back. When she is frightened, she tries to remember how small she is, how insignificant. She tries to picture herself from a great distance, just some girl lying for unknown reasons on the porch in front of a cabin. She tries to picture the planet Earth from outer space.
Marcus’s grandfather laughs. “First of all, give up on Canada. Wrong decade,” he says. “Wrong war. Don’t you read the newspaper? What does your father say?”
“He tears up like a girl. He won’t even talk about it, Grandpop.”
Gretchen tries to picture how angry and frightened her father must be. She thinks of how men go around so often secretly sick with insecurity, and how right they are to feel that way. She thinks of her father alone in that big, old, silent house. Not long ago she asked him if he ever thought about marrying again. “I loved your mother, Gretchen,” he’d said. He crossed to the refrigerator for a beer. “But it’s been years. I hardly remember her,” Gretchen had said. “Shut your mouth, Gretchen, if you know what’s good for you,” her father had said. “I loved her. And what’s done is done. That’s all there is to say.” Hours later, he’d stood in the doorway to her bedroom. When Gretchen looked up, he said, “I’ve got you. I loved your mother and I love you. That’s more than a man’s fair share.”
A night breeze has picked up, and Gretchen stands and stretches her legs. The sky is a humid wash of bluish-white, and the waxing moon casts shadows of the billowing clouds as they scuttle past. Only the brightest stars shine through, pinpricks of ancient, distant light. She is no longer listening to what the men are saying in the cabin behind her, just to the rise and fall of each voice. By the time she reaches the edge of the quarry, she can hear only frogs singing from the other edge of the water and the wind in the grass. She kicks gravel over the lip of the quarry just to hear the pebbles scrabble against rock and then land in the water with a plop.
“Gretchen,” Marcus says from behind her, and Gretchen jumps. The cabin behind Marcus is dark. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t,” Gretchen says. “I just didn’t know you were there.”
Marcus joins her at the edge of the man-made lake. Gretchen stoops down and feels around the ground for a smooth rock. When she finds one, she stands, holds it carefully in three fingers, and flings it out over the surface of the water. It skips twice, each splash a little sliver of silver against the dark face of the lake.
“My dad’s going to kill me,” she says. “He’s gone crazy by now, I know it. He’s liable to do anything.”
“I wasn’t thinking this afternoon. I’m sorry I brought you out here,” Marcus says. He tries to put his arm around her, but Gretchen shakes him off and crouches down to feel for another rock.
“Don’t be,” she says. Her second stone doesn’t skip. It hits the water and sinks. “What are you going to do?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Marcus says. “I kind of feel like I’ve burned all my bridges.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
Gretchen searches for another rock to throw but when she can’t find one, she stands up empty-handed. Marcus steps off the path into the tall grass and begins his own hunt for a stone.
From the front door of the cabin, Marcus and Gretchen are dark silhouettes against the distant trees. The old man watches them flinging rocks at the water, his arms crossed over his lean chest. The summer breeze eddies about the porch, lifting his sparse, uncombed hair. Behind him, the shortwave radio that sits on a card table next to the couch crackles to life. For decades now, the radio has been his only means of communication with the broader world, but he has rarely had reason to use it. For the most part, he just listens to the static and the small comfort of strangers speaking back and forth to each other across the ether. Tonight, however, just now, he hears his own name. Not a radio handle — his own name, and then, “Dad?”
The man turns to regard the radio, as if looking at it, or at the spot where it sits, hardly distinguishable in the dark cabin, might help him better hear his son.
“Dad?” the voice asks. “I need to reach you. Do you have your ears on? It’s about Marcus. I need to know if he’s with you. If he’s got a girl.”
The voice falls still and then there is only static. The man is struck by how bewildered his son’s voice sounds. How long has his son been baffled and unsure? He doesn’t know. He hasn’t heard his son’s voice in years. Something tragic happened to his generation, from which he has never recovered. And no telling yet, the man thinks, what will happen to Marcus and Gretchen’s. There is a great splash from the quarry, and at first he thinks either Marcus or Gretchen has leapt in, but after a moment he can see their figures again, moving about above the quarry in the grass. They must have heaved something heavy into the water. He will have to answer his son’s call. There are matters to be reckoned with, grave matters from which his little cabin and empty quarry are no protection. The children are out there vainly plotting God knows what in the moonlight — out there with the spawning frogs and the crickets and the bats. How precious children are, the old man thinks, as he turns and lights a lamp so that he might see the dials on the shortwave. What precious, assailable fools.
———-
Laura Krughoff received her master of fine arts degree in creative writing in 2003 from the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Leonard and Eileen Newman Writing Prize in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Meridian, Room of One’s Own (now Room), The Threepenny Review, Orchid, Other Voices, The Seattle Review and “Pushcart Prize XXXI.” She lives, writes and teaches in Chicago.
