The Cage

Throughout Charlton County, the locals always took him as the right sort. Above all a successful agriculturalist, a bit too foreign for most people’s tastes, yet, harmless all the same. A dogged worker and clever farmer, clean-shaven and without a disturbing accent, he never made any enemies, nor any friends. Mom showed up at her parents’ doorstep in the fall of 1950 with him at her side and George in her belly. She’d met him during her post-Emory years spent split between Northern California and Mexico City. He semi-acculturated, married, and with brains and sweat he built a small empire outside his wife’s hometown. But he was never the same after the accident. In the years after the accident, while I was still in high school, my brother officially took over the farm. I would rush home everyday to check on them. Dad would usually be outside, pretending to work on something, most often his truck. He’d be lying down under the chassis, blue jeans with bent knees sticking out, everything from the waist up concealed, intermittently sifting through his tool box. A flawless Craftsmen wrench might appear in his left hand, and then disappear, joining his hidden half underneath the truck. He would never exchange one size wrench for a different size. He struggled to control the twitch in his leg. I knew the times when he was trying hardest to listen because that was when he would lay completely still. In those days, around the time I’d finish up with the major household chores and start on our dinner, my brother would come in from the main bee yard, officially named - for our late mother - Queen Delia’s, which by then had been rebuilt much farther away from the house. Sporting the unshaven, ruddy cheeked, red-eyed warpaint of a 24-year-old alcoholic, he’d take a last drag off his butt and flick it behind him, towards the dead Oak tree, as he crossed the lawn on his way to the back-porch steps. Chancing he walks into the kitchen, I’d keep my eyes glued either to the floor or whatever recipe I was preparing. Constant using made his moods seesaw wildly, and I had long since abandoned the idea of predicting them. We won’t talk until he comes down a couple hours later for dinner. Once upon a time, our farm made the most revered High Grade AA Honey out of all the producers in Georgia, but that was before those hilljacks (what my father had called them) from Brushy Mountain Bee Supply sold us sick starter bees the summer I started high school. It was during that summer that mom died. She had grown up in the backwaters of southeast Georgia and northern Florida, inherited that uniquely rural understanding of the wilderness-lite, and had never been afraid of the bees. They could sense fear, she told me once, because I was young, afraid, and wouldn’t go near them. After a life of struggling to be the freest spirit, in the months leading up to her death she became much more withdrawn. She’d meander daily and for hours throughout the pine forest that bordered the west end of our property. She would take flowers from the house into the forest and leave them there. Returning instead with picayune things - winterberries, abandoned toys, rocks. Often, she took them to the side of the lawn where the old White Oak squatted. I’d follow her through my bedroom window as she left the forest and walked towards it, but then I’d lose sight of her, and I’d never ask why. One day, when she was passing through the overgrown grasses of the bee-yard that separate the forest from our house, a snake nipped her ankle. I assumed it was a Coral because they lay coiled, don’t rattle, and can kill. I learned that from some kid in Little League; “red on black, you’re OK jack. Red on yellow, you’re a dead fellow.” My mother worked summers at the Athens YWCA camp when she was in High School.Centuries after, on her more amiable days, she had tried to teach George and me what she’d learned about the woods. One of these lessons involved rattlesnakes. They were liveliest at sundown, especially on hot days. They lurked in tall grass and autumn leaves. They mainly hid-out in the rocks, but also enjoyed stacks of firewood, outhouses, and the shadowy spaces under the bee-hives. If the rattling stops, run. While she explained this to her two boys, her husband sat in a lawn chair, surveying his empire, choking back laughter. “Well boys, they’re everywhere.” Eastern Diamondbacks, Canebrakes, Copperheads, but she never mentioned Coral snakes. To this day I’ve yet to come across one. They have short fangs that wouldn’t have been able to penetrate even the deer-skin moccasins a loosely-related cousin had sent from Oklahoma as a birthday gift the spring before she died. But it was August in 1974 and she was an eighth Cherokee and liked the idea of the morning dew on her bare feet as much as she liked the feel of it. The fangs wouldn’t have gone farther than a wasp’s stinger before retreating silently to its den. Standing in a maze of pulsating bee hives; she must have interpreted it as just another angry sting, and continued on with the monotonous chores of a farmer’s wife, only now with a layer of calamine lotion soothing the initial effects of the venom as it mixed into her bloodstream. I had just started classes that week, and was spending as much time as possible at the high school before leisurely driving the forty-five minutes back to the farm – it was the only time I could ever drive. George and dad had gone to meet with another beekeeper way up in Chatam County that morning. It was an important trip. They went to see if he could offer any ideas as to why our bees weren’t producing any honey so deep into the season. The farmer couldn’t. They returned home. At the time, mom had taken to weaving her dark-brown hair into two long braids. With her body slumped forward on the sofa, they dangled lifeless, between her knees, the gray roots on the crown of her head greeted her husband and first-born as they walked into the curtained parlor that afternoon. She was wearing her finest white cotton dress and she was dead. My mom was a distant descendant of the 19th century Cherokee leader Major Ridge. In the 1830s, Ridge signed treaties with the US government behind the backs of the rest of his people, and his sprawling family built Palladian mansions in the Arkansas River Valley while the rest of the Cherokees cried their way to east Oklahoma. Hence, my dad considered the man “whiter than Brando” and once, during Thanksgiving dinner, thought it timely to refer to as an “Uncle Tomahawk.” After that, he spoke little with his in-laws. His thoroughly white father-in-law had long been using his wife’s legally tenuous claim of “Ridge-blood” (her mother, who lived somewhere in northern Texas, was a blue-eyed half-blooded adopted Cherokee that married and had her only kids by a German widower) to purchase tax-exempt properties throughout the southeast, and thus ardently defended this relation. Our town was small and the service he organized, without my father’s input, was huge. A childhood friend of hers, who had heard of our farm’s recent trouble, pulled me aside during the funeral and told me the problem was that we had mites, “a helluvalotter mites”, and that our bees were displaying “parasitic bee syndrome” and wouldn’t last through the week. I had never been in on the inner-workings of the farm before. When the man gave me his advice, I realized that, by default, I had now taken over my mother’s duties as intermediary between the bee-farm and the normal world. Dad, though respected for his clever and unorthodox methods of bee-farming, had always put on a display that the locals couldn’t, quite, grasp. Aside from the intricacies of beekeeping, in his later years his preferred topics for conversation were the disgraces of Mexican President Luis Echeverria and the ever-worsening illness of Pablo Neruda. In ’72 he sympathized with the George Wallace presidential effort and lamented the ultimate failure of the McGovern campaign - which he supported only after running-mate Thomas Eagleton’s history of electroshock therapy broke national headlines, and subsequently led to his admitting of being on the powerful anti-psychotic ‘Thorazine’ for the bulk of his public appearances. In the end, dad designated Governor Carter (whom he hated) as the one responsible for blowing the election for the Democrats – farming and politicking should be mutually exclusive. He spent the winter of ‘73 arguing with mom’s friends that Atlanta Brave right-fielder Hank Aaron’s impending pass of Ruth on the home run list “didn’t matter”. The previous spring he had claimed that Nierko’s knuckleball wasn’t a legal pitch, but, nevertheless, put George in the batter’s box and he’d get a hit at least three out of every ten at-bats. My brother, two seasons a forgettable relief pitcher for the Charlton County High School varsity team, returned home from the war with an honorable discharge and an astonishing Dexedrine addiction. On a weekly basis, he would stroll out of the town’s only Food King pushing a shopping cart, at capacity, yet stocked only with bagged rice, discount liquor, Bugler rolling papers and fresh “piña.” Once that started, the locals considered him suspicious. Standing there, sweating in the cemetery, the notion of my new interminable responsibility as cultural translator between the remnants of my family and the townspeople whose business we depended on made my stomach turn. I studied the ground while listening to mom’s old friend remind me twice to tell my father (who he was spying out of the corner of his eyes while talking at me) what he had just told me. Being that at the time I was bereaved and new to the family honey operation – up to his death dad would refer to me as a “bee-haver” rather than a beekeeper - I did not argue with the old friend, and waited for the casket to be fully lowered before passing on the ill news to my father. He and George stood together, apart from the rest of the attendees. My brother sipped at his flask, never permitting it to rest lower than his pearl-snap shirt pocket, and dad puffed a hand-rolled cigarette. They griped in unenthusiastic Spanish to each other out of the corners of their mouths while staring at Mom’s white headstone. A procession into town for an extravagant reception was up next. Mom’s dad was giving a speech. Her distant cousin couldn’t afford the Greyhound ride from Oklahoma. Neither of them looked up as I approached. I passed on the theory to dad. Without hesitation he called mom’s old friend a shit-for-brains, and, with a glance, inaudibly alerted my brother that we would not be taking in the reception. We made for the parking lot, dad marching ahead on a route that left a twenty foot buffer zone between us and the others. George took two pulls off his flask, reached into the open window of the truck, and popped open the door from the inside. I climbed in the middle and pulled up the passenger door lock. George sat down at my left and dad squeezed in on my right and cranked down his window. He took up most of my legroom while my brother took one more slug of Kentucky Dale, set the flask accessibly on the sun-bleached dashboard, and grappled with the sticky floor shifter as the truck roared to life. Its bald tires sprayed crushed gravel as George reversed out of our spot, then turned, and shifted into first before tearing out of the dusty lot, his flask flying from left to right across the dashboard and out the window while all the pale-skinned attendees stared on, mortified, from behind the chain link cemetery fence. “No, no, look! Esto es pura mierda! They’re shitting everywhere! Look!” Dad pointed out when we got back to the main bee yard. And they were, yellow-brown fuzz-balls slithering atop one another in throbbing heaps, leaving trails of amber ooze in their wake. The three of us, in sweaty white wife-beaters and black dress pants, stood there silent, peering down into our original hive, La Prima Guerrera, as my dad once called it. In hindsight they were both right. The malignant bees from North Carolina had somehow contracted dysentery and remained a desirable host for a certain new breed of parasite. Most of the bees shit themselves to death within days of showing symptoms, those that were to live had already flown off; the mites took their place in the stained pine-wood insect coffins. I think the technical word now used for what we witnessed going on inside of Senora Guerrera that day is “colony collapse disorder”. In that afternoon’s fading sunlight we took stock of our losses. We were nearly ruined. All of our bees were lost. Their 23 hives, filthy in their own right, now harbored some strange unseen North Carolinian disease, and needed to be replaced. Mom was dead and so were the bees and even my father – who, unbeknownst to me at the time, was already beginning to show signs of the upcoming lunacy which would precede the loss of his memory – realized that this day was going to change us forever. Speaking in his native tongue, he told his two green-eyed sons, “una reina fuerte es neccesaria para sobrevivir,” a strong queen is necessary for survival. That night I woke up to the smell of wood-smoke. Looking out the open bedroom window, a plume rose from the direction of the main yard. I ran to my brother’s room. It sounded like a .50 cal when I charged through the doorway and he shot up with a howl but it took several explanations for him to comprehend that I was concerned that the farm was going to burn down and that we needed to check on the hives! He hacked, used the palms of his hands to itch his eyes, and muttered that he’d meet me outside. I ran down to wake dad but his bed was made and he wasn’t there. Once down the back porch steps, an orange glow became increasingly apparent in the distance. Sprinting up, I could see a shadow prancing amid the hives, which jutted three feet out of the ground like burning stakes. He etched flaming riverbeds through the dry grass with a canister of gasoline. I yelled out to him and he turned to face me. Roaring hives spit and hissed around him and dense smoke fed into the humid night. In the glare of the fire his sweaty face was drawn deep crimson, the creases and wrinkles camouflaged by the churning inferno. In that moment, he reminded me of a photograph mom had shown me after walking in on her going through old photo-albums just before she died. Black and white, he stood alone, wearing a shabby suit, inside a small train station, a sign above locating him in ‘Miqihuana, Tamaulipas.’ Now, trapped in a circle of chest-high flames, he hollered out something in feverish Spanish, but all I could translate was ‘serpiente.’ I stared at him while he continued his ghost-dance; thirsty flames began to lick at his pant legs. Drenched with cold fear, all I managed was another yell. Panic was suddenly branded onto his face. An animal shriek, but I remained frozen, and a heart pounded through a feeble chest. Dad was burning alive. Then came a war-beat; thundering hell-bent through the cruel grasses behind me and whooping bare-chested into the fire. I rushed to the other side of the circle and saw fumes rising off their bodies. Dad’s pant legs were, in some places, undecipherable from his blackened skin and still sizzling. George picked him up and didn’t look at me. He bounded into the night, towards the house, with dad, wailing obscenities, cradled in his tattooed arms. It was dawn when George and I returned home from the hospital. The hives still smoldered, the oak tree still stood in its corner of the lawn, the tree-house still perched in its branches. My dad had built it for us when I was still young and George was a teenager. In the years before George left for the war, mom would lock us out of the house while trying in vain to finish her dissertation. Sometimes dad ended up bringing out sleeping bags. I picked up the metal canister of gasoline, climbed the ladder to the tree house, and stuck my head in for the first time in years. Now I saw my mother’s fate; hundreds of rocks, piled up to four feet high against the far wall, sloping down to a square foot of naked floor directly in front of me. Antediluvian cobwebs filled the dark recesses of the plywood cage. I poured the rest of the gasoline on the bare patch of floor. George stood below me. “Light.” I demanded. Taken aback, he paused, squinted at me, took a last drag off his cigarette, and passed it up, then backed away. I threw it in and jumped off the ladder. We watched our tree-house burn as the sun rose over the farm. During his stay at the hospital (his burns turned out to be surprisingly minor) his doctor - we had last seen him when they came to take mom’s body - discovered the brain tumors. I was shocked. George wasn’t. He told me I’d just never noticed, but dad had been getting crazier for months, if not years. Mom had known it too. That’s why she had started “sorting through all her old shit” and “trying to plan that trip to Oklahoma that the old man refused to go on.” We brought him home after two days. His brain condition must have worsened because of the accident. He hardly spoke during the drive, and what would I say? We got to the house and he limped painfully towards the charred boneyard. I tried to help him, he refused. Our feet whispered along in the tracks he made in the Georgia grass, through the burnt down bee yard and into the sparse pine forest beyond. Two hundred yards into the forest we must have walked. I tried to speak but was promptly shushed. Then he stopped, and while standing completely still, his ears pricked up. “Vamonos.” We continued on for a few minutes before dad motioned for us to stop again. He pointed to a tree branch thirty yards ahead. He hobbled toward it and we followed. A long brown appendage dangled off the branch. Closer to it, I began to hear a low droning noise. From ten feet away, our lost bees materialized. Directly under the swarm sat a damp, knee-high mound of dying flowers, a white-paper note pinned down at its base. George and I went back to the farm to get supplies needed to trap the swarm. Swarming had occurred before, but, on the rare occasions when one of our hives absconded from the farm, they might gather together dozens of miles away, and we would get a call from an angry father and/or husband, but they would always have fled again by the time we got there. They had never gathered on the edge of our property, and never in such a large group. Just over four years later, while at Food King with George, I saw mom’s childhood friend from the funeral. He was leery of George and wanted to avoid us, but, he had proven to know his bee-farming, and I wanted to tell him the story about that swarm’s odd behavior. I caught his attention and didn’t look away while walking up to him. “Well, damn. I’m not sure, you know. In the springtime they might go n’ congregate around a blossoming. But, I don’t recall the weather bein’ right for a second flowering that summer. That is strange.” His eyes darted anxiously avoiding George’s stare, then he perked up. “Hey! The only thing that’ll settle a swarm might be if they come across wood-smoke, that’s what I use to calm ‘em down. But… Sebastian should know that.” He suggested condescendingly before adding, “Ask your old man, he’ll agree - if he’s still got the feel for it that is - yellow pine works best!” I thanked him. He eyeballed our cart, then offered me a noticeably less enthusiastic “you take care of yourself now” before bumbling away down the produce aisle. “That crippled old bastard done lost the feelin’ a while ago” George deadpanned as he reached into a fruit crate. The man pretended not to hear and quickly turned the corner. My brother dug up a ripe pineapple. He had been up all night and I wasn’t sure if he had been addressing mom’s friend, me, or the fruit. Our eyes met and he smirked and I keeled over with laughter. I drove the old pickup home, it was hot out, an Indian summer, and as the battered frame rattled down the highway the engine purred like brand new. George smoked rollies and told me about a nurse he met in Saigon. She was from Nebraska, or Newark. “Fuckin a, man,” he grinned and exhaled, out of the open window, and into the passing dusk. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 1