I was stung only twice, I think by young bees that did not know me.
I retrieved C. and carried her straight to the garage. When I went back for Ted, I saw that he had fallen under a moving cloud that had stung him into silence. Honey dripped from the gash he made in the clapboards; honey dripped from the backhoe. I walked over to him and stood there and watched the bees moving across his back. They seemed finished with their fury; some flew off to repair the hive. As I waited for him to move, I reached out and tasted the honey from the claw of his machine. It was dark in the comb, and rich with the care I’d put into the flowers. I took a bigger piece of comb, brushed off a bee or two, and stuffed the dripping wax into my mouth. C., who had come to the door of the garage, saw me do this. She said it was the most cold-blooded act she’d ever witnessed — me eating honey while I watched Ted lie unconscious underneath the moving bees.
I’ve always known that in her life she witnessed far worse; still, it was my simple tasting of the honey that caused her to allow Ted to continue with his teardown once he recovered and went back to work. The strange thing is, although he survived a massive number of bee stings then, one single bee sting did him in about a year later. His throat closed, and he was gone before he could even shout for help.
I passed the bar exam and decided to practice Indian law. I got some land back for one tribe, went to Washington, helped with a case regarding tribal religion, one thing and another, until I jumped at the chance to come back. Only not to Pluto, but to the reservation where I would marry Geraldine and where, all along, the truth was waiting.
Although we asked Mother to live with us, she refused, and insisted on remaining in Pluto. When I visited her, I would walk the town and invariably pass the empty lot where our house had stood. Ted had died before deciding what flimsy box to erect, and the lot had gone to weeds.
One day as I was standing there, a car drove past and then stopped. An aged woman in a baggy summer dress got out and began to walk back toward me. Her dress, a lurid pink floral pattern, threw me off. As she drew near, I recognized C. She’d never worn a flower print before, only solid colors, and she had let her hair go white. Also, she had developed the hunch of an elderly, soft-boned woman. She looked pleased when she saw the look on my face.
“Didn’t I tell you I would get old?”
“I didn’t believe you,” I said.
C. didn’t seem concerned in the least at my awkwardness. Rather, it confirmed her belief, I suppose, and she said in a taunting voice, “Did you think I’d stay beautiful? Age gracefully?”
Staring into her face, I saw expressions — shame, defiance, maybe satisfaction — but no tenderness that I could recognize.
“You did what you did,” I said, at last.
“I had to so you’d leave.”
I took a step toward her, but she turned from me and stomped back to her car. I watched her drive off. After a moment, I walked up the limestone steps and through the phantom oak-and-glass front doors of the house where I grew up. I paced the hall, entered the long rectangle of dining room, rested a hand on the carved cherrywood mantel, then passed into the kitchen. The house was so real around me that I could smell the musty linen in the cedar closet, the gas from the leaky burner on the stove, the sharp tang of geraniums that I had planted in clay pots. I lay down on the exact place where the living room couch had been pushed tight under the leaded-glass windows. I closed my eyes and it was all around me again. The stuffed bookshelves, the paneling, the soft slap of my mother’s cards on the table.
I could see from the house of my dark mind the alley, from the alley the street leading to the end of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the crush of wild burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.
ABOUT A MONTH after our wedding, I was sitting with Geraldine. Between segments of the national news, we were chatting about some illness she’d once had, or I’d once had. C.’s name came up and Geraldine said, “Oh, that doctor who won’t treat Indians.”
“What?”
In all the time that I knew C., in all the time that I’d made love to her, I never knew such a thing. And there I was, a member of our tribe — which proved how off-reservation my mind-set was, growing up. But it was also strange I hadn’t heard this in my capacity as a judge, or from my mother. Then I remembered my head bumps.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, she won’t.”
“How so?”
Geraldine switched off the television, then returned to sit down beside me. By talking of C. we had already violated our tacit rule in which she was not mentioned. And it had gone further. Geraldine did not believe me.
“You must have known.”
It was the first time that my involvement with C. was acknowledged between us. Part of me wanted to drop the subject forever, but another part insisted I defend my innocence.
“I didn’t know.”
My words sounded false even in my own ears. There was a sudden cleft of space between us. Stricken, I said something I’ve always wished I could take back.
“But she treated me.”
Geraldine raised her eyes to mine, then looked away. I had seen disappointment.
“They always need an exception,” she said.
Geraldine then told me of several cases, over the years, where the doctor had turned people down — even in a crisis — and how she had let it be known, generally, that she would not treat our people. They all knew why. It was more than your garden-variety bigotry. There was history involved, said Geraldine. I understood, then, that I’d known everything and nothing about the doctor. Only later did I realize: if I had been the same age as C., it would not have mattered. Even though she’d cured my head bumps, become my lover, I’d always be her one exception. Or worse, her absolution. Every time I touched her, she was forgiven. I thought the whole thing out — as Geraldine says, I took in the history. I had to swallow it before I accepted why Cordelia loved me and why she could not abide that she loved me. Why she would not be seen with me. Why tearing down my house was her only option. Why to this day she lives alone.
Doctor Cordelia Lochren
Disaster Stamps of Pluto
THE DEAD OF Pluto now outnumber the living, and the cemetery stretches up the low hill I can see from my kitchen, in a jagged display of white stone. There is no bar, no theater, no hardware store, no car repair, just a gas pump. Even the priest comes only once a week to the church. The grass is barely mowed in time for his visit, and of course there are no flowers planted, so by summer the weeds are thick in the old beds. But when the priest does come, there is at least one more person for the town caf to feed.
That there is a town caf is something of a surprise, and it is no run-down questionable edifice. When the bank pulled out, the family whose drive-in was destroyed by heavy winds bought the building with their insurance money and named it the 4-B’s. The granite faade, arched windows, and twenty-foot ceilings make our caf seem solid and even luxurious. There is a blackboard for specials and a cigar box by the cash register for the extra change people might donate to the hospital care and surgeries of a local boy whose hand was amputated in a farming accident. I spend a good part of my day, as do most of the people left here, in a booth at the caf. For now that there is no point in keeping up our municipal buildings, the caf serves as office space for town council and hobby club members, meeting place for church society and card-playing groups. It is an informal staging area for shopping trips to the nearest mall — sixty-eight miles south — and a place for the few young mothers in town to meet and talk, pushing their car-seat convertible strollers back and forth with one foot while hooting and swearing as intensely as their husbands, down at the other end of the row of booths. Those left childless or, like me, spouseless, due to war or distance or attrition, eat here. Also divorced or single persons who, for one reason or another, ended up with a house in Pluto, North Dakota, as their only major possession.