Stolen Honey by Nancy Means Wright Page A

the mountains, she could hardly see them for the trees.
    The tractor struggled up the drive and quit, and Ruth Willmarth climbed down. She didn’t look fifty at all, Donna thought. She was, well, young-looking, with gray-brown hair pushed haphazardly on top of her head, a blue denim shirt open to her sweaty neck. But when she turned to face them, Donna saw that she was upset about something.
    “Is your mother coming by?” she asked Donna. “Something’s happened to the hives. The upper ones have been knocked off and some of the bees are dead. Another bunch have swarmed up in a maple tree. It could have been an animal, I suppose, a bear looking for honey. I only hope it wasn’t one of my heifers— Zelda, maybe. That beast!”
    “Mother’s coming to pick me up,” Donna said. “I don’t know why the bees should be dead.” She looked up at Ruth Willmarth’s flushed face.
    She did know, though. She knew. And it wasn’t Ruth Willmarth who was under attack. It was herself—and her mother. Someone was blaming them. Someone wanted to destroy their lives, the way the nightshade had destroyed Shep Noble.
    She dug her hands deep into her pockets, felt the lining rip.
    * * * *
    It was nothing Ruth had done, Gwen assured her when she pulled in an hour later to pick up her daughter; it might well have been a bear. “Last spring an old black fellow knocked over one of my hives searching for honey.” Gwen sent Leroy to tend to the damaged hives while she undid the swarm. Already part of it was on the ground from the weight of the few thousand bees that had dragged down the maple branch. She placed a new hive body on the grass with the entrance near the bees and spread a sheet in front. The bees would have to walk over the sheet to get into the hive and the white sheet would make the queen easier to spot.
    “It’s possible that somebody did this to get back at me,” she told Ruth while they were waiting for the bees to catch on. She didn’t want to worry Ruth, but she had to tell someone. “There was a letter to the editor in the paper, a woman deploring my conduct. Meaning more than the nightshade—meaning, oh, yes, my ‘mixed’ marriage. The backwoods bigot!” Gwen felt confused, wanting to disbelieve; wanting to accuse. She felt better, though, for having shared her thoughts.
    “Seems to me you’re a backwoods liberal,” Ruth said, and Gwen had to smile then.
    “The longer I live, the more oddball I get,” Gwen said. “Honestly, I’m sick of conforming to someone else’s norm.”
    “You got it,” Ruth murmured. The queen bee was moving across the white sheet now, a golden yellow with three black stripes that marked her as Italian. Gwen preferred the Italian to the Caucasian bees. They were more sunny, colorful. Gwen hoped she wouldn’t have to kill this queen, she was such a beauty. She’d have to see first what kind of egg-laying pattern the queen had made.
    Now the rest of the bees followed into the hive, and the two women walked back toward the barn, where Donna was helping Emily to grain the cows. Or trying to help, Gwen thought, smiling. Donna was all thumbs when it came to manual labor, be it dishes or vacuuming. Not that she couldn’t do it, it just wasn’t a priority with her.
    The girls were coming out of the barn with a new calf. It had a huge black head and long spindly black and white legs. It had been born the day before, Donna told her mother; “Isn’t it sweet?” She had her arm around it. It was one of those moments. Gwen nodded but couldn’t speak. Donna released the calf and went back toward the pickup, where Leroy was stacking the broken hives in the back. He looked hard at Donna, his face pinkening. When the girl frowned, he turned a deeper color and sucked on his lower lip with his teeth. One upper tooth was black, as though he’d been struck by someone or something. Gwen saw Ruth watching.
    “He has a crush on her, Ruth. Though at this point I think it’s more of a