"Look out your bedroom window as soon as you rise in the morning," Uncle Vern counseled, shifting gears. "You'll probably see a family of white-tailed deer wandering about the backyard. They clean up the fallen apples before wandering off elsewhere."
"They're also crazy for acorns," Houa noted. "Sometimes I see them over by the oak trees eating their fill of nuts."
After the evening meal, Uncle Vern led Bethany out behind the cowshed and showed his niece his honeybees. He kept five, ramshackle, top bar hives fashioned from rough- sawn poplar. The three-sided troughs were propped up on cinder blocks and fitted with plywood lids. Removing a lid, he gently lifted out a triangular bar with a bloated comb of glistening, amber fluid. “There’s ninety pounds of raw honey in this box alone,” he noted, “and the bees ain’t even finished collecting nectar for the season.”
A cloying sweetness flavored the humid air. “When will you harvest the honey?”
He eased the swollen comb back into the box and replaced the rickety lid. When handling the bees, both gnarled hands moved in somnambulistic, slow motion, not unlike a tai chi master. He didn’t bother with gloves or veil. The bees seemed perfectly comfortable with their keeper. He represented no threat. “Not till spring at the earliest. They’ll need most of it to survive the winter… especially the treacherous tail end in February and March.”
He tapped the narrow landing board. “That’s called bearding.” Uncle Ned indicated the huge clot of bees blanketing the front of the hive. “They camp out by the hundreds in the late summer when the heat gets oppressive.”
Somewhere in the invisible darkness an owl hooted. After an interval the bird repeated its low-pitched drone. “My trip to Braxton was a nightmare,” Bethany spoke softly with a flat affect, “an absolute debacle.”
“But I thought –”
Bethany told her uncle about the confrontation with the director of the food bank and her panic attack on leaving the blighted city.”
“Back to the psychedelic sixties when I was your age,” her uncle recounted with a whimsical smile, “this country was still a melting pot… things weren’t perfect, but we got along reasonably well, but that’s not the case anymore.” He studied the entrance to the hive where the bees were settling in for the night. “The Great Society is all washed up… government in Washington’s clueless.”
Several stragglers returned to the hive along with a huge drone, a male with bulgy eyes that extended around the side of his head. “How many bees in that hive you just opened?” Bethany asked.
“I dunno… fifty, sixty thousand.”
“Do they ever fight?”
“No, never… certainly not amongst themselves. They live to serve the queen… for the betterment of the colony.”
With the shrill cacophony of police and ambulance sirens still ringing in her ears, Bethany said, “Fifty thousand honeybees can live harmoniously in a wooden crate no bigger than a flower box, but half as many humans can’t manage a single night in Braxton without murder and mayhem?”
By way of response, Uncle Ned slapped viciously at the side of his neck. “Speaking of murder and mayhem, mosquitoes are quite troublesome this time of year.” He led the way back through the darkness to the house.
*****
In the morning just as Uncle Vern assured her, the deer - a buck with a narrow set of velvety antlers, his doe and two Bambiesque youngsters with speckled pelts - were meandering close by the apple tree, gorging on fallen fruit. "I generally take my vacation the beginning of June." Bethany hugged and kissed her uncle before heading off to Boston on the second full day of her visit.
Houa was lingering at a safe distance, but Bethany approached and kissed her too. The coppery-skinned woman generously returned the favor. "When the worst of the winter is over," Houa said, "your uncle drills tapholes with an auger and we make our own maple syrup. You might enjoy joining us." "We boil down the syrup usually in the spring," Houa explained, "once the sap begins rising through the roots and -"
"Autumn, too," Uncle Vern blurted, lurching awkwardly closer to the driver's side door. "The practice is less common, but there's plenty of sugary sap flowing in these beauties before the New England winter sets in." He gestured at the thickly wooded countryside bordering the farm. "We got plenty of sugar maples but also red, silver and black. Personally, I favor the blacks 'cause of the high sugar content."
"Well then," Bethany eased onto the front seat of her car and smiled mischievously at her newfound relatives. "That changes everything!"
A Room without a View
When the Richardsons, Melvin, Clarissa and their teenage daughter, Sade, moved into the split-level ranch house on Hemlock Circle, the neighbors were pleasantly surprised. A black family in the community – how wonderful, how deliciously delightful!
Unfortunately, the euphoria didn’t last.
By late August of the first year, Billy Ray Hooper, who owned the ranch house that abutted the Richardson’s property was ready to burn a cross on the black family’s front lawn. In lieu of anything quite that extreme, he simply refused to mow the lawn to the left of his property line, a not-so-subtle way of letting the dark-skinned neighbors know what he thought of them.
The stringy grass grew tall and turned to seed. Dandelions, crabgrass, goldenrod and an assortment of ugly, tenacious weeds predominated - but only on the left-hand side, close by the Richardsons’ property. Elsewhere, he added weed killer plus a generous dusting of lime. He positioned petunias, pansies and geraniums in potted plants on either side of the front stoop and trimmed the flagstone walkway with a gas-operated weed whacker. The other side, where the Richardsons resided, resembled a war zone.
Thirteen year-old George Weiner, who lived in the house in back of the Richardsons, watched events unfold with mild confusion. George’s seventh grade class was studying the history of western civilization and had only reached the Visigoths. He didn’t know if Billy Ray Hooper’s feud with the Richardsons was in any way similar to the cataclysmic upheavals he was learning about in middle school. Not that he cared all that much. He got along with black people just fine and was in two classes with the Richardson’s daughter.
“Why’s Mr. Hooper so mad at your father?” George asked one day.
Sade – the name was African and pronounced Shar-day. It meant ‘honor bestows a crown’ in Swahili or some other African tribal tongue. “Mr. Hooper was mowing his lawn Sunday morning and my father told him to stop, because that’s the Lord’s Day, the day of rest.” As Sade explained things, Mr. Hooper worked six days a week at the automotive supply store and the only time he had free was Sunday.”
They were outside in the driveway of the Richardson’s home. Sade’s father had bought a top-of-the-line basketball court with spring-loaded rim and transparent, adjustable-height backboard. Tall and big-boned, Sade played center on the girls’ basketball team. George went to all the games. “My father lost his temper and called Mr. Hooper a really bad name. That’s when all the trouble started.”
Billy Ray Hooper had lived in the same split-level house since he was a child, no bigger than George and took over the property when his parents passed away. That was over twenty years ago. The Richardsons moved onto Hemlock Terrace three years earlier. George watched the girl drive to the hoop from the right side and shoot a layup. The ball ricocheted off the rim and landed in a clump of honeysuckle. She tried the same move from the opposite side, dribbling with her left hand as a defensive measure.
“What name?” George asked.
Sade had measured exactly thirteen feet from an imaginary free throw line on the asphalt to the front of the rim and drawn a ragged line with a piece of chalk. She went and stood behind the line, bounced the ball a half-dozen times on the blacktop and took a two-handed set shot. Swooosh! “
Asshole. He told Mr. Hooper he was a boorish asshole with no respect for the rest of the neighbors.”
George retrieved the ball. “Your father’s a troublemaker.”
Sade waved her hand impatiently and he returned the ball. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” She pounded the ball four, five, six times on the ground and then sent it, with a hint of backspin, sailing toward the hoop. “He’s got a persecution complex.”
The coach started Sade in the center position because of her height and ability to aggressively snag rebounds even against taller opponents, but midway through the season he moved the girl to power forward. On defense Sade could post up with her back to the basket or worm her way under the hoop in man-to-man, zone defense. Now the coach had positioned her back at center. George didn’t understand the half of what Sade was telling him when she talked strategy. He preferred to just sit in the bleachers and cheer when the Wildcats scored points. “How about some one-on-one?” George grabbed the ball and joined her at the impromptu foul line. “First one to reach twenty-one.”
A beat-up Chevy pickup truck with a blown muffler pulled into the driveway adjacent to the property and Billy Ray Hooper climbed out. Seeing Sade, he waved and cracked a toothy grin.
Sade waved back. “Hi, Mr. Hooper!”
The man crouched down and raised his hands chest high. “Keep your palms up and knees bent when catching an outlet pass.” He winked mischievously and disappeared into the house. Fifteen minutes later George was sprawled out on the grass trying to catch his breath. Twenty-one to eighteen - he had beaten the girl but just barely. When he rose to his feet, she cuffed him on the shoulder and said in a low monotone, “About what happened last Saturday at the reservoir,...”
*****
The previous Saturday, George rose early and went fishing at the Brandenburg Reservoir. Technically, no one was supposed to fish or swim in the town drinking water, but the youth had found a cove squirreled away down a forgotten path overgrown with weeds and bramble. The cove was hidden behind a wall of pine trees and dense shrubbery. If he headed out around dawn and cut through the woods at the end of the street, he could reach the fishing spot well before any hikers were up and about.
George snagged largemouth bass and sleek pickerel casting with lures in the shallow waters. Golden perch and bottom-feeding hornpout were equally plentiful but favored worms and juicy night crawlers. For the first hour, he tried his luck with a standard red-and-white lure, casting out toward a clump of water lilies. He hooked an eighteen-inch pickerel and played the brawny fish in close to shore, where the pickerel broke toward a clot of reeds and the monofilament line got hung up on a submerged stump.
Around eleven, the sun loomed over the tops of the surrounding trees and the temperature had inched up into the mid-eighties. A light breeze rippled the surface of the water into glossy ribbons. George removed the lure and switched over to a hook and bobber. Spearing an earthworm on the barbed shaft of an Eagleclaw hook, he cast the bobber far out into the cove. Just as the plastic splashed down, skidding across the placid water, he heard the sound of rustling leaves. A moment later, Sade appeared. She was dressed in shorts and a Wildcats’ basketball jersey. “How’d you do?”
She flopped down on a tuft of grass. “It was a rout… thirty-eight to twelve. We killed them.”
A painted turtle raised its wedge-shaped snout above the water twenty feet from the bobber. A solitary dragon fly with transparent wings was hovering a few inched above the lily pads. “My parents had a big fight last night,” George confided. The bobber was drifting toward a rotted stump. He reeled the line in, steering it away from the wood and placed the rod carefully on the ground. “My father wants to put up a wooden fence bordering the property.”
“Who’s property?” She splayed out her tawny legs and lay back prone on the warm earth.
“Yours…ours. He’s gonna ask your father’s permission. My mother’s worried your dad will think that we’re putting up the fence because we don’t like colored people living next door.”
There was a prolonged silence. A redwing blackbird flitted out across the brush disappearing into a clump of gnarled birch trees. The painted turtle reemerged for a few seconds closer in to shore. “Yes, that’s true,” Sade finally said in a neutral tone.
“What’s true – that my father’s a racist or that your old man’s gonna go mental over the fence?”
“A little of both,” she replied.
George, who was standing near the water, reeled in the line. The worm had been nibbled away to nothing. He replaced it and hurled the line in a sweeping arc into the middle of the placid water. The sun was directly overhead now with temperatures topping out in the low nineties. He went to where the girl was resting and threw himself down on the rough grass. “I’m reading this novel by an English writer, E.M. Forster.” There was no reply. “A Room with a View.”
“What’s that?”
“The title of the novel I’m reading.”
She rolled over on her side and stared at him impassively. “Stupid title.”
George couldn’t help but notice that she had grown prettier over the past year. Not that the girl was particularly feminine in the traditional sense. Sade’s ebony skin was so incredibly smooth and flawless that he sometimes had the urge to reach out and touch her face. “It’s not stupid at all,” George protested.
The girl tugged a strand of dry straw-like grass from the ground and stuck it between her front teeth. She wasn’t the least bit interested in E. M. Forster or any other priggish, turn-of-the-century authors. Her basketball team had just annihilated the competition, stomped them into the ground - run away with the game. “In the story,” George continued, “the grownups act silly… like spoiled children.”
“Okay,” she murmured distractedly. He could tell she wasn’t listening. A pasty yellow butterfly flitted past making an erratic path toward the water line; attracted by the vibrant reds and oranges, it finally came to rest on a tiger lily.
“The adults act thoroughly ridiculous throwing temper tantrums and feuding with one another over the most idiotic things.”
Sade stared at the bobber. It hadn’t moved an inch since George replaced the worm. “Why are you telling me this?”
He leaned in closer to her. “My father and mother were yelling at each other last night over this moronic fence business… just like characters in the Forster novel.”
“A fence… it’s just a stupid pile of lumber.” Sade leaned forward until her face was no more than an inch from George’s and then, without warning, kissed him leisurely on the lips. “I’m not interested in A Room with a View.” She draped a hand around his shoulder and pulled him close again. “Now you kiss me.”
George took her face in his hands and returned the favor. Pushing him gently away, she rose to her feet. “You’re a good kisser.” George grinned self-consciously.
“My father doesn’t like you,” she blurted, a total non sequitur.
“Why not?”
“Why do you think?”
George understood perfectly well but held his tongue. After a long silence he asked, “Does your father think black people deserve reparations for slavery?”
“What sort of crazy question is that?”
“A simple yes or no will suffice,” George replied testily.
“Yes,” Sade replied, “my father thinks white people should pay reparations to every living black person in America.”
“And why’s that?”
“For all the suffering we’ve endure.”
“But you live in a perfectly nice, middle class community. Your old man drives a Lexus and earns a decent paycheck. Why should white people give him any more money than he already has?”
Sade shrugged. “I liked it better when we were kissing and discussing Ian Forest.”
“Forster,” George corrected. “E.M. Forster.” “Okay, so give me another kiss.”
“Reparations,” Sade side-stepped the request, “you didn’t say what that’s got to do with anything.”
“It’s a long story,” George replied evasively.
*****
The previous afternoon, when the quarreling had reached a crescendo, Mrs. Wiener said, “I got a rotten feeling about this fence business. Look at all the trouble Mel Richardson stirred up with Billy Ray Hooper over a stupid lawnmower.”
His wife laughed sarcastically. “He’s the kind of malcontent who probably thinks his kind deserve reparations for slavery.” George was crouched at the top of the stairs listening as the angry tirade filtered up from the kitchen.
“I heard,” Mr. Wiener fumed, “the jerk landed a six-figure job with the electric company,”. “Mel Richardson will retire with a phenomenal pension and full benefits. What the hell does he need reparations for?” When there was no immediate reply, the man added in a less excitable tone, “Maybe Richardson won’t care about the fence. It’s not like we’re asking him to reach into his own pocket and shell out any money.”
The squabble had run its course, and George retreated to his bedroom. He pulled a Webster’s Collegiate dictionary from the shelf and thumbed through the pages to the back of the book.
Reparations: compensation (given or received)
for an insult or injury; Compensation exacted
from a defeated nation by the victors; ‘Germany
was unable to pay reparations demanded for
World War I.’
A weird thought occurred to George as he lay in bed waiting for sleep: if anyone deserved reparations, it was Billy Ray Hooper. Mr. Richardson had goaded him for no good reason and then felt doubly indignant when the man retaliated – a passive-aggressive gesture of defiance – by letting the late summer weeds run amok. Still, despite the bad blood between him and the girl’s father, Billy Ray remained perfectly pleasant to Sade. “Keep your palms up and knees bent when you catch outlet passes!” The last image to flit across his mind before George drifted off to sleep was that of Bill Ray Hooper crouched down on his haunches in a defensive posture, elbows extended and all ten fingers splayed at the heavens.
*****
The kiss changed everything and it changed nothing.
Well, no, - maybe that was a bit extreme. It wasn’t like kissing some Barbie doll wannabe with pouty lips and a half pound of velvety eyeliner. Sade was still the female jock, the center on the girls’ basketball team who effortlessly slid in front of the better-positioned defensive players in the key position and snatched rebounds.
They had been friends for three years now, since the parents moved onto Hemlock Circle from Dorchester on the southern outskirts of Boston. Dorchester was a run-down, blighted section pockmarked with three-decker tenements and condemned buildings.
Immigrant Russian Jews lived there half a century earlier only to be driven out - white flight – by uneducated, southern blacks moving north in search of jobs and a decent life. In the late sixties following Martin Luther King’s assassination, riots broke out with looting and arson - not as bad as Watts, but scary stuff none-the-less. Now the more genteel, upwardly mobile descendents of those earlier Afro-Americans were drifting further south to middle class, gentrified suburbs in search of the American dream. So in a symbolic sense, Sade Richardson had been pursuing George for the better part of the past sixty years, and now that the girl with the feathery soft lips and immaculate skin finally snagged him, the boy was in no great hurry to get away.
*****
Later that evening at supper Mel Richardson said, “I’m going mow the lawn.” He was steering a row of sweet peas onto his fork. Mrs. Richardson had cooked scrod dusted with Italian bread crumbs in a lemon dill sauce.
“You already mowed the lawn,” his wife replied.
“Not ours – the idiot’s.” The idiot, of course, was Mr. Hooper and the lawn in question was the eight-foot wide parcel of unruly wilderness on the far side of the property.
Sade raised her fork and shook it at her father. “You go over there, and he’ll call the cops and have you arrested for trespassing.”
Mr. Richardson grinned at his daughter, but the man was all bluff and vacuous bluster.
Sade understood perfectly well that her father was just blowing off steam, a favorite pastime. He would throw back his shoulders, assume a menacing tone; once he had everyone’s undivided attention, he would make a rash, provocative pronouncement. But nothing ever came of it. With Sade’s father, threatening to do something homicidally reckless was more recreational pursuit than clinical pathology.
Melvin Richardson was a handsome black man with boyish, photogenic features. Like his daughter, the skin was smooth and clear with high cheekbones and sensuous lips. Deep-set eyes framed a broad forehead. When he smiled, the man looked ten years younger than his wife who was born the same month thirty-eight years earlier. Mrs. Richardson, by contrast, was light-skinned and rather plain with a nervous, petulant set to her thin lips.
“You shouldn’t have called Mr. Hooper that bad name,” Sade picked up where she had left off. “You keep saying Billy Ray’s a racist and bigot, but up until you started harassing him, the man treated us decent enough.”
“Whose side are you on anyway?”
“I’m just saying maybe you should go over there and bury the hatchet.”
Sade’s little brother, Leon, kept looking back and forth as the conversation progressed. At ten years old, he was still too young to have an opinion one way or the other. “Yeah, I’ll bury the hatchet one of these days,” Mr. Richardson snickered. “I’ll bury it right between his - ”
“You seem to be spending an awful lot of time lately,” Mrs. Richardson interrupted, “with the Wiener boy.”
“George,” Sade confirmed. “He’s always got his nose buried in a book.”
“The Wieners – they’re Jewish.” She turned to her husband. “The People of the Book - that’s what they’re called, because they’re always reading, studying, advancing themselves intellectually.” Fetching the coffee pot, she warmed her husband’s cup and placed a peach cobbler on the table. “The wife brought a chocolate cake over by way of a housewarming present the week after we settled in. Such a nice gesture, don’t you think?” Her husband shrugged noncommittally and nibbled at the dessert.
“He wants to be a writer… a novelist or something,” Sade ventured.
“Who does?” Leon finally entered the conversation.
“George. He reads these highfalutin, literary books, gets all excited and tells me about them.”
“What books?” Mrs. Richardson offered her husband a second helping of the peach cobbler.
“I don’t know. It’s all too complicated.”
Through the kitchen window, they could see Billy Ray Hooper wearing jeans and cowboy boots sauntering over to his truck. He fired up the engine, pulled out of the driveway and disappeared down the street. “Here’s your golden opportunity,” Sade said in a good-natured, teasing tone.
Mr. Richardson scowled. He placed his dirty dishes in the sink, went back and retrieved his coffee. “I’ll deal with that redneck hooligan another day.” He retreated to the den and the evening news. Leon also brought his plate to the counter and trailed away after his father.
After he was gone Mrs. Richardson said, “You take great pleasure aggravating your father.”
“Mr. Hooper isn’t a bigot. He doesn’t care one way or the other about black people. Daddy got him all riled up, and then he had to go and call him an asshole.”
Mrs. Richardson usually brought her daughter up short for using foul language, but the woman sighed and stared at her slender fingers. “You know how your father is.”
“Daddy doesn’t like white people.”
“No, it’s not that,” her mother protested. “He gets agitated… frightened and acts impulsively.” She began wiping down the kitchen table with a damp rag. “He shouldn’t have said that to Mr. Hooper, but he’s got too much pride to admit that he did anything wrong.”
*****
A week later on a Sunday morning, George went downstairs for breakfast but his parents were nowhere to be found. He glanced out the kitchen window. Mr. and Mrs. Weiner were standing over by a profusion of straggly lilacs in full bloom, jabbering with the Richardsons. They were breaking the news about the fence. The ‘privacy’ fence – that’s what they had decided to call it. Not an exclusion or security or I-hate-colored-people fence but a sturdy, six-foot cedar stockade that would sit just inside of the Weiner’s property line and give both families a measure of ‘privacy’.
Mrs. Richardson was all smiles. The willowy woman even laughed graciously, her head bobbing up and down in agreement with some point that Mr. Weiner had raised. Mr. Richardson was smiling too, but the expression was anything but congenial. There was much gesticulating plus several loud belly laughs and high-pitched titters that carried all the way across the back lawn and into the kitchen. It was grownups acting silly and totally out of control.
It was pure, one hundred proof, straight-from-the-bo