Sins of the Bees Read online

  For my family of men—my tribe, my genus, my species: Stephen, Phinehas, Benjamin, Isaiah

  Apis mellifera: The common honeybee. Order: Hymenoptera (Hymen is the Greek god of marriage, hence the union of front and hind wings); Suborder: Apocrita (ants, bees, and wasps); Superfamily: Apoidea; Family: Apidae (bees); Tribe: Apini; Genus: Apis ; Species: mellifera (honey-bearing)

  —The Beekeeper’s Handbook

  Ode to the Beekeeper

  who has taken off her veil

  and gloves and whispers to the bees

  in their own language, inspecting the comb-thick

  frames, blowing just so when one or the other alights

  on her, if she doesn’t study it first—the veins

  feeding the wings, the deep ochre

  shimmy, the singing—just like in the dreams

  that brought her here in the first place: dream

  of the queen, dream of the brood chamber,

  dream of the desiccated world and sifting

  with her hands the ash and her hands

  ashen when she awoke, dream of honey

  in her child’s wound, dream of bees

  hived in the heart and each wet chamber

  gone gold. Which is why, first,

  she put on the veil. And which is why,

  too, she took it off.

  —Ross Gay

  PART ONE

  Here, then, as everywhere else in the world, one part of the circle is wrapped in darkness; here, as everywhere, it is from without, from an unknown power, that the supreme order issues; and the bees, like ourselves, obey the nameless lord of the wheel that incessantly turns on itself, and crushes the wills that have set it in motion.

  —THE LIFE OF THE BEE

  PROLOGUE

  AUGUST 2001

  The show was finally over, white linen-draped tables lined with smudged champagne glasses and crumpled cloth napkins, the crumbs of catered cake. Isabelle wandered the vaulted room, haunted with the reverberating disruption of the Maidens—all her watercolor girls framed on soft gray walls, girls too young for their rounded stomachs and long-suffering pain, girls whose eyes still cried out to her in entreaty.

  Like O’Keeffe, Isabelle had returned to the Santa Fe desert looking to find healing in its austerity, to escape what she hadn’t ever been able to leave behind. But it was always there in her work, as inescapable as her memories. Study after study of the same subject. What she’d run from, what she’d always been running from—fifteen and alone with the wreckage of herself, her own stomach swollen with unwanted life. All the girls, holding themselves so still for her, their faces shuttered in retreat, their bodies burgeoning.

  After she’d fled the compound, fled Len Dietz and all he was working to enact—his promised land, his army of god, his holy family—she’d kept painting them, these girls, from memory, her mind delivering flashing snapshots just when she thought she’d finally forgotten their sorrow, their doomed fate.

  She’d thought then, as she often had over the past twenty years, of running back to Eamon, back to the island after all this time gone—decades now—but instead, as soon as she’d escaped Almost Paradise, she’d painted Eamon’s honeysuckle bonsai from memory in one fevered, post-Y2K, post–Wedding of the Maidens session. She’d named the honeysuckle painting In Eden, and when it had gone out in a small traveling art tour, on an impulse she hadn’t been able to halt, she’d sent Eamon a copy of the show’s magazine along with a packet of the painted girls, but she’d never heard anything back. She couldn’t blame him—not after her sudden abandonment so long ago—but she had despaired following each empty-mailbox day.

  In Eden was the only subject-matter departure of the show. Derek had hung it by itself in the back alcove, said people would buy the others, all the girls, just because of it, and he’d been right, the honeysuckle calling its children home, seedpod babies cradled tight in its roots.

  The show had been the success Derek had predicted from the start. He’d toasted Isabelle before he’d left, leaned close, said, “I told you so,” his face brushing her hair, his lips grazing her cheek. A man young enough to be her child, smitten with a sorrow that didn’t belong to him.

  Isabelle went back to the alcove and sat on the bench herself, studying the lovers’ bodies in the honeysuckle’s trunk, each one mirroring the other.

  “To you, Eamon,” she said finally, lifting her glass.

  Derek had tried to put the honeysuckle painting up for sale, too, said it would bring top dollar, but Isabelle told him it wasn’t hers to sell. That she needed to take it to its rightful owner.

  She stood and gently lifted it off the wall. “It’s time to go home,” she said.

  * * *

  She gave her apartment one last check—a cleaned-out fridge, emptied cupboards, a tidily made bed, and bare wood floors. An old lady’s spartan domicile.

  She didn’t know when she’d be back, or if she would ever be. She was tired of trying to pacify people who would never understand. People from a world where you could live happily ever after. A world where a mother didn’t give up her firstborn daughter, her only child. A world where virgin child brides weren’t given over to a fifty-some-year-old man to impregnate for his end-of-the-world new millennium and told that it was god’s will. A world where you didn’t bury pregnant girls or their stillborn babies under a cult’s palaver tree, declaring it divinity, heaven just another form of the girls’ hell.

  She grabbed an age-softened flannel shirt and flattened it against the bed, smoothing the creases before folding it for packing. A thing kept for so long. When she’d been going through the apartment before the show, she’d found it in the far reaches of the back cupboard, and when she’d pulled it out, there it was, still caught in the shirt’s folds after all these years—the island’s damp musk and cedar, a hint of salt air. She buried her nose in the shirt and inhaled. Even in summer, the island’s fog had chilled her. Trawler Island. So long ago. She thought of the young woman she’d been then and wanted to go back, tell her to stay.

  * * *

  Her suitcase packed, everything ready, Isabelle went to the bathroom and pinned her hair back, looking at herself in the mirror—the network of spider lines around her eyes, the softness along her once-distinct jawline, her hair turned from bright auburn to streaks of silver and gold.

  She opened the box on the counter and folded back the tissue inside. She’d kept Eamon’s marriage present all this time—honeysuckle bonsai earrings. His beautiful tree cut out in profile on wooden circles, its sweeping canopy painted green, the lovers still visible in its trunk. She fit the earrings carefully in her ears and studied their dangling grace against her long neck. She would take what came. That was the deal she’d made with herself. There would be no running this time. No more questing, searching. No more questioning. Only acceptance of whatever outcome there would be.

  * * *

  After the cab dropped Isabelle at the bustling airport and she got through the rushing push and stress of security, she made her way through the throngs of people to the boarding gate waiting area and sat in a corner with her suitcase and the honeysuckle painting parked in front of her. The TVs suspended around her played out a familiar scene of summer wildfire—billowing smoke and dramatic shots of flames licking up into the sky from the tops of towering pines perched high along an austere canyon rim. It looked like the apocalypse the Lenites had prepared for with Y2K, the new millennium, the end of the world—which, of course, had never come.

  But then the camera panned out to a full canyon view and Isabelle had a quick shock of recognition. She knew that place. She had lived in that place.

  Breathlessly she scanned the ticker-tape headlines running along the bottom of the muted screen: �
�Four hospitalized after an Idaho Fish and Game helicopter was shot down… Hells Canyon Visitor Center Occupation over… Fourteen suspects in custody on multiple charges, including arson… Wildfire still raging out of control in steep canyonland… Len Dietz, founder of Almost Paradise and occupation organizer, arrested…”

  Her body washed cold and her scalp prickled with goose bumps as the TVs flashed from one scene to the next—the compound filmed from above, swarming with SWAT and ATF, the air filled with black smoke. She watched without breathing as they showed scenes from the occupation, replaying wobbly insider home videos of Len pacing and preaching, his long hair glistening like a pelt on his back, his silver seeing-eye pendant swinging on his chest over his crisp white shirt, laundered and pressed by his child wives, who faithfully bore the fruit of his loins, propagating his holy army in preparation for the end times of the new millennium, everything ramping up to humanity’s sure and swift destruction, the four horsemen of the apocalypse well on their way, Len Dietz and his followers ready to join their rushing charge.

  Then the footage switched, showing Len handcuffed and booked, glowering at the camera with his piercing blue eyes, charged with enough crimes to hold him, but not enough to call those back from the graves they’d been sent to. Never enough to make up for all the pain and destruction he’d enacted upon one after the other of his followers who believed he was someone who could save them from themselves, save them from the end.

  All the girls who’d had no choice: Rebecca, Leah, Naomi, Ruth, Rachel, Miriam, Hannah, Eve, Abigail, Jerusha, Johanna, Esther. Girls baptized in the waters of the Snake River winding deep in Hells Canyon under the sheer peaks of the Seven Devils Mountains. Girls who never stood a chance against a force so large, so overpowering.

  Everything felt tipped sideways, Isabelle’s emotions reeling out—what she’d tried so hard to contain, to work through, to express in painting after painting. That pain. The wounds she would always carry, for failing them, failing herself. What she’d gone to the compound trying to achieve, paying witness, purposely connecting herself to something she’d been running from since she was a girl herself, trapped in her stepfather’s gaze, her body bearing the fruit of his dark touch.

  “The flames of hell unleashed,” one of the flashing TV headlines read, the drama of the reportage building. Fire, the one thing that had been able to do what nothing else had. The one thing that had been too big, too powerful, for even Len to direct, the force of his will burned away by the very thing he’d sought to unleash.

  But all the footage showed only the men—Len’s soldiers. Isabelle imagined Faith huddled like a protective mother around all the maidens and their surviving babies. Where was she now? Where would she go, now that the compound was swarming with the authorities? Where would all the girls go—those lucky enough to have been spared—their lives driven by the unrelenting wind and flames that had once been Len Dietz himself?

  When she had finally escaped to Santa Fe and changed her last name, making sure there was no record of her anywhere, that she hadn’t been followed, Isabelle had risked sending Faith one last painting—a thank-you for what help Faith had offered her in the end, secreting her out of the compound in the middle of the night, keeping her true purpose and feelings hidden from the rest of them. The painting was a farmers market scene from that first time they’d met, Faith dressed in her homemade dress and apron, a scarf tying back her long blond hair as she stood at her booth full of garden produce and fresh-baked pies, looking as if she’d just stepped off a nineteenth-century Scandinavian farm, carrying all the world’s burdens on her shoulders. Something nobody could ever take from her, those burdens. Baby after baby, girl after girl, woman after woman. Faith as midwife, witness to every dark thing Almost Paradise had tried to keep hidden.

  Two years ago, when Isabelle had been with Eli and selling her paintings at the Two Rivers farmers market every week, Faith had come up to her booth and told her that Almost Paradise was looking for an artist to do a series of commissioned paintings, and that they’d all agreed Isabelle was the one they wanted for the job. Isabelle had heard all the rumors, good and bad, about the cult—you couldn’t help it if you lived in town, even though most of the residents supported them—but she’d immediately seen Faith’s offer as a sign. A way to finally take back the past. A way to finally make some kind of difference in the future.

  When Isabelle had agreed to take the job, she’d thought she knew what she was getting into, that her work would serve as the only strength she needed. That perhaps she could make recompense at last, shed light on Len Dietz’s dark secrets, opening them up for the world to see, and therefore stop. But she’d come to realize that each painting she did was like dropping a pebble into a lake, the power of Len’s darkness swallowing everything in its wake. She’d been nothing more than another of the cult’s targeted women, just like all the others.

  Almost Paradise had been a well-formed entity by the time she’d come onto the scene—a local establishment: thousands of acres on the rim of a plateau overlooking the Snake River, along with the compound that Len had branded his “covenant community.” He’d been preaching his particular brand of doomsday, antigovernment religion in the area for decades with some success, but after President Clinton’s election, he’d started accumulating followers and converts—the end, he said, all but sure with the changing political tides, Armageddon written on the wall.

  With his Vietnam War background and local roots, people listened when Len told them the government was after them, that the New World Order was coming for them all. People who wanted to become Almost Paradise residents just had to agree to a community covenant, which required that they be god-fearing Christians who would stand and fight with one another should any resident’s rights be threatened. But those “rights” ended up having more to do with Len’s desires than anything else. He had built his own order—one that conscripted all of Almost Paradise’s unmarried girls and women to him. The virgins were his official wives, the nonvirgins his wife-concubines, and all of them were meant to bear his children, build his holy family. The men and teen boys became his soldiers, and the other married women the compound’s servants. Len was their leader, their ruler, and they were all to obey. By the time Isabelle had gone to the compound, a few dozen families lived there or in the surrounding area, and the town of Two Rivers was their support system, protecting the Lenites as part of their own. Anyone who didn’t comply was marked an enemy, an outsider, and retaliation—through threats or actual violence—was expected.

  Watching the footage on the airport TVs—all the bearded, camouflaged Lenite soldiers shackled—Isabelle wondered if any of them had understood what was coming. All this fire and loss. The end of everything they had been working so hard to create. “God’s Family” gone.

  When the flight attendant called for boarding over the speakers, it was all Isabelle could do to stand, to walk onto the plane and stow her carry-on with the honeysuckle painting above her, to sit at her window seat. The runway lights rushed underneath them as they took off, the dark outside growing larger and larger until it seemed it would swallow them whole. All that injury. All that sorrow. Gaping like an open wound.

  She had worked hard to keep the outside world at bay for the past year after she’d come back into society, but it had found its way to her anyway, pressing in, overtaking her.

  She leaned back, closed her eyes, tried to push away the flashing images of the girls’ faces, but the plane bucked in the air, everything rattling and shaking as if coming apart, and perhaps it was. Perhaps this was meant to be her end, too—all her documentation gone, all the girls left nameless and forgotten, their faces adorning strangers’ walls, forever muted.

  * * *

  Later, as they landed, Isabelle gripped her seat, the plane shuttling in hard and rough, a headlong rush, early-morning light breaking a bright horizon line. She felt drunk and swirling. She could barely find her way out of the airport to a taxi, everything strange and
disconnected feeling, as if she’d been transported from the flames into this cool world, thick fog obscuring the buildings in gray.

  When she got to the terminal, the ferry was just coming in, blowing its foghorn in short blasts, mist swirling from the water, the light soft. Air that made her feel as if she were breathing water—the smell of salt and seaweed, wet wood. This place. She’d forgotten its quiet magic.

  She remembered the way she’d sucked in her breath the first time she’d seen Eamon’s honeysuckle, the way it seemed to breathe, to pulse as if it were alive, the lovers’ bodies shaped inside it. Eamon’s trees had moved her like no art ever had, her paintings only a shadow representation of what he’d been able to bring out in trunk and branch, in whorl and knot.

  She’d thought about calling or writing ahead, had thought about finally giving Eamon all the letters she’d written to him from her bunker room in the compound, but in the end, she hadn’t. She couldn’t see how a series of despairing love letters from inside a self-imposed cult internment or an out-of-the-blue phone call after two decades gone would be any better than just showing up, even if there was a chance Eamon wouldn’t be on Trawler anymore, although Isabelle couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. It seemed he’d always been a part of the island.

  Over the years, she’d tried not to imagine the life they might have had. The family they might have made together. But it had been her choice, trying to find her way on her own, make it through all her own hauntings.

  She walked to the ferry’s front deck and stood watching the gulls sail around, the jellyfish float translucent in the water. Below her, the ferry attendants waved on the first row of vehicles. The drivers nudged into their front-row spots and parked. The farthest vehicle was a jalopy of a truck—a patchwork of turquoise and rust, several boxes strapped in the back. One was a bee box, Isabelle realized with surprise. It had been a long time since she’d seen one—in Two Rivers before Almost Paradise, when she’d been so briefly with sweet Eli and his bees and chickens, the lilac in his front yard that she had pruned, trying to form the honeysuckle bonsai from memory, trying to soothe her soul.