THE GARDEN STOOD like a small, spiky brown fortress inside its deer-proof palisades. The fence wasn’t proof against everything, though, and as always, I opened the gate cautiously. Once I had caught three huge raccoons debauching themselves amidst the remains of my infant corn; on another the intruder had been a huge eagle, sitting atop my water barrel, wings spread to catch the morning sun. When I opened the door suddenly, the eagle had uttered a shriek nearly as loud as mine before launching himself past my head like a panicked cannonball. And …
A brief, violent shudder went through me as I thought of the beehives in my old garden—knocked over by the flight of a murderer, the scent of honey from the broken combs mingling with crushed leaves and the sweet, butcher-thick smell of spilled blood.
This time, though, the only foreign body inside the fence was John Quincy Myers, tall and ragged as a scarecrow, and looking quite at home among the red-flowered bean vines and sprouting turnips.
“There you be, Missus Fraser!” he said, smiling widely at sight of me. “You’re well come in your time, as the Good Book says.”
“It does?” I had some vague notion that the Bible might include some mention of bees—perhaps John Quincy’s blessing came from the Psalms or something? “Er … Brianna said that I should come and … bless the bees?”
“Fine-lookin’ woman, your daughter,” Myers said, shaking his head in admiration. “Seen precious few women that size, and none of ’em what you’d call handsome. All pretty lively, though. How did she come to wed a preacher? You wouldn’t think a prayin’ man would be able to do right by her—I mean, in the ways of the flesh, as you might—”
“The bees,” I said, somewhat louder. “Do you know what I should be saying to them?”
“Oh, to be sure.” Recalled to the matter at hand, he turned toward the western edge of the garden, where the battered bee skep had been placed on a board atop a rickety stool. To my surprise, he reached into his bulging knapsack and withdrew four shallow pottery bowls made of the soft white glazed porcelain called creamware, which lent a disconcertingly formal note to the occasion.
“For the ants,” he said, handing me the bowls. “Now, there’s a mort o’ folk what keep bees,” he explained. “The Cherokee do, and the Creek and Choctaw and doubtless some kinds of Indian I don’t know the names of, too. But there’s the Moravians, down to Salem—that’s where I got the ant bowls and the skep. And they got their own ways, too.”
I had a vision of John Quincy Myers, clad in a buzzing blanket of bees, strolling down the streets of Salem, and smiled.
“Wait,” I said. “You surely didn’t carry those bees all the way from Salem!”
“Why, no,” he said, looking mildly surprised. “Found ’em in a tree just a mile or so from your house. But when I heard you ’n’ Jamie was back in your place, I had it in mind to bring you some bees, so I was a-looking out for ’em, see?”
“That was a very kind thought,” I assured him, with great sincerity. It was, but a small, disquieting question popped up in the back of my mind. John Quincy was a law unto himself, and if we were being biblical today, one might easily call him a brother to owls. He roamed the mountains, and if anyone knew where he went or why, they hadn’t told me.
But from what he’d said, he’d been coming to Fraser’s Ridge on purpose, knowing that Jamie and I were here. There were the letters he’d brought, to be sure … but the way the backcountry post worked was for letters to be passed from hand to hand, friend or stranger carrying them on, so long as the letters’ direction lay in their own path—and handing them to someone else when it diverged. For John Quincy to come here with the specific intent of delivering letters implied that there was something rather special about them.
I had no time to worry about the possibilities, though: Myers was winding up a brief exegesis on Irish and Scottish beekeepers, and coming to the point at issue.
“I know a few of the blessings folk use for their hives,” he said. “Not that I’d call what them Germans say sounds much like my notion of a blessing.”
“What do they say?” I asked, intrigued.
His bushy gray brows drew together in the effort of recall.
“Well, it’s … what you may call abrupt. Let me see now …” He closed his eyes and tilted up his chin.
“Christ, the bee swarm is out here!
Now fly, you my animals, come.