The bee swarm

You couldn’t really say we had close neighbors when I was nine.
But we did have neighbors.

Up the hill from our house was the low cinderblock house where Cecil and Thelma Hite lived. We rented our house from them and parked our car by their garage. Their back yard was even steeper than our yard and it ran right beside ours down to Spring Valley Road with an old wire fence between us. So they were above us and beside us on one side. Cecil’s mother, old Mrs. Hite, lived across the fence on the other side.

To get to school I had to walk across old Mrs. Hite’s corn field and through her side yard and down her driveway and along the two-lane by the creek to the teeny little grocery store and catch the school bus.

If you saw me scurrying around Mrs. Hite’s house, you would have thought I just couldn’t wait to get to school. Actually I always ran there because Mrs. Hite scared me. She was about a hundred years old. Her house was about a hundred years old. She still got her water from a well - there was still a pump in her front yard and when it was good weather you could see her out there pumping away with her skinny arms and her bonnet strings flying. She always wore an old bonnet and skirts down to the ground and a bib apron, even when she was out working in her big vegetable garden.

Once when I was coming home on a hot day she called me into her house. What could I do? You have to be polite to old people, even scary little old ladies. I stepped over the stoop and into her kitchen. I couldn’t believe it. She had an old iron pump right there in her sink! She pushed the handle up and down to draw up some water and gave me a jelly glass of it. That well water tasted like iron and was amazingly cool.

I couldn’t believe Cecil, our landlord, was her son. She was so tiny. He was a big round man, and he scared me too. I tended to avoid all adults on principle, but I really avoided him. He had this strange hand, with only a thumb and one finger. I thought I should pretend not to notice it, but I couldn’t help staring at it every time I saw him.

He kept bees in square white wooden hives down at the bottom of their back yard by the road. Mother couldn’t believe he did that when his wife was allergic to bees. I didn’t understand allergic. We all got bee stings from time to time – it was no big deal. It hurt a little and it made a great excuse to do some crying and get some sympathy. Usually I got stung on the bottom of my feet from going barefoot and stepping on some poor bee. I could hardly miss them, in those days there were lots of bees and it seemed as if there was one on every clover blossom.

Then one warm day the bees swarmed. They left the hive in a cloud and flew into our yard, where they all landed on our screen door. The bees completely covered the door in a mass of crawling little bodies. It made the whole door dark. Their buzzing was a loud continuous hum.

We were all excited – don’t touch the door! No, you can’t go outside! And then worried – what if they could get through the screen? What about the crack at the bottom of the door? Dad was outside and we were inside. He went to get Cecil. Joe B. and I screamed and jumped up and down for a while, until Mother had enough and sent us upstairs where we would be out of the way.

It took a long time for Cecil to come for the bees, and a long time for him to persuade the bees to leave the door and to take them away. By the time he left Mother was furious about the whole affair. She talked about it for a long time. She’d shake her head and say “How could he have bees when there are children right next door? And poor Thelma! If she gets stung just once she could die! How could he go on keeping bees when she’s so allergic?”

I didn’t know the answer to that.