The Bee God

Baigong village is tucked in a fold of the mountains of eastern Guizhou, its back to Moon Mountain, its front a staircase of terraced fields where the sky lies scattered in bright shards upon the water. For as long as anyone remembers, only one man in the village keeps bees: Long Laoyan. He is seventy-three and has kept bees for thirty years. Behind his house, on the slope, he sets out twenty-two hives of fir planks bleached white by the sun, their seams crusted with dull-yellow wax; lean close and you catch a smell sweet and sour at once, like melted sugar left too long on old wood.

He saved the wild queen on the third day after Grain Rain, the twenty-sixth of the third lunar month. The morning dew was heavy. He went up the slope with a bamboo basket to check the hives, and rounding the ditch where ferns grew thick he found a bee lying at the mouth of a rock crevice. Not an ordinary bee — bigger than the tip of a thumb, one wing torn halfway by a bamboo splinter, caked with mud, its body twitching, nearly spent. Most would have stepped on it and walked on. Long did not. He knelt, picked the mud from its wing with a fingernail, took from his breast a little bamboo tube of honeyed water, tipped half out, and let it drink from a blade of grass. Then he found a clean scrap of cloth, soaked it in tung oil, and bound the broken wing as carefully as one mounts a painting. The bee stayed in a small tube on his windowsill for seven days, until it could fly. On the evening it left, it circled his hand three times, settled, and stung him once on the back of the hand. It did not hurt — only a red mark the size of a grain of rice, gone in three days. His wife Pan clicked her tongue: "A bee worth seven days of your tending?" He smiled. "A life. What size makes it small?"

That summer the strange things began. Around Long's hives a band of wild bees always hung, not gathering nectar but standing watch like a dog at the gate. A viper came to the hive mouth, tongue flicking; the bees fell on it with a roar of wings and the snake fled. Once a bear came down the mountain to knock the hives over; stung dumb, it ran off into the night with a swollen face, and after that no bear track was seen behind the village. At first Pan scolded him for drawing wild things near, but when the hens stopped being taken by weasels she let it be.

Strangest of all was the flood. At Baigong the rain comes without warning: one moment clear sky, the next the clouds crush the mountain peak, and a yellow wall of wn Moon Mountain, dragging dead trees, broken stone, and drowned stock, roaring like a wall thrown down. Before each flood the bees grew restless half a day early, circling Long's roof beams, their wings cooling the nape of his neck — hurrying him to move the hives up to the high drying-rack. The first time he paid them no mind, thinking what does a bee know of water. The bees dived and stung his elbow, once, twice, driving him toward the door. Cursing, he moved the hives; that night the water came indeed, and everything low was flooded, yet the twenty-two hives on the drying-rack stayed dry, not a drop on the wax at their feet.

The story spread, and in the next village Hu Laoliu was the first to redden with envy. Hu was past forty and greedy to the bone: if a man netted fish he wanted a share, if a man grafted a tree he wanted a branch. Hearing that Long's bees were guarded by a "bee god" and that his honey was unnaturally sweet — the county buyer even paid thirty percent more — a crooked fire lit in him. On the night before Beginning of Autumn, after half a month of drought, the rain came sudden and hard, pelting the tiles like thrown beans. Under cover of dark Hu climbed the slope with a crowbar and pried open the wild nest in the rock crevice, meaning to scoop out a spring's worth of honey. The comb broke; honey and grubs ran over his hands and woke the whole hive. A black cloud poured out and fell on his face. He ran homeward with his arms over his head, the bees behind him, his face and hands swelling with stings until his eyes shut. At the edge of the terrace his foot slipped; he rolled down the slick field-banks and came to rest on the stone lip of the seventh terrace, his leg-bone snapping with a crack. He groaned in the rain till dawn, when villagers carried him back. He kept his life, but from then on he shivered at the sight of a bee and walked three paces wide around Long's slope.

Long held nothing against him. He mended the broken nest with mud and set a gourd of clear water before the crevice. The next Grain Rain, on the twenty-sixth of the third month, the wing-torn queen returned and settled on the old red mark, shook her wings, as if keeping an old appointment. The villagers set a small wooden tablet at the crevice, carved with three characters for the Bee God's Seat; no incense, no offering, only a daily gourd of clear water. Long traced the tablet and said: the bees honor no man; they honor only the man who is not greedy.

The rains still fall at Baigong, the floods still come. Long's hives still rest each year on the drying-rack, not one missing, the honey sweeter every season. A young man asked if the bee god truly answered prayers. Long pointed to the place on his hand where the mark had long since faded, and said: whether it answers, look to your own hands — are they clean? The wind crossed the slope and the twenty-two fir hives whispered, as if someone had answered, low, from far away.