THE SKEP-BOOK

Being the Whole Memory of the Parish, As Told to the Bees and Kept by Them, Set Down by Their Keeper Against the Day She Cannot Tell Them Herself.

Kept beside the hives by Sela Combe, Keeper of Bees these forty years, who has told the bees every death, every birth, and every disgrace in the valley — as is right and proper — and trusts them to hold what folk will not.

You Must Tell the Bees

It is the oldest manners we have. When a soul dies you go straight out to the hives, quiet, and you tell them — So-and-so is gone — and you turn the skep a little, or tie a scrap of black to it, and you ask them to stay. For if the bees are not told, they take it as a slight, and they grieve, and they leave, and a house that has lost its bees has lost its luck along with them, and everyone knows it.

But I tell them more than the deaths. I tell them the whole of it — the births, and the banns, and the quarrels, and the price of eggs, and who is not speaking to whom, and why. Because a hive told only the sad news would think the world was made all of sorrow, and bees, like children, must be given the whole of a thing or none of it. So they have the lot from me, every evening, at the hives, in the last of the light.

They keep it. That is the marvel folk forget. A register burns, a clerk forgets, iron ink says the wrong thing and stands by it — but the bees hold the true memory of this valley, longer and gentler than any book, and one day when I am gone they will hum it still, to whoever keeps them next.

Each entry: The Telling · The Season · What the Bees Did — for they answer, if you have the patience to be answered slowly.

1 · The Telling of a Death

The Telling. You go at once. You do not wait for morning. You put your mouth near the skep and you say the name, and that they are gone, and you ask the bees to bide. The Season. Any. Death keeps no season. What the Bees Did. They went quiet. A hive that has been told a death goes quiet, in respect — you may say it is only the cool of the evening, but I have told them in the warm of the day and they went quiet all the same.

2 · The Telling of a Birth

The Telling. You bring them a crumb of the christening cake, and the child's name, and you hold the cake to the door. The Season. Mostly the spring, the valley being what it is of a long winter's night. What the Bees Did. They hummed up warm and loud and worked the harder for a week. A christened hive throws the sweetest honey. You may believe that or not; I have forty years of it in jars.

3 · The Telling of a Disgrace

The Telling. Softly. The bad business — the thing the parish whispers and the register would never dare hold. The Season. All year. Disgrace, like death, keeps none. What the Bees Did. Nothing. And that is the wonder of them: the bees are the only confessors in the realm who neither judge you, nor repeat you, nor look at you differently in church on the Sunday. Whatever you give them, they keep it close, in the dark, and go on making honey out of it.

4 · The Telling of a Whole Year

The Telling. Every evening, the day's news, the small and the large, poured into the humming dark. The Season. The wheel of it, round and round. What the Bees Did. They took it all, and turned it — this is the truth of a hive — into something you could put on bread. A year of a parish's joy and grief and pettiness, and out of the far end of it: honey. There is no register in Murkminster can do that with a year.

5 · The Year They Swarmed

The Telling. I told them all I had, faithful, and still, one June, half the hive rose up in a great grieving cloud and went over the hedge and did not come back. The Season. Midsummer, when a hive is fullest. What the Bees Did. They left. I have never doubted why: there was a death that season I came to late, an old man three days cold before I thought to go and tell them, and they took the slight and went. (The young reeve says a full hive swarms for want of room, and will say so to your face, and I have stopped inviting him.)

6 · The Honey Itself

The Telling. — The Season. The taking, at the summer's end. What the Bees Did. They gave me the year back, in a jar, to taste. And a hard year's honey runs darker and takes you at the back of the throat, and a kind year's runs pale and easy, and I can read you a decade of this valley off a shelf of jars better than the Kalendar can read it off the wall — the winter of the fever is on that shelf, dark as tar, and the summer of the good harvest beside it, gold as a wedding.

7 · What I Am the Keeper Of

The Telling. — The Season. — What the Bees Did. Understand me: I am not the memory of this parish. The bees are. I am only the one who tells them, evening on evening, so that the true account of us is held somewhere safe and sweet and past the reach of fire and clerks. When I am gone, the account is not gone. It is in the hive. It will hum on.

8 · The Thing at the Bottom of the Jar

The Telling. The things I have told no living soul. My mother's dying. The child that did not keep. The one thing that has no christening name and never will. I have told the bees all of it, forty years, in the last light, with nobody by. The Season. The long evenings, mostly. Grief prefers the long evenings. What the Bees Did. Nothing. They heard nothing. A bee cannot hold a name or a grief; it does not listen; it wants sugar and room and the sun on the board and not one word I say. I have known this, I think, at the very bottom, a long while: the bees keep nothing. But a body that is carrying the unbearable needs somewhere to set it down — somewhere that will not flinch, nor judge, nor tell it in the lane — and the hives never once flinched, in forty years, and that, God forgive an old woman her comfort, was always the whole of the cure, and never the keeping at all. I told the bees that too, this evening. They did not mind. They never do. That is what they are for, though it is not, quite, what I say they are for.