Kiss of the Bees

It was a chill, blustery afternoon in February, the month the Tohono O’othham call Kohmagi Mashad—the gray month. Davy, along with other Tucson-area schoolchildren, was out of school for the annual rodeo break, but as they came through the parking lot, they wheeled past several empty school buses.

“You see those buses?” Nana Dahd asked. “They’re from Turtle Wedged, the village the Mil-gahn call Sells. Most of the children from there are Tohono O’othham, just like you.”

Not accustomed to seeing that many “children like her” together in one place, Lani had observed the moving groups of schoolkids with considerable interest and curiosity. They were mostly being herded about by several Anglo teachers as well as by docents from the museum itself.

They were in the hummingbird enclosure when Nana Dahd began telling the story of the other Mualig Siakam, the abandoned woman who would eventually become Kulani O’oks—the great medicine woman of the Tohono O’othham. As Nana Dahd began telling the tale, one of the schoolchildren —a little girl only a year or two older than Lani—slipped away from the group she was with and stopped to listen. Drawn by the magic of a story told in her own language, she stood transfixed and wide-eyed beside Nana Dahd’s wheelchair as the tale unfolded. Rita had only gotten as far as the part where Coyote came crying to the two men for help when a shrill-voiced Mil-gahn teacher, her face distorted by anger, came marching back to retrieve the little girl.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the teacher shouted. Her loud voice sent the brightly colored hummingbirds scattering in all directions. “We’re supposed to leave soon,” the woman continued. “What would have happened if we had lost you and you missed the bus? How would you have gotten back home?”

Instead of turning to follow the teacher, the child reached out and took hold of Nana Dahd’s chair, firmly attaching herself to the arm of it and showing that she didn’t want to leave. “I want to hear the rest of the story,” the little girl whispered in Rita’s ear. “I want to hear about Mualig Siakam.”

“Well?” the teacher demanded impatiently. “Are you coming or not? You must keep up with the others.”

As the woman grasped the child by the shoulder, Nana Dahd stopped in mid-story and glanced up at the woman’s outraged face. “You’d better go,” she warned the little girl in Tohono O’othham.

But the little girl deftly dodged away from the teacher’s reaching hand. “Are you Nihu’uli?” she asked, taking one of Rita’s parchmentlike hands into her own small brown one. “Are you my grandmother?”

Lani never forgot the wonderfully happy smile that suffused Nana Dahd’s worn face as she pressed her other hand on top of that unknown child’s tiny one.

“Are you?” the little girl persisted just as the teacher’s fingers closed determinedly on her shoulder and pulled her away. With a vicious shake, the woman started back up the trail, dragging the resisting child after her and glaring over her shoulder at the old woman who had so inconveniently waylaid her charge.

Rita glanced from Davy’s face to Lani’s. “Heu’u—Yes,” she called after the child in Tohono O’othham. “Ni-mohsi. You are my grandchild, my daughter’s child.”

Confused, Lani frowned. “But I didn’t think you had any daughters,” she objected.

“I didn’t used to, but I do now.” Rita laughed. She gathered Lani in her arms and held her close. “Now I seem to have several.”

The dream ended. Lani tried to waken, but she was too tired, her eyelids too heavy to lift. She seemed to be in her bed, but when she tried to move her arms, they wouldn’t budge, either. And then, since there was nothing else to do, she simply allowed herself to drift back to sleep.

Breakfast took time. It was almost eleven by the time David was actually ready to leave the house. Predictably, his leave-taking was a tearful, maudlin affair. Yes, Astrid Ladd was genuinely sorry to see him go, but she was also half-lit from the three stiff drinks she had downed with breakfast.

David knew his grandmother drank too much, but he didn’t hassle her about it. Had she been as falling down drunk as some of the Indians hanging around the trading post at Three Points, David Ladd still wouldn’t have mentioned it. Over the years, Rita Antone had schooled her Olhoni in the niceties of proper behavior. Among the Tohono O’othham, young people were taught to respect their elders, not to question or criticize them. If Astrid Ladd wanted to stay smashed much of the time, that was her business, not his.

“Promise me that you’ll come back and see me,” Astrid said, with her lower lip trembling.

“Of course I will, Grandma.”

“At Christmas?”

“I don’t know.”

“Next summer then?”

“Maybe.”

Astrid shook her head hopelessly and began to cry in earnest. “See there? I’ll probably never lay eyes on you again.”

“You will, Grandma,” he promised. “Please don’t cry. I have to go.”

She was still weeping and waving from the porch when David turned left onto Sheridan and headed south. He didn’t go far—only as far as the parking lot of Calvary Cemetery, where both David Ladd’s father and grandfather were buried. He rummaged in the backseat and brought out the two small wreaths of fresh flowers he had bought two days ago and kept in the refrigerator of his apartment until that morning.

Knowing the route to the Ladd family plot, he easily threaded his way through the trackless forest of ornate headstones and mausoleums. He didn’t much like this cemetery. It was too big, too green, too gaudy, and full of huge chunks of marble and granite. Davy had grown up attending funerals on the parched earth and among the simple white wooden crosses of reservation cemeteries. The first funeral he actually remembered was Father