John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse

What roused her was a different tone, an urgent, resonating thrum. She opened her eyes: all the air round about her was aglint with bees. Thousand on thousand, a roaring gold sphere, they hovered in the space between the hammock and the overhanging branches.

Her screams brought Grandfather from the porch; he saw the cloud of bees and ducked at once into the summerkitchen, whence he rushed a moment later banging pie-tin cymbals.

“Mein Schwarm! Mein Schwarm!”

Now Rosa and Konrad ran at his heels, he in his trousers and BVD’s, she with flour half to her elbows; but before they had cleared the back-house arbor there was an explosion in the alley, and Willy Erdmann burst like a savage through our hollyhocks. His hair was tousled, expression wild; in one hand he brandished a smoking shotgun, in the other his bee-bob, pole and all; mother-of-pearl opera glasses swung from a black cord around his neck. He leaped about the hammock as if bedemoned.

“Not a bee, Thomas!”

Aunt Rosa joined her shrieks to Andrea’s, who still lay under the snarling cloud. “The Honig! Ai!” And my brother Peter, having made his way to the scene in the wake of the others, blinked twice or thrice and improved the pandemonium by the measure of his wailings.

Uncle Konrad dashed hammockward with rescue in his heart, but was arrested by shouts from the other men.

“ Nein , don’t dare!” Grandfather cautioned. “They’ll sting!”

Mr. Erdmann agreed. “Stay back!” And dropping the bee-bob shouldered his gun as if Konrad’s design was on the bees.

“Lie still, Andy,” Grandfather ordered. “I spritz them once.”

He ran to fetch the garden hose, a spray of water being, like a charge of bird-shot, highly regarded among bee-keepers as a means to settle swarms. But Mr. Erdmann chose now to let go at blue heaven with his other barrel and brought down a shower of Judas leaves upon the company; at the report Grandfather abandoned his plan, whether fearing that Konrad had been gunned down or merely realizing, what was the case, that our hose would not reach half the distance. In any event his instructions to Mother were carried out: even as he turned she gave a final cry and swooned away. Mercifully, providentially! For now the bees, moved by their secret reasons, closed ranks and settled upon her chest. Ten thousand, twenty thousand strong they clustered. Her bare bosoms, my squalling face — all were buried in the golden swarm.

Fright undid Rosa’s knees; she sat down hard on the grass and wailed, “Grosser Gott! Grosser Gott!” Uncle Konrad went rigid. Erdmann too stood transfixed, his empty weapon at portarms. Only Grandfather seemed undismayed: without a wondering pause he rushed to the hammock and scooped his bare hands under the cluster.

“Take the Honig ,” he said to Konrad.

In fact, though grave enough, the situation was more spectacular than dangerous, since bees at swarming-time are not disposed to sting. The chiefest peril was that I might suffocate under the swarm, or in crying take a mouthful of bees. And even these misfortunes proved unlikely, for when Grandfather lifted two handfuls of the insects from my head and replaced them gently on another part of the cluster, he found my face pressed into Mother’s side and shielded by her breast. Konrad plucked me from the hammock and passed me to Aunt Rosa, still moaning where she sat.

“Open the hive,” Grandfather bade him further, and picked up half the swarm in one trailing mass. The gesture seemed also to lift Mr. Erdmann’s spell.

“Now by God, Tom, you shan’t have my bees!”

“Your bees bah.” Grandfather walked quickly to the open hive to deposit his burden.

“I been watching with the glasses! It’s my skeps they came from!”

“It’s my girl they lit on. I know what you been watching.” He returned for the rest of the bees. Erdmann, across the hammock from him, laid his shotgun on the grass and made as if to snatch the cluster himself — but the prospect of removing it bare-handed, and from that perch, stayed him.

Seeing the greatest danger past and his rival unnerved, Grandfather affected nonchalance. “We make a little gamble,” he offered benignly. “I take all on her right one, you take all on her left. Whoever draws the queen wins the pot.”

Our neighbor was not amused. He maintained his guard over the hammock.

“Ordinary thievery!”

Grandfather shrugged. “You take them then, Willy. But quick, don’t they’ll sting her.”

“By damn—” Mr. Erdmann glowered with thwart and crest-fall. “I got to have gloves on.”

“Gloves!” My father’s father feigned astonishment. “ Ach , Andy don’t care! Well then, look out.”

Coolly as if packing a loose snowball he scraped up the second pile. Mother stirred and whimpered. Only isolated bees in ones and twos now wandered over her skin or darted about in quest of fellows. Konrad moved to brush them away, murmured something reassuring, discreetly drew the kimono together. I believe he even kissed my mother, lightly, on the brow. Grandfather lingered to watch, savoring his neighbor’s agitation and his own indifference to the bees. Then he turned away in high humor.

“ Alle Donner! Got to have an opera glass to see her and gloves on to touch her! We don’t call you bashful no more, Konrad, after Willy! Wait till Karl hears!”

Uncle Konrad one daresays was used to these unsubtleties; in any case he was busy with Mother’s reviving. But Erdmann, stung as never by his pilfered bees, went now amok; seized up his bee-bob with a wrathful groan and lunging — for Grandfather had strode almost out of range — brought it down on his old tormentor’s shoulder. Futile was Konrad’s shout, worse than futile his interception: Erdmann’s thrust careered him square into the hammock, and when Konrad put his all into a body-block from the other side, both men fell more or less athwart my mother. The hammock parted at its headstring; all piled as one into the clover. But Grandfather had spun raging, bees in hand: the smite en route to his shoulder had most painfully glanced his ear. Not his own man, he roared in perfect ecstasy and hurled upon that tangle of the sinned-against and sinning his golden bolt.

Now the fact of my salvation and my plain need for a pacifier had by this time brought Aunt Rosa to her feet; she alone beheld the whole quick sequence of attack, parry, collapse, and indiscriminating vengeance. But with me and Peter in her care her knees did not fail her: she snatched my brother’s hand and fled with us from the yard.

In Grace meanwhile the service had proceeded despite shotgun-blast and clang of pans, which however were acknowledged with small stirs and meetings of eyes. Through hymn, Creed, and prayer, through anthem, lesson, and Gloria the order of worship had got, as far as to the notices and offertory. There being among the congregation a baby come for christening, the young minister had called its parents and Godparents to the font.

“Dearly beloved,” he had exhorted, “forasmuch as all men, though fallen in Adam, are born into this world in Christ the Redeemer, heirs of life eternal and subjects of the saving grace of the Holy Spirit; and that our Savior Christ saith: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God’; I beseech you to call upon God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of His bounteous goodness He will so grant unto this child, now to be baptized, the continual replenishing of His grace.…”

Here the ritual gave way before a grand ado in the rear of the church: Aunt Rosa’s conviction that the family’s reckoning was at hand had fetched her across the avenue and up the stone steps, only to abandon her on the threshold of the sanctuary. She stood with Peter and me there in the vestibule, and we three raised a caterwaul the more effective for every door’s being stopped open to cool the faithful.