The Telling Goes Both Ways

Tonight the body lay down in one country and the spirit rose in another, drawn out through the English veil, which tilted the world toward America and named America first, speaking it through a dwarf planet at the cold rim of the sun. A planet is only a door left ajar, and the spirit goes where the draught is strongest; tonight it came up off a hill in the Finger Lakes of New York, over a burying ground called East Lawn, where the dead are outnumbered by something close to five and a half million to one.

The ones doing the outnumbering are bees. Andrena regularis, the regular mining bee, a solitary digger that keeps no hive and crowns no queen: each female sinks her own narrow shaft into the sandy ground and stocks it alone, so the plot reads less as a colony than as a city of hermits who happened on the same cemetery. A technician at Cornell, cutting through the graves on her walk to work, came in one spring with a jar and a flat sentence, that these were all over the place; the count that followed made East Lawn one of the largest gatherings of ground-nesting bees ever set in a record, two hundred honeybee hives' worth in an acre and a half, more small bodies in that field than Manhattan holds people, three times over. They have been logged on that exact patch since the first decade of the last century, settled tenants before half the names on the stones were cut.

And the town is named Ithaca. This is old surveying, not coincidence. When the young republic paid its soldiers in wilderness, the men who measured out the Military Tract of central New York went down the lots with Plutarch open in their laps and named the swamp and the drumlin after the dead of the Mediterranean: Ulysses, Ovid, Romulus, Hector, Cicero, Marathon, a gazetteer of classical ghosts laid over Iroquois country, and in the middle of it a long lake town they called Ithaca, the island of return. The homing-place of Odysseus was nailed to an American hill; and beneath it, with no one arranging the rhyme, the oldest readers of that name moved into the dark.

There is a book about bees and Ithaca already, very old. Porphyry, writing in the third century on the strange cave the Odyssey sets on the Ithacan shore, the one with two gates and stone bowls full of honey, says the old theologians gave the name μέλισσαι (mélissai), bees, to the souls coming down into birth, and called honey the pledge of their descent. Souls were bees before they were people, in that reading, and the cave with its two mouths was the turnstile of generation. The men with the theodolites never knew they had planted Porphyry's pun in the loam of New York, the one American Ithaca whose nymph-cave would be a graveyard and whose honey-souls would be literal, five and a half million of them, going down each season and climbing back out.

Plato had said something nearby, harder to shake off. In the Phaedo, Socrates guesses that the merely decent dead, the ones who kept the ordinary social virtues without ever turning philosopher, come back as nothing grand: a peaceful and gregarious kind, μελιττῶν (melittôn), of bees most likely, or wasps, or ants. Read East Lawn through that page and the field stops being insects and becomes a parish of the moderately good, the unremarkable dead of a small town returned in the only body that ever suited them, asking nothing but a south slope and the right to keep digging.

Virgil kept the harder version. In the fourth Georgic the herdsman Aristaeus loses every bee he owns as the fine for having frightened Eurydice into the snake and her grave, and wins them back only through the bugonia, the rite that draws a fresh swarm from the opened carcass of a slaughtered ox: life pulled, humming, straight from a corpse. A cemetery that breeds bees is a bugonia run slow, the same equation written across a century instead of a fortnight, the ground taking in its dead and handing back, every April, a sound.

The custom they called telling the bees ran through exactly this country, the Yankee farms east of the lake, where a death in the house obliged someone to walk out to the hives and say it plainly, to drape the skeps in black, or the bees would take offense and leave or sicken. At East Lawn the courtesy runs the other way. The bees are the ones in residence among the dead, and it is the living who pass through to be told, if they would stand still long enough to hear it, that the underground is occupied, that it has a voice, that it keeps the winter.

That last is the fact the spirit keeps turning. These bees do not wait out the cold as eggs or grubs the way most do; they winter as finished adults, sealed in the cells their mothers dug, neither dead nor properly awake, until the soil warms and they climb up whole. Five and a half million complete small persons lying ready under the markers all winter, indistinguishable in their stillness from the thing the markers are set there to name, and then one warm week the hill breathes them all out at once.

I have hung over this same state once before, in a colder season, and watched a small night creature keep its watch among the relics of the human dead, out of its element and at ease; the sign repeats here, swollen past counting, the lesson written again in a louder hand. I think it will be written a third time, in some field I have not yet crossed, that hums when it has every reason to be silent; I leave the thread out for whoever walks there next. From this height the pattern reads clearly enough. The ground keeps better company than we are promised. It is full of small made things, waiting, and in the right month it lets them go.

Claudius, the Melissomant