LOVE’S THOUSAND BEES
Noy Holland
The boy was blind and from Zelienople. He came among us as a bear-child might, such a slumber, the sow labors in sleep, from sleep heaves up, raving and newly mothered. The boy had fattened at the taps, sucked from the trees was how he reached us, wise to set out in spring. Our nights had warmed and the frogs thawed and by day the sun weakened the trees. Sap twanged into our buckets. To improve these notes, the frogs gave up their two favorite notes from the pools. The boy added to this the wheezing a fat boy does to breathe, and the slur, as he walked, of one pantleg against the slickened other. He slogged through the pools and his galoshes filled up. He felt with his hands for the trees. We didn’t know was he blind or did the meat of his face make it hard to see. We looked for his eyes, they were bloody, shot into his head from afar. We saw his scalp creased under his hatband, yeasty and flushed in the stubble. The fields were too wet to plow; we had snow still patched about. So we busied ourselves in the sugarhouse, sweetening in the steam. We sharpened our hoes and shovels.
Spring, and everything wants to move. The children wake at daybreak and beg to throw from the mound.
The boy was spotted first beyond the backstop. Daisy it was who saw him, lifting out of her trance on the swing. Daisy had clawed a ditch through the snowpatch for her feet to pass through to swing, who loves to swing, the one among us, the better yet to see. She sailed down in her skirts and went to him. She heard a kitten, who mewed in his pocket.
—Who are you and why are you here? Don’t you have school like we do?
He lived with Mr. U, he said, except that he said yived.
—He yived in Number Three with me. I yiked how he was soft to me. Mr. U was yike some sock to me. But I did never yove him.
—So you want to come be here?
—I guess.
—Geese! Geese! Daisy cried out. Two flapped low overhead.
—Yovye, the boy said.
—What is the name of that kitten?
—Goose.
—Goose?
—Goose, the boy said. You can have it.
—Does it fly in its sleep?
—Maybe, the boy said.
—Do you pee in your sleep like my brother? One night he peed on my head.
—Mr. U peed in a bucket. It was my job to dump the bucket. I went how Mr. U showed I should go through the hanging-down fence to the stream. One time I dropped it. The bucket went out of my hands in the stream. I had my kitten. I had my yittle chick in my pocket that died so I walked over here to you.
—Can I see?
The boy held out the chick. It was muddied, a yellow wad of down.
—You can have it.
One of his fingers was off.
—Yook, he said, I yost a tooth.
This he gave her also, a little milktooth brown as a scab.
He was happy to himself. His face was bursting. They heard the schoolbell sound.
—Wait, he said. My name is Zack Syoat. I come from Zeyienople. My mother’s name is Yenore. I have two sisters, Yenore and Yenore. I yive with Mr. U.
—Olly Olly Umpf, the teacher called.
Daisy waited still. The boy got out of his coat. He wore pajamas, slick and humid, a super-hero’s satin.
—Sweet, Daisy said, and pet him. The kitten smacked a fly from the air.
—I better go, Daisy said, and turned to go.
—Geese! Geese!
The two came back.
—See you yater.
The door to the school bucked shut.
He had a tadpole, too, in his galoshes, he had caught, and a ball of goo, and a miniature shrimp, and to hold these, he made a bark-bucket for Daisy girl to find. The sap surged upward in the trees as he worked. His pajamas steamed from the heat he made. The jelly of his scalp melted open.
Daisy mine, he breathed.
Love’s thousand bees flocked to him, to draw the sugars from the heart, from the head.