“You can go,” I said.

But the bees remained there like planes on a runway not knowing they’d been cleared for takeoff. They crawled on their stalk legs around the curved perimeters of the glass as if the world had shrunk to that jar. I tapped the glass, even laid the jar on its side, but those crazy bees stayed put.

************

That night, I lay in bed listening to the flicks and twitters and thrums inside the bee jar, waiting till it was late enough so I could slip out to the orchard and dig up the tin box that held my mother’s things. I wanted to lie down in the orchard and let it hold me.

When the darkness had pulled the moon to the top of the sky, I got out of bed, put on my shorts and sleeveless blouse, and glided past T. Ray’s room in silence, sliding my arms and legs like a skater on ice. I didn’t see his boots, how he’d parked them in the middle of the hall. When I fell, the clatter startled the air so badly T. Ray’s snore changed rhythm. At first it ceased altogether, but then the snore started back with three piglet snorts.

I crept down the stairs, through the kitchen. When the night hit my face, I felt like laughing. The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.

To reach my spot I had to go to the eighth row left of the tractor shed, then walk along it, counting trees till I got to thirty-two. The tin box was buried in the soft dirt beneath the tree, shallow enough that I could dig it up with my hands.

When I brushed the dirt from the lid and opened it, I saw first the whiteness of her gloves, then the photograph wrapped in waxed paper, just as I’d left it. And finally the funny wooden picture of Mary with the dark face. I took everything out, and, stretching out among the fallen peaches, I rested them across my abdomen.

When I looked up through the web of trees, the night feels over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged, but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it wide, just wanting the night to settle on my skin, and that’s how I fell asleep, lying there with my mother’s things, with the air making moisture on my chest and the sky puckering with light.

I woke to the sound of someone thrashing through the trees. T. Ray! I sat up, panicked, tying up my hair. I heard his footsteps, the fast, heavy pant of his breathing. Looking down, I saw my mother’s gloves and the two pictures. I stopped buttoning and grabbed them up, fumbling with them, unable to think what to do, how to hide them. I had dropped the tin box back in its hole, too far away to reach.

************

The bees were still in there the next morning when Rosaleen showed up. She was bearing an angel food cake with fourteen candles.

“Here you go. Happy birthday,” she said. We sat down and ate two slices each with glasses of milk. The milk left a moon crescent on the darkness of her upper lip, which she didn’t bother to wipe away. Later I would remember that, how she set out, a marked woman from the beginning.

Sylvan was miles away. We walked along the ledge of the highway, Rosaleen moving at the pace of a bank-vault door, her spit jug fastened on her finger. Haze hung under the trees and every inch of air smelled overripe with peaches.

“You limping?” Rosaleen said.

My knees were aching to the point that I was struggling to keep up with her. “A little.”

“Well, why don’t we sit down on the side of the road a while?” she said.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “I’ll be fine.”

A car swept by, slinging scalded air and a layer of dust. Rosaleen was slick with heat. She mopped her face and breathed hard.

We were coming to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where T. Ray and I attended. The steeple jutted through a cluster of shade trees; below, the red bricks looked shadowy and cool.

“Come on,” I said, turning in the drive.

“Where’re you going?”

“We can rest in the church.”

The air inside was dim and still, slanted with light from the side windows, not those pretty stained-glass windows but milky panes you can’t really see through.

I led us down front and sat in the second pew, having room for Rosaleen. She plucked a paper fan from the hymnbook holder and studied the picture on it – a white church with a smiling white lady coming out the door.

Rosaleen fanned and I listened to little jets of air come off her hands. She never went to church herself, but on those few times T. Ray had let me walk to her house back in the woods, I’d seen her special shelf with a stub of candle, creek rocks, a reddish feather, and a piece of John the Conqueror root, and right in the center a picture of a woman, propped up without a frame.

The first time I saw it, I’d asked Rosaleen, “Is that you?” since I swear the woman looked exactly like her, with woolly braids, blue-black skin, narrow eyes, and most of her concentrated in her lower portion, like an eggplant.

“This is my mama,” she said.

The finish was rubbed off the sides of the picture where her thumbs had held it. Her shelf had to do with a religion she’d made up for herself, a mixture of nature and ancestor worships. She’d stopped going to the House of Prayer Full Gospel Holiness Church years ago because it started at ten in the morning and didn’t end till three in the afternoon, which is enough religion to kill a full-grown person she’d said.

T. Ray said Rosaleen’s religion was plain wacko, and for me to stay out of it. But it drew me to her to think she loved water rocks and woodpecker feathers, that she had a single picture of her mother just like I did.

One of the church doors opened and Brother Gerald, our minister, stepped into the sanctuary.

“Well, for goodness’ sake, Lily, what are you doing here?”

Then he saw Rosaleen and started to rub the bald space on his head with such agitation I thought he might rub down to the skull bone.

“We were walking to town and stopped in to cool off.”

His mouth formed the word “oh,” but he didn’t actually say it; he was too busy looking at Rosaleen in his church, Rosaleen who chose this moment to spit into her snuff jug.

It’s funny how you forget the rules. She was not supposed to be inside here. Every time a rumor got going about a group of Negroes coming to worship with us on Sunday morning, the deacons stood locked-arms across the church steps to turn them away. We loved them in the Lord, Brother Gerald said, but they had their own places.

“Today’s my birthday,” I said, hoping to send his thoughts in a new direction.

“Is it? Well, happy birthday, Lily. So how old are you now?”

“Fourteen.”

“Ask him if we can we have a couple of these fans for your birthday present,” said Rosaleen.

He made a thin sound, intended for a laugh. “Now, if we let everybody borrow a fan that wanted one, the church wouldn’t have a fan left.”

“She was just kidding,” I said, and stood up. He smiled, satisfied, and walked beside me all the way to the door, with Rosaleen tagging behind.

Outside, the sky had whited over with clouds, and shine spilled across the surfaces, sending motes before my eyes. When we’d cut through the parsonage yard and were back on the highway, Rosaleen produced two church fans from the bosom of her dress, and, doing an impersonation of me gazing up sweet-faced, she said, “Oh, Brother Gerald, she was just kidding.”

************

We came into Sylvan on the worst side of town. Old houses set up on cinder blocks. Fans wedged in the windows. Dirt yards. Women in pink curlers. Collarless dogs.

After a few blocks we approached the Esso station on the corner of West Market and Church Street, generally recognized as a catchall place for men with too much time on their hands.

I noticed that not a single car was getting gas. Three men sat in dinette chairs beside the garage with a piece of plywood balanced on their knees. They were playing cards.

“Hit me,” one of them said, and the dealer, who wore a Seed and Feed cap, slapped a card down in front of him. He looked up and saw us, Rosaleen fanning and shuffling, swaying side to side. “Well, look, what we got coming here,” he called out. “Where are you going, nigger?”

Firecrackers made a spattering sound in the distance. “Keep walking,” I whispered. “Don’t pay any attention.”

But Rosaleen, who had less sense than I’d dreamed, said in this tone like she was explaining something real hard to a kindergarten student, “I’m going to register my name so I can vote, that’s what.”

“We should hurry on,” I said, but she kept walking at her own slow pass.

The man next to the dealer, with hair combed straight back, put down his cards and said, “Did you hear that? We got ourselves a model citizen.”

I heard a slow song of wind drift ever so slightly in the street behind us and move along the gutter. We walked, and the men pushed back their makeshift table and came right down to the curb to wait for us, like they were spectators at a parade and we were the prize float.

“Did you ever see one that black?” said the dealer.

And the men with his combed-back hair said, “No, and I am not seen one that big either.”

Naturally the third man felt obliged to say something, so he looked at Rosaleen sashaying along unperturbed, holding her white-lady fan, and he said, “Where’d you get that fan, nigger?”

“Stole it from a church,” she said. Just like that.

I had gone once in a raft down the Chattooga River with my church group, and the same feeling came to me now – of being lifted by currents, by a swirl of events I couldn’t reverse.

Coming alongside the men, Rosaleen lifted her snuff jug, which was filled with black spit, and calmly poured it across the tops of the men’s shoes, moving her hand in little loops like she was writing her name – Rosaleen Daise – just the way she’d practiced.

For a second they stared down at the juice, dribbled like car oil across their shoes. They blinked, trying to make it register. When they looked up, I watched their faces go from surprise to anger, then outright fury. They lunged at her, and everything started to spin. There was Rosaleen, grabbed and thrashing side to side, swinging the men like pocketbooks on her arms, and the men yelling for her to apologize and clean their shoes.

“Clean it off!” That’s all I could hear, over and over. And then the cry of birds overhead, sharp as needles, sweeping from low-bough trees, stirring up the scent of pine, and even then I knew I would recoil all my life from the smell of it.

“Call the police,” yelled the dealer to a man inside.

By then Rosaleen lay sprawled on the ground, pinned, twisting her fingers around clumps of grass. Blood ran from a cut beneath her eye. It curved under her chin the way tears do.

When the policeman got there, he said we had to get into the back of his car.

“You’re under arrest,” he told Rosaleen. “Assault, theft, and disturbing the peace.” Then he said to me, “When we get down to the station, I’ll call your daddy and let him deal with you.”

Rosaleen climbed in, sliding over on the seat. I moved after her, sliding as she slid, sitting as she sat.

The door closed. So quiet that it amounted to nothing but a snap of air, and that was the strangeness of it, how a small sound like that could fall across the whole world.