Read Online The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd - Free Book Online Page B

we had slept more than half the morning away. I hated to wake Rosaleen, so I pulled the wooden picture of Mary out of my bag and propped it against a tree trunk in order to study it properly. A ladybug had crawled up and sat on the Holy Mother’s cheek, making the most perfect beauty mark on her. I wondered if Mary had been an outdoor type who preferred trees and insects over the churchy halo she had on. I lay back and tried to invent a story about why my mother had owned a black Mary picture. I drew a big blank, probably due to my ignorance about Mary, who never got much attention at our church. According to Brother Gerald, hell was nothing but a bonfire for Catholics. We didn’t have any in Sylvan—only Baptists and Methodists—but we got instructions in case we met them in our travels. We were to offer them the five-part plan of salvation, which they could accept or not. The church gave us a plastic glove with each step written on a different finger. You started with the pinkie and worked over to the thumb. Some ladies carried their salvation gloves in their purse in case they ran into a Catholic unexpectedly. The only Mary story we talked about was the wedding story—the time she persuaded her son, practically against his will, to manufacture wine in the kitchen out of plain water. This had been a shock to me, since our church didn’t believe in wine or, for that matter, in women having a lot of say about things. All I could really figure was my mother had been mixed up with the Catholics somehow, and—I have to say—this secretly thrilled me. I stuffed the picture into my pocket while Rosaleen slept on, blowing puffs of air that vibrated her lips. I decided she might sleep into tomorrow, so I shook her arm till her eyes slit open.
    ‘Lord, I’m stiff,’ she said.
    ‘I feel like I’ve been beaten with a stick.’
    ‘You have been beaten, remember?’
    ‘But not with a stick,’ she said. I waited till she got to her feet, a long, unbelievable process of grunts and moans and limbs coming to life.
    ‘What did you dream?’ I asked when she was upright. She gazed at the treetops, rubbing her elbows.
    ‘Well, let’s see. I dreamed the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., knelt down and painted my toenails with the spit from his mouth, and every nail was red like he’d been sucking on red hots.’
    I considered this as we set off for Tiburon, Rosaleen walking like she was on anointed feet, like her ruby toes owned the whole countryside. We drifted by gray barns, cornfields in need of irrigation, and clumps of Hereford cows, chewing in slow motion, looking very content with their lives. Squinting into the distance, I could see farmhouses with wide porches and tractor-tire swings suspended from ropes on nearby tree branches; windmills sprouted up beside them, their giant silver petals creaking a little when the breezes rose. The sun had baked everything to perfection; even the gooseberries on the fence had fried to raisins. The asphalt ran out, turned to gravel. I listened to the sound it made scraping under our shoes. Perspiration puddled in the notch where Rosaleen’s collarbones came together. I didn’t know whose stomach was carrying on more about needing food, mine or hers, and since we’d started walking, I’d realized it was Sunday, when the stores were closed up. I was afraid we’d end up eat- ing dandelions, digging wild turnips and grubs out of the ground to stay alive. The smell of fresh manure floated out from the fields and took care of my appetite then and there, but Rosaleen said, ‘I could eat a mule.’
    ‘If we can find some place open when we get to town, I’ll go in and get us some food,’ I told her.
    ‘And what’re we gonna do for beds?’ she said.
    ‘If they don’t have a motel, we’ll have to rent a room.’
    She smiled at me then.
    ‘Lily, child, there ain’t gonna be any place that will take a colored woman. I don’t care if she’s the Virgin Mary, nobody’s letting