Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [88]
“Who?”
“Boma Mellowbug.” Sugar nods at a great ramshackle house nested into the woods just over the fence from Hideaway Farms. The house itself is small, composed of wooden shingles, but it has many things tacked onto it to increase the living quarters, such as a school bus, very rusted. Alice can see chairs and a stovepipe inside the bus, and so many plants growing in there that their leaves jam against the windows and windshield like greenhouse plants. Horse trailers and refrigerators are parked in the yard among the huckleberry bushes. A trio of hens step primly around the splayed, spotted legs of a dead-looking beagle.
“What’s the man got against Boma?” Alice asks, though she can guess. The white fence between the two properties could be the Iron Curtain. It’s not clear to Alice, though, which country she’d want as her own, if she had to choose.
“Well, mostly he hates her bees. She’s got bees living in her roof. He says they’re going to kill his birds, but they wouldn’t. They’re good bees if you love them, and Boma does. A bird wouldn’t know enough to hate a bee, I don’t think. Do you?”
Alice has already decided that Heaven is a hard stone’s throw beyond her ken. “I wouldn’t know,” she says, which is the truth. Nothing in her life has prepared her to make a judgment on a war between bees and ostriches. As they walk slowly past Boma’s mailbox, which has been fashioned from a length of drainpipe and a wire egg basket, Alice hears the faint, distant thrum of the hive. She makes up her mind that for as long as her mission takes, on this stretch of Heaven’s road at least, it would be a good idea to love Boma’s bees.
FALL
21
Skid Road
TAYLOR TURNS THE HANDI-VAN UP Yesler Way, climbing the long hill above the waterfront. The streets are lined with dapple-trunked sycamores. From between the buildings come sliced glimpses of cold-looking water. A blind passenger in the seat behind her is telling Taylor about how she is forgetting the colors. She has lost all of them now but blue. “I think I recall blue,” the woman says, “but I haven’t seen it for forty years, so I have no idea how far off track I might really be.”
Taylor stops carefully at a light. This morning she made a hard stop at a railroad crossing, and someone’s seeing-eye dog slid all the way up the aisle from the back. She could hear the toenails scraping over the grooves in the rubber floor mat. After the van had come to a respectable standstill, the dog simply got up and walked back to the rear of the van, making Taylor feel terrible, the way people do when you step on their toes and they sigh but don’t say a word.
“I never thought about that, that you might forget colors,” Taylor says, trying to concentrate on her driving and also be friendly to the blind passenger, although this conversation is depressing her deeply. She recognizes the woman as a regular: Tuesdays and Fridays, for dialysis.
“Oh, you do, you forget,” the woman insists. “It’s not like forgetting somebody’s name. It’s more like you have in mind your idea of a certain color but it might drift, you know. The same way you can drift off the note a little bit when you’re singing.”
Taylor’s radio comes on in a fit of static and demands to know her location.
“I just plussed at Pioneer Square and I’m ten-nineteen to Martin Luther King,” she says. “I have two minuses at Swedish Hospital.”
“Okay, Taylor, ten-twenty-seven after that,” says the radio.
“Ten-four,” she replies.
To get the job with Handi-Van, Taylor only needed a good driving record, a Washington State license, and three weeks of training, plus a course in CPR. The hardest part was learning to use the radio code, which she still feels is unnecessary. It doesn’t actually save syllables, in Taylor’s opinion; for instance, “ten-twenty-seven” is no easier to say than “return to base.” It’s probably less embarrassing to say “ten-twelve