‘You all right?’asked Zach.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘You’reshaking over there.’

‘I’m fine. I do that sometimes.’

I turned away and looked out the window, where there was nothing but fields and now and then a falling-down wooden barn or some old, abandoned colored house.

‘How much further?’ I said in a way thatsuggested theexcursion could not be over too soon.

‘You upset or something?’

I refused to answer him, glaring instead through the dirty windshield. When we turned off the highway onto a beat-up dirt road, Zach said we were on property belonging to Mr. Clayton Forrest, who kept Black Madonna Honey and beeswax candles in the waiting roomof his law office so his customers could buy them. Part of Zach’s job was going around to deliver fresh supplies of honey and candles to places that sold them on consignment.

‘Mr. Forrest lets me poke around his law office,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘He tells me about the cases he’s won.’ We hit a rut and bounced on the seat so hard our heads rammed into the truck roof, which for some reason flipped mymood upside down. I started to laugh like somebody was holding me down tickling my armpits. The more my head slammed against the truck, the worse it got, till I was having one big, hilarious seizure. I laughed the way May cried. At first Zach aimed for the ruts just to hear me, but then he got nervous because I couldn’t seemto stop. He cleared his throat and slowed way down till we were bounce-free. Finally it drained out of me, whatever it was. I remembered the pleasure of fainting that day during the Daughters of Mary meeting and thought now how much I would like to keel over right here in the truck. I envied turtles their shells, how they could disappear at will. I was conscious of Zach’s breathing, his shirt pulled across his chest, one arm draped on the steering wheel. The hard, dark look of it. The mystery of his skin. It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I’d honestly thought such a thing couldn’t happen, the way water could not run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. Alaw of nature. Maybe it was a simple matter of being attracted to what I couldn’t have. Or maybe desire kicked in when it pleased without noticing the rules we lived and died by. You gotta imagine what’s never been, Zach had said. He stopped the honey wagon beside a cluster of twenty hives tucked in a thicket of trees, where the bees could have shade in the summer and shelter from the wind through the winter. Bees were more fragile than I ever imagined. If it wasn’t mites ruining them, it was pesticides or terrible weather. He climbed outand dragged a load of equipment off the back ofthe truck—helmets, extra supers, fresh brood frames, and the smoker, which he handed me to light. I moved through camp hor weed and wild azalea, stepping over fire-ant mounds and swinging the smoker while he lifted the lids off the hives and peered inside looking for capped frames. He moved like a person with a genuine love of bees. I could not believe how gentle and softhearted he could be. One of the frames he lifted out leaked honey the color of plums.

‘It’s purple!’ I said.

‘When the weather turns hot and the flowers dry up, the bees start sucking elderberry. It makes a purple honey. People will pay two dollars a jar for purple honey.’ He dipped his finger into the comb and, lifting my veil, brought it close to my lips. I opened my mouth, let his finger slide in, sucking it clean. The sheerest smile brushed his lips, and heat rushed up my body. He bent toward me. I wanted him to lift back my veil and kiss me, and I knew he wanted to do it, too, by the way he fixed his eyes on mine. We stayed like that while bees swirled around our heads with a sound like sizzling bacon, a sound that no longer registered as danger. Danger, I realized, was a thing you got used to. But instead of kissing me, he turned to the next hive and went right on with his work. The smoker had gone out. I followed behind him, and neither of us spoke. We stacked the filled supers onto the truck like the cat had our tongues, and neither of us said a word till we were back in the honey truck passing the city limits sign. TIBURON, POPULATION 6,502 Home of Willifred Marchant ‘Who is Willifred Marchant?’ I said, desperate to break the silence and get things back to normal.