The Observer by Marina Endicott

Author:Marina Endicott [Endicott, Marina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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One cloudy, cool day with no wind, Malcolm drove out to our place to check the beehives. I’d almost forgotten they were there. He climbed into his white-paper gear and came to the door to talk to me, fiddling with his helmet/veil combo, stiffeners around the face giving it the look of a fencing visor.

“Settling well, seems like,” he said.

I was a bit dopey from putting Ethan down to sleep and it took a minute for me to understand he meant the bees. “Oh good,” I said.

Malcolm’s big white head bobbed slowly. “I thought they would.”

I still could not decide if he was a little odd, or a phony like his dad. Do phonies keep bees?

He looked up and his eyes came into focus through the visor. “It’s been two weeks, and I want to test the water out there in the slough…”

He lifted the helmet, finally satisfied with the bend of the stiffener, slipped it over his head and dropped the veil forward to test the fit, nodding gravely like a giant bug accepting your acquaintance.

Woken by our talking, Ethan had come out into the hall in his diaper, trailing a blanket as an afterthought. The bright doorway and the strange honeyman standing silhouetted there must have shocked him—he turned and tangled himself in his blanket and fell, and set up such a howling that I had to leave Malcolm to the bees. “No no no no no, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s all right,” I whispered in Ethan’s delicate ear, all the useless comforting things that somehow soothe.

I carried him around the living room until he quieted and then took him out onto the front porch to see the blue truck, and pointed to the small figure of Malcolm now past the paddock, out where the stacks of boxes looked over the field. I stood Ethan on the porch railing to rest my arms, telling him soothing stories about bees, sweetness and light, and we watched Malcolm for a long time as he pulled drawers in and out of the boxes. At this distance we could not see the bees at all.

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