Stingers

My brother, Ernie and I loved going to work with our father. He farmed my great grandmother’s 160 acres in southeastern New Mexico. It was fifteen years before my folks purchased it from her. We lived in town, eight miles away, and Daddy commuted in his green 1958 Ford pickup. Most days he left before we got up, and came home dead tired. Covered in powdery field dust, his blue eyes were sometimes the only recognizable detail of his face. If we were already asleep, he’d defy Mama’s decree to let us sleep, come into our rooms, and tickle us awake for a pillow fight. I think Mama secretly enjoyed our gleeful roughhousing, but tried not to smile.

Summertime meant twenty-four seven on the farm. Our father ran the irrigation pumps day and night, setting aluminum siphon tubes into ditches and swishing them to suck water, which poured into furrows of cotton and grain. The alfalfa fields begged us to romp through their purple flowers chasing yellow butterflies. Daddy said no, it would tromp the stems, and he couldn’t mow a packed down field.

He took us with him, “to help,” he said.  We weren’t much help, but we loved to explore. A massive weeping willow on the reservoir banks sheltered minnows under its roots.  Grandma gave us red metal coffee cans. We fashioned nets from her old cotton stockings and baling wire.

Years before Daddy was born, my great grandparents had an apple orchard. They kept bees for pollination. They sold honey, and Grandpa packed wooden crates with apples and sent them off on the train to St. Louis. One winter in the early 1930’s, the freeze came early and hard, killing all the trees and bees.

The honey house was a long, low adobe structure behind Grandma’s house. My brother and I loved to poke through the rusting comb separator and lift the lids of abandoned hives.  There was a cider press and apple crates:  Pecos Valley’s Finest, Ernest Nelson Farm. Various scythes and even a hand bellows for smoking bees hung from nails along the wall.  At the end of the building, there was one tiny room with a cot covered in folded-up cotton sacks. A scale hung from the rafters. During cotton picking season, Daddy let me write the weights down in a ledger book when each man heaved a bulging canvas sack onto his shoulder and hooked the strap into the scale hook. I loved the smell of cotton.

My father said this little room was where his great grandfather slept.  He had been a soldier in the Civil War, and we even found a round metal button on the floor, CSA. Daddy said that meant he fought for the South.  But I didn’t know about the Civil War then, and neither did Ernie, because he was only five.

On the low rafters, birds made nests where parts of the roof were missing, and little white papery wasp nests stuck to the adobe bricks. One of us tugged an apple crate, and climbed up.   We watched as gray squiggly larvae moved inside the translucent cells. Ernie grabbed a rake and I got a pitch fork.  Swap, swap.  The implements were heavy, and the nests high above. I can’t remember who did it, but somehow a nest hit the floor.

Swarms of angry wasps covered heads and faces, arms and necks.  Grandma heard our screams from the clothesline in the back yard.  Her apron flapped as she tried to beat the stinging whirring mass off.  She pulled us from the room, scolding and urging us forward, out into the sunlight. There she tossed us headlong into the muddy water of the irrigation ditch which bordered her yard.  In she came, all five feet of her, shoes and all, still beating at the wasps with her flour sack apron. Once in the water, the buzzing swarm disappeared. Grandma scooped up handfuls of mud and poulticed our swollen faces.  I don’t know if this was one of her Cherokee cures or just her instinctive move to cool the fire of the wasp stings. “Keep this on.  Let it dry.  It draws the poison out.”

We howled in pain. Ernie’s eyes were nearly closed by the stings.  His summer crew cut left his scalp without hair to protect it, and the awful bumps made him almost unrecognizable.  Because I was the fair one, Grandma always made me wear a hat, and this day, instead of tossing it aside, it  had remained on my nearly white pixie cut.  The few stings on my face didn’t begin to compete with my always-peeling sunburnt nose.

As Grandma pulled stingers and tried to shush our cries, she kept up a chant, “Lands sakes, lands sakes, what made you do such a thing?”