The Honeyed Lies of Jameison March

When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.

What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.

Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.

Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.

On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.

For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.

They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.

They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.

They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.

But, again, that's all town gossip.

What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.

Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.

So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.

Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.

The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.

The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.

Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.

They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.

The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.

It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.

Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.

Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.

When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.

When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.

Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.

The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.

Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.

When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.

When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.

When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.

"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."

He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.

He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.

He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.

Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.

He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.

And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.

I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.

So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.