Lavender Farmer

The lavender farmer stood at the top of the hill, watching the woman in the neighbouring paddock. She was tending her hives, or at least trying to, and seemed to be doing it in a very strange way. She would approach a hive gingerly, then retreat, turn in a little circle, then move towards the hive again. At first he thought it was some kind of hippy new-age bullshit, mimicking the dance of bees when they found a new source of honey, until he realised she was crying, bawling. She wasn't wearing her protective gear.

"Bloody hell."

Should he go down there? He vacillated. No, not after...not since….

Christ.

He was going to have to go down there.

The farmer and the bee keeper hadn't spoken in eight years. The year her husband ran off with his wife. The year they both drowned trying desperately to cross a swollen creek, afraid their respective spouses were on their tail. They weren't. The first the respective spouses knew of either incident were twin police cars coming down their shared driveway, the first stopping to open one gate, the second moving on to the other. The respective spouses stood on their respective porches and watched. Watched the cars, watched each other.

He watched her a bit longer, trying to make sense of it. Recently she'd been more and more careful about her gear. When once she'd just go out in long sleeves, gloves and a face net, lately it would be a full length HAZMAT suit, full head helmet like a white welding mask. But not today. Today she was hatless in shorts and a singlet, far less clothing than she normally wore and....ah, crap.

He pelted down the hill as fast as he could go, as fast as his own protective gear would allow - no time to take it off . He had realised what she was going to do. His breathing loud in his respirator, he reached her just as she finally stopped dancing and was stretching out an arm to lift the lid off a hive. Without bothering to yell he grabbed her around the waist and tackled her to the ground, rolling her away from the hives. She curled up in a ball, arms over her face and when she was ready, he eased her up and walked her back to his house.

They sat in silence nursing tea, then he took her home.

Suicide by bee. Jesus.

That night he was up late on the computer. The next morning he dropped a fat envelope in her mail box and waited. From the kitchen window he saw her walk down her hill and climb through the fence separating their properties. She glanced up at the house - he retreated a little to give her the illusion of some privacy - and walked up and down the rows of lavender, nearly ready for harvesting. The French was ready to go, the English and Spanish not long behind. She trailed a gloved hand through the flowers, picked a leaf and crushed it, bringing it to her nose, then walked briskly back to her farm.

An envelope appeared in his mail box the next day, full of instructions and a one page contract.

He got to work, put in a gate between the properties. Looked at the catalogue she'd enclosed and circled some sizes.

He sat on the bed after his shower and looked at his scarred arms, red and scaly and itching, always itching, and dreamed of relief. After twenty years of farming lavender the rashes had only started coming on in the last couple of months, but it was bad. Some days he'd return to bed before dark with eyes streaming and swollen shut and skin on fire.

She came over the next day with a new acquisition - a petrol-powered pruner. They both laughed at the name and tried saying it six times fast. He hadn't seen her laugh in a while. He hadn't laughed for a while. He suited up and followed her down to the beds; excited, she was leading, arms bare. She spent the day in school, learning the right angles, the right knots, not too many in a bunch, how to hang them to dry and how to tell when they were. Later, making oil, but not yet.

He had school, too. Extracting, moving, wooing the bees and showing them some love. Talking to them: you talk to bees! Knowing when and how, even who.

The respirator lay discarded in the drying shed, his suit with the built-in boots hanging neatly alongside. He could breathe again, his skin could breathe again. It healed, free from the allergens and pills and ointments that provided no relief at all, really. He felt the sun on his face through the net and got to work lighting the smoker packed with fresh pine needles, all the while quietly singing a warning to the bees - no sense in startling them. They worked together, separately, on their adjoining farms, the gate was left open, often as not. They started an honesty farm-gate stall and talked about setting up at the Sunday markets, drawing up a roster.

She started adding new products instead of just wholesaling. Creams (which he could never use), oils. Lavender-flavoured honey, honey made from lavender pollen, honey mead, lavender jam. Lavender beeswax lip balm. Bees and flowers, their nemeses, their friends, their living.

Her HAZMAT suit wasn't neatly hung up. She'd ritually burned it in a bonfire started with the discarded woody stems and did a bee dance in the orange night, thanking the nothing she believed in and actually looking forward to the morning.

She stopped scratching at the bee tattoo on her wrist, added another in shades of purple and blue.