He said sometimes we were the pilot, and sometimes we were the lightning storm.

* * *

In late July, we finally racked off our locust mead, honeysuckle mead, blackberry mead, and scuppernong wine, and still I waited to be asked to help with the action. This, I thought, would be incontrovertible proof that the family had accepted me as I accepted them, like the song in the songbook called “Mutual Love”: Now I am a soldier, my captain’s gone before.

In early August we celebrated with a harvest festival, which Dice called the poskito in honor of the Mississippian Indians. We drank mead that tasted like white wine and honey. All of us worked half-drunk from breakfast on, eating peaches till our stomachs hurt, carrying great baskets of tomatoes, squash, peppers, to the kitchen, where Pear reigned over six family members, pickling and canning, making jams and sauces, desiccating, curing, anticipating a winter that was impossible to imagine now, in the caressing heat of the dog days. The fields sloped a bit more than usual, tilt-a-whirled when I stood up with my basket full of sun-hot strawberries.

Afterward, we lay around the porch like a pack of dogs. We heard the whir of a motor, and then Bay pulled his dirty white car into the courtyard. Those of us who were awake hooted. I noticed his beautiful blue clothes, blue shirt, blue pants, not yet turned to the ochre median of our farm apparel. He’d been gone two months, expecting to find a new brother, but he returned alone. I watched him embrace Sara and Gemini.

I had started to forget Bay. The way the scars on his arms gleamed. I wanted to lie next to Bay in a moment when he was not searching, leading, working. I wanted to lie next to Bay in a moment when he was still.

So it happened that I ran to him as he walked to the beehives. I threw my arms around his neck. He kissed my sunburned forehead. “Half the family is looking,” he said. “Wait till this evening.” I snuck a glance at Dice. Couples weren’t allowed, but Dice permitted the sharing of minds and bodies, Bay had told me at the bus stop on Tunnel Road. I did not sense how convenient it was for Dice, my tendency to believe I could find freedom in another person.

I watched Bay. He knew how to handle bees and did not wear protection.

“They’ll sting you anyway, if they want to,” he said. His flat smile cleaved me like an axe.

He tilted up the lid of the first hive and squeezed in the silky grayish smoke from his herb-stuffed bellows. The bees flattened and slowed their bunched, frenetic pattern.