First Look: The Last Beekeeper
This excerpt is part of our First Look column, where you’ll find exclusive sneak peeks of new and forthcoming books across all genres!
Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Last Beekeeper, publishing March 7th. Pre-order your copy here!
Sasha, Age 8
My bees will survive, Sasha promised herself as she crouched in the dirt watching them die. A worker bee hauled a dead sibling to the opening of the hive and launched the body onto a pile of her lifeless sisters in the dirt below.
“Why are they dying?” Sasha whispered to her father, his head so close to hers his whiskers brushed her cheek.
He rubbed his face with stiff, arthritic hands and crawled closer to the hive. “Come here.”
He put a hand on the pine box. Sasha did the same.
“What do you feel?” he asked.
“Wood?” The smooth grain gave slightly under her fingernails as she pressed harder.
“What else?” Warmth brewing inside the hive overpowered the shade cast by oak branches.
“It’s hot. And buzzing.”
“Bees hum at the exact pitch of a G note, like on Mom’s piano,” her father said, pipe smoke infused in his shirt mixing with lavender in the breeze.
“How do they know the note?” She pressed her ear to the side of the hive, vibrations tickling the inner parts of her ear.
“They just know. They communicate with signals only bees understand.”
With her cheek still flush against the hive, Sasha looked at her father and blinked three slow, deliberate blinks, scrunching her eyes tight each time.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sending a signal only you can understand.” Again, she stared at him and blinked three times.
He furrowed his brow as if concentrating. “I love you, too.”
Her father placed one hand on the hive and the other on Sasha’s shoulder, his callused skin chafing her sunburn. The hum disoriented her until she felt as if she hovered above the ground. The buzzing grew louder, filling her skull, telegraphing secret signals down her neck and arms to warm her fingertips.
“That note is a part of you now.” His words hung in the viscous air. “It’s a huge responsibility to be tuned to the pitch of a bee.”
For a moment Sasha could see the air—particles, sound waves, breath—moving like liquid around her. She parted her lips to taste the sizzle of lavender and wax.
A loud chirp startled Sasha and she pulled her ear away from the hive.
“This is Lawrence.” Her father answered his phone and walked toward the farmhouse, leaving Sasha alone with her bees and the vibrations destined to tremble under her skin long after the hives fell silent.
Sasha’s 22nd Birthday
Sasha stepped off the sour-smelling bus hoping the taste of chaff in the air would guide her back to the farmhouse. Every night since her father had gone to prison, she had visualized walking up the sagging porch stairs, retracing the familiar path down the hall, fingertips recounting each dent in the scuffed chair rail, every flourish in the wrought-iron heat vents.
She hadn’t been this close to her childhood home in eleven years, but it had never felt farther away.
The hydraulic bus door screeched as it slammed closed. Sasha jumped sideways and the bus lurched away.
After six steps on the broken pavement, memory tingled in her feet, her knees, and the thumping space in her chest. When she first landed in state care, she used to spin herself dizzy to see if she could intuit which direction led back to the farm. No matter how long she spun, and even if she tripped or fell, she always recognized the beeline home before opening her eyes.
Flanking the desolate road, fields that once swayed with barley and rye now teemed with an untamed fervor that prodded at the dormant wildness in Sasha. She yanked up a tuft of tall grass, clotted dirt clinging to the roots. The earthy aroma, the precise mixture of life and decay that punctuated her childhood, greeted her like an old friend and conjured a longing to howl into the wind whipping her hair across her face.
Sometimes the vibrations in Sasha’s fingertips, ghosts of the bees she and her father once tended, swarmed her with aggression, attacking her from the inside. Too much lost when the bees died. Too much wrenched from her tattered, younger self. Other days, the gentle hum enveloped Sasha in tender, honey-soaked memories of her father’s beard and a world that had not yet come undone.
She no longer whipped her head around to chase rogue flickers in her peripheral vision. The barely audible hum of tiny, nonexistent wings hovering close to her ear rarely tempted her to close her eyes and hope anymore.
Her bees, like nearly all the pollinators, had disappeared more than a decade ago.
As Sasha trudged up the final hill toward her childhood home, the familiar buzz warmed her fingertips. She shook her hands out, forcing blood into her fingers, and clapped to dispel the phantom hum.
She shouldn’t have waited so long to return home. She had aged out of the state juvenile-care system four years ago. Since then, she had relentlessly promised herself she’d return to find the research her father buried. Soon, she repeated in her mind every night before slipping off to sleep. Soon.
But she couldn’t take time off work from the bike shop. The bus ticket cost too much. The walk from the bus stop was too long. Convenient reasons to avoid home made staying away an easy habit, one she could no longer indulge. Her father’s first parole hearing was scheduled in less than a month and she intended to unearth the documents he buried before his release. If he found them first, Sasha might never understand what she helped him hide all those years ago. She might never understand the truth about why he chose prison over her.
The media already hummed with news of the hearing. Will the last beekeeper be released early? Will the last beekeeper’s daughter testify on his behalf?
The letter from her father’s lawyer requesting her presence at the parole hearing lay crumpled in a pocket of her backpack. Writing a dispassionate note on her father’s behalf instead of appearing in person had been the coward’s way out, but hadn’t she learned that maneuver from her dad, who chose to hide behind his secrets instead of parenting his motherless child?
The first night Sasha spent in the state home, she made herself three promises, and every night since she had renewed the vow before going to sleep. Find the research. Understand the truth. Rebuild a family.
But now, as she took the first steps toward acting on her oaths, she worried she wouldn’t find anything at the farm and would have nothing left to promise herself, other than rebuilding a family, which seemed more unlikely than unearthing the mythic lost documents.
Maybe it would be better not to try.
Dust from the road clung to the sticky saliva gathering in the corners of her mouth. Sasha adjusted the backpack on her aching shoulders and took a swig of water from a nearly empty bottle.
She stopped visiting her father in prison years ago. Not because she didn’t love him, but because she couldn’t take the bullying by other kids. But now, with the possibility of his imminent release, Sasha needed to know what she helped her father bury in the field all those years ago. She needed to understand why he chose to protect those documents instead of her. And more than anything, she needed to finally understand if it had all been her fault.
The weight of everything she owned thumped against her body as she swung her violin case to maintain momentum as she approached the driveway.
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING.
Hand-painted red letters on a sheet of plywood leaned against a large rock marking the driveway.
Fucking squatters.
Technically, the farm had defaulted to state ownership when her father went to prison. She had no legal claim, but this land belonged to her and she to it. Local officials wouldn’t notice if she camped out for a few nights. Squatters, however, would fight.
Sasha kicked the sign, the impact on the rubber toe of her boot reverberating in her knee. This was her home. She kicked it again, cracking the brittle wood, but not breaking it.
Sasha didn’t want a fight, but she refused to turn back.
What right did squatters have to turn her away?
She quickened her pace and passed the weatherworn barn that had once been her mother’s workshop. Her eyes stung as she faced the house she had been dreaming of for years, but her dehydrated body failed to conjure tears. The garden spilled onto the driveway in a tangled mess. Shutters hung at odd angles. A dry sob stuck in her throat when she saw the silvery leaves of her mother’s unruly lavender, lording over the weeds.
The tire swing she and her father used to beat like a piñata to vent their frustrations twisted in the wind, the rusty chain creaking with the familiar groan that made Sasha’s knees wobble.
She drank the last swallow of water, dropped her pack to the ground, and ignored the buzz building in her ears. It’s not real. They’re gone.
She knelt on the ground and leaned her elbows on her pack, taking in the familiar but altered scene. A tower of rusty bike wheels impaled on a spike stood in front of the porch. Of all things to survive time and looters. The day she and her father moved her hives to hide them in the forest, she had marked the hives’ location with the sculpture, a monument to all she and her father failed to protect.
As she ran a finger absentmindedly over the cracked leather of her violin case, something landed on the handle.
At first, she mistook the insect for debris carried by the wind, but the wind had stilled. Her throat tightened as the shiny stinger twitched.
A bee. Her skin burned with the decades-old guilt of her role in the demise of the final bee colony. The last of their kind.
No one had seen a honey bee in the wild for eleven years.
Yet there it sat. A bee. A perfect, beautiful bee, taunting her. Haunting her.
Apis mellifera, her father’s voice boomed in her mind.
The Earth seemed to stutter on its axis as Sasha stared at the fuzzy body, the threadlike antennae. As the bee rose into the air in front of her, the whir of its wings stirred a faded memory as elusive as a forgotten color.
The vibrato hummed in her teeth as the bee lowered itself to walk across the violin case.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the mirage summoned by her desperate need to believe some bees had survived.
She had spent her first eleven years helping her father tend bees, and every year since trying to forget the hypnotic sound of being surrounded by them.
Sasha, of all people, didn’t fall for the bee-sighting hysteria. She knew the truth.
The bees were gone.
Sasha stared at the figment, willing it to dissipate. Was she so weak her mind could conjure a bee to appease the empty, aching space in her chest?
Entranced by the impossible creature—conjured by heat, dehydration, or the shock of being home—Sasha didn’t notice the man emerging from the farmhouse.
“Pick up your pack and turn around,” he shouted, a rifle on his shoulder aimed at Sasha’s chest.
Sasha jumped to her feet, knocking her pack over. “Pilgrims are no longer welcome here.”
When she looked down, the imaginary bee had vanished.
Excerpted from The Last Beekeeper by Julie Carrick Dalton © 2023, used with permission from Forge Books.
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Julie Carrick Dalton is the Boston-based author of The Last Beekeeper and Waiting for the Night Song, named a Most Anticipated 2021 novel by CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and others, and an Amazon Editor’s pick for Best Books of the Month. A Bread Loaf, Tin House, and GrubStreet Novel Incubator alum, Julie is a frequent speaker on the topic of Fiction in the Age of Climate Crisis at universities, conferences, libraries, and museums. Her writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Orion, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, and other publications. When she isn’t writing, you can usually find Julie digging in her garden, skiing, kayaking, or walking her dogs.