Lost in the Funhouse Read Online Free PDF Page B

was not in our make-up to serve Him in His.
    By eleven, then, this Sunday morning, Aunt Rosa had brought Peter home from Cradle Roll, Konrad was back from Bible class, and the family were about their separate pleasures. Grandfather, having inspected the bee situation earlier and found it not apparently changed, had settled himself on the side porch to carve a new drive-wheel for Peter’s locomotive; my brother watched raptly, already drawn at three to what would be his trade. Rosa set to hammering dough for Maryland biscuits; Konrad was established somewhere with the weighty
Times
; Mother was in her hammock. There she had lazed since breakfast, dressed only in a sashless kimono to facilitate nursing; oblivious to the frowns of passing Christians, she had chain-smoked her way through the Sunday crossword, highlight of her week. At eleven, when the final bell of the morning sounded, I was brought forth. Cradled against her by the sag of the hammock, I drank me to a drowse; and she too, just as she lay-mottled by light and leaf-shadow, lulled by mywork upon her and by wafting organ-chords from the avenue—soon slept soundly.
    What roused her was a different tone, an urgent, resonating thrum. She opened her eyes: all the air round about her was aglint with bees. Thousand on thousand, a roaring gold sphere, they hovered in the space between the hammock and the overhanging branches.
    Her screams brought Grandfather from the porch; he saw the cloud of bees and ducked at once into the summerkitchen, whence he rushed a moment later banging pie-tin cymbals.
    “Mein Schwarm! Mein Schwarm!”
    Now Rosa and Konrad ran at his heels, he in his trousers and BVD’s, she with flour half to her elbows; but before they had cleared the back-house arbor there was an explosion in the alley, and Willy Erdmann burst like a savage through our hollyhocks. His hair was tousled, expression wild; in one hand he brandished a smoking shotgun, in the other his bee-bob, pole and all; mother-of-pearl opera glasses swung from a black cord around his neck. He leaped about the hammock as if bedemoned.
    “Not a bee, Thomas!”
    Aunt Rosa joined her shrieks to Andrea’s, who still lay under the snarling cloud. “The
Honig!
Ai!” And my brother Peter, having made his way to the scene in the wake of the others, blinked twice or thrice and improved the pandemonium by the measure of his wailings.
    Uncle Konrad dashed hammockward with rescue in his heart, but was arrested by shouts from the other men.
    “
Nein
, don’t dare!” Grandfather cautioned. “They’ll sting!”
    Mr. Erdmann agreed. “Stay back!” And dropping the bee-bob shouldered his gun as if Konrad’s design was on the bees.
    “Lie still, Andy,” Grandfather ordered. “I
spritz
them once.”
    He ran to fetch the garden hose, a spray of water being, like a charge of bird-shot, highly regarded among bee-keepers as a means to settle swarms. But Mr. Erdmann chose now to let go at blue heaven with his other barrel and brought down a shower of Judas leaves upon the company; at the reportGrandfather abandoned his plan, whether fearing that Konrad had been gunned down or merely realizing, what was the case, that our hose would not reach half the distance. In any event his instructions to Mother were carried out: even as he turned she gave a final cry and swooned away. Mercifully, providentially! For now the bees, moved by their secret reasons, closed ranks and settled upon her chest. Ten thousand, twenty thousand strong they clustered. Her bare bosoms, my squalling face—all were buried in the golden swarm.
    Fright undid Rosa’s knees; she sat down hard on the grass and wailed,
“Grosser Gott! Grosser Gott!”
Uncle Konrad went rigid. Erdmann too stood transfixed, his empty weapon at portarms. Only Grandfather seemed undismayed: without a wondering pause he rushed to the hammock and scooped his bare hands under the cluster.
    “Take the
Honig
,” he said to Konrad.
    In fact, though grave