A minute before noontime on a blinding brightJune day, a small wasp backed its black and yellow abdomen out of a scarred hole left behind by a maple syrup spigot in a sugar maple tree, pushing with its back legs, then its middle legs and then its front legs until its compound eyes registered a thousand images that came together into tree and field and house. In a confusion of daylight, it spread its front wings and then its hind wings and flew toward a mound of lumber in the middle of the field. In its solitary flight it curved recklessly toward the house, then toward the woods, and finally straightened into a small opening in the stack of wood where it became a social being once again.
His society whirred and hummed in the rotting portion down in the middle of these old planed boards, once neatly stacked in one direction with a few cross pieces, now jumbled and twisted, bleached white in the sun, weathered for half a generation, stroked with heavy black checks and warped up sharply at the ends. As the summer wore on, the city of yellow jackets grew exponentially, although there was no one to witness their frequent coming and going. There was only the small field of overgrown grass and weeds behind a cedar-shingled house that had been abandoned for years. The shingles were weathered gray and black. Only the frames around the four dark windows on the back of the house still held a few clinging flakes of white paint. There was an odd dormer in the roof that could have been designed for dwarves, with tiny black windows. A piece of shingle came loose from the side of the house and flew halfway to the pile of lumber. The towering pines around the edges of the field swayed magnificently.
The yellow jacket was emerging again, its antennae feeling the air and its mandibles pulling at a speck of weathered wood, when it became aware of three giants approaching from the woods. They pounded the earth fearlessly. Boys. They were striding toward the lumber, thinking about Shakespearean stages, riverboats, forts, anything that could be imagined out of an old pile of boards and turned toward an adventure. The yellow jacket pulled in his antennae and rejoined his comrades.
One of these boys was my brother, Ted. One was my friend, Peter Crowell, and the third was me. We had come because this was forbidden territory. The old cedar-shingled building, not far from Peter's house, was one of the two haunted houses in our end of town. It was full of ghosts and possibly a grumpy old man with a gun, though no one had ever seen this man. We hovered near the house as close as we dared, knowing that we would have to be satisfied instead with the pile of lumber. It was close enough to be a dangerously reckless place to play, but far enough to give us half a chance.
As soon as we jumped the pile and Peter started kicking at a board we knew something was wrong. There was a humming and buzzing sound beneath our feet, like thousands of tiny sewing machines working faster and faster. We could almost feel the boards lift, as swarms of black and yellow bodies emerged from the gaps. The noise was deafening. Only Peter had sense enough to turn tail and sprint. He'd already been stung four or five times by then, and a few bees trailed after him as he ran but they couldn't nail him.
My brother Ted and I didn't show the same good sense. In fact, we panicked. We stood flapping our arms, hooting and screaming, stamping on the boards, slapping our thighs and knees and shoulders and brushing at our arms and legs furiously while the bees piled up inside our shirts and pants and stung us from our crew-cut heads to our thin-socked ankles. By the time we started flying, there wasn't a place on our bodies that wasn't pumped full of venom. We ran toward the woods, screaming to the pines, full of fear and poison, and trailed by the last angry wasps. We nearly fell into a cellar hole lined with round stones as we tried to reach Peter's house.
The three of us banged, howling and sweating and squealing, into Peter's kitchen, where we met his mother's surprised face. She located three sticks of butter and smeared us from top to bottom. The bumps on our bodies seemed to sizzle like sautéing mushrooms, and the hundreds of pricks of pain felt sharper and more poisonous the more she rubbed.
To keep from passing out we lay down with our feet propped up. Finally, Peter's mother let my brother and me hobble home. We veered recklessly down the road, unable to walk a straight line. My mother took us to the doctor. We endured a few home days filled with empty nursing before we came back to life. When I emerged again for the first time, it was a magnificent Saturday. The tall pines swayed gracefully as I stopped to sample a breeze blowing from the open field behind our house.
from SMALL TOWN TALES, copyright 1997, by Sidney Hall, Jr.