Sugar and Alice pass by a dwelling that looks slightly more prosperous than most, though less interesting: a yellow brick rectangle set in a huge, flat lawn with nothing planted in it.
A riding mower preens in the carport. “That’s Les and June Courcy’s, they’re white,” Sugar says, with neither favor nor disapproval, as if she’d simply said, “There goes a white rooster across the road.” The two women walk on.
The land is steep. Everywhere Alice looks she sees long, dark loaves of hill cut with forested hollows. Around the houses, almost everyone has a goat to keep down the under-brush, although once in a while a front yard will sport an old orange mower alongside the satellite dish.
As they crest the hill, they’re faced suddenly with a long mowed field surrounded by white fences, exactly like the horse farms Alice has seen in Kentucky. A brass sign on the white gate says HIDEAWAY FARMS. The shining asphalt drive trails proudly up the knoll to a stone house trimmed in white.
The brass knocker on the front door is huge, as if to suggest you ought to be a fairly good-sized person to bother those within. Alice asks, “What’s that place, racehorses?”
“Ostriches,” Sugar replies.
Alice laughs at her cousin’s sense of humor. “They get a good price for the meat?” she asks.
“No, the feathers. For ladies’ hats and things.”
Alice stares, but Sugar is not smiling. In fact, she looks irritated. “Ostriches?” Alice asks. “An ostrich farm?”
“That’s what I’m a-telling you.”
“Who ever heard of the like?”
“I never did,” Sugar admits, “before this fellow name of Green come in from New Mexico or New Hampshire, one of the newer states, and says you can get rich on raising ostriches. He’s been trying to get the state government in on it. The thing is, though, you have to be rich to start with, to raise ostriches. They cost you around twenty thousand dollar for a pair, just to set up housekeeping.”
“Lord,” Alice states. “Every feather on their hide must be worth a thousand.”
“That’s about it. The fellow was trying to sell the eggs for a hundred dollar, telling people around here they could hatch them out and get into the business that way.” Sugar starts to giggle. She holds her fist in front of her mouth. “Roscoe’s friend Cash, that just moved back here from Wyoming, told the man he’d buy one if Mr. Green would promise to set on it himself.”
Alice feels intensely curious. She has never seen an ostrich, and combs the ridge for the sight of sassy tail feathers and a long pink neck, but she sees only velvet grass. “I don’t reckon they’re out today,” she says at last, disappointed.
“Oh, you see them, some days,” Sugar insists. “The kids like to pester them to pieces, to try and get them to run. Or spit, I heard they’ll spit if they’re mad. I don’t know that a bird could spit, but they’re an odd bird. They don’t bury their heads, that’s just a tale. Mr. Green says he’s going to shoot the kids with rock salt, and that’s not a tale, he’ll do it. He said out loud in the grocery he’d like to see Boma Mellowbug drop dead tomorrow.”
“Who?”
“Boma Mellowbug.” Sugar nods at a great ramshackle house nested into the woods just over the fence from Hide-away Farms. The house itself is small, composed of wooden shingles, but it has many things tacked onto it to increase the living quarters, such as a school bus, very rusted. Alice can see chairs and a stovepipe inside the bus, and so many plants growing in there that their leaves jam against the windows and windshield like greenhouse plants. Horse trailers and refrigerators are parked in the yard among the huckleberry bushes. A trio of hens step primly around the splayed, spotted legs of a dead-looking beagle.
“What’s the man got against Boma?” Alice asks, though she can guess. The white fence between the two properties could be the Iron Curtain. It’s not clear to Alice, though, which country she’d want as her own, if she had to choose.
“Well, mostly he hates her bees. She’s got bees living in her roof. He says they’re going to kill his birds, but they wouldn’t. They’re good bees if you love them, and Boma does. A bird wouldn’t know enough to hate a bee, I don’t think. Do you?”
Alice has already decided that Heaven is a hard stone’s throw beyond her ken. “I wouldn’t know,” she says, which is the truth. Nothing in her life has prepared her to make a judgment on a war between bees and ostriches. As they walk slowly past Boma’s mailbox, which has been fashioned from a length of drainpipe and a wire egg basket, Alice hears the faint, distant thrum of the hive. She makes up her mind that for as long as her mission takes, on this stretch of Heaven’s road at least, it would be a good idea to love Boma’s bees.