He’d sometimes rant on about this sort of thing at the dinner table, stabbing his fork into a bit of chicken breast and swinging it in the air to make his point. “Those chickens out there, that’s your model for womanhood. They’re hard-working, thrifty, good mothers, they submit to the will of the rooster. On the other hand the rooster’s always scouting for danger, always scratching up feed for his hens and calling them over to eat it. There’s the ideal family.”
“So you want thirty wives, then?” said Helen.
“That’s not what I mean.” He tucked the chicken into his mouth and talked with his mouth full. “On the other hand that would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
“You wouldn’t last a day.”
“There you go, talking back at me.”
“Ah, go on with you.”
“No, really. What are they going to think of me in town if you’re never listening to a word I say, always giving me lip? They’ll think this is a woman-run house. They’ll laugh at me.”
“They already do.”
Manny’s face flushed. “I should be treated with respect in my home. You shouldn’t talk to me like that. Go cut me some more bread.”
The phone rang, startling all three of them. Karl was the one sitting closest to the phone, but he made no attempt to answer it. He was uncomfortable with phones; he would never answer it if Augusta was there with him, and if a call had to be made it was Augusta who did the dialling. She pulled the phone off the kitchen counter and placed it on the table beside her so she could check the call display to make sure it was Joy phoning. She didn’t feel like fielding well-meant questions from the women at the church or seniors’ centre about the outcome of Gabe’s surgery.
“Damn it,” she said. “It’s Ernest again.” Ernest Grey had been phoning for months. Augusta didn’t know him, or anything about him other than what she could guess from his phone calls. He still had an old rotary-dial phone; she could hear the click and spin on her answering machine as he tried redialling in his confusion, after reaching the answering machine. When she first heard that rotary dial she wondered briefly if there hadn’t been some accident in time, if someone from the past was dialling into her present to leave a message on her machine. But that was just a flight of fancy. If Ernest were from the past, why would his name appear on her call display?
Ernest was ancient; his voice was cracked and faded, and his mind was slipping on him. He was trying to phone someone else when he phoned Augusta, someone named Linda. A daughter, perhaps? Augusta guessed he was living alone, and not in some home, because no one seemed to be there to stop or help him. Occasionally she answered the phone and explained once again that he had the wrong number. More often than not he would call only once, and that was the end of it for a while. But sometimes he’d try over and over, all through the day, until Augusta unplugged the phone. She hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those days. She didn’t like talking to him. He was befuddled and half deaf and she had to go over and over it, explaining the situation until he understood. She hated talking to him because the thought of being caught in her own dreams like that—living like a sleepwalker—scared her to death. She had watched Edna from the seniors’ centre, who was ninety-two and had a daughter who was a senior herself, decline into twilight over the last two years. No one wanted her sitting at their card table. She talked and talked, repeating herself over and over, because she forgot what she had just said. She used to know the games, but now she needed someone to coach her every step of the way. One day Faye Risby yelled at her, “If you don’t know the game, get out!”
Edna said, “You can’t tell me I’m dumb. I’ve got a right to be here.” Maybe so, but when there was a meeting now everyone tended to sit hurriedly, in long rows of seats that excluded Edna, so she was forced to sit in the front row alone.
Gabe was walking around the hospital in that kind of confused state for days after the seizure, making it clear he wanted to go home, though it was equally clear he had no idea where he was. He was only dimly aware of the nurses, the hospital bed, and the other patients in the intensive care ward. They all blended and disappeared into the fictions his mind created. That past week he had told Augusta and Joy that the first couple of days in hospital he thought he was sleeping on top of the washer and dryer at home, with his feet through the wall. If Joy went off to get a bite, and wasn’t there to stop him, he would pull out the catheter tube and try to use the washroom, though he wasn’t sure where it was and would go wandering out into the hallway with his gown open at the back. At one point he put the long blue plastic bedside urinal on his foot, thinking it was a shoe (Augusta knew another man, Ralph Fielding from the seniors’ centre, who did the same thing after a stroke. It made her wonder what was going on inside men’s heads that made them equate their penises with their feet).
Before the seizure Gabe had walked in his sleep now and again, a symptom of his illness. Joy once woke to find him poised and ready to urinate in the closet of their bedroom. She woke him in time, thankfully. Other times she’d wake in the night and find him sleeping in odd places, curled in a corner of the kitchen, or spread out on the floor of Joy’s sewing-room. He never remembered how he’d got there.
Augusta was a sleepwalker. A couple of months before, she had leapt out of bed in the night convinced the apartment was on fire. She ran into the kitchen, where she could see and smell the smoke and hear the fire alarm blaring in the hall. Then all she could think of was getting back to Karl to wake him, as he wouldn’t be able to hear the alarm. She was desperate to reach him but somehow the space of living-room between the kitchen and the bedroom door stretched out of proportion, seemed so much longer than it was in reality. It took for ever to reach the bedroom, and when she finally did and cried out, “Wake up! There’s a fire!” the shrieking of the fire alarm stopped. There was no smoke. No fire. Even so, she made Karl help her check every electrical connection. She phoned Rose and made her go hunting around the apartment building for smoke. There was no fire. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been warned, of what she wasn’t sure.
Augusta had begun walking in her sleep in her teens. She’d clamber out her bedroom window, then run around the house. Climbing in was a good deal harder than jumping out, so at the point of return, when she had to figure her way back through the window, she’d begin to wake up, conscious of what she’d done but not why. She would sense the chill of the early morning, the dewy or sharply frosted grass under her feet, but only just barely, as in sleep one was aware of the surrounding darkness and that darkness became incorporated into the dream. Anxiety was the trigger for her sleepwalking. That dream she had about the fire followed the vision she had of Gabe with the bee on his lip. And the sleepwalking she did as a teen started after the vision she had of her mother’s death.
Just that day on the train, she had dreamed she had woken from sleep to find a hole had opened up in the train floor between her seat and Esther’s. There was no flash of passing ground as she would have expected. Instead, extending from the floor, there was a rectangular pit of sorts, though there was no dirt. The walls were white and smooth, and lit up from within, in the way snow seemed to glow from within on the night of a full moon. Esther was still sitting with her, smiling, swaying with the train. Her basket had disappeared, presumably into the hole, but the shasta daisies were on her lap. She handed them to Augusta and invited her to throw the flowers into the hole. When she did, the pit was suddenly full of flowers. Augusta stood to jump into those flowers, but Esther said, “Wait a while.” And so they sat together, swaying with the train, talking of inconsequential things, with the pit of flowers absurdly open between their feet.
When Augusta awoke, into the real world this time, Esther was looking at her, smiling. “Did I snore?” said Augusta.
“No, you were laughing.”
That dream had the quality of a premonition, a dream foretelling her own death, though she didn’t want to believe that. Wasn’t she just preoccupied with
Gabe’s illness? she wondered. With the possibility of his death, her worrying mind was manufacturing nightmares. Yet it hadn’t felt like a nightmare; Esther said she had laughed.
Augusta set the phone back on the kitchen counter, then glanced at Rose as she sipped her tea. She wouldn’t tell Rose about the dream she’d had on the train, though she’d told her almost all her other premonitions. It would scare Rose to death. She believed in Augusta’s visions, considered them a gift, and was hungry for stories about them. And Augusta had no shortage of strange tales to tell her. She’d had more than her share of premonitions and ghosts. Even Olaf’s cabin had been haunted, or Augusta felt it had. It was a wretched house to live in, dark and full of squeaks and shifting timber. There was so little privacy. When she knew the men were out feeding the sheep, she bathed hurriedly near the kitchen stove, pouring warm water from the stove reservoir over herself with a saucepan as she stood in the square galvanized steel tub she washed laundry in, fearful that any minute she’d be caught naked in the kitchen. She never felt alone there, even when Olaf and Karl were in the mountains with the sheep for the summer and she was by herself for weeks on end. The first winter of her marriage she had a dream about the place. She was standing in the room she shared with Karl, only in her dream there were two beds in the room, a twin set, covered over with grey army blankets. She stood between them, looking down at a corpse that lay in one of the beds. The corpse was Karl’s mother, Blenda, as she looked in the portrait that hung over the table. Someone stood behind Augusta. She turned to see who it was and saw her own self standing there. “That woman died in this house,” she said to herself. “We have to be careful not to step in her shoes.”
When she turned back to the bed, the corpse was gone and a mannequin was in its place, covered up to the chin with blankets. She turned around to say something to herself but her companion was also gone. When she looked back at the dead woman’s bed a third time it was herself lying there.
“Your mother didn’t die in the house, did she?” she asked Karl in the morning as they sat at the breakfast table. Olaf had been gone when Augusta awoke, out checking for newborn lambs.
“No, she died outside, of cold.”
“I thought you might have found her before she died and brought her inside.”
“No, she was dead out in the field. Why’re you asking?”
“No reason.”
Ranch life was different from the mixed farming she’d grown up with. Karl and Olaf crossed Rambouillet ewes with black-faced Suffolk rams to get a heavier lamb, but the Suffolk were a knot-headed bunch, prone to wandering off by themselves rather than flocking, always finding ways to break through a fence, and their offspring acted more like goats than sheep. They kept a few goats as well, milk goats to feed orphaned lambs if there were no ewes to take them, and to provide fresh milk to the herders when they were on the mountain ranges.
Olaf often hired Indian hands over whites, as he could pay them less and get more work out of them. Manny had done the same, though not with the same tight-fistedness. He’d hired Indians and strays in the Depression, when no one else would, and during the war, when there was no one else to hire. He’d hired others, too. One summer when Augusta was still a girl, he’d hired a white man with a Japanese bride. The man’s girl-bride scrubbed dishes silently beside Augusta, as she spoke no English. When they left at the end of the summer, the girl handed Augusta her blue silk parasol, printed with birds and bamboo. Manny had been generous with the Indians and strays; when they left, they left with their bellies full. Occasionally, when times were better for them, these men returned to say thanks with cigarettes for Manny, candy for Augusta, and tapioca pudding for Helen. When she was nine or ten Augusta rode the saddles the hired men left on the wooden benches inside the implement shed, breathing in the smell of leather.
Manny traded horses with the Indians from the Neskainlith band, horses that were broken only because they were underfed and tired. When he fed these horses, their strength and fight returned. While Augusta tamed the horses with apples, Manny mastered them. In the catch pen he jabbed at them with pitchforks, hit them around the head with the bullwhip, and forced them into the squeeze. The horses jerked their heads against the wood of the chute with eyes wild and rolled back, and when the bullwhip cracked, the skin on their necks rose up. Augusta flinched with them.
These horses were runaways, predisposed to taking off out of control, dragging the buggy or farm equipment behind them. They ran with harrows in spring, hayrack in summer, disc in fall, feeding sleigh in winter. Once a grey dappled mare ran wild, pulling Manny and Helen in the buggy down Shuswap Hill, spooked by the dust that chased her. She thundered over the ridge and down the gravel road that was the highway with her mane flapping in knotted clumps. Manny pulled back too fast. One rein whipped from his hand and kicked and jumped against the mare’s front hoof. Helen dug her fingers into the planking of the seat; her hair and cloak were loose and flapping behind her. Manny clung to the back of the seat, his feet against the baseboard, the whole of his weight pulling on the one rein until it snapped. The buggy swayed close to the bank. Saplings whipped Helen’s arms. She cried God help me over the thundering hoofs and flying rocks. At Peterson Road, facing a fence, beads of sweat over her neck, the mare tired to a stop.
Back at home Manny removed the buggy wheel by tapping it off with a hammer and greased the axle with butter. A wheel rim was lost and the seat was knocked loose. Later Helen sat Manny down near the stove and rubbed butter into his hands. It was the year during the Depression that they couldn’t give butter away. But when the war was on, Helen measured butter in her Blue Willow teacups for cooking. She weighed it on the kitchen scales and wrapped it in scrubbed flour sacks to sell in Chase. She traded butter, eggs, bread, and honey for ration coupons with Dr. Litwin’s wife and the butcher’s young bride.
Augusta was thirteen when Manny came home from town saying he’d hired Harry Jacob, an Indian man living on the reserve. “I told Harry and his woman they could set up a tent by the creek for the summer,” he said to Helen. It was Harry and his woman, never Harry and his wife. The title “wife” was reserved for white women. The couple set up a huge canvas tent, the kind ranch cooks housed their stoves in, a tent with a hole at the top for a stove-pipe. Harry’s woman had no stove, but built a campfire under that hole, so the tent was always filled with smoke. Harry, his woman, and their children smelled of smoke; to Augusta their skin appeared stained with it. The couple had a six-year-old boy whose name Augusta no longer remembered, and a girl two years younger than Augusta named Alice. Alice went barefoot and wore the same dress every day, a flowered yellow shift. She spoke little English. Harry’s woman spoke none. She had a ragged, indifferent air about her, as if she knew nothing she said or did would make a difference. The boy was sick. He spent his days inside that smoke-filled tent watched over by his mother. To Augusta’s delight, Alice came out to play hide-and-seek, kick the can. They chased each other clear around the farm. It was the closest thing she’d had to a sister, to a friend.
Manny didn’t like Augusta playing with her. After chores, while Augusta and her father were sharing the water in the wash-basin, cleaning up for supper, Manny said, “Why do I have to keep telling you to leave that girl alone?”
“I wasn’t doing nothing,” said Augusta.
“I saw you run through their tent with that girl chasing after you.”
“We were playing tag.”
“They don’t keep themselves clean. That youngest kid’s sick. He’ll never make old bones.”
“I don’t play with him. He just lays around anyhow.”
“The boy could use some peace, I should think. He won’t get any rest with you howling through the tent. You leave them be. You hear?”
“There’s nobody else to play with.”
“Augusta, listen to your father,” said Helen. She set two plates firmly on the table and swung around to pick the whistling kettle off the stove.
“W
hy can’t I play with Alice, then? She’s not sick.”
Manny pulled the towel off the nail in the wall and dried his hands. “She’s a Siwash.” Her face must have told him she didn’t understand. “It means Indian,” he said.
Next day when she caught up with Alice, Augusta tried it out. She had only meant to tease Alice. “Hey, Siwash!” she called. Alice turned and stared at her. “Siwash! Siwash!” Augusta sang out. Alice turned heel and ran, through the pasture, into the bush. Augusta ran after her. “Alice!” she called out. “Hey, Alice. What’s wrong?” But Alice was a deer in the bush, practised at hiding. Augusta shuffled back home with a knot growing in her stomach. She walked through the open door into the house holding her belly. Helen was at the kitchen table, gripping Manny’s plaid jacket by the collar, rummaging in the pocket. She pulled out a handful of change and inspected it. “What’re you doing in the house this time of day?” she said.
“I don’t feel so good.”
Helen turned; her face paled. She placed a cold hand on Augusta’s cheek, on her forehead. “You been staying away from those kids like your father said, haven’t you?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You been coughing?”
“No ma’am.”
“That boy’s very sick. You understand you could get sick too, don’t you? If you play with him or his sister?”
Augusta nodded.
“It’s just your tummy?”
“Yes. Can I go?”
“Lie down in your room. I’ll bring you some ginger in sugar-water. See if that doesn’t fix you. I don’t want you going outside again today. All right?”
The powdered ginger and sugar drink didn’t fix the ache in Augusta’s belly, as she knew it wouldn’t. She had hurt Alice and nothing could be done. What could be done? She scanned her room. She had few possessions. Toys were scarce in those days. She had several dolls that her mother had fashioned from socks and scraps, but just one store-bought doll, a pretty thing with a ceramic head covered in blond curls; it had eyes that closed and a box inside that said “Mama” when she laid it flat. She had seen this doll in Eaton’s catalogue, dreamed of it, pleaded for it, prayed for it, and on Christmas morning when she was eight she had found it under the Christmas tree. Now it sat staring into the nights, on her nightstand. She had named it Carla, the most exotic name she could think of.
A Recipe for Bees Page 7