There were often others fishing on the sandbars or from the rocky beach farther downriver, or swimming in the pools upstream. Sometimes Indian kids slid down the bank and swam along the opposite shore. Once Manny even floated by, fully clothed except for his shoes, on his back with his hands behind his head, serenely drifting on the water. Augusta called to him, but he didn’t seem to hear. He went on floating downstream. The Reverend pointed at him with his chin and said, “If I could choose a way to die, it would be to slip under this water in midstream and let it carry me into eternity.”
He often talked about death and souls and such; even the sex of angels (girls, the Reverend thought, certainly all females), and did fish have souls? (The Reverend didn’t want to think so but felt they certainly must.) As for the appearance—or sex—of God, the Reverend didn’t believe man had been created in His image. Rather he believed God took the forms of all His creations. At any given moment He could be a fish. A tree. A rock. The earth itself. Or He might be a stranger one came across, a fellow passenger on a bus or train. Woman or man. Whatever took His fancy. God spent eternity amusing Himself by seeing what it was like to be each of His creations, every single one of them. When He grew bored, He simply created something new. It was an idea that made Augusta suddenly careful of ants underfoot, and apologetic to the turnips she ate. “He could be anywhere, anything, walking among us,” said the Reverend. “Maybe He’s you.”
“Maybe He’s you,” said Augusta.
“Oh, no. Not me!”
“I notice you don’t talk about these ideas in your sermons,” said Augusta.
“Madam, if I talked like this from the pulpit I would be out of a job and we would not be fishing right now.”
Augusta shrugged. “Might give you more time for fishing.”
“Hmm. I’ll consider it.”
But he was only joking. When she was able to slip away from the farm to attend church, his sermons were always the solid, stoic affairs that were expected of him. At church they kept a polite distance from each other; he treated her like any other member of the church, shaking her hand at the back of the church once the sermon was over. His wife, Lilian, always dressed so beautifully in blue, stood beside him, also shaking hands. Most times Augusta tried not to catch Lilian’s eye as she shook hands. But once she looked straight into Lilian’s face. Lilian smiled and winked at her. It was the knowing wink women friends pass between each other in the kitchen as their menfolk blather nonsense in the living-room. A conspirator’s wink.
As the months of Saturday fishing trips went on, it grew harder for Augusta to think of that respected and dignified preacher and this fisherman as one and the same man. It dawned on her that the Reverend she’d known all the years of her childhood was a role played, a fiction. And here, holding a fishing rod, sitting on the banks of the South Thompson, was the actor, the man behind the fiction. His wife had also been playing a part, the tidy, perfectly organized leader of the Sunday school and women’s church league who never lost her smile. Now Augusta discovered that under that smile something was boiling away. “She steals, you know,” said the Reverend.
“Steals? Lilian?”
“Nothing she needs, mind you. Things that make no sense. A scarf. A bar of soap. Once a can of salmon. Always from a store; never from a member of the church, thank God. It’s been going on for years. I’ve tried stopping it. I’ve made her take the things back to Colgrave and Conchie’s and explain and beg them not to tell anyone. But it goes on. Now I have Ed Conchie watch her when she comes in, and add what she takes to our bill. The church elders all know about it. I’ve explained. They keep an eye on her. I suppose most people know about it by now. Though no one’s ever said anything to me, or to her.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s my fault, I think. She wasn’t cut out to be a pastor’s wife. She had to learn how to look nice all the time, even at home, because someone’s always dropping in. And she’s expected to organize meetings and Sunday school, all of that. She didn’t know how, at first. And I was hard on her. I yelled until she cowered. All that fear and tension had to come out somewhere, didn’t it? So she takes things, useless things. I’ve never hit her, but I might as well have. Ranting on like that. And what have I to show for it? High blood pressure and a wife who steals. Well, she doesn’t do it so much any more. I guess I’m getting easier to live with. Getting older has a way of mellowing you. In any case I learned some things. Maybe it was God’s will that I messed up so badly with my own wife. It makes me watch for other women in the same boat.”
“That why you go fishing with me?”
The Reverend grinned at her. “You’re doing me the favour. Not the other way around. Although I admit that when you came in that day I did feel guilty. I didn’t do very well with you and your father, after your mother’s death. I had your father in, you know. I had him come to my office and we talked. Or rather, I talked. He’s a hard man to get a word from. I tried to get him active in the church again, and tried to offer some help for you. There were women in the church who would have come out, to help with housework or meals, to visit with you. But he wouldn’t have any of that. He didn’t want to see anyone. I guess I can understand, what with the talk going around that the baby wasn’t his. Still, I should have pushed things, for your sake.”
Augusta felt the anger flare up. “The baby was his.”
It was a lie. Manny had hired Harry Jacob for another summer after his son’s death, though Harry’s woman and Alice never came back with him. Harry Jacob was a hard worker, practised at working alone, unsupervised. Manny could leave him, even during haying, and catch a Saturday morning of fishing if he wished. But Manny wouldn’t have him in the house, not with sickness raging through the reserve. So Helen took meals out to Harry’s tent in the evening; she carried beef stew to him in syrup cans, and slabs of buttered bread, buttered sides together, wrapped in clean cloth. She rubbed apples to a shining red with her apron before taking them to him. Mornings and afternoons when Manny was in town or fishing, and Harry Jacob worked in the field alone, she brought him sweet coffee, and delicate cookies made from precious sugar, nuts, and beaten egg-whites called Penna Dutch kisses.
Through the kitchen window Augusta would see Harry Jacob and her mother chatting in the alfalfa. Harry had a way about him, a slickness that reminded Augusta of Clark Gable, though he wasn’t as handsome as all that, not dressed in field denims, not all greasy-haired and sweating from a day’s work. Yet even unwashed and dressed so poorly, he leaned against the tractor as if he owned it and all he saw around him; cocky and relaxed, he pointed at the hills or at the house with his coffee-cup, talking and laughing, no doubt at his own jokes. Helen fidgeted with her apron, or hugged her belly, shy as a schoolgirl, and laughed at almost everything he said. He was younger than Helen by a good ten years and yet he made her behave like that, like a silly, flirting teenager. It made Augusta angry to see them together. She wanted her mother to go back to acting her age. She should quit all that silly giggling and get back to work. Here was Augusta, just fourteen and stuck with the summer’s canning, a job she hated; here she was sweating over the stove in the heat of July when she could be down at the river swimming or fishing with her father.
“I saw you talking to Harry again,” said Manny one evening.
Helen wiped her mouth with her napkin. “He helped me move the bee boxes after I took him lunch.”
“You spend too much time talking to him.”
“I’m being friendly. You don’t want me to be friendly to our help?”
“You’re being too friendly.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Don’t give me that look.”
“What interest would I have in an Indian?”
“None, if you know what’s good for you.”
“Enough of this. Harry will work harder if he’s fed and treated well. And that’s what I’m doing. In any case, don’t you think we owe him something? His son died on our land and we did nothi
ng to help him.”
Manny, red-faced, pushed his chair from the table and crossed his arms. But he said nothing more about it, and he didn’t make a fuss when it was Harry Helen asked to work with her in the honey house for the final harvest, and not Manny. Extracting and bottling honey wasn’t a job Manny liked. It was hot, sticky work and he was always stung badly. And besides that he’d take any excuse to go down to Deep Pool for a little fishing. Augusta was ready to help but Helen got her busy in the kitchen, canning plums. So it was just Harry and Helen out in the orchard, gathering the frames. Helen opened the hive, lifted off the inner cover, and slid out the frames filled with honeycomb, one by one, all the while squeezing puffs of smoke into the hive with a smoker, to calm the bees. She tapped the frame against a rock near the entrance of the hive, to rid it of as many bees as she could, then brushed the remaining bees from the comb with a handful of long grass. She then carried each frame, cleaned of bees, some distance away to put it into a covered super, or bee box. When she had a box full of honeycomb she had Harry carry it to the honey house.
Helen kept the house hot to keep the honey flowing, by stoking up the portly little Dandy Perfection woodstove, but not so hot that the beeswax melted from the frames. She held the frame full of honeycomb upright with one hand and slid a hot uncapping knife upwards across the comb with the other, to remove the wax caps that sealed the cells of honey. She removed all the caps on one side of the frame in a single sweep, taking enough wax to free the honey but not so much as to damage the comb. She then put the knife back into a pail of water on the stove, to keep it hot. It was dangerous work, and if she wasn’t careful she’d lose a thumb to the uncapping knife. She uncapped both sides of the frames and handed them to Harry to insert into the honey extractor, two frames at a time. Then he turned the crank at the top of the extractor, spinning the honey out of the frames into a tub that was tapped at the bottom. When he was done, he turned the frames around and spun the honey from the other side of the comb. He turned slowly at first, while the comb was still heavy, then gathered speed as the frames emptied. Later Helen did the straining and bottling. When Augusta produced honey of her own, she would leave the honey house so sticky that when she took off her dress to wash up, it nearly stood by itself.
The kitchen was as hot as the honey house, as Augusta was canning that day. At one point she felt she’d suffocate from the heat, it was so stifling, and so she walked outside for some cooler air and a break from the work, wiping the sweat from her forehead with her apron. Why she wandered over to the honey house and peeked through the window she could only guess at now. Certainly she had her suspicions. Harry and Helen were both in there, labouring away. Helen had covered the floor in newspaper and would change the paper several times that day as it became gummy and difficult to walk over. Harry’s smoky skin glistened in honey and sweat. Helen was stickier yet, as she was the one uncapping the comb. Neither of them saw Augusta peering through the small window in the far side of the room. Harry stopped turning the extractor for a moment and reached over to wipe a dollop of honey from Helen’s lip, then licked his finger. Helen grinned at him, running her tongue over her lips. It might have been a scene from the Song of Songs. Your lips, my promised one, distill wild honey. Augusta didn’t rush in to accuse her mother, or to backtalk as Joy did decades later. She turned on her heel and walked back to the house and went on canning plums as if she’d seen nothing at all.
• • •
“All that doesn’t much matter any more,” said the Reverend. “It’s all in the past.”
Augusta bounced the rod up and down. “I had a premonition she would die. I saw her coffin. I told her so, too. She wouldn’t believe me. Or maybe she did. She just didn’t want to hear about it.”
“I don’t suppose she would.”
She had told Manny about the vision first, as he had been right there in the garden when it happened. She thought now that he’d even been the reason she’d had the premonition. Manny went fishing by himself, now that Augusta was becoming a young woman, and when Augusta asked to go with him he said, “Stay here and help your mother.” It seemed that the more she blossomed, the more he withdrew his affection. Hungry for it, she one day put on that pretty, childishly flowered blouse that almost hid her breasts, made him coffee and a plate of butter fingers, and took them out to the vegetable garden, where he bent hoeing between the rows. She plastered sweetness on her face, willing the child to the surface, the woman to submerge, hoping for that smile of his that had edged away, hoping for his hand on her shoulder in congratulation for this small effort of helpfulness. He smiled when he saw her coming down the row, all right, then stretched and took out his red handkerchief to dry the sweat on his forehead. “Putting on the dog there, aren’t yah?” he said. She looked down at her blouse. “What’re you all dressed up for?”
Augusta shrugged.
“Well, what you got there?”
“Coffee. Thought you’d be hungry.”
“I am. I am.” He took the cup and ate the cookies from the plate as she held it, then handed back the cup, the handle all smeared with soil. He smiled his thanks and said, “That’s my girl.” After taking the plate and cup back to the kitchen and slipping them into the soapy dishwater in the sink, she skipped back outside and wrapped her arms around Manny’s waist. He dropped his hoe, took her arms in his two fists, and pushed her away. “What’re the neighbours going to think?” he said. “You’re too big for that! Go on with you!”
She stumbled back. What did he mean? She must have done something shameful to be punished so, but what? All she’d done was wrap her arms around him in lovingness. That was the shameful thing, it must be. She felt suddenly dirty. The soil under her shoes—the garden, the sky—whooshed away from her in all directions. She stared at her feet, the only solid objects in all the swirling around her. For a moment the spinning subsided and she was no longer in the garden. There was a hole, a deep rectangular hole, in front of her feet. An open grave. She held something in her hand—rosemary, a clutch of rosemary. In the grave there was a simple wooden casket—whose casket? Her hand tensed, squeezing the rosemary so the air became thick with fragrance. Then the rosemary, the grave—everything—melted away in a whirl of motion, and when it finally stopped she found herself standing in front of her mother’s huge rosemary mound, her hands pinching the buttons of her blouse.
She stared at the rosemary redolent in the warm evening air. Why was she standing here? Her father chopped into the soil right behind her. Her father. The cup of coffee. The plate of butter fingers. His hands pushing her away. “Mama’s going to die.”
“What?”
“She’ll die.”
She heard her father’s footsteps coming towards her, but she couldn’t move. She felt transfixed by the rosemary. Then his hand was on her shoulder and the spell was broken. He was angry. “What’re you talking about? Who’s going to die?”
“Die?”
“You said, ‘Mama.’ You said your mama was going to die.”
“I don’t know. I saw—I don’t know what I saw. I saw Mama’s coffin. There in the rosemary.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“No. I saw it. Mama’s going to die!”
“Stop that! Stop it!”
“I saw!”
“You shut up now. Quit your crying. You’re working yourself into a fit. She’s not going to die. And don’t tell your mother about this. It would scare her.”
But Augusta did tell her mother about the vision she had seen in the rosemary. She told her that very day, after pouring them each a cup of tea. She filled in details, the tan in the wood of the coffin (likely poplar, she thought), the gravel that surrounded the grave, the pungent smell of rosemary.
“And what is it that I’ve died of?” said Helen.
“I don’t know.”
“And when will this happen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want it to happen.”
“I doubt that it will. I b
elieve you saw something. I’m just not sure we need to give it much credit.”
“You remember when you knew Dad cut his hand on the mower? It was like that.”
Helen flushed for a moment. She drank her tea. “Even if I believed you, what can I do? I don’t know when I’ll die, or how. I don’t know any more than anyone ever does about their own death. I think it would be best if we forgot about it. And you understand you’re to keep this within this house. You’ll be thought balmy if you go off talking about it.”
But she had told the Reverend and he hadn’t thought her balmy. He had placed his fishing pole beside him and poured them both tea from the little ceramic teapot he’d brought. “That’s a gift, you understand,” he said, “from God. That you can see the future.”
Augusta sipped her tea. “It doesn’t feel like a gift,” she said. “I should be able to use it, shouldn’t I? I should be able to help people avoid things. I couldn’t stop my mom from dying.”
“No, it’s not like that. You musn’t think you have the power to control things.” He patted her hand. “You know what I think? I think you take too much on yourself. You worry too much. You need to get out. Be with some women friends. How about getting a job? The health unit in Kamloops is looking for women to help the elderly make meals or clean house, or to watch babies when their mothers go to the doctor.”
“I don’t have a car. Olaf wouldn’t stand for it—me driving the truck into Kamloops every day.”
“I’ve been thinking of getting a truck myself. It would be so much easier when we help a member of the church move. And there always seems to be something to haul to someone’s home. Last week I took Lucy Guterson’s old washer out to Mrs. Reed’s because hers had broken down. I had to borrow Alfred Campbell’s truck to do it. I’m forever borrowing his truck. Well, the upshot is, if I get the truck, I could lend you the Austin. Or you could have it, for that matter.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. That’s too big a gift.”
A Recipe for Bees Page 10