A Recipe for Bees

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  It was his wife, Lilian, who first brought the gossip to the Reverend’s attention, gossip she’d heard at the church women’s league meeting. Likely it was Martha Rivers who started that ball rolling; she was a leading member of the league. “They’re saying Augusta is soliciting,” Lilian told him. “To make a little money, as Karl isn’t bringing anything in. They’ve gone back to calling that place the Whorehouse Ranch, instead of the W.H.”

  The Reverend stormed into the next assembled meeting of the ladies of the league and, with Lilian dressed so beautifully in blue at his side, gave them hell. “I heard your talk about Augusta Olsen. I don’t know who started it, or why, but I’ve never been so ashamed of the lot of you. She’s stuck way up there, and who of you has visited her? Or paid her a kind word? Instead you make up stories about her. Making her life miserable. There are those in this room—in this town—whose minds are smaller than a thimble. I advise you to keep your mouths shut, unless you’ve got something worthwhile to say, and get on with your meeting.”

  The Reverend told her all about it at the next Saturday’s fishing, his face flushed with excitement. Augusta interrupted him as he repeated the bit about their minds fitting into thimbles. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ll think you’re involved. They’ll read things into our fishing trips.”

  “I suppose they’ve done that already.”

  “But you getting mad like that won’t stop the talk. It’ll just inflame it. Now Martha Rivers and her gaggle will have another bit of gossip to hand around, how you defended me. They’ll speculate on why.”

  “But Lilian was right there with me, standing by me.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like, do you? I could lose everything. Olaf could kick me off the ranch.”

  The Reverend laughed. “That would be the worst, wouldn’t it?”

  “This is serious. I’m afraid you’ve made things worse.” And she was right. That was why those boys thought they could throw rocks at her the next Saturday, when she was all tidy for town. She was walking down the wood plank sidewalk by the train station, heading for the truck, when she heard the first stone land by the heel of her shoe. Then another. Then one hit her shin. She turned. Three boys ran off, stones dropping from their hands. They knew there was no one willing to protect her. The Reverend’s defence of her had fuelled the flames; if he did more he would be implicated, if he wasn’t already. Karl would never say anything. Olaf would have picked up a stone and joined them if he’d been there. There was nothing she could do. She had put up with poverty and insults, and now rocks. She’d put up with a husband who didn’t touch her for fear of disturbing his father. Where would she go, she wondered, if Olaf saw fit to throw her out of the house? Manny and the cold silent farm were all that awaited her, and she doubted that he would take her back in any case. She had made her bed. If she chose not to lie in it, she would have to move to the city. She would have to find work. All she knew in the world was cooking and cleaning. And where would she find the funds to set herself up in some other place? She didn’t even have bus fare.

  Six

  WHEN AUGUSTA FOUND she was pregnant she was, in turns, thrilled and terrified. She longed for a baby of her own, but she knew the child couldn’t be Karl’s. In the three weeks it took to find the courage to tell Karl, she brooded over the day Helen had told them she was pregnant. It had been a Sunday; there had been roast beef, scalloped potatoes, a layered jelly mould for dessert. As Harry Jacob was now back at the reserve, her mother took more time on their meals. “I’m having a baby,” she said.

  Manny stopped eating, his fork in mid-air. “A baby? We can’t be having a baby.”

  “Well, we are.”

  Augusta wondered why Helen chose to tell Manny then, with her sitting right there with them. Shouldn’t a wife tell her husband about a pregnancy first, privately, before telling the children? She felt as she did when, at night, she heard the rhythmic thumping of her parents’ bed legs against the uneven floor overhead; she was listening in on something that shouldn’t be overheard.

  “We’re too old for chasing around with babies,” said Manny.

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now, is there?”

  “Isn’t there some woman thing you can do?”

  “A woman thing?”

  “To stop it?”

  Helen stared at Manny until he went red. He pushed his plate away from him.

  “That’s not going to do us any good. Here it is. We’ve got to accept it.”

  Manny sat back and crossed his arms. His nostrils flared as he breathed in. “It’s mine, is it?”

  “Whose else would it be?”

  “Could anything go wrong?” said Augusta. “Could it make you sick?”

  “Sick? Like what?”

  “Like what I saw. Out in the rosemary.”

  “Enough with that,” said Manny.

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” said Helen.

  “I don’t mind there being a baby,” said Augusta. “I’d like a sister.”

  “That’s good, dear. You’ll be a help.”

  Manny pushed back his chair, took down a gun from the rack, and stomped outside. “Go see what your father’s doing,” said Helen. “I want a bit of time in the house to myself.”

  Manny was walking the sorrel mare from the stall as Augusta reached the barn. Along with the gun he carried the bullwhip he used in training the horses. “What’re you doing?” Augusta said.

  “Taking her for a walk.”

  “Can I come?”

  “You may not want to.”

  Augusta trailed behind Manny anyway, stumbling over wheat stubble, watching the rear of the sorrel mare sway and her tail flick at the flies. She licked her teeth, tasting the jelly dessert, thinking of Helen’s jar of King George one-cent pieces she had counted and admired, once again, after church that morning. She thought of the flat, tart taste of those pennies. She expected nothing as she followed Manny and the mare to the benchland.

  She stopped following when they reached the stubble of burnt fallen trees at the edge of the field several yards away from the old homesteaders’ well. She knew now. Manny lifted the split boards away from the hole of the well and threw them to the side. “Why do you have to kill her?”

  “She’s too wild. She’ll never be of any use to anyone.”

  “You could sell her back to the Indians.”

  “They wouldn’t have her either.”

  “I’ll have her. I’ll tame her.”

  “You’d get yourself killed in the process.”

  “No I wouldn’t. She’s never thrown me. You don’t have to do this. Please!” She started to cry.

  Manny stared at her angrily, silencing her. “If you’re not going to help, go home.”

  Augusta took several steps backwards but stayed there, watching, crying silently. Manny took the halter off the horse and stepped the sorrel mare slowly backwards, cracking the bullwhip to one side of her. She stomped and snorted, threw her head back, and whinnied. When her back feet met the hole, Manny threw his weight into her chest, pushing her backwards. The mare snorted and shuddered as she lost her footing and her great body thundered down the neck of the well. Manny stumbled and almost followed her; Augusta’s arm jerked forward as he fell to the ground, landing on his chest only inches from the hole. He brushed himself off and picked up the rifle, bouncing it slightly as if weighing, appraising, a piece he might buy. Then he lay back down on his chest, set the gun to his shoulder at an awkward angle, shooting down the well. Augusta didn’t look away. There was nothing to see, only her father’s back jerking suddenly as if he had just shot a gopher.

  Later that evening, in the light from the Coleman, Augusta watched Manny take down his gun again, already loaded, from the gunrack.

  “Now what are you doing?” she said. “You’re not thinking of killing one of the others?”

  “No.”

  “Where you goi
ng then?”

  “Out.”

  “Can I come?”

  “If you keep your mouth shut.”

  She followed him to the field, where the wheat stooks stood silver in the moonlight. The wheat stubble crunched beneath his steps and she could see the ribs in the bottom of his boots, the moon was that bright. When he stopped and put his hand out for her to stop and levelled his gun, she waited, breathless, as three does and a buck came into view. She waited as he waited, and then breathed out as he sighed and lowered the gun. Together they watched the deer graze on the stooks until, scared by a twig snapping in the woods behind, the deer bounced off across the fields.

  Manny thundered around the farm all that November and into December, hammering loose boards on the barn into place, fixing broken fences that wouldn’t be used until the following summer, tearing down the old shed that for years had sagged under the weight of snow. Helen, for her part, busied herself by preparing her bees for the winter, fitting wood at the base of the hive to reduce the entrance against mice, and wrapping heavy black tar paper around the hives to protect them from the cold. Bees spent the winter closed into themselves, clustered into a ball, eating honey and doing the jitterbug. Those at the centre of the ball were warm enough, but the bees on the outside were cold. They buzzed and jittered just as kids stamped their feet and rubbed their hands to warm themselves in the winter schoolyard. The agitation of these few bees spread to the bees one layer down, then two layers and three, until there was a cascade of excitement rippling through the hive. They all trembled and flapped their wings, generating heat that warmed the whole hive. As the temperature went up, the bees calmed down, until the hive cooled off and the frenzy of excitement started again.

  That was pretty much how Helen spent that winter too. She claimed an empty upstairs room as her own and often locked herself inside. She took few meals downstairs and instead ate plate after plate of cinnamon toast, then scrounged in the cupboards for the last cookie or piece of cake Augusta might have had time to make earlier in the week. Augusta would hear her pacing the floor overhead and when, a few minutes later, she went to take her mother a cup of tea, she’d find Helen limp in sleep in her chair.

  Helen even hid when company came, and so did Manny; he simply walked away across the snow-covered field as if he hadn’t seen the visitors coming down the road. Both of them would leave Augusta to turn their infrequent guests away. One day in December, Helen was standing at the kitchen window, nursing a cup of tea, when she said, “Oh, good gracious.”

  “What?” said Augusta. She was seated at the kitchen table, peeling apples for a pie. The whole kitchen smelled of them.

  “I don’t want to see those gossiping women.”

  Augusta stood and looked out the window with Helen. Martha Rivers was driving her mother, Mrs. Grafton, up the driveway in a truck. “You like Mrs. Grafton,” said Augusta.

  “Tell them I’ve gone to town.”

  “They’ll see the truck is here.”

  “Tell them I skied then.”

  Augusta laughed. “Skied?”

  “I don’t know. Tell them anything. Just make them go away.” She fled upstairs to her room, forcing Augusta to greet the women and to tell them, stuttering, that her mother was sick and couldn’t be disturbed.

  That was a long, cold winter. When the soil finally warmed and the trees began leafing out, Helen, heavy in her pregnancy, unwrapped her hives to find half lost to starvation and disease. She could tell that two of the remainder had lost their queens. A hive that had lost its queen was frantic; the bees buzzed loudly around it in a restless, disorganized fashion, anxious and unsure. Helen might have been one of those bees, flying from one thing to another, starting chore after chore but never finishing anything, leaving Augusta to pick up the pieces behind her. Less than a month before she was due, all the craziness that had been building inside her blasted its way out onto a helpless wild creature that happened into the yard.

  When Augusta was a girl there were porcupines everywhere, waddling comically from beneath stacks of hay in the fields as she forked the hay into cocks. Her father would go after them with a pitchfork, infrequently killing them, most often driving them into the bush or up a tree. On a Saturday when Manny was down at Deep Pool fishing, Augusta and her mother were hanging laundry on the line when a porcupine appeared in the yard. Helen gave a little shriek. There it was, within a rock’s throw, moving in its strange rolling gait straight for them. The porcupine was no real threat but Helen wasn’t thinking straight, or maybe some part of her had seen what was coming at her in three weeks’ time and her fear bundled itself and took the form of that porcupine. “Get the gun,” she yelled.

  “It’s all right,” said Augusta. “I can scare him off.”

  “I said get the gun!”

  “All right. All right.”

  Augusta made a dash for the house and took the .22 repeater from the gunrack and loaded it before running back outside. She aimed at the porcupine, which was still approaching the laundry line, but the little prickly thing looked so comical, so harmless in its way, that she couldn’t imagine killing it. She let the gun drop.

  Her mother said, “Give it here.”

  Helen was a terrible shot, even at this close range. While the porcupine tried desperately to waddle away, Helen fired and fired at it, kicking up dust around it several times before finally hitting it. With the very first shot, though, something in her manner changed. Blood crept into her cheeks and with each bullet her face darkened further. She looked at first angry, then furious, then enraged, and finally sinister. It was crazy behaviour. She reloaded and went on firing at the porcupine, hitting and missing, until its body was a bundle of prickly red pulp. Then, perversely, she invited Augusta inside the house for tea, leaving the body of the porcupine where it was for Manny to dispose of when he returned home. Helen was triumphant as she served them both tea in those rose-patterned teacups, but sat shamefaced as they ate their biscuits, and as she cleared away the dishes she looked sad.

  The night Augusta told Karl she was pregnant was the only time she ever saw him close to tears. He didn’t cry, but she could see the effort in his face to keep the tears back. All he said was “Yeah?” and then, grinning, “I wanted a baby too, you know.”

  It was all he could say in words, but what he didn’t have words for he said in flowers. He hunted the hills and brought down bundles of buttercups and glacier lilies that blossomed right in the snow, cutting yellow swaths across mountain slopes. Then wild roses and wildflower bouquets of yellow bells, shooting stars, bluebottles, and white mayflowers that bloomed together in hillside gardens so lovely that it appeared God had planted them Himself. He brought lupines, white daisies, pearly everlastings, fireweed, and handfuls of what he called “sunflowers,” which weren’t a true sunflower but flannel root, which turned the hills above Chase and the South Thompson gold. Karl so wanted that child, and delighted in Augusta for giving it to him.

  Pregnancy sat well on Augusta. People talked of women blossoming in pregnancy and that was just what she did. Her skin shone and her senses came alive. Colours were brighter, smells stronger, touch more electrifying, tastes capricious. It was as if she’d never smelled a flower before, never touched the fur on a kitten, never seen the blue in the sky or in Karl’s eyes, or never tasted the salt in a pickle. Her body’s craving for salt made a thief of her. The one indulgence that Karl allowed himself—that Olaf allowed him—was Hereford brand corned beef. Karl added a can to his little stock each trip to town, so there might be five cans of bully beef in the cupboard at a time. The craving made her take down a can and open it on the sly, all the time watching out the window in case Karl or Olaf came down from the mountains for the day. She ate half the can in one sitting, then wrapped the rest in wax paper, tucked it in a syrup can so Bitch wouldn’t get at it, and put the lard can in the water trough, where Karl and Olaf would never look, ready for the next craving that came over her.

  She was guiltily eat
ing Karl’s bully beef by the water trough when she heard Joe on the other side of the house, in the front yard. He was swearing for all he was worth, as if he’d hit his thumb with a hammer or banged his shin on the sharp edge of a board. Augusta dropped the last bits of bully beef on the ground, where one of the barn cats was sure to clean up the evidence, and wiped her mouth and hands on her apron as she ran around the house to see why he had come. What if Karl or Olaf came down with the horses to get supplies and salt for the sheep and caught him there? “Joe?” she cried out. But when she reached the front of the house she stopped short. There was no one in the yard. There were no tire tracks or footprints in the deep dust of the road. She trotted around the other side of the house, and then to the barns, and finally back inside the house, but there was no sign of anyone having been there.

  Augusta’s labour pains went on for twenty-six hours, so long that her doctor gave up on her and went home not once but twice. The nurses finally gave her a supper of roast beef, potatoes, peas, and rice pudding, and that meal must have done it, because not an hour after Augusta finished eating, Joy was pushing her way out.

  It seemed at the time that the nurses swept Joy up before Augusta had a chance to see her, let alone hold her, but Augusta couldn’t be sure, as her mind was still floating on a slurry of anaesthetic. She didn’t know if her baby was whole and well or somehow ill. All she knew was that she’d given birth to a girl. She wouldn’t see her baby until nursing time. In those days a baby was supposed to sleep for four hours between feedings, and a mother was supposed to ignore her if she cried.