The night Augusta saw Manny on the street in Kamloops she woke suddenly and began to cry. Karl sat up beside her in the dark. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Dad’s dead. He’s dead.”
“That was weeks ago!”
“I saw him. I thought I saw him today in Kamloops. Then it wasn’t him at all. Now I just saw him again. I dreamed he was here in this room. Talking to me.”
Joy, sleeping in the crib next to their bed, began to whimper. Augusta picked her up and, seated on the edge of the bed and still crying herself, rocked her back and forth. Karl was bewildered by her sudden grief. She wished he would put an arm around her, or fix her a glass of hot milk, or ask her what she was feeling, listen to her. Instead he got dressed. “Where are you going?” she said.
“Out. Might as well get a start on chores. I can’t sleep with you going on like that.” She had been angry at him then, but understood now, so many years after the fact. He’d no more witnessed that sort of crying and carrying on than Bitch had smelled a woman’s skirts, not since his mother had walked into the snow, at any rate. No one had taught him how to hold a woman and in that way share the grief and lessen it; no one had taught him the words to say. He didn’t know how, and his lack of skill made him fearful, and the fear made him angry.
Angry or scared then, but later in the day he was sorry. He brought her a kitten from the barn to make up in some way for his behaviour of the night before. Karl was so shy giving his presents. Red-faced, he held out that little offering in his big hand as if he was sure she’d reject it, and him too. But she took it and kept it in a box in the kitchen while he returned to the barn. She’d have to take it out again before Olaf came in for dinner. It was just another kit from a barn cat’s litter, a fearful, desperate creature always shrilly mewing. On and on, it never shut up. Joy had been crabbing all that day too; nothing would please her. She lay crying in the Indian basket on the kitchen floor as Augusta tried to bake bread. The kitchen was hot from the oven. Sweat slid down Augusta’s nose, and Joy’s and the kitten’s shrieks pierced her ears. Suddenly the lid inside Augusta blew clean off. She picked up the kitten and shook it, and when that only made it mew harder, she threw it at the wall. For the briefest of blessed moments Joy stopped crying. Then she started again and the kitten was there on the floor, dead. Augusta had killed it. That was precisely what her hands had wanted to do with her own baby girl. Not kill her, no—not that. But shake her and make her stop, make the noise stop, make the demands stop. Augusta stared at her hands, at the fists they had become. Then she fled the kitchen, leaving Joy crying in her basket, and ran around to the far side of the house, where she slid down the warm wall and held herself.
Out in front of her, the sheep pastures stretched on and on. Beyond them the poplars still held a few leaves. If it were winter she could walk out into those fields and lie down in snow and find cool comfort. But it was too warm now for dying, and she had Joy to think of.
Then suddenly it was winter. The fields had turned to white and the day to evening. Wind scattered fine snow across pastures so white they seemed to be lit from within. And there was a figure out there, a woman walking away from the house. Augusta called, “Blenda?” But the woman went on walking and then, so far out that Augusta could have mistaken her for one of the black poles of bare poplar if she hadn’t been moving, she lay down and became part of the field. Augusta stood to follow her, to find her, but as she took her first step it was a warm autumn day.
In the dark of their bedroom, after she’d rocked a restless Joy to sleep, she said to Karl, “What are we still doing here? Why are we renting out my farm to someone else when we could be living there, farming for ourselves?”
“Shush. You’ll wake Father.”
“No. You tell me. Why are we still here?”
“Father needs help. I can’t run both farms.”
“Your father can hire more help. If you think he doesn’t have the money, then you’re a bigger fool than I’ve been. Don’t you see? You can farm for yourself. You can get out from under his thumb. I can get away from him!”
“I don’t have the money to set out on my own.”
“I’m going to die here. You understand? I will die.”
Of course she knew Karl would do nothing. She’d have to do it herself. The following morning she scrawled her demands on brown wrapping (as Olaf had not allowed her the luxury of writing paper) while sitting on a stump outside. Then she took a stout stick and marched into the house, and when the black bitch snarled and leapt to bite her, Augusta brought the stick down hard on the mutt’s nose and sent her yelping outside. She slapped her demands on the table, and yelled them in case her suspicions that Olaf couldn’t read or write were true. “We’re moving to my farm. You’re going to give Karl thirty per cent of this year’s lamb sales so he can set out on his own. You owe him at least that for all the work he’s done for you.”
Olaf’s nostrils drew together, and he pursed his lips. He nodded and went back to drinking his coffee. Augusta stood there, waiting for some reply. “You agree?” she said finally.
“Yes. Just get the hell out of my house.” He put a sugar cube in his mouth and sucked coffee through it, making a slurping sound that he knew Augusta hated. Augusta went outside, and when she saw Bitch waiting by the side of the house, growling, she whacked the dog on the nose a second time. The dog fled.
Looking back, Augusta wondered why she had ever stayed so long or put up with so much. No woman would now, now that she had some choice in life—somewhere to go, and the means to get there. But then, well, a woman put up with more because there was no way out. The same could be said of a man, in some cases. Divorce was rare among farmers, practically unheard of. Where was there to go? Whoever walked off the farm walked away with little or nothing. Husbands and wives were married to the land as much as to each other. A different sort of love arose from that kind of necessity; it wasn’t romantic or lustful, but it was steady. It was a love they manufactured each day, so that they could carry on.
Seven
THE APARTMENT WAS much neater than Augusta had left it three weeks before, though it was still chock-full of stuff; they never had enough storage room. The floor was vacuumed, the side tables were dusted, the kitchen counter was cleaned off. Everything was in order, despite the efforts of the cats. Two of the kittens sat amid the clutter of ornaments on the shelves. Another sat between plants on the windowsill, eyeing the birds. A fourth purred in Augusta’s lap and the rest chased an empty orange plastic container, from inside a Kinder Egg Surprise, around the room.
“You’ve done a nice job of cleaning up,” she said to Karl. “Much better than I’ve ever done myself.” It was true. He had always been tidier than Augusta. Even before she went into beekeeping full time, she found herself embarrassed, when visitors dropped in, by the slut’s wool gathering in the corners and the stack of dishes soaking in the sink. She found herself apologizing for yesterday’s breakfast crumbs still littering the floor under the table. Nothing much had changed; if anything, her housekeeping skills were worse than before, because she was often unable to reach a crust of toast that had fallen from her lap to the floor, and the vacuum was too heavy and awkward for her arthritic hands. Karl did the vacuuming now. She tidied the apartment when the spirit moved her, which was less and less often these days. She made the bed when she got around to it, sometime in the afternoon, after she and Karl had had their nap. There was no use making it twice in one day. Housework would never be her crowning achievement, the life’s work for which she’d be known: Here lies Augusta. She kept a tidy floor.
Joy, on the other hand, got herself all wound into a knot over housekeeping, even though their house was never finished. Gabe had built the house with the help of Joy and whomever he could bribe into wielding a hammer. Seven years after he’d started the house, the kitchen cupboard was still on the floor, not nailed to the wall, and one wall of the living-room was unfinished plywood. The floor of the guest ro
om was uncarpeted and the doors of Joy’s walk-in closet lacked the mirrors he had promised to put up.
But though the house was unfinished, it was not untidy. Joy kept that place spotless. Gabe complained that it was uncomfortably clean. Before he’d gone into the hospital, she had spent much of her time at home picking up the Polar Bear socks, the blue underwear, the denim overalls, the red longjohns, and the crocheted hippie hat that he insisted on wearing, and tossing them into the empty basket she had set in each room expressly for Gabe’s dog piles. As she pointed out, only the socks were truly dirty. If he would just put his clothes away in the evening, she wouldn’t have to do so much laundry. She had been trying to break Gabe’s habit of dropping his clothes on the floor since she’d married him. Joy hung her clothes neatly in a closet she kept fragrant with lavender potpourri. She did the wash every evening immediately after work and ironed clothes in the early morning. She told Augusta it was peaceful doing her chores then, in the hours before Gabe awoke. She could get a handle on things; she could get the house under control before he woke to make his messes.
Augusta could guess at the source of her daughter’s obsessive tidiness. All through her growing-up years, Joy had been too embarrassed to bring her schoolmates home to their messy house. Well, once she had done so. She had invited Jenny Rivers, Martha Rivers’ daughter, home to show her the newborn kittens nested in the empty calf stall. When she brought Jenny into the house for Kool-Aid and cookies the girl said, “Your house is a mess. You live like Indians”—even though Augusta was standing right there in front of her.
Joy said, “We do not!” But Augusta could see that she perceived the kitchen, the house, her mother, in a new, stinging light. Supper was never on time, dishes were always in the sink, because Augusta spent her days outside on a tractor, or shovelling manure, or loading the stone-boat with rocks that were magically and frustratingly manifested by frost each winter. The kitchen smelled foul, of the compost rotting in a bucket on the counter, and of damp mildew from the basket of dirty laundry still sitting in the corner. The floor was gritty because it hadn’t been swept for days. Augusta smelled faintly of manure, obscenely of sweat, of labour, of work. Her hands were rough, a man’s hands; they had never seen nail polish. Augusta had few occasions to put on a pretty dress or paint her lips red, and fewer reasons to bathe in bubbles. She seemed too lazy to care, or to tidy up on a day when she knew Joy was bringing a friend home. That was how Joy judged Augusta. Although Joy said nothing then, Augusta could see it in the embarrassment and anger in her face. Augusta, for her part, had put the blame firmly on Jenny Rivers. The girl was just like her mother.
Karl hadn’t helped matters. He was forever making Augusta feel bad about her poor housekeeping habits. One day he came home from Chase with a set of stainless-steel pots. He’d run into a wandering salesman, likely while having coffee and a game of crib at Yep Num’s café. He didn’t say anything at all about the pots, not at first. He set them down on the kitchen table and sat to take off his boots.
“What’s this?” said Augusta. Delighted, she fingered the slick surface so like a mirror that it reflected everything in the kitchen: the cupboard with its few dishes, the brown jug on the windowsill, the stack of dirty pots soaking in the sink, her own smiling face stretched all out of proportion. How wonderful to have stainless-steel pots after years of wrestling food off the chipped enamel. “They’re wonderful,” she said and tried to hug Karl. But he stood and shook her off. “When you slept in this morning I couldn’t make porridge,” he said. “I couldn’t find a clean pot.”
Augusta stared at the pots as Karl climbed the stairs to the bedroom. His words had taken away the shine on those pots and left them looking cheap. What was more, Joy had been playing in the parlour and had heard them. She stood in the parlour doorway, staring at Augusta, accusing Augusta. Then she ran to her room and slammed the door behind her.
Joy, in her more anxious moments, still sometimes went into a cleaning frenzy when she visited Augusta. Not a month before Gabe fell to the seizure, she had come for a visit and promptly started scrubbing the bathroom. She had gone to use the toilet, but when Augusta went to check on her as she’d been gone so long, she found Joy on her hands and knees, wiping the base of the toilet with a washcloth. “Oh dear, you didn’t come here to do housework,” said Augusta.
“No, I want to,” said Joy.
“Come have some tea.”
“Let me do this. I’ve got to do this. Do you have a brush? To clean the floor? I’ve got to clean this floor.”
“I suppose. Yes. Under the kitchen sink.”
Joy glanced at Gabe and he got up and went to the kitchen to retrieve the cleaning supplies. Joy pulled up her sleeves, put on rubber gloves, and, on hands and knees, scrubbed the bathroom floor. Gabe pushed a rag around the bathroom sink until Joy backed into him and shooed him to the living-room. When the cats came to wind themselves around her, she hissed at them and pushed them away over and over again. “Do you really have to have so many cats?” she all but yelled.
“It’s only temporary,” said Augusta. “Until I find homes.”
Joy moved on to the bathtub, the sink; she polished the mirror, which had been spattered by weeks of Karl’s shaving. Once the bathroom was done she cleaned the kitchen, scrubbing the grime from under the microwave, and pushing the stove and fridge to one side to clean beneath them. She vacuumed the living-room rug and spent the rest of the afternoon dusting the many figurines and teacups, bears, and milk jugs that cluttered the shelves. “Do you really need all this stuff?” she said, and her face was red in anger. But how could the apartment be anything but cluttered, Augusta wondered. Her space had shrunk from that huge drafty old farmhouse down to two rooms and a bathroom.
Manny’s house—Augusta’s house—had been huge compared to Olaf’s bachelor cabin. There were four bedrooms upstairs, although two of the rooms were left empty for the first few years they were in the house as they didn’t have furnishings for them. The front door led into the kitchen, as it did in most farmhouses. Off the kitchen were two rooms: a large, dark parlour that she rarely used, and a sitting-room that had been her childhood bedroom. This room was brightly lit by day by three long windows with slide-up bottoms that let the fresh air in. The windows were curtained with drapes made of paper; they were soft, almost velvety, and covered in a floral print.
She and Karl had sold much of her parents’ furniture to pay Manny’s debts, so the sitting-room, like the rest of the house, was sparsely furnished at first. She had a camp cot that functioned more or less as a couch on which she napped or laid Joy down to sleep. There was one chair, and a rug that Helen had made by pulling strips of fabric through a hemp feed-sack with a wooden hook. It was quite a pretty thing; Helen had been skilled at rug-making and had fashioned a rose design into it. In the corner of the room, Augusta kept the silk parasol the Japanese girl-bride had given her. The only other bit of furniture was the old treadle Singer sewing machine that had belonged to Helen and that Augusta still used. Augusta had breast-fed Joy in this room. Much later, after Joy had grown up and left home, she and Karl watched television here.
The kitchen was a small, dark room and yet it was the centre of the house, the heart. It was where she, Karl, and Joy ate, where Augusta cooked and canned, where they took their morning coffees together, and where Augusta and the Reverend visited after fishing. The linoleum on the floor was well worn; its flowered pattern had disappeared in spots and the edges were ripped. But it was a lot easier to clean than the wood floor of Olaf’s kitchen. They had kept the big wooden icebox that had belonged to her parents. Karl put blocks of ice a foot by two feet into the top portion of this insulated box, where the ice lasted for up to a week. He hauled the ice from Pillar Lake in winter, and stored it, covered in sawdust, in a pit dug into the ground under a small shed on the north side of the house. The icebox was a treat after they’d gone so long without one at the Whorehouse Ranch. Augusta could again make the Spanish creams and l
ayered jellies that her mother had created.
The Grafton boy had left behind a kitchen cabinet, a hutch atop a base of cupboards. It had been painted cream at one time but the paint was worn from years of use and the wood showed through. In here Augusta kept the dishes: tin plates Karl refused to give up, and Helen’s rose-patterned plates, cups, and saucers. Beside the cabinet there was one tall window that faced the fields and the barns. Sometimes out of this window she’d see a bear with cubs far off in the field, or a coyote trotting through the hay. The window was curtained with plastic drapes, ugly things but cheaper than fabric—cheaper, even, than the paper drapes. A wooden table stood in front of the window. Other than the calendar and her mother’s cups and saucers, the only decoration in that kitchen in those first years was a brown jug that had come as a sales gimmick in a bag of flour. She kept this, filled with wildflowers, on the windowsill.
As time went on, the house was slowly filled with the Reverend’s gifts: the calendar he gave them each year, the pretty milk jug he bought for Augusta’s birthday, the sturdy bedside table he made her one Christmas, the framed needlework and doilies Lilian made herself and sent along, the hooked rug the Reverend bought at a church bazaar, and a framed painting he did himself of the South Thompson River at Deep Pool. He brought good, practical gifts, like a second-hand radio when the power line finally stretched as far as the farm, an electric kettle, a toaster.
Now that Olaf wasn’t around, Karl was demanding in bed, or as demanding as he could be. He turned to Augusta almost nightly with his head down, smiling shyly, and Augusta let him climb aboard. It was over quickly; it took less time than sweeping the kitchen floor or doing a sinkful of dishes. She might have been a ewe chewing her cud as the ram mounted her and went at it; her role was to stay put. He gave her no time to warm to the idea. Afterwards he thanked her, several times, as if it were a particularly difficult chore for her that had pleasant results for him, as if she had spent a July afternoon sweating over the stove, canning the jars of strawberry jam he loved so. He made no attempt to arouse her; it was as if he didn’t understand that she, too, could be occupied by pleasure, as if he didn’t know that she, too, had the hot tongue and taste buds necessary to enjoy a good strawberry steeped in syrup.
A Recipe for Bees Page 17