A Recipe for Bees

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Harry Jacob came by the farm looking for work not long after they moved. She was upstairs changing the sheets on the bed when she heard the knock on the door. By the time she made it downstairs, he was walking between the outbuildings, heading towards the barn. Presumably he was searching for Karl, though Karl was in town that day. As Augusta stepped into her gumboots, she watched through the screen door as Harry slid between the granaries and headed towards the honey house. He’d cleared a hole in the dust and was peeking through the honey-house window as she made her way through the grass to catch up with him. “Hello, Harry,” she called out.

  He startled and turned. “Augusta,” he said and extended his hand. When she wasn’t quick to take it, he slid his hands into his pant pockets. “I was just—I was looking for Karl. He around?”

  “In town.”

  “Oh.” He stared down at his boots. He appeared older than his years. His hair had gone completely grey. He had a bit of a belly on him.

  “Something I can help you with?”

  “I was thinking he might have some work for me.”

  “I don’t think so. Karl hasn’t been hiring since we moved off the ranch. We haven’t been going up on the mountain in summer, so we’ve been doing all the work ourselves.” It was the truth. Karl didn’t have the money to hire help. “Heard Alice died,” said Augusta. Karl had brought the news home from town two winters before. One of the herders having coffee at the café had told him Alice had come down with the flu and had never pulled out of it. She had finally died of pneumonia.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “How’s your wife?”

  “Good. Good. She’s living with her cousin now.”

  “Ah.”

  “What did you do with all your mother’s bees?”

  “Dad shook them out and put all the hives inside. One colony found a home in the attic here; another one lives in the wall of the barn. We don’t know where the others went. They’re probably all over the farms around here.”

  “You ever going back into honey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could sell that equipment of your mother’s, you know. I’d buy it.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Well. If you need any help, you let me know.”

  “Sure.”

  “All right then.” He nodded and put his hand up in a wave as he passed by her. Augusta watched as he cut across the field and jumped over the fence to get on the road. He’d walked all that way to ask for a job, likely stopping at every farm in the valley. She thought about giving him a ride back to town. But what if Sara McKay or Martha Rivers saw him in the Austin with her? He turned to look back at the farm and waved when he saw she was still standing there. Augusta waved back and went into the house.

  Augusta had thought of making honey, starting an apiary. Helen’s bee boxes and honey extractor were still in good shape, as Manny had carefully stored them in the dry honey house. She would fill glass jars with liquid amber and attach pretty labels: Augusta’s Honey, or Sweet Clover Farm Honey. Jars and jars of honeyed light. But then where would she sell them? she wondered. During the war honey had replaced sugar for canning, sweetening tea and coffee, and making cakes and cookies. Now that the war and rationing had ended, the market for honey had bottomed out. Augusta herself had dumped her honey-canned fruit once sugar was available. Everyone was hungry for sugar then, and sick and tired of honey.

  So Augusta chose to go into eggs. There was little investment and not much work, as Manny’s chicken coop was in decent shape, and Augusta and Karl needed eggs themselves. Augusta begged change from Karl and bought hens from whomever she could—from Mrs. Grafton, Sara McKay, and even Martha Rivers—and started out with thirty-six chickens in all. A henhouse that size needed only one rooster, two at most. Too many roosters and the chickens wouldn’t lay eggs.

  Augusta put her hand on Karl’s arm. “Karl, you remember that couple living beside us who bought a rooster for every chicken they had?” Karl laughed.

  “What?” said Rose.

  “These two bought an acreage next to the farm just before we left,” said Augusta. “They were city people, and figured now that they were out in the country, they needed to produce their own eggs. They thought chickens were monogamous, like geese. The roosters were so busy raping the hens and clobbering each other that the hens gave up laying from the stress of it all.”

  They all laughed. Manny had called a city-dweller that useless a cock’s egg, after those first malformed eggs of the laying season. Living that long on concrete, eating food that they had no hand in producing, led to a naiveté most city people weren’t aware they possessed.

  Eggs bought in a supermarket were most often white, perfectly shaped, thin-shelled, anaemic-yolked, tasteless things. That was what most people thought of now, when they thought of an egg. But those were factory eggs—laid by battery-house chickens kept overfed, immobile, and cramped—chosen for shape and size. The yolks of eggs from chickens allowed to run around the yard weren’t pale yellow; they were almost orange and had a sharp, unmistakable smell. The eggs Augusta collected had brown shells and came in all shapes and sizes. Some chickens consistently laid huge eggs with two or even three yolks. Sometimes these big eggs cupped one very large yolk. On the other hand, pullets laid tiny eggs, some with nothing inside but the white, or with just a marbling of yolk. The first eggs of the laying season were often misshapen. The shells were thick and rippled or appeared corrugated; occasionally there was no shell at all, only a soft external membrane.

  Augusta sold her eggs for forty-five cents a dozen. Hardly big money, and later on, when Joy was in her teens, the price she got was barely worth the cost of keeping chickens. Even so, almost all the farm women in the area sold eggs, to bachelor neighbours who didn’t keep chickens, to town people, and to Colgrave and Conchie’s. Martha Rivers put her eggs in pails and carried them down the old Shuswap Road shortcut to Chase. It must have been a four-mile hike. It wasn’t that the Rivers didn’t have a truck; it was that driving the truck to town would have taken all the profit out of selling those eggs. Augusta only took eggs to town on days when they were going anyway, as it was much too far to walk from their place.

  A week or two after she’d begun selling eggs, Augusta walked into the kitchen to find Karl raiding her supplies. “What are you doing?”

  “Thought I’d take Dad some eggs.”

  “He can pay like everybody else. I’m not giving him eggs.”

  “For Pete’s sake!”

  “He never gave us anything he didn’t work us for.”

  “It’s just a dozen eggs.”

  “Then you pay for them.”

  “You want me to pay for my own eggs?”

  “They’re not your eggs. They’re mine. My chickens.”

  “That you bought with my money.”

  “You’re farming on my land.”

  “Ah, Christ!” Karl dug into his pocket and slammed two bits on the table and walked out of the house with his dozen eggs in a basket. Augusta, feeling childish and stupid, sat down in the kitchen chair with her coffee. When the anger and embarrassment of the argument wore off, she contemplated what she’d buy with her egg money: new paper or plastic curtains, maybe a new oilcloth for the table. It didn’t cross her mind to buy anything as extravagant as a new dress. Egg money wasn’t much to begin with, and it went back into housekeeping and the farm. What that money did do was provide a woman with a little buying leverage, much like the money she’d earned working in Kamloops. A woman knew her man couldn’t begrudge her a tin of sockeye salmon or a bit of chocolate if she was providing the two dozen eggs that covered the cost. Although more forceful women like Martha Rivers, who did save their egg or cream money for themselves, were often well turned out in new blouses. Women like that—women who had no trouble finding pleasure for themselves and figured they deserved it as much as their husbands or children—made
Augusta angry. They were selfish. She probably would have been better off if she’d joined them in the fun of a little indulgence. As it was, her resentment surfaced in odd places, like in a basket of eggs for a lonely old man.

  It wasn’t a week after Augusta made Karl pay for Olaf’s eggs that the Reverend arrived on the farm doorstep with a half-dozen fresh trout and invited himself in for supper. Augusta was embarrassed, as she wasn’t dressed for company; she wore a ratty old house dress. She cleaned and cooked the trout as the Reverend and Karl drank coffee together at the kitchen table. The Reverend did most of the talking. Karl bounced Joy on his knee and answered questions about his plans for the farm and how was Olaf getting along, but he didn’t offer much, didn’t help the conversation along. They ate the fish and when Augusta stood to clean off the table, the Reverend helped dry dishes. She was uncomfortable about this. He was a guest, she the hostess, and no man had ever done dishes in her house. When she was done washing and had pulled the plug on the sinkful of water, she realized her engagement ring wasn’t on her finger. “My ring!” she said. Then suddenly she was living the moment of her wedding vision: her hands searched in soapy dishwater along with the Reverend’s, and his hand met hers under water.

  Augusta didn’t see Karl watching them search for the lost ring at the time; she didn’t know he’d seen a thing until they were standing together watching the Reverend drive down the roadway with two dozen of her good eggs. “You don’t have to look so tragic,” said Karl. “He’ll be back.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you were selling your eggs, not giving them away.”

  “They’re my eggs and I’ll give them to whomever I want. Don’t you think we owe him something? He lent me his car so I could work. He brings us things we can use.”

  “I don’t want his things. I don’t want any of it.”

  Karl marched back to the house and Augusta followed him into the kitchen. “I do. It makes my life easier. We couldn’t afford those things.”

  Karl shoved a chair so it scraped loudly across the floor. It was as much anger as he ever showed. “Don’t you think I wish I could afford them?” he said. “Don’t you think I want those things for you?”

  “I don’t know what you want. The only things I ever get, I’ve got to fight for myself.” It was true, or partly true, but the moment she said it she wished she hadn’t. Karl gave the chair a final push and went upstairs to the bedroom.

  The Reverend had never been Augusta’s lover, not in the way Karl and half the town likely thought, though once, as they were sitting on the rocky beach at Deep Pool, he had taken her hand and said, “If I were thirty years younger, if things were different—” But that was as far as he went, and a little hand-holding and the occasional chaste kiss were as far as they took things. They fished off the bank, and sometimes fried the fish they caught right there, in butter, in the cast-iron pan the Reverend kept in his truck. They built a fire in a circle of stones on the beach and kept it lively by adding twigs and branches from time to time between casts. Usually it was rainbow or Kamloops trout they caught (Karl said they were the same thing, both pink-fleshed fish that tasted the same). Along with the fried fish the Reverend made strong tea in an old kettle that was blackened from many campfires. Other times they’d bring hot dogs that they cooked on maple sticks and ate with crusty rolls and hot English mustard. And always Augusta brought the Reverend his sweets. He was so like a bear, feeding on the butter tarts and jelly rolls and cake she baked each Friday evening. Fatter and fatter he grew, until she supposed no one could suspect licentiousness of him, because, with that belly in the way, how could it possibly be accomplished?

  Joy took a shine to the Reverend, at least when she was very small, as he was there every Saturday offering her sweets and little toys. When she was about two and a half, he finally convinced Augusta to come back to church each Sunday. “Courage,” he said. “Show them what you’re made of.” And she did sit through his services, alone in the front row with Joy on her lap, as there was no one with whom she wanted to sit. She never stayed for coffee afterwards. Once during a service Joy wriggled off her lap, and before Augusta could catch her she scurried to the pulpit with her arms held up to the Reverend, clearly wanting to be picked up. The Reverend, laughing, scooped her up and sat her on the edge of the pulpit and finished his sermon with one arm around her. Augusta was sure that incident got Martha Rivers’ gums flapping.

  Augusta wasn’t sure what Joy’s childhood memories were. Joy changed the subject or turned away whenever Augusta brought it up. Augusta remembered the Easter eggs they had dipped in pickled beet juice to make them pink, or boiled in orange rind for orange, or soaked in slightly stewed nettle or lamb’s quarter for green or in caked laundry blueing for blue. She remembered helping Joy wrap the eggs in crisp brown onion skins and string before boiling them to create a delicate, mottled, multicoloured pattern.

  She remembered how she and Joy had jumped up and down in the huge wool sacks held upright in wooden frames, to pack the wool down for shipping. How they could both fit into that bag together, holding each other’s hands and jumping as if on a trampoline, sweating and giggling, the wool so full of lanolin that even Augusta’s garden-cracked heels softened.

  She remembered taking Joy out to watch the sheep in the top field when Karl was working elsewhere on the farm. The field was fenced on three sides, so there wasn’t much to watch for except coyotes. Augusta packed a lunch of cheese sandwiches, cookies, and milk, and a bag of toys for Joy, and together with a dog named Jack they walked through fields of grass and alfalfa. Joy didn’t like “girl toys,” as she called them. She wanted cars, trucks, farm sets, and, above all, horses. Together they built miniature farms in the field as they watched the sheep. From sticks they made tiny barns, shearing sheds, cabins, houses, and fenced-off pastures filled with toy cattle and sheep. Augusta made Joy a wagon one day, from a large matchbox and four empty thread spools. They ploughed tiny fields, and planted gardens using moss and the previous year’s dried berries and rosehips for vegetables and fruits.

  There was the Christmas she was too busy to help Joy learn her lines for the pageant, and when the evening for the pageant came round Augusta had to sit in the front of the church with the poem in hand and coach her along. Every child in that church had a part, and Joy’s recitation came at the end of the program, when everyone had had quite enough; people were beginning to mill about at the back of the church, where women from the league were serving hot cocoa. Joy stood on stage, uncertain, and began mumbling, then stopped short. She looked down at Augusta, terrified. The few other children still on stage giggled. Those few people still listening in the audience coughed. Rather than waving Joy off stage and giving her some sign that it was all right, she gestured for her to go on, and mouthed the words of the poem to her. Joy went on mumbling, her bottom lip trembling, as Augusta fed the poem to her line by line. The event shamed Augusta now. But somehow at that moment it was important that Joy finish the thing, so no one from the women’s league could say her girl was stupid, or a quitter. Instead, in all likelihood, they talked of how poorly her child did, how pushy she herself was. Joy finished the poem and, to a paltry hand of applause, ran off stage crying.

  Karl seemed to have a way with Joy, at least when she was still a young child. In winter he often boiled her a pot of toffee, then drizzled it onto a clean bed of snow, sometimes forming the letters of her name with the thick sweet stuff. It cooled quickly and hardened into candy that broke into sticky shards when she bit into it. In spring and summer he scrambled around the house on all fours, a horse for Joy to ride on. He threw her into the air and caught her over and over again, until they were both out of breath from giggling. Out in the yard he put down his tools and swung her around in a game of airplane any time she wanted. He built her a swing, too. It was a sturdy rope swing with a wooden seat hung from the big maple that stood beside the house. Augusta remembered the day he put up that swing with such clarity that when sh
e thought of it she wept. She had put on coffee and was waiting on it, enjoying the warm heady smell, when she happened to look out the kitchen window. There he was, way up on a ladder propped against the stout arm of the maple, the red in his jack shirt and his crop of carroty hair on fire in the evening sun. Augusta found herself watching him, struck by the strength in his back and arms, amazed all over again at the largeness of his hands, farmer’s hands that had grown huge from a lifetime of work.

  Karl didn’t expect conversation from Joy, as Augusta did, and Joy was a help to him, handing him tools as he worked on the tractor, or carrying empty buckets behind him. It seemed so important to her that she did help. She followed him like gosling after goose. He was always giving her some little thing to do to keep her busy, but he seemed to think Joy was a puppy, born with the sense to avoid danger, not the helpless child she was. Once, as he was shovelling out a stall, a horse kicked Joy in the small of her back and Karl didn’t even notice. Augusta came out carrying coffee and found Joy sitting on dirty straw in the horse’s corral, dazed. She asked Karl what had happened but he only shrugged and went on shovelling. Augusta packed Joy off to bed for a nap and it was then, as she was undressing her, that she found the red, perfectly shaped hoof mark on the girl’s back. Only by the grace of God had the horse missed booting Joy in the kidney or in the head. Another time the big ram butted Joy down again and again as Karl sheared sheep nearby. Karl, engrossed in clipping, didn’t hear the screams, but Augusta did, and carried the terrified girl off to the house. Joy was only bruised, but how much worse could it have been? Augusta worried Karl over that until he snapped at her. “She could have been killed!” she said.