A Recipe for Bees

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Joy had admired that brooch one day during Augusta’s stay with her. Augusta was hurriedly putting on her makeup in the bathroom, as Joy was waiting for her in the kitchen. She had her makeup bag in the bathroom but, as she called out to Joy, “I forgot my comb in my purse. Could you bring it, please?” Joy obliged but misunderstood her request, and rummaged in the purse for the comb, instead of bringing the purse to the bathroom. She happened on the brooch.

  “What’s this?” she said, bringing it and the comb to the bathroom.

  Augusta took the comb and looked away as she combed her hair. “Oh, I treated myself to that after we sold the farm.”

  “I’ve never seen you wear it.”

  “Never had the occasion, I guess.”

  “It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She held it up to the light. “So lovely! It’s like the bee was caught in its own honey.” She took it back to the kitchen with her, and when Augusta came out of the bathroom she was still admiring it.

  Augusta sat at the kitchen table, tasting the honey on her lips and watching Karl as he slept, chin on chest, in his chair. A single white hair stood up defiantly at the top of his bald head, silhouetted by the window behind him. It made her smile. Perhaps it was no coincidence that her love affair with Karl had begun, so many years after their wedding, when she started producing honey. It had been an ointment for her soul, a source of self-assurance and fun, but perhaps it had also been a salve for the many old hurts between them.

  Augusta gifted Karl with the first cake of honeycomb she produced on her own. She cut it from the frame in June and carried it on a plate to the garden, where he was hoeing and plucking weeds from between rows of sugar peas and sweet peas. The honey was yellow and sharp with the flavour of dandelions; even the comb itself was bright yellow. The honey ran liquid from the cells, quickly filling the shallow plate and running onto her fingers, down her arm. When she reached Karl his hands were caked in garden soil, so she let him taste the honey from her sticky fingers. He ate the honeycomb she held up for him and, laughing, licked the honeyed palm of her hand. Her bees, which had been flitting from sweet pea to sweet pea, flew up to the scent of honey, alighted on her plate, hovered around her sweet fingers.

  Gabe had once brought a recipe to show Augusta. It was literally a recipe for whipping up a batch of bees, which he had found in Virgil’s Georgics. He gave her a copy. It was now dog-eared because she loved it so:

  How often in the past the putrid blood

  Of slaughtered cattle has engendered bees …

  A bullock with two years’ growth of curving horns.

  Both nostrils and the life-breath of his mouth

  Are plugged, for all his struggles.…

  They abandon him shut up, with broken branches

  Under his flanks and thyme and fresh-picked cassia …

  Meanwhile the moisture in those softened bones

  Warms and ferments, and little animals,

  An amazing sight, first limbless, then with wings

  Whirring, begin to swarm, and gradually

  Try the thin air, till suddenly, like rain

  Shed from a cloud in summer, out they burst.…

  Marvellous. Terrible. It had made Augusta laugh. Likely what they took for bees were some sort of golden fly. The people who wrote the Bible thought the same thing, that bees rose from the bodies of the dead. Didn’t Samson scrape honey from the carcass of a lion on the way to his wedding? Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet. Augusta had seen the eggs and larvae of bees growing inside the hive or she might have believed it herself. She liked the idea that for generations folks went around thinking they could whip up a batch of bees, create life from herbs and a carcass of an animal they had killed with their own hands, and have the sweetness of honey arise out of that. Maybe they had it partly right, she thought—the sense of the recipe, anyway—because wasn’t that how some marriages went? The ones that seemed, at least from the outside, as if they could go on for ever? Somewhere along the road something knocked the life-breath from the marriage; some turn of fate—the death of a child, a lost job, or more likely an affair—killed it dead. Oh, it struggled on for a while, but anyone looking at a couple at that stage could see that the marriage was dying. The partners’ movements seemed at odds with one another. Suddenly they were crashing into each other in the kitchen, stepping on each other’s toes. The dance they had once done effortlessly became a chore that left them both irritable and hateful. But after that stage, after the kicking was over and the breath was gone, they passed by each other like strangers on the street; there was an agreement there, all right, but of another kind.

  But that was where the magic, the recipe for bees, came in. Because occasionally something fermented inside the lifeless carcass of a marriage, something began to stir, limbless at first, then with wings whirring, trying out the thin air, till suddenly, like rain from a summer cloud, it burst out with a force that drove old lovers to do things no one, not even they themselves, thought they were capable of.

  A couple of weeks after Augusta took that week-long job at the old man’s home, Karl started bringing her eggs. The first eggs of the laying season, eggs laid when the light was just strong enough to pull them from the young hens. Tiny eggs, eggs without yolks, eggs with rippled shells, or soft, rubbery eggs without shells at all. She’d seen them all before; these first marvellous eggs of the season were nothing new to either of them. Yet Karl hunted for them in the secret nests young hens made in the long grass around fence posts, nests the hens lined with down and feathers they plucked from their own bodies. He presented the eggs like gifts, some so fresh they were still warm and moist. “Look here what I’ve got. You ever seen anything like it? Look how small.” And they’d look together, both amazed at this small, soft-shelled thing they passed between them.

  She had the habit then of taking her evening coffee outside, by herself, as Karl and Joy finished off their supper plates in the kitchen. Most times she sat on a stump Karl had placed at the foot of the garden, and from there she looked over the field, imagining the young corn that would sprout there, rolling the day over in her mind, finding pleasure in sitting that no longer required a fishing pole to justify it. Then she’d just know he was there, and she would turn and find Karl standing on the porch watching her. At first he bloomed pink and all but fled back into the house, but gradually, evening on evening as the corn seedlings sprouted and took on their leaves, he stood a little longer, ventured a smile now and again, until he stood so long, watching her with such sweetness, that it was Augusta who blushed and turned away.

  One day Karl came home carrying a single precious calypso orchid, a fairy slipper, a flower he had to have been searching for because it never grew out in the open, but off the road, in places of magic where a rotting log lay among evergreens on needle-covered ground—a cool, mossy place—only there. So he’d been looking for it, hoping to please her. When he walked up as she worked over a hive in the orchard, and held the orchid out to her, there, that had been his apology and his forgiveness. Of her, for taking a lover all those years ago, and of himself, for not knowing how to be that lover.

  Joy saw her silly old parents courting in this way. After Karl had gone out to do the evening chores, while she and Augusta were finishing up the dishes, Joy said, “Why do you have to act like that? You should act your age.”

  “And how’s that?” said Augusta.

  “You’ve been all over each other. It’s embarrassing.”

  “I should think you’d be happy to see us getting along. And anyway, I hardly think a little hand-holding qualifies as being all over each other.”

  “It’s sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “I know about you. I know about you and Reverend Lakeman.”

  “And what do you know?”

  Joy paused, then said, “Nothing.”

  “No. You tell me. What did you mean?”

  “I said, nothing!” Joy
didn’t say any more. She went on wiping dishes. And Augusta didn’t press further because she was suddenly lacking the heart necessary to speak. Her hands shook as she sank them again and again into the dishwater.

  What was it, two weeks, three weeks later? She had taken Joy into Kamloops and dropped her off to shop by herself after making plans for them to meet at the Silver Grill. It was much the same as in her days with Joe. The high-backed booths were the same, though they’d been re-upholstered, and the fascinating old clock was still on the wall. She bought a newspaper and sat down at the same window table she’d taken that very first day, and ordered coffee and pie. Blueberry pie. The pastry was soggy but the berries were fresh, and whipped cream could make up for most anything. She took a second bite out of the pie and looked out the window. There was the young Augusta walking down the sidewalk towards the café. She was wearing a pretty blue dress, sandals, and her hair spilled over her shoulders. Somehow time had skipped backwards all those years. Was she coming to see Joe? Her heart pounded at the thought. Was it possible? Would she see Joe, sweet Joe, again?

  But then there were men talking in the booth behind her, talking about this phantom of her young self approaching on the sidewalk. “Hey, look at her!”

  “Man, isn’t she something?”

  The young Augusta dissolved into Joy. It was a shock to see her self disappear like that and to have this other young woman walking in her place. Until that moment she hadn’t realized just how much she and Joy resembled each other, at least from a distance. She wondered if men had talked like that about her when she was that age. She had thought herself an ugly duckling. Likely Joy was more resourceful when it came to men. Times were changing, and Joy had gone on dates as Augusta never had. No man came to court her, not with marriage in mind, or even serious lovemaking, in the old sense of the word. For Joy it was play, a form of entertainment. Shaggy-headed boys in strange theatrical costumes took her away for the evening in shining cars shaped like fish. She put on smiles for these boys as she never would for Augusta; she was some other girl getting into their cars. For them she had a skip in her step, an alertness, even a giggle. She hardly ever laughed at home, and her natural quietness had been tuned to a practised muteness with this onset of womanliness. Between Karl and Joy, supper time was frustratingly quiet. That was why Augusta left them to finish their meal and took her coffee outside—to get away from that lack of talk. Yet, off the farm, Joy seemed to be some other creature entirely. Even here in the city with her mother, she could be chatty when she wanted.

  Joy came into the restaurant and joined her at the table. She’d just sat down—not even a hello—when out she came with it. “Who’s my father?”

  It was a punch in the stomach. “What?”

  “My father. Who was my father?”

  “Lower your voice!” Augusta hissed. She could feel the red rising in her face. Certainly these men behind her would be listening.

  The waitress came, carrying coffee and offering Joy a menu, but even with this interruption she wouldn’t let it go. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Who was he?”

  “Karl is your father.”

  “You were having an affair with Reverend Lakeman all those years. I saw you.”

  “What did you see?”

  “You holding hands. I saw you kiss him once.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Is that what this is about? That’s as far as it went. We were friends. Good friends. I never hid the fact that I loved him. He stood by me through some trying times in a way your father was incapable of.”

  Joy was quiet for a moment, then she said, “Was he my father?”

  “The Reverend? Heavens, no!”

  “Jenny Rivers told me Dad wasn’t my father.”

  “Well, Jenny Rivers is a stupid, gossipy girl.”

  “Why do I look so different? Why am I so tall?”

  “All you have to do is look at me. Your grandmother was tall.”

  “Jenny Rivers said there was talk after I was born. That Dad wasn’t my father.”

  Augusta stared down into her coffee-cup. “Yes, there was talk. How on earth did you come to be talking about such things?”

  “They used to make fun of me, you know. At school. When I was a kid. They called me a bastard. They called you things.”

  “What did they call me?” Joy slouched farther down into the booth. “Karl’s been a good father, hasn’t he? He never made you feel less than his daughter, did he?” Joy shrugged, then shook her head. She stared at the table. “Karl is your father. That’s the truth. You understand me?”

  The day after Joy asked who her father was, Augusta made a trip into Kamloops on her own and forced herself to find Joe’s number and to dial. She was nearly faint with relief when it was he who answered.

  “Joe?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Augusta.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, then “Just a minute.” She could hear him covering the receiver with his hand, and his muffled voice saying, “Why don’t you take the coffee into the living-room. I’ll just be a minute,” and to Augusta, “Hello?”

  “I won’t keep you. I wondered if we could meet, at the café. Today. I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”

  “All right.” Then he laughed a little nervously. “Is it a matter of national security?”

  “Not quite.”

  “How about two, then? At the Swill?”

  Joe was there at two. As he sat across from her he said, “Hasn’t changed much, has it?” Although he had. He’d been in his forties when they’d spent those afternoons at the Plaza Hotel, and he’d have to be sixty now. He had much less hair and he’d lost some of the height and breadth that had made him seem so protective to Augusta during their affair. But then Augusta supposed she’d done a fair bit of changing herself. She’d put on weight and changed her hair colour. She wore glasses now. “You’re looking good,” he said.

  “You too.”

  “You want lunch?”

  “No, coffee’s fine.”

  “What’s so urgent?”

  “No how’ve you been?”

  “Got my curiosity up,” he said. Augusta fiddled with her coffee-cup. “Come on, out with it.”

  “We’ve got a daughter.”

  Joe grinned. “Really?”

  “I thought you’d be mad.”

  “How could I be mad at a thing like that?”

  “She’s seventeen and asking questions. Why she doesn’t look like Karl and so on. There was some talk—there was a lot of talk—and I guess she heard it. I told her Karl’s her father and I think she believed me, but I thought it was time I told you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I tried phoning once. And I came here. For a while I kept thinking I’d see you on the streets.”

  “Chickened out, eh?”

  “It would’ve complicated things, wouldn’t it? If I told you? Would you really want to know?”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Joy.”

  “Pretty name. She’s seventeen? It’s been that long?” Augusta nodded. He shook his head. “I suppose I should give you some money, shouldn’t I? To help things along. Is she going to college?”

  “Then I’d have to explain where the money came from.”

  “You could say you found work in Kamloops. Then maybe we could get together sometimes, here.”

  “I’ve already gone through the gossip once. I’m not going through it again. You don’t know how it was. Besides that, taking money from you would change everything.”

  “You going to tell her about me?”

  “You want me to?”

  “I don’t know how I’d explain some kid turning up on my doorstep.”

  “That’s just it, isn’t it?”

  “And wouldn’t the boy have a hard time with it?”

  “I guess. I think Karl likely heard along the way. His father did. But I don’t w
ant to dredge it all up again.”

  They sat in silence for a long time. Then Joe said, “Best to let it lie, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “You got a picture of her?”

  “Yes, of course. Here. That’s this year’s school picture.”

  “Ah, look at her.”

  “I should have brought more photos. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “What is she like? Does she have hobbies? Is she good at school?”

  “She does pretty well at everything. No A’s this year, but she’s not working hard either. She used to do a lot of horseback riding, but she seems to have given up on that now. She’s not much for baking or canning or any of that sort of thing, and Karl can’t get her to help out with chores. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what her interests are now. She just seems to hang around with her friends. She has a lot of boyfriends. When she comes home she locks herself in her room and listens to music. She likes to shop for clothes.”

  “Sounds like a regular teenaged girl to me.”

  “I suppose. We fight a lot.”

  “I came looking for you too, you know.”

  “Not the days I came.”

  “Right after you said we should stop, I came to this café every day. I figured you’d change your mind and turn up. But you didn’t. Then I sort of gave up. I didn’t come after that. But that’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it?” He took both her hands in his. “So tell me, how’ve you been?” Augusta pulled her hands from him and glanced around the café. “Sorry,” he said.

  “We moved back onto my home farm. I’ve got my own honey business. Here, I brought you a jar.” She took the small jar of honeycomb from her purse. “Sales are pretty good. I meet a lot of people that way.”

  “Look at that.”

  “One day I heard you outside the house. I thought for sure you’d turned up and Karl would catch you there. I ran to find you, I was so sure.”