A Recipe for Bees (10 page)

When she turned back to the bed, the corpse was gone and a mannequin was in its place, covered up to the chin with blankets. She turned around to say something to herself but her companion was also gone. When she looked back at the dead woman’s bed a third time it was herself lying there.

“Your mother didn’t die in the house, did she?” she asked Karl in the morning as they sat at the breakfast table. Olaf had been gone when Augusta awoke, out checking for newborn lambs.

“No, she died outside, of cold.”

“I thought you might have found her before she died and brought her inside.”

“No, she was dead out in the field. Why’re you asking?”

“No reason.”

Ranch life was different from the mixed farming she’d grown up with. Karl and Olaf crossed Rambouillet ewes with black-faced Suffolk rams to get a heavier lamb, but the Suffolk were a knot-headed bunch, prone to wandering off by themselves rather than flocking, always finding ways to break through a fence, and their offspring acted more like goats than sheep. They kept a few goats as well, milk goats to feed orphaned lambs if there were no ewes to take them, and to provide fresh milk to the herders when they were on the mountain ranges.

Olaf often hired Indian hands over whites, as he could pay them less and get more work out of them. Manny had done the same, though not with the same tight-fistedness. He’d hired Indians and strays in the Depression, when no one else would, and during the war, when there was no one else to hire. He’d hired others, too. One summer when Augusta was still a girl, he’d hired a white man with a Japanese bride. The man’s girl-bride scrubbed dishes silently beside Augusta, as she spoke no English. When they left at the end of the summer, the girl handed Augusta her blue silk parasol, printed with birds and bamboo. Manny had been generous with the Indians and strays; when they left, they left with their bellies full. Occasionally, when times were better for them, these men returned to say thanks with cigarettes for Manny, candy for Augusta, and tapioca pudding for Helen. When she
was nine or ten Augusta rode the saddles the hired men left on the wooden benches inside the implement shed, breathing in the smell of leather.

Manny traded horses with the Indians from the Neskainlith band, horses that were broken only because they were underfed and tired. When he fed these horses, their strength and fight returned. While Augusta tamed the horses with apples, Manny mastered them. In the catch pen he jabbed at them with pitchforks, hit them around the head with the bullwhip, and forced them into the squeeze. The horses jerked their heads against the wood of the chute with eyes wild and rolled back, and when the bullwhip cracked, the skin on their necks rose up. Augusta flinched with them.

These horses were runaways, predisposed to taking off out of control, dragging the buggy or farm equipment behind them. They ran with harrows in spring, hayrack in summer, disc in fall, feeding sleigh in winter. Once a grey dappled mare ran wild, pulling Manny and Helen in the buggy down Shuswap Hill, spooked by the dust that chased her. She thundered over the ridge and down the gravel road that was the highway with her mane flapping in knotted clumps. Manny pulled back too fast. One rein whipped from his hand and kicked and jumped against the mare’s front hoof. Helen dug her fingers into the planking of the seat; her hair and cloak were loose and flapping behind her. Manny clung to the back of the seat, his feet against the baseboard, the whole of his weight pulling on the one rein until it snapped. The buggy swayed close to the bank. Saplings whipped Helen’s arms. She cried
God help me
over the thundering hoofs and flying rocks. At Peterson Road,
facing a fence, beads of sweat over her neck, the mare tired to a stop.

Back at home Manny removed the buggy wheel by tapping it off with a hammer and greased the axle with butter. A wheel rim was lost and the seat was knocked loose. Later Helen sat Manny down near the stove and rubbed butter into his hands. It was the year during the Depression that they couldn’t give butter away. But when the war was on, Helen measured butter in her Blue Willow teacups for cooking. She weighed it on the kitchen scales and wrapped it in scrubbed flour sacks to sell in Chase. She traded butter, eggs, bread, and honey for ration coupons with Dr. Litwin’s wife and the butcher’s young bride.

Augusta was thirteen when Manny came home from town saying he’d hired Harry Jacob, an Indian man living on the reserve. “I told Harry and his woman they could set up a tent by the creek for the summer,” he said to Helen. It was Harry and his woman, never Harry and his wife. The title “wife” was reserved for white women. The couple set up a huge canvas tent, the kind ranch cooks housed their stoves in, a tent with a hole at the top for a stove-pipe. Harry’s woman had no stove, but built a campfire under that hole, so the tent was always filled with smoke. Harry, his woman, and their children smelled of smoke; to Augusta their skin appeared stained with it. The couple had a six-year-old boy whose name Augusta no longer remembered, and a girl two years younger than Augusta named Alice. Alice went barefoot and wore the same dress every day, a flowered yellow shift. She spoke little English. Harry’s woman spoke none. She had a ragged, indifferent air about her, as if she knew nothing she said or did would
make a difference. The boy was sick. He spent his days inside that smoke-filled tent watched over by his mother. To Augusta’s delight, Alice came out to play hide-and-seek, kick the can. They chased each other clear around the farm. It was the closest thing she’d had to a sister, to a friend.

Manny didn’t like Augusta playing with her. After chores, while Augusta and her father were sharing the water in the wash-basin, cleaning up for supper, Manny said, “Why do I have to keep telling you to leave that girl alone?”

“I wasn’t doing nothing,” said Augusta.

“I saw you run through their tent with that girl chasing after you.”

“We were playing tag.”

“They don’t keep themselves clean. That youngest kid’s sick. He’ll never make old bones.”

“I don’t play with him. He just lays around anyhow.”

“The boy could use some peace, I should think. He won’t get any rest with you howling through the tent. You leave them be. You hear?”

“There’s nobody else to play with.”

“Augusta, listen to your father,” said Helen. She set two plates firmly on the table and swung around to pick the whistling kettle off the stove.

“Why can’t I play with Alice, then? She’s not sick.”

Manny pulled the towel off the nail in the wall and dried his hands. “She’s a
Siwash.”
Her face must have told him she didn’t understand. “It means Indian,” he said.

Next day when she caught up with Alice, Augusta tried it out. She had only meant to tease Alice. “Hey, Siwash!”
she called. Alice turned and stared at her. “Siwash! Siwash!” Augusta sang out. Alice turned heel and ran, through the pasture, into the bush. Augusta ran after her. “Alice!” she called out. “Hey, Alice. What’s wrong?” But Alice was a deer in the bush, practised at hiding. Augusta shuffled back home with a knot growing in her stomach. She walked through the open door into the house holding her belly. Helen was at the kitchen table, gripping Manny’s plaid jacket by the collar, rummaging in the pocket. She pulled out a handful of change and inspected it. “What’re you doing in the house this time of day?” she said.

“I don’t feel so good.”

Helen turned; her face paled. She placed a cold hand on Augusta’s cheek, on her forehead. “You been staying away from those kids like your father said, haven’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You been coughing?”

“No ma’am.”

“That boy’s very sick. You understand you could get sick too, don’t you? If you play with him or his sister?”

Augusta nodded.

“It’s just your tummy?”

“Yes. Can I go?”

“Lie down in your room. I’ll bring you some ginger in sugar-water. See if that doesn’t fix you. I don’t want you going outside again today. All right?”

The powdered ginger and sugar drink didn’t fix the ache in Augusta’s belly, as she knew it wouldn’t. She had hurt Alice and nothing could be done. What could be done? She scanned her room. She had few possessions. Toys were scarce in those days. She had several dolls that her mother
had fashioned from socks and scraps, but just one store-bought doll, a pretty thing with a ceramic head covered in blond curls; it had eyes that closed and a box inside that said “Mama” when she laid it flat. She had seen this doll in Eaton’s catalogue, dreamed of it, pleaded for it, prayed for it, and on Christmas morning when she was eight she had found it under the Christmas tree. Now it sat staring into the nights, on her nightstand. She had named it Carla, the most exotic name she could think of.

She slipped the doll out to the tent when Manny was doing barn chores and her mother was in the chicken coop collecting eggs. Her gift didn’t produce the reconciliation she’d hoped for, nor did Alice make the show of gratitude Augusta had expected. Alice took the doll from her and walked away, down to the creek, making it clear by the set of her shoulders that she didn’t want to be followed. Less than a week later, Alice’s little brother was dead. Harry’s woman took Alice back to the reserve, and once the field work was finished Harry followed.

Augusta had seen a young girl who’d made her think of Alice during her ride home earlier that day. The train was following the ocean at that point. Spooked by its passing, a heron lifted from the shore and flew for a time parallel with the rails. Augusta watched, prickling, as the great clumsy bird became graceful in flight. Grey and white, so like a flying dinosaur, surely it must have lifted from the waters of a whole other time. The heron veered and headed over the train; it cast a shadow over the train window as it disappeared overhead.

When Augusta faced front again she saw an Indian girl standing ahead near the track. As the train came on her,
Augusta felt the girl was staring at her. She stared right back. She felt a little silly, but she couldn’t make herself look away. The girl could have been Alice, she looked so like her. Why the girl was staring at Augusta she could only guess at. Perhaps the girl thought she recognized Augusta. But she didn’t smile. She was a pretty girl, not yet a teen, standing limply and without proper posture, in a flowered shift. She had a limp bouquet of white and ragged shasta daisies. She held these flowers up to the window as the train passed, offering them to Augusta, but unlike almost everyone else Augusta had seen beside the track that day, she didn’t wave.

Still holding her hand to the glass in the beginning of a wave, Augusta went on staring out the window although the girl was long gone. Had she even been there? The memory of her felt like one of her crazy incomprehensible dreams. Maybe, lulled by the sway of the train, she had dropped off for a moment, and this dream girl, an echo of Alice, had escaped, skipped out of her head to go picking daisies. But that was foolishness, silly thoughts.

“You see some deer?” said Esther.

“Hmm? No, no. There was a girl by the tracks.”

“A girl? I didn’t see anyone.”

“She had a bunch of daisies, like yours.”

Esther shrugged and chuckled and pulled her glasses forward and let them drop down her face so they rested oddly on her chin. She rubbed her eyes and sat back, but didn’t pull the glasses back on. They bumped there on her chin, still hooked loosely over her ears, with the movement of the train. She closed her eyes and a little while later she began snoring. Augusta watched her for a time, thinking
the glasses would fall from her chin and land in her lap, waking her, but they didn’t.

The night Alice’s brother died, Helen grabbed Augusta by the shoulders and shook her. “See what could have happened if you didn’t listen to your father? See?” She hugged Augusta. “You could be dead!”

Augusta pulled away from her mother and ran to her room. She sat on her bed and stared at the space where Carla had kept watch over her. She was sorry the boy was dead, sorry for Alice and her silent, unsmiling mother. But all Augusta could think of was how she hadn’t listened to Manny. She had played with Alice, she’d gone into the tent with that sick boy, and in play had touched their smoky skin. Had she brought the boy’s sickness into the house on her hands?

In the kitchen her mother was taking the blame for the boy’s death. “We should have taken him to the doctor,” she said.

“And who would have paid?”

“The doctor would have taken a calf in trade.”

“Then we’d be out the calf.”

“You put more value on a calf than on that boy’s life?”

“He was his parents’ responsibility, not ours.”

“It was our Christian duty to help.”

“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?”

“You could hire him back. Give him a raise.”

“And risk bringing sickness onto the farm?”

“You’ll hire off the reserve in any case. There’s few enough hands left, with the war on. Ask him to leave his woman and the girl at home. He can see them weekends. He works well, doesn’t he?”

That first summer after Karl and Augusta were married, Olaf hired a slight one-legged Indian man named Pete to do the packing for the summer—to take a pack horse down from the mountain where they pastured the sheep, into town to get supplies to bring back. As a kid he’d jumped off a barn loft onto a rusty nail, and the leg had developed gangrene and he’d lost it, but it didn’t slow him.

When Karl brought Pete to the house to introduce him, Augusta didn’t want to shake his hand. The Indians had sicknesses, didn’t they? She wiped her hands on her apron when he offered his hand, refusing him, and mumbled that she’d been baking bread, that her hands weren’t clean. But he could see as soon as Karl invited him in for coffee that she hadn’t been making bread; she’d been cleaning up the breakfast dishes. “I don’t want you bringing the hired hands to the house,” she told Karl, after Pete had left.

“That’s not sociable,” said Karl. “They’ve got to come by sometimes. And there’ll be times you’re expected to make meals, you understand. For threshing crews. For the shearing crews when they come round.”