A Recipe for Bees (15 page)

“What does he mean, I’m like my mother?”

The black bitch came out from under the table then, excited by the raised voices. She stood behind the old Swede’s chair, yapping and barking so that Olaf had to shout over her. “I won’t have it. No woman under my roof will behave like that!”

“Like what?” yelled Augusta. The black bitch leapt out from behind Olaf’s chair and nipped at her skirts. She
kicked at the dog, yelling all the while over the old man’s insults. “You’d keep me locked up here, in the dark, with no friends, no money, no pleasures of any kind—”

“Shut her up!” hollered Olaf, and at first Augusta thought he meant the dog. But it was Augusta he wanted shut up.

“Augusta, please!” said Karl.

There at the kitchen table—with the bitch growling and the old Swede raging—Augusta knew the Reverend was right: this was slow death. Olaf would whittle away at her until there was nothing left, just as he had with his wife and his son. Well, she wouldn’t let him. She’d find work. The Reverend would give her a letter of reference to take to the health unit in Kamloops. She’d make friends, earn a little money.

A school for the mentally handicapped—they were called “retarded” then—put an ad in the paper for someone to drive kids from Chase to school in Kamloops and back each day. Augusta sent in a letter of application and got the job. The wage barely paid for the gas, but through the health unit she could find work for the day in Kamloops. The Reverend lent her the old black Austin for these jobs, and she loved driving, lived for it; it freed her so. She could imagine herself hovering alongside the car, arms outstretched, hair blowing back, flying. She felt as if she could drive all day.

Every morning after she dropped the children off at school, she drove around to the health unit, where one of the nurses would have a list of people she could work for that day, doing housework for the most part. She worked for many of these people on an ongoing basis, daily or
weekly. The first job she took on was working for Virginia, a widow who needed help to get in and out of the bathtub. Bathing her, Augusta saw what was to come. She tried not to stare as she helped the old woman wash herself; she tried to look at the ceiling, or the toilet, or the door, but her eyes were drawn back to Virginia’s body over and over again. The woman’s skin was surprisingly youthful and smooth; the skin on her upper arms and legs was not much different from Augusta’s, though Virginia must have been eighty. Only the woman’s hands and face had truly aged, and her posture, because she was bent over, and there was a slight hump at the base of her neck that always compelled Augusta to stand straighter. The old woman’s underarm and pubic hair was as grey as the hair on her head. Augusta hadn’t thought old women had pubic hair, or anything down there at all. In her mind they had been as hairless and smooth—and as sexless—as little girls. Yet as she steadied the old woman and helped her step, dripping, from the bathtub, she couldn’t help but see that Virgina was still a woman. Although her breasts hung flat, the silvery bush at her crotch attested that if she didn’t let her passion loose, it was only because she was tired, or without companionship. Virginia slipped and fell while she was at home alone, breaking her hip, and died shortly after, not three months after Augusta took on the job.

Mrs. Stead, whose husband owned a freight company, had Augusta come by every Thursday morning to clean a house that was already practically spotless. One Thursday morning Augusta checked into the health unit for afternoon jobs and found one of the nurses fretting over a woman nearly nine months pregnant who already had nine children.
The woman had a bad tooth, an abscess making her crazy, as if she didn’t have enough to be crazy about, and a dental appointment she couldn’t get to because there was nobody to look after her brood of young kids still at home.

Augusta phoned Mrs. Stead. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if I came a little later this morning,” she said. “There’s a woman with a large family who needs to get to a dentist and there’s no one to help her out.”

“There must be someone else who can do it.”

“No, ma’am. I’m the only one who showed today.”

“Can’t it wait? I have plans.”

“She’s in some pain.”

“Well, what time will you be here, then?”

“I should be there by eleven-thirty. It depends on how long her appointment—”

“All right. But no later than eleven-thirty. I have to leave here at one.”

“I’ll try—”

Mrs. Stead hung up.

Augusta drove to the address the nurse had given her. It was a house too tiny for nine children and one more on the way, but it was the right house nevertheless. The same went for the woman who answered the door. She was too young and thin to be the mother of ten but there she was, pregnant as a woman could get; six of the nine children were clinging to her skirts. “The other three will be home shortly,” she said. No
hello
. No
how do you do
. Augusta supposed that when you were in pain, and had that many children, you saved your breath for more important things.

The woman set out the makings for lunch on the table, in case her appointment ran long, and fled. Lunch was a
loaf of bread and a can of jam, but no butter or margarine, and a jug of skim milk reconstituted from powder. Not much to feed nine hungry children. When the other three rushed into the house, all nine of them made a run for the table, though it was only ten-thirty. Augusta tried to settle them, make them sit down and eat properly, but the food was gone before she could create any kind of order. After lunch she got the kids playing hide-and-seek in the back yard and went about doing what she could for this woman, though she was only being paid to mind the children. She tidied up, swept the floors, did the dishes, and finished mending a few bits of clothing sitting in a basket by a chair. She got herself so wound up in her charity work for this woman that she didn’t notice the time passing until it was nearly one o’clock and the pregnant woman was walking through the door.

Augusta turned down the dollar the woman offered her for her time and rushed off to Mrs. Stead’s. She ran up the steps to the front door but the door flew open before she’d had a chance to knock. Mrs. Stead was furious. “Where have you been?”

“As I said on the phone, there was this woman—”

“You said eleven-thirty. Look what time it is.”

“She was in a lot of pain. There were all these children. They needed lunch.”

“You made me miss
my
lunch. I had a lunch date at the golf clubhouse with some very important people. Do you understand? People who shouldn’t be kept waiting.”

“But that poor woman—”

“I don’t care what your excuse is. You made a commitment to clean this house every Thursday morning and that’s
what you’ll do. I won’t have you putting other people’s work ahead of mine. I don’t ever want this to happen again.”

“But I couldn’t—”

“Do you understand me?”

Augusta stared at the woman for a moment, then said, “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

“All right. Get to work. I don’t want to waste any more of my day on you.”

Augusta slammed through her housework, vacuuming, mopping, dusting, waxing, and polishing. When she was done, Mrs. Stead stood at the door to hand her her wages. Augusta took the money but then threw it on the floor. “Why not give that to somebody who needs it?” she said. “Like that poor woman I worked for this morning? You can get yourself someone else to work for you.” It was worth the three dollars and fifty cents she went without that day, worth every penny to tell her to shove off. She worried a little that news of what she’d done would get back to the nurses at the health unit. But Mrs. Stead said nothing about it, only asked for another girl who was more regular, and the nurse who had got Augusta working for the pregnant woman understood. Anyway, there were plenty of jobs where that one came from. Augusta was never without work if she wanted it.

Karl hated that she worked. He hated anything that upset his father, that heaped his father’s condemnation on him. Out of the black of their bedroom he asked her, “You don’t really have to work, do you? They’ll say I can’t afford to keep a wife.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” She shouldn’t have said it, but there it was, and she just made things worse by trying to explain
herself. “I can’t keep begging from Olaf. We must have some independence. If you won’t get it, I will.”

“Then don’t go fishing with the Reverend. Please.”

“There’s nothing for me here on this ranch. I have no friends. The Reverend’s the only friend I’ve got. I’ll go crazy if I don’t see anyone but you and that old Swede.”

“Shush!”

“You shush! He can’t hear us. Listen to those snores. You’d think he was breathing his last.”

“Surely if you take work you get out enough. You don’t need to go fishing with the Reverend too. It means so much to Father that you don’t.”

“I don’t care what he thinks. The Reverend is my friend and I’ll go fishing with him and you can be thankful for the trout we eat Saturday evenings.”

In the dark she felt him pulling up his resolve. “You won’t go fishing with him any more.”

“I’ll do as I like.”

“I said you won’t go, and you won’t.”

“What right have you to say? You give me nothing. Look at the dresses I wear! I can’t remember the last time you made love to me.”

There was a long silence. Augusta felt her body taking shape in the black, pulling all out of proportion. Her feet and hands felt too large, her head too big. She was a cartoon figure. None of this was real. She couldn’t be living this life. How had she got here?

“I’m tired,” Karl said finally. “We work such long hours.”

“I found those magazines.” He said nothing to that. After a time he rolled over, turning his back to her. “He’s
not going to kill me off like he killed your mother,” she said. It was cruel, but there it was.

Karl sat up. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I heard.”

“He didn’t kill her. She killed herself.”

“Same thing. I see it now, how it happened. He killed her off in little bits. He took away her voice. Then he took away her hands. Then he took away her will.”

“You don’t understand. She was so sad. For years she was sad.”

“I understand exactly. I understand he’s doing that to you. And he’ll do it to me. But I won’t let him. You can stay here and die if you like, but I won’t.”

Karl said no more about the Reverend, and found ways to be busy most Saturday mornings when she drove herself into Chase. Olaf simply stopped speaking of her in any way. She might have been an unseen ghost rambling the house or, more to the point, a maid; after a day of work she still came home to make supper and clean house, but he didn’t acknowledge her presence.

Augusta began taking her supper alone, after the men had gone to bed, or when they were out doing evening chores. While they men ate supper she busied herself washing the lunch dishes, or sweeping dog hair from the floor, or washing laundry by hand. It was a hard life in those days before modern appliances. Cooking meant splitting wood and making a fire. Washing meant hauling water. She didn’t even have a toaster. In her early years of marriage she toasted bread on a contraption very much like
a small oven rack, taking off one of the round stove lids and placing the rack. Even when she worked out of the health unit in Kamloops as domestic help, keeping house was no easy task. Not every house had electricity yet, and many were without phones. A woman had to be fit to keep a house then; she had to have muscle.

Each morning she made herself a simple bag lunch of buttered homemade bread, a piece of cheese, an orange or apple, and a thermos of tea. She ate it on the bench in front of the health unit. It never occurred to her to eat in a restaurant. She couldn’t bring herself to pay what the clapboard outside the café next to the health unit advertised—a buck fifty for a bowl of soup and a sandwich that she could make herself at home. It was robbery. Yet one day she forgot her bag lunch and there she was, an hour’s drive from home, with a couple of hours to kill before her next job. She had taken extra afternoon work, as school was out during the summer and she didn’t have to drive the two handicapped children home. She’d have to feed herself somehow, and pass the time.

The café was nearly empty, as it was between coffee time and lunch time. It was an adventure for her, going inside. She chose a booth large enough to hold several people, because it was near the window, looking over the bench on which she sat most lunch hours. She stared at this bench, suddenly shy, unwilling, unable to look around the café, until the waitress came by with the menu and a glass of water. The waitress said, “You alone?”

Augusta stared at the woman’s apron. Her question felt like an indictment. Did she expect that Augusta was meeting some man? Or had Augusta missed a sign over the
door, like the ones over the bars that said
Women Must Be Accompanied by a Gentleman?
“Alone?” she said.

“Is anyone else joining you? Lunch hour starts in about fifteen minutes. The place gets pretty crowded.”

“No, no it’s just me.”

“Well, you can sit here if you want, but if a big group comes in I might have to move you over to one of the smaller tables.”

“I won’t be long.”

“Pardon?”

“I said I can’t stay long. I have to get back to work.”

“All right then. Just so you know.”

“I’ll get a sandwich. What you have on the board outside.”

“The soup and sandwich?”

“Yes, that’s fine.”

“All righty. Coffee?”

“Yes. No. Tea, please.”

It was only then that she looked around at the place. It was a small café called the Silver Grill (later she found out from Joe that the locals called it “The Swill”). The whole place smelled of tomato soup and fried onions. Someone sitting at the counter on one of those spinning stools could watch as the cook grilled his cheese sandwich. Parallel to the counter and grill, one long line of high-backed red booths ran along the window. Augusta sat in one of these. In between the booths and counter was a row of small tables. The blue-green walls were bare except for a monkey calendar over the grill and a large, delicately carved wooden clock that hung over the door. It was like a large cuckoo clock except that, as the clock hit twelve and its
doors opened, a stage emerged on which several brightly coloured figures circled in and out of the clock, dancing to a lively music-box tune. The figures were little men and women chased by Death, a skeleton in black robes holding a scythe. Augusta was enchanted. She’d never seen anything like it. She watched the clockwork people, spellbound, until the music-box tune played itself out and the stage and all its figures retreated.