A Recipe for Bees (23 page)

“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 room 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 layered 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.

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.”