A Recipe for Bees (27 page)

A few days into her new job, she phoned Sara McKay again and asked her to ask Karl and Joy to come to Kamloops the next day, Saturday, and meet her at the Silver Grill café. Once they had ordered their meals, she regretted the choice of café. She didn’t like having Karl there, in the place she still thought of as hers and Joe’s. She felt nervous that Joe might walk in the door and discover her sitting with her husband. Joy slouched angrily in the corner of the booth beside Karl and only picked at her food. “Can we go now?” she said.

Karl ignored her. “You’ll clean house for him, a stranger, but you won’t come home and straighten things for your own husband and daughter.”

“It’s a job,” said Augusta. “I get paid.”

“If it was income you were after—”

“You’d pay me a wage for keeping the house?”

“Well, no. But we could have come up with something for you.”

Augusta glanced at the couple sitting beside them, at one of the tables for two, and lowered her voice. “Don’t you see that all I want is a bit of independence? I’ve never had anything to call my own.”

“You’ve got the farm, don’t you? You keep reminding me it’s yours.”

“But you run it. You decide what’s to be done. You’re the one taking in and laying out the money.” The waitress came by with the bill. “I’ll pay for my lunch,” said Augusta. She put her purse on the table and searched it for change. The bill was only a dollar seventy-five. She must have enough. But she came up two bits short. “Karl, could you loan me a quarter for this, until I get paid next week?”

Karl picked up the bill. “Keep your change,” he said, and stood.

Joy got up after him. “Oh, you’re independent all right,” she said.

“Wait,” said Augusta. Joy turned but Karl, not hearing, walked out the door. “I miss you.” Joy looked down at her feet, turned, and walked out under the music-box clock.

Augusta collected the change she had counted out on the table. Enough for a few cups of coffee. All she had until the old man paid her in a week’s time. What was she doing?
She gave her notice to the old man that night, and packed her things and left for home after making him lunch the next day.

When she arrived, Sara McKay’s Mercury Comet was in the yard, though the International was nowhere around. The kitchen door was open. Sara was at the sink, cleaning fish. She was short and portly, matronly, though she wasn’t much older than Augusta. “Sara, what are you doing here?”

The woman jumped. “Good Lord, you scared me.”

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Does Karl know you’re here?”

“Of course he does. He’s the one who hired me.”

“Hired you?”

“To keep house. Make meals. I’m staying in that room there.” She pointed at Augusta’s sitting-room. The door was open and all the furniture had been moved around. Augusta’s silk parasol was hanging upside-down from the roof so the lightbulb shone through it. “We got to talking the night I came over to give him your message. I’d been looking for a job.”

“What about Roger?”

“I left Roger. Kind of funny, eh? You left Karl, then I left Roger to come here.”

“I didn’t leave Karl.”

Sara snorted. “You say so. Karl will be back shortly. Joy will be home from school in about ten minutes. Are you staying to dinner?”

“What did you do to my cupboards?”

“I arranged them so they make sense.”

“They made sense before.”

“You say so.”

Sara didn’t have the skillet out. Only a pot of water sat on the stove. “Aren’t you going to fry those?” said Augusta.

“Karl doesn’t like his fish fried. He likes them boiled, like I do them.”

Who did she think she was, telling Augusta what her own husband liked or didn’t like, as if she knew better? That night Augusta, Karl, Joy, and Sara ate a silent dinner of bland, tasteless fish. Sara kept glancing at Karl, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was intent on his plate and the fish he ate hungrily; he’d never eaten Augusta’s fish with that much energy. When he was done he patted his belly and smiled at the woman and said, “That was good.” Augusta looked at Sara, and at Karl, and at Sara.

“What’s going on here?” she said later, after pulling Karl outside.

“What do you mean?”

“Sara McKay, that’s what I mean.”

“Joy and I couldn’t keep up school and farm work and the house besides. So when she offered on Friday night, I hired her.”

“I thought you were broke. That’s why I went off to bring in a bit of money. Now you pay that woman to keep house when you’d give me nothing.”

“You’re my wife. I can’t expect a stranger to work for nothing. That’s slavery.”

Augusta groaned and threw her hands in the air. “What do you want from me?” said Karl. “You left. I made the best of it and now you don’t like that either.”

“What I want is some respect. What I want is some income, something I can call my own, a reason for getting
up in the morning. I need to get out, to have some friends.”

“You’ve got all that here. If money’s what you’re after, we can work something out. Not much, but something.”

“It’d still be your money, not mine.”

“It’s my money I give to that woman, and she seems happy enough.”

“It’s not your money she wants.”

“Now what do you mean by that?”

“Don’t you see how she’s looking at you?”

“Don’t go off—”

But Augusta wasn’t listening. She stormed off into the kitchen, where Sara was washing the supper dishes. “You’re fired,” she said.

Sara wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “What?”

“Out. Get your stuff. In fact, I’ve got a job for you. A live-in situation. Just perfect for you.”

“You can’t—”

“Yes I can. This is my house. My farm. I own it. Karl doesn’t own any of it. Did you know that? Only the sheep and machinery, and the bank owns half of that. If you thought you were working yourself into a cosy situation, you were sadly mistaken.”

“I didn’t—”

“Go on. Get packed.”

“What does Karl have to say about all this?”

“That depends,” said Karl. He was leaning against one side of the doorframe. “That mean you’re coming home?” he said to Augusta.

Augusta sighed. “I guess,” she said. “If you’ll have me.”

Sara threw down the towel and marched into her room—Augusta’s room.

“She’ll need to be paid.”

“You know where my wallet is.” He nodded at the pants hanging on a coat hook by the door, then turned and walked off into the cornfield, which was nothing but mud right then as the snow had just that week melted. Augusta shook her head at his naiveté. He’d trust that woman and leave his wallet any old place. But she herself should have been watching Sara as she packed her things into burlap bags, because the silk parasol the Japanese girl-bride had given Augusta so many years before went missing for good.

Augusta spent days after that cleaning the house, rearranging the kitchen, putting the furniture back in place, erasing all evidence of the other woman’s presence. When she’d set the kitchen to order and washed all the floors, she started work on the dark, hidden-away places, the top cupboards and the pantry, the attic and beneath the beds. Karl’s old suitcase was under the bed, where he always kept it. Augusta slung it onto the bed and opened it, already angry, yet hoping he’d thrown out the filthy magazines. He hadn’t. He’d added to the collection, but along with those magazines there was also a book in the suitcase, a book unlike any she’d ever seen him read, called
How to Love a Woman
. It was a lovemaking manual with tasteful, instructive drawings, not smut, and chapters on courting a woman, assessing her likes and dislikes and the ways she might like to be touched, and commenting on things that should never be done. Had he been thinking of her, that she might come back? Or had he been thinking of Sara McKay? Surely not Sara.

Augusta put the book and the suitcase back under the bed, then went downstairs and left the house. She wrapped
her sweater around her. It was past noon and still a fog hung over the valley, draping itself over the barn and outbuildings. Hoar frost gently snowed down from the birch and glistened on the bare lilac bushes near the house. There was still a bite of winter in the air, though they would begin seeding in less than two months’ time. It was so very quiet. Even the occasional bleating of a lamb for its mother was hushed by the heavy mist. She headed towards the barn, thinking she’d check for newborn lambs. But there was someone ahead of her, walking among the outbuildings—a dark figure masked in fog. “Hello?” said Augusta. Karl was in town and Joy was at school. Neither of them would be back before four. “Are you looking for Karl?”

The figure kept walking, slowly, as if he hadn’t heard her. “He’s in town,” Augusta called out, then regretted it. She shouldn’t be admitting that she was home alone. She retrieved a shovel Karl had left propped against the implement shed and, carrying it between her hands like a shotgun, made her way past the many granaries and sheds towards the barn. The figure had disappeared. Had he slipped between the outbuildings? She walked slowly, checking each of the passageways between the buildings. “Hello?” she called out. “Can I help you with something?” A chill went through her. Why hadn’t she thought to put on a coat? “I’ve seen you, you know.” Maybe it was some kid out to scare her. Or maybe it was one of Joy’s many boyfriends sneaking around. “If you’re looking for Joy, she’s not here.”

Augusta turned to walk between two granaries. Whoever it was must have gone behind the outbuildings. She
turned the corner at the back of the buildings and there was the figure, trotting off into the fog. Was it a woman? “You there,” she said. “What do you want? What are you sneaking around here for?” Augusta followed the figure, heading towards the honey house. She couldn’t see the building at first, it was so hidden in fog. But she heard the rusty squeak of the hinge on the door she hadn’t opened in years, and then the door slammed shut. There was no way she was going inside. The window she’d spied her mother and Harry through all those years ago was filthy, covered in fly specks and dust. She pulled the sleeve of her sweater down over the heel of her palm and rubbed a circle in the grit. The inside of the honey house was pretty much as Helen had left it: the Dandy Perfection woodstove and the honey extractor, the rows of honey jars on the shelves above. And there was Helen, standing with one hand on a stack of beehive boxes, smiling. Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders; she was wearing the dress Augusta had cut down the back to bury her in. She patted the hive box.

“Mom?” said Augusta. “Mom!” She ran around to the door and scrambled inside, but there was no one there. Just the many empty hive boxes, and all her mother’s equipment. Augusta sat on a stack of hive boxes and hugged herself. “Mom?” A few lambs bleated in the barn, the sound so muffled by fog that they seemed to be a great distance away. She looked around at the equipment in the dim light, then stood to inspect the extractor, the bottles, the boxes themselves. Except for a layer of dust they were all in good shape. The boxes only needed a few nails and a fresh layer of paint.

• • •

“I’d like twenty dollars,” said Augusta.

“Twenty? What for?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“You know we’re low on money.”

“You were willing to give Sara McKay money; I think you can spare me a little.”

“All right, all right. But I’d like to know what it’s for.”

“Bees,” said Augusta.

Joy looked up from her plate. “Bees?”

The bees came in the mail, buzzing away in a wood-framed screened box. Honey was popular again, as everyone was suddenly concerned about eating natural things, wholesome things, when all through the fifties it had been sugar they’d wanted. She could get as much as thirty pounds of honey off each hive at first harvest, and she’d put the honey in bottles with pretty labels. It wouldn’t be that much extra work. A beekeeper needed to make only eight or ten visits to each hive a year, checking for problems like raiding by other bees or wasps, covering the hives come winter, feeding sugar-water syrup to help them along, examining the hive to see that the queen was alive and well and that there was lots of brood, and adding supers as the hive grew. If she didn’t give the bees enough room, half the hive would turn emigrant on her and swarm off to find a new home. But if she could catch swarms from wild hives, or swarms that had taken off from other beekeepers, early enough in the year she could put them into new hives. The swarm, like immigrants, would be much more productive than the established hives.

Augusta had Joy help her retrieve Helen’s hive from the honey house. It was relatively easy, just a matter of
climbing into the attic and cutting the combs down one by one. But the bees were more active this time of year, and they didn’t take kindly to having their home moved. Augusta dressed Joy in overalls, gloves, and a bee veil, and had her stand at the base of the ladder as Augusta handed down honeycombs to her. Joy then put the combs in bee boxes that Augusta had made ready. All was going well until a few bees made their way inside Joy’s veil and she ran off shrieking, trying to yank the veil off. Augusta climbed down the ladder and ran after her, trying to get her to stop, but she couldn’t keep up with her. Finally she stopped and watched Joy run around. Joy eventually ran back to Augusta, with one glove off and the veil half off her face. Augusta calmly removed the veil and inspected the few stings the girl had received on her face. She took her into the house and put a poultice of baking soda and water on the stings.

“If you don’t panic, they usually don’t sting even when they get inside the veil,” she said.

“I hate bees. I’m never helping you again.”

“Oh, come on. Do the stings hurt any more?”

“No.”

“When you’re thrown, the thing to do is get right back on the horse,” said Augusta. She took Joy’s hand and led her back outside.

“Where are we going? I don’t want to go near those bees again.”

“Don’t worry, we’re not going there.”

“Where then?”

“You’ll see.” Augusta led her around back of the barn, where one of Helen’s old hives had built a home inside the
barn walls. It had grown over the years and had swarmed many times. There was a swarm now that had landed in a clump only a few feet from the original colony. It clung to the wall at about shoulder height. Joy stood back, but Augusta reached up and ran her hand over the bodies of the bees, petting them as her mother had. A few bees flew off and hovered around her, but none seemed interested in attacking. “Come, try it,” said Augusta.