A Recipe for Bees (34 page)

A
UGUSTA TOOK
K
ARL’S
hand and together they walked onto the balcony to wave across the garden as Joy got in the car and drove off. Karl put his arm around Augusta. “She’s a brave girl,” he said. “I don’t think I could stand it if you got sick like Gabe did. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Yes you would,” said Augusta. She cupped his face in the palm of her hand and kissed him. It was a sweet kiss. He tasted of peppermint and the cookies he’d eaten that afternoon. He gave her shoulders a squeeze, kissed her forehead, and walked through the living-room back to the bedroom. She heard him rustling around in there. Likely wrapping an anniversary gift, she thought. She felt a great tenderness for him wash over her. She wanted to run her fingers over the papery skin on the back of his hand; to touch and be surprised yet again by the youthful flesh hidden away from sun under shirt and pants. She wanted to stroke the hair in those secret spots, hair that was no longer coarse and coiled but had grown thin and smooth with age, a baby’s hair in grown-up places.

Would Joy and Gabe’s marriage survive into old age, she wondered. Would it even survive these next few years as Gabe recovered? She knew her daughter well enough to know that Joy believed God had given her the miracle she’d been after, that He had healed Gabe. She doubted that Joy gave much credit to the surgeon. But of course the surgery was no miracle, and it would be a long time before Gabe was truly healed. One of the nurses at the hospital had given Joy and Augusta a book on head injuries, and what Augusta had read made it clear that Gabe would be a real handful until he recovered, and that he might never recover completely. He wouldn’t be able to do much or concentrate, and it would be a long time before he realized what had happened to him, that he wasn’t as capable as he had been before. He would have to be watched constantly, because he might endanger himself, and other people, if he tried things he could no longer do. It would be some time before he was able to work, or even drive. Augusta wasn’t sure Joy was up to managing all that, or if she fully understood what she was up against. Did she think everything was going to go back to normal now, Augusta wondered, under God’s divine hand?

She looked down at her beehive in Rose’s garden. The bees were calmer; there were fewer bees dancing around the hive. Now, in late August, when there were fewer flowers and honey flow was coming to an end, her bees made do with the nectar and pollen of asters. But they longed for the sweeter nectars; they watched the dances of returning foragers more closely than they did at other times of the year, hoping for news of fields of sweet clover. When she had still been on the farm, she had had to be careful to keep
the car windows shut, because the bees, then more than ever, were drawn to the smell of honey drifting from the warm jars and tin buckets she delivered to her customers. They would hover in clouds around the car, confused by the sweet smell, muddled by longing for something they couldn’t find.

Augusta went back inside the apartment and stretched out on the couch. She felt pleasantly emptied, as if she were resting after some great effort. It was the relief of finally hearing about Gabe, she thought. She had wondered briefly if that dream of the pit full of flowers had been a premonition of Gabe’s death, and not her own. Now she knew it was her own. But what did it matter? Her mother had been right, that day Augusta described the vision of Helen’s death. She was no better off knowing about it beforehand. Augusta didn’t know when she’d die or how. She didn’t know any more than anyone ever did about their own death. She was perhaps worse off, she thought, for all her worrying. She wondered if any of it was even real. She wondered if the visions she saw—of Gabe, of her mother’s coffin, of Karl’s mother walking out into the snow, of Helen in the honey house—were products of her own powerful imagination, the back of her head offering warnings and solutions, in the way night-time dreams sometimes solved problems. Had years of telling and retelling stories, a little differently each time, obscured her memory of what had actually happened? Had she really told Karl that Manny would drown a week before it happened? Yes, she thought so, and Karl said he remembered her telling him. But maybe what he remembered was the story she had told so many times, with all its additions and exclusions, all the
fuzzy details that had found their way into that story from others. Sometimes she believed her own stories as truth; other times she believed them as fiction.

Karl slid back into the living-room and turned on the television for the evening news. This disappointed her. When she had heard him coming, she had thought he was bringing out her anniversary surprise. “Didn’t you have plans—” she said.

“What?”

“Did you have plans for supper?”

“No. I hadn’t thought about it.” He
had
forgotten. Augusta got up and slammed around in the kitchen, taking out her disappointment on the cutlery and plates, and prepared Karl a pointedly modest supper—sardines, fried potatoes, bread, and tea—a small revenge because he had not thought to take her out for an anniversary supper. They ate in front of the television set. Because the day was hot and the fans were going, the volume on the TV was turned high so Karl could hear it. They didn’t try to talk.

Her hands were stained purple from the blackberries she’d picked that morning. She wished she’d had some container to collect them in, as Esther had. She would have taken them home to bake a blackberry pie. No, she would have baked
two
pies, and taken one down to the old man’s house and left it there on his doorstep, with a note:
Love your garden!
Or maybe she would have drummed up the courage and knocked on his door and given him the pie herself. Maybe she would go armed with a clutch of dahlia tubers, to exchange for some bittersweet, and start a friendship that way. Or maybe she would invite him to one of the many garden shows at the civic centre or at one of the
churches, and then work up to dinner or an evening out. But there was Karl to contend with, and all the gossiping women at the seniors’ centre. And besides that, the old man of the garden seemed as uninterested in companionship as that old man she’d worked for in Kamloops so many years ago. She hadn’t been able to engage him in a game of crib, much less a bit of conversation; the old man of the garden showed all the signs of being much the same. Her feelings for him were conjured up; this was as much a fantasy as her first love for a demon-possessed boy.

After dinner Augusta chastised herself for her sulkiness. After all, she could have made dinner reservations herself. She decided to do something cheerful. She went into the kitchen to make popcorn with the popper Karl had given her one Christmas, a contraption she hadn’t quite mastered. But her absence from the living-room, or the sound of popping, brought Karl into the kitchen. He said, “Shouldn’t you warm the machine first?” And “You don’t put butter inside the machine!’ When, in frustration, she dumped the popcorn into the sink, he said, “It’ll plug up the drain!” Augusta began to cry and Karl, because he had never known what to do with tears, went back to the television set.

Augusta slapped the kitchen counter, then stomped into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. It was hot in there; the sun had cooked the south side of the apartment building. She drew the curtains and plunked herself on the bed.
Impossible, niggardly man
, she thought. How could she have spent so many years with him? She lay in the dark, sweltering room, fuming. He should have come to see what was wrong, to make amends.

A couple of months before, Augusta had dreamed that she was in an expensive carriage pulled by two black high-spirited stallions and driven by a man in tails and a top hat. This man wasn’t Karl but he was her husband. She was young, dressed in high fashion for the Victorian era, in a black dress with ruffles around the neck, and she had a muff that she was proud of because it had real fur trim. She put her hands in the muff and showed it off to those passing by in carriages and motor cars. But no one would look; no one even glanced her way. It was as if she were invisible. All around them, in the night, a carnival was going on. She could hear the music and laughter of crowds, but as there were no lights she couldn’t see anything but the many carriages and cars that passed close by.

Her husband, this Victorian gentleman, pulled the carriage to a stop in front of a large black building, stepped out, and strutted up the dark steps and disappeared. Where had he gone, she wondered. No light leaked through an open door. There were no windows. She waited.

A coach stopped nearby and a group of elegant young men stepped out, lighting cigarettes in silver holders. She tried to overhear their conversation but couldn’t—the music of the carnival overwhelmed their voices. They were handsome men, just boys, really, so much younger than her husband. She waved to them, opened the carriage door, and lifted her long dress to expose a shapely young leg, but the boys didn’t glance her way either.

A parade of horse skeletons pranced by in the dark, glowing phosphorous, and then the parade and the carnival music disappeared abruptly as her husband walked back down the steps. As he made his way to the driver’s side he
became Karl, dressed in the outfit he wore on the farm: white shirt and armbands, wool pants held up by suspenders, and a big, wide-brimmed hat. The fashionable carriage and horses rippled and dissolved into the old International they had become engaged in. As Karl turned the truck around, the elegant young men in the carriage finally saw Augusta. They nodded in recognition and faded away. She knew she couldn’t tell Karl about any of what she had seen at the carnival—the gleaming skeleton horses, the longing she felt for the young men—how could she tell him? So they drove in silence up the familiar dusty hills of their early marriage.

Augusta went into the bathroom and washed her face with cold water; she soaked a facecloth with water and wiped the sweat from the back of her neck, from between her breasts, under her arms, behind her knees. She put on a fresh dress and went back into the coolness of the sitting-room to watch television from her chair next to Karl’s. Once there she tried to ignore him, to keep a stony silence, but her anger didn’t last; it drained away. She forgave him his inadequacies, just as he had forgiven hers so many times in the past, because Karl, resourceful as all farmers were, found a way to say the things he wished he had said over the years, all the things he had been unable to say. It wasn’t much; a simple gesture he had been planning for a day or two, a message contained in flowers. He handed Augusta a bouquet tied in ribbon that he had hidden beside his chair: a clutch of pearly everlastings with white woolly stems, and flowers that would last until the first snows of winter.