A Recipe for Bees (5 page)

“He’s also the patron saint of those with epilepsy, as well as lovers, of course.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. It’s true. Gabe showed me in one of his books.”

“Then Saint Valentine is the one we should be praying to today. Gabe’s a perfect candidate, a beekeeper who has fits.”

Augusta laughed despite herself, then felt the lump of worry well up in her throat. Even without the vision, she would have known something was wrong with Gabe, long before he had that seizure. He had always been such a calm man; not even Joy’s stormy moods would faze him. But
now his own mood switched from honeyed light to thunderstorm in a heartbeat. He slept more than a grown man should and still walked around exhausted. He was fired from his construction job because he couldn’t keep up. To Joy it seemed like pure laziness. She’d come home from the work that now paid their bills and have to clean house and make supper besides, because Gabe had nothing ready. He’d be sitting in his big green armchair, dozing. When it came time to harvest the honey from his own hives and bottle it for sale, he needed help from Joy, as he never had before.

It was Gabe who had collected the hive Augusta had now. When that swarm of honeybees landed on Rose’s fence at the back of the garden, it seemed like Providence to Augusta, because she had been telling Rose not two days before how much she missed having a hive of her own. The bees were clustered in a ball hanging from the fence. Rose told Augusta she thought there must be some round structure under them that they clung to, some construction of honeycomb they had created; she said it couldn’t possibly be all bees. But it was all bees. Layer on layer of bees on bees, the outer ones jittering around and occasionally lifting off for short flights before returning to the globe. Under that first covering Augusta showed Rose the second layer of bees, sitting quietly, clinging to each other by the legs. They had created this marvellous fabrication with their own bodies.

Augusta phoned Gabe, and he came up the same day with his gear and a new box of frames and foundation. The only protective clothing he wore was a pair of yellow rubber gloves. He rarely got stung, though Joy was stung all the time when she helped him. Augusta herself could expect
ten stings a day when harvesting. Honeybees tended to sting people in places where they sweated, like under the arms or waistband, where their animal scent was strongest. The bees were grumpy at the end of honey flow, as there was less nectar to collect and nothing to keep them occupied. They were protective of the ripening honey as it was all they had to see them through winter. The gloves she wore while working with them at such times were peppered with stingers. When she held the gloves up to the light, the stingers that stuck out of the leather looked like thistle spurs.

It wasn’t that the bees ignored Gabe. They were interested in him, attracted to his sweet scent. They swarmed around him, lit on his arms and face, and got tangled in the fine hairs at the top of his head where his hairline was retreating. Like all good beekeepers he kept his movements slow and steady to avoid agitating them, but Augusta believed that they didn’t see him as a threat because he smelled so wonderful. He smelled like the hive.

Gabe set the bee box under the swarm, then gave the fence one sharp tap. Rather than flying, startled, all over the place, the bees fell in a clump into the box with all its frames and the comb foundation on which they would store their honey. They sounded crunchy as they fell into the hive, like breakfast cereal poured into a bowl. With his gloved hand Gabe brushed the few that still clung to the fence into the box. Augusta ran her hand over the bees that crawled atop and between the foundation frames. They were warm, familiar.

Augusta hadn’t realized how ill Gabe had become until that day Rose drove her back from the seniors’ centre
because she was expecting Joy to arrive for a visit. Karl had stayed behind to finish off a card came. When they got home Joy was waiting in Augusta’s apartment. “You’re late,” she said to Augusta. “Why are you always late? Doesn’t my life matter? Don’t you care that I’ve got things to do? It’s like the whole world revolves around you. Other people have things they’ve got to do.”

“I’m sorry,” said Augusta. “I didn’t know you were in a hurry today.”

“That’s not the point. You could be on time, for Christ’s sake.”

Augusta and Rose both gasped. There was righteous Joy taking the Lord’s name in vain. Joy put her hand to her mouth, then she was crying.

“Rose, would you mind putting on the kettle?” asked Augusta. She took the Kleenex box over to Joy and sat on the couch next to her.

“I think he’s nuts,” said Joy. “He’s like Jekyll and Hyde. One minute he’s all sweet and nice and the next he’s yelling at me.”

“Gabe?”

“He never used to yell. We hardly ever got into fights, you know? Now he yells at me for no good reason. It’s like he’s some other guy.”

“Maybe he’s depressed,” said Augusta.

“We don’t go out any more or visit friends, because he can’t carry on a conversation. I’m not even sure I love him any more.” Joy blew her nose into the tissue Augusta had given her. “Now God’s talking to him.”
God?
thought Augusta. While working on the hives or relaxing in the house, Gabe would get rushes of emotion, a sensation of
expansion, as if he were ballooning outward, moving into everything that surrounded him. He said the feelings were pregnant with import and there were words attached to them, words he could never get out. He would rush to Joy and say, “I understand.” He’d gesture excitedly with his hands, trying to get the words out. “Everything.”

“You understand everything?”

“Yes. Sort of. Oh, shit. It’s gone.”

“You had an idea? Or what?”

“No, more than that. Like a light. Like—”

“God?”

“Yes, like that.”

As Gabe described it to Joy later on, the feeling sounded like the times when she couldn’t come up with the name of a person she’d known for ever, a name that was on the tip of her tongue, the fumbling feeling of searching for a missing word. Only for Gabe the inability to find it went on for a long time and was accompanied by washes of transcendence, the effervescent emotions that might attend a visitation by an angel or, for others, a UFO sighting. “Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” he said to Joy.

“Yes. No.”

Crazy, yes, Augusta thought. On the other hand, Joy went to see her pastor to find out why God wasn’t talking to
her
. God was talking to Gabe, a non-believer—a man who’d
gone back to the world
, who’d
strayed from faith
, a
backslider
, a
black sheep
—and not to her. Gabe had been pulled into that born-again stuff after his parents died, but he didn’t buy into it any more, though Augusta was unsure of what he did believe. God talked to people in Joy’s church. Any time someone got a good idea, or any idea for that
matter, thought Augusta, they said, “The Lord spoke to me.” A humble lot, she supposed, if they never believed they had an idea of their own. Augusta went to her own church most Sundays but didn’t much care for Joy’s; more to the point, the things her daughter believed made her laugh. In a fit of exasperation over her mother’s beliefs Joy had once said, “How are you going to feel when I’m caught in the rapture and carried to heaven and you’re left down here?”

Augusta laughed. “Well, I’d miss you. But I’d be quite all right here, with Karl and Rose and everyone at the seniors’ centre.”

Maybe she shouldn’t have laughed. It was all very serious to Joy, no joke at all. She really did imagine that the end times were so imminent that any minute now she’d be sucked up to heaven by a cosmic vacuum cleaner, leaving her poor unbelieving mother here on earth. How Joy had come to believe the things she did was beyond Augusta. She didn’t get it from me, she thought. Augusta had her own brand of faith, one she had often described to Rose and other ladies at the church as a gardener’s faith, one that died down in winter and grew in spring with the resurrection of nature. Much of the time she didn’t know what to believe, but in spring and summer, when she worked in the abundance of a garden—felt the mud between her toes, tasted the ecstasy in a strawberry eaten fresh off the plant—she had to believe God was a sensualist who enjoyed a good tomato. Augusta couldn’t help but feel that the God of Joy’s church was mighty thin.

“I wouldn’t feel slighted,” the preacher had advised Joy, when she told him God talked to Gabe.

“But why Gabe?” said Joy. “He doesn’t believe.”

“Maybe he’s calling Gabe home.”

“But God has never talked to me. And I’ve never had any miracles. I’m not asking for big ones, just little ones, like Mrs. Tanner’s when she found that five-dollar bill inside the outhouse at the park when she was broke.”

“But you have faith. What do you need with miracles when you have faith? Gabe doesn’t have faith and so God is trying to get his attention, trying to tell him something. But God may be too big for Gabe to handle. That’s why he can never remember what God has said to him.”

“But what if it isn’t God?”

“Well, that’s just it. It may be the devil playing tricks with his mind.”

One would think a preacher would have an easier time telling God from the devil, Augusta thought, as Joy told her all this. As it turned out, Gabe was having little seizures in his left temporal lobe, under his forehead. His surgeon told him that seizures in this area of the brain affected language, but also created the sensations Gabe was talking about. A sense of awe, words that seemed to carry a divine message, a feeling of profound meaning. Gabe’s spirit of God was nothing but a cascade of electrical impulses flowing through part of his brain, a nest of excited bees in his basket hive. Despite her opinion of Joy’s church, Augusta found herself disappointed by this. What a bitter pill to swallow, if the Spirit really was only a manifestation of the flesh.

But then, she wondered, what was she to make of her own occasional premonitions? They suggested so much, that eternity had surfaced into the temporal for a moment.
Was
this
God talking? she wondered. Bees danced their elaborate dances to tell each other where the best nectar was. It was a language that had for so long gone unnoticed, and then been misunderstood by beekeepers, because bees danced in the dark of their hive and on the vertical floor of the honeycomb, hidden away. It was a language of touch and smell, not sound, as they gleaned information by touching the bodies of the dancing bees with their antennae. They deduced the type of flower the dancing bee had located by the scent of it still lingering on its body. Dancing bees offered other foragers tastes of the nectar they’d collected so they would know what they’d find. It was a language so unlike that of humans as to be nearly unrecognizable. Was the language of visions and dreams—the strange, nearly incomprehensible images and symbols—God’s language? Why didn’t He speak up, she wondered, and say things clearly in a language she could understand? God seemed to be as much a tease as that old man down the road from the apartment, hoarding his garden to himself, allowing her only the bittersweet twigs she could steal. Why didn’t he come out and introduce himself, she wondered, instead of watching the world from behind the curtains of a darkened window.

The day after Gabe was hospitalized, Joy picked up Augusta at the train station and dropped her off at the hospital cafeteria so she could refresh herself before going to see him. Joy then went home to catch a nap. The cafeteria had floor-to-ceiling windows looking over landscaped grounds. Augusta found herself a table right by one of these glass walls and, as she drank her tea, a small black rabbit bounded across the lawn right up to the window. Domestic
rabbits ran wild over the whole south island. She had seen them on the hospital grounds when visiting friends from the seniors’ centre; rabbits speckled or tan, off-white or black, grazing on the lawns or begging from visitors who fed them limp lettuce from plastic bags. This rabbit of Augusta’s sniffed the glass at her shoes and sat up, clearly begging for food, apparently unaware of the glass that separated them. The rabbit was so trusting that Augusta could hardly believe it. The creature seemed like a gift, a divine comfort. For a moment the anxiety that had tightened her neck slipped away.

After her tea, Augusta found her way to the intensive care unit of the neurology ward. The sign on the door said, “Knock and wait for a nurse to assist you.” Augusta knocked and waited a long time out in the hallway, unsure if she should knock again or not. The pain in her hip gnawed away at her. Some kind soul dressed in white had seen her breathless confusion over the buttons in the elevator, asked her where she was going, pressed the appropriate buttons, and told her which floor to get off at. Then there was another agonizing walk to the nursing station, and still another down a corridor to the door of the unit where her son-in-law lay. She was staring down that hallway at an elderly woman tied into a wheelchair when the nurse finally opened the door. “Gabe Suskind?” Augusta asked her.

“Are you family?”

“I’m his mother.”

The nurse led her into the long narrow room and to a bed occupied by a man Augusta didn’t at first recognize. “Gabe?”

“You can try talking to him if you like,” said the nurse. “But please keep it down.”

It was Gabe lying in the bed, but it also wasn’t. His hair against the pillow was as carroty as ever, but his skin was nearly as white as the sheet he lay on, and none of his expressions was there, certainly not his smile. The nurses were keeping him sedated so he wouldn’t move around, as he had for much of the day before. A bit of dribble slid down the side of his mouth. There was no bee on his lips. Nevertheless, here was the vision she had seen in her kitchen the day she had pulled herself up from the floor to open the door for Joy. She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped the saliva from the corner of Gabe’s mouth, then leaned into the bed rail. There was no place to sit. One bed was arm’s length from the next, and in between were an assortment of IV stands and drip lines. Augusta shifted her weight carefully, to dampen the pain in her hip and to steady herself, so she wouldn’t hobble and knock something over.