A Recipe for Bees (9 page)

The dances went on in the schoolhouse, with the desks pushed back into the corner, on Saturday nights—but only until midnight, as right on into the fifties there was no dancing on the sabbath. The RCMP drove there from Chase just before twelve to make sure of it. No alcohol was allowed inside a public building so there was no booze in the schoolhouse. There were few drinking places in the area at the time—Yep Num, who owned the café and
rooming-house in Chase, rented a room to men so they could sit and drink—but there were plenty of bootleggers. In Chase an English butcher named Miller made beer and sold it along with his meat, and there were stills hidden all over the mountain sides, especially across the lake in Celista. Home brew was passed from man to man around the back of the schoolhouse, where the horses were tied and where fights were taken. There was almost always a fight at these things, though no man ever seemed to get seriously hurt. The Christmas dance was the worst for it. If there was a fencing dispute, or a suspicion over a missing cow, or an unpaid debt, the bitter feelings floated to the surface on booze, or were carried to the front on petty jealousies over who danced more than his share with the schoolteacher.

When a fight erupted it went outside and took all the men with it. It was so like a cock-fight, with a circle of men egging the fighters on. The women and children were left in the schoolroom by themselves to wait for the men to come to their senses. No nice woman dared go outside, not at any point, not until it was time to go home and she and her children left accompanied by her husband. No woman except one of the Grafton girls, who was given to sitting in cars with men and their beer. When the fight was done the men swaggered back in, laughing, to seek out partners for the next dance.

Manny got into a few of those fights himself as he challenged any man who had more than one dance with his wife. The son of one of those men got a group of boys together the following Monday and threw rocks at Augusta. She was perhaps eleven at the time. They followed her
home after school for that whole week, hurling rocks at her, almost always missing, but terrorizing her out of her skull. One of them was a snotty-nosed Grafton boy, she remembered that.

What moved boys to throw rocks, she wondered now, as she drank her tea. Just today, boys had thrown rocks at the train. The train was passing a playing field behind a school, and along the fence that separated the tracks from the schoolyard boys were lined up, facing the train. Augusta couldn’t see the expressions on their faces, but she could see their hands raised and she lifted hers to wave back before realizing that they weren’t waving at the passing train. They were throwing rocks at it. One rock banged against the side of the train, and Augusta flinched back from the window. Boys had done that in her day as well, thrown rocks at trains, at the windows of abandoned homesteaders’ shacks, and at neighbours’ dogs, not to shoo them away but for the fun of it, to see the dog run. She supposed that was partly why those boys had thrown stones at her so many years ago. She had run home and, crying, breathless, finally told her mother about the boys’ harassment. The next day Manny walked with Augusta to school and, out on the school grounds, cuffed the ears of all three boys and told them to leave Augusta alone. Of course Manny’s visit only made things worse. The boys did stop throwing rocks at her, but took up words instead; every afternoon they ran after her, calling her all manner of obscenities. She wouldn’t tell Helen or Manny again. Instead she learned to avoid the boys on the schoolyard, to scuttle home right after school before they took a notion to go after her. She was always on guard, watching for them, and if the boys
came her way she fled, often to the girls’ five-seater outhouse behind the school. She avoided the eyes of boys, held herself close and contained, and learned to be invisible.

In the forties a man like Manny was called a leghorn rooster, after the small scrappy birds that strutted around the yard as if they owned it and dared anyone to say they didn’t. He might have even liked the nickname, as he was always going on about the “pecking order.” He saw the true natural order of things there in the chicken coop: man at the head, protective and paternal, and under him a hierarchy of women who in turn ruled over the children. He ignored the fact that given free run of the fields, the hens mated with nearly every rooster, not just the nastiest one, and that there were plenty of bossy hens who beat up on deferential roosters. Helen had one of those roosters in the scratch run at the time, a bird Manny had named Sorry, as he thought any rooster who let hens boss him around was a sorry rooster indeed.

He’d sometimes rant on about this sort of thing at the dinner table, stabbing his fork into a bit of chicken breast and swinging it in the air to make his point. “Those chickens out there, that’s your model for womanhood. They’re hard-working, thrifty, good mothers, they submit to the will of the rooster. On the other hand the rooster’s always scouting for danger, always scratching up feed for his hens and calling them over to eat it. There’s the ideal family.”

“So you want thirty wives, then?” said Helen.

“That’s not what I mean.” He tucked the chicken into his mouth and talked with his mouth full. “On the other hand that would be all right, wouldn’t it?”

“You wouldn’t last a day.”

“There you go, talking back at me.”

“Ah, go on with you.”

“No, really. What are they going to think of me in town if you’re never listening to a word I say, always giving me lip? They’ll think this is a woman-run house. They’ll laugh at me.”

“They already do.”

Manny’s face flushed. “I should be treated with respect in my home. You shouldn’t talk to me like that. Go cut me some more bread.”

The phone rang, startling all three of them. Karl was the one sitting closest to the phone, but he made no attempt to answer it. He was uncomfortable with phones; he would never answer it if Augusta was there with him, and if a call had to be made it was Augusta who did the dialling. She pulled the phone off the kitchen counter and placed it on the table beside her so she could check the call display to make sure it was Joy phoning. She didn’t feel like fielding well-meant questions from the women at the church or seniors’ centre about the outcome of Gabe’s surgery.

“Damn it,” she said. “It’s Ernest again.” Ernest Grey had been phoning for months. Augusta didn’t know him, or anything about him other than what she could guess from his phone calls. He still had an old rotary-dial phone; she could hear the click and spin on her answering machine as he tried redialling in his confusion, after reaching the answering machine. When she first heard that rotary dial she wondered briefly if there hadn’t been some accident in time, if someone from the past was dialling into her present to leave a message on her machine. But that was just a flight
of fancy. If Ernest were from the past, why would his name appear on her call display?

Ernest was ancient; his voice was cracked and faded, and his mind was slipping on him. He was trying to phone someone else when he phoned Augusta, someone named Linda. A daughter, perhaps? Augusta guessed he was living alone, and not in some home, because no one seemed to be there to stop or help him. Occasionally she answered the phone and explained once again that he had the wrong number. More often than not he would call only once, and that was the end of it for a while. But sometimes he’d try over and over, all through the day, until Augusta unplugged the phone. She hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those days. She didn’t like talking to him. He was befuddled and half deaf and she had to go over and over it, explaining the situation until he understood. She hated talking to him because the thought of being caught in her own dreams like that—living like a sleepwalker—scared her to death. She had watched Edna from the seniors’ centre, who was ninety-two and had a daughter who was a senior herself, decline into twilight over the last two years. No one wanted her sitting at their card table. She talked and talked, repeating herself over and over, because she forgot what she had just said. She used to know the games, but now she needed someone to coach her every step of the way. One day Faye Risby yelled at her, “If you don’t know the game, get out!”

Edna said, “You can’t tell me I’m dumb. I’ve got a right to be here.” Maybe so, but when there was a meeting now everyone tended to sit hurriedly, in long rows of seats that excluded Edna, so she was forced to sit in the front row alone.

Gabe was walking around the hospital in that kind of confused state for days after the seizure, making it clear he wanted to go home, though it was equally clear he had no idea where he was. He was only dimly aware of the nurses, the hospital bed, and the other patients in the intensive care ward. They all blended and disappeared into the fictions his mind created. That past week he had told Augusta and Joy that the first couple of days in hospital he thought he was sleeping on top of the washer and dryer at home, with his feet through the wall. If Joy went off to get a bite, and wasn’t there to stop him, he would pull out the catheter tube and try to use the washroom, though he wasn’t sure where it was and would go wandering out into the hallway with his gown open at the back. At one point he put the long blue plastic bedside urinal on his foot, thinking it was a shoe (Augusta knew another man, Ralph Fielding from the seniors’ centre, who did the same thing after a stroke. It made her wonder what was going on inside men’s heads that made them equate their penises with their feet).

Before the seizure Gabe had walked in his sleep now and again, a symptom of his illness. Joy once woke to find him poised and ready to urinate in the closet of their bedroom. She woke him in time, thankfully. Other times she’d wake in the night and find him sleeping in odd places, curled in a corner of the kitchen, or spread out on the floor of Joy’s sewing-room. He never remembered how he’d got there.

Augusta was a sleepwalker. A couple of months before, she had leapt out of bed in the night convinced the apartment was on fire. She ran into the kitchen, where she could see and smell the smoke and hear the fire alarm blaring in
the hall. Then all she could think of was getting back to Karl to wake him, as he wouldn’t be able to hear the alarm. She was desperate to reach him but somehow the space of living-room between the kitchen and the bedroom door stretched out of proportion, seemed so much longer than it was in reality. It took for ever to reach the bedroom, and when she finally did and cried out, “Wake up! There’s a fire!” the shrieking of the fire alarm stopped. There was no smoke. No fire. Even so, she made Karl help her check every electrical connection. She phoned Rose and made her go hunting around the apartment building for smoke. There was no fire. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been warned, of what she wasn’t sure.

Augusta had begun walking in her sleep in her teens. She’d clamber out her bedroom window, then run around the house. Climbing in was a good deal harder than jumping out, so at the point of return, when she had to figure her way back through the window, she’d begin to wake up, conscious of what she’d done but not why. She would sense the chill of the early morning, the dewy or sharply frosted grass under her feet, but only just barely, as in sleep one was aware of the surrounding darkness and that darkness became incorporated into the dream. Anxiety was the trigger for her sleepwalking. That dream she had about the fire followed the vision she had of Gabe with the bee on his lip. And the sleepwalking she did as a teen started after the vision she had of her mother’s death.

Just that day on the train, she had dreamed she had woken from sleep to find a hole had opened up in the train floor between her seat and Esther’s. There was no flash of passing ground as she would have expected. Instead,
extending from the floor, there was a rectangular pit of sorts, though there was no dirt. The walls were white and smooth, and lit up from within, in the way snow seemed to glow from within on the night of a full moon. Esther was still sitting with her, smiling, swaying with the train. Her basket had disappeared, presumably into the hole, but the shasta daisies were on her lap. She handed them to Augusta and invited her to throw the flowers into the hole. When she did, the pit was suddenly full of flowers. Augusta stood to jump into those flowers, but Esther said, “Wait a while.” And so they sat together, swaying with the train, talking of inconsequential things, with the pit of flowers absurdly open between their feet.

When Augusta awoke, into the real world this time, Esther was looking at her, smiling. “Did I snore?” said Augusta.

“No, you were laughing.”

That dream had the quality of a premonition, a dream foretelling her own death, though she didn’t want to believe that. Wasn’t she just preoccupied with Gabe’s illness? she wondered. With the possibility of his death, her worrying mind was manufacturing nightmares. Yet it hadn’t felt like a nightmare; Esther said she had laughed.

Augusta set the phone back on the kitchen counter, then glanced at Rose as she sipped her tea. She wouldn’t tell Rose about the dream she’d had on the train, though she’d told her almost all her other premonitions. It would scare Rose to death. She believed in Augusta’s visions, considered them a gift, and was hungry for stories about them. And Augusta had no shortage of strange tales to tell her. She’d had more than her share of premonitions and ghosts.
Even Olaf’s cabin had been haunted, or Augusta felt it had. It was a wretched house to live in, dark and full of squeaks and shifting timber. There was so little privacy. When she knew the men were out feeding the sheep, she bathed hurriedly near the kitchen stove, pouring warm water from the stove reservoir over herself with a saucepan as she stood in the square galvanized steel tub she washed laundry in, fearful that any minute she’d be caught naked in the kitchen. She never felt alone there, even when Olaf and Karl were in the mountains with the sheep for the summer and she was by herself for weeks on end. The first winter of her marriage she had a dream about the place. She was standing in the room she shared with Karl, only in her dream there were two beds in the room, a twin set, covered over with grey army blankets. She stood between them, looking down at a corpse that lay in one of the beds. The corpse was Karl’s mother, Blenda, as she looked in the portrait that hung over the table. Someone stood behind Augusta. She turned to see who it was and saw her own self standing there. “That woman died in this house,” she said to herself. “We have to be careful not to step in her shoes.”