A Recipe for Bees Read online

  Praise for A Recipe for Bees

  “A Recipe for Bees confirms Anderson-Dargatz as a novelist with staying power.… [It] is a richly textured, life-affirming novel teeming with the small, hard-won victories that make life not only bearable, but glorious.”

  —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

  “A heady blend of earthy realism and romantic exoticism.… What Gail Anderson-Dargatz has achieved is a commemoration of a lifestyle and a collection of characters that live on when the novel is finished.”

  —Elm Street

  “The quirky texture—Margaret Laurence meets Gabriel Garcia Márquez—succeeds with elegance and energy.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “I ended up reading the book in one sitting, hardly noticing that I was getting burned by the Long Beach sun.”

  —Geist

  “Anyone who thinks rural characters in Canadian fiction are dull and bland should pick up one of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s novels.”

  —The Financial Post

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1999

  Copyright © 1998 Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1999. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1998. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpt this page–this page from The Georgics by Virgil, translated by L.P. Wilkinson (Penguin Classics, 1982) copyright L.P. Wilkinson, 1982. Used by permission.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 1963–

  A recipe for bees / Gail Anderson-Dargatz.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36386-2

  I. Title.

  PS8551.N3574R42 1999 C813′.54 C99-931127-1

  PR9199.3.A52R425 1999

  v3.1

  For Eric and Irene

  Acknowledgements

  A GREAT MANY people have participated with me in the writing of this novel, providing details and suggestions. In particular my thanks go to Alberta provincial apiculturist Kenn Tuckey, beekeeper Ted Kay, and my own beekeeper, Floyd Anderson-Dargatz, for their help with the beekeeping passages, and to the staff at the Kamloops Museum and the R.J. Haney Heritage Park in Salmon Arm for helping me place this novel in time. I am also indebted to Diane Martin and Louise Dennys for their loving approach to editing. Bible quotes in this novel were taken from the Jerusalem Bible; the Ryrie Study Bible; the Thompson Chain-Reference Bible; and the New Marked Reference Bible, edited by J. Gilchrist Lawson. Virgil’s recipe for bees is taken from The Georgics, translated by L.P. Wilkinson and published by Penguin. Sections of this novel were first published in the story “Turtle Valley” in Canadian Forum magazine. Photos in this novel are from my parents’ photo albums. My most heartfelt appreciation goes to Eric and Irene Anderson for the lives they’ve led and the stories they tell.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  One

  “HAVE I TOLD you the drone’s penis snaps off during intercourse with the queen bee?” asked Augusta.

  “Yes,” said Rose. “Many times.”

  Before Augusta dragged her luggage upstairs to the apartment, before she checked on the welfare of her elderly husband, Karl, even before she hugged and greeted her seven kittens, she had made her way, with the aid of a cane, across the uneven ground to inspect the hive of bees she kept in Rose’s garden.

  “They won’t mate at all unless they’re way up in the sky,” said Augusta. “The drones won’t take a second look at a queen coming out of a hive. But when she’s thirty, a hundred, feet up in the air, then she gets their interest. They’ll seek her out, flying this way and that to catch her scent until there’s a V of drones—like the V of geese following a leader in the sky—chasing along behind her.”

  “You were going to tell me about Joe,” said Rose.

  “As soon as the drone mounts and thrusts, he’s paralysed, his genitals snap off, and he falls backwards a hundred feet to his death.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  In late summer, hives full of ripening honey emitted a particular scent, like the whiff of sweetness Augusta used to catch passing by the candy-apple kiosk at the fall fair, but without the tang of apples to it. She should have been smelling this now, but instead the hive gave off the vinegar-and-almond scent of angry bees. They buzzed loudly, boiling in the air in front of the hive like a pot of simmering toffee. There were far more guard bees than usual, standing at attention at the mouth of the hive.

  “Something’s been after the bees,” said Augusta. She took a step forward to examine them, but several bees flew straight at her, warning her off. “I’ll have to look at them later,” she said. “When they’ve settled down.”

  She turned to the balcony of her apartment, directly above the garden. “Do you think Karl remembers today is our anniversary?”

  “He hasn’t said anything to me,” said Rose. Later that evening, though, Augusta would learn that Rose had hidden Karl’s flowers in her fridge. He had walked up and down the roadsides and into the vacant lots, searching for pearly everlastings, sweet tiny yellow flowers with white bracts that bloomed from midsummer right on into winter, and held their shape and colour when dried. They were the flowers Karl had picked for Augusta’s wedding bouquet forty-eight years before. He had brought the flowers to Rose’s apartment in a vase and asked her to hide them in her fridge until later that day.

  “You’d think he’d remember, wouldn’t you?” said Augusta. “Especially after everything that’s happened these past three weeks.”

  “You’d think.”

  “You can hear it, you know.”

  “What?”

  “The snapping. If you’re listening for it, you can hear a sharp crack when the drone’s penis breaks off.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Rose followed Augusta as she headed through the sliding glass doors into Rose’s apartment to retrieve her luggage. “Can you carry this one upstairs?” she asked Rose. “And this one? I can only manage the one bag with this cane of mine.”

  Rose took the bags, one in each hand. “But you were going to tell me the story, about seeing Joe again.”

  “Not now, Rose. I want to see if Joy’s phoned with news about Gabe.”

  “But you promised.”

  “We’ll have plenty of time later.”

  “You’d go and tell something like that to some strange woman on the train, but you won’t tell your best friend.”

  “I like Esther. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of her. I promised to show her my hive.”

  “You’ll be seeing a lot more of her. I don’t care if I ever see her again.”

  “We
ll, since neither Esther nor I can drive, you’ll have to drive me, so yes, you will be seeing her again.”

  “Oh, isn’t that just great? Now I’m your personal chauffeur.”

  Augusta turned around at the doorway. “Rose, what’s this all about?”

  “Just tell the story. About Joe. I thought you never saw him again.”

  Augusta shook her head and started up the stairs to her apartment. “I’m sure I told you all that already. I can remember showing you the brooch he gave me. Ages and ages ago.”

  “Yes, the day we met. But you never told me the story. Are you really going to give that brooch to Joy?”

  Augusta had met Rose five years before, on the ferry, just after she and Karl had sold the farm. Augusta and Karl were moving to the warmer climate of Vancouver Island. Rose turned the corner into the ferry bathroom and there was Augusta, sitting at the mirrored makeup counter they have on those boats, rummaging through her big purse. Augusta had looked up at Rose in the mirror, smiled, and said, “Do you have a comb? I can’t seem to find mine.”

  Perhaps it was an inappropriate request to make of a stranger, she thought now, rather like asking to borrow someone’s toothbrush. Rose said no. “They have them at the newsstand.”

  “Thanks. I’ll get one from there. That’s a lovely brooch you’re wearing.”

  “It was my mother’s,” Rose replied, and Augusta promptly caught her in a web of conversation about the brooch a man named Joe had given her, a brooch Augusta pulled from her purse and showed Rose: a silver setting hemmed a real bee suspended in amber. When Augusta held it up, it cast a little pool of honey light on the floor. “It was the only lasting thing he ever gave me, in the way of presents,” she said. “And that was decades after I’d stopped seeing him. I still dream about him, you know.” Rose nodded and smiled and moved slowly backwards, away, to a toilet stall. Augusta, seeing her discomfort, left before she came out again.

  Yet Rose did turn up at the newsstand where Augusta was buying a bag of combs. Augusta was talking to the clerk because the bag of combs had been opened and who knew how many were missing? She was successful, too; the clerk gave her the bag of combs for a dollar. Augusta grinned and winked at Rose when she saw that she’d been watching her dicker. Augusta enjoyed haggling. She often checked out the plants displayed at supermarket entrances, and if there was one going brown from too much water or sun, she took it to the produce clerk and (leaning a little more than usual over her cane, with a hint more creak in her voice) talked him into giving it to her. She always got her fern or African violet, and without fail she would bring it back to the car and say to Rose, “Look what I scored.” Augusta nursed nearly every plant back to health; her apartment was filled with plants that the kittens regularly knocked from the plant stands, the shelves, the windowsills.

  After Augusta had collected her change, she walked right up to Rose, holding out the bag of combs. “What colour do you like?” she’d said, as if she and Rose were old friends. Rose selected a blue one, a comb she still carried tucked away in her purse, though she never used it. Augusta introduced herself.

  Then Karl was there, opening a canvas bag for Augusta to put the extra combs in. He looked up at Rose, surprised, as if to say, Who the hell are you? And Rose stared back at him the same way. She later said that she had imagined Augusta a widow, like herself. Rose’s husband had been dead ten years by then. Augusta introduced her to Karl, and when Rose shook Karl’s hand, her hand slid right up his wrist, as there was no thumb to stop it. He grinned at the look on her face. He took a quiet, perverse delight in offering that thumbless hand to strangers last minute, so they didn’t suspect. He had shot the thumb off while hunting when he was a kid, and there was nothing but scarred flesh from his forefinger to his wrist. When he flexed the muscles, even though he was in his eighties, he still felt the missing thumb bending. It itched but he couldn’t scratch it. That itch would have driven most people to distraction, but not Karl. He appeared to bear all things, as he had his father’s demands and Augusta’s infidelities, with equilibrium. Augusta believed he was missing a certain quality of imagination. He accepted things as they came to him because he couldn’t see the use in trying to change them. She had spent a lifetime battling this quality in him. Still, he was a dear man, and Augusta couldn’t help loving him, even if he sometimes did put cheddar cheese into his tea instead of milk, even if he sucked his coffee loudly through a sugar cube held between his teeth.

  That meeting was how Augusta and Karl came to live in Rose’s apartment building. The three of them had got to talking on the ferry and Augusta said she and Karl had sold their farm in the Shuswap, in the interior of British Columbia, and were staying with their daughter, Joy, and son-in-law, Gabe, outside Victoria until they found a place of their own. Rose said that she managed an apartment building for seniors, in Courtenay, and that there was an apartment coming up for rent at the end of the month, as Mrs. Meecham was getting too old to live by herself and was moving into a home. One thing led to another and Karl and Augusta moved into the apartment. There was a three-hour drive or train ride between Karl and Augusta, and Joy and Gabe. That was a good distance between a mother and a daughter. Close enough, but not too close.

  “Joe asked me to give the brooch to Joy,” said Augusta.

  “Joe? When?”

  “At the auction.” Rose sat Augusta’s two bags on the landing of the second floor and crossed her arms. “I’m not going any farther until you tell me the story.”

  “Oh, Rose. I’m too tired for this right now. All this worry over Gabe—” She made her way to the apartment door, hooked the cane over her arm, and put the key to the lock. She sighed. “You bring the bags inside and I’ll make a nice cup of tea, and if Karl’s down at the seniors’ centre I’ll tell you all about it, okay?”

  But Karl was there in the apartment, as Augusta knew he would be, sitting at the kitchen table by the phone. The kitchen and living area were all one room and each wall was lined with shelves filled with teddy bears and dolls and ceramic figurines; not a collection, exactly, just a lifetime of purchases and gifts. It was a hot day; Karl had the fan in the living-room going. He stood when the door opened. “Anything?” said Augusta.

  “Nothing yet.” He walked up to kiss her, but Augusta was already leaning down to scratch the spines of the many cats that slid and meowed around her unsteady legs. Karl hoisted the bag she had carried, took the two from Rose, and hauled them all into the bedroom. Augusta hugged the kitten she had named Blondie to her chest as she watched him walk away. Why did she do that? she wondered. Why hadn’t she accepted his kiss? Now and then Augusta still caught Karl watching her, when she was busy putting together tea for the two of them, or washing the breakfast dishes while Karl and Rose took in a game of crib. He didn’t smile or say anything, but she saw it in his face, how he loved her. Then he glanced away, at the crib board, or lifted his cup for a sip, and she really saw it—burning in his face, reddening his ears—all the years of unsaid things.

  Even so, Augusta took Karl somewhat for granted and even turned her eyes elsewhere. She had a crush on the old man with the garden beside the seniors’ centre, and she had never even met the man. She knew nothing about him, other than what he revealed of himself through his garden. When she walked by his house, she sometimes caught him hovering out of sight behind his dark window, watching; there was some movement there, the flick of a curtain, a shape in the black. Although he lived right next door, he didn’t go to the seniors’ centre; he kept himself locked away.

  She had once stopped at the old man’s garden, leaned across the fence, and broken off a piece of bittersweet. It was a bush that produced bright purple flowers all summer long, and then brilliant red berries come fall. The twig tasted bitter, then sweet, as its name promised. Karl’s father, Olaf, had once told Augusta that sheep herders hung bittersweet around the necks of sheep they thought had been rendered sick by the evil eye. She chewed the twig with a deliberate slowness, knowing the
old man was watching, knowing she should really walk on. But instead she leaned on her cane and inspected his garden. He had filled the lawn with snowball bushes, a flowering plum and quince, a hazelnut tree too lanky to produce nuts, and trembling aspens with leaves that now scattered like spilled pennies. Here and there he grew beds of sunflowers mixed with banks of pink and white cosmos, and yellow marigolds and calendulas. Against the warmth of the house he grew tomatoes, love apples, Eve’s temptation.

  She wanted to know the old man. She wanted to share the time of day with someone capable of sweet-talk and tenderness in a way that Karl wasn’t. She wanted to hold hands and feel the thrill of a secret so dangerous she could tell no one, not even Rose.

  Augusta sighed and put the cat on the floor. “Let’s get some tea on,” she said. But before she plugged in the kettle she picked up the receiver and listened for a dial tone.

  “Funny that Joy hasn’t phoned,” said Rose.

  “They did say the operation could take anywhere from five to eighteen hours.”

  “We could be waiting all day, then.”

  “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. I’ve asked a lot of you today. Missing the train and then having you drive all the way to Parksville to get me.”

  “And driving that woman back besides.”

  “Esther. Her name’s Esther.”

  Esther had got on the train at Langford, just outside of Victoria. Augusta had been struck by a weeping spell on leaving the city, and was blowing her nose when a very fat Native Indian woman struggled up the last step onto the train with a huge basket. A mother and her young son of perhaps four followed the woman on board, and waited as she turned herself sideways and made her way slowly down the aisle. The boy asked his mother, in a voice so clear and loud that it made Augusta wince, “Why is that lady so fat?”

  The Indian woman closed her eyes for the briefest of moments. She turned awkwardly in the aisle and bent down towards the boy, showing her ample backside to Augusta and the three young men sitting two seats down from her. The young man facing Augusta looked at the big woman and then sniggered with his two companions.