A Recipe for Bees Read online

  “It’s okay to be big,” said the woman. “Like it’s okay to be small like you.” Presumably she smiled and tweaked the boy’s cheek, but all Augusta could see was the shake of the woman’s massive shoulders. The boy’s mother made some half-hearted apology, then pulled him off the train. Augusta watched her as she led the boy down the platform and onto the second car of the train. Augusta’s car wasn’t completely full, but someone sat in each set of seats except those across from Augusta. The Indian woman glanced from seat to seat and then smiled apologetically. “You mind?” she said. Augusta could hardly say no. That seat was the only one in which the woman was likely to fit. She moved her feet to one side as the woman sat down heavily facing Augusta; she took up the whole of the two seats. She slid the huge basket between their feet on the floor, then rummaged through her handbag, found a cloth hankie, and dabbed the sweat from her face. “Hot,” she said.

  Augusta smiled and stared out the window to avoid further conversation. When she glanced back, the Indian woman had leaned back into her seat and closed her eyes. The woman’s basket was decorated with woven designs of what appeared to be stylized feathers in purple and green. It made Augusta think of a basket Karl had brought home for Joy so many years ago. He had bought it from an Indian woman who used the baskets she wove to pick berries on Olaf’s ranch. Augusta couldn’t recall the design on that basket, but it must have been very like the feathers on this woman’s; it had been decorated in the same way, with coloured fibres woven right into it, to form patterns. A bundle of shasta daisies drooped over the side of it. The old man living by the seniors’ centre grew shasta daisies, a huge patch of white that delighted the butterflies. But the flowers could be a nuisance. They took over a garden, just like mint; there was no getting rid of them. You could dig them out, but you’d always miss a root and they’d come right back next spring. They refused to die.

  The fat woman’s name was Esther Joseph, though Augusta didn’t know that then. They didn’t introduce themselves until they were stranded in Parksville. Esther was a good three hundred pounds, and tall, a giant of a woman. She wore glasses but no jewellery, and her stumpy ankles disappeared into white runners. She wore a dress with a floral print, and its short sleeves exposed a gardener’s tan that ended at her elbows.

  “I’ll stick around,” said Rose. “Maybe you can find some time to tell me about Joe.”

  Augusta lowered her voice as Karl came back into the kitchen. “For God’s sake, Rose. Not while Karl’s here.”

  “He wouldn’t hear anyway,” said Rose. “Eh, Karl?”

  “What was that?” said Karl.

  “See?”

  “Rose!” said Augusta. “Have a cookie.” She put the cookie in Rose’s mouth.

  Rose took a bite and spoke with her mouth full. “I suppose you’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have any inkling how Gabe’s doing? I mean, any more premonitions?”

  Augusta set teacups and saucers, milk and honey on the table. Karl and Rose took their tea black, and Augusta normally didn’t put honey in her tea, but today she craved sweetness. “No, not really,” she said. “Nothing since that day I found myself on the floor.” Augusta had predicted Gabe’s illness; that is to say, she’d had a vision of it. She was fussing around in the kitchen, making supper as Gabe and Joy were about to arrive for a visit when, no matter which way she turned, she saw a patch of white appear in front of her, the edges sloping off into the kitchen scene around her, and in this white was Gabe’s face—or almost Gabe’s face, because his features retained little expression and his skin held the milky pallor of the gravely ill. His eyes were closed and there was a honeybee on his lip. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the vision was gone, and she found herself on the floor beside the kitchen table. She sat there with her stiff legs stretched out in front of her. Karl was down at the seniors’ centre playing crib. If she had thumped loud enough on the floor Rose might have heard, as her apartment was below Augusta and Karl’s. When Joy knocked on the door, Augusta had a hard time standing. She’d had to pull up her body using the edge of the table because her hip had locked on her. Then there was the rattle of keys outside the apartment, and the door opened and Joy pushed her way in, panicked, keys in hand. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Augusta.

  “You look so pale.”

  “I fell.”

  “You fell? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes. Fine. Nothing’s broken. I’m fine. I didn’t fall, exactly. I had trouble getting up.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Just let me sit. There. Get me a cup of tea, will you, Joy? And a biscuit from the box on the counter? I need to gather myself. Gabe, sit by me. No, here, in Karl’s chair.”

  As Joy was pouring tea, Augusta told Joy and Gabe about the vision. She said she thought it was a premonition of illness, but they both laughed it off. Rose took it seriously. She said, “We should write it down, don’t you think? So there’s proof when it happens?” She did just that. She had Augusta describe the vision again, and wrote down every detail, then put it into an envelope that she sealed with an Easter Seal and mailed to herself, so the cancellation mark would date it.

  Then Gabe had the seizure. Sunday afternoon, three weeks back, he began staring over his right shoulder, with an expression on his face that Joy described as frightened, as if he were watching his back, as if he were being chased by some demon. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked him. “What are you looking at?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and then he wasn’t able to say anything at all. Joy went into the next room to phone for an ambulance, and as she was on the phone she heard Gabe howl, an inhuman howl, and fall to the floor. She extricated herself from the emergency operator and ran back into the kitchen, where she found the table askew and Gabe thrashing around on the floor under it. “Just like a dumb hurt animal,” Joy told Augusta over the phone. “He wasn’t human. He wasn’t Gabe.”

  Augusta’s first love had howled like that before each of his fits. Tommy Thompson was an older boy who had shown no sign that he knew Augusta was alive. The other kids made fun of him. He was an epileptic, and as a young girl still in school she watched him slide into possession as surely as into the water of a river. He’d turn his head stiffly to look first to the far wall, then to the stove in the centre of the room, and finally to the line of pegs where they hung their coats at the back. He couldn’t stop himself from turning; nothing could make him look away. That was the warning.

  The other kids would giggle out of nervousness, because they knew what was coming. They called him savage on the school grounds during lunch break, and wild man, crazy man. Tommy Thompson, sitting at his desk, would open his mouth and out would come a noise that wasn’t a human scream or the cry of an animal, but something completely different, a noise that seemed to come not from him but through him, the sound of a soul departing under protest. Then he would fall heavily, with a thud like a sack of potatoes dropped on a kitchen floor. His body would jerk and thrash for what seemed like an eternity, while the teacher, Mrs. Sawyer, acting with the knowledge of the day, tried to force a spoon between his teeth to stop him from biting his own tongue. Mrs. Sawyer never succeeded, which was lucky for her; she might have choked him or lost a finger to his mindless bite. Some time later Tommy would stop convulsing and begin breathing heavily, nearly snorting, until he slowly came back to himself.

  After she got off the phone with Joy, Augusta immediately phoned Rose to tell her the awful news. “I’ll be right up,” said Rose. She barged into Augusta and Karl’s apartment, broke open the seal on the envelope in front of them, then waved her handwritten description of Augusta’s vision above her head, crying, “See! See! There’s proof!”

  Karl, sitting at the kitchen table with his arm around Augusta, stared at Rose, bewildered, as if to say, What the hell is she doing? Even so, he didn’t question her about her behaviour. So much went on around
him that he didn’t understand, didn’t hear.

  Augusta hadn’t told Karl about her vision. Augusta had never had much luck discussing premonitions or ghosts with him, though early in their courtship she had believed he would have to be sympathetic, what with that phantom thumb of his.

  Now, today, Gabe was having brain surgery, of all things. It seemed to Augusta an impossibility, a cruel joke, something from a monster movie. He had been in that hospital for three weeks, undergoing test after test as the doctors figured out what was wrong. Augusta went down to Victoria to be with her daughter and Gabe right at the start, the day after Gabe fell ill. Rose volunteered to drive her, but Joy asked her mother not to bring Rose. “I don’t want to have to deal with strangers while all this is going on.”

  “Rose is hardly a stranger,” said Augusta.

  “Come on, Mom.” Augusta knew Joy didn’t like Rose, or more to the point she didn’t like the way Rose was always hanging around. One day after Rose had visited with the four of them, Joy said just that to Augusta.

  “Rose? She has no family left, and no kids of her own. She’s my friend.”

  “She’s always here, even Christmas and Thanksgiving. She gives me the creeps.”

  “Joy!”

  “She does. I don’t think she likes men.” Augusta repeated that last bit to Rose and they’d had a good laugh over it. After all, Rose had been married for thirty years.

  So Augusta took the train down to be with Gabe and Joy. She went by herself. Karl didn’t like travelling, but he would have gone and helped her with the frustrations of travel if it hadn’t been for those cats. Seven of them. A young couple from church had taken in a stray cat and fattened her and then the cat had been killed on the road outside their house. It wasn’t until a day later that they realized she’d dropped a batch of kittens in the attic. Augusta took the kittens on, even though Rose, as manager of the place, reminded her that she was not supposed to have pets in her apartment. “I’ll find homes for them,” she said. “But somebody’s got to care for them now, or they’ll die.”

  She fed them milk and canned catfood by spoon, twice a day, because if she put the bowl on the floor they walked through the food and tracked it across the carpet. When she was standing, they crawled up her pantleg, mewing and scrambling, knocking each other out of the way in a race to eat. The kittens pretty much set the schedule for the day, so when Joy phoned with the news about Gabe, Karl and Augusta decided that Karl would stay home. Someone had to take care of those kittens, and Rose wasn’t going to do it.

  Augusta spent her days sitting in a chair beside Gabe’s bed with Joy, and every night she went home and cooked Joy and herself a late-night meal. She spent almost every minute at Joy’s side, except the hour or so she slipped off to give Karl or Rose an update on the phone. One would have thought a daughter would appreciate all that help and want her mother around at a time like this, but not Joy. She had sent her mother packing today. That was why Rose had to drive all the way down to Parksville this morning, to pick up Augusta. Augusta had got off the train there to use the washroom—she couldn’t manoeuvre in the one on the train—and the conductor must have thought that Parksville was her stop because the train had left for Courtenay without her. Why he didn’t listen to Esther when she told him to wait, Augusta could only guess at. Just before Duncan, the conductor had opened the door to the train car and yelled, “Drunken Duncan!” The three young men seated ahead of Augusta had laughed. There was a large Indian population in Duncan. The town was built, in part, on reserve land. The train station at Duncan was like all the others, but several totem poles stood beside it. A sign proclaimed it The City of Totems.

  There was only one passenger train service on Vancouver Island, up island in the morning, down island in the afternoon. Augusta no longer drove; Karl’s eyesight had failed to the point that he wasn’t allowed to. Rose was indeed their chauffeur, among other things.

  “I don’t understand Joy,” said Rose, taking the cup of tea Augusta offered her. “Why would she send you home today of all days?”

  “We had a bit of a fight yesterday.”

  “A fight?”

  “A disagreement.”

  “Over what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Although it did. She felt foolish now, and ashamed of herself. They had been downtown, as Joy wanted to spend some time away from the hospital, to try to calm down, and at Augusta’s urging they had gone to Munro’s bookstore. The bookstore was one huge room with a high vaulted ceiling and elaborate quilted hangings on the walls. It was a magnificent bookstore, a cathedral devoted to books, and readers worshipped here quietly, whispering their questions to the clerks, smelling and touching the books—revering them as if they were sacred objects. Joy must not have felt she belonged. For her, it must have been like entering the tabernacle of another’s faith. She rarely read, and what she did read was Christian. Reading was a luxury, an entertainment, and there were always other, more pressing demands on her time, or at least she made it seem so. Gabe used to read, and Joy bought him books in her more generous moments, but it made her angry to see him sitting there reading when he could have been putting up those kitchen cupboards or finishing that wall in the living-room or installing the mirrors on the doors of her walk-in closet. So she was waiting on Augusta, all but tapping her foot.

  A book caught Augusta’s eye, that was all, a romance called Savage Persuasion. It was a book Rose might have bought. On the cover there was a picture of a hunk holding a dark-haired woman, he dressed in a Native Indian’s loincloth, she in a purple gown that was pulled off her shoulders. Augusta felt its binding and smelled it with the same satisfaction with which she touched all books. It was impulse. She felt a compulsion to take the thing, a tension that wouldn’t let go of her. In the moment after she pocketed the book, she expected her heart to race, the sweat to bead on her upper lip, but there was none of that. She felt relief; a sensation of freedom came over her.

  But then Joy was standing right there, like an angry mother watching a disobedient child. “What are you doing?” she shrieked. As if she didn’t know, as if Augusta were a naughty child. She made Augusta put the book back, and then apologized to the clerks as she pulled her mother out of the bookstore by the arm. Apologized, as if she had the right. She drove Augusta all the way back to the house without saying a word, but once at home she had plenty to say. “What on earth got into you?”

  “I don’t really know. I—”

  “I’ve never been so humiliated!”

  “It’s not so bad. It’s kind of funny. Don’t you think?”

  “Funny?!”

  “I just mean—it’s not like I meant to! It just sort of got in my bag.”

  “How can you say that? Never mind! I don’t want to hear about it. Oh, God! I don’t want to have to deal with you tomorrow, not while the operation’s going on.”

  Joy looked old at that moment; she had her sweater folded across her belly and her arms crossed so her shoulders were rounded. Augusta thought at the time that they could be a couple of sisters wrangling away over petty jealousies. Then she caught sight of herself in the mirrored cabinet that held the television set. The tart red of her lipstick couldn’t conceal the fact that she was a much older woman, neither could the outrageous purple of her blouse, nor the brightly patterned scarf she’d used to pull the hair from her face. All the colour in the world wouldn’t rejuvenate the withered skin of her neck. She was the ageing queen bee, wings tattered and legs crippled from years of life inside the hive; her usefulness was all but over. “I’ll stay at the house then,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  “I may come back to rest. The operation could be as long as eighteen hours.”

  “I’ll be quiet. I won’t bother you.”

  “Please. Take the train tomorrow. Go home. Be with Dad. It’s your anniversary tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to go. Not now. I want to be here.”

  “I don’t want you here.”

 
Augusta began to cry. “What about me?” she said. “You’re not thinking about me at all.”

  “I’m not thinking about you? For heaven’s sake, he’s my husband.”

  “Well, it’s just not fair, sending me off like that.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  “I can’t deal with you. I just can’t deal with you right now.”

  Augusta had been petulant, childish during that argument, she knew that now, now that she was back at the apartment. If she had eased up maybe Joy would have calmed down and let her stay at the house, or in the hospital waiting-room. But it seemed so unfair to be shipped off like that, like old useless baggage. “You can tell if a queen bee is getting old, you know,” she said.

  “Ah-huh,” said Rose.

  “Her movements are slower. She’s got less get-up-and-go. She lays fewer eggs. When she’s failing, her daughters simply replace her.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “They build a queen cell and put in a freshly laid egg. Then they’ll feed that new larva enough royal jelly to make a new queen. The old queen lives out her days in a corner at the bottom of the hive.”

  “Feeling a little down, today?” asked Rose.

  Augusta shrugged. “I can’t be a ray of sunshine on a day like this.”

  “No, I don’t suppose so.”

  Augusta breathed in the scent of honey as she sipped her tea, and immediately thought of Gabe. Once, after putting new beeswax foundation in the frames of Augusta’s hive, Gabe had gone inside and made tea for Augusta, Karl, and Rose in Rose’s kitchen, then brought it outside to where they were sitting in the garden. When he handed Augusta her tea, his fingertips had left the sweet maple-syrup scent of foundation on the cup. She had inhaled the scent with every sip. How could a woman not love a man who smelled that wonderful? Even when he hadn’t been working with the bees, Gabe carried a sweetness around him. Sometimes he smelled like honey, caramel, or canned peaches—the sugary scent diabetics often gave off. When he sneezed it was much stronger; the heady smell was exactly like that of black poplar coming into leaf, a smell Augusta remembered from her childhood. Maybe his scent was a symptom of his illness, like the sweetness of roses that sometimes surrounded the dying.