A Recipe for Bees Read online

  Where was Gabe now, she wondered. Was he floating off someplace as the doctors did those terrible things to his body? Or was he there in that operating room, listening in? Was the operation over? Had he made it back to his body okay? Joy had promised to phone one way or the other, but it was almost two now and they hadn’t heard a thing. She would have to sit here with Karl and Rose and wait. There would be no visits to the seniors’ centre today.

  That was where Augusta, Karl, and Rose spent most of their days—eating lunch, playing cards, and generally painting the air blue with the complaints of the day: of welfare bums and Indians who were getting too big for their britches; of girls having babies on their own, shame on them; and of governments misusing their tax money. Augusta was growing tired of the pettiness of the place, the grumpiness. But at least at the centre there were others who could understand the complications of ageing; there were others for whom arthritis had rendered fastening a brassiere an impossibility, buttoning a blouse maddening, brushing hair painful, and doing up shoelaces a feat of Olympian proportions. A number of women had trouble bending far enough to cut their own toe-nails, and so headed for that handsome Dr. Miles for a regular ten-minute toe-nail snip. At the centre incontinence was not the embarrassment it was elsewhere—there was a definite rustle at lunch time as Depends-clad bottoms settled into chairs. And many of them suffered from aching knee and hip joints, so that getting up was the same pain-filled ritual dance: there was the groan or two, the private swearing, the testing of the sore leg, the hobble to the left and to the right to see which leg was going to hold the weight. And many of the seniors carried canes, some fiercely equipped with a spike strapped to the end, to better protect themselves from icy patches on the sidewalk and teenagers on skateboards.

  Sometimes Augusta sat in a group of women at the seniors’ centre and looked around wondering why she was there. She didn’t feel like one of them; she couldn’t possibly look the way they did, all white hair and stooped posture. They seemed an embittered old bunch to her, blinded to new sensibilities, digging their heels in against the pull of change, howling for a world long gone. But the white hair and aching joints were hers as much as theirs, and women her age died in town every week. Do the other women feel the way I do? she wondered. Do they look at me and say, I’m not like that, am I?

  Two

  AUGUSTA DIPPED HER spoon into the honey as one of the kittens climbed the leg of her pants and nestled in her lap. Rose peered down at the kitten and shook her head, her hair bouncing like meringue. She had the sun-weathered skin of a farmer and wore no makeup. She was dressed in a pink sweatshirt and jeans. Augusta inspected her honey-dipped spoon. “Did you know eating honey protects your stomach from aspirin?” she said. Rose sighed and caught Karl’s eye.

  “How was the train ride?” asked Karl.

  “Very nice. Except I got off at Parksville and the train left without me.”

  “That Esther woman made her miss the train.”

  “She did not.”

  “Did so.”

  “She told you to get off at Parksville, didn’t she?”

  Augusta licked her spoon. “Honey won’t give you gas the way sugar can.”

  “Didn’t she?”

  Augusta sighed and put down the spoon. “Just to use the washroom.”

  “It was her ploy to get a ride to the mall.”

  “So you’re saying Esther delayed her trip by more than two hours to get a ride to the mall?”

  “Yes.”

  Augusta shook her head and took another spoonful from the honeypot. It was from her mother, Helen, that Augusta had learned beekeeping, and she had learned it almost as soon as she could walk. As a child she had walked barefoot through the orchard, carefully, slowly, lest she step on a bee or stir them into stinging. The air in the orchard was thick with Helen’s honeybees and the renegade wasps that ransacked the fruit, so walking with her mother through the clouds of bees to the peach trees was sometimes like parting a curtain. The bees would sweep away from their bodies and then collapse in behind them. Neither of them wore black into the orchard, even on church Sundays, because they feared bees might mistake their large black shape for a ransacking bear and swarm around them, stinging to protect their hives. After making their way through them Helen would pick Augusta a peach and she would eat it there, surrounded by bees, pestered by wasps. The juice that dribbled down her chin was warm, comforting, sticky, sweet; bees landed on her chin and lips before buzzing off.

  Helen taught Augusta to pet the hives. She brushed her hand affectionately across the many bees climbing across the frames of honeycomb, and Augusta followed in kind. It felt like petting the belly of a loudly purring cat, except the wings beating against the palm of her hand tickled. But she just did this with the calm hives, and only on a day when the bees had a good supply of nectar and pollen, and the weather was fine. The mood of the hives varied from day to day, depending on the supply of nectar and whether or not they had been pestered by robber bees or pillaging skunks.

  In her turn, Augusta had got Gabe started in his honey business, and that had been the beginning of their shared affection. She had given him most of her boxes and equipment when she and Karl sold the Shuswap farm and moved to Vancouver Island. He didn’t make much money at it. It was Joy who brought in the steady income, working as a receptionist at a paving company. Before he became ill, Gabe had taken jobs doing whatever he could: house construction, cabinet-making, farm work. His bees were more like a calling than an occupation.

  He was as obsessed with beekeeping as Augusta was. His bookshelves were filled with books about the art of beekeeping, the biology of bees, myths and legends associated with bees. He told Augusta that bees were the souls of the dead flying off to the afterlife, or just returning to start a new life. He said Jesus created bees: he washed his hands in the river Jordan and the sparkling drops that fell from his hands flew off as bees. The image captured her. As they flew up into the sun the fine hairs on their bodies caught the light and sparkled. They looked like flying jewels, or rain drops. As long as the sweet smell surrounded Gabe, Augusta would believe almost anything he said: that a tablespoon of honey sucked on before bed would induce sleep. That a swarm of bees could be settled simply by tanging pots of iron and brass together. That bees were the “birds of the muses” and could bestow the gift of song or eloquence on a baby simply by landing on that babe’s lips. She wished it were that easy; she would find a bee and coax it with honey onto Gabe’s lips and give him back his gift of speech.

  Gabe looked much as Karl had done when he was a young man, though Karl was a smaller man, built like his father, Olaf. Even so, Karl had carried his body tall, as Gabe did now—at least, unless his father was around, in which case Karl’s body shifted from self-possessed grace to bone-sad clumsiness. But his eyes never changed. Eyes so blue, well, she could have drowned in a blue like that. It was a blue made bluer still by the red that fired into his face at any embarrassment. When they were first courting, back then, it took only the suggestion of a hello, the suspicion of a caress, the possibility that Karl might have to speak her name, and his face was alight, as red as the cloth handkerchief he carried.

  Karl was twelve years Augusta’s senior. He was already beginning to bald when she first saw him, as she and her mother were walking down the road to see Mrs. Grafton, Martha Rivers’ mother. Mrs. Grafton’s husband, Harold, was a Rosicrucian and wouldn’t allow his wife and children to eat meat. That was a problem for Mrs. Grafton, as she was anaemic much of the time and too tired to chase around after all her children. Harold also believed that plants and animals had spirits and so he wouldn’t chop down a tree, but he would cut and stack the wood once the tree was fallen. Helen could never see the sense of it. “He’ll spare the soul of a tree but not a head of lettuce,” she said. Harold was away most weekdays, working at the sawmill, so that was when Helen slipped meals of meat up to Mrs. Grafton: lamb chops, roast lamb, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. “We Anglo-Saxons ne
ed our meat,” she told Mrs. Grafton.

  On this day Helen carried a syrup can filled with beef stew. It was midsummer and the grass along the road was dry and dusty. A few wildflowers bloomed: shaggy daisies, blue bachelor buttons, chicory, violet aster, vetch, and delicate white pearly everlastings. Helen hadn’t changed out of her house dress for this visit, which embarrassed Augusta so much that she couldn’t bear to look at her. She herself had changed into her good blue pinafore, and stockings that itched. She was hot and couldn’t understand why she had to accompany her mother on this visit. It would be the same as it always was. They’d knock on the door of the Grafton house and one of the children still at home would answer the door. (There were twelve children in the family, all of them white-blonds. Even then Augusta couldn’t always tell them apart.) Helen would ask for Mrs. Grafton and the child would say, “Mama’s hiding again.”

  From somewhere in back of the cluttered house Mrs. Grafton would call, “Is that Helen? Helen, I’m here. I’m not hiding. I’m just feeling poorly.”

  The child at the door might turn back to them then and, calm and quiet as a preacher’s wife, say, “She’s saying that ’cause she’s embarrassed. She ain’t sick. She locked herself in the bedroom and won’t come out.”

  It was almost the same every time. Augusta would stare at the ceiling as her mother visited with the wild-eyed, pasty-faced Mrs. Grafton, and the children yelped and leapt around outside like savages. Martha Rivers was sure to be there. She was bossy, the oldest of the Grafton children and already thrice a mother herself. She spent as much time running her mother’s home as she did running her own, and she wore responsibility like a cleric’s robe.

  Augusta’s mind was taken up with dread of the coming afternoon as she watched her feet kick dust. Their collie, Sammie, was at her heels. Her mother hummed something—a hymn, likely—and crickets were singing in the grasses. Then Sammie yelped and darted off and her mother yelled at the dog and Augusta forgot all about her feet and the dust and the hot dry afternoon, because suddenly, there in front of her, was a blue like the blue she’d seen when she’d opened her eyes while swimming in the South Thompson and gazed up at the summer sky through water, layers of blue, a colour that could fly her away if she let it.

  That was the first time she saw Karl, the very first time, because there was a face around those two bits of take-your-breath-away blue; a red face, as Sammie was biting Karl’s leg and was in no mind to let go.

  “Git away!” Helen yelled. “Sammie git!” But Sammie wasn’t going to let go of the man’s trouser leg and the bit of flesh he’d sunk his teeth into and, as Karl was making no real attempt to get the dog off him, Sammie had no reason to let go. Karl didn’t let out one cussword, not one; he said nothing at all. But what he didn’t say fired up his face and, with his carroty hair blowing all over, he looked the devil himself. Augusta stood back while her mother pulled the dog away by the scruff of the neck. “I’m sorry, Karl,” she said. So this man was someone her mother knew. “Is your leg all right? Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Karl smiled but didn’t say anything, and the colour didn’t leave his face. He went on his way, limping, and Augusta, Helen, and Sammie went on theirs.

  The next time Augusta saw Karl was when he was sagging beside his father, Olaf, in the truck, dressed in black, his head down, staring at his hands as they drove to the church on the day of his mother’s funeral. It was painfully obvious that they’d had no woman’s help in dressing. Olaf’s socks were ridiculously mismatched—one blue, one green—and Karl had a red handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. Red at a funeral! Those two men were the sorriest sight Augusta had seen in her short life, and though she was at a funeral she couldn’t help the smile that crept onto her face. She was just fourteen and she could go right ahead and laugh at the grief of strangers. She hadn’t known sorrow yet. She herself hadn’t known Karl’s mother, or the mangy old Swede Karl called Father. But her own father had worked with the Swede years before, and as Karl’s mother had died from cold in a snowdrift out in the field not a quarter-mile from home—died in a manner that reminded everyone how close death’s bite was—it turned out to be one of those funerals the whole town attended. Karl was twenty-six then, and she thought how funny he looked, how sad and how funny. She didn’t see him again, even in town, until she was eighteen and her mother was three years dead and the stud-horse man paid a visit.

  Augusta stood up from the table and went over to the balcony to look down at her bees. They were still agitated, buzzing excitedly around the hive. Karl joined her, carrying his cup. “I take it you checked on the bees already,” he said.

  “Yeah. They’re upset, like something’s been after them.”

  “Boys,” said Karl, “throwing rocks at the hive. I caught them at it this morning.” He pointed at the parking lot behind the low white picket fence that surrounded Rose’s garden. “They were over there, using the hive for target practice. I think they were trying to get the bees to swarm out. I was walking across the parking lot on my way home when I saw them. I chased them off.”

  “That explains it. I’ll just leave the hive alone, then. Let the bees calm down. The less I fuss over them the better, after something like that.” Augusta turned to Karl. “So where were you walking from? Seniors’ centre?”

  Karl’s ears blushed. “No. Just out walking.”

  Augusta looked him over briefly. He was up to something. Maybe he’d been out buying her an anniversary gift. She went back inside to join Rose at the table. Karl followed. “Did I tell you Saint Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers?” said Augusta.

  “Is that so?” said Rose.

  “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 wer
e 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.”