A Recipe for Bees Read online

  “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 he
r 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.

  A nurse came and took Gabe’s blood pressure and his pulse; lifted the blanket and checked the catheter and the filling bag of urine. She left Gabe’s bedside without having once acknowledged Augusta’s presence.

  Augusta took Gabe’s hand. She didn’t know what else to do. It was limp and cool. The whole room was cool. She could see, now, why the nurses all wore sweaters. Fevers, she guessed; they kept the room cool to help combat fevers. She had done that herself for Joy, so many years ago: immersed her in lukewarm water to help bring down a fever. An old remedy, but it worked. When she took her daughter in to that handsome Dr. Collier, he had congratulated her. After he moved back east, to London, Ontario, Augusta had written to him twice, but he hadn’t answered. Too busy, she supposed.

  Augusta stroked Gabe’s hand and glanced around the intensive care unit. At the far end was a room made of glass, with curtains only partly covering the glass walls. Everything within the room was white—white blankets on the bed, a white nightstand with a glass vase full of white shasta daisies. There was a woman in the bed. Dead, thought Augusta, that woman’s dead. She stared at the woman for a long time, hoping for some sign she was wrong, then watched as the nurse who had opened the door for her led a young woman and two men, who were clearly brothers, from the corridor into the glass room. The young woman cried out. The nurses stopped what they were doing for a moment and braced themselves against whatever they stood beside—the foot of a bed, the counter, the sink, the open fridge with all its bottles lined up inside. The nurse closed the curtain around the inside of the room and shut the door as she left it.

  The moment passed for the nurses and they went on with their chores, but Augusta couldn’t let it go. The grief of the family intensified the pain in her hip, gutted her stomach, dizzied her. Now that the curtains were drawn around the inside of the glass room, Augusta could see herself, Gabe—the whole room—reflected there. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. She began to sweat and became short of breath. Her heart fluttered. The nurse who had opened the door for her unceremoniously slid a chair next to her and moved on before Augusta could thank her.

  Augusta dropped heavily into the chair and placed her fingers over Gabe’s limp hand. Her face was level with the high bed he slept on. Her feet ached. She wanted more than anything to slip her shoes off and let her swollen feet free, but a nurse had just scolded a very young woman standing by a patient in the next bed for walking around barefoot. “You don’t know what you’ll pick up,” she had said.

  Smelling Gabe’s sweet scent, Augusta closed her eyes and saw him in her mind’s eye in the orchard, mid afternoon, hunched over a bee box. Bees in his hair. Bees on his cheeks. Bees hovering around his head. He smelt of God’s own fruits and flowers and of honey itself. His was the sweetness of angels. Being stung so often, Joy had become an expert on the many cures for bee stings: a slightly moistened sugar cube applied to the welt, or a paste of baking soda, or slices of raw onion, or poultices of summer savory. But the sugar-cube treatment took the pain away immediately. Augusta must have nodded off to sleep then, sitting in the chair, still clasping Gabe’s hand, because suddenly Joy was beside her, removing Gabe’s hand from her grasp and holding it in her own.

  One wouldn’t think a mother-in-law would be so fond of a son-in-law. But there it was. Gabe had lost his parents when he was in his twenties, to a car crash. Maybe that was why he was more of a son than son-in-law to Augusta. He was the one who had visited her every day when she had been hospitalized two years before, not Joy. Joy had only managed the one visit. Augusta was in the hospital because her young doctor had pulled her off her old heart medication too quickly and she had collapsed in the kitchen. When it first started she thought she was having another vision so at first she didn’t call out to Karl. The room became soft, bent all out of shape. Objects she knew were solid were dancing around like drunken sailors. The table leaned so much that she was sure it would give way if she so much as put a teacup there. The only two things she was somewhat sure of were the floor she was standing on and the blue phone on the counter that was miraculously holding its shape. Then the floor began to shift under her feet. She leaned against the counter and called out to Karl but the television was on high and he didn’t hear. She grabbed the phone and used the redial button to call Rose. When Rose answered she heard the phone hit the floor.

  The next thing Augusta knew, she was in a white room and everything was fuzzy and moving. Nothing made sense. She tried focusing for a while on the objects around the room: the square box on an arm above her, the skinny stand to one side that she knew she was attached to, by the tube running out of her. Most peculiar of all was the big red shape beside her, moving and changing; it wasn’t one shape, it was many. Jiggling and flowing from one solid into another. She wished it would stay still and become just one thing so she could get a good look at it. She reached out to touch the red shapes, and as her arm took motion it too multiplied, flowed from one shape to another. It was ridiculous—laughable—and frightening at the same time, yet she was drawn to reach out. Because the red shape smelled of honey. The whole room smelled of honey and the red shape was the source. Even as she reached out, she giggled at the red thing’s duplicity. She giggled right out loud. “Augusta,” it said. “Mom.”

  That was her. She was Mom. Of course. All at once the higgledy-piggledy shapes joined into one. There was her arm, one arm, reaching out to touch the red. And the red was Gabe’s shirt, and Gabe was in it, smelling of honeycomb and peaches. Her Gabe. He was holding a teddy bear. “Thought you could use a friend.”

  Augusta named that bear Gabe, and slept with him tucked in beside her every night of her hospital stay. Joy didn’t think much of that; she read all kinds of unsettling sexual things into Augusta’s behaviour and gave her heck. “The bear was comforting, that’s all,” Augusta told her. “And Gabe is the most comfortable person I know to be around.”

  Gabe had given her the teacup she drank from now, as she sat with Karl and Rose at the table. He had surprised her with it, in fact. During their last visit, they had all gone into that antique store togeth
er. Lovely place. China teacups set out on mirrored glass shelves so the whole place shimmered in the pretty colours of the cups. There was one teacup and saucer there of a pattern Augusta had grown up with—the pattern of a set her mother had owned: a delicate yellow with roses painted around the rim. Augusta admired the teacup but finally put it back on its mirrored shelf. She couldn’t afford it and Karl wouldn’t give her the money to buy it. “What do you need that for?” he said. “You’ve got teacups all over the house.” When they all returned to Augusta and Karl’s apartment that afternoon, Gabe insisted on making the tea, and when he brought the tea to the table she saw why. How had he managed to buy the cup without her seeing? Because it was Gabe’s idea, she saw that clearly, though Joy smiled as though she were in on the gift. Joy wouldn’t have thought to buy her that cup any more than Karl would have Karl wasn’t much for buying gifts, even for birthdays or anniversaries.

  “You planning anything special for today?” she asked him.

  “Special? What like?”

  “I don’t know.” She glanced over at Rose as she took a seat beside her. “Just thought you might have planned something.”

  “Thought we’d be waiting around for Joy’s call. Didn’t think we’d be going down to the seniors’ centre.”

  “No, of course not.” She examined him as he scratched the scar where his thumb was missing. His ears were a little pink, but not the red they usually bloomed when he was lying or trying to hide something from her. With all that had been going on, she doubted she would have remembered that today was their anniversary herself, if Joy hadn’t reminded her. “You remember when we met?” she asked Karl. “When you came to the farm with that horse dealer?”