A Recipe for Bees (22 page)

After that Augusta stopped going to Chase for supplies altogether, and made Karl pick up mail or pay bills. It was the city of Kamloops she lingered in, where she shopped and visited the Silver Grill café for a cup of coffee and a bit of sweet reminiscing. On days when she could leave Joy at home with Karl, she sat in the café for hours, watched by the questioning eyes of the cook, trying to look calm as she drank coffee and ordered pie she couldn’t eat so she could justify sitting another hour, but Joe never did turn up.

Around this time she dreamed she was dressed in rags and walking alone down a lonely road. A car pulled up beside her and the driver was Joe, dressed in his medals. She felt awkward because she was dressed so poorly and because she was homeless; she felt lost and ragged. Even so, she got into the front seat beside him, and as they drove along she started to feel better, and her clothes began to change from shabby to fashionable. They went on driving down the road with no destination in mind. Joe happily whistled “Fascination.”

She tried phoning him once. She parked herself in the phone booth near the café and found his name and number in the phone book and forced herself to pick up the receiver. But that was as far as she got. If his wife answered, what would Augusta say? If Joe answered, would he really want to talk to her? She stood in the phone booth, holding the receiver, until a man wanting to use the phone tapped on the door.

After that, she began searching for Joe along the streets of Kamloops. She’d walk for hours, pushing Joy in the
pram, haunting the pretty window displays full of things she couldn’t afford, hoping she might bump into him. Once she thought she had seen him turning a corner, and ran after him, only to find it was some other man. Another day she stepped out of the pharmacy and was standing on the fan-shaped imprint in the sidewalk that said “Rexall Drugstore,” tucking her wallet back into her purse, when she looked up to see not Joe but Manny passing by and walking down the street. Was this one of her visions? Was he a ghost or had she really stepped backwards in time?

She called, “Dad!” and ran after him, and took him by the shoulder. When he turned he wasn’t Manny at all, but some stranger. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I—”

The man smiled and tipped his hat to her and walked on. She stood in the centre of the sidewalk for some minutes, bumped and jostled by passers-by, watching her father walk away.

“I saw Gabe walking around Nanaimo today,” said Augusta.

Karl looked at her and blinked. Rose said, “What?”

“I saw him walking around, as if he weren’t sick or lying on the operating table.”

“A vision?”

“Not exactly. I thought it was him, but then it wasn’t. I was so sure I’d seen him.”

“That’s encouraging, don’t you think?” asked Rose. “Maybe some part of you is saying he’ll be up and walking around in no time.”

Augusta didn’t tell Rose the rest, about how she had been so convinced it was Gabe that she’d called out his name. But still she’d been groggy, half asleep. She’d been
dozing as the train pulled into the station. Esther had woken her. “Is this your stop?” she said, shaking Augusta’s knee, shaking her awake. “Hey, are you getting off in Nanaimo?”

Augusta grunted groggily and looked around. The train had come to a stop and somehow she had remained asleep as the three young men and the rest of the passengers left the train. Had she slept through the conductor’s call as well? She must have. “Where are we?” she said.

“Nanaimo,” said Esther. “Are you getting off here?”

“Nanaimo?” said Augusta. “No, no, I’m staying on to Courtenay.”

“You want something then? Something to eat? They have a snack bar here. We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, maybe.”

Augusta slipped her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her eyes as Esther took her massive basket with her and left the train. When Augusta followed, the conductor was leaning against the station, smoking a cigarette. The Nanaimo station was much like the others, although this one had several planter boxes in which maroon chrysanthemums had been planted. Its platform connected with a back alley on one side and a sidewalk leading to shops on the other. A snack truck selling coffee, doughnuts, and chips was parked in the back alley, in front of the station building. Esther stood beside the snack truck, talking to the woman who ran it. She laughed a shotgun laugh, sending the crows on the roof of the station flying off in all directions. Crazy birds, thieves, Augusta thought, they’d snatch any shining thing that caught their eye. She had seen them swoop down to pick up bits of glass glittering by the roadside, had yelled at them as they pinched new penny nails
from Karl’s barnside workbench. She watched one crow fly over—its wingtips transparent in the sunlight—then followed its shadow as it slid across the platform. Several people were walking by, in a group. One of them, a man in his late forties, turned and Augusta saw that it was Gabe. She took a quick painful step forward and called, “Gabe!” but when he turned he wasn’t Gabe at all. The man looked away as he would from any stranger, and continued walking with the group of people.

Esther went on talking to the woman who ran the snack bar, and the conductor went on smoking and staring off into the sky as if nothing had happened. Perhaps they hadn’t witnessed her folly. Why on earth had she seen Gabe? she wondered. What was her mind telling her? That he would pass on? Or maybe that he would make it, he’d be walking around in no time? Sometimes her premonitions were vague like this. She could tell what they meant in hindsight. When the event was over she could tack on meaning to the gut feelings she’d had when she knew something was wrong, or to that strange dream that had meant nothing at the time. Other times she knew what her visions meant at the time she had them, like when she saw her mother’s death, and her father’s.

The night Augusta saw Manny on the street in Kamloops she woke suddenly and began to cry. Karl sat up beside her in the dark. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“Dad’s dead. He’s dead.”

“That was weeks ago!”

“I saw him. I thought I saw him today in Kamloops. Then it wasn’t him at all. Now I just saw him again. I dreamed he was here in this room. Talking to me.”

Joy, sleeping in the crib next to their bed, began to whimper. Augusta picked her up and, seated on the edge of the bed and still crying herself, rocked her back and forth. Karl was bewildered by her sudden grief. She wished he would put an arm around her, or fix her a glass of hot milk, or ask her what she was feeling, listen to her. Instead he got dressed. “Where are you going?” she said.

“Out. Might as well get a start on chores. I can’t sleep with you going on like that.” She had been angry at him then, but understood now, so many years after the fact. He’d no more witnessed that sort of crying and carrying on than Bitch had smelled a woman’s skirts, not since his mother had walked into the snow, at any rate. No one had taught him how to hold a woman and in that way share the grief and lessen it; no one had taught him the words to say. He didn’t know how, and his lack of skill made him fearful, and the fear made him angry.

Angry or scared then, but later in the day he was sorry. He brought her a kitten from the barn to make up in some way for his behaviour of the night before. Karl was so shy giving his presents. Red-faced, he held out that little offering in his big hand as if he was sure she’d reject it, and him too. But she took it and kept it in a box in the kitchen while he returned to the barn. She’d have to take it out again before Olaf came in for dinner. It was just another kit from a barn cat’s litter, a fearful, desperate creature always shrilly mewing. On and on, it never shut up. Joy had been crabbing all that day too; nothing would please her. She lay crying in the Indian basket on the kitchen floor as Augusta tried to bake bread. The kitchen was hot from the oven. Sweat slid down Augusta’s nose,
and Joy’s and the kitten’s shrieks pierced her ears. Suddenly the lid inside Augusta blew clean off. She picked up the kitten and shook it, and when that only made it mew harder, she threw it at the wall. For the briefest of blessed moments Joy stopped crying. Then she started again and the kitten was there on the floor, dead. Augusta had killed it. That was precisely what her hands had wanted to do with her own baby girl. Not kill her, no—not that. But shake her and make her stop, make the noise stop, make the demands stop. Augusta stared at her hands, at the fists they had become. Then she fled the kitchen, leaving Joy crying in her basket, and ran around to the far side of the house, where she slid down the warm wall and held herself.

Out in front of her, the sheep pastures stretched on and on. Beyond them the poplars still held a few leaves. If it were winter she could walk out into those fields and lie down in snow and find cool comfort. But it was too warm now for dying, and she had Joy to think of.

Then suddenly it
was
winter. The fields had turned to white and the day to evening. Wind scattered fine snow across pastures so white they seemed to be lit from within. And there was a figure out there, a woman walking away from the house. Augusta called, “Blenda?” But the woman went on walking and then, so far out that Augusta could have mistaken her for one of the black poles of bare poplar if she hadn’t been moving, she lay down and became part of the field. Augusta stood to follow her, to find her, but as she took her first step it was a warm autumn day.

In the dark of their bedroom, after she’d rocked a restless Joy to sleep, she said to Karl, “What are we still doing
here? Why are we renting out my farm to someone else when we could be living there, farming for ourselves?”

“Shush. You’ll wake Father.”

“No. You tell me. Why are we still here?”

“Father needs help. I can’t run both farms.”

“Your father can hire more help. If you think he doesn’t have the money, then you’re a bigger fool than I’ve been. Don’t you see? You can farm for yourself. You can get out from under his thumb. I can get away from him!”

“I don’t have the money to set out on my own.”

“I’m going to die here. You understand? I will die.”

Of course she knew Karl would do nothing. She’d have to do it herself. The following morning she scrawled her demands on brown wrapping (as Olaf had not allowed her the luxury of writing paper) while sitting on a stump outside. Then she took a stout stick and marched into the house, and when the black bitch snarled and leapt to bite her, Augusta brought the stick down hard on the mutt’s nose and sent her yelping outside. She slapped her demands on the table, and yelled them in case her suspicions that Olaf couldn’t read or write were true. “We’re moving to my farm. You’re going to give Karl thirty per cent of this year’s lamb sales so he can set out on his own. You owe him at least that for all the work he’s done for you.”

Olaf’s nostrils drew together, and he pursed his lips. He nodded and went back to drinking his coffee. Augusta stood there, waiting for some reply. “You agree?” she said finally.

“Yes. Just get the hell out of my house.” He put a sugar cube in his mouth and sucked coffee through it, making a slurping sound that he knew Augusta hated. Augusta went
outside, and when she saw Bitch waiting by the side of the house, growling, she whacked the dog on the nose a second time. The dog fled.

Looking back, Augusta wondered why she had ever stayed so long or put up with so much. No woman would now, now that she had some choice in life—somewhere to go, and the means to get there. But then, well, a woman put up with more because there was no way out. The same could be said of a man, in some cases. Divorce was rare among farmers, practically unheard of. Where was there to go? Whoever walked off the farm walked away with little or nothing. Husbands and wives were married to the land as much as to each other. A different sort of love arose from that kind of necessity; it wasn’t romantic or lustful, but it was steady. It was a love they manufactured each day, so that they could carry on.

T
HE APARTMENT WAS
much neater than Augusta had left it three weeks before, though it was still chock-full of stuff; they never had enough storage room. The floor was vacuumed, the side tables were dusted, the kitchen counter was cleaned off. Everything was in order, despite the efforts of the cats. Two of the kittens sat amid the clutter of ornaments on the shelves. Another sat between plants on the windowsill, eyeing the birds. A fourth purred in Augusta’s lap and the rest chased an empty orange plastic container, from inside a Kinder Egg Surprise, around the room.