A Recipe for Bees (6 page)

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 together. 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?”

“Ah-huh,” said Karl. His ears blushed. He glanced at her and back at his cup, smiling.

The stud-horse man who had introduced Karl and Augusta was named George Hucker. He hooked up two studs, stallions, to a two-wheeled cart and rode them around from farm to farm to service mares for a fee. His occupation was called “travelling the stud” in those days, and it often involved more than mating horses.

When George Hucker arrived at the farm in the early evening, after supper, Augusta was planting potatoes and her father, Manny, was shovelling out the calf stalls. They
were both sweating, neither looking their best, but they dropped what they were doing and greeted their guests. “What you doing here?” said Manny. “Both my mares are pregnant; you know that.” He waved his hand at the mares grazing in the field behind the barn.

“Got a young man here looking for a horse. You remember Karl.”

“Yeah, Karl. How’s Olaf?”

“All right.”

“Don’t think you ever met my daughter, Augusta.”

Karl smiled and nodded but didn’t offer a handshake.

“So,” said George. “Got anything for us?”

“What you in mind for?”

“Karl wants a good riding horse. Something sturdy and reliable and in good health. Nothing fancy. Karl here can’t afford too much.”

“Don’t know if I can do anything for you, Karl,” said Manny. “Wasn’t planning on selling.”

“Are you sure there, Manny?” said George. “Maybe Augusta has some thoughts on the matter?”

“You’d have to ask her yourself. She’s got her own mind.”

“I don’t know,” said Augusta.

“Why not try Grafton,” said Manny.

“Heard all his mares was sold. Ones not sold are a little on the high-strung side.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

George offered Manny and Karl a cigarette. Karl struck a match on the side of the wagon and lit Manny’s and George’s cigarettes before lighting his own. It was then that Augusta noticed he was missing the thumb on his right
hand; he expertly held the match between his index and middle fingers. The stud-horse man, and Manny, silently smoked their cigarettes as Karl stole glances at Augusta.

It was only after they were married that Augusta understood that the stud man was also a trader of another kind, a matchmaker, and that she was the merchandise being appraised that day. She didn’t clue in, even after weeks of Karl’s visits. He started showing up at the farm, smelling of soap and carrying things. Sometimes he brought copies of
National Geographic;
once he brought flowers. Neither Manny nor Karl was much for talk so these were awkward visits. Augusta set out coffee, and cookies if she’d had time for baking that week, and sat at the kitchen table with the two of them. Her father smoked his pipe and leafed through the
National Geographic
if Karl had brought one. Karl ran a fingernail back and forth along the grain of the wood in the kitchen table.

It was during one of these visits that Karl told Augusta about how he had lost the thumb. He’d shot it off himself when he was sixteen, while hunting deer in John Walter’s field, about a half-mile from home, with a Winchester rifle that belonged to Olaf. The gun went off when he tripped over a log in the long grass of the field. There was no pain at first. He didn’t realize the damage he’d done until he saw the thumb dangling from his hand. Olaf took Karl down to Chase in his truck. With no freezing to stop the pain, the doctor trimmed off the hanging shreds of Karl’s flesh and detached the thumb. Then he and Karl took a night train to the Kamloops hospital for surgery while Olaf headed back to the farm to take care of the animals. Olaf had little sympathy for Karl. He said it was his own careless fault
he’d shot his thumb off and he wouldn’t pay the hospital bill. Karl took care of the bill himself by trapping foxes and selling the furs.

Augusta had to drag that story from him, as he was as economical with language as he was with most everything else. There was little conversation among the three of them, just statements thrown out and never collected. “Good price on wool this spring,” said Karl.

Manny turned the page of the
National Geographic
. “Some fool’s trying sugar beets back of Kamloops,” he said. “Too dry there.”

Karl slurped his coffee.

At some point Augusta sighed with impatience, refilled the men’s cups, and left the house under the pretence of hanging laundry or feeding pigs or bedding calves. The notion that Karl had come courting never occurred to her until that one day when he followed her out the door. “You don’t have to go,” he said.

Augusta took the last step off the porch and turned to face him. “I’ve got chores.” She waved a hand back at the house, at her father still sitting there in the kitchen. “If I don’t do them no one will.”

This wasn’t quite true. Manny was still a hard worker, though since Helen’s death he worked sporadically, in fits of frenzy that drove him to near exhaustion. After these outbursts he did nothing for a week or more but sleep, or sit in the house or on the stump out back of the barn. The pigs and calves and chickens would have starved if Augusta hadn’t made feeding them her chore, along with all the housework and laundry and meal making. Manny had even stopped fishing, though occasionally, very occasionally, he
went down to Deep Pool to swim. Augusta dreaded those times, fearing he would drown in the fast undertow of the river, and then how could she keep the farm running?

Karl fumbled in his pocket for a time. Augusta thought he was about to give her something but he didn’t. He took out his red handkerchief and blew his nose. “The flowers,” he said.

She couldn’t think what he meant; then she remembered. He’d brought a wilting handful of roadside daisies and bachelor buttons. Back then she’d called them cornflowers; they were pretty as the day was long. Karl had laid the flowers on the table when he took the coffee from her, but she hadn’t thought much more about them. “They make you sneeze?” she said, because she couldn’t think what else to say.

Karl shook his head and wiped his nose. He put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I bring them all for you,” he said. “Why you think I’ve been coming here all this time?”