A Recipe for Bees (13 page)

That first day she went fishing with the Reverend, they saw Manny walking the river bank some distance away. He waved, but he didn’t come over to greet them.

“We should make a habit of this,” said the Reverend.

“I don’t think I could. Olaf doesn’t like me using the truck to come to town. And I know he wouldn’t like me fishing with you.”

“But you’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure.”

“If you change your mind, I’ll be at my office. Saturday mornings are best for me.”

The Reverend never addressed the problem that she had brought him, about finding Karl’s dirty magazines. All he ever said about it, he said in the car as they drove to the river on that very first fishing trip. “God wouldn’t give us those feelings if they weren’t to be enjoyed,” he said, out of the silence they had been driving in. It took Augusta a moment to understand what he was talking about. “But like eating,” he continued, “one doesn’t want to overdo it.”

But the Reverend had missed the point entirely. Or perhaps she hadn’t explained herself. It wasn’t excess Karl was guilty of. In their few years of marriage she had come to consider him a man of many fears and few desires, and had resigned herself to a life of longing, and shamefully pleasuring herself. But when she found those magazines, it infuriated her. While she went without, he indulged himself! He had found the time, albeit in the outhouse, but he had found the time for
that
, when he could find no time for her. It was a meanness of spirit that extended into all areas
of their lives together. Of course, what chance did he have of being anything different, with a father like his?

“I heard you went fishing with that Reverend,” said Olaf. They were sitting at the dinner table.

“You heard right.”

“You let her go fishing with another man?”

“He isn’t another man, father,” said Karl. “He’s Augusta’s minister. We should feel honoured he’s chosen her for companionship.”

“He has his own wife for companionship.”

“She doesn’t like fishing,” said Augusta.

“He should be fishing with some other man. That ain’t right, fishing with another man’s wife. There’ll be talk. Don’t your wife care about how it affects us?”

“And just how does it affect you?” said Augusta.

“Haven’t you heard the saying:
Watch out when the preacher comes calling on your wife alone?”

“You dirty old—”

“Augusta,” said Karl. There was warning in his voice. He was learning, from Olaf.

But then so was she. “The Reverend invited me to go again Saturday, and you know what? I think I will. I’m taking the truck. And I’m going fishing. If you want anything picked up then, add it to my list.”

Augusta was surprised to find herself standing up to Olaf, and to Karl. But the Reverend’s attention made everything all right, made it okay. He was an important man, a man of status. If he chose to fish with her, how could she say no?

His name was Gavin Lakeman, but he was always the Reverend to Augusta. Never Gavin, never Reverend
Lakeman. He was tall, a good six feet, and barrel-chested. Although he kept himself clean-shaven he was never without that five o’clock shadow, and his arms were covered in a pelt of black hair. He had a temper that he had to fight, especially as he had high blood pressure.

These Saturday morning fishing trips became regular outings, during which the Reverend refreshed the meagre fly-casting skills Augusta had learned from Manny, though at first she caught only bony whitefish. The Reverend, on the other hand, could land a fly in the exact spot a trout had broken the water’s surface, and he seldom went home without a string of a dozen fish. He wasn’t one to yank a fish out of the water and hurl it to shore, as Manny had when Augusta had fished with him so many years before. The Reverend cast out in the middle or far side of Deep Pool, and when he felt a bite he’d coax the fish in to shore for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, talking to it all the while. “Come along, my beauty. There you are. There you are.” Then, “You really are a beauty, aren’t you?” as he admired the fish flopping in the sand at his feet. Then he killed the fish by grasping its tail and whacking its head against a rock, and that sudden whack, after all those persuasive murmurs, came as a shock to Augusta as well as to the fish.

There were often others fishing on the sandbars or from the rocky beach farther downriver, or swimming in the pools upstream. Sometimes Indian kids slid down the bank and swam along the opposite shore. Once Manny even floated by, fully clothed except for his shoes, on his back with his hands behind his head, serenely drifting on the water. Augusta called to him, but he didn’t seem to hear. He went on floating downstream. The Reverend
pointed at him with his chin and said, “If I could choose a way to die, it would be to slip under this water in midstream and let it carry me into eternity.”

He often talked about death and souls and such; even the sex of angels (girls, the Reverend thought, certainly all females), and did fish have souls? (The Reverend didn’t want to think so but felt they certainly must.) As for the appearance—or sex—of God, the Reverend didn’t believe man had been created in His image. Rather he believed God took the forms of all His creations. At any given moment He could be a fish. A tree. A rock. The earth itself. Or He might be a stranger one came across, a fellow passenger on a bus or train. Woman or man. Whatever took His fancy. God spent eternity amusing Himself by seeing what it was like to be each of His creations, every single one of them. When He grew bored, He simply created something new. It was an idea that made Augusta suddenly careful of ants underfoot, and apologetic to the turnips she ate. “He could be anywhere, anything, walking among us,” said the Reverend. “Maybe He’s you.”

“Maybe He’s you,” said Augusta.

“Oh, no. Not me!”

“I notice you don’t talk about these ideas in your sermons,” said Augusta.

“Madam, if I talked like this from the pulpit I would be out of a job and we would not be fishing right now.”

Augusta shrugged. “Might give you more time for fishing.”

“Hmm. I’ll consider it.”

But he was only joking. When she was able to slip away from the farm to attend church, his sermons were always
the solid, stoic affairs that were expected of him. At church they kept a polite distance from each other; he treated her like any other member of the church, shaking her hand at the back of the church once the sermon was over. His wife, Lilian, always dressed so beautifully in blue, stood beside him, also shaking hands. Most times Augusta tried not to catch Lilian’s eye as she shook hands. But once she looked straight into Lilian’s face. Lilian smiled and winked at her. It was the knowing wink women friends pass between each other in the kitchen as their menfolk blather nonsense in the living-room. A conspirator’s wink.

As the months of Saturday fishing trips went on, it grew harder for Augusta to think of that respected and dignified preacher and this fisherman as one and the same man. It dawned on her that the Reverend she’d known all the years of her childhood was a role played, a fiction. And here, holding a fishing rod, sitting on the banks of the South Thompson, was the actor, the man behind the fiction. His wife had also been playing a part, the tidy, perfectly organized leader of the Sunday school and women’s church league who never lost her smile. Now Augusta discovered that under that smile something was boiling away. “She steals, you know,” said the Reverend.

“Steals? Lilian?”

“Nothing she needs, mind you. Things that make no sense. A scarf. A bar of soap. Once a can of salmon. Always from a store; never from a member of the church, thank God. It’s been going on for years. I’ve tried stopping it. I’ve made her take the things back to Colgrave and Conchie’s and explain and beg them not to tell anyone. But it goes on. Now I have Ed Conchie watch her when she comes in, and
add what she takes to our bill. The church elders all know about it. I’ve explained. They keep an eye on her. I suppose most people know about it by now. Though no one’s ever said anything to me, or to her.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It’s my fault, I think. She wasn’t cut out to be a pastor’s wife. She had to learn how to look nice all the time, even at home, because someone’s always dropping in. And she’s expected to organize meetings and Sunday school, all of that. She didn’t know how, at first. And I was hard on her. I yelled until she cowered. All that fear and tension had to come out somewhere, didn’t it? So she takes things, useless things. I’ve never hit her, but I might as well have. Ranting on like that. And what have I to show for it? High blood pressure and a wife who steals. Well, she doesn’t do it so much any more. I guess I’m getting easier to live with. Getting older has a way of mellowing you. In any case I learned some things. Maybe it was God’s will that I messed up so badly with my own wife. It makes me watch for other women in the same boat.”

“That why you go fishing with me?”

The Reverend grinned at her. “You’re doing me the favour. Not the other way around. Although I admit that when you came in that day I did feel guilty. I didn’t do very well with you and your father, after your mother’s death. I had your father in, you know. I had him come to my office and we talked. Or rather, I talked. He’s a hard man to get a word from. I tried to get him active in the church again, and tried to offer some help for you. There were women in the church who would have come out, to help with housework or meals, to visit with you. But he wouldn’t have any
of that. He didn’t want to see anyone. I guess I can understand, what with the talk going around that the baby wasn’t his. Still, I should have pushed things, for your sake.”

Augusta felt the anger flare up. “The baby was his.”

It was a lie. Manny had hired Harry Jacob for another summer after his son’s death, though Harry’s woman and Alice never came back with him. Harry Jacob was a hard worker, practised at working alone, unsupervised. Manny could leave him, even during haying, and catch a Saturday morning of fishing if he wished. But Manny wouldn’t have him in the house, not with sickness raging through the reserve. So Helen took meals out to Harry’s tent in the evening; she carried beef stew to him in syrup cans, and slabs of buttered bread, buttered sides together, wrapped in clean cloth. She rubbed apples to a shining red with her apron before taking them to him. Mornings and afternoons when Manny was in town or fishing, and Harry Jacob worked in the field alone, she brought him sweet coffee, and delicate cookies made from precious sugar, nuts, and beaten egg-whites called Penna Dutch kisses.

Through the kitchen window Augusta would see Harry Jacob and her mother chatting in the alfalfa. Harry had a way about him, a slickness that reminded Augusta of Clark Gable, though he wasn’t as handsome as all that, not dressed in field denims, not all greasy-haired and sweating from a day’s work. Yet even unwashed and dressed so poorly, he leaned against the tractor as if he owned it and all he saw around him; cocky and relaxed, he pointed at the hills or at the house with his coffee-cup, talking and laughing, no doubt at his own jokes. Helen fidgeted with her apron, or hugged her belly, shy as a schoolgirl, and laughed
at almost everything he said. He was younger than Helen by a good ten years and yet he made her behave like that, like a silly, flirting teenager. It made Augusta angry to see them together. She wanted her mother to go back to acting her age. She should quit all that silly giggling and get back to work. Here was Augusta, just fourteen and stuck with the summer’s canning, a job she hated; here she was sweating over the stove in the heat of July when she could be down at the river swimming or fishing with her father.

“I saw you talking to Harry again,” said Manny one evening.

Helen wiped her mouth with her napkin. “He helped me move the bee boxes after I took him lunch.”

“You spend too much time talking to him.”

“I’m being friendly. You don’t want me to be friendly to our help?”

“You’re being too friendly.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Don’t give me that look.”

“What interest would I have in an Indian?”

“None, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Enough of this. Harry will work harder if he’s fed and treated well. And that’s what I’m doing. In any case, don’t you think we owe him something? His son died on our land and we did nothing to help him.”

Manny, red-faced, pushed his chair from the table and crossed his arms. But he said nothing more about it, and he didn’t make a fuss when it was Harry Helen asked to work with her in the honey house for the final harvest, and not Manny. Extracting and bottling honey wasn’t a job Manny liked. It was hot, sticky work and he was always stung badly.
And besides that he’d take any excuse to go down to Deep Pool for a little fishing. Augusta was ready to help but Helen got her busy in the kitchen, canning plums. So it was just Harry and Helen out in the orchard, gathering the frames. Helen opened the hive, lifted off the inner cover, and slid out the frames filled with honeycomb, one by one, all the while squeezing puffs of smoke into the hive with a smoker, to calm the bees. She tapped the frame against a rock near the entrance of the hive, to rid it of as many bees as she could, then brushed the remaining bees from the comb with a handful of long grass. She then carried each frame, cleaned of bees, some distance away to put it into a covered super, or bee box. When she had a box full of honeycomb she had Harry carry it to the honey house.

Helen kept the house hot to keep the honey flowing, by stoking up the portly little Dandy Perfection woodstove, but not so hot that the beeswax melted from the frames. She held the frame full of honeycomb upright with one hand and slid a hot uncapping knife upwards across the comb with the other, to remove the wax caps that sealed the cells of honey. She removed all the caps on one side of the frame in a single sweep, taking enough wax to free the honey but not so much as to damage the comb. She then put the knife back into a pail of water on the stove, to keep it hot. It was dangerous work, and if she wasn’t careful she’d lose a thumb to the uncapping knife. She uncapped both sides of the frames and handed them to Harry to insert into the honey extractor, two frames at a time. Then he turned the crank at the top of the extractor, spinning the honey out of the frames into a tub that was tapped at the bottom. When he was done, he turned the frames around
and spun the honey from the other side of the comb. He turned slowly at first, while the comb was still heavy, then gathered speed as the frames emptied. Later Helen did the straining and bottling. When Augusta produced honey of her own, she would leave the honey house so sticky that when she took off her dress to wash up, it nearly stood by itself.