A Recipe for Bees (20 page)

The lights overhead were too bright; they hurt her eyes and made the white walls seem foggy and distant. Her body felt numb and sounds were magnified, distorted; she felt as if she were underwater, struggling to surface into wakefulness. The squeaky footsteps of a nurse’s shoes came down the hall towards the closed door, then turned and receded. Another nurse’s footsteps passed by. Then it was quiet for a long time. She closed her eyes and her thoughts drifted, slipped away. She could still smell the nail-polish-remover scent of the ether they’d used on her.

Out of the silence came two voices that seemed hushed and disembodied. Augusta opened her eyes. Although she thought the voices came from outside the recovery room door, she had heard no one approaching. She thought the voices must belong to nurses. “I’ve never had to do this before,” said one voice.

“At least you don’t have to tell her yourself. The head nurse gets that job.”

“How does she do it? Does she just come out and say it? ‘Mrs. Olsen, your father has drowned’?”

There was a pause during which Augusta imagined that the nurse shrugged or nodded in reply, and then the voices became indistinct. They didn’t recede, they simply diminished. There were no footsteps walking away and Augusta began to doubt what she’d heard. She tried to move, to find out what all this was about. Her father drowned? But nothing would move; her body seemed caught in the moment of the young nurse’s telling, frozen in it. She drifted in and out of the dream world the anaesthetic had induced until the recovery-room door opened and Karl came in.

Augusta took hold of his arm and asked him immediately, before saying hello, “Is Dad all right?”

“Manny? He’s fine. I saw him in town.”

Augusta lay back on her stack of pillows. “I dreamed he drowned. Tell him not to go swimming. He takes chances, by himself.”

“Manny’s not going to drown. In any case you can tell him yourself. He’s coming by tonight.”

Manny did visit the maternity ward that evening, wearing the clothes he wore to milk his herd, smelling of manure and sour dairy, carrying a fistful of roadside daisies that he
laid on the table beside her bed. He was looking old, tired. His clothes hung on him. She was glad none of the women in the ward were from Chase; his appearance shamed her. “You haven’t been eating,” she said.

“I eat well enough.”

“You forget when you’re alone. You forget to eat.”

He scratched the back of his neck. “How you been doing?”

“Fine.”

“A girl, eh?”

“Yes.”

“What you call her? Joy?”

“Yes.”

“Funny name. No name at all. Should have named her after your mother.”

“She’s my baby. I’ll name her what I want.” Then, “You didn’t come for supper that time, like you said you would.”

“Well.”

“You could come. You could have supper with us. Sunday.

“All right. Sunday.”

“You’ll come?”

“I’ll come.”

“You sure you’ll come? ’Cause I’m not going to go to all that fuss if you’re not going to come. With the baby and all.”

“I’ll come. I said I’d come!”

Augusta pulled the sheets up over her chest. “I dreamed you drowned.”

“What? Drowned? Crazy dream, that.”

“It wasn’t a dream, exactly. I heard these voices outside the door—afterwards, you know, when I was in the recovery room. I was alone and I heard these voices.”

“You hearing voices, they better keep you in the hospital for a week longer, eh?” He grinned. He hadn’t shaved that day, or for a week, by the look of him. Coarse grey hairs prickled at his chin.

“Promise me you won’t go swimming like you do. You take chances on the river.”

Augusta sat back in her pillows and Manny scratched his neck and glanced around the room at the other women in their beds. Then the nurse with a mole at her lip brought Joy in for her feeding and asked Manny to leave, and there wasn’t another chance for discussion of the matter.

That was Manny’s only visit. Olaf never came, never offered a word of congratulations. He had ignored her through her pregnancy, and would go on ignoring her, and Joy, once she brought the baby home. She half expected a visit from Mrs. Grafton, and dreaded one from Martha Rivers, but neither woman turned up. The Reverend was her only other visitor, and he dropped by for a few minutes carrying a little crocheted blanket that Lilian had made for Joy. “How’s the mother?” he said, grinning.

“All right.”

He looked around the room at the other women and lowered his voice. “Guess you won’t have much time for fishing for a while.”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“I’ll hold your spot. It’s no fun fishing without you.” He turned the hat in his hands. “Pass my congratulations on to Karl.”

“Sure, sure I will.”

He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “It’ll all blow over.”

He turned and walked out without saying goodbye, though he stopped at the doorway and glanced back at her briefly. She spent the rest of that week in the ward with nothing to do except brood over the dream—or vision or hallucination—that she had had in the recovery room. She came to doubt she’d heard anything at all.

Augusta and Rose cleared away the lunch dishes. “Karl,” she said, “do you remember me telling you my father was going to drown?”

“Something about it.”

“What do you remember?”

“You said you had a dream or something like that, and you thought he was going to die.”

“You remember when I had that dream?”

“You were in the hospital. The week Joy was born.”

“And then he did die.”

Karl nodded. “Why’re you asking?”

She’d half hoped that she’d remembered wrong, that she’d had that vision of Manny’s death after the fact and somehow remembered it the other way around. It would have given her less reason to believe in the odd dream pointing to her own death that she’d had on the train earlier in the day. But that vision of Manny’s death must have happened the way she remembered it, and she remembered it all so clearly.

She had been packing her things, getting ready to leave the hospital, when the young nurse, all starched cap and apron, came into the ward, looking so concerned that Augusta immediately asked, “What’s wrong with my baby?”

“It’s not your baby.”

“What then? What’s happened?”

“The head nurse wants to see you.”

This was when Augusta knew that the voices she had heard in the recovery room were right. “You haven’t done this before,” she said to the nurse.

“Pardon?”

Augusta didn’t say another word. She felt drowsy or drunk as she followed the young woman to the head nurse’s office. The room felt familiar though she’d never set foot in it before. There was a monkey calendar on the wall, exactly like the one at the Silver Grill. On the nurse’s desk were a white ceramic coffee-cup holding pencils and pens; a photograph of two red-haired children, a girl and boy; several file folders; books; a telephone; and a bouquet of white daisies in a blue glass vase. Augusta turned to the head nurse and watched the nurse’s mouth tell her what the disembodied voices had told her the day she had Joy.

There were times, like this one, when she felt she was simply walking through the moment, knowing every word, every sound, every motion. Life was a joke heard for the third time, the punch line long ago given away. Living wasn’t living at such times; it was acting. She felt distanced from her own life, dead to it. How many more times would she take these same steps, speak these same words? She was walking the same life over and over until, like an old carpet in a hallway, its fibres wore away and she could see clear through them.

That day, the day her father drowned, Karl drove Augusta and Joy home down the highway that followed the South Thompson, the river that had claimed Manny. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

“What?”

“Do you remember what I said, about Dad drowning?”

“Of course.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No.”

“I told him. He went anyway.”

“That was his choice.”

His irritability stopped her from saying more. She stared at the deceiving calm of the South Thompson. It looked so lovely, hardly capable of taking a man’s life. It wore the wide infinity of the sky, and made her believe that if she sank into those waters she would come out in some other place, a mirror to this one. Manny had once told her that the Indians living on the other side of the river believed a whole other world existed on the underside of the water, populated by fish and other creatures who acted like humans. Maybe this was where her father had been heading when he’d stepped into the South Thompson and been swept away. Maybe some small craziness inside him had known that the other place was there, underneath all that flowing water, and was bound to discover it. His soggy body had bounced against rocks and surfaced, but maybe the part that was truly her father had come up again in that place where the fish had souls, and it was human beings who were the myths and legends, mere stories told to fish children.

Augusta refilled all their teacups and took a cookie for herself, then carried her cup over to the balcony again. Rose followed her, and together they looked down at the hive in the garden below. A loose ball of bees still hovered in front
of it. “Did I ever tell you there are undertaker bees?” asked Augusta.

“No,” said Rose. “Surprisingly, I can’t recall you ever telling me that.”

“Most bees die outside, while foraging. But some die inside the hives. The undertaker bees carry the dead body through the hive and deposit it outside the opening. They leave it there a day or two until it’s dried out a bit, so it’s lighter. Then one of them collects the dead bee and flies into the sky, away from the hive, where it drops the body. Isn’t that a fitting funeral for a bee? A sky burial.”

“A hell of a lot more exciting than the funerals we go to,” said Rose.

Augusta nodded and ate her cookie. It seemed they were always going to somebody’s funeral, a man or woman from the seniors’ centre, someone they had played cards with the week before. Augusta couldn’t say that she had ever got used to it, exactly. On the other hand, funerals were social events at this stage of life, a chance to catch up with friends still living. They were dry affairs. The funeral home and crematorium in town were plunked down in the centre of a treeless cement parking lot and were surrounded by seniors’ housing complexes. (A cunning bit of development there, she thought. The law of supply and demand in sublime action.) The services were getting to be repetitive. They were made to sing all the old favourites: “Abide with Me”; “The Lord Is My Shepherd”; “Rock of Ages”; and “In the Garden” (“He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am his own”). Augusta didn’t want anything so dour sung at her funeral. She’d have them sing “Morning Has Broken.” None of this
sulking around her dead body as if that were all there was left of her.

Death hadn’t been handled by strangers when her mother had passed away. When Augusta came home from school to learn that her mother had just died giving birth to a dead child, she struggled right along with the ladies of the church women’s league as they carried the body from the bed downstairs to the parlour. She stood behind them as they wiped her mother down, and she cut that good navy dress clean along the back so her mother could be buried in it. She helped lower the body into the wooden casket, and combed out her mother’s long hair so it spread over the white lace pillow she was laid to rest upon. She was seeing death through. At just fifteen years old she was asked to do it, and she did it, even if her father could not.

Her father had been there when she came home from school. He had been sitting at the kitchen table—sitting perfectly still amid the sea of busy church women. He hadn’t shaved that day and was wearing the grimy plaid shirt he’d done chores in that morning. Augusta had wrapped her arms around his neck, but he’d taken her wrists in his hands and yanked her arms away and whispered,
hissed
, “What will the women think? Get away with you!”

Then he’d stood and left the house and sat on a stump round back of the barn, staring off into space. He didn’t lift a finger to help with any part of the funeral preparation. He left it all to the women of the church. But Augusta had to be useful, Martha Rivers made sure of it. “See to the baby, will you, Augusta?” she said.

The other women went silent for a moment. Some of them glanced at one another with knowing smiles. Augusta
wondered what they were up to. Were they testing her mettle? Seeing if she’d touch a dead child? “What do you want me to do?”

“Just clean the baby. Wipe her off. Wrap her in something. Did your mother have a christening gown for her? Well, a blanket will do then. You’ll need a knife, to clean up the cord.”

Augusta filled the wash-basin with warm soapy water, and carried it and a towel and knife upstairs to the bedroom where her sister still lay in the wooden cradle that had once been Augusta’s. For no good reason Augusta could see, the women followed her, Martha Rivers in the lead. The baby’s face was covered in a crocheted blanket, and when Augusta lifted the blanket away she got her first look at the dead child. Her sister was so unbelievably tiny. She was a blue doll, caked with blood and white stuff collected around her neck. Her hair was black, black as an Indian’s.

“She’s so dark!” Augusta said, turning to the door. The women were crowded there, huddling in the doorway. They were a dizzy bunch, staring at her like that, especially Martha Rivers. Why on earth was she smiling at such a time?

“Yes, she is dark, isn’t she?” said Martha Rivers. “Nothing like your mother. Or your father.” One of the women covered her mouth to suppress a giggle and pushed her way out of the group. “What?” said Martha Rivers. “Have I said something?” But she never lost that smile.

Augusta felt her blood rising. She caught Martha Rivers’ meaning. She knew now what her mother had done. “My grandmother was dark,” said Augusta. “Italian.” Though her grandmother was as British—as fair and blue-eyed—as the rest of the family.

“Yes, of course,” said Martha Rivers. “Well then, you know what to do.” She turned and took most of the women back downstairs into the kitchen. Mrs. Grafton was the only one to stay. She came into the room and put a hand on Augusta’s shoulder. “I’ll clean the child. There’s no need for you to do it. You’ve been through enough today.”