A Recipe for Bees (21 page)

“No,” said Augusta. She shrugged away Mrs. Grafton’s hand and fought nausea to wipe the baby clean, to wrap her in the crocheted blanket her mother had made. The baby’s joints were as loose as a Raggedy Ann’s; her lips looked as if they’d been drawn on with a pen. Her tiny fingers were perfect and her long fingernails showed the blue of the skin underneath. Her hair was silky black, and even in death her little head carried the sweet smell that assured she would be snuggled and loved. Augusta wanted to hold her and never let her go; she wanted to rock the child as she rocked her cloth dolls. When Mrs. Grafton finally went downstairs and left her alone, she did hold her; she held her grief as she would have held her sister in life, close to her chest, her cheek against the baby’s soft black hair. Up to this moment she had felt nothing but irritation and anger—at her useless father and the stupid ladies of the women’s league; at the disruption to her routine. It all seemed her mother’s fault. Helen in her selfishness had gone away; she’d hid and left Augusta to handle things yet again. But here, holding the weight of that child in her arms, baby love like a stone in her throat, Augusta cried. Her sister didn’t have a name. She would never have a name except the one Augusta gave her right there. She called her baby sister Joy, because that was exactly what Augusta did not feel.

• • •

Augusta finished the last of her cookie and glanced at the bird feeder that hung beside her on the balcony. Karl had kept it stocked with birdseed and suet, but they had only managed to attract a few common birds—towhees, chickadees, sparrows, and juncos. The old man down the road appeared to have enticed most of the more interesting birds to the feeders in his garden. She’d seen varied thrush there, and Steller’s jays and occasionally a few California quail sneaking in and out of his bushes. There, for much of the season, birds had twittered and swooped like angels around the cathedral spires that were his trees. Dozens of hummingbirds had buzzed around the flowers in his garden until midsummer, when they’d left for the fireweed blooming in the mountains.

A hummingbird had flown up to Augusta’s window on the train that morning, showing off its green iridescent neck plumage before shooting off. It was late in the year for a hummingbird sighting, she thought, although they sometimes flocked in late August after coming down from the mountains. But they rarely stayed more than a day or two before flying south.

When Augusta had been a girl, birds had been as abundant as the food they fed on. Every farm in the valley had several pairs of bluebirds, sweet, trusting little birds that nested in birdhouses farmers nailed to fence posts, and blackbirds that sang out their territory in the marshes. Crows followed along behind her mother, plucking up the Lincoln Homesteader peas as she planted them. Goldfinches clung to the stems of bobbing cosmos and took their dinner right from the flower heads that had gone to seed. Birds pooped on the laundry hung out on the line,
and generally made themselves so available that Manny went out with the shotgun each morning of the garden season to shoo them away.

Even Helen’s funeral had been besieged with birds. Augusta had been fifteen at the time. So young! She couldn’t remember much of the service now, of what the Reverend had said about her mother. What she did remember, she recalled with such clarity that it was as if she were there now, standing by the grave, staring down at her mother’s casket. It was a plain wooden box, built by Mr. Rivers, Martha Rivers’ father-in-law. He built all the coffins for the congregation. She had brought rosemary to toss in the grave, a promise that she would never forget her mother or her baby sister, and she squeezed this bouquet so tightly that the sweetness of rosemary drifted around her. She must have cried during the service because standing here, looking down at her mother’s grave, she tasted the saltiness on her lips.

A crowd of people stood behind her, mostly women. The women who had known her had brought dishes of food for the meal that followed. The few who didn’t know her mumbled among themselves at the unfairness of a God who would make childbirth so heavy a burden. They didn’t talk about the questionable paternity of the baby, not here at the funeral, though by then all of them must have known. Certainly that was why it was so well attended. For them the funeral was a carnival of sorts; they came to see how she and Manny would react. They watched so they would have something to entertain themselves with later. Nevertheless each of the women carried flowers to throw into the grave.

Where was her father? He wasn’t standing with her and she hadn’t thought much about it until that moment, but it was strange that a girl should stand alone at her mother’s grave. She glanced tentatively at the crowd, but turned quickly back to stare down at her handful of rosemary. There were so many people watching her. She tossed the rosemary down into the grave, onto her mother’s casket. Then the others threw flowers into the grave; delphiniums and foxgloves, Indian paintbrushes, bundles of bachelor’s buttons, sweet-smelling snapdragons, marigolds and calendulas, wild roses and handfuls of shasta daisies. The casket was completely covered in flowers, so that no wood showed through. It could have been a pit full of flowers, and like a child leaping onto a bed of leaves she could have jumped into the flowers and landed softly.

Martha Rivers came over to Augusta at the luncheon that followed, and pulled her outside by the arm and made her stand on the steps of the church. She put an arm around Augusta and despite herself Augusta calmed a little under her touch. Martha pointed at the trees around the church, and at the rooftop, and at the air above them, because the trees, the church roof, the air was thick—black—with crows. Augusta held her ears against their chatter. “Crows don’t flock together this time of year,” said Martha. “Those are angels, come to take your mother. Most times when people die, they get themselves just one angel to come help them over to the other side. But when a baby that young dies, then a whole chorus of them comes, to help that little soul along. Your mother and your sister are lucky, to have all that help. It’s not always easy to get there. Look at that!” The whole flock took to the air then,
shocked into flight by some passing car, and they quite literally darkened the sky. Feathers lost in flight or from their short-lived airborne battles drifted down.

Manny shook Helen’s bees out of their hives the evening after the funeral. It was a European tradition to force bees out of their hives on the death of the beekeeper. Bees couldn’t belong to anyone else, and in some way they aided the ascent of the beekeeper’s soul. Maybe that was so, because one of the hives collected in a great ball against the kitchen window that Helen had spent so much time looking out of. They stayed there until sunset, then, catching the last of the light, flew off in a glittering golden-red globe that moved through the sky as if guided by a single mind. Swarms rarely flew far. Augusta watched as this swarm, attracted to the lingering smell of honey, found a knothole in the honey-house roof and took up residency in the rafters. The descendants of Helen’s bees lived there for decades afterwards.

Augusta saw Harry Jacob in town about a month after Helen’s funeral. She paid for her grocery order at Colgrave and Conchie’s, picked up her two bags, and turned to see Harry walking in the door. He stopped when he saw her glaring at him. He was all slicked up for town, likely pursuing some new woman, she thought. The anger must have shown in her face because his eyes darted around the room as if he were searching for escape. Finally he turned on his heel, jogged down the store steps, and headed off towards the train station.

After the funeral Augusta went numb all over. She slept and slept. Then, when nothing was getting done around the farm because grief had hit her father in pretty much the
same way, something clicked inside and she worked herself to exhaustion. She filled her days to fill her mind and keep her mother out of her thoughts. Even so, the grief snaked up and rubbed itself against her when she was thinking of some other thing: were these pickles still good? Should she count on a late summer and plant another row of peas? Did the floor need washing? And suddenly she’d be weeping. Grief invaded her lungs and left her short of breath. It leapt into her heart, bringing its skip-beat panic. It wound itself around her neck and tightened against her throat; it pulled at her hands, making her drop the pickle jar to the floor. It slid into her belly and squeezed her stomach so she had no desire to eat, and then it fingered its way into her mind and stole names—names of people she had known for years, names of plants she had known from her mother’s garden. She forgot why she had entered a room and would have to retrace her steps. And she walked in her sleep, as she’d done since seeing that rosemary vision of her mother’s death, except she didn’t run around the house. Now she’d wake and find herself out in the garden, or standing in the barn, with a hazy notion that she’d been hunting for something she’d lost. But once she was awake, she couldn’t think what it was she was searching for.

Shortly after Helen’s death, Tommy Thompson was killed. Somehow he’d got himself enlisted during the war, despite the fits. He must have lied to get in. But why, wondered Augusta. He must have known that anywhere, any time—driving a truck or shooting across a muddy patch of ground at some German soldier who was shooting back—possession could take his soul up and out of his body and replace it with a thrashing, incoherent demon. At home
he’d been avoided because of his fits. He’d been called “wild man” and “savage,” as if he were an Indian, though not by Augusta. Were the seizures in some way to blame for his death? Did the possession take him during some crucial time, on some battlefield, leaving his body without the wits to defend itself? She never found out. She could never bring herself to ask his parents when she saw them in town, although she had written to them after she saw his death announced in the newspaper.

The letters she sent to that boy’s parents were strange, and unsigned, and they shamed her still. It must have made their grief more intolerable, to be reminded of it weekly by this stranger, because she had written every week for nearly four months. The letters rambled on about how she had loved him, how brave he was, how considerate and kind, how unfair the war was, and how unfair death was; she went on about the sorrow that nearly ripped her apart, the nightmares that plagued her, her inability to sleep or eat, the weight she had lost over his death, the sadness that made it impossible to carry out the most basic daily chores. All this about a boy she barely knew and had hardly spoken with. The letters were nutty, and Augusta blushed when she thought of them.

Augusta led Karl and Rose into the living-room, where they took their seats. “Would you want to know when you were going to die?” she asked.

“No,” said Karl.

“Absolutely,” said Rose.

“Why? Why would you want to know?”

“So I could prepare.”

“How could you prepare for something like that?” asked Augusta. “I’d worry to death.”

“I’d get my affairs in order. Plan my funeral.”

“That’d be a waste of time,” said Karl. “Leave that to the living, after you’re gone. It’s one less thing to worry about while you’re alive.”

“What would you do, then,” Augusta asked him, “if you knew you were going to die?”

“I already know I’m going to die,” said Karl. He laughed, but Augusta didn’t. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. She had known when she married Karl that she’d likely be widowed at some point. Women generally outlived men, and there was such an age difference between her and Karl. She should count herself lucky to have him with her now, she thought. Even so, living without him was a prospect she shunted to the back of her mind.

When Manny had died, grief hadn’t hit Augusta right away. She had kept herself busy setting things straight at his farm—Augusta’s farm. She had to sell most of the animals and some of the equipment to pay off his debts, and then they rented out the house and farm to Martha Rivers’ younger brother, Teddy Grafton, so he could be close enough to help out his parents. The rent brought in a little money; not much, but it was regular, and Augusta and Karl could call it their own and stick a little of it away each month.

The baby made the gossip that much worse. One day Augusta had Joy in the pram and was walking with her from the train station, where Karl had parked the truck, to Colgrave and Conchie’s. Karl was already at Yep Num’s, having walked there as Augusta settled Joy into her
carriage. Augusta saw Martha Rivers approaching from the direction of the store and speeded up her walk, but Martha ran to catch her. She caught up with her out of breath and placed her body in front of the pram so Augusta had to stop to avoid running into her.

“Well!” she said. Not even a decent hello. “Let’s see!” She bent over the pram and took a perfunctory peek at Joy sleeping there, but she hadn’t really wanted to see. It was only an excuse to say it. “My, doesn’t she have her father’s eyes?” Then she smiled, turned heel, and walked briskly back to the store. Joy didn’t have Karl’s blue eyes. Joy’s eyes were turning brown, as brown as Joe’s. Anyway, Martha Rivers hadn’t even seen her eyes, as Joy was sleeping.

Augusta walked with the pram a little distance towards the store and then turned a wide arch away from it. If Martha Rivers knew about Joe, then the men who haunted the café knew about him. The old men without the strength to work. The bachelors, like Percy Martin, and the men without jobs. They would all know by now. She stood there, on the wooden platform of the train station, at the point where the platform turned into a sidewalk that led to the café. Harry Jacob left Colgrave and Conchie’s and crossed the street. When he saw her standing there he stopped and tipped his hat to her, before going on his way. It was a gesture of what, she wondered. Respect? No man tipped his hat to her in that town any more. Even he must have heard the gossip. Then
that
was why he tipped his hat. They were equals now. Some time later Karl left the café, and when he saw her standing there, he came over. When she said she hadn’t done the shopping, he didn’t ask why. He left her in the truck and bought his supplies alone. If
he had heard anything about Joe in the café, he didn’t say a word. Not then. Not ever.