Read Online A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Free Book Online Page A

He simply wouldn’t have believed her. She’d tried telling him once, during their courtship. As they sat in the International on Bald Mountain looking over the farms and the South Thompson below, she asked him, “You ever had a dream that came true?”
    “Dreaming don’t get you nowhere.”
    “I mean a dream you have in your sleep.”
    “I don’t dream.”
    “You must dream. Everybody dreams.”
    “If I do I don’t remember.”
    “Doesn’t that bother you?”
    “No.”
    “How about a feeling, then? You get a feeling something’s going to happen and it does.”
    “You believe in that kind of thing and somebody’s going to make a sucker out of you.”
    Augusta knew that a man who didn’t dream and, what was more, didn’t care, wasn’t a man to trust with a thing like a premonition. Karl was so like her father in that regard. Manny wouldn’t have known a miracle if Jesus himself had walked across the waters of the South Thompson and slapped him with a trout. Although Helen had often talked in the morning about the day to come as if she already knew it. “A good day for sewing,” she had once said, staring out the window at the road that led to town, and that was the day the sewing-machine salesman knocked on the door.
    “ ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth,’ ” she had said, looking out over the birds on the fence near the marshland. “ ‘Three for a wedding and four for a birth.’ Four magpies. Cows will be calving today.” Sure enough, three of the five pregnant cows picked that day for calving.
    They were little coincidences, easy to dismiss, and nothing was said of them. But there were other times, like the day when Manny cut himself so badly on the mower, when Augusta was convinced her mother had some sort of fore-knowledge. What were they doing together? Washing dishes, likely lunch dishes, when Helen stood straight and gasped. “Your father’s in trouble. Quick, get one of his leather belts. I’ll saddle a horse. Meet me outside.”
    Helen and Augusta rode together on the same sling-backed mare to the field where Manny had been mowing hay. When they reached him he was sitting on the ground next to the mower, gripping his wrist. Blood was pouring from his hand onto the green, freshly cut grass. The sickle bar on the mower had become jammed and he had been attempting to free it when he sliced the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. But this accident had only just happened. It had taken Helen and Augusta ten minutes to reach him. Certainly he hadn’t called to them. How did Helen know? That was, in fact, what Manny asked.
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Helen. She wound the leather belt tight around his arm as a tourniquet.
    “You’ve been fooling with it again, haven’t you?” he said.
    “I haven’t been fooling with anything.”
    “But how did you know? It’s the devil’s work.”
    “It’s God’s work. I’m here helping you, aren’t I? You’d be out here bleeding to death otherwise.”
    “I’m not bleeding to death.”
    “That’s what you think.”
    Augusta didn’t think it was the premonition business that Manny minded, exactly; it was that his wife had a skill he didn’t have, a powerful one, too. Manny himself was forever finding omens of bleak events after the fact. His favourite was a hen’s crowing. Although Helen’s yard was full of crowing hens, he refused to believe a hen ever crowed. That would be unnatural. Crowing, like fighting, was the job of the rooster. So when some misfortune took him by surprise—a pig having its leg broken in the confusion of a truckload of pigs on the way to auction—he remembered that a hen had crowed unnaturally just thatmorning, and hadn’t that been a sign of the coming day’s bad luck?
Spooky
.
    So it was from her mother’s side that Augusta’s ability was passed on. Even Joy showed some budding signs of having the gift. She had had her own premonition of Gabe’s illness. She had dreamed that she and Gabe were