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

walking down the main street in Chase but that they were from a different time, not the time of the street. Another Gabe walked down the sidewalk towards them. Joy was afraid because she knew that if the two Gabes met, her Gabe, the one walking with her, would disappear. And that was exactly what happened. As the two Gabes passed each other, Joy’s Gabe started to fade, lose colour, become transparent. She picked him up and put him in a shopping cart in an effort to save him but he continued to fade, just as the other Gabe, a stronger, surer Gabe, kept on walking away. Perhaps it wasn’t a premonition, Augusta thought. Maybe the dream was only a reflection of what was happening in real life. Joy’s Gabe
was
fading away. His words flew from his grasp like so many swallows. He’d be talking quite animatedly and then he would
fade
. His sentence would trail off and he’d stare into space. Once, when Augusta was asking him some question or other about the hives, he said, “Could you slow down? I can’t
listen
so fast.”
    But then Gabe had never been much for small talk, even before he got sick. During that tense visit when Joy brought him home to the farm for the first time, he hardly said a word. Augusta filled the silence with chatter about bees. The kettle whistled.
    “I’ll get it,” said Gabe. Augusta was a little uncomfortable having this strange man make tea in her house. Onthe other hand, it was nice being served for a change. He made the tea, found cups in Augusta’s cupboard and milk in the fridge. He poured milk in all their cups, though Karl drank his black, often with a lump of cheddar at the bottom. There was a long silence during which even Augusta couldn’t think of anything to say, and all four of them drank their tea. It was Karl who eased things a little. “I haven’t had tea with milk since 1945,” he said. “Not bad.”
    Joy and Gabe were married just two months later, not five months after they met at a Christian retreat. Although Augusta didn’t condone their haste, she did understand it. Good fundamentalist Christian couples often got married soon after they met.
It is better to marry than to burn
. But then, Augusta and Karl had been married only four months after the stud-horse man’s visit. They had spent their honeymoon night in the Kamloops Plaza Hotel. She had no memory of that night—it had long ago been heaped over by other memories, thick and pungent, of Joe in a similar room in the same hotel. And in any case, that honeymoon night hadn’t been her first time with Karl. They had lain together, tormented by mosquitoes, on a bed of pine under heavy clouds that threatened rain. They hadn’t undressed; they’d simply pulled down their underwear. After he was done, Karl kissed her soundly and said, “That was good.” Augusta had felt no pleasure at all. It was over quickly and it had hurt. From the start, Karl’s lovemaking was brief, to the point, practical, and in the dark. It all had such a disappointing sense of hurriedness about it. The voice of the old Swede haunted him even in matrimonial intimacy, Augusta was sure of it. She could almost hear his voice over Karl’s shoulder:
Don’t you have something better to do?
Hurry up, hurry up. What’s the hold-up? Can’t you do anything right?
    Augusta moved her things—a trunk of clothes, a chair, some bedding, and a few dishes—into the old Swede’s cabin, onto the W. H. Ranch. She slept with Karl in Karl’s childhood room, which had only one short, thin partition dividing it from Olaf’s sleeping quarters—a partition that did nothing to stop Olaf’s snores from waking Augusta at night.
    Olaf doled out bits of money for Karl and Augusta’s purchases at Colgrave and Conchie’s general store in Chase, but he gave Karl no wages and Augusta no housekeeping allowance, so she was forced to ask for it, to come begging to him if they needed groceries. He griped bitterly if they went into town more than once a week, or if