“Ah-huh,” said Karl. His ears blushed. He glanced at her and back at his cup, smiling.
The stud-horse man who had introduced Karl and Augusta was named George Hucker. He hooked up two studs, stallions, to a two-wheeled cart and rode them around from farm to farm to service mares for a fee. His occupation was called “travelling the stud” in those days, and it often involved more than mating horses.
When George Hucker arrived at the farm in the early evening, after supper, Augusta was planting potatoes and her father, Manny, was shovelling out the calf stalls. They were both sweating, neither looking their best, but they dropped what they were doing and greeted their guests. “What you doing here?” said Manny. “Both my mares are pregnant; you know that.” He waved his hand at the mares grazing in the field behind the barn.
“Got a young man here looking for a horse. You remember Karl.”
“Yeah, Karl. How’s Olaf?”
“All right.”
“Don’t think you ever met my daughter, Augusta.”
Karl smiled and nodded but didn’t offer a handshake.
“So,” said George. “Got anything for us?”
“What you in mind for?”
“Karl wants a good riding horse. Something sturdy and reliable and in good health. Nothing fancy. Karl here can’t afford too much.”
“Don’t know if I can do anything for you, Karl,” said Manny. “Wasn’t planning on selling.”
“Are you sure there, Manny?” said George. “Maybe Augusta has some thoughts on the matter?”
“You’d have to ask her yourself. She’s got her own mind.”
“I don’t know,” said Augusta.
“Why not try Grafton,” said Manny.
“Heard all his mares was sold. Ones not sold are a little on the high-strung side.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
George offered Manny and Karl a cigarette. Karl struck a match on the side of the wagon and lit Manny’s and George’s cigarettes before lighting his own. It was then that Augusta noticed he was missing the thumb on his right hand; he expertly held the match between his index and middle fingers. The stud-horse man, and Manny, silently smoked their cigarettes as Karl stole glances at Augusta.
It was only after they were married that Augusta understood that the stud man was also a trader of another kind, a matchmaker, and that she was the merchandise being appraised that day. She didn’t clue in, even after weeks of Karl’s visits. He started showing up at the farm, smelling of soap and carrying things. Sometimes he brought copies of National Geographic; once he brought flowers. Neither Manny nor Karl was much for talk so these were awkward visits. Augusta set out coffee, and cookies if she’d had time for baking that week, and sat at the kitchen table with the two of them. Her father smoked his pipe and leafed through the National Geographic if Karl had brought one. Karl ran a fingernail back and forth along the grain of the wood in the kitchen table.
It was during one of these visits that Karl told Augusta about how he had lost the thumb. He’d shot it off himself when he was sixteen, while hunting deer in John Walter’s field, about a half-mile from home, with a Winchester rifle that belonged to Olaf. The gun went off when he tripped over a log in the long grass of the field. There was no pain at first. He didn’t realize the damage he’d done until he saw the thumb dangling from his hand. Olaf took Karl down to Chase in his truck. With no freezing to stop the pain, the doctor trimmed off the hanging shreds of Karl’s flesh and detached the thumb. Then he and Karl took a night train to the Kamloops hospital for surgery while Olaf headed back to the farm to take care of the animals. Olaf had little sympathy for Karl. He said it was his own careless fault he’d shot his thumb off and he wouldn’t pay the hospital bill. Karl took care of the bill himself by trapping foxes and selling the furs.
Augusta had to drag that story from him, as he was as economical with language as he was with most everything else. There was little conversation among the three of them, just statements thrown out and never collected. “Good price on wool this spring,” said Karl.
Manny turned the page of the National Geographic. “Some fool’s trying sugar beets back of Kamloops,” he said. “Too dry there.”
Karl slurped his coffee.
At some point Augusta sighed with impatience, refilled the men’s cups, and left the house under the pretence of hanging laundry or feeding pigs or bedding calves. The notion that Karl had come courting never occurred to her until that one day when he followed her out the door. “You don’t have to go,” he said.
Augusta took the last step off the porch and turned to face him. “I’ve got chores.” She waved a hand back at the house, at her father still sitting there in the kitchen. “If I don’t do them no one will.”
This wasn’t quite true. Manny was still a hard worker, though since Helen’s death he worked sporadically, in fits of frenzy that drove him to near exhaustion. After these outbursts he did nothing for a week or more but sleep, or sit in the house or on the stump out back of the barn. The pigs and calves and chickens would have starved if Augusta hadn’t made feeding them her chore, along with all the housework and laundry and meal making. Manny had even stopped fishing, though occasionally, very occasionally, he went down to Deep Pool to swim. Augusta dreaded those times, fearing he would drown in the fast undertow of the river, and then how could she keep the farm running?
Karl fumbled in his pocket for a time. Augusta thought he was about to give her something but he didn’t. He took out his red handkerchief and blew his nose. “The flowers,” he said.
She couldn’t think what he meant; then she remembered. He’d brought a wilting handful of roadside daisies and bachelor buttons. Back then she’d called them cornflowers; they were pretty as the day was long. Karl had laid the flowers on the table when he took the coffee from her, but she hadn’t thought much more about them. “They make you sneeze?” she said, because she couldn’t think what else to say.
Karl shook his head and wiped his nose. He put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I bring them all for you,” he said. “Why you think I’ve been coming here all this time?”
His face burned brightly now, but so, Augusta supposed, did hers. He reached out and cupped her cheek in his right hand. It was a strange sensation to feel his thumbless hand on her cheek, the bumpy scarred flesh against her skin. Where had he found the courage? He was shaking, but he didn’t take his hand away. He was like the barn cats she tamed. Jittery and scruffy, the tops of their ears frozen off, they were chased by dogs and coyotes and still they pushed past the urge that told every fibre in their small bodies to run away, and tentatively came to her for a scratch and a meal of leftovers. How could she turn away from him? How could she say no to a man who needed so much? She looked at Karl, into his eyes, and got caught in that blue; she floated in it.
Karl brought her more flowers, and raspberries, blueberries, huckleberries, and saskatoons that he’d bought from the Indian women, and took her on drives and to the dances. As a twenty-year-old he had walked the twelve-mile round trip from Olaf’s cabin to the schoolhouse for several of these dances, but had never found the nerve to go inside. He had just hung around the schoolhouse door, watching. It wasn’t that he couldn’t dance; he took home to his bedroom what he saw on the lighted schoolhouse floors and danced with the broom to the music in his head until his father banged on the wall and shouted for him to cut out the thumping around.
Those first few weeks Karl was like a lamb following Augusta around as she did chores or worked in the kitchen, sometimes helping, sometimes sitting beside her, blowing on his harmonica as she sang along. He courted her the way the heroes in the westerns he read courted their women, with flowers, shy kisses, and little gifts of berries. It would have gone on for ever like that if she hadn’t gone ahead and done the asking. Whatever possessed her? Because something did possess her. She didn’t think she wanted marriage, not yet, not to this man who was so much older and had a life so run by his fat
her that he didn’t collect a hired hand’s wage for working on his father’s sheep ranch. Nevertheless, there were the words, coming out of her mouth. “Is marriage what you’re after?” she said. “I mean, do you want to marry me?”
They were sitting together in the dark green International truck that belonged to Karl’s father, on top of Bald Mountain, looking over the farmland below. Karl was dressed as he always was, in wool pants and suspenders, a wide-brimmed hat. He wore armbands to keep the sleeves of his white shirt from getting in his way while he worked. A man didn’t show his forearms by rolling up his sleeves in those days. He’d been playing “You Are My Sunshine” on his harmonica and Augusta had been half singing, half humming along. Then the words were there, out of her mouth and hanging in the air between them. Had she really said them?
Karl quit playing and tapped the spit from the harmonica onto his pant leg. He cupped her cheek in his hand. For a moment she couldn’t catch her breath; her heart skipped once and when he spoke the terror settled into her belly. “If you’ll have me,” he said. He was so earnest, so desperately earnest. He was thirty. She was eighteen. Her mother had been dead three years. She said yes.
Three
WHEN SHE TOLD Manny she was marrying Karl he said nothing at first. He stood up from the kitchen table and refilled his cup. Finally he said, “You know about Karl’s mother.”
“I know she died. I remember the funeral.”
“That ranch is a long way out from things. A lot farther from town than here.”
“I know.”
“A woman shouldn’t be that far from things.”
“You don’t want me to marry Karl.”
“I have no say in it.”
“So you want me to marry?”
“I have no say. You do as you like.” He wouldn’t save her from herself. She had made her bed and she would lie in it.
Augusta now wore the diamond engagement ring and wedding band Karl had given her the year Joy left. She had gone without a ring for most of their early marriage after losing her first engagement ring to a sink of dishwater. That first ring wasn’t worth much. Karl had no money of his own. “You know the ring is glass, don’t you?” Martha Rivers said.
The day Karl gave her that first engagement ring, Augusta was so excited that she asked him to drop her off at Mrs. Grafton’s house. Mrs. Grafton was the only woman Augusta could think to tell. But Martha Rivers was there, visiting her mother.
“I know the ring is glass,” said Augusta. “It’s all he could afford right now.”
In fact she hadn’t known. She had supposed Karl had begged money from his father to buy her a diamond. She had known it was modest, all right, but she’d been proud showing it off to Mrs. Grafton and even to Martha Rivers. But Martha Rivers could never keep her big mouth shut. “You’ll be living with his father,” she said. “His father won’t give him nothing. You’ll be in that house with that old man and his dog. It’s no life for a woman. You know the history of that place, don’t you?”
She knew some of it, or thought she did. Karl’s father had bought the ranch from a man named Doc Perry—Doc was a common nickname for a bartender at the time, around the turn of the century. Doc Perry had kept prostitutes at the ranch for the use of his customers, and the place had got its own nickname: Whorehouse Ranch. After Olaf bought the farm and he and Karl’s mother moved in, the place was more delicately referred to as the W. H. Ranch, but the name still stuck.
“Oh, that reminds me,” said Martha Rivers, “I was going to tell you I heard Shirley Matthews was raped by one of her daddy’s herders. That little short fellow. Percy Martin. After a binge in town, on a weekend off. Caught her behind the barn, right under her dad’s nose. Drunk as a skunk. You’d wonder how he found the stuff to do it.”
“Well, the girl must have done something to bring him on,” said Mrs. Grafton.
“She’s gone to the police. Her father took her.”
“He’ll only make things worse for his daughter.”
“They’re already calling her Dirty Shirley. Not myself, of course. I wouldn’t call her that.”
Mrs. Grafton laughed. “Dirty Shirley. Oh, that’s terrible, now. Too good. Too good.”
Augusta didn’t laugh. She couldn’t see the humour in any of that. There was an awkward pause where all three women stared at their hands, then Martha Rivers turned to her. “Well, Karl’s father is no picnic. Do what you want, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Augusta had met her future father-in-law by the time Karl gave her the glass ring. Karl had taken her to the cabin the two men shared and introduced them formally. But they’d had little to say. She knew from Manny’s talk that Karl’s father’s name was Olaf, Olaf Olsen. Olaf was what she called him in her own mind, but to his face she called him Mr. Olsen, and that was what she went on calling him, even in discussions with Karl. He was not a man who lent himself to informality, though he lived in bachelor squalor.
Olaf was short like Karl, and he was as fair, though what little hair he had then was white. He wore a moustache discoloured yellow from pipe smoking. That first visit he was shaven, but carried around him the sour yeasty smell of a man who has been years without a woman.
The cabin’s rooms were created by partitions, walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling. There were two floors, with two rooms on each floor. At ground level the front door led into the kitchen, where Olaf and Karl took their meals. There was a second room off the kitchen that had once, presumably, been a sitting-room but was now used for storage of farm equipment and horse blankets and the like. The two rooms upstairs were bedrooms for Olaf and Karl. The only picture hanging in the kitchen was a photograph of a young woman in Victorian dress.
The cabin smelled like an odd mix of sheep’s wool, boiled meat, strong coffee, pipe smoke, and wet dog, and was dark and colourless except for the chair on which Olaf sat; it had long ago been painted a rusty red, like the red of a barn, and that colour was now peeling to reveal the wood grain underneath. When Karl ushered Augusta into the cabin on her first visit, she went to sit in this chair but Karl took her arm and offered her another. Olaf came down from his bedroom and claimed that red chair, from which he dominated the room. In Olaf’s presence, Karl suddenly became someone Augusta didn’t know. His shoulders turned in, he rarely looked up, and when he spoke he took on a tone of apology, of absurd formality. “This is Augusta, Father,” he said. “Whom I wish to marry.”
The old man filled his pipe and lit it. Eventually he looked at Augusta, or rather he looked her over—as if she were a ewe he might purchase. Though his eyes were the same startling blue as Karl’s, one of them was half blind, clouded over. Olaf watched Augusta until she grew embarrassed and looked down. Neither of them had offered her coffee or anything that might occupy her hands.
“I worked with your father,” said Olaf.
“Yes, he’s told me.”
“He’s a hard worker,” he said. High praise, Augusta supposed. “That was years ago. Long before Mother’s death.”
“I was sorry she passed away,” Augusta said. “I went to her funeral. Of course I was very young.”
Olaf watched his foot rubbing the floor. “Well, she’s long gone now,” he said. He laid his pipe on the table and took out a red handkerchief like Karl’s. He blew his nose long and noisily. The floorboards overhead creaked from one end of the house to the other, as if someone were walking there.
“Is someone else here?” said Augusta.
“It’s getting to be an old house,” said Karl. “Creaks a lot.”
Augusta glanced up at the portrait of the young woman. “That your mother?”
“Yes.”
“She was pretty.”
“That was taken when she was seventeen. Before she left the old country.”
“What was her first name?”
“Blenda.”
Augusta heard a scratching under the table. There was a dog there, to one side of Olaf’s feet. The dog scrambled out
of the darkness and wrapped itself around Olaf’s leg, alternately whimpering and snarling at Augusta. The thing was pitch-black, a mongrel. “You got to excuse the Bitch,” said Olaf. “She never smelt a woman.”
Karl coughed and went red. Bitch. Augusta thought at the time the old Swede was simply being offensive, trying to shock her or test her mettle. But Bitch was the name Olaf had given the dog. Bitch. In all things he was to the point. Augusta’s mother had never allowed the dogs in the house. They smelled and shed their hair and rolled in offal. They were necessary but dirty things that should be kept outside. There would be changes when she took over the running of this house, or so Augusta thought.
The wedding itself was a disappointment, as shoddy and small as that engagement ring. Olaf no longer believed in church-going, and Karl, apparently, didn’t seem to care.
“Don’t you believe in God, then?” Augusta asked him.
“It’s hard to believe in what I can’t see,” said Karl. “And I’m not going to waste my time worrying about it.”
Even so, Augusta insisted on a real church wedding, in her own church, with the Reverend to marry them. Her dress was the one she had proposed to Karl in, a blue cotton print shift that was the best she had; her bouquet was a handful of pearly everlastings Karl had picked from the roadside. It was hot. Sweat beaded the foreheads of the little gathering—it was only Olaf, Manny, the Reverend, and a handful of church women, including Martha Rivers, whom she had not invited. She had no women friends save Mrs. Grafton, and Mrs. Grafton, though she’d said she’d come, hadn’t. It was a dreary affair, over quickly. Karl had to put that engagement ring on her finger all over again because he couldn’t afford a wedding band.
On the way down the aisle Manny leaned close and hissed, so only she could hear, “You can still get out of it, you know.” It was exactly what she wanted at that point, to run away, to hide. She could pull her arm away from her father and hightail it out of the church and run off, but to where? What would she do? What work would she find? Her face was red—she could feel it. Her father’s grip on her elbow was tight. The room collapsed in on her, gathered her, propelled her hotly to that little carrot-haired, red-faced man, and the hand that waited.
A Recipe for Bees Page 5
