“We used to. Bitch kept getting them.”
“My father never would have kept a dog around that killed chickens.”
“Dad won’t get rid of Bitch. She’s his pet.”
“We’re going to do without eggs and a little income because of that dog?”
“We can buy them.”
“Your father foots the bill for eggs when he could have his own, because of that stupid dog?”
That was it—their one date for the summer.
Sometime in September, depending on the weather, the parade of sheep would march back down the highway to the Whorehouse Ranch, where they were pastured for the winter. Karl hauled feed out to them each day on sleighs: corn silage; swede turnips; and hay of mixed alfalfa, wild grasses, and alsike clover. During lambing, dried sugar-beet pulp was added to the ewes’ feed.
Come lambing season, the cycle of work began all over again. They trimmed the sheep’s hoofs and clipped the wool around the udders and flanks to make nursing easier, and the lambing pens were prepared. Once the ewes began lambing, Augusta and Karl and Olaf took shifts during the night, checking for births or complications. There were ewes that died giving birth, lambs lost. Sometimes a ewe that had lost a lamb would not accept another ewe’s orphan. Karl would then put a sheepdog in with both the ewe and the foster lamb, and within a day or two the ewe would grow protective of the lamb and accept it, because of the dog’s presence. At other times, when there were twins, Karl would leave one lamb with its mother; the other he would clothe in the skin of a lamb that had died, and place it in a pen with the dead lamb’s mother. The ewe would smell her offspring on this changeling and nurse it. Once the ewe had accepted it as her own, Karl would remove the dead lamb’s hide.
Sometimes, though, the orphaned lambs simply had to be bottle-fed, if there was no ewe to take them. That first lambing season on the Whorehouse Ranch, Augusta bottle-fed a sweet black lamb she named Molly. She brought it into the house and, sitting by the kitchen stove, held it like a baby and nursed it from a bottle until it grew too big to hold. Even after it was weaned and began spending its time tagging along with the flock, it always ran to Augusta and nuzzled her hand. Several days after Karl and Olaf shipped off a load of lambs, Augusta noticed that Molly was gone. When she asked where the lamb was, Karl was evasive. “She’s around her somewhere,” he said; then later, after a week had gone by, “Coyote must have got her.”
“You shipped her off, didn’t you?” said Augusta.
Karl’s face grew red. “That’s what we do here,” he said.
“But you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want you making a scene.”
“She was my pet.”
“You can’t make pets of them. We’d never sell any if we made pets of them.”
“But just this one. Why couldn’t you let me have this one?”
Thinking about that lamb now, Augusta believed it wasn’t a pet she had wanted as much as a child. She felt herself drawn to the tiny dresses, miniature shoes, and sweet little blouses in the baby goods section of the general store. She once picked up a lovely white christening gown and felt the soft ruffles and silky ribbons between her fingers. But then Martha Rivers was right there, pregnant as an elephant. It would have been, what, her fifth? She had six altogether. At least she had been less productive than her mother.
Martha Rivers smiled at Augusta. “Too bad you won’t have need of those.”
Augusta smiled back. “How’s that?”
“Well, Karl can’t have children, can he?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Everyone knows. He had mumps when he was—twenty, I think it was. Or was he younger? We all know what that does to a man.”
“I don’t think it’s your place to talk about things like that.”
“We’re friends, aren’t we? I’ve known you since you were born. And in any case, I only tell things like they are.”
In home in bed that night Augusta asked Karl, “Is it true you can’t have children? Did you have mumps when you were a man?”
“Who told you that?”
“Martha Rivers.”
“Gossiping woman.”
“Is it true?”
“I don’t know. I did have the mumps. I don’t know what it did to me.”
“We could try, couldn’t we?” She ran her hand down his thigh. He was wearing his longjohns as the weather had turned cold.
“He’ll hear us,” said Karl.
“So what if he does?”
“Stop it!”
“Are we to go the whole of our married lives afraid to lie together as man and wife?”
“We’ll find another time.”
“What other time?”
“When he’s out.”
“And when is that?”
“When he’s out with the sheep. We’ll find some time alone together.”
“In the day?”
“Yes.”
“You’re always out with him. If he’s doing chores, you’re doing chores.”
“Enough. I’m tired.”
Augusta thought now that she could hardly blame Karl, with his father always at him, always complaining. It didn’t much matter what Karl or Augusta did—it wasn’t good enough for Olaf. One night she served scalloped potatoes. Olaf picked up his plate and peered at it. “What’s this?” he said.
“Scalloped potatoes,” said Augusta.
“What’s this they’re floating in?”
“They’re baked in cream.”
“You don’t cook potatoes in milk. You boil them. In water.”
“Why don’t you try them?”
“I’m not going to eat that slop. Looks like curdled milk. Turns my stomach.”
Augusta threw down her fork and pushed herself away from the table and ran upstairs. But nothing went said in any part of that house without the rest of the house hearing it.
“What’s the matter with her?” said Olaf.
“You don’t have to complain so much about her cooking.”
“If she’d learn to cook I wouldn’t have to.”
“The potatoes are good. If you’d only try them, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t you talk like that to me.”
Augusta sat on the bed but didn’t bother lighting a lantern. Light slid up from downstairs through cracks in the floorboards. There was one knothole in the floor, and if she peered through it she could see both of them at the table, if she shifted from side to side. First Karl, then Olaf. They didn’t say anything more. Olaf pushed the scalloped potatoes around on his plate. He took a forkful, sniffed it, licked it, put it in his mouth. Augusta watched him chewing. He took another forkful, and another. It was cold in the bedroom. Augusta lay back on the bed and pulled a corner of the grey camp blanket over her legs. The light from the floorboards hit the ceiling in slices so the wood there looked like the slats on a lambing pen or a crib. Then there was a figure behind the slats, a shadow moving across the ceiling. Augusta sat up. There was something in the room with her, something blocking the light from below. “Bitch?” she whispered. But the shadow on the ceiling wasn’t the shadow of a dog. It was a human shadow. “Who’s there?” she said. She didn’t breathe. The floor creaked a little, as if under some weight. It was Blenda, Karl’s mother, she was sure of it, though why she couldn’t say. Augusta grappled with the matches at the bedside table and lit the lantern. The shadows vanished. She was alone.
She sat there for a while, staring into the dark corners of the room. It would be winter soon and the snowy roads would make the drive to town difficult. She thought of Blenda trapped in there all those winters. She must have needed to get out of that house, away from these men who could sit together in the kitchen for hours and not say a word, even if it meant walking between the sleeping bodies of the sheep in the cold fields. Was that what had killed her? The badgering and the silence? On a night when any sane woman would stay inside by the fire, had it driven her out into the snow?
> Four
A GOOD DEAL of Augusta’s train ride that morning had followed the ocean, the Strait of Georgia between Vancouver Island and the mainland. At one point she saw a pier jutting out into a bay. On the end of the pier a young woman and an old man were fishing together. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty, and the man was at least seventy. Augusta wondered, were they father and daughter? Father and granddaughter? Not lovers, surely. If they weren’t related by blood, what interest would that young woman find in that old codger? Perhaps they were only strangers who had met on the pier and decided to sit together for a bit of fishing. Who knew what brought folks together? It was only important that they did come together, somehow, despite the odds.
She smiled to herself as she sat down to lunch with Karl and Rose. The gossips of Chase would have speculated in that way about Augusta and the Reverend when Augusta was, what? Twenty-three? When they fished the South Thompson. She had gone to church only infrequently following her marriage, as Olaf griped over her town trips, and she really didn’t know the Reverend well, not in a personal way, when she went to his office. Where had she found the courage?
“I’m sorry to bring you this,” she said. “But I’ve no one else to talk to about it. We’ve been so isolated on the ranch that I haven’t made any friends, but now that I’m here I feel so ashamed. I mean, I found some magazines, belonging to my husband, in his old suitcase under the bed; those kind of magazines. Do you know what I mean? And I felt dirtied by them. What I mean to say is, they shocked me. Should I have told Karl I found them? But he would get angry. Or he wouldn’t say anything at all. Most times he doesn’t say anything.”
The Reverend listened but didn’t respond at first, and so out of nervousness Augusta babbled on until she drove herself to tears. The Reverend handed her a handkerchief. “How’s your father?” he said.
“My father? All right, I guess. I hardly see him. I ask him to come for dinner, you know, but he never comes. I don’t get over to the farm any more.”
“Manny stopped going to church years ago. I think he stopped right after your mother’s death, didn’t he? I sometimes see him in town. He looks so sad. I feel sorry for him, you know. He has no one.”
“He doesn’t want anybody. He never wants to see me. I could die for all he cares.”
“Oh, I don’t think so—”
“I know I don’t get to church much. Olaf won’t let me drive the truck.”
“I see. I see.” The Reverend offered her a second handkerchief. “You fish, don’t you?”
“Fish?” said Augusta, wiping her nose.
“Fish.”
“Well, yes. I used to fish with my father all the time, when I was a child. I don’t think he ever goes fishing any more. Karl doesn’t fish. I miss it, actually.”
“Me too. My wife doesn’t fish. She says it’s boring. And I don’t like fishing with men. They get competitive. They compare their fish, for length.” The Reverend smiled, a little slyly, so Augusta found herself laughing despite herself at his small, indecent joke. “Of course, I rarely catch anything,” he said.
“I liked the sitting. It was an excuse to sit and be peaceful. With Karl and Olaf—well, I feel like I always have to be doing something. Housework or chores or helping Karl. He never says anything, but he looks at me, you know? Judging, if he catches me sitting.”
“It’s the same in my line of work. The congregation doesn’t like to see me idle. That’s why I never go to the café; I get these looks telling me I should be someplace else, helping someone. I suppose it’s understandable, as they do pay my way. Nevertheless, even God’s servants need repose.” He reached over and patted Augusta’s hand. “As does a housewife.” He stood and took his coat from the rack by the door. “Shall we go, then?” he said.
“Where?”
“Fishing.”
Augusta laughed, but she went with him, wearing her one good dress, her wedding dress, and a sweater she took from the truck seat before joining him in his Austin. They went fishing at Deep Pool, a fishing hole Manny had taken her to when she was a child. Deep Pool was on the town side of the South Thompson River, a short drive from Chase. From Deep Pool it seemed as if Chase had once been a much larger town and had been split in two by the changing course of water, because there were communities facing each other on opposing banks of the river. Whites lived on one side, in or near Chase, and Indians lived on the other, in the reserve village. For much of her childhood, there was literally no bridge between them. The bridge over the South Thompson wouldn’t be constructed until 1938, only a few years before Helen died. Before that, Indians coming over to town canoed, or swam their saddle-horses across. Sometimes on moonless nights the Indians went out in their canoes holding flaming pitch torches made from ponderosa pine, what they called salmon wood because they used the torch flame to attract the salmon to the surface of the black water. They then stabbed the fish with homemade three-pronged spears. They were glittering fireflies on the water; they were ghost lights rising from Deep Pool.
Every Saturday Manny had driven Augusta down to Deep Pool so that they could sit out on the dock and fish. It was an excuse to do nothing, because Helen could hardly complain about a missed half-day of field work if they brought home a dozen trout to slice open and fry in fresh butter for supper, especially since Manny volunteered to cook them himself. The river was wide, and its slow-moving waters were deceptive. At Deep Pool, Augusta could walk for yards hip-high through water that reflected the changing sky and showed little of its underside. Then suddenly there was nothing underfoot—sand and gravel gave way to empty space. She sank like a stone, gasping water, down into the bottomless pool, where something slid past her legs before she swam back to the surface.
That first day she went fishing with the Reverend, they saw Manny walking the river bank some distance away. He waved, but he didn’t come over to greet them.
“We should make a habit of this,” said the Reverend.
“I don’t think I could. Olaf doesn’t like me using the truck to come to town. And I know he wouldn’t like me fishing with you.”
“But you’d like to, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“If you change your mind, I’ll be at my office. Saturday mornings are best for me.”
The Reverend never addressed the problem that she had brought him, about finding Karl’s dirty magazines. All he ever said about it, he said in the car as they drove to the river on that very first fishing trip. “God wouldn’t give us those feelings if they weren’t to be enjoyed,” he said, out of the silence they had been driving in. It took Augusta a moment to understand what he was talking about. “But like eating,” he continued, “one doesn’t want to overdo it.”
But the Reverend had missed the point entirely. Or perhaps she hadn’t explained herself. It wasn’t excess Karl was guilty of. In their few years of marriage she had come to consider him a man of many fears and few desires, and had resigned herself to a life of longing, and shamefully pleasuring herself. But when she found those magazines, it infuriated her. While she went without, he indulged himself! He had found the time, albeit in the outhouse, but he had found the time for that, when he could find no time for her. It was a meanness of spirit that extended into all areas of their lives together. Of course, what chance did he have of being anything different, with a father like his?
“I heard you went fishing with that Reverend,” said Olaf. They were sitting at the dinner table.
“You heard right.”
“You let her go fishing with another man?”
“He isn’t another man, father,” said Karl. “He’s Augusta’s minister. We should feel honoured he’s chosen her for companionship.”
“He has his own wife for companionship.”
“She doesn’t like fishing,” said Augusta.
“He should be fishing with some other man. That ain’t right, fishing with another man’s wife. There’ll be talk. Don’t your wife care about how it affects
us?”
“And just how does it affect you?” said Augusta.
“Haven’t you heard the saying: Watch out when the preacher comes calling on your wife alone?”
“You dirty old—”
“Augusta,” said Karl. There was warning in his voice. He was learning, from Olaf.
But then so was she. “The Reverend invited me to go again Saturday, and you know what? I think I will. I’m taking the truck. And I’m going fishing. If you want anything picked up then, add it to my list.”
Augusta was surprised to find herself standing up to Olaf, and to Karl. But the Reverend’s attention made everything all right, made it okay. He was an important man, a man of status. If he chose to fish with her, how could she say no?
His name was Gavin Lakeman, but he was always the Reverend to Augusta. Never Gavin, never Reverend Lakeman. He was tall, a good six feet, and barrel-chested. Although he kept himself clean-shaven he was never without that five o’clock shadow, and his arms were covered in a pelt of black hair. He had a temper that he had to fight, especially as he had high blood pressure.
These Saturday morning fishing trips became regular outings, during which the Reverend refreshed the meagre fly-casting skills Augusta had learned from Manny, though at first she caught only bony whitefish. The Reverend, on the other hand, could land a fly in the exact spot a trout had broken the water’s surface, and he seldom went home without a string of a dozen fish. He wasn’t one to yank a fish out of the water and hurl it to shore, as Manny had when Augusta had fished with him so many years before. The Reverend cast out in the middle or far side of Deep Pool, and when he felt a bite he’d coax the fish in to shore for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, talking to it all the while. “Come along, my beauty. There you are. There you are.” Then, “You really are a beauty, aren’t you?” as he admired the fish flopping in the sand at his feet. Then he killed the fish by grasping its tail and whacking its head against a rock, and that sudden whack, after all those persuasive murmurs, came as a shock to Augusta as well as to the fish.
A Recipe for Bees Page 9
