A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page B

first winter of her marriage she had a dream about the place. She was standing in the room she shared with Karl, only in her dream there were two beds in the room, a twin set, covered over with grey army blankets. She stood between them, looking down at a corpse that lay in one of the beds. The corpse was Karl’s mother, Blenda, as she looked in the portrait that hung over the table. Someone stood behind Augusta. She turned to see who it was and saw her own self standing there. “That woman died in this house,” she said to herself. “We have to be careful not to step in her shoes.”
    When she turned back to the bed, the corpse was gone and a mannequin was in its place, covered up to the chin with blankets. She turned around to say something to herself but her companion was also gone. When she looked back at the dead woman’s bed a third time it was herself lying there.
    “Your mother didn’t die in the house, did she?” she asked Karl in the morning as they sat at the breakfast table. Olaf had been gone when Augusta awoke, out checking for newborn lambs.
    “No, she died outside, of cold.”
    “I thought you might have found her before she died and brought her inside.”
    “No, she was dead out in the field. Why’re you asking?”
    “No reason.”
    Ranch life was different from the mixed farming she’d grown up with. Karl and Olaf crossed Rambouillet ewes with black-faced Suffolk rams to get a heavier lamb, but the Suffolk were a knot-headed bunch, prone to wandering off by themselves rather than flocking, always finding ways to break through a fence, and their offspring acted more like goats than sheep. They kept a few goats as well, milk goats to feed orphaned lambs if there were no ewes to take them, and to provide fresh milk to the herders when they were on the mountain ranges.
    Olaf often hired Indian hands over whites, as he could pay them less and get more work out of them. Manny had done the same, though not with the same tight-fistedness. He’d hired Indians and strays in the Depression, when no one else would, and during the war, when there was no one else to hire. He’d hired others, too. One summer when Augusta was still a girl, he’d hired a white man with a Japanese bride. The man’s girl-bride scrubbed dishes silently beside Augusta, as she spoke no English. When they left at the end of the summer, the girl handed Augusta her blue silk parasol, printed with birds and bamboo. Manny had been generous with the Indians and strays; when they left, they left with their bellies full. Occasionally, when times were better for them, these men returned to say thanks with cigarettes for Manny, candy for Augusta, and tapioca pudding for Helen. When shewas nine or ten Augusta rode the saddles the hired men left on the wooden benches inside the implement shed, breathing in the smell of leather.
    Manny traded horses with the Indians from the Neskainlith band, horses that were broken only because they were underfed and tired. When he fed these horses, their strength and fight returned. While Augusta tamed the horses with apples, Manny mastered them. In the catch pen he jabbed at them with pitchforks, hit them around the head with the bullwhip, and forced them into the squeeze. The horses jerked their heads against the wood of the chute with eyes wild and rolled back, and when the bullwhip cracked, the skin on their necks rose up. Augusta flinched with them.
    These horses were runaways, predisposed to taking off out of control, dragging the buggy or farm equipment behind them. They ran with harrows in spring, hayrack in summer, disc in fall, feeding sleigh in winter. Once a grey dappled mare ran wild, pulling Manny and Helen in the buggy down Shuswap Hill, spooked by the dust that chased her. She thundered over the ridge and down the gravel road that was the highway with her mane flapping in knotted clumps. Manny pulled back too fast. One rein whipped from his hand and kicked and jumped against the mare’s