A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

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, hewent 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 somuch? 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