A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page A

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 father 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 BaldMountain, 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

    W HEN 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 ofhis 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