A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page B

daddy’s herders. That little short fellow. Percy Martin. After a binge in town, on a weekend off. Caughther 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, withtwo 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