Free A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page A

time, she should count her blessings. At least Karl wasn’t demanding and jealous, as her father had been with her mother. Manny had always tried to keep tabs on Helen’s whereabouts, what she was doing, fretting over any manwho might tip his hat to her on the street, especially a stranger.
    “Who’s he, then?” he’d say.
    “Mr. Wallace,” said Helen. “He and his wife bought the Michaels’ house. I sold his wife eggs last week.”
    “Looks like a dandy.”
    “He’s a lawyer. A very nice man.”
    “I don’t like the looks of him. You stay away from him, hear?”
    “I can’t sell my eggs and honey if I’ve got to stay away from everyone.”
    “You watch out for him. You don’t know what men like him are capable of.”
    “You don’t even know him.”
    “I know his type.”
    The infrequent dances were the worst for Manny as they attracted bachelors from miles around: herders and cowboys, lonely and bushed and sick for female company. There was always a shortage of women dance partners, and it was a niggardly husband who hogged his wife all for himself. So Manny was forced to stand back against the wall, with his arms crossed, watching his wife dance with other men.
    The dances went on in the schoolhouse, with the desks pushed back into the corner, on Saturday nights—but only until midnight, as right on into the fifties there was no dancing on the sabbath. The RCMP drove there from Chase just before twelve to make sure of it. No alcohol was allowed inside a public building so there was no booze in the schoolhouse. There were few drinking places in the area at the time—Yep Num, who owned the café androoming-house in Chase, rented a room to men so they could sit and drink—but there were plenty of bootleggers. In Chase an English butcher named Miller made beer and sold it along with his meat, and there were stills hidden all over the mountain sides, especially across the lake in Celista. Home brew was passed from man to man around the back of the schoolhouse, where the horses were tied and where fights were taken. There was almost always a fight at these things, though no man ever seemed to get seriously hurt. The Christmas dance was the worst for it. If there was a fencing dispute, or a suspicion over a missing cow, or an unpaid debt, the bitter feelings floated to the surface on booze, or were carried to the front on petty jealousies over who danced more than his share with the schoolteacher.
    When a fight erupted it went outside and took all the men with it. It was so like a cock-fight, with a circle of men egging the fighters on. The women and children were left in the schoolroom by themselves to wait for the men to come to their senses. No nice woman dared go outside, not at any point, not until it was time to go home and she and her children left accompanied by her husband. No woman except one of the Grafton girls, who was given to sitting in cars with men and their beer. When the fight was done the men swaggered back in, laughing, to seek out partners for the next dance.
    Manny got into a few of those fights himself as he challenged any man who had more than one dance with his wife. The son of one of those men got a group of boys together the following Monday and threw rocks at Augusta. She was perhaps eleven at the time. They followed herhome after school for that whole week, hurling rocks at her, almost always missing, but terrorizing her out of her skull. One of them was a snotty-nosed Grafton boy, she remembered that.
    What moved boys to throw rocks, she wondered now, as she drank her tea. Just today, boys had thrown rocks at the train. The train was passing a playing field behind a school, and along the fence that separated the tracks from the schoolyard boys were lined up, facing the train. Augusta couldn’t see the expressions on their faces, but she could see their hands raised and she lifted hers to wave back before realizing that they weren’t waving at the passing train. They were