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

throwing rocks at it. One rock banged against the side of the train, and Augusta flinched back from the window. Boys had done that in her day as well, thrown rocks at trains, at the windows of abandoned homesteaders’ shacks, and at neighbours’ dogs, not to shoo them away but for the fun of it, to see the dog run. She supposed that was partly why those boys had thrown stones at her so many years ago. She had run home and, crying, breathless, finally told her mother about the boys’ harassment. The next day Manny walked with Augusta to school and, out on the school grounds, cuffed the ears of all three boys and told them to leave Augusta alone. Of course Manny’s visit only made things worse. The boys did stop throwing rocks at her, but took up words instead; every afternoon they ran after her, calling her all manner of obscenities. She wouldn’t tell Helen or Manny again. Instead she learned to avoid the boys on the schoolyard, to scuttle home right after school before they took a notion to go after her. She was always on guard, watching for them, and if the boyscame her way she fled, often to the girls’ five-seater outhouse behind the school. She avoided the eyes of boys, held herself close and contained, and learned to be invisible.
    In the forties a man like Manny was called a leghorn rooster, after the small scrappy birds that strutted around the yard as if they owned it and dared anyone to say they didn’t. He might have even liked the nickname, as he was always going on about the “pecking order.” He saw the true natural order of things there in the chicken coop: man at the head, protective and paternal, and under him a hierarchy of women who in turn ruled over the children. He ignored the fact that given free run of the fields, the hens mated with nearly every rooster, not just the nastiest one, and that there were plenty of bossy hens who beat up on deferential roosters. Helen had one of those roosters in the scratch run at the time, a bird Manny had named Sorry, as he thought any rooster who let hens boss him around was a sorry rooster indeed.
    He’d sometimes rant on about this sort of thing at the dinner table, stabbing his fork into a bit of chicken breast and swinging it in the air to make his point. “Those chickens out there, that’s your model for womanhood. They’re hard-working, thrifty, good mothers, they submit to the will of the rooster. On the other hand the rooster’s always scouting for danger, always scratching up feed for his hens and calling them over to eat it. There’s the ideal family.”
    “So you want thirty wives, then?” said Helen.
    “That’s not what I mean.” He tucked the chicken into his mouth and talked with his mouth full. “On the other hand that would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
    “You wouldn’t last a day.”
    “There you go, talking back at me.”
    “Ah, go on with you.”
    “No, really. What are they going to think of me in town if you’re never listening to a word I say, always giving me lip? They’ll think this is a woman-run house. They’ll laugh at me.”
    “They already do.”
    Manny’s face flushed. “I should be treated with respect in my home. You shouldn’t talk to me like that. Go cut me some more bread.”
    The phone rang, startling all three of them. Karl was the one sitting closest to the phone, but he made no attempt to answer it. He was uncomfortable with phones; he would never answer it if Augusta was there with him, and if a call had to be made it was Augusta who did the dialling. She pulled the phone off the kitchen counter and placed it on the table beside her so she could check the call display to make sure it was Joy phoning. She didn’t feel like fielding well-meant questions from the women at the church or seniors’ centre about the outcome of Gabe’s surgery.
    “Damn it,” she said. “It’s Ernest again.” Ernest Grey had been phoning for months. Augusta didn’t know him, or anything about him other than what