My father stands at the center of distant summers woven from spruce trees and knee-high weeds and sizzling streaks of honeybees. Alone.
I see the sapphire sky, his greying stubble, his scalp studded with sweat. I hear his voice in the prairie silence. Monosyllabic in most settings, he brims with words in the bee yard, unsolicited lectures on the curative effects of propolis, the difference between capped and brood cells, burr and bridge comb.
I nod through his lessons. He knows I’m not listening.
He lights the edge of a newspaper and furls it into a cone that he blows down, making it puff like an herbal healer’s pipe. He slips it into the smoker, followed by a handful of cedar shavings. The shavings cling to the fissures between his bratwurst fingers. His hands are graceless in any context but this.
He puffs the smoker three times. The leather bellows rasp. The spout groans cedar smoke that rises warm and sweet over the abandoned Philpott yard, where he keeps thirty-two beehives, and where he brought me today to see a queen.
I hate the Philpott house. The windows are smashed. The paint and shingles have peeled. Canola grows in the fields the family once owned, and my father’s bees pollinate their loss.
He comforts me. “Don’t worry. They were an ordinary family. Nothing tragic about them.”
“So why’d they leave?”
“Who knows? Maybe they needed a fresh start.”
Three boxes make a beehive, and there are nine frames to a box. Stitches of wax hold each frame tight to the wood, and bee glue turns the boxes into a single tower that he methodically deconstructs. Unbroken focus at every step. Never a centimetre off. An almost reverent precision that I wish my mother could see when he forgets their anniversary, or lets slip an off-colour remark he doesn’t apologize for, or coughs in movie theaters, or nods impatiently at check-out tills, or when she complains that he only married her because of her looks.
A flutter of cedar smoke. The bees grow louder. He assures me they’re calm, and I believe him. His word is as true as the maneuvers that clear away the excess wax and pry each frame from its container. He never wears gloves. When stung on the hand, he uses his metal hive tool to pinch out the venom sac without spilling a drop, a sober exactness that amazes me every time I see it.
Six frames in, he smiles behind his veil. “Here she is.” He pushes his index finger into the fizzing rectangle of bees. “She’s a beauty,” my father whispers. “See her?”
I see her. She’s marked on the head with a dollop of pink paint. While the drones vibrate madly, she strolls through them with elegance, hauling a thorax twice as long as theirs. Sunlight hits her back and spins a radial of gold that looks like a wedding ring, evaporating.
Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is a columnist at Canadian Dimension magazine and has contributed to non-fiction publications including Jacobin, Liberated Texts, and Monthly Review. His fiction work has appeared in Quagmire Literary Magazine, antilang., Fairlight Books, and others. His book on Canada’s role in the war in Afghanistan will be published by Lorimer Books in September 2023.
Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
Vast 