Garden of Eden (11 page)

The sun hasn’t yet climbed above the horizon and the glow of night still rests in the hollows of the land as it spreads out around her. The caragana hedge, the trees of the yard, block most of the view, but she knows the land is there. It’s imprinted on her psyche; her mind’s eye sees over the deck and the driveway, through the hedge, past the trees, to the peaceful, wide fields that lie beyond her farmyard. It would be utterly silent except for the waking twitter of small birds in the unleafed caragana hedge and the lilacs by the steps. She walks farther out onto the deck, retying the dressing gown tightly around her, as now that she’s outside in the clean, cool air the overwhelming heat is dissipating and she feels the chill.

She kicks off her slippers and steps into her muddy rubber boots that stand by the door. She can’t remember putting them there and doubts she was the one to do it, but it crosses her mind that her boots are witnesses to her plight, they are companions, so she doesn’t mind their cold interior and dampness on her bare feet. In her urgency to be away from the house, she hardly notices.

She crosses the deck, goes down the steps, across the gravelled drive, and hurrying now, she has to do this before the others wake, she squeezes through a gap in the caragana hedge, a shelter belt from the wind, that makes a square around the houseyard except for part of the way across the front where the driveway enters. The house, with its weight of expectations, its sleepers, recedes from her.

Barney has left a strip of grass maybe five feet wide between the hedge and the summerfallow field beside it. She sets out south, following the hedge’s rectangular boundary. The grass, genuine prairie grass, is a dull gold, about a foot high and so fine it has fallen over on itself, so that she walks more on top of it than actually in it. Her boots have a wet sheen now and the hem of her nightgown will be soggy, not that she cares. But the air is so delicious in her head, her lungs, she can feel it filling some of that emptiness in her chest. She forgets about the damp and keeps going, now turning west when the hedge does along the back of the house, past the row of shiny steel grain bins.

As she walks she turns her head left to study the southern horizon. Spread out before her in a long undulating wave is her farm, the biggest farm in the district. It washes slowly away from her, descending as it goes, across faded stubble till it begins to rise again, now a blackened rectangle that reaches out to touch the bottom of the sky. Ahead of her and to her right, less than a half mile away, is the fence-line that marks the border of Ramona and Vance Norman’s ranch. Her eyes follow the barbed wire to the deep coulee that the fence fails to contain, that reaches into Iris and Barney’s land. That quarter had once been pasture, but Barney had broken most of it. She had resisted his plans only when he’d wanted to burn the homestead buildings. An eyesore, he’d said, and she’d closed her mouth tightly in disagreement, mutely refusing consent to his burning them — it was bad enough her father had sold the house to be moved to town. This morning her mother’s parents’ falling-down barn and two decayed sheds are tugging her toward them, as if there’s some comfort to be had on the ground where her grandparents first made
a home, where her mother was born and grew up, an explanation maybe, an answer to the question that has emptied her chest:
Why?

A noise, not too loud, intrudes and she stops to listen. It’s a distant sound, higher pitched than farm dogs or coyotes, more musical, growing louder by the second. She lifts her head to search the sky, and finds to the east of where she stands, flying not very high, as if they’ve just taken off or are searching for a place to land, a chevron of geese heading in a northwesterly direction. If they keep to their heading, they’ll fly right over her. One arm of their formation is very long, while the other has only about five birds in it. It’s not that this is so unusual, but she wonders why it would be so on this windless morning when it’s nowhere near hunting season.

As they come closer to where she stands a few feet from the hedge, she sees that it’s only the lead goose and the birds in the short wing who are honking. She suspects that soon geese will reply from the far end of the long arm, and in a moment a couple of them near its back do, which satisfies her. Soon they’re just above her, like the skeletal shadow of a phantom airship, breaking into individual birds as she watches. They hold their speed steady, their wing-beats constant and regular so that she feels sure in their view she’s only part of the hedge or tree or rock. Over her they go, one after another. The light is such that she can make out no details of their bodies, just the black shape of bird after bird as they pass overhead in a line that wobbles faintly with their uncoordinated wing-beats.

Then they’re gone and she stands transfixed, still staring up to the section of sky where their bodies were, even though she can hear them receding behind her. When she finally turns to follow their flight, they’re almost out of sight, soon to pass over the river valley to the northwest where the rising blue-shadowed cliffs sweep against the horizon.

In the few minutes she has been outside the light has changed dramatically with the higher position of the sun. Now it’s just above the horizon — it’s past seven she thinks, soon everyone will be up and I’ll be caught — but she forges on, hurrying now, trying to beat the rush of the sun behind her, in the direction of the coulee.

In the rising light the decaying, grey buildings ahead of her are
precise again. And Barney wanted to burn them, she thinks, still indignant.
I don’t care if you are dead,
she says to his shadow, realizing its presence has been with her since she squeezed through that gap in the hedge.
You were wrong about that. I know it,
he says, and she feels his arm across her shoulders hurrying her, as she slips a little in the mud, down the rutted track that was once a road, in the middle of the stubblefield.

At the coulee’s lip every little knob and rock, every dip and badger bush stands out sharply. It’s the light the Great Plains is famous for and she’s grateful for it, too, on this brisk morning of her husband’s funeral. Even the drugged sluggishness is leaving her in the morning light and the cool spring air. In another fifteen minutes that precious light will have spread itself out more evenly and with less extreme attention; the high spots will flatten a little, the low spots will rise to meet them, and the promise of heaven will be gone until, as the sun lowers itself gently down the sky, its rays will once again make every stone and blade of grass ring with golden light.

When she reaches the dull, matted grass, she pauses, not out of choice, but by the gentle force of the place itself. Barney is still with her; she’s begun to suspect he’s the one who has called her out here on this errand so early on this chilly morning of the day she has to bury him. She crosses the narrow patch of grass, going slowly. First her father and then Barney had ploughed as close to her grandparents’ buildings and to the edge of the coulee as they dared, fearing Iris’s mother’s wrath and then her own if they edged over too far and brought down one of the shacks or lifted and tumbled a rock that Iris knew must be left as it had been since the last ice age.

She finds herself standing at the edge of one of the two tepee rings that are the only ones left of what was probably an encampment, but the rest of which her grandfather had destroyed with his first ploughing, seventy years earlier. Probably didn’t even notice they were rings.
He knew,
Barney says, in her head, and Iris gives him credit for having a grasp on the truth now. Besides, it’s an old grief, as old as the hills and the valley bottoms. They were always doomed, Iris thinks.
As are we,
she hears, and Iris is surprised that he would think such a thing.

But the stones still lie there, half-hidden in the damp yellow-grey grass, so lichen-covered and crumbling with age that if she looks too long, instead of seeing them more clearly they disappear into the texture of the grass-covered earth. Some days when she comes here she is able to see most of the individual stones, but not the order or design she knows to be there. It’s the strangest thing, as if the stones were alive and could hide themselves from her if they chose to. This morning, arrested by the light, the circles rise clearly in the grass, and she stoops and rests a hand on the curve of one that’s covered with a thick coat of pale green lichen. It’s satisfyingly scratchy against her palm, and the contrast — her fingertips touching a bare spot of hard, cold rock — makes her fingers tingle.

She rises and walks to the entrance of the decaying barn. Its big door lies broken and decomposing in the grass where a typically savage wind put it years ago — and standing in the opening where it used to be, she gazes upward to the patch of sky she can see through a wide hole where there was once roof. A beam of light pierces it and spotlights the opposite wall, up high, so she can make out the soaked brown wood, still tightly joined horizontally, and an old bird’s nest of mud and twigs — swallows, she thinks — nestled under a cracked rafter. Here her grandfather harnessed Clydesdales — he was famous for his beautiful, matched teams — and sat on hay bales with his hired man, both puffing solemnly on pipes, while across the way in the house where now there’s only a grass-lined, indistinct depression, her grandmother was baking the breakfast buns she’d set the night before, or checking the Sunday roast. She cannot think what all this means, both of them dead now since Iris was a teenager, and their children too, dead or dying. The barn not likely to stand more than another year. Her grandmother’s face is suddenly before her, her image as clear as if she were there in flesh and blood: the halo of fine white hair, the habitual half-smile she wore as if she knew something the rest of them hadn’t figured out yet, her startling blue eyes that in old age instead of fading, grew darker.

The memory ebbs and Iris turns away, her chest suddenly hollow again, when she thinks she hears Ramona’s voice on the wind. She looks around quickly, but no, the sound has faded, she’s alone in this
precious space of clear air, of walking spirits. Over by that small pile of rocks, so old they’ve grown together, Ramona had knelt before her, her cheeks flushed with joy, her eyes lit up with a new, deep light.
I’m going to have a baby.
Iris remembers herself as outraged at this betrayal. Wailing at Ramona’s news,
But we were going to go away to school together!
Ramona so caught up in her own adventure she never saw Iris’s selfish anger, or if she did, she thought it childish, something that would pass.

Iris had been gathering the first crocuses to take to her mother. She’d dropped them, left them there to die in the damp grass.
This is what I want,
Ramona said, grasping Iris’s hands in hers, trying to see into Iris’s eyes, into her very soul. And Iris pulling away, her anger turning slowly into sorrow because Ramona was leaving her, going off into some foreign, grown-up world where Iris wasn’t ready to follow. The coulee was filling with purple shadows, a chasm opening to swallow them, dropping down to its bottom more than a hundred feet below, passing through time incarnated as layers of earth, to those millions of years earlier. And hidden in the grip of the soil and rocks, the fossilized bones of monsters.

Now Iris moves to the coulee’s edge and stands looking down into it, following its geography with her eyes to where it widens and deepens on the other side of the fence. With the melted snow and the long spring rains the slough at the bottom is twice its usual size; it has drowned out rosebushes up the coulee side. In the shallows the bull-rushes and pale, rustling grasses stand motionless, and farther along, out of her sight, she knows the coulee drops off more and widens into clay-bottomed, rock-strewn badlands, with a view of the wide river valley into which its waters — when there are some — drain.

She and her mother used to walk here carrying a mesh bag with a picnic lunch in it when she was a child. The patch of grass had been bigger then. Her mother would name the plants, the ones that her mother had taught her; once she’d picked up a stone scraper and told Iris that a long time ago, in the very place they were standing, a Native woman had knelt and scraped a buffalo hide clean of flesh. They’d startled swans in the slough, and often deer bending to drink. Far, far down the coulee, high above the river, golden eagles sometimes
circled. You could tell them from hawks by their size and by the mastery of their soaring, as if moving their wings was too much trouble, and then, sailing off with an unconquerable, lazy power that made Iris’s heart do funny things in her chest.

I loved you, old man, Iris thinks, I know you’re gone, I know it, and it’s been too long to cry, and is bewildered, realizing it’s James Springer she’s grieving now, and not her husband. James doesn’t reply. She wants to believe she was wrong, she wants to beg God for forgiveness, and Barney’s ghost too, but no matter how she tries, there’s a core that won’t accept that she sinned. Now that both James and Barney are dead, what can any of it matter anyway?

But it’s Barney’s warmth that envelops her; his presence is so intense he has crept into every pore of her being, and even the wind that has risen, as it always does on the prairie when the sun is well above the horizon, can’t shake him off. He has come to get her through his funeral, he will help her find a way to be a widow.

I loved you too, Barney, she tells him. You were my life.

The wind flaps his dressing gown around her shins; she pulls it tighter, holding the collar in both hands, and hurries down the strip of grass between the two wheel ruts, back to the house in the full morning light. Now her fingers are icicles, and her toes inside the boots she crossed the river in are numb. At the back door she steps out of them and into her slippers, enters the kitchen, and almost bumps into Fay who’s just emerging from the half-bath by the door.

“God, I need a cigarette,” Fay says. “I’m out.”

“Somebody’ll be here soon and give you one,” Iris replies. She’s certain Ramona will drive up in her battered old half-ton any second now asking, “What can I do to help?” Fay coughs raggedly into her hand. “Where were you?”