Garden of Eden (14 page)

“Amazing, isn’t it,” Jay says. “You know, I’ve lived without this nearly all my life?” Her skin prickles. She tries to see him, but he’s a black patch in front of the hazy bulk of the weeping birch, the church a looming shadow behind it. “Today I was thinking I’d like to see the land — I mean, walk on it. You know?” Ideas, notions, words are tumbling about inside Iris like clothes in a dryer, and she struggles to sort them. What is it he has said?

“It’s not good for a person not to know the night sky,” she says, “especially a writer,” and is a little surprised at what’s come out of her mouth.

“What?” he says, then, “Oh, yeah.” A pause. “You’re right, probably more than you know.” She wonders if this is a slight, meaning she’s only a stupid countrywoman, or she’s only a woman. “I can see it can change your understanding of life, or deepen it, or something,” he goes on. “You’re right. I do need to see this.” He moves toward her slowly, still looking upward, and some distant light, a coating of silver from a star, is shining on his face, and she forgives him, thinking now that perhaps it wasn’t a slight. “I think this craving I have to walk on some land is something I should pursue,” he says, with such seriousness that she would laugh, did she not recognize that note in his voice — longing, sorrow, or something deeper even than that, nameless, maybe unresolvable — Before she can stop herself, she says, “I could show you my farm.”

“I’ve seen about five farms already,” he answers sharply. “They’re not very interesting. I mean —
the land,”
emphasizing the last two words, as if she isn’t very bright. “But nobody seems to have any,” he goes on, rueful now. “I can’t figure it out.”

“No, no,” she says. “There’s lots of unbroken land around.” An inner voice unexpectedly quibbles with this, but she ignores it.

“Not a park,” he warns her. “Parks aren’t the real thing.” She’s irritated again, as if she needs this city dweller who has never even seen the night sky to tell her about land. And yet, she’s curious about him, she suspects him of having fastened himself to her, as if he has decided she’s the one who can give him what he needs. In the stillness and the pure night air she can feel emotion wafting from him, how he’s worn out with wanting. It makes her gentle with him.

“Tell you what,” she says, and at her new tone, his feet make whispering noises as he moves closer to her across the lawn. “We — I have some unbroken land and my neighbours have more. I’ll take you walking there if you like.”

“I’d like that very much.” There it is, that rich, masculine sound again.

“I have to go, it’s late,” she says, and begins to walk quickly away.

“Good night,” he calls to her. She glances over her shoulder, but he’s blended into the shadows; she can’t make him out.

Driving home, she wonders if she has lost her mind, with her
community and church work, the visitors and the housecleaning and baking that goes with them, with the decisions about the farm she still has to make, and what she’s half afraid might turn out to be in him only simple neediness, the everyday kind that ends by sucking up the life of others, then moves elsewhere to do it all over again.

When she goes to bed though, her solitariness is so all-encompassing it’s almost more than she can endure. That amorphous, steady ache that is Barney’s absence has coalesced into a ball in her chest and she lies with one hand pressed flat between her breasts, as if to keep the pain from spreading.

She falls asleep and dreams she’s making love to someone, she doesn’t know who. But his mouth is open on hers and he’s deep inside her, ecstasy is rippling up her body in waves that grow stronger and stronger. He begins to pull away, she’s lifting her head, open-mouthed, to get closer to him. But the more she strains to reach him, the more he retreats from her until she wakes alone in her empty bedroom, sweating, gasping, and appalled.

Asleep once more, she dreams she’s in water, swimming. It’s night, she’s all alone out in the open ocean. The water is black and cold, chunks of ice float past her now and then, and waves roil up and slap at her, and although she’s afraid when the water threatens to wash over her, by kicking hard and flailing her arms she manages to stay afloat. The waves build up higher and collapse, foaming, over her head or inches from her face, but when she rises with a swell she catches a glimpse of a thin line of lights along a shore in the far distance. There’s a city there, she sees, she’s trying to swim toward it through waves that threaten to drag her down into their freezing, black and bottomless depths.

She’s talking to Ramona on the kitchen phone when she hears somebody knocking on the front door. Ramona has taken to calling her every morning as soon as she has Vance out the door to his fieldwork and Ryan and Cody, the only two left at home, off to school. It’s just for a quick chat to see how Iris is doing: Did she sleep? Should she drop over right away, or is Iris okay this morning? What are her plans
for the day? Iris is faintly chagrined at how much that early morning call has come to mean to her. Today Ramona has invited her for supper — what a spate of invitations she has been getting, they’re almost more than she can cope with — and now they’re trying to find an evening when they’re both free. She tells Ramona she’ll call her later.

As soon as she enters the hall she can see a man’s head through the small window in the upper part of the door. She sighs inwardly, her eyelids feel gritty with lack of sleep; she’d hoped to find a few minutes for a nap, although her dreams are so relentless these days she’s become apprehensive about closing her eyes.

Years earlier Barney had torn off the wide, old-fashioned veranda that had originally fronted her parents’ big frame house and replaced it with a more stylish plank deck that runs continuously across the front of the house and down the side to just past the kitchen door. The man standing there is small and middle-aged, his greying hair slicked back neatly, his light tweed jacket worn-looking, his grey trousers in need of a press. She notes his briefcase and thinks at once, salesman, not a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon.

“Mrs. Christie? I’m Jim Schiff. I’m with Harris and Block Holdings.” He offers her his card which, after a second’s hesitation, she takes. “I’d like to talk with you about your farm.”

“It isn’t for sale,” she says, but her voice is dubious, not because it is for sale, but because only yesterday the Hutterites had sent a contingent of men to her. There were two of them, one young man, one old, both dressed in their home-made heavy black cotton suits, their plaid shirts buttoned securely to their tieless throats. She’d invited them in and they’d taken off their straw hats and held them against their chests, staring around them at her elegant living room, then seating themselves gingerly on the grey velvet sofa.

“Listen,” the old man had said. “Us Hutterite seed for you, if you need. Move on three, four air seeder, be done in couple day. If you want —” Then he’d lifted a finger to silence her in case she was about to reply before he was finished. “But, we want to buy your land.”

Joe Morris, her lawyer, had said, “I must especially caution you, Iris, not to make a deal or even sound like you’re making a deal with
anyone before you consult Luke or me. You cannot believe how many sharks there are out there, just waiting to get rich on a widow’s misfortune.” He’d smiled at her and she’d smiled back, not really believing him. “I mean it, Iris,” he’d said, frowning at her, as if she were a recalcitrant child. The two of them had gone through high school in the same class, then off to university together such a long time ago, only he’d stayed, years later coming home to practise law, while she’d come home at the beginning of her second year and married Barney. “You always want to think the best of people. But listen, some of them search the papers for estate sales, hoping to catch you when you’re weak. And then when you do sell, it’ll be the same thing over again, only this time it’ll be financial managers, investment people, bankers, after your money.” He’d shaken his head, giving her the impression he was sparing her stories he knew that would curl her hair — widows and children thrown out on the street without a crust of bread — but what Iris was thinking was that he was taking it for granted that eventually she’d sell. But not to the Hutterites. She’d thanked them politely, vaguely, served them tea, and they’d gone away.

The man standing on her deck — Jim Schiff, he has said his name is — is shifting his briefcase to his other hand.

“I think you’ll want to know about our plan,” he says, and she recognizes his remark as his first ploy. Suddenly, beginning to see his visit as the inevitable, she capitulates, “Come in,” and steps aside to let him through the door.

In the living room she sits in the grey velvet wingback chair and offers him the sofa where the two Hutterite men had perched so gingerly. He sits quickly, relaxing for a second, as if it’s a relief to have a soft chair under him. He sets his briefcase on her polished teak coffee table and snaps it opens. A stack of colourful, shiny brochures spill sideways and he takes one out and closes the case with a small thud. Now she notices what might be broken veins in his cheeks and she suspects him of being a drinker.

“You have a plan for my place?” she says, pleased at having said “my place” instead of “ours” first try. She remembers her father’s advice that in making deals you never show your weakness.

“I see nobody’s out there working your land,” he says. “I — forgive me — but I made inquiries in town and was told you’re newly widowed. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Thank you,” she says, and clears her throat softly, letting her eyelids rest shut for an instant.

“I imagine what to do with your land is rapidly becoming a problem for you.”

“The Hutterites offered to come and seed for me in a week or so when it’s dry enough.” She offers this casually to see what his response is.

“I imagine they offered to buy too,” he laughs, as if he finds Hutterites amusing.

“Your plan?” she reminds him, barely keeping the annoyance out of her voice. She turns her head away to look out the big front window where she sees the rail of the wide deck, and beyond it the roof of his white car glinting in the sun. Behind it the leaves of the young poplars shine like silver coins, and above it all is the sky, a cloudless, rich blue. Sleepless or not, she would like to be outside, walking.

“I must first ask you not to discuss any details about our conversation. We find it considerably easier to do business if its nature stays among the people directly involved. Innuendo and rumour just confuse matters.”

“I see,” she says vaguely, thinking, surely not telling people what’s going on is what causes rumours.

“We’re in the process of assembling a parcel of land.” His voice is easy now, casually confident. He picks up the single brochure he has taken from his briefcase and hands it to her. She glances at it, seeing a checkerboard of photos of couples standing with a third person, presumably a real estate agent, in front of a Cape Cod farmhouse, a row of attractive condominiums, a California-style split level. She sets it on the side table beside her chair. “It involves most of your neighbours. If you don’t know that now, I expect you soon will.” She’s startled by this, now wholly attentive.

“How big a parcel?”

“Oh, roughly, a hundred sections,” he says, watching her face. She
does a rapid mental calculation: a section is a mile by a mile — that’s ten miles by ten miles.

“That’s a lot of land.” She’d give anything for Barney to be here; she can’t think how he’d react. Once he would have tried to figure out how to outwit this company, as her father would have done, but lately — He’d throw him out? He’d sell?

“You have a good part of it,” he says. “I believe you own or control —”

“Own,” she says stiffly.

“— something like eight thousand five hundred acres?” Schiff snorts. “Forgive me, I’m from Iowa, actually, but even now the size of some of the farms up here astonish me.”

“It isn’t all arable,” she demurs.

“Nearly all. I’d say just about all.”

Iris realizes then that this isn’t just a feeler on his company’s part. Maybe even, during the last couple of weeks when she’s been staggering around in her widow’s daze, somebody’s been out driving around on her land. It shakes her a little.

He takes a folded map out of his briefcase and spreads it on the table. Iris is shocked. It’s her rural municipality with a large area shaded in a variety of pale colours and the resulting coloured block, a huge rectangle that encompasses most of the township, outlined in black felt pen. Her farm is pink, she sees. Next to it Vance and Ramona’s place is yellow. The farms Schiff’s company wants to acquire extend from the far side of Iris’s all the way to the edge of Chinook on two sides of the town. There must be twenty or more families involved.

“Why do you want so much land?” she asks suspiciously.

“I work for a big company. We want to get into grain marketing and it isn’t worth our while to farm anything smaller.” She takes another quick look at the map, wondering if they actually own any of this or if it’s merely speculation. She would ask, but thinks he wouldn’t tell her anyway, it would be tipping his hand.

“That will take a lot of money,” she says instead, dubiously.

“Yes,” he answers her, nodding and tapping the coloured block with his finger. “But, we have it.”

“American? You must know we have foreign-ownership laws here in Saskatchewan. Foreigners can’t own more than ten acres, I think it is.”

“There’s no law about foreign money backing a resident owner. Anyway, I’m not the buyer.” He looks up and smiles at her. “We’re offering, say, fifteen times the assessment.” She no longer has any idea what her land is assessed at for taxation purposes, which for years has been less than its market value, although times are so uncertain this could always change. “That’s better than fair,” he says, as if she’s objected. “Now, wait” — lifting his hand, palm toward her, like a traffic cop — “you haven’t heard the whole proposal. We’ll buy it lock, stock, and barrel. You just take the money and walk away.” Her face is suddenly hot, her pulse has begun to thud in her throat. “We’re talking about two million dollars, depending on what you have for machinery. If your machinery’s new, probably more,” he points out. “That’s only a fraction of the total investment in this project. My employers —”