Garden of Eden (50 page)

She doesn’t understand why nobody will listen to her, why nobody wants to help. Is it because after a Communist regime, an apparently more democratic government willing to align itself with the West has to be supported, its flaws ignored? Why? Because that’s
how governments work? They’re incapable of subtlety? They’re stupid? Because any improvement at all is at least an improvement? And as for the Ethiopians — the amount of aid money going in there from countries like Canada must be enormous. And Ethiopia can’t do without it. But it was the press who started the rebellions that got rid of Haile Selassie and then of Mengistu, by telling the truth about what was happening.

What if I’m wrong? she asks herself. What if I’ve misunderstood, overreacted, what if all of them are right and what I thought was an emergency was really a commonplace? But she knows what she has seen.

She thinks of Abubech who has surely weighed a few thousand starving people against the endless good her project can do, and has chosen her project, because as Betty said, people are always trying to kill each other somewhere. The killings will go on regardless, but the work with the indigenous seeds will slowly, year by year, improve the lot of the Ethiopian peasant. This is it, she thinks. I, who have never seen such suffering am weighing my perceptions over the perceptions of a woman who has lived her whole life in the certain, horrific knowledge of it. How do I dare?

It occurs to her to wonder if the word “genocide” carries political implications she doesn’t understand. Is there some international law like the Geneva Convention or something, that, if it is proven to be going on, forces actions no government wants to take? Is it a word aid agencies are warned never to use without a pile of bodies in front of them? Without maybe having to run for their own lives? Is that why I’m so quickly dismissed?

Here she is, sitting up in bed in her own house in safe, comfortable Canada, and she’s breathing in and out, her heart is pumping blood through her veins just as it always has, and down the road in Chinook children will soon be walking to school and the grocery store will open, the cash register will ring, somebody will pump gas at the co-op, and nobody in the whole town is starving or being tortured or murdered. Doesn’t that mean something against the darkness? Isn’t that a reason to go on?

In the silence while Betty drinks again, Iris understands at last that there is nothing she can do.

“Betty,” she says, “isn’t it time to get that Ph.D.?” Betty laughs.

“Is that advice?”

“Yes, I believe it is.” When Betty doesn’t say anything more, Iris says, “Thanks for at least trying to find out if I was right or not.” She waits for Betty to speak again, but she doesn’t, and finally Iris hangs the phone up gently, quietly.

She leans over to replace the phone on the bedtable beside the lamp. As she sets it down, she notices something glint in the light on the corner of the bedtable farthest from her, behind the lamp’s wide crystal base. She reaches for it and pulls it over to her.

It is the carved wooden cross that the young guide Yared gave her. She remembers him looking hard, straight into her eyes with an expression she couldn’t even begin to read. He’d spoken slowly, emphasizing each word:
I am giving you this so that you will remember me.
She stares down at the small wooden cross on its leather thong lying in her open palm. After a moment she lifts it on over her head, straightens it against her throat and chest, then leaves it to rest lightly there between her breasts.

Ramona and Vance, Iris, Lannie and Misty are seated in the town hall in the midst of row upon row of friends and neighbours. Every chair is taken and people are lined up three deep along the back wall and halfway up the sides. As Iris entered Henry Swan, standing with a group of men at the door, had turned to her and said formally, pointedly, “Good evening, Iris,” while the men he’d been standing with, people she’d known all her life either would not meet her eyes, said nothing, or were unusually jovial in their hellos, so that she knew they were angry with her. When she saw Luke standing with a knot of older ranchers on the far side of the hall, she felt his hard blue eyes penetrating right through her, and she pretended not to have noticed his stare. When she led Lannie and the others to their seats down this row, she’d noticed Marie Chapuis, Ardath Richards, and Mavis Miller sitting together two rows ahead. In the general rustle at her arrival, they turned to stare, returning her greeting with brief, guarded smiles. She was hardly surprised, had squelched her hurt
feelings, having resolved to stand up to everyone’s complaints without giving in, or breaking down, or revealing any anger of her own.

But what she’s really feeling right now is fear; she’s quaking with it. She’s going to have to speak in front of all these people, she’s going to have to explain, defend herself, be persuasive, truthful. She has to lock her hands together to keep them from trembling, her jaw is clenched so tightly it hurts. Schiff has delivered an ultimatum: everyone has to sign by the end of the month or the whole deal is off. Some are convinced it’s a bluff, others aren’t so sure; all of them know if the deal’s to go through, Iris Christie has to agree to it. The crowd is unusually quiet, a sign of the seriousness of the situation that has brought them here.

Seated at a long table facing the crowd is a row of men: the reeve of the municipality in his western clothes, Chinook’s mayor in his sports coat and jeans and boots, a couple of politicians in shirts and ties, both of them men Iris went to school with, Jim Schiff the land buyer, a government land agent dressed the same way as the men in the crowd, the director of Vance’s conservation organization wearing the hiking boots that instantly give him away to the crowd as not one of them, and the head of a hunters’ lobby group. Behind them is an easel with a professional-looking flow chart on it that Iris recognizes as Jim Schiff’s company plan.

People shift positions noisily, begin to whisper to one another as the mayor, the reeve, the government agent, the hunters’ lobbyist each speak briefly about the problem as they see it and how it should be handled. The crowd is waiting to hear from Jim Schiff and from the representative of the conservation organization — no, Iris thinks, they’re waiting for their chance to tackle Vance and me. She can hardly believe she’s going to have to stand against her entire community, when she has spent her life accepting and accommodating herself to its beliefs and standards and way of doing things. Her palms are wet and she unclasps her hands to wipe them surreptitiously on her thighs.

The room is deathly silent as Jim Schiff lays out his plans once again. He ends by telling them in an amiable, almost condescending, way that he and his people are prepared to take their money and their project to another site they’ve already selected if the signatures aren’t
forthcoming by the thirtieth of the month. Iris had been told the meeting was “a chance to clear the air,” and “to clarify the situation.” Maybe. But now she sees clearly that as far as Schiff is concerned, its sole purpose is to get her to sell. She sees that he thinks she won’t be able to withstand her community’s pressure. For a second, she wavers. He’s right: there’s no way she’ll be able to hold firm.

What does she want the worry of all that land for, anyway? Why does she want to complicate her life when Barney isn’t here to help and support her? Could she possibly live here among people she has been friends with her whole life if they all hate her? She knows what they can do to people if they turn against them, she has seen it: nobody speaking to the offender, shutting the door in his face, hanging up if she phones, turning away at public events, leaving him to sit alone, throwing rotten tomatoes at her house, spray-painting graffiti on his fence; in the countryside putting sugar in fuel tanks, leaving gates open, spooking cattle and horses so they run away, or turning them into crops to destroy them, tearing up fence posts or disputing established land boundaries, dumping garbage in fields, even setting crop or grass or building fires. To be the object of so much hate — she won’t be able to endure it.

The conservationist is speaking. He’s a handsome, youngish man, dark-haired, short, wearing round, gold-framed glasses that keep sliding down his nose, dressed in the inevitable plaid shirt, jeans, and those hiking boots as if he strode here all the way from downtown Vancouver, or wherever he’s from.

“Together Mrs. Christie and Mr. and Mrs. Norman own over twelve thousand acres. The Normans have sold to us. As you know, Mrs. Christie is considering making an arrangement with us to turn her land into a grass conservation area.” Iris dares to glance at Vance, who’s staring unblinkingly straight ahead, his jaw firmly set. “Given the size and the drastic nature of Mr. Schiff’s proposal, somebody has to represent those of us who think that enough of the grassland of this region has been ploughed up, enough of it is in the hands of larger and larger entities, driving out the true family farmer and displacing or threatening the existence of too much wildlife, and killing off biodiversity, both plant and animal.”

“Consider the future of your children if we just left the logging companies to take all the trees, the fishermen to fish out the ocean, the farmers to wipe out every last shred of grassland biodiversity. There’ll be no future for your kids then — no clean air to breathe, or water, or new medicines, no —”

Somebody is booing him. From three or four places around the hall voices are rising to challenge him.

“You got no respect for us!” The chairman recognizes the loudest voice, although Iris doesn’t recognize the speaker. “You got no respect for what we’ve accomplished here, not for what we’ve suffered, or what we want — you don’t care what happens to us. Our lives aren’t worth anything to you.” He punches his arm toward the young man with each phrase, and voices rise up around him in angry agreement.

“It’s no skin off your nose when we get shoved out of our jobs or off our land and can’t look after our own families any more. You don’t have to live with the shame of being on welfare. Or all the bad things that happen when a family falls apart — drinking, wife abuse, kids going delinquent because they can’t see a life that makes any sense any more. When they got no future and no place to call home. When you think about it, that’s what happened to the Indians when we came — only a thousand times worse.”

A woman, again Iris can’t see who it is, shouts, “If a kid’s got scurvy, or he’s in jail, it don’t make much difference to him if he’s breathing clean air or not.”

The room is getting rowdier, people are talking out loud to each other, or shouting across the hall. The chairman is calling for order but nobody’s listening. The uproar in the hall swirls around Iris. She’s thinking of all the farm meetings she’s been to over the years: over drought, over the dismantling of the Crow rate, over the government’s desire to take exclusive jurisdiction over the sale of certain grains from the Wheat Board. Each time they were filled with fear, seeing one more blow that might be the one that would finally fell them, but she never saw them as agitated as they are tonight.

She remembers something Vance said, “Our branch line’s gone, our elevators are going. It’s the end of an era and everybody knows it. If you aren’t willing to go the way of the big boys, they’ll drive you
out — market forces will drive you out. If all you really want is to stay on your own farm and listen to the birds sing in the morning and smell the fresh air and watch the sunset, you’ll fight any force that tries to take it away. You won’t care what side of the fence it’s coming from.”

It’s Schiff’s turn now, an old rancher is challenging him, questioning him closely, objecting to what he’s told them he wants to do.

“Globalization!” he shouts. “That’s just another word for turning all of us out onto the streets to starve while you get rich. Ain’t you never heard about the camel going through the eye of the needle?” Then he declares belligerently that he’d take the environmentalists any day over the Jim Schiffs of this world. Iris is glad to hear she and Vance aren’t entirely alone after all, that apparently they will have some allies.

But as they shout at each other, argue and debate, she has begun to think about the dust rising off her land, the wind carrying away the topsoil, and the weeds Vance has fought all summer and can barely keep ahead of, she’s thinking about that handful of soil he held in his hand months ago to show her, how it trickled through his fingers like water, no organic matter left in it at all. Dead. Then a face rises up before her eyes: beautiful, stern, clear-eyed, an age of suffering far older than the face itself written in its lines. It is Abubech.

Iris is standing before she quite realizes she is, and when people see her on her feet they hush each other until the hall is silent.

“I know you’ll think it’s easy for me to say, but we’ll all be better off in the long run if we refuse to deal with Mr. Schiff.”

“Louder,” a couple of people call. “We can’t hear you, Iris.” She takes a deep breath, touches the back of the chair in front of her with her fingertips to steady herself. She wants to tell them what she saw in Ethiopia, but knows they wouldn’t listen and, anyway, there’s so much to say she wouldn’t know where to begin. “He represents — for all of us out here on the land — the return of the feudal system, where his company owns all the land and we’d work for him, and he can hire us or fire us and pay us what he wants. But it’s worse than that. He doesn’t just want to own all the land, he wants to own all the seeds too, so that every time we want to plant anything at all, we’d have to buy the seeds from him. He could starve us if he wanted
to, make us do what he wants, hungry people will do anything for food. So I’m not selling to him, not now, not ever. And if that means the whole deal falls through, I’m sorry to upset people’s plans, but that’s the way it is.” She sits down into a heavy silence. Ramona squeezes her hand, then lets go. People begin to stir now, to shift their positions, turning to mutter to each other. Someone boos her, someone else hisses at the boo.

A nasal voice she recognizes as Hank Osbourne’s, a man she dated as a girl, long before Barney, calls from somewhere near the door, “Easy for you, Iris. We ain’t all rich, you know, get to do whatever we want with our places.” His voice vibrates with anger. Heads swivel, embarrassed grins on a few faces. Mavis and Ardath, Iris notes with some satisfaction, drop their eyes after they’ve located the speaker, as if they feel distaste for his words.