Garden of Eden (7 page)

“I’m going on to see her as soon as I can get away from here. It was raining so hard on Sunday, and Barney was ho …” — she corrects her remark quickly — “was too tired to drive all that way to Swift Current and back. So I’m going by myself right away.”

“Luke and me are going up on Thursday,” Mary Ann says. “We’ll have supper at Fay’s, haven’t seen the grandkids in quite a while.” Fay is Barney’s younger sister. Iris doesn’t think she can endure much more of this halting, boring conversation. “Funny thing,” Mary Ann continues, resting one elbow on the table, rubbing the tablecloth with swollen, arthritic fingers, “but all I can think about with all this rain is them drought years.” Iris’s mouth is full of the cake Ramona has brought her. “The dust years,” Mary Ann goes on. “There was a book in them days — no, maybe when the worst was over. About the Okies?” She looks up at Iris. Iris nods. “In the States. How they lost everything in the dust bowl and went away, left everything behind,
tried to get to California, I think it was. Funny,” she says. “That book got passed around from house to house all through the countryside till most everybody read it, even them that didn’t read books much.” She sighs and straightens her back as if it’s aching.

Iris thinks, oh brother, am I going to have to listen again to how people were happier when they were poor in the Depression? How people stuck together then like they don’t now? This makes no sense to her, never has, even though all the old people swear it’s true. She would like to ask Mary Ann, were they happy when they had only potatoes to eat? When their kids couldn’t go to school because they didn’t have shoes? When their cows got too thin to give milk and their horses weakened and died of starvation?

But Mary Ann is staring around the room as if she’s not seeing a thing there. “Too much of a good life — too much
things
— it kills something in people.”

Her words arrest Iris’s movement as she brings the cake and strawberry-laden fork to her lips. She sets it down, then, keeping her voice mild, trying to erase any hint of complacency, says, “They say the drought in the eighties was worse than the one during the Depression, but our improved farming methods and our new genetically engineered seeds and our technology all made it so we still got crops.”

“Lotta people lost their places during the eighties,” Mary Ann points out. Iris shrugs.

“Bad management, places too small, you know.” She lifts her fork again and takes another mouthful — delicious.

Mary Ann says sharply, “You wouldn’t shrug if it was your place.” Iris stops chewing, surprised. Her place? It’s the biggest, most prosperous farm in the district. She and Barney, and her parents before them, are rich from that farm. Lose it? Never! She glances at Mary Ann, sees the set to her jaw. Remembers the poverty Barney grew up in.

“Yes, you’re right,” she says meekly. “Of course, you’re right.” She mustn’t quarrel with Mary Ann too, she’s Barney’s mother, she has to get along with her. Besides, she likes Mary Ann, her stubborn, down-to-earth good sense, her courage at living what has been a hard life, driven almost wholly by men’s desires and needs.

She pushes her half-eaten plate of cake away and takes her leave of
her mother-in-law quickly, promising to drop in whenever Barney can make the time to drive up, knowing that it’ll surely be summer before that happens, and with Barney as good as gone — but she won’t think that; it isn’t as if he’s declared their marriage to be over, or that he’s died on her. Still, what she wouldn’t give to have him forget his ranch and come back and be her husband again.

Without saying goodbye to anybody — if she did, it would be another hour before she gets away — she leaves the tea, pushing back coats jammed into the overfull coat rack to locate her own and then scrabbling among the rows of muddy boots for hers, putting them on, then sliding out the door between a family of newcomers entering the hall. She has told the others she can’t stay to clean up. Knowing there’s always plenty of help, no one will mind.

As she’s driving out of the parking lot an unaccustomed relief floods over her. She has never minded these events before, even enjoyed them, nor has she ever questioned their necessity knowing, as she does, that they are what make the community. Still caught up in surprise at her reaction to leaving the hall full of her relatives, friends, and neighbours, she momentarily catches a glimpse of Barney moving slowly on horseback through the lodgepole pines that surround his cabin in the wilderness and she understands a little about why he’s gone. Abruptly, she’s gripped by the desire to reverse herself, to throw everything up too, run to him, and throw her arms around him:
I give up, you’re right,
she’d say.

Somehow she’s turned the wheel left when she meant to go right, and there it is on the corner: the house where James or Jake Springer used to live, newly painted a pale blue with white trim, its big yard still framed by the ancient sixty-foot poplars the pioneers planted. The memory of their lovemaking, so long ago now, hits her low in her abdomen with an immediacy that stuns her — his mouth on her breasts, his gentle, insistent hands on her body, his … She catches her breath. The one person who loved her wholly, without equivocation, dead now, gone forever. And she can hardly believe she could ever have done such a thing — her, a respectable married woman, a woman in love with her husband, and him a good man who didn’t drink or abuse her or even look at other women. Even more puzzling
is her lack of shame at her adultery, as if the pure, desperate love she and James shared is its own justification.

And what about the pain? she asks herself. The need to sneak around, lying to Barney that she was cleaning his house and seeing to it that he ate the occasional decent meal, when in fact her cleaning was perfunctory and she rarely did more than make a pot of tea. What about the constant terror of being caught, her life ruined by her own unaccountable, driven need for an old man? Not for the first time, and not without perplexity, and something else less easily nameable, she thinks there was something in their relationship that felt like father and daughter. Maybe that was part of why it was so good. Her own father so distant. She pulls back in distaste from this line of thinking. It was love, she tells herself, that was all, and we were a perfect match sexually.

Sex with Barney has become a disaster. When he comes home for a night every week or so she is so ardent, so tender, eager to woo him back, trying to please him with all the things she knows he likes best: touching him just so, her kisses studied, expert, filled with desire, and him apologizing afterward — “I dunno what’s — the thing is —” She can feel the effort it takes him to respond at all. Then lying silently beside her, awake but pretending not to be, while she does the same, hurt and angry, desperate to speak to him about this nameless thing that’s spoiling their love, but afraid to say a word for fear of hurting him, or of having him say something she couldn’t bear to hear — or even worse — of scaring him away so he stops coming home at all. She holds back tears and grips the steering wheel more securely. She has decided he’s having an affair with his ranch, and until he tires of it, or begins to remember all the bad things about ranching that he once couldn’t wait to get away from, she’ll have to settle for being second best, even if she hates it with every fibre of her being. Patience, her father would say. Wait it out. You got time. That’s how he did business, she remembers grimly, it always worked for him.

The small, muddy town recedes behind her now, as she climbs out of the valley and begins to gather speed on the highway. Sun has broken through the clouds; the haze that has for days obscured the distance has dissolved and she can see the prairie, varying from flat
to slightly rolling, and nearly all of it cultivated, unfolding for miles out on each side of the road, tilting upward to a faint line of purple hills at the bottom of the sky. She sets the car on cruise and loosens her grip on the steering wheel. Driving through this vast, open landscape always has this relaxing effect on her, and makes the town seem claustrophobic.

Why won’t Barney come home? When he does, he gets out of the truck and stands for a moment with his back to the house and to her and stares out over the farm: field after field, a rolling green carpet in the late spring, a sea of pale gold by August, shadows dappling its stately, slow-moving waves, in winter a blue-shadowed, gleaming white ocean. Or he looks out to the sky-filled space that is the river valley with its white-flecked cliffs and its steep dun-coloured sides. It’s as if he’s searching for something there that, judging by the puzzled expression he wears when he at last turns to her, he never seems to find. How could he have chosen thick coniferous forest and precipitous hills, a landscape where he can see neither the sunset nor the sunrise, over the heart-stopping vistas of the farm?

That moment of clear sunlight has gone, it has begun to rain again, and, with an exasperated “Damn,” she turns on the wipers. She hasn’t told Barney where she’s going, and for an instant she tenses again — what if she misses his call? She’d have phoned him, but knows it’s hopeless to try to catch him inside. I’ll be home by ten, she tells herself, and he never phones before dark; if I don’t answer, surely he’ll keep trying. She reminds herself, too, that as soon as calving is over in another month at the most, he’ll spend more time at the farm with her, but this thought doesn’t comfort her the way it used to. She no longer holds the key to his heart. He’s retreating from her, growing smaller and smaller, and she doesn’t know how to bring him back.

By the time she reaches the outskirts of the small city spread down the wide, shallow valley and partway up its sides, it has again stopped raining. She drives to the nursing home where it sits high on the sloping valley wall. As she parks, everyone Iris sees around her is a
stranger. This too is something she can’t seem to get used to. What with the rapid, bewildering changes in the farm economy, bankruptcies and land losses, consolidation of small farms into big ones like her own have emptied out the countryside. Half the people she knows have gone to British Columbia or Alberta, to the cities, to find work, her own once huge extended family reduced to a fraction of what it was when she was a child.

As she approaches the nursing desk to make the obligatory inquiry about her mother — not that they ever have anything to tell her that she can’t see for herself — she meets a handsome woman walking out. The woman glances at her, a glint of something, recognition maybe, passes over her features, but she doesn’t speak or nod. Iris thinks maybe she ought to know her, although she can’t place that assured stride, that smooth cap of fine fair hair, that delicately boned face with its haughty expression.

“Who was that?” she asks the nurse on duty, Rosalie, who’d been a couple of years ahead of her in high school in Chinook. The woman is moving quickly down the steps on the other side of the glass doors.

“Daisy Castle,” Rosalie says. “Don’t you know her? She lives over west on the border. Her dad’s Irv Castle?” Iris remembers now. Wild as a coyote, people said, when she was a girl. “Her mother’s here too,” Rosalie goes on. “Alzheimer’s.” She reaches for Iris’s mother’s chart. “Nothing new here,” she says of Lily. Old people totter past, or roll by in wheelchairs. A TV set in the corner is on too loud, a soap that nobody’s watching. Iris, staring down at Rosalie’s tight bun of grey hair, is thinking vaguely, she ought to colour it, it makes her look so old that way. Rosalie is religious though, nursed for her church for a few years in Bangladesh or Thailand or somewhere.

“You know, Iris,” Rosalie says, still not looking up, “your mother could be at home. There’s nothing much the matter with her.” Iris can’t think what to say. What about her mother’s heart? What about her forgetfulness? She’s about to respond with a polite “Oh?” but Rosalie goes on. “She’s stable enough. And that disorientation she has sometimes — who wouldn’t get disoriented with nobody to talk to day after day after day?” She looks up now, something glimmering in
her dark eyes that are so striking in that plain, aging face that Iris is taken aback.

“That’s one reason we brought her here after Dad died,” she replies stiffly. “So she’d have people her own age to socialize with. We couldn’t leave her on her own in town and she’d have been lonely with us out on the farm.” Rosalie doesn’t say anything, just looks down to her papers. After a second’s silence, feeling as if she’s somehow been humiliated, Iris walks away.

Her mother is sitting across the room in a leather armchair, her legs covered with an afghan composed of white daisies with yellow centres that Iris remembers her, in better days, crocheting herself. She lifts her head slowly when Iris enters, as though she has been napping. Beside her the television set flashes soundless pictures and Iris reaches over and snaps it off.

“How are you, Mom?” she asks, crossing to her mother, bending and kissing her forehead. Her mother looks down with quavering head at her body, so wasted now that it barely disturbs the afghan.

“I’m not well at all,” she says, smiling — she’s making a joke. She turns her head to the window, sighing, and for an instant Iris sees the woman her mother used to be, the fine nose, the high cheekbones, the patrician mouth. How haughty she could be, Iris remembers with a trace of irritation. “I’m going to die soon,” her mother says.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come last week,” Iris explains. Confronted by her mother’s frailty, she’s overcome with her failures as a daughter. “I’m really sorry,” she says again, meaning it this time. Her mother observes her, and Iris is surprised to see how blue her eyes are today. It seems to Iris that the colour has been progressively leached from them over the years she has been here, as all excess flesh has slowly melted from her bones.

“I’ve never been so tired in all my days.”

Iris recognizes this as something she has heard before, as far back as she can remember, whenever her mother had finished the canning, or the spring cleaning, or given a family dinner. “Where’s Barney?”

“At the ranch.”

“What ranch? His father’s?”