Garden of Eden (9 page)

Or maybe he really doesn’t mind. Maybe he’s looking forward to seeing his son, especially now that Barney has returned to the cowboy life he was raised in. Her face heats up at this thought. The truth is, she has always felt a sort of perplexed guilt at stealing him from his family. Now she realizes Luke and Mary Ann had expected that from his bride; what they hadn’t expected was that their own son would turn his back wholly on their way of life and everything they stood for, trading in the ranching way of life so casually for what seemed to them — to all of them — its opposite, farming. But surely she’s not responsible for that? Surely that was his choice?

“I tell ya,” Luke says. “Don’t know what he’s thinking about. Past fifty and still can’t make up his mind what he wants.” He shifts gears, usually an effortless push and click but this time it’s a rapid and hard movement, and when she glances at him, his lips have tightened. Change the subject, quick.

“How is Mary Ann these days?” she asks brightly. “Her arthritis not too bad?”

“Pretty sore mornings,” Luke says.

“The doctor’s no help?” He shrugs, she struggles on. “And Fay and the kids?” Has she gone too far, asked too many questions, begun to seem nosy to touchy Luke?

“Don’t see too much of ‘em. Fay lost her job in the drugstore when it closed. She’s looking around. Barry’s at home.”

“Oh?” Iris is startled, and bites her tongue to keep from saying more. Fay’s husband hasn’t been home regularly for years.

“Getting too old to rodeo,” Luke points out, as if he knows what she’s thinking and isn’t going to pretend to her everything is fine between his daughter and son-in-law. Recognizing this for what it is, that she’s finally family, she feels only exasperation. “Guess now he figures he needs his wife and kids. Got a job at that feedlot outside Swift Current.”

“Quinn will be glad to have him home,” Iris remarks, thinking of him at twelve when he used to come and stay with her and Barney — and then run away — every single time, back to the city, or to whatever town his father was rodeoing in. Luke shrugs again. She’d like to ask if Fay is still drinking, but of course can’t since it isn’t supposed to be happening. She’s running out of things to say.

When she’d tried to phone Barney to let him know she and Luke were coming, the phone rang and rang into a muffled silence. Out in the corrals, she supposes, or riding the steep, wooded hills looking for cows. Thank God it’s stopped raining, really seems to mean it this time.

“How many cows Barney got to calve out?” Luke asks.

“I think about eighty. He said he’d start small till he got back in the swing of things.” Luke grunts, whether in amusement, exasperation, or agreement, Iris can’t tell.

“Wolves, grizzlies, all gone from them hills now,” he remarks. “Used to be stories, you wouldn’t believe …” Iris remembers now the importance of waiting. Luke speaks when he’s good and ready and if you interrupt his thoughts, he quits talking, period. “Used to take Howard and Barney when they were kids up to the old Sullivan
place for roundups. A long time ago. Old Man Robinson would be there. Jerretts, Castles would come with all the kids. We’d camp there, three, four days, while we brought in all them cows, sorted them out.” The hint of sadness in his voice makes her risk a glance at him. As far as she can tell, his expression hasn’t changed. “Yeah, Castles’d be Barney’s nearest neighbours. Irv is running the place now. His boy Dennis helps. That Daisy comes and goes.”

She’s resting her left arm on a sports bag full of clean jeans, shirts, socks, and underwear for Barney that, because of the mud and the other things they’re carrying in the back of the truck, they’ve had to put on the seat between them. In the steel toolbox, besides the bag of Iris’s own clothing, there’s a carton of groceries, fresh baking, fruit, even lettuce and tomatoes for salad, something Barney won’t have seen since he was last home. There isn’t even running water to wash the lettuce in, she’ll have to pump it at the well. Grandma pumped water at the well her whole married life, she tells herself. It didn’t kill her. But there isn’t much comfort in the thought. All those women worked too hard, never had a second to themselves, never got to do anything that was fun or just for themselves and nobody else.

The truck slows, and Luke turns the wheel west off the highway. He reaches down and jerks the knob that puts the truck back into four-wheel drive. The truck bucks and growls, but it pulls on through the mud. Iris hangs on to the armrest when they slew sideways and appear to be going straight for the ditch. Mud and water spray up and hit the windshield and the side windows, it’s hard to believe anything could get through this mess. She peers through a splattered window and sees a broken landscape of pines and steep, sloping hillsides and knows they’re well into the Cypress Hills. Soon — if they don’t get stuck or slide off the road — they’ll reach Barney.

“Not far now. Wind’s up. Could be a good drying day,” Luke says. Unexpectedly, he goes on, “I told Howard I’m ready to retire, told him to come home. I think he’s got a woman where he is. ‘Bring her, if she’s a good woman,’ I told him.” His words are broken by the roaring and bumping of the truck. Iris opens her mouth to speak, but abandons the attempt, the truck is making so much noise she’d have to yell. And anyway, she doesn’t know what to say about
Howard, Barney’s half-brother who is also Lannie’s father. It’s nothing to me, one way or the other, she tells herself, but I’ll never be able to like him, not after the way he dumped poor Lannie on us and walked away and never even looked back.

She finds herself smiling, remembering Lannie as a little girl, kissing her good night as she lay in bed, tucking her in, leaving the door open so a shaft of light brightened the darkness. How she missed her when she went off to university, how — those letters again, the ones she found in Lannie’s book bag. Surely they must have been someone else’s? But no, her name was on most of them. Why would anyone write obscene notes to her? Why would she keep them? Iris shakes her head quickly, she’s been down this frightening path a thousand times before and is never any the wiser.

They’re climbing a high, narrow, winding road that she recognizes as the one that will lead them over the last barrier on this long trek to Barney’s godforsaken ranch. At the top they’ll see through the filthy windshield far below them and across the narrow, grassy valley, nestled in the dark pines near the bottom of the far slope, the small log house that’s become Barney’s home. A wave passes through Iris — nausea, heat, excitement — she can’t name it, just wishes it would pass, it scares her. Maybe she’s making a mistake. Maybe she has been right all along, and Barney wrong. And yet — she sees Barney as he was when she first knew him: tall, lean, slow to smile, staring at her as if by the sheer intensity of his gaze he might make her his. She smiles to herself, suddenly sure that he’ll be glad to see her, and her old contentment in her marriage returns to move slowly through her.

The truck gives one last lurch, Luke says “Whoooaa” to it, it straightens itself, and they’ve reached the top of the ridge. He stops the truck, pushes the knob that sends out a steady stream of cleaning fluid, the wipers thump on high for a minute and as the windshield gradually clears, Iris leans forward to peer ahead and below. There’s one more barrier she’s forgotten about. Below them, partway across the valley, where normally there’s a narrow, shallow but fast-running, clearwater stream whose gravel bottom a truck rolls easily over, lies a wide expanse of rushing black water. They sit silently, staring down at it.

“Hell,” Luke curses, mildly enough, then, “must be some way through it.” He puts the truck back in gear and they inch their way down the narrow trail that winds down the hillside. Frowning, Iris says, “There’s no smoke coming out of the chimney.”

“He must’ve been out too long. Fire went out. It ain’t that cold.” They reach the bottom of the valley and make their way a few yards along the trail to the very edge of the water. For a minute Iris thinks Luke is going to drive right on through it. But he stops the truck again, leaves it idling, gets out, and walks to the place where the creeping edge of the water forms a small pool on the road before it eddies rapidly away downstream. He stands so long Iris considers whether she should get out of the truck and stand with him.

She peers across the water to the cabin. There’s no sign of movement, but over the hiss and burble of the water she hears cows bellowing. The sound makes her uneasy. She stares harder across the water’s silver expanse, and sees two saddlehorses standing motionless against the fence in the pen closest to the house and, in the next pen, cows milling about, calling or stopping to watch her and Luke.

Luke opens the truck door and climbs in. Iris’s palms have begun to sweat, and the back of her neck is damp against the stiff edge of her plastic raincoat.

“What?” she asks uneasily, breathlessly.

“He’s only got two saddlehorses here.” Iris waits for him to go on, but of course, he doesn’t, and it dawns on her that he means Barney must be around, inside the house maybe, since both horses are in plain sight. Luke leans on the horn, then beeps it rhythmically. Nothing stirs, then Iris notices what Luke probably took in at a glance: Barney’s half-ton parked by the side of the cabin under a couple of tall lodge-pole pines. He has to be inside. Now her heart is thumping in her chest; the strength of its beating tells her she’s anxious before she recognizes the nausea again in the pit of her stomach. She turns her head to Luke quickly, out of control, is about to say “Luke!” but he’s speaking.

“I’m going across on foot.”

“Can’t we drive?”

“Nope,” Luke says. She waits. “Road’s washed out right in front of us. Must be a two-foot drop.”

Iris feels she should protest, however futile. Luke is an old man, and they don’t know how deep the water is. But he’s getting out, reaching into the carry-all box in the back of the truck. He pulls out his long yellow riding slicker. When he has it on, he reaches inside the cab and shuts off the motor. “This is as far as we go,” he says, and Iris smiles. She sees it’s grim cowboy humour.

“I’m coming too,” she says. In the abrupt silence her voice is too loud.

“You wait here,” Luke says amiably, as if she hasn’t spoken. “I’ll come back for you. Or Barney will.” This last is so clearly an afterthought that Iris realizes Luke thinks something’s happened to Barney. The heat envelops her again, she feels as if she’ll stifle in her raincoat and jacket and in the cab. She pushes herself quickly across the seat and clambers out on the driver’s side, her scarf clutched in her hand. Luke is standing meditatively at the water’s edge.

She cries, “A rope, is there a rope?” Luke turns back to her, not looking at her, and goes to the truck box again. He rummages around inside while she stands, worried, behind him, her hands in tight fists at her side. She’s holding her breath and lets it out in a sudden rush as Luke pulls out a coiled yellow nylon rope.

“Never go anywhere without it,” he says, and she realizes this is more humour and it frightens her even more. That’s what she is, she’s scared to death. She pulls open the truck door and leans hard on the horn again, then waits. Nothing. Silence. Even the cows have stopped bellowing, and she thinks now that cows only bellow when there’s something wrong — they’re hungry or thirsty or have lost their calves — a fact Luke would have noted instantly.

“I’m coming too,” she repeats. He doesn’t answer or even look at her, but walks around her to the front of the truck where he fastens one end of the rope with one of those fancy cowboy knots Barney is so good at to the big truck’s grillguard. The noise the water makes hurrying by seems to grow louder, and behind it Iris hears some other higher-pitched hissing or whoop she can’t identify that mingles with the cows’ renewed calls. Luke goes past her back to the cab where he reaches in and does something to both gears and pulls on the emergency brake. Iris looks again toward the cabin. Still no
movement from it but the tops of the pines all the way up the ridge behind it are in motion, and she understands the other noise she hears is wind, thinks automatically, good, Luke was right, it’ll dry up this mud.

Luke looks at her now, he’s got a funny sort of smile on his face. She recognizes it as an attempt at reassurance. A peculiar lightness has entered his voice. He’s good at trouble, comfortable with it. Sensing this about him, a flash of anger briefly knifes through her. Irrationally, she would like to blame him for this.

“This here’s a forty-foot rope,” he says. “I’d say that stream’s maybe fifty feet across. Can’t be deep all the way — maybe only twenty feet or so down the main channel. Should be long enough.” Iris looks wildly around. Seeing what she wants — she can be good at trouble too — she pulls a rain-swollen tree limb about two inches in diameter out of the roadside water and struggles to strip off the small branches. Luke is busy tying a loop in the other end of the rope. She expects him to tie it around his waist, but instead he loops it over his head, across his shoulder and chest and under his arm. She hands him the stick. He takes it as if it’s all he’s been waiting for and turns his back on her, then turns back again.

“Here.” He hands her the thick coil of rope between the end tied to the grillguard and the end he’s formed into a loop around his body. He moves the knot until it’s resting against his shoulder blade. “Let it out slow.” He steps into the water and for the first time Iris sees the washout. The water’s mid-thigh on Luke already. He wavers a bit, then regains his balance.

“There’s probably a boat on the place. This must happen all the time. I’ll come back for you.” She doesn’t want to wait but something holds her back from insisting, some last-minute fear. It isn’t this violent flow she’s afraid of. It’s whatever is on the other side.

The rope is stiff and hard in her hands and each loop stays formed until Luke moves ahead and pulls it taut. Then she lets another loop go. He moves slowly, prodding ahead with the stick before each step. Every few steps he wavers a bit, as if he’s lost his footing. He’s an old man, she reminds herself, his balance probably isn’t that good any more. I should have gone myself, but the very image of striking out
through the water while Luke waits in the truck makes her laugh out loud. She’s glad Luke can’t hear her over the stream’s racket.