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?”
“No, ours.” She pulls the visitor’s chair closer to her mother’s, seats herself, and leans forward to take her mother’s hand in hers.
“What’s this?” her mother asks, her eyes widening. Iris has told her about the ranch, more than once, as a matter of fact, but she explains again.
“Barney bought a ranch late last fall, and now he’s calving so he’s there all the time —” She wants to go on, she wants to tell her mother everything, suddenly tears prickle behind her eyelids. She wants to say, He’s left me, Mom, even though she knows Barney would deny this, and her mother would not say, I told you he’s not one of us, although this is what she’d always thought, had barely troubled to hide behind the cool formality with which she’d treated Barney. Her mother’s hand is cold and Iris rubs gently to warm it. She lifts her eyes and finds her mother staring at her in that piercing way she always had whenever she suspected there was something going on that Iris didn’t want her to know about. But now Iris sees a remoteness, a distance, as if Iris is some woman her mother hardly knows and is only moderately interested in. In an unexpected flash she sees too in her mother’s face an echo of her grandmother’s — her mother’s mother — before it disappears as quickly as she found it. Confused, unable to tolerate so probing a gaze, she blinks and looks away like a guilty child.
“People grow away from each other,” her mother says, no longer looking at Iris. “Your father and I did.”
“No!” Iris says, shocked. This is news to her. In her memory her parents were the ideal couple, community leaders, solidly a pair in everything they said or did. She thinks of their brief antagonisms that flared up and then died away as quickly as they’d come — or so it had seemed to her. Now her heart begins to beat faster. It trips in her wrists and throat, tiny thuds that propel too much blood up into her cheeks.
“When Laurence died, Jack changed forever.” Her mother pauses. Lily — what a lovely, melancholy name, Iris thinks, and wonders if it’s true that your name helps set your destiny, remembering Lannie telling her from her hospital bed that Iris is the goddess of the rainbow. Lily pushes Iris’s hand away, but gently, slowly. Laurence was Iris’s brother, stillborn when Iris was a year old, nothing more than a story, no, a myth, to Iris. “Men want sons,” her mother says. “God knows why,” and she smiles, so that Iris knows she’s making a joke again.
“How did he change?”
Her mother stares down at the afghan, then she says, poignantly, “He wasn’t any good at loving any more.” She swallows perceptibly, as if her throat hurts her. “He grew to love land more than anything — more than me or you.”
Iris sits back startled and puzzled. Her father had stopped loving them? Is that what her mother means? She’d never doubted her father loved her; hadn’t he given her anything she asked for? She knows her mother thought that they had spoiled her. Except that time when she’d asked for a horse. It can’t be. They’d gone everywhere as a family; there’d been no quarrels, no shouting, no cold silences, and when her mother was busy with her church work her father took her with him, even to auction sales where mostly men went. Thomases don’t sell land, he often used to say, Thomases buy it. When Barney married her, he married that dictum, too. Now it jolts her a little, as if she’s hearing it for the first time, she who’d always taken its sentiment for granted as wise and right, the way the world needed to be. She waits uneasily for her mother to go on.
“He got land fever,” her mother says, and laughs gently at the old phrase, or maybe it’s that she finds the condition amusing, although the tears still sit, pooled in the wrinkles at the bottom of each eye.
Land fever? Was that what happened to Barney? But no, she answers herself. Barney’s buying the ranch had to do with — turning away from everything he’d become since he’d left his father’s dirt-poor ranch up in the hills to marry her and become a farmer, for some incomprehensible reason needing to go back to his beginnings. Articulating this for the first time, she feels a cold relief.
“That’s how you wound up with the biggest farm in the district, Iris,” her mother says. “I guess you should thank him for it. I’m sure Barney does” — that wry, faintly contemptuous note still there after all these years. But Barney doesn’t, not any more, Iris knows.
“I don’t know how you can say that Dad didn’t love … you,” she says in wonderment. “You never fought. You always seemed so — comfortable — together.”
“About this ranch,” her mother says abruptly, as if Iris hasn’t spoken. She drops her eyes from Iris’s and picks at a daisy’s yellow centre. “You haven’t gone with him to live there?”
“No.” Iris shakes her head, watching her mother’s fingers as they pluck, pluck at the daisy.
“Why not?” The question is firm, and in its surprising lack of rebuke Iris remembers the gaze of the woman in her dream.
“It is a beautiful place,” she says. “It’s over west in Fort Walsh country, you know? It has lots of trees and deep coulees and valleys and streams …” Her mother doesn’t appear to be listening.
“You better go there, Iris,” her mother says, startling Iris with her firmness as if she knows something Iris doesn’t. She closes her eyes. Her fingers stop their restless picking.
“I don’t want to,” Iris says bleakly. She hears the hint of anger in her own voice and tries, too late, to soften it. But there it is, out at last. She just doesn’t want to.
“Why not?” her mother asks in a whisper, her eyes still closed.
“There’s no running water, no electricity, no decent roads. It’s fifty miles to the nearest town. I’m past fifty, Mom. It’s too late for me to start living like my grandmother did. And I don’t know a thing about cattle, you know I don’t.” She’s trying to find good reasons to tell her mother, explanations nobody could find fault with, but instead she finds herself recalling the dehorning so long ago on the Christie ranch, before she and Barney were married, the blood drenching Luke’s shirt, Barney’s half-brother Howard’s barely concealed rage, the screams of the animals, and Barney trying to hide it all from her, afraid if she really saw it, she’d go away and never come back. And never telling her mother about this, not wanting her to be right. “I still love him, Mom,” she whispers.
Her mother is asleep. Iris leans toward her and whispers, “Mom? Mother?” There is no response. She peers at her mother’s delicately lined face, the fine skin, the palest flush in her cheeks showing she’s still alive behind her stillness. “Help me, Mother.” Her mother’s eyes are still closed; she moves her head irritably, a tiny, almost imperceptible jerk, and a frown passes across her features and disappears.
The door opens and a nursing assistant enters the room quietly. She’s carrying the supper tray which she sets down on the table by Iris, snapping on the lamp beside it.
“Will you feed her or do you want me to?” she asks.
“I’ll feed her,” Iris says. The nurse bends over her mother.
“Wake up, Mrs. Thomas, suppertime,” she calls. “When she finishes eating, call me and I’ll help you put her to bed.” Lily says, “Don’t worry, I have the garden planted.” The nurse turns to Iris with a smile and says, “She’s alone too much; all our old people are.” She gives the afghan a little pat, then leaves the room quickly.
Lily doesn’t want to eat, and when she lifts one thin hand in a gesture of refusal and turns her head away to stare into the shadows at the end of the room, Iris makes no effort to persuade her. After a while she pushes the buzzer at the head of her bed, and together she and a different nursing assistant, this one a dark-skinned, slight woman whose accent Iris can’t penetrate, help her mother into the bed. Lily soon falls back into sleep or wherever it is the very old go when they close their eyes. Perhaps she will die tonight, perhaps this is the last night they, mother and daughter, will spend together. And when she goes, Iris thinks, watching that scarcely discernible quiver in her mother’s chest, who will take her place? For in this instant she understands what she has not known before, that there will never be any kind of loss as whole and irrevocable as the loss of her mother.
Evening has come and the room is filling with shadows, dissolving the walls and ceiling. Iris sits on, lost in reverie, this place, this room, this woman who bore her, introduced her to life, nursed her and cared for her and taught her, filling the space left by Barney’s defection. She thinks, I could take her home with me, right now, tonight. She tries hard to think what it would be like with her mother at home, but her mind won’t deal with it. Not in the new uncertainty in which she lives with Barney neither fully gone nor fully present.
She remembers her answer to her mother’s Why not? A sulky I don’t want to.
Suddenly it’s as if an axe has cleaved her bloodlessly in two, from the crown of her head right down through her womb, and in that remorseless opening into her own soul, she sees what she’s been: selfish through and through, a stubborn child blindly wanting her own way. And more: terrified by Barney’s attempt to drag her out of her complacent, comfortable rut of a life. Utterly terrified. And that — that is the real reason she has refused to go.
The Wild
It’s noon by the time she and Luke set out for Barney’s ranch. Driving home from Swift Current in the darkness last night she had felt her loneliness as close to unbearable. If she could not thank Barney for forcing her into so radical a change in her lifestyle at this late stage in her life, faced with
her own childish stubbornness, she knew she had at least to try to meet him halfway. As she drove the wide, curving highway toward Chinook, the damp blacktop eating up her headlights, she thought ruefully and with a touch of something close to shame at her own newly glimpsed wilfulness: if I don’t go to him, our marriage will never be the same again.
Having made her decision, she has been forced to ask Luke to drive her to Barney’s ranch, since most of the road there is impassable this rainy spring without a four-wheel drive, and Barney has theirs with him. Sitting beside Luke on the hard seat of his scarred and dented old truck, her side of the seat covered with a faded quilt which she knew Mary Ann would have insisted on spreading where Iris would sit — this out of some indissoluble embarrassment at her family’s life even after all the years Iris has been her daughter-in-law — Iris glances quickly at him. The same clean, sharp profile, impossible to tell by it he’s seventy-five, and he’s as handsome as ever, although his handsomeness is forever spoiled for Iris by the implacable set of his face. She’ll never get used to these hardbitten old ranchers with their grim ethic, never smiling for fear somebody might take them for soft, still testing and finding wanting their fifty-year-old sons. It had taken years, no matter what Barney said, before she stopped feeling a bit scared around him.
At the moment they’re driving down a narrow paved road, for which Iris is grateful, as she needs a respite from being thrown around in the cab by the muddy, deeply rutted roads they’ve had to travel before they reached this twenty-mile stretch of pavement. She rearranges her shiny blue raincoat, pulls her damp silk scarf off her head and spreads it out on her knees to dry. Luke turns on the windshield wipers, spraying the windows with cleaning fluid at the same time. Neither of them can see anything as the lumps of pale brown mud dissolve and smear the view of the narrow black road and the drenched yellow fields stretching away on both sides of it. Bit by messy bit the wipers clear two fan-shaped openings.
Garden of Eden Page 6
