Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  In the few minutes she has been outside the light has changed dramatically with the higher position of the sun. Now it’s just above the horizon — it’s past seven she thinks, soon everyone will be up and I’ll be caught — but she forges on, hurrying now, trying to beat the rush of the sun behind her, in the direction of the coulee.

  In the rising light the decaying, grey buildings ahead of her are precise again. And Barney wanted to burn them, she thinks, still indignant. I don’t care if you are dead, she says to his shadow, realizing its presence has been with her since she squeezed through that gap in the hedge. You were wrong about that. I know it, he says, and she feels his arm across her shoulders hurrying her, as she slips a little in the mud, down the rutted track that was once a road, in the middle of the stubblefield.

  At the coulee’s lip every little knob and rock, every dip and badger bush stands out sharply. It’s the light the Great Plains is famous for and she’s grateful for it, too, on this brisk morning of her husband’s funeral. Even the drugged sluggishness is leaving her in the morning light and the cool spring air. In another fifteen minutes that precious light will have spread itself out more evenly and with less extreme attention; the high spots will flatten a little, the low spots will rise to meet them, and the promise of heaven will be gone until, as the sun lowers itself gently down the sky, its rays will once again make every stone and blade of grass ring with golden light.

  When she reaches the dull, matted grass, she pauses, not out of choice, but by the gentle force of the place itself. Barney is still with her; she’s begun to suspect he’s the one who has called her out here on this errand so early on this chilly morning of the day she has to bury him. She crosses the narrow patch of grass, going slowly. First her father and then Barney had ploughed as close to her grandparents’ buildings and to the edge of the coulee as they dared, fearing Iris’s mother’s wrath and then her own if they edged over too far and brought down one of the shacks or lifted and tumbled a rock that Iris knew must be left as it had been since the last ice age.

  She finds herself standing at the edge of one of the two tepee rings that are the only ones left of what was probably an encampment, but the rest of which her grandfather had destroyed with his first ploughing, seventy years earlier. Probably didn’t even notice they were rings. He knew, Barney says, in her head, and Iris gives him credit for having a grasp on the truth now. Besides, it’s an old grief, as old as the hills and the valley bottoms. They were always doomed, Iris thinks. As are we, she hears, and Iris is surprised that he would think such a thing.

  But the stones still lie there, half-hidden in the damp yellow-grey grass, so lichen-covered and crumbling with age that if she looks too long, instead of seeing them more clearly they disappear into the texture of the grass-covered earth. Some days when she comes here she is able to see most of the individual stones, but not the order or design she knows to be there. It’s the strangest thing, as if the stones were alive and could hide themselves from her if they chose to. This morning, arrested by the light, the circles rise clearly in the grass, and she stoops and rests a hand on the curve of one that’s covered with a thick coat of pale green lichen. It’s satisfyingly scratchy against her palm, and the contrast — her fingertips touching a bare spot of hard, cold rock — makes her fingers tingle.

  She rises and walks to the entrance of the decaying barn. Its big door lies broken and decomposing in the grass where a typically savage wind put it years ago — and standing in the opening where it used to be, she gazes upward to the patch of sky she can see through a wide hole where there was once roof. A beam of light pierces it and spotlights the opposite wall, up high, so she can make out the soaked brown wood, still tightly joined horizontally, and an old bird’s nest of mud and twigs — swallows, she thinks — nestled under a cracked rafter. Here her grandfather harnessed Clydesdales — he was famous for his beautiful, matched teams — and sat on hay bales with his hired man, both puffing solemnly on pipes, while across the way in the house where now there’s only a grass-lined, indistinct depression, her grandmother was baking the breakfast buns she’d set the night before, or checking the Sunday roast. She cannot think what all this means, both of them dead now since Iris was a teenager, and their children too, dead or dying. The barn not likely to stand more than another year. Her grandmother’s face is suddenly before her, her image as clear as if she were there in flesh and blood: the halo of fine white hair, the habitual half-smile she wore as if she knew something the rest of them hadn’t figured out yet, her startling blue eyes that in old age instead of fading, grew darker.

  The memory ebbs and Iris turns away, her chest suddenly hollow again, when she thinks she hears Ramona’s voice on the wind. She looks around quickly, but no, the sound has faded, she’s alone in this precious space of clear air, of walking spirits. Over by that small pile of rocks, so old they’ve grown together, Ramona had knelt before her, her cheeks flushed with joy, her eyes lit up with a new, deep light. I’m going to have a baby. Iris remembers herself as outraged at this betrayal. Wailing at Ramona’s news, But we were going to go away to school together! Ramona so caught up in her own adventure she never saw Iris’s selfish anger, or if she did, she thought it childish, something that would pass.

  Iris had been gathering the first crocuses to take to her mother. She’d dropped them, left them there to die in the damp grass. This is what I want, Ramona said, grasping Iris’s hands in hers, trying to see into Iris’s eyes, into her very soul. And Iris pulling away, her anger turning slowly into sorrow because Ramona was leaving her, going off into some foreign, grown-up world where Iris wasn’t ready to follow. The coulee was filling with purple shadows, a chasm opening to swallow them, dropping down to its bottom more than a hundred feet below, passing through time incarnated as layers of earth, to those millions of years earlier. And hidden in the grip of the soil and rocks, the fossilized bones of monsters.

  Now Iris moves to the coulee’s edge and stands looking down into it, following its geography with her eyes to where it widens and deepens on the other side of the fence. With the melted snow and the long spring rains the slough at the bottom is twice its usual size; it has drowned out rosebushes up the coulee side. In the shallows the bull-rushes and pale, rustling grasses stand motionless, and farther along, out of her sight, she knows the coulee drops off more and widens into clay-bottomed, rock-strewn badlands, with a view of the wide river valley into which its waters — when there are some — drain.

  She and her mother used to walk here carrying a mesh bag with a picnic lunch in it when she was a child. The patch of grass had been bigger then. Her mother would name the plants, the ones that her mother had taught her; once she’d picked up a stone scraper and told Iris that a long time ago, in the very place they were standing, a Native woman had knelt and scraped a buffalo hide clean of flesh. They’d startled swans in the slough, and often deer bending to drink. Far, far down the coulee, high above the river, golden eagles sometimes circled. You could tell them from hawks by their size and by the mastery of their soaring, as if moving their wings was too much trouble, and then, sailing off with an unconquerable, lazy power that made Iris’s heart do funny things in her chest.

  I loved you, old man, Iris thinks, I know you’re gone, I know it, and it’s been too long to cry, and is bewildered, realizing it’s James Springer she’s grieving now, and not her husband. James doesn’t reply. She wants to believe she was wrong, she wants to beg God for forgiveness, and Barney’s ghost too, but no matter how she tries, there’s a core that won’t accept that she sinned. Now that both James and Barney are dead, what can any of it matter anyway?

  But it’s Barney’s warmth that envelops her; his presence is so intense he has crept into every pore of her being, and even the wind that has risen, as it always does on the prairie when the sun is well above the horizon, can’t shake him off. He has come to get her through his funeral, he will help her find a way to be a widow.

  I loved you too, Barney, s
he tells him. You were my life.

  The wind flaps his dressing gown around her shins; she pulls it tighter, holding the collar in both hands, and hurries down the strip of grass between the two wheel ruts, back to the house in the full morning light. Now her fingers are icicles, and her toes inside the boots she crossed the river in are numb. At the back door she steps out of them and into her slippers, enters the kitchen, and almost bumps into Fay who’s just emerging from the half-bath by the door.

  “God, I need a cigarette,” Fay says. “I’m out.”

  “Somebody’ll be here soon and give you one,” Iris replies. She’s certain Ramona will drive up in her battered old half-ton any second now asking, “What can I do to help?” Fay coughs raggedly into her hand. “Where were you?”

  “I stepped out to get a breath of air,” Iris says, with such firmness she knows the subject won’t come up again.

  “Are you okay?” Fay asks, studying her now, just as Iris feared.

  “I need some coffee.” She goes to the counter where the coffeemaker sits, but Fay has already made some. Now Iris feels her full bladder and crosses back again to the half-bath, stepping around Fay who has gone silent to stand with a lost air, looking out the window in the back door. She’s still in her dressing gown, a faded pale green terry-cloth robe with long pulls of thread hanging down here and there and the cuffs bleached to white with washing. Her blonde hair hangs messily to her shoulders and her skin is grainy with a yellowish tint, her eyes puffy and red from crying. She looks ill, but then she usually does, especially in the morning.

  “Why don’t you go bathe,” Iris suggests gently. “I want a cup of coffee before I dress, and the kids’ll be up soon and neither one of us will see a bathroom again for hours.”

  “I’ll have some coffee first too,” Fay says, rousing herself from the window. “God, I wish I had a cigarette.” Iris goes into the bathroom and relieves herself. When she has rearranged her robe and comes back out, Fay has poured two mugs of coffee and set them on the table along with sugar and cream in blue pottery containers.

  “Lannie gave me those, a long time ago,” Iris says, noticing them for the first time in ages. “They look pretty with the yellow walls, don’t they? She should be here, you know.”

  “Nobody knows where she is,” Fay replies in her blunt way, meaning, Iris sees, that the family has tried and failed to find her in the days since Barney’s death. “Even Howard doesn’t know. Ten years is a long time.” Iris wants to argue — it hasn’t been ten years — but a voice inside her that she usually keeps muffled tells her that Fay is probably right.

  “Are the other kids coming?” she asks. Misty and Dillon, Lannie’s brother and sister.

  “He didn’t say, probably doesn’t know where they are either.” There’s a hint of contempt in Fay’s voice. “Barry’ll be here in an hour or so.” There’s no rush, the funeral’s not till two. Soon Iris will have to bathe and dress, put on makeup, compose herself for the biggest ordeal of her life.

  She’s no longer worried about it. Instead, she’s remembering the morning of her father’s funeral, sitting here in silent misery at this same kitchen table with her mother, before the onslaught of family and neighbours began. How still her mother had been, her straight posture more rigid than usual, but her eyes pale and misted over, as if her husband’s death had blinded her to the palpable world around her.

  Tears drip silently down Fay’s roughened cheeks and she wipes them away absently. Iris sits peacefully, her mind wandering to the coulee, the shacks, the barn, to the ancient circles of stone.

  “I think I hear a vehicle,” Fay says, in her rough smoker’s voice, and stifles a cough to listen. Iris listens too, but hears instead the soft fall of bare feet coming up the basement stairs.

  She rises and walks rapidly toward the door, anxious to escape without facing whoever it is about to enter from the basement.

  “We’ll take care of any company till you’re ready,” Fay calls to her. Iris doesn’t answer or look back, just moves on steadily, quickly, down the hall and up the stairs.

  Now, staring at the dress she’s picked to wear to the funeral as it hangs, freshly sponged and pressed by Ramona, on the closet door, it crosses Iris’s mind that her mother might not approve of her not buying a new dress, then remembers that they’ve agreed not to tell her mother about Barney’s death. She’s so frail, Iris protested to Mary Ann over the phone, and then to Cousin Eunice, and Aunt Mina, and to her minister, Henry Swan, she’s so frail now, I have to be with her when she’s told. She takes the black crêpe dress from the door and throws it on the bed, thinking her mother might not be very upset, she never liked Barney much anyway.

  Suddenly tiredness sweeps over her in a wave, irresistible, and she crawls onto her bed, clasps her hands together under her chin, brings her knees up tight against her abdomen, and closes her eyes. She’s sorry now that she didn’t let her mother know. She needs her mother here, with her; without her mother she can’t face another second of this horrible day.

  Someone is knocking on her door. Startled, embarrassed to be caught like this, she uncurls herself and pulls herself to her feet so rapidly that for a second she’s dizzy. She tightens the robe’s belt and, turning her back to the door in the pretence of doing something to the dress, calls, “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?” The door opens a crack — it’s Fay — and Iris says over her shoulder, as cheerfully as she can manage, “I’m fine, I’ll be down soon.” Silence. The door clicks shut. Now the doorbell is ringing, and through the open window Iris hears the muffled crunch of tires on the gravel driveway around the corner of the house. She goes into the bathroom and turns on the taps to run her bath. The noise of the rushing water blots out all sound from below, the door between her and all of them, between her and the rest of this nightmarish day, is closed, locked. Barney’s been dead three days, she thinks, and already the world has lost its customary face, begun to reveal parts of itself she has known nothing about, parts that, even though so far benign, scare her.

  She lifts a soapy hand to her eyes. It’s the first time she has cried, comforted by the release of tears as they slide soundlessly down her face to flow off her chin and cheeks into the bath.

  As she’s coming out of the bathroom there’s a sharp, fast rap on the bedroom door and Ramona enters. She’s wearing jeans and a creased white sweatshirt, her eyes are reddened and puffy behind her glasses, her straight brown hair pulled back in its inevitable ponytail.

  “Want me to help you get dressed before I go home to get ready?”

  “Please,” Iris says. She needs Ramona’s brusque matter-of-factness, her lack of sentimentality. With Ramona she can just be herself. “Everybody is going to be staring at me,” she says, not liking the hint of a whine she hears in her voice. Ramona’s all business as she picks up Iris’s hairbrush from her vanity.

  “We better do something with your hair first. You want to be neat, but not showy, I think. No eyeshadow or blush,” she tells her. “Remember, it doesn’t matter how you act. This is one time no matter what you do, people will forgive you. Anyway, I’ve never seen you be anything else but a lady.” Iris smiles faintly at this, and gives herself over gratefully to Ramona’s ministrations.

  Finally, she’s ready. Her thick, wavy hair is pulled smoothly back from her pale face and fastened with a black velvet bow, she’s wearing the smoothly fitting black dress, her feet are clad in neat black pumps.

  Just as Ramona clasps on the strand of pearls Barney had given Iris as a wedding present, Eunice, Iris’s cousin on her father’s side, bursts into the room, holds out her arms, and says, “I-ris!” in the very tone Iris dreads most: heavy with false sympathy and false affection. Eunice is married to a man who was once an accountant but now does something with stocks and bonds. He’s rich, nobody from the family ever sees him. She’s still wearing her dark mink coat, she must have just arrived from Regina and come straight upstairs. Iris allows herself to be enfolded in the scented
silkiness of the fur, then extracts herself quickly. Before she can speak, Eunice has turned to Ramona. “I’ll take over now, Ramona.” Her voice is brisk, her tone patronizing. “It was good of you to help.” For a second, Iris thinks by the abrupt flush in Ramona’s cheeks that Ramona is going to tell Eunice to bugger off, but after an instant’s hesitation, Ramona gives Iris a rough, quick hug, then leaves, closing the door a little too hard behind her. Eunice sweeps off her coat, drapes it over the satin chair, and smooths her smart navy dress over her gaunt hips with bony fingers that end in long red nails. She turns to Iris with a glance devoid of sympathy or tenderness or pity.

  “A little lipstick would help,” she declares.

  The rituals of bereavement begin. One by one the female relatives from more distant farms and ranches or the city come up, knocking softly, and are ushered in by Eunice in her queenly manner. They kiss Iris, tears in their eyes, mumble a few words, then, glancing apprehensively at Eunice, exit as quickly as they decently can. Iris replies stiffly the same rote phrases: “Thank you for coming; It was good of you to come; I’m fine; Thank you for coming.”

  At last Fay pounds up the stairs and knocks sharply on the door. The funeral parlour’s limousine is waiting. Iris’s stomach goes queasy. Eunice says sharply, “I wish you’d put some earrings on.” Iris shakes her head mutely, no, at the pearl and diamond pair Eunice holds out that she has found in Iris’s jewellery box. A gift from Barney on their tenth anniversary. “Here!” Eunice says, she’ll not take no for an answer, and seeing this, Iris capitulates and puts them on. She takes a quick glance in the full-length mirror and is taken aback at what she sees. It is her face, the fine-grained, pale skin, the prettily bowed lips, the small, straight nose, the black eyebrows and lashes framing the brown eyes that she’d always wished were blue. But all colour has fled from her cheeks and mouth, emotion has drained from her features, leaving behind a heart-shaped, ghostlike mask. And how can she appear so composed and elegant when on the inside she’s all tremulous chaos? And the earrings — Eunice was right: they’ve taken her from grieving penitence into regal sorrow.