“I’m sorry if I’ve distressed you,” he says, looking genuinely penitent. “I’ll drop out again in a few days,” he adds as he goes into the hall. “I’ll let myself out.” And he’s gone, the front door clicking shut quietly behind him, before she can move or speak.
For a long moment she stands motionless in the centre of the room, one hand resting against her throat. Then she hears a car door slam. This mobilizes her and she goes to the big window and sees him drive away in his plain white Buick.
She’s still staring out the window when a small red car comes slowly up the driveway. It stops where the Buick did, and Iris is thinking, go away, when the driver’s door opens and Henry Swan gets out. Sylvia, his wife, is sitting in the passenger seat. They’ve paid her a couple of duty calls already, Iris doesn’t think she can face another one. But now Henry is pulling his seat forward and waiting while somebody climbs out of the back seat to stand on the gravel as Henry gets back in. It’s Jay Anselm.
She steps back from the window hurriedly, pushing her hair back from her face, then fluffing it with her fingers as the front doorbell rings. When she opens the door, he seems bigger than he did a couple of days earlier. She thinks again that his hair is too long and notices he has changed his black jacket for a warmer-looking brown leather windbreaker.
“Remember me?” he asks. “Is this a good time?” Behind him Sylvia rolls down her window and calls, “Sorry we can’t stop. Henry has calls to make.”
“That’s okay,” Iris calls back. “I’ll see you at church.” Jay is examining the long, wide deck that’s painted a dark brown, the big front window, craning his neck to look up at the second floor as if he’s a workman come to estimate a job. She can hear the gravel crunching under the car’s tires as the Swans drive away.
“Of course it’s a good time,” she says.
“It was such a great day,” he remarks, following her down the hall to the kitchen, “that I just couldn’t stand to stay in town. Anyway, I’m not sure what I’m looking for is there.” Uncertainly he adds, “I suppose I should have phoned.” They’re in the kitchen now and Iris stops and faces him.
“No need,” she says brightly, not wanting him to know how peculiar she’s suddenly feeling. “I’m pleased to see you. Coffee?” She sees his eyes which she remembers as black are really a rich brown, and today she detects a puffiness under them that she wonders about. Maybe he can’t sleep either; maybe he too has dreams that make him thrash in bed and lie awake.
“I’d like to go for that walk you promised me.” Promised? she thinks, and is for a second irritated. “I mean, if it’s okay …” His voice trails off and he looks down at his feet. She sees he’s wearing stiff new tan cowboy boots.
“Those boots won’t be easy to walk in,” she says, and hears a girlish note in her voice. He grins and she feels her heart speed up, gives a quick, embarrassed laugh and goes to pull on the jacket she keeps at the back door. He’s there instantly, opening the door onto the deck.
The unfettered light and the feel and scent of the spring air take her breath away. How could she have stayed inside and missed this brilliance, this exquisitely scented air? Impulsively she puts her hand on Jay’s arm.
“I’m glad you came,” she says, but what she’s really saying is, I’m glad it’s spring. I’m glad I’m out of the house. Maybe life is possible after all. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even smile, and she drops her hand quickly, embarrassed again, and leads the way down the steps and across the lawn, through the hedge, and out onto the prairie grass. They don’t speak as they walk, and Iris, glancing at him, sees that his expression is clouded, it’s that look of unease again. Catching her studying him, he smiles.
“You okay?” he asks. She nods. They walk on in silence and by the way he’s holding his head she knows he’s listening to the birdsong, trying to find the birds singing in the long grass or on the wing. She thinks briefly of Jim Schiff and his money and feels a quick rush of excitement in the pit of her stomach, then realizes: it wouldn’t bring Barney back. And I’d have to give up this place. But I may have to give it up anyway, and her joy deserts her.
The grass lies ahead of them, a smooth, creamy yellow patch beside the neat rows of stubble that stretch off to the left and far beyond. The old barn and the sheds are like three old men, all warped and twisted, leaning patiently into the weather, their window-glass long since gone, shingles split and torn and blown to the four winds. She likes their greyness, their emptiness, their air of history; they speak of things she has always known. In their presence even her bad dreams pale.
“Here we are,” she says, and draws a deep breath because it has always seemed to her — perhaps her mother said so? — that the air over native grass is fresher, more highly scented than elsewhere. Jay has stopped and is staring down at the stone circles.
“What are these?”
“Stone circles left by the Indians a long time ago, to hold down their tepees in the wind, they say.”
“And these?” He’s pointing one after the other, to four half-buried piles of lichen-coated rocks embedded at opposing points in one of the circles. “There’s a pile in each direction.”
“The Plains Indians prayed to the four directions, I’ve heard, and so I suppose …” She trails off, shrugging.
“They’re ceremonial then,” he says.
“There used to be a whole lot more circles, my mother said. Grandpa ploughed them up and used the stones to make a dam west of here.” She points. “My dad tore the dam out and levelled that hollow. Got a little more land that way.” Her parents had quarrelled, not raising their voices, but the air so cold around them, and her mother furious in that rigid, disdainful way of hers that Iris came to know as she grew up, her father red-faced with exasperation, stomping out, her mother saying to her brusquely when she noticed Iris standing in the doorway, You go and play. The abrupt recollection shocks her; she doesn’t know where it’s been hiding all these years. She goes on quickly, “Of course, that drove away the birds. Swans, pelicans, ducks, geese.”
“And over here, what’s this?” He’s walking toward the lip of the coulee where there’s another pile of rocks.
“Grandpa could have piled them,” she says, not sure.
“They look pretty old to me,” he says, and she has to agree.
“So it’s Indian, for some other kind of ceremony.” She doesn’t say anything, suddenly irritated at his trying to teach her about her own land. “Look!” he says suddenly. “It’s not a pile, it’s a circle. But it’s way too small for a tepee.” He squats, puts his hands on the rock, touching the vivid lichen grown over their surface with his palms. Patches are cream, russet, black, gold, green. But he’s looking out over the coulee to the high beige cliffs across the valley with their dashes of white brilliant against the blue of the sky.
“Those things are everywhere,” she says, not trying to hide her annoyance. “If the land’s not ploughed up, it’s got Indian circles and Lord knows what all on it.” She starts down the sloping side of the coulee, ignoring him. In a minute she can hear his boots slipping on the crumbling clay side, and little stones and small lumps of yellow soil roll down to where she’s descending more carefully.
“Don’t you care,” he calls down to her, “that all that history got lost when people turned up the land?” She has reached the coulee bottom now and is standing beside the slough. She looks up at him where he’s squatting a few feet down the hillside, squinting against the light, and speaking over her head, as if he’s quizzing all those old farmers who are dead and gone, and not her.
“I made sure the ones that are left didn’t get ploughed up, didn’t I?” Yet, forced to think about it, she’s not sure why she has been so adamant about the stone circles. A wind comes lapping down on her from nowhere; it brushes her face, rushes around her, tugging at her jacket, whipping her hair, then leaves her as suddenly as it has arrived. “We drove them off their own land. They deserve at least a memorial,” she says, but
this last is said wonderingly, softly, as if she’s only speaking to herself.
He comes down the hillside fast, sideways, his boots making the dirt spurt out behind him, then follows her as she turns and climbs through the barbed-wire fence onto the Normans’ side of the coulee. But when he’s through the fence he stops her by putting his hands on her upper arms. It’s a light touch, but it shocks her.
“I love this place,” he says clearly. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in my life.” He says it with such intensity, direct to her face; her mouth and throat have gone tremulous from his touch.
She stamps her feet in last year’s faded grass to get the clay off her shoes, and he smiles, staring down at his dirty new boots, making no attempt to clean them, then looks around at the pale hillsides, the hawk circling above them. “I’ve been working on this novel — it must be six years now. It fills a suitcase, I’ve done so many drafts. Nobody will publish it. Everybody says it’s good, that I’m incredibly talented, that —” He’s growing visibly angrier. “They just want me to change this, or change that, or drop out this character or that one, or write a new one, or —” Now he stops and breathes loudly through his nose. “But I think” — he looks down at her — “I think that maybe what they all dislike, or feel as an absence of something, is really caused by a kind of inauthenticity in it, that God knows I’ve felt myself — You know what I mean?” She shakes her head, no, slowly, meeting his gaze which is once again so intense she’s taken aback.
“I’ve got the characters and the story and the ideas and the narrative drive, but I don’t have …”
“Stop,” she cries out, laughing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about writing,” he says, leaning close to her so that she sees the thickness of his eyelashes and the whiteness of his teeth. “I’m talking about authenticity, about being who you are — about knowing who you are,” he corrects himself, looking away, “and writing out of that.” She wonders whether she knows who she is? And answers, Of course I do: Barney’s wife. But that thought confuses her, stops her from going any further. Besides, she doesn’t think that’s quite what he means.
He has gone on ahead, runs a few steps, stops, then stands gazing out across the wide expanse of sky and land, as if he can’t get enough of it. She catches up to him and they stand together looking up the sloping coulee walls here at the narrow end, and down to the first bend where the coulee widens and levels out for a long stretch before it continues its descent. A meadowlark calls its liquid, melodic line and it fills her with happiness.
“What has all that got to do with your coming here to live?” she asks him.
“I didn’t say I was coming here to live.” His voice is sharp.
“Excuse me,” she says. “Why are you considering moving to a small town?”
“It’s cheaper to live,” he says, looking away now. “It’s —” he shrugs. “It’s maybe a better place to … find yourself. Solitude, and all that.”
“Oh, you mean like Christ’s forty days and forty nights in the desert, or wherever it was.” She’s teasing him.
“And my main character is a small-town boy,” he goes on as if she hasn’t spoken. “The first third of the novel is set in a little town a long way from the city, and I guess maybe I don’t know enough about small-town life. I thought I did, but I realize I don’t. So I’ve come here to start over again. A year or so, that ought to do it.”
“How will you — I mean —”
“How will I live? I got a grant. It’s not very much, but I told the Council I was going to write some non-fiction pieces on country life and they bought it.”
“You mean —” she hesitates, puzzled, and he glances at her, then looks away.
“I’m an artist! They already gave me three grants to finish my novel and I haven’t been able to in that time. Who the hell are they to tell me how long it’s going to take? Art is art! You can’t fake it! You can’t write to somebody’s timetable —” He stops abruptly, turns away, but not before she sees the way his mouth has twisted, and his unexpected vulnerability fills her with surprise.
The sharply sloped clay wall they’ve come down is behind them and the cow path they’ve been walking on has given way to a long grassy slope that rises gently in two levels to the flatland above. He turns back to the rise and runs up the slope to the first level. By the time she reaches it, he has gone on and is back at the top at a narrow point that widens farther on to the west, but on the Normans’ side of the fence where it’s all grass. She climbs up slowly and finds him sitting in sparse dead grass on the rock-strewn coulee edge. As she sits down beside him, he stretches out and leans on one elbow, his head on his fist, facing her.
“So you want to get to know us,” she says.
“I want more than that,” he tells her, but he has shifted his gaze over her to the sky.
“Which is what?”
“I thought that country people were basically the same as city people, that they were motivated by the same drives. Well, in the end I suppose they are. But the other night I saw that it’s all nuanced differently, that the life I thought was so simple is really surprisingly complex and —” He pulls himself into a sitting position beside her, staring out over the coulee and the river cliffs and the sky.
“Of course we’re not the same,” she says. Again he ignores her remark, which is probably just as well since she isn’t sure she could defend it. There’s a long pause. “With their high-tech equipment and their market-talk — their belief in the individual and in business, as if it were the new God.” He turns to her, looks into her eyes. “I couldn’t believe it. Here they’ve lived on the land all their lives! They’ve known nature in a way I’ll never know it, I couldn’t see a trace of —” He turns away abruptly.
“A knowledge of nature is the bedrock of all our lives out here. Just because we don’t talk about it all the time …” Her voice trails off. He sighs, then stretches out full length again.
Sitting with her legs curled up under her makes them ache and she stretches them out, then turns on her side, and, supporting herself on her elbow, her head propped on her palm, lies face to face with him. It crosses her mind that this is a bit like being in bed together, but a stubborn part of her denies that there’s anything wrong or unseemly about it. Anyway, there’s no one here to see it. They lie like that for a couple of minutes, not speaking, studying each other in an intimate way.
“You’re tired,” he says.
“I have trouble sleeping now,” she says. But she doesn’t want to think about her dreams, and in the brief instant she closes her eyes she sees Lannie in her yellow dress, the sun striking fire in her red-gold hair, waving goodbye for the last time as she drives away. Lannie would be — thirty — now, she can hardly believe it. She feels his breath on her face; it makes her forget what she was thinking about. “How old are you?” Her voice comes out husky and soft, surprising her.
“Thirty-six.”
“I’m almost twenty years older.”
The prairie sky soars at their backs and elbows. At their feet is only the emptiness of the wide valley that extends outward to the pale cliffsides with their darker blue shadows in the draws that are stands of firs. A light breeze lifts locks of her hair and then riffles his, leaving a strand on his forehead. She wants to reach out and brush it back into place.
“How did you wind up here?” he asks her.
“I’ve always lived here. Except for a year at university in Saskatoon.”
“Only a year?”
“I only went to please my mother.”
“What did you want to do yourself? Get a job?”
“I’ve never had a job.” She’s a bit rueful.
“No kidding? How did you manage that?”
“I didn’t need money,” she points out, caught between embarrassment at having to say it and reasonableness.
“There are other reasons to get a job,” he says, laughing a littl
e, as if he finds her innocence charming.
“That’s what my mother said,” Iris answers, aware she sounds petulant. “But she never had one either.”
“Didn’t you have an ambition? A dream, I mean?”
No, Iris thinks, ambition was for people who hadn’t enough, or who weren’t satisfied with what they had. “I did lots of volunteer work, taught Sunday school, and church camp in the summer …”
He’s continuing to study her closely as she speaks, as if he sees something in her that interests and pleases him. How long has it been since a man really looked at her? “I was in love with Barney and I wanted to be his wife. That was what I wanted.” After a long minute he lifts his head from his fist and moves his face closer to hers. She sees his intention in his eyes, can’t quite believe it, so doesn’t flinch or move away; he comes a little closer, puts his lips on hers.
It’s a gentle kiss, with closed lips, but she feels it all the way down in her vagina, that first, most exquisite flush of sexual arousal, and as he draws slightly away, she opens her lips so she can catch some air. He comes closer again, his second kiss is just as gentle as the first, but she tastes the warm moisture of his mouth and, realizing abruptly how hungry she is for a man’s touch, reaches out her hand to rest her palm against his cheek, then slides it back farther to cup the hard base of his head, his thick hair tangling in her fingers. He rests one hand on the curve of her hip below her waist. She’s about to pull herself harder against him, when suddenly he rolls over to lie on his back and stare up into the sky.
Her body protests, making her breath come quickly. She sees him put one hand over his eyes, and then take it away. His gesture, its meaning unclear but surely boding no good, makes her lower her elbow, and lie motionless, her head resting on her outstretched arm. What has she done? What’s the matter with her?
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