Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to take advantage of a widow,” he says, as if he’s angry. “I’ve been celibate for quite a while. I’ve been trying …” But his voice trails away. So have I, she’s thinking. She almost tells him then about the last few months of their marriage, of her ardour, and Barney’s attempts to respond to her but his failure — or was it her failure that she no longer aroused her husband, after all those years? But she can’t bear to have him know that her own husband stopped desiring her.

  “Why?”

  “I just thought it was something I needed to try for — for my writing —” She feels such tenderness at his admission. How could he think such a thing would help anything? She reminds herself she’s twenty years — no, sixteen years older than he is. He’s not looking at her, seems to have forgotten she’s there, and suddenly she finds herself desperate to have back the intimacy they were feeling.

  “What’s it like kissing somebody old enough to be your mom?”

  He casts her a mischievous glance. “Delicious,” he says, which makes her laugh, although it hurts her, too. “I’m leaving in a few days to go back to Toronto. Get my stuff together.” He moves abruptly, as if he’s just relinquished something, pulls himself close to her again; this time when he takes her in his arms he presses the length of his body against hers. Such a surge of electricity goes through her, confusion and desire, comfort at his maleness, an instant’s longing for Barney, and more deeply, that other unnameable yearning.

  He kisses her face, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, and in his passionate gentleness she’s reminded of James. When he moves his head to nuzzle his face in the hollow between her shoulder and her jaw and presses hard there with his open mouth and begins to tug her blouse up out of her slacks, she suddenly sees she’s a hair’s breadth away from unzipping her slacks and pulling them off, and then she feels deeply embarrassed, as if she’s gone backwards into teenagerhood, or fallen into some space of utter confusion where she doesn’t know which man is making love to her: Barney? James? This stranger? She’s breathless and trembling, but she manages to pull away from him. Neither of them speaks, and she feels she doesn’t have to say, he knows what she’s thinking: I’ve only been a widow a few weeks, you’re too young for me, and, my God, I’m not ready yet for this.

  “Sorry,” he says again. “I don’t think I’m ready for this.” She can’t tell if he’s joking or not, wasn’t she the one to pull away this time? “Let’s go back.” He jumps up and stands over her.

  “I thought you wanted to go walking,” putting her hand over her eyes so she won’t have to look into his face.

  “I’ve seen enough for now,” he says. Slowly, still trembling, she gets to her feet and brushes off her slacks. He lifts a blade of grass from her hair, and she has to stop herself from catching his hand and pressing it to her mouth. They walk silently back toward her farmland, holding the barbed-wire fence apart for each other to climb through, then walking on in silence, past the falling-down barn and sheds, past the stone circles which have retreated out of sight in the grass, back down the machinery trail on the edge of the field of stubble.

  “I’m staying with Henry and Sylvia,” he says, when they’re almost back at the house. “Henry’s family knew my dad’s family, years ago in Toronto,” he explains, although she hasn’t asked. “Call me there if you feel like it.”

  “You can call me,” she says, suspecting he thinks he shouldn’t phone her. Besides, she comes from a time when women did not phone men, and she can’t quite imagine doing it.

  At the house he stops at the bottom of the stairs, his forehead creased, his eyes that liquid dark brown, full of some deep sadness or longing. She wants to hold him, to comfort him. After a moment she says, making her voice bright, “I’ll make some lunch,” and goes quickly up the steps onto the deck. He follows her, then stops and leans against the railing.

  “No, thanks. The Swans are going to pick me up on their way back and it’s probably going to be any minute.”

  She wants to ask him what his kisses mean, she wants him to say something promising or final, she wants him to kiss her again, hard, she wants — but instead they stand side by side, barely speaking, Iris so intent on picking up every nuance of emotion or intent on his part that she’s barely breathing, and he, sunk so deep in thought, she doubts he remembers she’s there. In a few moments the small red car comes putt-putting up the driveway.

  “Here they are,” he says. She wants to speak to him, tries in the minute or two before the car arrives at the house, to think of something meaningful and strong, something that will bring him back to her. But she can’t think of anything that doesn’t sound needy or schoolgirlish, so in the end, again, she says nothing. He smiles at her briefly, without intimacy, then goes down the steps to the waiting car. As Henry pilots it away down her access road Iris stands watching. It turns onto the grid that leads to town, and as she watches it grow smaller and smaller, she feels relief and disappointment, embarrassment and excitement in roughly equal quantities, until the car disappears from view.

  Good Land

  Iris, still in her pink satin dressing gown, stands with her back to the front window and surveys the living room where last night the two dozen members of the Women’s League met. She muses on their new gentleness with her, and the sympathy for her she’d seen in their faces whenever they looked at her, yet as the evening passed, certain nuances, it seems to her, crept into the subtext of the conversations: assumptions that she would or wouldn’t do certain things any more now that she doesn’t have a husband, a certain subtle drop in her status, although she can’t quite put her finger on specifics, now that she’s a widow. She sees why all the widows she knows holiday together, play cards together, drive to the city together. It isn’t so much because of the widowhood they have in common, as she’d thought, but because of their having been pushed aside by the society of which they’d always been a part. I used to do that to them too, she thinks now, and is saddened as much by this new perception as she is by her realization that Barney’s death has caused her to lose rank.

  The chairs have to be rearranged, the sofa cushions need fluffing, the bric-a-brac on the tables has to be moved back into place, the rug vacuumed to restore it to its air of never having been walked on. A half-hour’s work, if that. The women had washed the cups and saucers and dessert plates before they left; there isn’t even washing up to do.

  She wonders what she did with her days before Barney died? They always seemed so busy, and now, no matter what she has to do, they seem empty, and everything she does increasingly pointless. She hopes this is just a stage in widowhood that will pass eventually. She remembers now that she had that frightening dream again last night, and for an instant the memory freezes her to the spot. Always the same dark water threatening her, trying to drag her under. She supposes the dream has to do with losing Barney, although she can’t see what the connection is. But she’s beginning to feel it’s trying to tell her something, she has no idea what, and she doesn’t know who might be able to help her understand.

  “Iris.”

  His voice startles her into an involuntary jerk and she snaps her head up to see Luke standing in the dining room, having entered so quietly through the kitchen that she didn’t hear him at all. He’s not standing straight, his back seems bent, as if he has hurt it, and in the shadows — the dining room with only one small window high in the wall is the darkest room in the house — she can’t quite make out his face, but his voice — it’s the quavering voice of an old man. She stares at him, her uncertainty growing.

  He comes forward slowly, as if each step is painful, past the heavy old mahogany table covered with papers she has been trying to deal with, past the sideboard making the silver-framed family pictures jingle, into the living room where he stops at the sofa that acts as a divider between the two rooms in front of him.

  “Come in,” she says, trying to sound welcoming. “Please, sit down.” He hesitates, then comes around
the sofa as she comes forward, stopping with the coffee table between them. In the better light flowing through the big window behind her Luke looks every second of his seventy-five years — no, he looks ninety. And his skin has that papery look of the very old, his face grey, as if he’s ill. “Are you all right?” she asks.

  He doesn’t answer. Iris suddenly remembers she’s dressed in her housecoat and under it is only her sheer nightie. She reaches up and pulls the lapels of the dressing gown closed across her chest, holds them there with both hands.

  “I had three sons,” Luke says. It’s as if his chest hurts and he has to squeeze the words out around the pain. She pulls the lapels tighter, clenches them in her fists. “Three sons,” he says, and puts a hand out to support himself on the back of one of the grey velvet wingback chairs. “Howard no better than he should be. I know that. Wesley — had a good heart, Wesley, even if there wasn’t nothing upstairs. But the two of ‘em —” He breathes heavily for a minute. “They shamed me.”

  Iris’s blood has begun to pound in her ears, and over it there’s a rushing sound, it’s the noise her breath is making as it speeds up and grows thinner. Luke goes on, relentless. “Barney. He was — the one. He was … my boy.” He opens his mouth, he’s struggling with himself, Iris can see his struggle. “It was you.”

  At this, she cries out, “Luke!” A plea to him to stop before it’s too late, to not say what she knows he’s going to say, what she has always known he has wanted to say.

  “You took my boy from me. You brought him here — You turned him into — your pet —” He casts one hand out in a violent gesture that would annihilate the luxurious living room, the entire house, Iris herself.

  “Luke!” Now she’s angry. “He loved me! He wanted me!” Her words hurt her throat. She thinks, He doesn’t like women. She lets go of the lapels, moves closer to him. “You drove him away yourself with your meanness.”

  He staggers back as if she has struck him, drops his eyes to the carpet, half turns away, and she wishes she could take back what she has just said, although for nearly thirty long years she has wanted to say it. Luke and Barney always quarrelled, they were always attacking each other, she’d stood between them lots of time, or Mary Ann did, before it came to blows. He has no right to blame her. But he isn’t finished yet.

  “Not even any grandkids. At least Howard had a family.” It’s as if she hasn’t said what she has said. “Where are my grandkids?” Then, his face crumbling, “I got nothing left.”

  She’s stunned by his accusation, there’d never been a word between them about grandchildren — unless he’d said something to Barney about it and Barney hadn’t told her. Faltering, she draws on her mother’s haughtiness, although even to her own ears she sounds dismayingly childish.

  “That was between Barney and me. It is none of your business.” But suddenly she thinks, Is this what this emptiness is, no matter how hard I work, or how busy I keep myself? Is it that I haven’t our children to comfort me, now that Barney’s gone? Without willing it, she moves to a chair and collapses into it.

  “You think about what I said,” he warns her. He lifts one hand slowly to point at her, his small blue eyes gleaming like lasers, pinning her to her chair. “Because you’ve got through life so far without a mark on you. But I’m telling you, Barney’s gone for good. And that little-girl face of yours don’t work no more. You better just do some thinking.” He drops his arm, turns away. As he makes his way out of the living room and through the dining room, she can hear the heels of his boots smacking across the kitchen vinyl. The back door bangs shut. In a moment his truck starts up and rumbles away down the road, and still she sits on in the chair where he has felled her, as brutally as if he’d struck her with his fist.

  “Hi, there, Iris,” Ramona calls as she gets out of their battered halfton that’s pulled to a halt on Iris’s driveway. She bends to retrieve a cake in a square, flat pan from the seat. Vance climbs slowly out of the driver’s seat and the sight of his worn, faded Levi’s, dusty riding boots, plaid, western-cut shirt, and dented, oil-stained stetson makes her heart miss a beat — Barney had returned to dressing this way after he’d gone to live on his ranch. And although Ramona’s been over often since Iris’s disaster, Iris hasn’t seen much of Vance, and when she did he was uncharacteristically subdued, pale behind his windburn, and dressed up in his suit, not looking like himself at all. They climb the steps to her, and Ramona, stooping to kiss Iris on the cheek, goes on cheerfully, “With all the stoppers, I thought you might be running out of stuff.”

  Vance bends to brush Iris’s forehead with his lips too, then follows her, as Iris follows Ramona around the corner and into the kitchen. Ramona wears a loose, man’s shirt over her jeans to hide the stomach she has developed since the births of her children; she carries twenty extra pounds on her big-boned, strong frame. In high school she played basketball, volleyball, soccer, and now she handles horses as well as Vance. A tiny part of Iris, although she has no desire at all to have Ramona’s ranch life, envies her physical strength, the way she handles her body, a sort of ease in it, an acceptance of it that Iris knows she lacks herself and which she doesn’t quite understand, thinks maybe it’s the result of Ramona’s always doing outdoor work like the men.

  “What’s all that?” Ramona asks, peering into the dining room where the table has disappeared under stacks of paper.

  “Mail. I haven’t touched it since the funeral, and it was just piling up —”

  “Big job,” Vance says.

  “I started by separating the magazines and newspapers from the letters,” Iris tells them, meaning to make light of the heap. “Then I separated the bills from the cards and letters about Barney. Then I separated the bills I can figure out what to do about — phone, power, fuel, crop spray, fertilizer — from the ones I can’t.”

  Vance says, “That’d be all of mine. I can’t figure out what to do with any of ‘em.” The bills for the funeral are there too, and brochures from companies wanting to sell her a tombstone for Barney’s grave.

  Ramona says in a firm voice, “What are the ones you can’t figure out?” Iris sees she means to help.

  “Oh, Wheat Board documents, forms that have to be filled out from Sask. Agriculture and Agriculture Canada — that sort of thing.”

  “You better go see your lawyer about them,” Vance says. “Or Luke could help you.”

  Iris shrugs without replying — there’ll be no help from Luke and that last, vicious remark of his repeats itself in her head: that little-girl face of yours. She hurries to the coffee machine while they’re arranging themselves in chairs, one at each end of the table, the cake in the centre.

  “That cake looks good yourself,” she says briskly over her shoulder. “A lot better than the leftovers I had for you.”

  “You’re looking pretty good yourself,” Ramona says bluntly, studying her. Iris looks down at herself: neat beige cotton slacks, flowered blouse in bright pinks and greens whose cheeriness belies how she really feels. “Did you sleep last night?” Iris shrugs, she’s thinking about Luke, who only a few hours ago had descended on her like an Old Testament prophet, scaring her to death. She says only, “It’s worse at night.”

  “Don’t you worry, it’ll all work out. Just time,” Vance says, his voice hearty and a shade too loud.

  “I sure wish I could help.” Ramona’s voice catches, and there’s a silence during which Iris is reminded that Vance and Ramona have lost an old, close friend, and she says, her voice also breaking, “I know you miss him.” Blinking, Vance looks away. Ramona swallows, then says, “Isn’t this weather great? Spring at long last.”

  “Got any calves yet?” Iris asks, busying herself with the coffee ritual, taking mugs from the cupboard, spoons from the drawer, the cream pitcher from the fridge.

  “Lots of ‘em,” Vance says. “Cute little buggers.”

  “You should come over and see ‘em,” Ramona says, and there’s that all-too-familiar hint of hurt in he
r voice, which Iris hears with something between irritation and resignation. She wants to be the friend she used to be long ago, it’s only that — but she can’t change the facts that have spoiled their friendship: that she’s richer than Ramona, that Ramona has five children and now grandchildren too, and she has none.

  Without answering, she carries the mugs, spoons, cream, and sugar to the table and sits down between them with her back to the counter where the coffee machine has begun to burble softly. They’ve left the inside kitchen door open and Iris is aware of the scented spring air flowing in through the screen in the outer door. In the trees red-winged blackbirds call to each other. Ramona and Vance lean toward her, listening with such attention that she’s disconcerted. She starts again. “I’ll tell you the truth,” she says, although she isn’t sure she knows what it is, nor does she know why, after all these years, this moment seems the right one to start revealing things — it’s just that they’ve been so good to her over these last few weeks. “You know I’ve always had a busy life —”

  “We know, we know.” They nod vigorously. Iris hesitates, drops this tack, hasn’t she just told them she’ll tell the truth? If she can just find the words — “I always felt funny at your place.” It comes out flat, insulting, and she feels Ramona stiffen. She hurries on. “I felt — It’s the kids,” she says, finally, and stops, her face growing warm.

  “It’s true the place was always noisy, and kind of messy.” Ramona’s tone is careful, slightly injured, as Iris was afraid it would be. Now she’s staring at Vance who, in his turn, is gazing at the tabletop with an expression Iris can’t read.

  “I mean,” she manages to say, sounding lame even to herself, “because I don’t have any.” She knows Ramona will interpret this as meaning she regrets having none of her own, which isn’t exactly what she intends at all, but she doesn’t know how to say so without making matters worse, since she’s pretty sure it would never occur to them, as it hasn’t to Luke, that there’s any purpose in life for a woman beyond having children. Ramona leans forward, exhaling gently, fastening her green-flecked hazel eyes on Iris’s face.