“Everybody thought sure she’d be back for Barney’s funeral.”
“But nobody knows where she is to tell her,” Iris says, surprised, thinking this is common knowledge around the community. People had stopped asking years ago. “I haven’t heard from her — “she hesitates, about to modify the truth, then tries to think what the truth is. “It’s been years, I don’t know how long. At least five, maybe … even longer. Neither’s anybody else, not even Luke and Mary Ann. And it’s ten since she left.”
“Why? That’s what I want to know. Why doesn’t she write anybody a letter — I mean, not even her grandma? Or she could phone, at least. It’s so — ungrateful. You know it is, Iris.”
“But don’t you see?” Iris says quickly. “That’s it, you know. We hurt her — all of us, from Howard just walking away from her — her own father! To the kids at school who knew all about her: her mother dead, her no-good father abandoning her. And then, when she took the pills, there isn’t a person in town who doesn’t know that, too. She — “Iris is about to say, I bet they even know about her abortion, but doesn’t because she has never told Ramona about it either, had managed not to for Lannie’s sake. She swallows. “She’s so … proud, and so … she feels so much. I think she just can’t bear to even think about this place. I wanted to give her time … But now …” She thinks of the wrinkled handful of notes in Lannie’s book bag. Did the fact that Lannie kept them mean she wanted some kind of help? Or was it only that she meant to destroy them but forgot? How could she forget them?
“The poor kid.” There’s another long silence, during which they can all hear the clock, caught in a band of sunlight on the wall above the table, ticking precisely, steadily on. A hawk cries from his airy kingdom above the farm. The sound falls down the sky, sails over the lilacs and caraganas and poplars, across the driveway and into the kitchen: that high-pitched screech, a hunting cry. Ramona stirs, looks at her watch.
“Oh, Jesus, there’s a heifer ready to calve in the barn. Hurry up, Vance.”
But Vance wants to talk to Iris about seeding so it’s agreed that Ramona will take their truck and check the heifers, and Iris will drive Vance home once they’ve finished their business. As the old pick-up rattles off to town, spewing oil fog into the fresh spring air, Vance and Iris get into Barney’s shiny half-ton and start out to make the rounds of the farm.
This is a ritual she’s used to, having done it every spring for years with Barney, sitting beside him as the half-ton bounced over gopher and badger holes on grassy road allowances or down rutted machinery tracks between two fields, while he talked the whole time about prices, the futures markets, what fields he’d seed to durum, what to spring wheat, checking on the winter wheat and the fall rye if they’d seeded any, whether it was wet enough to try some canola or to seed into stubblefields instead of letting them lie fallow for a year as you had to do in such dry country, always seeding only half your land at a time, while the other half lies gathering moisture and rebuilding its nutrients.
Now, here she is performing this ritual with Vance Norman, and she’s the one driving the pick-up. The world has turned itself on its head overnight. She turns to Vance, is surprised to see he’s frowning, the window rolled down and his elbow sticking out into the air gone subtle with new warmth. She sees how worn his boots are, and his jeans are loose on him, not stretched tight over his thighs the way she remembers them being the last time she looked. He’s working too hard, she thinks, just trying to stay afloat; no wonder he agreed to this deal.
“Weeds and more weeds,” he says. Iris knows the wild oats at least have been getting worse each year. It didn’t seem to matter how much money Barney spent on herbicides. “I hear he’s got some Downy Brome,” Vance says. “I heard on coffee row at least three people in the municipality have it on their land. It come up from the States in cut hay, or maybe it was contaminated seed grain. The usual.” Her father always used to say the West got its weed problem from the bags of seeds settlers brought from Europe.
“I think maybe there is some,” Iris says slowly. “The extension agrologist was out with a scientist from the research station. I forgot all about that.” She drives Vance over to the field in question so he can have a look at it, although so early in the season there isn’t much to see. “It’s basically good land,” she says comfortably to Vance. His silence makes her falter and she turns to him. “Isn’t it?”
“Nope,” he says, a dogged note in his voice. “Should all be seeded back to grass, just left alone for about a hundred years. Might get back some fertility by then.” Without noticing, she has lifted her foot off the gas and they go slower and slower. “See those white patches?” He points toward low hillocks in the summerfallow field beside them. It’s that time in spring when the low spots are still too wet for machinery to go on, but the hilltops are dry. The crown of each is bleached almost white. “Salts are rising all over the place. Nothin’ll grow where it looks like that. You know that, Iris.” The truck has come to a halt in a dip and Iris shifts into neutral.
He opens the truck door, gets out, strides into the field where at one of the dry places he bends down, clenches his fist around a handful of soil, then brings it to her. “Look at the colour of this stuff,” he says. She leans over to the passenger side to see. “It looks like ashes. It ain’t even soil any more. It’s got no fibre, it won’t even stick together.” He spreads his fingers and the dirt slides easily between them to drift, pale and powdery, onto the land. “Got no nutrients left. Where the soil’s got no nutrients left it can’t grow wheat with good protein. Hell, Iris, don’t tell me you don’t know that.”
Iris stares dubiously at the soil as it drifts away from Vance’s hand. She can’t deny it’s a long way from the rich black soil she has seen in fields around Saskatoon or even north of here. Still, all Iris’s life this has been the refrain: this dry country, this desert country. If it was too dry for farming, why did everybody farm it? How had her father become rich on wheat sales if this was really a desert?
“For land that’s no good, it’s grown a lot of wheat,” she says.
“We’re talking about fertility, Iris, not drought. Only reason Barney still grows something on it is because he pours the fertilizer to it. How the hell long can you keep that up? That chemical fertilizer just knocks the organic stuff out of the soil, just kills it.” He wipes his hand on his pants and looks away across the fields north to where the blue river cliffs are hovering in a mirage high above the horizon. Seeing them, she remembers that only yesterday she lay on the grass at the edge of the coulee and kissed Jay Anselm and fitted her body to his.
Vance gets into the truck beside her, slamming the door shut. She says, “But why does that company want it if it’s no good?”
“They’ll pour the chemicals on; they’ll wring every last ounce of good out of it till there’s nothing left but ashes, till this place looks like the moon. Then they’ll walk away, richer than —” He stops, his mouth working. “It takes five hundred years to grow one inch of topsoil, Iris. In the meantime, what do the rest of us do to live?” She hesitates, bewildered, then gravitates back to her immediate concern.
“Can’t you farm it?”
“Jesus, Iris,” he says. “I didn’t know it was this bad. I never really noticed it when I was helping Barney harvest. You just do your job, try not to think.” He takes off his hat and wipes his forehead with his forearm leaving a streak of dirt across the whiteness where his constantly worn wide-brimmed hat shelters it from the sun. Iris feels as if she has been punched in the stomach. Does this mean she’ll have to sell after all? “You’ll have to back me for chemical fertilizer, too,” he mumbles, looking away from her, “otherwise, won’t nothin’ grow.” Relief floods over her.
“Oh, of course,” she says. “Didn’t I say that? I meant to. And crop spray. Actually Barney’s already bought this year’s supply when it was on sale. It’s in the quonset.”
They sit in silence while a handful of horned lar
ks skim the grass ahead of them with their dainty, bouncy flight. It occurs to her that this is the first wildlife they’ve seen since they began their farmland tour more than an hour earlier. She and Jay didn’t see any either, and she wonders where all the wildlife is this spring.
“I’ll farm it for you, Iris, like I said. At least for a year till you figure out what you want to do. But I’m telling you, this land’s nearly dead. A few more years is all it’s got left if you keep up this kind of farming.”
Iris is horrified, but then doubt creeps in; Vance isn’t a farmer after all, what does he know? And even though he and Barney rarely argued, they tended to skirt subjects, to say nothing when a conversation might be the expected thing, Vance keeping his land in grass the way he did and raising cows, and Barney seeding from fencepost to fencepost. So she doesn’t know what Barney would have said to counter Vance’s arguments. She wonders suddenly if maybe Barney couldn’t counter them, if maybe he just thought his money was defence enough. She hates herself for the thought, with him dead now.
She puts the truck back into gear and they’re moving up a rise. At the top, she brakes. The field beside the track they’re travelling on is in summerfallow. A breeze has come up, and as they sit in silence looking out over the more than three hundred unseeded, bare acres, a burst of wind rushes across its mottled grey-and-brown expanse, picking up dirt and weeds and small rocks as it goes. For an instant the horizon is blotted from view by the pale soil as it lifts on the air and corkscrews into the distance, rising as it goes.
This is her best soil blowing away, this is gold, this is the future speeding off to fall into ditches, onto roads, onto the streets of the town where it’ll do nobody any good. And not a single windbreak to be seen, since Barney pulled out the few rows of straggly caraganas her grandfather had planted. This is absolutely it, she’s had it; if she could drive with her eyes shut, she’d close them so she doesn’t have to see and thus to think about her farm. She sees Barney, the look on his face when he studied the land, his eyes narrowed, speculative; she did not think she saw love there.
“I want you to get Luke’s okay on this deal,” Vance says quietly.
“Luke!” she says contemptuously before she can stop herself.
“Did you two have some words? I don’t mean to pry, but I know Luke isn’t the easiest —”
Iris says softly, turning her head to look out the side window away from him, “Did you know he hates me?”
“Hate? No, he don’t hate you. It’s just — you know — families.” He gives a small, uncomfortable laugh. Vance turns to her and studies her, looking deep, behind her skin. Then he tightens his jaw and turns his face from her so cleanly and firmly it reminds her of Luke, and she knows she could torture Vance with red-hot pokers and he’d never say another word.
They’re still bumping slowly down the track, have almost reached the point where the trail turns and goes south. What she’d really like is never to have to see Luke again. No, what she’d really like is to sleep soundly at night, to stop having those dreams.
“I’m thinking of going away for a while,” Iris says, then stops, surprised. But as she listens to the echo of her own words she realizes this has been forming in the back of her mind since the day she buried Barney. Now it’s said, it seems inevitable. “Once you and I are all set up, I mean,” she adds quickly.
“That’s probably a good idea,” he says finally. “I’ll look after your place for you. Ramona and me. You can count on it.” He leans back against the seat, relaxing for the first time and Iris realizes he’s relieved that she won’t be around to oversee him, maybe start giving him orders. “You should maybe try to track down Lannie. Unless you got some other plans.”
She starts to respond to this, just more meaningless discussion of the same old subject, but something strange is going on inside her; she can feel that hard ball of resistance dissolving, that she knows now is made of vigilant avoidance of a deeply uncomfortable subject. And then the darkness and the immense, unfathomable depth of the water in her recurrent dream rise up and she knows that all that she doesn’t understand about her relationship with Lannie, and her marriage to Barney is in that deep, black water. She says in a puzzled, uneasy way into the gulf between them, “Maybe it’s time I did that.”
She reaches out and turns the key of the already running truck, so that the ignition makes that grinding noise that proclaims to the world an idiot is driving.
“I’ll drive,” Vance says in a tone that brooks no argument, and Iris feels the warm, rough weight of his tanned and calloused hand as it closes over hers and pulls it gently back from the key.
It is that unexpected contact with human flesh, or maybe it’s that it’s male flesh again, but the feel of his hand makes her quiver like jelly. It’s her own molecules spinning out of their places and she knows if it weren’t for Vance’s hand holding hers she might simply disintegrate into whirling fragments, the pieces scattering the length and breadth of creation, like the soil that’s lifting off her field out there and swirling away into the sky.
Snakeskin
She’d called Joe Morris, her lawyer, told him she’ll be away for a while and he’d said that there was no business to be done that couldn’t wait a couple of weeks, “And anyway, you’ll keep in touch with the Christies about where you are, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” she’d said, nodding briskly, even though he couldn’t see her, even though she hadn’t any idea where she’d end up. She phones her mother-in-law. “I’ve decided to go away for a while,” she tells her. “To tell the truth” — how often she has been saying that phrase lately, as if up till Barney’s death she’d done nothing but tell lies — “I’ve decided to see if I can find Lannie. I want to tell her about …” she hesitates. Mary Ann lets her breath out in a rush.
“You do that, Iris, that’s just the thing. You go to Howard. I’ll give you directions to that place where he works. If anybody knows how to find her, he should. At least have some clues or something.” Her pain at her son’s indifference fills her voice. “If you go see him in person, he can’t put you off. I’d of gone myself, but my arthritis …”
“I know, Mary Ann. But it isn’t up to you, it’s up to me. I should have gone years ago.” She tells her that Vance will take care of the farm for her. “I shouldn’t be gone more than a couple of weeks.” When she hangs up, relief at having avoided Luke, at least for now, floods through her. But there’s still one task left: she has to tell her mother.
She’d already gone once to tell her about his death, but when, after taking a deep breath to steady herself, she’d pushed open the heavy glass door into the lobby of the nursing home, she’d been told by the nurse on duty, a stout, grey-haired woman, that her mother had had a “spell” that morning.
“Why didn’t someone call me?” Iris asked, visions of another funeral rushing past her, so that she had to put her hands down on the desk to support herself until the fear diminished.
“We tried,” the nurse answered, fixing her with a hostile stare. “It would help if you had an answering machine.”
She wanted to explain about Barney, about the chaos her life had become, but nothing came out except a breathless “How bad is she?” And in the instant before the nurse answered, she saw before her the church where James’s funeral was held. A wooden structure more than seventy-five years old, the oldest church in the district, standing alone now, in the middle of wheat fields. Simple and small with a short, plain spire and three arched windows down each side. She saw the patient air it had acquired, a kind of weary knowingness, as James had, as if nothing could surprise it any more, or hurt it, or change it. His was the last funeral held there, nobody uses it any more. All of the past vanishing, as if it didn’t matter.
“She’s fine,” the nurse told her briskly, and Iris thought of the stone circles on the prairie, still there after hundreds of years. The thought soothed her and her heart slowed to its normal pace. “Goodness knows what upset her. B
ut she was restless and it isn’t good for them to be restless when their hearts aren’t too steady. Doctor Wiebe gave her a little something to quiet her.”
Although Iris sat at her mother’s side for two hours, the “little something” kept her mother asleep the entire time, and dreading her task, Iris couldn’t bring herself even to try to wake her. In the end she’d left without telling her about Barney.
Today, tentatively pushing open the door to her mother’s room, she stops in surprise. The curtains are open, the room flooded with afternoon sun, and on the windowsill the geraniums Iris started herself from seeds and brought when they were only a couple of inches tall are starting to bloom red and pink. Her mother sits in the lounge chair facing the door and the television set, her daisy afghan covering her legs. A large book of photographs is open on her lap and she looks up from it to Iris standing in the open door. She says nothing, though, and her silence disconcerts Iris. “Hi, Mom,” she says. She crosses the room quickly, kisses her mother, sets the guest book qfrom the funeral reception on the table at her mother’s elbow, and seats herself on the visitor’s chair. She wonders if maybe her mother is looking at her this way because she doesn’t recognize her.
“I have been waiting for you to tell me about your husband’s death,” her mother says, mildly enough, but Iris freezes, she can feel her face flushing; for an instant she’s fourteen years old again, trying to explain away some failure of hers to her mother.
“I tried,” she says hastily. “I came but —”
“I overheard it,” her mother interrupts in that throaty whisper that is all that’s left of her voice. “Two nurses talking outside my door. Thinking I was asleep.” Her gaze doesn’t waver. “It was a nasty shock.”
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