Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  Iris is caught between surprise at her mother’s clarity and protest at being accused again: she’s a widow, she’s bereaved, why is everyone intent on making her feel guilty?

  “I did try to tell you, Mom.” That long-buried anger at her mother’s attitude toward her marriage surfaces again. “You never liked him,” she says and looks away.

  “Indeed, I did not,” her mother retorts, and lets her head fall back against the headrest. “Nor did I much like what he became.”

  “Which is what?” Iris demands.

  “He was false,” she says, in a faintly surprised tone, as if she can’t believe Iris didn’t know this. Iris is about to defend Barney, but this remark makes her pause.

  “False?” she asks, her voice coming out rough and unsure. Her mother doesn’t say anything, then her expression softens and she closes her paper-thin eyelids; Iris can see the quick movements of her eyes behind them before she opens them again.

  “For a moment I’d forgotten how much in love with him you were,” she says. “It was what I had to keep reminding myself. That you loved him, and — love is blind, they say.” She turns her pale, delicately wrinkled face to Iris’s.

  “He was a good man,” Iris says, too surprised to be indignant. “He was a good husband.”

  “Indeed,” her mother says again in a newly softened voice.

  “He worked hard,” she points out. “He wasn’t lazy, and he was smart, as smart as Dad. And he took care of Lannie when Howard asked him to … He took her on as a daughter!”

  “None of those things,” her mother says.

  “What, then?”

  “Oh, Iris,” her mother says gently. “Did you never see that he wasn’t happy farming? Didn’t see that it was impossible for our two families ever to blend, that by your marriage you drove a wedge into our family life? Did you never see that Barney — “Of course she knew Barney wasn’t at home in her family, she could hardly miss that, it’s just that it wasn’t Barney’s fault. “Did you not understand the quality of his affection for you?”

  “He loved me!” Iris says quickly. Her face is hot again, she can feel her hands beginning to tremble.

  “My dear,” her mother says so softly Iris has to lean forward to hear her. Then she sighs, as if she’s lost her train of thought, or maybe decided against pursuing it. “He was a confused, complicated man.” Iris’s anger is again mixed with surprise. How could her mother think such a thing? Barney was as straightforward as the day is long, he was — “I always thought that in the end he would make you unhappy.” Pictures tumble swiftly through Iris’s head: how close she and Barney had been, their few quarrels that were over nothing really, the way in which she’d always felt she could never quite reach his core — and then it’s James she thinks of. Her affair with James, and for one instant it’s clear to her why she risked her good name, her marriage, everything, to be with him: because he held nothing back from her, nor she with him. Because with him she was like a seed lying in fertile earth and he was the warmth and darkness that sheltered and nurtured her and would have helped her grow, if they could have been together all the time, if he had lived longer. While she and Barney —

  “I loved him, Mom,” she says, and doesn’t know herself if she means Barney or James. “And he loved me.” She means Barney now, and says this last with all the firmness she can muster. “Loved,” she repeats. “It was love, not … anything else.” But there is no faltering in her mother’s eyes, no admission of error, no regret; instead, there is that old assessing gaze that Iris learned from her childhood to dread. It meant that once again she was not measuring up.

  “I am so sorry he died so soon,” her mother says. “You have a hard road ahead of you.” In the long silence between them, Iris feels the sting — the quality of his affection — decides her mother won’t reply if she does ask what she means.

  But then, suddenly, a scene comes into her mind: sitting at the kitchen table with her father, just before the wedding. “Barney’s marrying a lot of land,” her father said gruffly, then he’d looked at her steadily, from under his thick black eyebrows. “What?” then, “He’s marrying me,” laughing, thinking he was making a joke. “I’m trying to tell you something, girl,” her father had said, still stern. And his message had slowly begun to sink in — Barney was marrying her because some day he’d own the Thomas farm. “That’s absolutely ridiculous!” she’d said, and walked out of the room.

  She searches rapidly backward through the years of their marriage and finds no scene, no clue that would tell her her father had been right. No, she insists to herself, he did love me; he married me because he wanted me. All those years he was faithful to me. I was the one who was unfaithful. She thinks of Luke’s remark, that she’d got through life so far without a mark on her. So what if bad things didn’t happen to her — is that something to be ashamed of? She would like to ask her mother, but she doesn’t.

  Her mother stirs, closes the heavy book on her lap and gestures to Iris to take it away. Iris uses both hands to lift it off her mother’s lap and set it at the foot of her bed. When she turns back to her, her mother has let her head fall back against the chair, but her eyes are open and she’s watching Iris again in that distant way, as if Iris is a stranger, not the daughter she bore with her own body, and loved, and nourished, and taught.

  “I’ve had some time to think now, and I realize that Lannie needs to know about Barney. They loved each other, and she’d want to know. So,” Iris takes a deep breath, “I’ve decided to find her.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” her mother says, as if she’s merely remarking on the weather. “I should imagine by now she’s ready to be found.”

  “What?” Again, Iris is taken aback.

  “She went away; she failed; she could not bring herself to return.”

  Her mother lifts one small-boned, blue-shadowed, thin hand and gives a slow, brief wave. “Too much time has passed; she needs to be found.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You told me she left to find her father: but Howard can’t be found.” She laughs softly, wryly. “No, there’s no father to be found in Howard. So she’s out there, wandering the earth, looking for … herself, one supposes,” her mother says, and picks at the yellow centre of a daisy. “Yes, you go find her. And when you do, bring her here to see me. Will you do that?”

  “You know I will, Mom,” Iris says, and she reaches out and takes one of her mother’s chilly, skin-and-bone hands and, impulsively, bends and brushes it with her lips. Even if she’s not ready to admit to any of what her mother’s said to her, she is humbled by the acuity of her view, and by her certainty, perhaps even grateful that it is offered since she feels so lost herself these days. She wonders, too, if age will bring such clarity to her.

  She has said goodbye to Ramona and Vance and promised to phone Ramona every day and Ramona has promised to visit her mother weekly for her; she has emptied the fridge of perishables, unplugged the television set and turned off the satellite system against electrical storms; her bag is packed and standing at the kitchen door.

  But she finds she cannot leave. Up the stairs she goes to wander through the four bedrooms, and down to roam through the basement, past the pool table nobody has played on since last Christmas, past the liquor cabinet full of bottles of alcohol nobody has touched in months and maybe never will again. The television set, the tape player, the table where they’d sometimes had the neighbours in to play cards on winter nights. Everything has a layer of dust on it, and abruptly, like a child, she writes on the piano lid, IRIS, then stands back, looking down at what she has done. It’s over, she thinks. My life here is over.

  Then she feels a kind of reeling in her head, as if the floor has suddenly tilted sideways; for an instant everything goes black, and when colour comes back into the rug and walls and the old plaid sofa, a picture goes through her mind so fast it hardly has time to register: she is holding out her wrist and cutting at it with something — but sh
e won’t allow herself to see that. She doesn’t have to go, she can stay if she wants to; nobody is making her go. But that notion has to be cast out too. The emptiness of the house now is unbearable. She’s afraid she’ll never be able to sleep again if she doesn’t find Lannie. She walks slowly up the basement stairs, putting her feet down heavily so that they make a noise on each step, as if to reassure herself by the sound that she exists. She goes into the dining room full of heavy, old-fashioned mahogany furniture that belonged to her parents and, before that, to her grandparents, stopping at the sideboard where her collection of family pictures sits. Women in high-necked dresses with tight bodices and long, full skirts, well-fed, pompous-looking men with drooping moustaches and hard eyes. Barney in a picture that’s not even a year old. He refused to go to a portrait photographer with her so she’d had to resort to framing a snapshot taken by Ramona at one of their joint barbecues. She reminds herself that she should visit his grave, she hasn’t been there yet, but decides to wait till her return. She picks the picture up and slides it into her coat pocket. Lannie’s high school graduation picture is there, but it’s too big to carry, so she leaves it.

  She stands a moment longer, but these photos of the dead fill her with a kind of prickly annoyance. All of them, she thinks, and still I’ve come to this: alone, a widow, all the past in the end meaningless. Maybe they are what is causing her bad dreams, her sleeplessness, it’s the weight of their deaths dragging her down into their darkness. She turns away abruptly, picks up her suitcase and goes out, pulling the door firmly shut behind her.

  Yet, as she turns her car onto the main grid that leads away into the world, she cannot stop herself from a quick glance back. There it is: the house she has lived in most of her life, its dark brown a rich hue in the spring light, the conical peaks of the steel grain bins behind the house rising above the poplars and the caragana hedge to glint in the morning sun. She slows and stares at all of it, tries to fix it in memory, as if by doing so she will secure it forever to the spot where it stands. So it will be there when she gets back.

  She turns back to the road ahead of her where above the town, the cliffs of the river valley hover mistily blue and white, and above them is the vast expanse of sky, far too big for her to see all of it in the limits of her windshield. It takes her breath away, and she experiences a moment’s fleeting joy — she’s free — quickly followed by: I’m alone, I have no destination. But though her hands on the steering wheel are damp with her sudden, powerful foreboding, she does not turn the car around and go back.

  Once she’s out racing down the highway, it gets easier, and when she remembers that her ultimate destination is shrouded in mystery, she decides instead to think only of the first step: the ranch in the foothills near Calgary. It’s like learning to walk, this trying to find her new way in the world on her own.

  It’s cool and windy — it’s always windy in the spring — but the sky is cloudless and an intense blue, and the early May light so lucid that, like a tourist, she can’t stop looking at the fields and hills as she approaches and passes them. The light is merciless; it brings out every colour, every shade, every landform and slough and straggly, neglected, gap-toothed caragana hedge where there was once a settler’s home. In the few places where the old houses still stand, their windows and doors boarded, shingles missing, she feels again her community’s respect, maybe it’s even wonder, that families of six and eight children lived in their tiny confines, without running water or electricity, and braving the horrendous winters with nothing but coal and wood fires. The light gives the shabby, greyed structures beauty, lends them a certain dignity.

  To the south it’s either high, grassy hills or land that falls away for miles, all the way to the U.S. border, and beyond it, to the low purple mountains of Montana. Before she notices it, she’s turned north and climbed even higher — her father never failed to point out that this is the highest place in Canada between the Rocky Mountains and a point in Ontario — to the entrance of Cypress Hills Park. Then he would add proudly, as if he’d had a hand in it, that the glaciers had gone around the hills, instead of covering them as they had all the rest of the landscape.

  But the sign jolts her for another reason. She remembers that this is the turn west to go to Fort Walsh, or if you’re feeling adventurous, even beyond Fort Walsh, through the wilderness of coniferous forest and coulees and rushing streams — she’s maybe twenty-five miles from Barney’s ranch. One day, perhaps, she’ll go there again, but it won’t be for a long, long time.

  Instead, she wills herself to remember picnics at Fort Walsh. Whenever relatives visited from other parts of the country, her parents would pack everybody into the car and off they’d go to the fort to give their guests a taste of western Canadian history. Not that Iris recalls much about it herself: the Cypress Hills massacre when drunken American wolfers killed a camp of Indians in the mistaken belief they were the ones who’d stolen the wolfers’ horses; the Mounties’ badly mismanaged but nonetheless courageous, even triumphant, trek from the East that the massacre had finally precipitated, eventually setting up Fort Walsh here in the hills; the 1880s when the buffalo were nearly all gone and the Indians were starving and camped out at the fort in the hope of getting food from the Mounties; Sitting Bull and his people on the run from the Bluecoats after the battle of Little Big Horn, looking for protection and then rations; it even has a graveyard — in the early 1880s it was a good-sized town. She finds that hard to believe: the stockaded fort with its whitewashed buildings never did have to fend off hostile Indian attacks; it’s only a tourist attraction now, with an interpretative centre, costumed guides, and buses to the Farwell and Solomon posts where the massacre took place. Nobody lives there at all, the surrounding countryside is barely inhabited. And it’s miles from anywhere. Resolutely, she whizzes past the entrance, begins the long descent to the plains below.

  Eventually she turns west onto the Trans-Canada Highway, crosses the border into Alberta, and at Medicine Hat stops to stretch her legs. She’s been gone from home about three hours; so far the way is familiar; she has made this hundred-and-fifty-mile trip a half-dozen times a year, mostly to shop. Even though she doesn’t yet feel she has really gone anywhere, when she parks in the mall lot and goes inside, people seem to have a different look about them — people whose faces she has been looking at her whole life, whose work she knows as well as she knows the back of her own hand, whose voices she can hear in her head, are indeed the only voices she knows. Judging by the stetsons and boots they wear, mostly ranchers, their small sons dressed identically to them, their wives with lined faces from their outdoor lives and endless hard work; retired farmers, products of an older world with their fingers thick from work, their faces still darkened from sun and wind; city housewives, nondescript, absorbed in their errands. Yet today all of them look faintly alien. She tries hard to shake this perception and fails. It drives her to sit down on one of the hard plastic chairs in the noisy, falsely bright food court where she sips a cup of flavourless coffee and mulls over this bewildering observation.

  At last she decides that it must be because she’s going away, that the lifeline stretched between herself and these people and the farm miles back is stretching thinner and thinner the farther away she goes. A chill runs down her back. Should she turn back? But they’re expecting her at Howard’s, she has said goodbye to everyone, she has promised to find Lannie. She hurries out of the mall, gets back into her car, and heads west on a narrower road.

  The countryside between Medicine Hat and Lethbridge is less dramatic; everything is closer together than the first part of her trip, and there are more buildings, more farms, and she knows later on in the season there’ll be more variety in the crops growing in the fields than around her home: besides wheat, sugar beets, corn, potatoes. But this road is busy and, not used to so much traffic, she has to pay attention. She turns on the radio and drives to the accompaniment of country music: Randy Travis with his nasal, mellow voice, k.d. lan
g who comes from a town north of here.

  This is the music of her country, and gazing out at the flat, cultivated landscape with that clean light spilling over it, Iris wonders whether its easy rhythms and nasalized sentiments are the right ones to express this place she calls home. She fiddles with the dial and stops, arrested between two stations by high-pitched, warbling cries that burst in through the ether to fill the car — behind the voices the insistent, hollow boom of drums. Goose bumps rise on her forearms, her hair prickles, a shiver races down her spine. At once unbearably sad and stirring, she recognizes aboriginal people’s wild, thrilling music. She listens, fascinated, but at a curve in the road the sounds fade out as mysteriously as they came.

  She drives on to Fort Macleod and the land opens up again, unfolding lazily on each side of the highway, the mountains sitting like a bank of clouds along the horizon that tilts upwards the farther west she goes. She should be getting tired, she has been on the road a long time, but apart from being ravenous, she is in no hurry to arrive at her destination. She finds there’s an odd solace in driving alone like this, as if for the time being her grief and troubles were held in abeyance. And the countryside is so wide open, so visually stunning in its vastness, and so empty of people, although the signs of their presence are everywhere in the herds of cattle she sees spread out in the fields, and all the cultivated land.

  She parks on a side street, goes into a café, finds a table, and sits down. It’s just like the café in Chinook, chrome tables and chairs, the floor dirty with dried mud from the men’s boots, it even smells the same — french fries, onions, beef. Half the tables are occupied, mostly by men in jeans, jean jackets, and ball caps, although there are a couple of stetsons too. The men all turned to look at Iris when she walked in, but she expected that; she’s a stranger here after all.

  The waitress is a plump woman her own age, her greying hair pulled back and tucked into place with shiny plastic combs.