“Welcome to the fort,” she says, handing Iris a menu, then snapping out her order pad and pencil from her pocket. Iris remembers there’s a fort here, she thinks it’s one they called in school a “whisky” fort and the Mounties came and shut it down in the last century.
“Oh, Fort Whoop-Up, isn’t it?” she asks, smiling, pleased with herself.
“Nope,” the woman says. “Fort Whoop-Up’s by Lethbridge. This is Fort Macleod. When the Mounties came out here in 18—” she hesitates, “1874, they built this fort. Named it after the head Mountie. Whoop-Up was a whisky fort, not like this one.” Iris stares at her, the menu open in her hand. The waitress grins. “One of my kids is a university student, works at the fort in the summer. There’s lots of history around here. If you came from east, you’ve been driving on the Red Coat Trail. That’s what they call it now.” Seeing Iris is staring blankly up at her, she says, “The Mounties, you know? This is the trail they followed when they started up in the East. It was quite a trip.” She taps her pencil on her pad and Iris sees she wants to get on with her work.
She says quickly, “A Denver sandwich and coffee, please.” Now she remembers what she’d been told about the Mounties’ trip out here. They’d ridden horses all the way, fed the horses the wrong grass, thinking the greener it was the richer it would be, when out here the best grass was the cured yellow grass — and they’d picked the wrong horses in the first place, they weren’t nearly strong enough. And what else? Half the men couldn’t ride a horse, either. But they came anyway, and did what they’d set out to do — brought law and order — and some of them were so brave, to this day people still tell their stories.
She heads out of Fort Macleod on the road that leads past the fort and soon turns north to run parallel to the jagged row of blue-grey mountains that line the western sky. This is a narrower, quieter road. Carefully, she consults the directions Mary Ann gave her and drives more slowly so as not to miss her turns. At one point two white-tail deer jump across the road in front of the car and Iris has to break hard to avoid hitting them, at the same time marvelling at their grace. At another, spotting movement in the field to one side, she sees a coyote running away from her on a diagonal path, stopping when she does to look back over his shoulder at her. It reminds her that she rarely sees coyotes on her own land any more, although deer still cross it. And antelope. Barney said you never used to see antelope off grassland, but now you do because there’s so little grass left for them to graze. Or was it Luke? Luke, who has always hated her and she didn’t even know it or, believing herself wholly blameless, refused to see it.
At last she spots the tall red-brick posts that support the open iron-grillwork gates she has been looking for. She drives through them and down a quarter-mile of paved asphalt road and stops in the driveway of the ranch where Howard is supposed to be working. The house takes her breath away. It’s huge, three times the size of her own not-so-small frame house, and complicated; she can’t quite make out what’s what for a moment, all these rough stone facings, the gleaming sheets of slanted glass reflecting only darkness or clouds, and masses of flowers, tulips mostly, red and yellow, blooming everywhere. Behind the house, the grey and mauve mountains, their peaks still snow-covered, rise into a surreal blue sky.
Iris looks but can’t see any way around this mansion to where the actual workings of the ranch should be. She’s about to go on around the circular driveway and back out onto the road in search of another entrance when to the right off the flower-bordered, paved driveway she spots a lane that disappears between two more pillars, stone this time, that are themselves half-hidden by the branches of tall conifers. She knows it will lead to the stables, the hay sheds full of the best timothy hay for the racehorses, the offices, the tack room, and whatever else the breeders and trainers of racehorses require. And it’s where she’s sure she’ll find Howard, about whom Luke always said, “Had a way with horses. Liked ‘em.” High praise, coming from Luke.
The spruces are parting on each side of her car; ahead and to her right sits a small log house. Rows of brilliant pink and white petunias bloom on each side of the sidewalk that leads up to the door of what she guesses will be Howard’s home. Beside it, and straight ahead of her, is a long white stable trimmed with shiny red paint, and to her left, gleaming, white-painted corrals. Behind them, she catches a glimpse of a racetrack. She can hear Barney’s voice: What a set-up! Must’ve cost millions!
There’s activity in the corrals to the left. She can see heads bobbing, both men’s and a horse, and the horse is whinnying. No, it’s a louder, wilder cry than that, and although she has had little to do with horses, she knows a stallion’s cry when she hears one. She hesitates, unable to decide if she should go there to look for Howard or try his house first. She opts for the house, needing the time it will take her to walk up the sidewalk and knock and wait; then maybe she’ll be ready for him. She parks in front of the house, goes up the few feet of walk between the petunias, and knocks on the dark-stained plank door.
A pretty teenager wearing skintight jeans and a faded, too-tight western shirt unbuttoned to the cleft of her small, high breasts opens the door. Her hair is pale blonde, cut short, but curly. Iris’s immediate reaction is disapproval — Howard is old enough to be her father. Then she realizes who this is.
“Misty?” she asks. The smell of brewed coffee wafts invitingly around them on the still afternoon air, and a shout echoes from the corrals on Iris’s left.
“Yeah,” the girl says brusquely, leaning against the door frame. She’s wearing a silver and turquoise Navajo bracelet on her wrist and she twists it slowly with her other hand. She’s not welcoming, she’s not even polite.
“I’m Aunt Iris. I’ve come to see your father.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, as if she’s just remembered Iris is expected. A little taken aback by her rudeness, Iris can detect no hint of Lannie in her sister’s face — Lannie’s fairness, yes, but she hasn’t Lannie’s freckles, and there’s a lushness to her face and body that is the opposite of Iris’s memory of Lannie’s thinness and fragility. She winces inwardly. “Come in,” Misty says, softening. “Dad’s out working with a stud, but he’ll be in soon for coffee. Want some?”
The room is warmly dark, the log walls having darkened with age; she guesses the cabin was built before the turn of the century, probably was once the ranch house itself, and there are only a couple of rag rugs spread out to lighten the plank floor, and an orange-and-red Mexican blanket is thrown over the leather couch. Cowboy artifacts are everywhere: silver pistols mounted on the wall beside hand-forged iron spurs, and a plaited horsehair whip — Barney had one too, bought it or won it from an Indian on the reserve near the Christie ranch — and above that, a tanned diamondback rattler skin is tacked to the wall.
“Have a chair,” Misty says, pointing to the chairs around the round wooden table that’s covered with a brightly flowered plastic tablecloth. She turns back to the stove where a coffeepot hisses softly over a blue flame. Scarred thick brown mugs sit upside down on the table and a jam jar in the centre holds a cluster of spoons. Iris is reminded of the ranch houses Barney took her to before they were married: the wagon wheel chandeliers, the stiff furled ropes hanging among the coats by the door, and the rows of battered cowboy boots; at the brandings, the neighbours’ brands cut into the piecrusts. Misty fills a mug for her, a few grounds spewing out with the still bubbling, smoky liquid.
“Are you still in school?” Iris asks. “I’ve lost track of how old you are.”
“Naw,” Misty says. “I quit a long time ago. “I been married, but I’m not any more.” She pulls out a chair roughly, gracelessly, and sits. “I work at the house, cleaning and sometimes in the kitchen.” She pauses. “He likes me to serve when he has company. Guests.” She says this last with special emphasis, as if she’s been corrected, and didn’t like it much. “I wear this dress, with this apron” — indicating it with her hands, and a faint, scornful smile. “Dad got me the job.
I sort of look after him here,” she adds, and shy pleasure creeps into her voice, quickly muted by a tension Iris takes an instant to see as uneasiness, if not fear.
“How lucky for him.” Now she realizes Misty must be in her early twenties. “And Dillon?”
“He works here too. For now, anyway.” Her voice has lightened a little, the shy note remaining. “I’ll miss him if he goes. I might go back to Calgary, try to get a job there. Maybe …” Her voice trails off. The door opens behind Iris and a wedge of sunlight widens across the room. Iris stands and turns. Behind her, Misty stands up abruptly, noisily, and goes to the stove. With the light behind him Howard, a big man, looks about twelve feet tall and she can’t make out his face. But she can smell him — sweat mostly, and horse — but some other odour too that makes her think of Barney, Howard, and Luke working together in Luke’s big corral, and all the tensions that flowed among them, only half-concealed beneath the surface.
Now she remembers Barney climbing the corral, using his body to hide the dehorning of steers going on behind him. Afraid that if she saw the blood spurting ten feet from the animals’ heads, if she had time to really hear the screams of the steers as Howard sawed off their horns, she would run away in horror, she would never marry him. The wind whooping around them mingling with the animals’ cries, her glimpse of Howard’s contemptuous half-smile that she thought then was meant for her and knows now was meant for Barney because he wanted a woman out of his class, would give up his manhood for her. And Luke, grimly determined to ignore it all. The fistfight the next day it took Barney years to tell her about. His black eye she’d seen herself. Luke knocked backwards into the manger. Howard packing his gear and leaving that night. And yet Luke forgave Howard for going, but not Barney.
“Hello there, Iris,” Howard booms, advancing with his hand out. She takes it, overcome by his size, by the fact that she still can’t see his face, and by the boisterous way he has chosen to greet her. As her hand touches his she knows his manner masks dislike. Like his father, she thinks.
“It’s good to see you again,” Iris says. “We hardly spoke at the funeral.”
“Couldn’t stay long,” he’s scraping out a chair and sprawling in it. Now Iris can make out his features, he has always been the handsomest of the Christie men, that dark, rough, all-man look, where Barney’s features were more precise, less aggressively masculine, and in later years had been softened by excess flesh. “Whew! That bastard’s something to handle,” Howard says to Misty, whose laugh wavers between admiration and contempt, as if she’s not sure which would be best. She fills his cup.
“Hungry?” she asks. He shakes his head, no, without looking at her. Misty hovers a moment at his shoulder, touches it so lightly Iris is sure he doesn’t know she has. Iris is struck by how pretty she is, how curvaceous her small body. Certain men would be very attracted to her; Iris can see how tempting she is. Misty sets the coffeepot on the burner, then turns to face them, her back resting against the stove.
Howard says in a lazy drawl, “I’m surprised to see a lady like you in a place like this.”
“I won’t stay long,” she replies too crisply, bristling at his comment. “I’m finding time a bit long on my hands now.” She hesitates, then decides to plunge ahead. “I thought how much I’d like to see Lannie again. I miss her very much. But I don’t have an address for her any more, and I thought you might.”
“Hell, I coulda told you over the phone. You didn’t have to come all the way out here.”
“I was on my way to Calgary,” Iris lies. “Anyway, I — to tell the truth the funeral sort of blurs in my mind, but I felt bad that I didn’t talk to Barney’s brother.”
“Hell, Iris, I’m only Barney’s half-brother,” Howard says, falsely amiable, and again Iris sees his rage and wonders why he can’t get over the grudge he bears all of them because he isn’t Luke’s full son.
“I’m sure Barney never thought of you as anything but his brother.” She knows though, that Barney was Luke’s favourite, even if he didn’t know how to show it, even if Barney didn’t know it himself. The two brothers, eyeing each other, vying for Luke’s approval. She doesn’t dare say that Howard’s the only one who can’t forgive Luke for not being his father. Howard is silent, then snorts as if he has just remembered something he didn’t like much.
“The old man wants me to come back and take over the ranch.” But his voice is quieter now, as if he no longer cares that she’s here. “Now that Barney’s — gone.” He turns his head away toward the patch of blue in the small window above the sink.
“It would be good if you could,” she says. “They’re getting old and your mother suffers a lot with her arthritis. It’d be nice if she could move into town, at least for the winter —” Howard interrupts as if he can’t stand to hear what she’s saying.
“Yeah, I might have to do that.” His eyes are dark and hard; they glint, but emit no light. I raised your daughter for you, she’s thinking, although she’ll never say it out loud. She thinks instead how ironic it is that tough old Luke succeeded in instilling his hardness in his stepson, but failed when he tried to do the same thing with Barney. How glad she is of his failure.
“I haven’t seen Misty or Dillon in — it must be a dozen years. I didn’t recognize her.”
“Yeah,” Howard says. “She grew up all right.”
“You should see Dill,” Misty says. “He’s not as big as Dad, but he’s …” She hesitates. “Really grown up.” She keeps shifting between a sullen forty-year-old and an eager ten-year-old, Iris notes. Is that what not having a mother does to you?
“I haven’t heard from my oldest in a long time,” as if he can’t bring himself to say Lannie’s name.
“Years,” Misty interjects. “I was about sixteen the last time she wrote me a letter. She was in Toronto. She said I could come and visit her there.” Her voice sounds muffled, she might be going to cry. “But I never did.”
“We don’t know where she is,” Howard says flatly, but there’s a hint of something that makes Iris hesitate; she understands that one word from her would be all it would take to make him blow up.
“But when she left our place years ago, she said she was coming to see you. Didn’t she find you?” As soon as she asks it Iris remembers that, of course, she did. Lannie wrote to them about it: I stayed with him for a while. “Do you think she’s all right?” she asks Misty finally. “What was she doing in Toronto?”
“Receptionist in a doctor’s office,” Misty says. “Taking university classes at night — or something.”
“How the hell should I know if she’s okay or not?” Howard interrupts. “What am I supposed to do about it? You and Barney raised her.” His anger frightens Iris and suddenly a matching anger at his unfairness rises in her: We raised her because you refused to! You gave her away to us — you told her you’d come back for her! She’s about to respond, but Howard says, in a calmer tone, “Yeah, she found me. I was working in Kamloops. She stayed a while. Then she left.” He’s not looking at Iris at all.
Misty says, “She was living with a guy in Toronto. Tim, she said his name was.”
“Oh, Tim!” Iris says, relieved to hear a name she recognizes and Howard looks quickly at her, would like to know who Tim is.
“She told me,” Misty says, that sullenness suddenly reappearing, “when I was about ten or something, that she was going to come back and get me. Hah!” Iris wants to defend Lannie, but not even to write to her sister after she’d left the farm; this isn’t excusable, and it shakes her.
“God knows what’s become of her,” she says abruptly. “I —”
“She’s mad at all of us, I guess.” The simple, glum way Howard says this makes Iris forget his unreasonable anger. She’s warming to him a little. After all, she didn’t treat Lannie with enough understanding either. And she can’t help but think of Howard’s intense grieving after Dorothy’s death, so that when she looks at him now, she feels her own expression soften. Surely he d
eserves a little sympathy too.
“She doesn’t know Barney is —” she forces herself, “dead,” her voice breaking a little.
“I still have that letter some place,” Misty says.
“Do you? Could you get it? I want to find her now,” she says, her resolve hardened. “Don’t you worry. I’m going to find her,” she repeats looking straight at Howard. He blinks and looks away.
“Come on,” Misty says. Iris follows her through the door beside the stove into a short hall running parallel to the kitchen. Directly ahead is a cramped little bathroom, the white fixtures and white vinyl floor shining with cleanliness. There are doors on either side of the bathroom and Misty leads the way through the one on the right.
It’s a small room too, the dark log walls rendering it gloomy, but there’s a patchwork quilt, its bright colours faded with age, spread neatly on her single bed. The quilt is oddly familiar to Iris. Three teddy bears — white, grey, and a tawny gold — lean against each other on the pillow. The red curtains at the small high window have been there a long time judging by the way their folds are faded. Opposite the bed there’s a shiny, dark brown, imitation-wood chest of drawers, and on the white-painted dresser that sits below the window Misty has arranged small glittering bottles and jars of cosmetics and perfume. A large poster of a rock star with spiky blue hair and a flaming guitar hangs on the wall between the bed and the dresser. Iris is swept through with pity for this lonely girl. A black-and-white snapshot sits on the dresser in an ornate gold-coloured plastic frame, a woman squinting into the sun. She doesn’t have to look closer to know it’s Misty’s mother.
She opens the top drawer of the bureau and carefully lifts out a jewellery box of the kind Iris remembers seeing on her girlfriends’ dressers when they were adolescents: cream-coloured imitation leather, gold trim stamped around its borders, fake red suede inside. Misty says, smiling, “It was Mom’s. So was the quilt. Grandma Christie gave it to me, oh, years ago. She said Mom made it for me.” She and Iris look down at the quilt in silence. Then Misty pulls out the chair in front of her vanity, sets the box on her lap and opens it gently. Handling it as if it were gold, Misty lifts out a letter, closes the lid, and sets the box on the vanity. Her cheeks are flushed pink, and Iris sees how she treasures it.
Garden of Eden Page 17
