Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  She is growing fierce, Iris is a little frightened of her, but most of all, she’s aghast at what she’s hearing. Recognizing that this is more than Iris can handle, Abubech breathes deeply several times. “Forgive me — I talk too much. It is my failing. But — you must think hard about what you have and how to use it.”

  After a moment she tells Abubech about the company trying to buy up all the land around Chinook, how she isn’t sure what to do and is giving herself a year to make a final decision.

  “It is greed,” Abubech says simply. “Greed for wealth, greed for power that begins with the ownership of land. They are harassing and stealing and undercutting people all over the world to get control of their farmland. Here in Africa it is especially bad. Or if they don’t want to own the land outright, they want to put the farmer in such debt for his chemical fertilizers, his pesticides and herbicides, even his hybrid seeds — in your country for his machinery — that they don’t need to own the land because they have control of it anyway.” Looking away from Iris, she says “There is evil in the world.”

  From the other room comes a loud cry in a timbre so strange that Iris’s skin prickles. Both she and Abubech start; they scramble to their feet and run the few steps into the bedroom. Lannie is trying to sit up, her eyes are huge and liquid, searching.

  “Where, where?” Lannie asks them, lifting her head from her pillows. “I need — I want —” and then her words break apart into meaningless sounds. Abubech waits at the foot of the bed while Iris, speaking soothingly to Lannie, wipes her face with the cloth she keeps by the bed, and smooths her forehead with one hand while she pulls her pillows into place with the other. At last Lannie relaxes visibly and her eyelids drop shut. Iris checks to make sure the intravenous needle hasn’t come out of her wrist and that the fluid is running as it’s supposed to.

  Abubech says, “It’s late. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Iris sits beside Lannie with a basin of cool water, wiping away her sweat, now and then moistening her lips, and despite the I.V., dropping water with a teaspoon into her parched mouth. Lannie is moaning and tossing again, and Iris moves the basin out of the way before Lannie tips it. She talks to her quietly, “It’s all right. Everything’s fine. You’re going to be fine,” all the time stroking her face or her shoulders or holding Lannie’s hand, so thin now she can see through the bluish skin. Eventually Lannie quiets again, and Iris resumes stroking her face.

  She thinks of the men she has loved. She wonders if she really loved Jay. I desired him, she tells herself, and I felt something very strong for him that I thought — that seems to me even now — was love. It puzzles her. I loved James Springer, because he was so full of passion and Barney and I in all our years together never experienced that kind of physical passion for each other. I loved Barney, first because he was a romantic figure — handsome and remote — then I loved him as if he were part of me, as if there was no separation between us. But there was.

  Lannie’s always transparent skin is shiny now, stretched tight over the delicate bones of her face. She’s so beautiful, Iris thinks, and I never really noticed it before. I’ve been such a coward, and yet so fierce and desperate, I would not let anything disturb my little paradise — not Lannie’s anguish, not Barney’s struggles, not even my own, unlived life, my Self that was begging to get out. She thinks again of her mother, lets her mind slide back over the years to the picnics the two of them used to have on the grass overlooking the deep coulee, the way her mother changed when she was there, a peace settled over her that used to extend itself to Iris so that she moved inside it too. Her mother would kneel and smell the grasses, she would separate the stalks gently and say to Iris, “See? This one is called speargrass, and this one is blue-joint.” How she loved that land. When we were there, her love of it was in every line of her body, every footstep, every breath she took.

  She thinks of her father’s announcement at his birthday dinner: Your mother and I are moving to town so you two can have the place to yourselves. Her father did not love the land, no. But her mother did. I drove her out, as surely as if I’d locked the door against her. She prays that she is still alive, so that she, Iris, may admit to her crime, ask forgiveness, and at last try to, in some way, make it up to her mother.

  She walks through a palace or a cathedral somewhere in the heart of Ethiopia; this is a building she should recognize, she learned about it in the camps, but she can’t call its name to mind. The building is vast, an endless labyrinth of ruined and half-ruined rooms, some with arches still standing, but no walls on either side, some with walls standing but only raw-edged openings torn in the piled rocks instead of doorways. An icy wind howls through it, moaning some message she can’t quite understand. She keeps walking, stumbling and falling over rocks, cutting herself on their sharp edges, she’s bleeding from her knees and shins and hands. Every step leads her farther down toward the dark centre of the building, which is also a monument, although she doesn’t know what it commemorates.

  Now the stones ooze a stinking tarlike liquid; they menace her with their evil. She’s panicky with fear, but she can go only forward, farther down, the way behind her obliterated as she passes, until at last she reaches the centre. Here, in the blackest of all the rooms, an obelisk towers over her, both its zenith and its foundation erased in impenetrable darkness. Its four sides are intricately carved with symbols, interspersed with strange birds and animals. One has the head of a lion, the outspread wings of a great bird, the tail of a lizard. A line of elephants marches nose to tail, a badger flings up dirt, an eagle soars over craggy mountaintops, a giant fish roils a vast, inky sea. The sun sends its burning rays earthward, the moon moves through its stages, all the myriad stars in the sky send out steady beams of crystal light.

  As she stares in awe up at the obelisk, the symbols break apart into words, the words dissolve into pictures, the pictures come to life. Armies swarm, roaring, swords clash, guns boom and crash, fountains of blood spout with heavy, sickening splashes across its surface. Kings, queens, sultans, and emperors pass by, the fringe of their red and purple processional umbrellas swaying over jewelled thrones carried by crews of scarred, naked slaves. Floodwaters pour over cities drowning them, fires consume them before her eyes, hurricanes push up walls of water to swamp flotillas of ships bobbing between mountainous walls of water, avalanches roar down mountainsides to crush screaming villagers. Women, children, soldiers, old people die, swords plunged into their chests, hanging from gallows, blood streaming from bullet wounds, contorted in torture chambers: headless, armless, limbless, begging for food, for mercy, for life.

  It is the history of the world; history is a monster.

  Lannie cries out wildly, and Iris leaps up from her bed of cushions, getting tangled in the one blanket she’s allotted herself, and clutches Lannie who has managed to stand and seems to be trying to climb up the wall. Iris pulls her down.

  “Lannie, Lannie! Stop it, Lannie! Stop it!” She’s at her wits’ end, she doesn’t know what to do. When she has Lannie lying down and covered, the I.V. dangling uselessly at her bedside, out of her need to do something, anything, she takes Lannie’s pulse. For an instant, she can’t find it, and then at Iris’s fingertips laid against her wrist-bone, a tiny bird seems to be struggling: a weak flutter of wings, a pause, another flurry, longer this time, and then a pause so long that Iris is rising from her chair before she feels the quiver of its wings again.

  It can’t go on like this for many more hours. Impulses rush through Iris: to run screaming into the street, to lift Lannie into her arms and drag her onto a plane for Canada, to fall, weeping in despair, over her body. To have come all this way to find her, only to have her die in her arms. Because it’s perfectly clear to her at this moment that Lannie is dying.

  She will not panic. Instead, she washes Lannie’s face with fresh warm water, rinses it clean of soap and pats it dry. She does the same with her hands, then places her arms carefully by her sides under the bedclothes.
She draws up the sheets and blankets, smooths them, and folds them down neatly under Lannie’s chin. She kneels to say a prayer for Lannie’s recovery, the first formal prayer she has said outside of church in years. She is sitting vigil now, the job of women and priests.

  As she waits quietly by Lannie’s bedside, Barney’s funeral begins to march past her eyes. She lets it come, watching as if she hadn’t been there at the time. The gathering in the church vestibule as the funeral director organized the mourners into rows according to closeness to the departed, Iris last, with Howard at her side, behind Barney’s mother and father, his sister Fay and her husband, their four children, Barney’s aunts and uncles and cousins, Iris’s relatives, and ahead of the other relations, Ramona and Vance and their family. How cold the church had been, as the house had been earlier that morning. Even though the sun shone in the open doors of the vestibule, she shivered with the cold.

  She and Howard make their way past the people who’d come too late to find seats and who stood in the back, down the wide aisle past crowded pew after crowded pew. There is no one on the side reserved for Iris’s oldest child. It was rightfully Lannie’s place, and Iris feels her absence acutely; she feels naked on that side. Even though Howard walks beside her, supporting her, he has hardly spoken to her. He looks grim, angry even, although his eyes are red. She remembers how on that interminable walk up the aisle Wesley’s funeral came back to her — nobody in the echoing church but a dozen family members, no choir, no banks of flowers. As if his life had been meaningless, his death unimportant. She remembers thinking then that her heart would break over poor Wesley.

  As she makes the turn into the first pew under the pulpit, she glances past the rows of family, looking for Ramona. There she is, halfway back, wiping her eyes. In that second, behind Ramona’s family, Iris sees a row of strangers, which puzzles her until she realizes they’re the Castle family — the old man, his son, and his daughter Daisy. It amazes her that she could notice these things with one part of her mind while the other is hollow with the fact of Barney’s death. As she seats herself, the organist begins to play a lugubrious, tuneless noise and Barney’s funeral begins.

  She sits crushed against Howard’s bulky arm, not moving away, partly because the row is crowded with the immediate family, and partly because she doesn’t want to leave the safety of his body. On her other side Mary Ann sobs audibly and Luke takes deep, slow breaths that quiver slightly and that everyone can hear. Iris doesn’t cry, although she wants to. Howard doesn’t turn to look at her or to comfort her. She can feel the whole time the strength of whatever it is he’s holding in, she doesn’t know what it is, she doesn’t want to know. She feels small and isolated and half-frozen without Barney there beside her while the twins boys, Barney’s distant relatives, their faces polished to a shine, sing two cowboy hymns in thin, unmusical voices, and Barney’s uncle Len, then the skip of his curling team, and finally Vance Norman give brief eulogies, which Iris can’t remember, only that Vance’s was terse, delivered through tight lips. The people stand to sing or pray, then sit with much rustling of garments, thumps, and coughs.

  All the while, just ahead and to her right, she can see the expensive oak casket Ramona picked. She can see the hump of his knuckles where the undertaker had folded Barney’s hands on his chest. She knows Barney is wearing the navy blue pin-striped suit she picked for him, the white silk shirt, the dark red silk tie. She knows he looks perfect, if not the Barney she has been married to all those years.

  When it is finally over, she tries to stand, but Howard has to put his hand under her elbow before she can get up. Behind her, she hears the creaks of the mourners getting to their feet. She takes three steps to Barney’s side. Howard and the funeral director stand discreetly nearby, ready to catch her if she falls or tries to get into the coffin with her husband. It seems to her that a wind is blowing through the church with a high, whining noise, engulfing her in its cold breath. She remembers how she put her hand out to touch him, to take his hands in hers, how she bent to put her face against his mouth one last time, but Howard and the funeral director each took an arm and moved her back. She knows that somebody is closing the coffin, but she doesn’t look up, and she doesn’t lift her head as she moves down the aisle behind it. She doesn’t see the pallbearers lift it down the church steps or put it in the back of the limousine. She doesn’t know if she cried or not. She thinks perhaps she didn’t. She remembers how heavy the pain in her chest was, that she could hardly move because of it.

  They are at the open grave high above the town, overlooking the whole valley. She remembers how from up there she could see the pockets of snow still resting in the clefts of the hills, and the returning hawks circling on the wind drafts above the river.

  Then she is at the reception, seated at the centre of one side of a long table with Luke on her left and Mary Ann on her right. There is a babble of voices all around her and much laughter from those more distant from the family’s table. Howard stands before very long and walks among the tables, shaking hands and talking to this man and that. Luke doesn’t move, and Fay and Mary Ann speak in low voices to each other and, red-eyed, hand each other tissues. When everyone has eaten their fill of small, triangular sandwiches provided by the church ladies and the cakes shiny with icing, and drunk two cups each of tea or coffee, they form a long line to the table where the family sits.

  That is the part Iris dreads most. She stands up, the better to speed the process. One by one the faces of the people of her community confront hers: lined faces, rough faces, faces dark with years in the sun and the wind, faces pale with illness or old age and, startled by grief into clairvoyance, she recognizes immanent death lurking there; she sees the bright inquisitive eyes of the young searching for explanations of this day, for news of the world; she locks eyes with those deepened with mute suffering and finds in those few humble ones mutual recognition, perhaps even comfort; she sees eyes with no shadows behind them, no depth at all, so that she wonders if those people are truly alive or any different from the deer hiding in shrubs or the badger digging a burrow into the earth, or if perhaps that blankness is evil. She shakes hands briefly with each person, tilting her head to receive polite kisses on her cheek, says, “Thank you,” over and over again, until the line dwindles and ends. She does not cry. Then Fay and Barry drive her home to the farm where relatives are waiting, having gone ahead, or, following in their own vehicles, are soon to arrive.

  What she cannot forget is leaving Barney behind in his coffin in that hole in the frozen ground. They could drape it with all the fake green blankets they liked, it was still a hole in the ground and she had gone away and left Barney there. And she had not gone back, not even once. When a tombstone-maker had sent her his advertising material, she had thrown it in the garbage without reading it. She sees now that as soon as she gets home it will be necessary to get him a headstone, the most beautiful marble headstone she can find.

  And then she understands that Barney is really dead.

  Lannie is quiet, her chest rising and falling evenly, and Iris sits by her bedside and cries quietly. When she gets home she will fold Barney’s jackets and trousers and sweaters, shirts and underwear into boxes; she will empty the bathroom cabinet of his shaving lotion, his razors, his deodorant and toothpaste and toothbrush; she will clean out the drawers of his bedside table and throw away all those useless odds and ends he would toss into it every evening for want of a better place. She will keep his picture and his curling trophies; she will give his coin collection to his nephew Quinn whom he had tried and failed to make his son; she will give his framed high school diploma back to Mary Ann and Luke; to Fay she will give — she can’t think what is precious enough to give to the sister he’d stood by through all the vicissitudes of her unhappy life. Maybe the worn leather desk set Fay had given him as a teenager and that he’d used all these years. And his two silver pens.

  The vast, rubble-strewn city is utterly silent; the night smothers its motion an
d noise. In the soothing ambience of this room closed off from the grim reality of the city, she finds something that is, if not exoneration, close to forgiveness of herself for all her many follies and sillinesses, her cruelties, her selfishness. It is, at least, a rueful acceptance of the woman she now recognizes as herself.

  The room has grown peaceful, the flow of calm so strong it is tangible. It is something beyond the furniture, the damp and wrinkled sheets and blankets, beyond the unconscious woman, beyond even the shadows in the corners, the dusky ceiling. In this miraculous calm Iris feels herself clearly: her toes, one by one, her fingers — their tips, their sinews, the flesh of her palms — the muscles in her thighs and calves and arms, the bones of her ankles and wrists, her womb, her breasts, the pulse in her chest and throat, each hair on her head. With relief, flushed with the rich warmth of her own blood, and with simple joy at the shock, the rightness of it, she settles down, at last, into her own body.