Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  The car stops opposite the steps. Immediately the driver’s door opens, and she sees it’s the same man who came to her weeks ago: Jim Schiff, from the company that wants to buy her land.

  “Welcome back, Mrs. Christie,” he calls up to her. “Was it a good trip?” Iris studies him, not replying.

  “You have a new car, I see,” she says in a measured, not-unfriendly way.

  “It is a beauty,” he says. “May I come up and talk to you?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she says. He has already come around the car and put his foot on the first stair. He stops, frozen in mid-step, then puts his foot back down on the gravel.

  “I beg your pardon?” he says, smiling uncertainly.

  “No, it isn’t any use,” she says. “My place is not for sale. Not now. Not ever.” He stands looking up at her; she can see him trying to figure out what he ought to say to her now. “You may as well go,” she says, and smiles in what she hopes is a pleasant way. In the back of her mind it registers that the countryside she can see from her deck is beginning to look dry, it’s been almost a month, Vance told her, since the last rain, and that was barely half an inch. She frowns without noticing she is, wondering about the crop. The old dust bowl black humour passes through her: Remember in the Bible when it rained forty days and forty nights? Yeah? Well, Chinook got a tenth.

  “I’d just like to talk to you a little,” he says softly. “No pressure, just to make sure you know what our offer is. I’ll be happy to tell you what your neighbours are thinking, so that you can evaluate your position.” A magpie lands on the deck railing and struts self-importantly a few steps in their direction, its glossy black feathers gleaming an iridescent purple and turquoise.

  “I appreciate that,” Iris says gravely, “but it makes no difference. I’ve decided not to sell.” He lowers his head to stare at the ground in front of his scuffed brown oxfords. She notices that his hair is thinning at the crown of his head, and he seems tired or — suddenly she wonders if this is a ploy, that she should feel sorry for him so that she’ll let him into her house and then —

  “Maybe you don’t understand,” he says at last, raising his head, looking first down the deck to where the magpie has fixed him with a glassy, one-eyed stare, and then up to Iris. “We will have all this land. We will have every farm from the other side of you to town. You’ll be isolated, you’ll have no neighbours.” He stops, as if he thinks he’s gone far enough for now.

  “That’s not true,” she replies calmly. “You won’t have the Normans’ place either.”

  “Hah!” he says abruptly. Suddenly she knows that he is not merely an agent: he’s the real buyer. The magpie screeches, flies up into a poplar branch and sits there, bobbing up and down. “The Normans have no choice. They’re heavily in debt. We’ll buy their note from the bank and take the place over. We’ve done it before.” His tone is faintly amused.

  “I believe you’re too late for that,” she says comfortably. “It’s owned by a conservation organization now.” If he’s dismayed, he doesn’t show it, but he’s silent for a moment, gazing around the yard and out beyond it to the dusty fields of ripening crops. At last he says, as if he’s innocently curious, “Why are you so determined not to sell?”

  “I don’t like your plans,” she says. “I don’t like what you want to do to us.”

  “Your community can only benefit,” he replies, surprised. “Think of the jobs we’ll provide for local people.” The magpie squawks again and Iris glances at it, bemused, before she speaks.

  “Where will they live if you’ve taken their land?”

  “We’ll build new houses in Chinook for everybody who works for us. The social and cultural life in town will flourish again. It will be the way it was in the twenties, that time you prairie folk are constantly mourning.”

  “People owned their own places then,” Iris says. “What you’re proposing sounds like England during the Industrial Revolution, or like Ethiopia under Haile Selassie when all the land in the country belonged to him, and the people worked twice as hard so they could pay their taxes. And mistreated their land just so there’d be something left over for their families. And still they went hungry.” He goes on again as if she hasn’t spoken, and she wonders why she’s still standing here listening when what she wants to do is go inside and lock the doors. But that would look like weakness, so she doesn’t.

  “With computerization and satellite link-ups we can do our business from Chinook. In time we’ll use robot tractors and combines. It’s called ‘precision farming’ and it’s the coming thing. We’ll build huge greenhouses and laboratories with our own plant-breeders to do up-to-the-minute experiments to produce new crops as well as improve the old ones. We’ll own the very seeds you plant,” he tells her. “We’ll own those dandelions out there, we’ll own the carrots in your garden.”

  His voice is mild enough, but his look is one that in the old days would have frozen her, or sent her running into Barney’s arms, but now she says, reasonably enough, “You have no faith in the people at all, do you? You think none of us will object, that we’ll just let you turn us into slaves, into serfs and peons? People who came here three generations ago and knew nothing but hardship until the middle of this century —” She thinks of the Indians whose land they’d stolen, and she hesitates for just an instant, hopes he hasn’t noticed. “You think we’ll give up our land that easily?”

  “Money talks,” he says. “Everybody has his price.”

  Something is rising in Iris. She feels dizzy, disoriented, the inner chaos distracting her from the breeze, the birdsong, the smell of crops in the fields.

  Then she thinks, Barney died for something. When he left me — it was leaving me, even if he didn’t know it himself — it was to go to the land; he left me for the land. He was telling me something, but I couldn’t understand it, I was so caught up in myself that I couldn’t even hear it. I suppose he didn’t really understand it himself. Her hands, her face, her chest feel hot, as if she might be glowing, and looking down at him, she begins to feel big, as if she’s gaining a foot or two in height, and expanding in breadth. As if she has, in her travels, acquired something — something that might be power.

  “I think you are evil,” she says. “Get off my land.” And when she says my land it seems to her that the entire countryside comes to a halt, the wind ceases its murmur, the moving grass stands still, the birds halt in mid-song.

  The phone rings, but Iris has been sleeping only lightly and she snaps on the bedside lamp and answers it on the second ring.

  “Betty Chamberlain,” a voice says. Iris is alert at once. Her clock says it’s three in the morning.

  “What did you find out?” she asks, forgetting even to say hello. Betty laughs, and there’s something in the sound, some imprecision that tells Iris Betty has been drinking. What time is it in California? she wonders. After midnight, at least. She sits up and lifts the phone from the bedtable onto her lap.

  “I talked to Frank,” Betty says.

  “Yes?”

  “Grain has gone in,” she says. “One of the NGOs took in a truckload.” When Iris hears that what she’d wanted has finally happened, it no longer seems like a solution or even much help. A truckload of grain for all those people?

  “But what about,” it’s hard for her to say it even now, “the question of — genocide.” In the small pause that ensues Iris thinks she can hear Betty breathing, the sound too deep, muffled, or as if she were cupping her hand around the receiver.

  “Iris,” Betty says, “listen. What happened to you happens to firsttime visitors to Third World countries all the time. It’s an old story. It doesn’t mean anything. Forget it.”

  “I won’t forget it,” Iris says determined. “I think every time people hear something like that, they hear the truth. Some kind of truth. There is so much evil in the world.” She can hear Betty draw in a long breath, not wearily, but as if she’s letting some emotion go.

  She s
ays a long “Mmmmm” glumly, and then, as if she’s reciting, “They’re fixing the roads, probably for the first time since the war; they’re allowing dissenting newspapers to be published in Addis; they’re trying not to interfere in tribal politics —”

  “They’re taking care of Tigrayans,” Iris says.

  “I don’t know,” Betty says, in a defeated tone. “People are always trying to kill each other somewhere.” Iris sees how easy it would be to forget the man in the hotel corridor, the beggar child crying in the dirt, the women walking slowly up the road bent double under their burdens, even Abubech and her courage and dignity.

  “I spoke to a newspaper journalist about it; I called Amnesty, and an aid agency that has a branch near there. They’ve all called me back and told me to forget it, that I was wrong. One of their so-called sources even said that the Amharas and the Tigrayans love each other.” Her emotion is so strong that she has raised her voice without meaning to.

  “Let me tell you,” Betty says, “that if you insist on making a fuss about this,” her voice is louder now, “people will be killed. They will stop that project you told me about, if you’re associated with it. Are you willing to risk that? Do you want that responsibility?”

  “What about my responsibility to the people who said they are starving?” she asks Betty. “What about to those who claim people are being imprisoned and tortured and killed in secret? What about their right to a better government, to go about their legitimate business in dignity and without fear, the way we do?” Betty doesn’t say anything and then Iris hears a faint clink, and knows Betty is drinking.

  “Some choice,” Betty says finally, but it’s as if Iris has been talking about whether to wear the blue dress or the red. Again, more loudly this time, Iris hears the ringing of the wineglass’s rim against the receiver.

  She doesn’t understand why nobody will listen to her, why nobody wants to help. Is it because after a Communist regime, an apparently more democratic government willing to align itself with the West has to be supported, its flaws ignored? Why? Because that’s how governments work? They’re incapable of subtlety? They’re stupid? Because any improvement at all is at least an improvement? And as for the Ethiopians — the amount of aid money going in there from countries like Canada must be enormous. And Ethiopia can’t do without it. But it was the press who started the rebellions that got rid of Haile Selassie and then of Mengistu, by telling the truth about what was happening.

  What if I’m wrong? she asks herself. What if I’ve misunderstood, overreacted, what if all of them are right and what I thought was an emergency was really a commonplace? But she knows what she has seen.

  She thinks of Abubech who has surely weighed a few thousand starving people against the endless good her project can do, and has chosen her project, because as Betty said, people are always trying to kill each other somewhere. The killings will go on regardless, but the work with the indigenous seeds will slowly, year by year, improve the lot of the Ethiopian peasant. This is it, she thinks. I, who have never seen such suffering am weighing my perceptions over the perceptions of a woman who has lived her whole life in the certain, horrific knowledge of it. How do I dare?

  It occurs to her to wonder if the word “genocide” carries political implications she doesn’t understand. Is there some international law like the Geneva Convention or something, that, if it is proven to be going on, forces actions no government wants to take? Is it a word aid agencies are warned never to use without a pile of bodies in front of them? Without maybe having to run for their own lives? Is that why I’m so quickly dismissed?

  Here she is, sitting up in bed in her own house in safe, comfortable Canada, and she’s breathing in and out, her heart is pumping blood through her veins just as it always has, and down the road in Chinook children will soon be walking to school and the grocery store will open, the cash register will ring, somebody will pump gas at the co-op, and nobody in the whole town is starving or being tortured or murdered. Doesn’t that mean something against the darkness? Isn’t that a reason to go on?

  In the silence while Betty drinks again, Iris understands at last that there is nothing she can do.

  “Betty,” she says, “isn’t it time to get that Ph.D.?” Betty laughs.

  “Is that advice?”

  “Yes, I believe it is.” When Betty doesn’t say anything more, Iris says, “Thanks for at least trying to find out if I was right or not.” She waits for Betty to speak again, but she doesn’t, and finally Iris hangs the phone up gently, quietly.

  She leans over to replace the phone on the bedtable beside the lamp. As she sets it down, she notices something glint in the light on the corner of the bedtable farthest from her, behind the lamp’s wide crystal base. She reaches for it and pulls it over to her.

  It is the carved wooden cross that the young guide Yared gave her. She remembers him looking hard, straight into her eyes with an expression she couldn’t even begin to read. He’d spoken slowly, emphasizing each word: I am giving you this so that you will remember me. She stares down at the small wooden cross on its leather thong lying in her open palm. After a moment she lifts it on over her head, straightens it against her throat and chest, then leaves it to rest lightly there between her breasts.

  Ramona and Vance, Iris, Lannie and Misty are seated in the town hall in the midst of row upon row of friends and neighbours. Every chair is taken and people are lined up three deep along the back wall and halfway up the sides. As Iris entered Henry Swan, standing with a group of men at the door, had turned to her and said formally, pointedly, “Good evening, Iris,” while the men he’d been standing with, people she’d known all her life either would not meet her eyes, said nothing, or were unusually jovial in their hellos, so that she knew they were angry with her. When she saw Luke standing with a knot of older ranchers on the far side of the hall, she felt his hard blue eyes penetrating right through her, and she pretended not to have noticed his stare. When she led Lannie and the others to their seats down this row, she’d noticed Marie Chapuis, Ardath Richards, and Mavis Miller sitting together two rows ahead. In the general rustle at her arrival, they turned to stare, returning her greeting with brief, guarded smiles. She was hardly surprised, had squelched her hurt feelings, having resolved to stand up to everyone’s complaints without giving in, or breaking down, or revealing any anger of her own.

  But what she’s really feeling right now is fear; she’s quaking with it. She’s going to have to speak in front of all these people, she’s going to have to explain, defend herself, be persuasive, truthful. She has to lock her hands together to keep them from trembling, her jaw is clenched so tightly it hurts. Schiff has delivered an ultimatum: everyone has to sign by the end of the month or the whole deal is off. Some are convinced it’s a bluff, others aren’t so sure; all of them know if the deal’s to go through, Iris Christie has to agree to it. The crowd is unusually quiet, a sign of the seriousness of the situation that has brought them here.

  Seated at a long table facing the crowd is a row of men: the reeve of the municipality in his western clothes, Chinook’s mayor in his sports coat and jeans and boots, a couple of politicians in shirts and ties, both of them men Iris went to school with, Jim Schiff the land buyer, a government land agent dressed the same way as the men in the crowd, the director of Vance’s conservation organization wearing the hiking boots that instantly give him away to the crowd as not one of them, and the head of a hunters’ lobby group. Behind them is an easel with a professional-looking flow chart on it that Iris recognizes as Jim Schiff’s company plan.

  People shift positions noisily, begin to whisper to one another as the mayor, the reeve, the government agent, the hunters’ lobbyist each speak briefly about the problem as they see it and how it should be handled. The crowd is waiting to hear from Jim Schiff and from the representative of the conservation organization — no, Iris thinks, they’re waiting for their chance to tackle Vance and me. She can hardly believe she’s going to have to sta
nd against her entire community, when she has spent her life accepting and accommodating herself to its beliefs and standards and way of doing things. Her palms are wet and she unclasps her hands to wipe them surreptitiously on her thighs.

  The room is deathly silent as Jim Schiff lays out his plans once again. He ends by telling them in an amiable, almost condescending, way that he and his people are prepared to take their money and their project to another site they’ve already selected if the signatures aren’t forthcoming by the thirtieth of the month. Iris had been told the meeting was “a chance to clear the air,” and “to clarify the situation.” Maybe. But now she sees clearly that as far as Schiff is concerned, its sole purpose is to get her to sell. She sees that he thinks she won’t be able to withstand her community’s pressure. For a second, she wavers. He’s right: there’s no way she’ll be able to hold firm.

  What does she want the worry of all that land for, anyway? Why does she want to complicate her life when Barney isn’t here to help and support her? Could she possibly live here among people she has been friends with her whole life if they all hate her? She knows what they can do to people if they turn against them, she has seen it: nobody speaking to the offender, shutting the door in his face, hanging up if she phones, turning away at public events, leaving him to sit alone, throwing rotten tomatoes at her house, spray-painting graffiti on his fence; in the countryside putting sugar in fuel tanks, leaving gates open, spooking cattle and horses so they run away, or turning them into crops to destroy them, tearing up fence posts or disputing established land boundaries, dumping garbage in fields, even setting crop or grass or building fires. To be the object of so much hate — she won’t be able to endure it.

  The conservationist is speaking. He’s a handsome, youngish man, dark-haired, short, wearing round, gold-framed glasses that keep sliding down his nose, dressed in the inevitable plaid shirt, jeans, and those hiking boots as if he strode here all the way from downtown Vancouver, or wherever he’s from.