Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  As before, her eyes need a moment to adjust to the shadowy interior. Clean coffee mugs stand neatly upside down on a spread tea towel beside the old blue granite basin and she thinks she detects the faint odour of brewed coffee. A neat pile of split wood rests on a square of linoleum beside the cookstove. Goose bumps jump up on her arms, a shiver rushes down her back, but then she realizes all of this must have been done by the Castles, who would need to use the cabin occasionally.

  She walks into the living room. There she sees a neatly rolled and tied sleeping bag lying on the old sofa where she’d found Barney that day, and on the floor at the end closest to where she stands, there’s an open sports bag out of which hangs the sleeve of what has to be a woman’s blouse.

  Have the Castles moved in here without asking her? Well, that’s all right. Why not? She takes a step forward, thinking to walk through the room, to possess it as her own.

  All Barney’s treasures are gone from the walls, taken by Luke. Mary Ann said something about it to her in an apologetic way. And Luke loaded up Barney’s horses and took them to the family ranch where he’d been born. There’s nothing left of Barney here. Bitterness strikes, but she stifles it, and feels in its place sadness that she never managed to possess the Barney she’d been in love with as a girl — that cowboy part of him that he’d abandoned almost as soon as they were pronounced man and wife. And she had herself colluded in it, for how could he be at once both a copy of her phlegmatic farmer father and a wild, romantic cowboy?

  She goes back into the kitchen with its freshly swept floor and its shiny coffeepot sitting empty on the cold stove. She means to walk through the corrals, something she has done only once, the day eighteen or so months ago when he’d brought her here and told her he was planning to buy this ranch. This will be the last time, she’s thinking, when as she puts her hand out to open the door, it opens inward and she finds herself face to face with a woman. With her back to the light, the woman’s features aren’t clear. It takes Iris a second to recognize Daisy Castle.

  “Oh!” they both say, and stare. Daisy’s hair is blonde, cut short and straight, which suits her because she has such good bones. Iris sees that even without makeup or any gesture made toward her femininity, Daisy is beautiful. For an instant they stand motionless, assessing each other, then both speak at once.

  “Come in,” Iris says, because it is her house.

  “I saw your car,” Daisy says. The way she steps back she obviously wants Iris to come outside and just as suddenly Iris finds the cabin chilly and too dark, the ghost of Barney’s body hovering back there behind her. She’s grateful to go out into the warmth and light.

  Daisy’s saddle horse, a slender sorrel, is tied to a corral railing to Iris’s left. Iris feels awkward, can’t think what to say. Daisy is silent, walks to the sawed-off stump of a big tree in front of the small window to Iris’s right. Iris says, “It was in the back of my mind for a long time to come out here, but I couldn’t seem to —”

  “I’m sorry about Barney,” Daisy says rapidly, and lifts her chin to look away into the trees up the hill behind the cabin, as if she can’t bring herself to look at Iris. “So, you’ve come to — what? Throw me out?”

  “I didn’t know you were here,” Iris says, surprised. Daisy studies her, her blue eyes narrowed, a hard, impenetrable expression on her face. Iris stares back, confused. She remembers what she has heard about her, that she does what she wants, takes off on the spur of the moment, comes back as unexpectedly, that men want her, that she has always had any man she wants. The longer their eyes engage, the more something is slowly beginning to stir in Iris’s bosom. Some funny feeling — some — At the same time she notices Daisy’s expression is losing its hardness, her mouth softening. She looks away again, blinking, and in that gesture, Daisy’s uncertainty, Iris’s uneasiness, her sense of something strange going on here begins to form itself into a hint, then a notion, then a shattering certainty.

  “You were having an affair with my husband,” she says, and there are so many emotions rising in her at once: rage, hatred, loss, a sense of profound betrayal that knocks speech right out of her. She thinks of his corpse again, lying as if he were merely asleep, on the couch in the room behind her, then turns aside, runs a couple of steps away from Daisy, back to the house. Tears start to pour out, but this so humiliates her in front of this woman that she manages to stop. And besides, she’s thinking for the first time: I did the same thing — I had an affair with James, and for the first time, she feels shame over it. But confusion overcomes her and she takes a minute, panting, breathing deeply, then turns back to Daisy.

  Daisy is standing silently. She wears faded tight Levi’s, scuffed brown riding boots, a denim shirt, a heavy silver and turquoise Indian bracelet on one tanned wrist, a man’s wristwatch on the other, and her straw stetson dangles from her fingers. She’s excruciatingly slender, and taller than Iris by at least six inches. She’s younger too, Iris notices, although she’s pleased to see apprehension in her face and, also, hints of the toll that hard living has taken.

  “I thought you must know,” Daisy says quietly. “Everybody else around here did, at least they suspected it.” She shrugs. “They would have thought that about me no matter what.”

  “How would I know?” Iris spits out furiously. “I hardly saw him from the time he moved out here in the early spring.” Then she thinks, Ramona and Vance — they must have known, and she sits down hard on the old railway ties that form the step into the cabin. “Why?” she asks, not really of Daisy. Daisy shrugs again.

  “I was there,” she says, “and you weren’t.” When Iris looks up at her, she’s surprised to see that hard expression back. “Don’t worry,” Daisy says. “He loved you.” Iris would like to tell her to shut up because she knows it isn’t true, Barney had stopped loving her. But she doesn’t, she’s overcome with amazement at her own naivete, her stupidity. Small birds in the branches of a pine a few feet away from them have begun to quarrel noisily among themselves. Iris wants to tell them to shut up. Just shut up. She remembers now that she’d thought he couldn’t be having an affair because there was no one to have it with. Now she knows he didn’t want to make love to her any more because he was making love to Daisy. She sees the two of them in bed together and is sickened and humiliated. She looks up at Daisy and says with great bitterness, “I suppose he thought I’d never know.”

  “I don’t blame you if you hate me.”

  “I do hate you,” she says. “You smug bitch.” She isn’t even surprised to hear herself say this, nor sorry. She finds she’d like to walk across the few feet that separate them and slap this woman’s face hard. Daisy flushes so slightly that Iris isn’t sure she’s not imagining it. “And him,” she says, “That lying —” but words won’t come for whatever it is Barney has done to her. Now she has had a minute to think about it, she isn’t surprised after all. It’s the logical thing, given how their marriage had gone. Resentment and anger is leaking slowly out of her, being replaced by a heavy, dragging regret, by sorrow over the whole business — their marriage, which started out so perfect, going so wrong. Surely her affair with James came out of whatever was wrong with it, that she’d not been able to see, and not out of — whatever she’d thought it was: her own benevolence in the face of James’s flattering need for her, his amazing passion for her. “We should have had children,” she says. Daisy goes rigid.

  “What do you mean?” Daisy asks. “Adopt them?”

  “No!” Iris says. “Have them, you know? Give birth?” This is a challenge, an insult. At least I could have had them if I’d wanted to, she thinks. Another thing everybody says about Daisy is that she can’t have children and that’s why she’s always been so wild. Some childhood horse accident or something.

  “If you think being a father will stop a man from being unfaithful, you’re crazy.” Then Daisy turns away as if she plans to go over to her horse, mount it, and ride away. But she stops abruptly in mid-stride, and turns back t
o Iris. “Are you telling me —” She hesitates. “Don’t you know?”

  The small birds in the pine behind Daisy gather themselves into a bunch and whirr up out of the tree and then down to vanish in the tall grass at the edge of the stream. A few yellow leaves float by them on the water.

  “Know what?” she asks finally.

  “That —” Daisy frowns as if she can’t decide whether to go on or not. She lifts her eyes to Iris’s and studies her across the distance between them. Iris would like to walk away across the stream, back to her car, but she stands slowly to face Daisy. “That Barney had himself tested and he couldn’t have children either.” Iris knows she means, the same as me. As if that gave them rights Iris doesn’t have.

  “Liar,” she says. “You lie!” Daisy flushes, shakes her head slowly, adamantly, no. “How do you know that?”

  “He told me, when I — when we talked about my not having any kids either. He said it didn’t matter to you, because you didn’t want children.” She walks the rest of the way back to the tree stump and sits, her shoulders slumped, the straw stetson falling from her fingers to the ground. She may be crying. Iris is unmoved; she’s thinking, This would explain why he finally stopped bothering me about children.

  “He never told me,” Iris says. “I didn’t know. Why didn’t he tell me? When did he have himself tested? Where?”

  “I don’t know,” Daisy says. “Ten years or more ago, I think. I don’t know where. Montana, I suppose.” Then she straightens her back slowly, arching it a little, clenches one fist and presses it against her chest, and an expression of such pain crosses her face that Iris looks away.

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” she says again, plaintively.

  “It isn’t easy to admit that you’re infertile,” Daisy replies sadly. “You don’t feel like a worthwhile person when you can’t have children. A man —” she hesitates, “a man feels like he’s not a man. That’s why he could tell me and he couldn’t tell you. I am famously infertile.” She drawls this last, her voice filled with bitterness.

  Iris doesn’t know what she feels: Regret? Anger at herself? Sorrow at the loss of her unborn babies? She rubs her face with both hands, trying to think. Sweat has broken out again all over her body, and she’s furious too at this annoyance, and then at the reminder that it’s too late, it’s too late, it’s too late. Barney, how could you do this to me?

  Daisy has been watching her apprehensively as if she thinks she might need to run from Iris, or maybe to rush to her aid should she faint or go crazy. But Iris is trying to figure out what really matters here, because she can’t handle this confusion.

  “Did he love you?” she asks Daisy finally. Daisy looks down at her scuffed boots and turns one ankle as if considering it.

  “I don’t think so,” she says lightly. “Nope,” she says. “No, he was going through something. I don’t know what. He talked about you — Iris this, Iris that. Never anything important, just —” She shrugs. “What we had —” She falls silent, then goes on. “We had a good time.” But the way she says it, Iris knows that it wasn’t a good time at all, not for Daisy. Maybe not even for Barney. And knowing him as she does, far better than this woman could know him, she knows too with a frightening sadness that Barney had to have loved Daisy, and in ways Iris would have wanted for herself, but could never arouse in him in all those years together.

  Passion, she supposes. Yes, everything about Daisy’s history tells Iris that she’s a passionate woman, and the truth is, as Iris has known since her affair with James Springer who was passion itself, that she is not a passionate person. She has something else, grace, maybe, or — she doesn’t know what. But passion belongs to other people, not to her.

  Then she remembers what happened to her in Lannie’s apartment in Addis Ababa, when she beat her head against the floor, when she cried because she loved Jay and he didn’t love her, and she could never have him. Even though she understands that her anguish was for Barney’s loss and not for Jay’s. During that endless time of Lannie’s near-death she had found that thing in herself that had always been missing — her passion — that she thought she’d been born without and had been glad of. But no, she is just like everyone else after all — as capable of suffering and of joy — has always been like everyone else, only has refused to allow it.

  How afraid she has been of suffering. She remembers an hour alone with Ramona in the hospital in Chinook. Ramona had just given birth to her second, or is it her third child. Iris sat in the visitor’s chair beside her, leaning close to her, Ramona tired, her cheeks flushed with colour. “What is it like?” she asked. Or maybe she didn’t ask, but Ramona told her, “It’s pain and work and more pain until you think you can’t endure it — You can’t imagine how bad it is, Iris. It’s like having your bones pulled apart. But then, at that moment when the baby slides at last out of you, what you feel is heat, and the gush of blood, it seems like the whole world is coloured with that blood, this whole ravishing world is made of women’s blood.”

  And Iris refusing that female darkness. Not understanding then that it is the darkness that lights the world.

  She glances at Daisy and finds she has stopped hating her.

  “I could have had children, as far as I know, anyway, but I didn’t want them.” Daisy stares, wide-eyed into Iris’s face as if she’s seeing something there that surprises her. “What I’ve found out since Barney’s death — about being human — that — that is what I tried so hard to escape knowing. I thought that if I had children, I would never again be safe.” She presses her palms together in an unconscious gesture of prayer. “I didn’t want to know that there is no safety, that no one can ever escape the lot that goes with being a human being. Maybe, in the end, I was just a coward.”

  She turns away from Daisy then, and walks to the water’s edge, crosses, gets in her car, and starts it. As she manoeuvres the car into a turn to drive away, Iris sees Daisy still standing there across the water. She seems very small.

  “I’ve come to take you home with me,” Iris says to the figure sitting beside the low window, one arm resting on the sill next to a pink geranium, the legs hidden under an afghan. She hears a laugh, a light, musical sound that confuses her and, with the sunlight coming through the window casting the woman in shadow, she pauses, wondering for an instant if she has come to the wrong room.

  She advances, and the shadowy figure sitting in the chaise longue acquires features, the mauve bedjacket with the frill at the neck, the narrow satin bow quivering against the drooping, puckered skin of the throat, the two gaunt, trembling hands resting now on the afghan, and the eyes, so blue, two beams of light in the dim old face surrounded by the thin cloud of white hair.

  “Home?” her mother says, her voice quavering. “I’ve been here long enough to call this home.” She closes her eyes and lets her head fall back to rest against the leather couch. Iris stoops to kiss her withered, powder-dry cheek, and sits.

  “I should never have left you here,” Iris says. “It was wrong of me. It was so wrong and I’m so terribly sorry. Forgive me, Mom.” Lily opens her eyes. Their unseemly brightness today frightens Iris, it speaks to her of some otherworldliness creeping into this still living person. She is afraid, she finds, of what these old, wise eyes might see.

  “Did I ever ask to come back to the farm?” her mother asks. Iris is taken aback. No, her mother had never asked to come home. “Do you think that because I’m old I have no sense of what my life should be?”

  “It isn’t that I think that exactly,” she says. “But only that you aren’t strong enough to do things without help, and so I thought maybe you haven’t …” Known, she was about to say.

  “I have thought it often,” her mother says. “But I have known what must be given up.” Iris sits back, recognizing that her mother has finally gone somewhere that Iris will not be able to follow.

  And her eyes, so large and glittering, so unlike her mother’s eyes. It’s as if with them Lily is swallowing
the whole earth and everything that’s on it — all of us, Iris thinks, and our past together, and the barn and the rippling yellow grasses and the swallows and the radishes in her garden and the babies and the blue-checked apron she wore on Easter Sunday, and the tines of the fork she held in her hand when she ate, and the yellow cup her mother gave her to drink out of when she, Lily, was a child and that I, Iris, still have somewhere. She is eating the earth, my mother is, this life, she is going to digest it at last and then leave it behind. And I too am now no more than that yellow cup, so precious and so insignificant, or the tang of the earth in the spring, or the white stones on the prairie.

  She would cry out, Mother, do not leave me. But the futility of this is clear. It is as if the earth has rumbled and split, opening a chasm between the two of them.

  Her mother has always loomed so large in her life, an omnipresent, giant shadow in which Iris has walked. She has not remembered that her mother walked in her mother’s shadow, and that mother in hers, and on and on, backwards into darkness. That her love and reverence for her mother are both necessary and over. That in some new and profound way she can barely imagine, she will have to cast off her daughterhood to achieve herself.

  And, of course, she knows her mother will die soon, and that she, Iris, like every other child, will never cease to miss her and to mourn her. For a split second she holds both these worlds in her cupped hand and cannot tell which is the more true or the least true, which matters more and which less. And then she thinks, I will bear my grief in this knowledge; I will stop being the child in order to become the mother.

  It is late afternoon, the days are growing shorter, and Iris is leaving the deck to go for a walk wanting to enjoy every moment of every day before the snow comes, the storms and blizzards, the shattering cold that is life on the Great Plains, that linger in back of the bright shadows of the hottest day. The caragana hedges are losing their leaves, and beyond them the harvested fields lie in shattered strips of brown or thin rows of gold where the crops have been taken. A good harvest, a good profit made. For the last time, she tells herself and feels excitement.