Then she hears a motor and lifts her head to see the Swans’ red car putt-putting up the access road to the driveway where she stands. It halts a few feet from her, the driver’s door opens and Jay Anselm emerges. For an instant her knees go weak before she steadies herself. He comes toward her slowly not quite frowning, his mouth wavering, his eyes troubled, glances off to the fields and then back to her as he reaches her. They stand facing each other, neither speaking for a long moment. He clears his throat, she moves her feet, they both speak at once, laugh, and Iris says, “You first,” and when he seems to be having trouble finding something to say now she has given her permission, she says, “It’s nice to see you, what are you doing here?”
“I’ve decided to stay in Chinook, at least for a while. The novel —” He shrugs, smiles at her, but when he bends his face close to kiss her, she turns her head so that his kiss lands on her cheek. “You’re angry,” he says. Now she’s searching quickly through herself to find that centre so newly discovered, out of which truth flows. She steps back, away from him.
“I was about to go for a walk,” she says. “Would you like to come?” They set out walking, squeezing through the hedge, rounding the yard, then moving side by side down the machinery trail that leads to the coulee where months ago he kissed her for the first time, where Barney came to help her on the day of his funeral, where her grandparents first settled when they came from the Old World to make a home in the new one. They don’t speak as they walk; it is as if he can divine her need to be silent.
At the patch of prairie he goes immediately to the edge of the coulee and stands staring out over the immense view beyond the small curving river glinting softly in the fading golden light, toward the purple river cliffs and above them to the brilliant, deep blue of the late fall sky. She walks past the stone circles, past the depression that is all that’s left of her grandparents’ lives, past the hapless, decaying old barn. The grass is stiff and yellow and smells of dust.
“How beautiful it is here,” he says, but she is looking at the earth.
“It’s dry, there’s been no rain, pray for snow this winter.” And yet, there is such beauty in the brilliance of winter. And after it, comes spring.
“You’re angry because I left you. I had to go, I had things to do —”
“I’m not angry,” she says quietly. “I was hurt, I admit that, but if I’m angry with anyone, it’s with myself. My fascination with you was very foolish. I thought you were something you were not —”
He turns back to her quickly. “What did you think I was?” The quickness of his question startles her.
“I thought you were my youth, I guess. For one crazy moment I thought I could have it back, as if all those years of Barney — all those years of living could be scrubbed away and I could start all over again.” He’s still staring at her, wants her to say something more, or something different. It makes her pause in surprise at what she sees now is his desperation. “It isn’t your fault it’s over, or at least not in any way you seem to be able to do anything about. I met this handsome, interesting young man and I went sailing off into never-never land. You’re a figment of my imagination, Jay.” She says this last softly, laughing a little at herself, then lifting her head to gaze around her at the prairie, at the fields of her farm, and back toward the house she has lived in nearly all her life. “I was lost,” she says to him. “But now I’m found.” He’s moving toward her, she sees he wants to hold her and kiss her, to will her back into his spell, and she puts up her hand to stop him.
For when she looks at him she sees him clearly even though the sun is low on the horizon and all the shadows are growing long and crickets are lilting in the narrow slough below them. He is a handsome man, although not as beautiful as she once thought. Gazing at him she can see what a lot of trouble he is. At her age she hasn’t the energy for a man like this. “You’d be better off with a woman your own age.” He’s silent, gazing at her.
Looking down at the circle of stones they’ve inadvertently stopped inside, he says, “Our lovemaking was no imaginary event. It was good —”
“Jay. I thought I was in love with you. It was foolish of me; it was wrong. Sometimes I can hardly believe what a fool I’ve been —” She tries again. “I was desperate — I couldn’t see a future so I grabbed at a chance to go backwards, to be a girl again. As if anyone ever could. Life is a stream and it only runs in one direction.”
“Iris,” he says, moving toward her again. “I —”
“It runs to the sea, Jay,” she tells him. “That’s where it’s going — to the sea.”
Iris wakes suddenly as if someone has been calling her. It’s four in the morning, but she’s wholly awake and alert, knows she won’t sleep again. She has only partly drawn the curtains and the moon is shining in across her bed, flooding the carpet and the mirrored wall with its white light. She listens. Is someone in the room with her? In the silvery shadows at the end of the bed a figure is taking shape, a dark robe or a cape, a head covered with a nun’s veil or a shamma, a woman’s face, the round cheek, the dark eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Then it’s gone, melts slowly away into the shadows.
She listens again, but the house is silent, Lannie in her room sound asleep, and Misty in hers. How good it feels to have the house full.
The moonlight illumines the pages of the book she has left open on her new desk. She lies still musing about all the books and papers she still has to read. There’s so much to learn that sometimes she thinks she will never be able to educate herself properly about the issues that she really cares deeply about: food for the hungry, crops, biodiversity, water supplies, the true nature of the grassland and its place in some not-yet-formulated system to provide food security.
She regrets deeply all the wasted years, the education she turned away from. Whenever she despairs, thinking herself too old to learn all she needs to, she forces herself to count the years ahead of her, to spread them out and see them as day after day, and then she knows that as long as she stops wasting time, she has enough left to find out what she needs to know, and to do what she wants to do.
She hopes in two years’ time, with Lannie’s, Vance’s, and Ramona’s help, maybe even Misty’s too, to have found a legal way to establish people on her land, to have the capital in place to supply them with homes, equipment, and a living, to have recruited the first special few, and to have done enough research to know what seed she needs — the native seeds of the original short, mixed grass prairie, and from nearby — and to have purchased some to begin her reclamation project, to have built a greenhouse and started the plants herself so as to have more seed.
They have agreed to set the first people up on a plot adjacent to the mouth of the coulee because there is already a water supply there, and because it is still in native prairie. Already, she and Vance have begun to locate the few patches of native grass remaining in their area in order to get more seed most nearly indigenous to her fields. She sees a husband and wife hand-broadcasting the seed mixture from seeds, or using one of the grass seeders other prairie-restorationists have invented. It’s an experiment, she says to herself, there may be a better way, and if there is, in time we’ll find it.
She and Lannie have begun to search out the experts and to talk with them. Soon they’ll travel to Arizona to see all the systems people there have developed to save precious water. She sees in the shadowed ceiling a council of all the people who’ll come to help them, the farmers of the new millennium, deep in discussion about alternatives, exchanging ideas, arguing, shouting, laughing together. A thrill runs down her back. This will come, she’s sure of it.
And, too, they’ve had their first confrontations with the doubters, telling them her dream. To start over again, here, on this land, first, to put it back the way it was, and then to find out what it was we should have done a hundred years ago. “We are not too old a country, we are not too overpopulated; we haven’t yet done irrevocable damage. We can learn from the Native peop
le. We will try to find a way for all of us to have a place of our own that will somehow provide for us.” Their countering arguments are predictable, and are not without truth. But she can answer them.
A hundred years, she thinks to herself, pleased with the sound of it. It will take at least that long to set things on these thirteen and some sections to rights again. And when she thinks of the long struggle ahead, she finds she’s not afraid of all those who say she’s crazy, a dreamer and a fool.
She pushes back the covers, gets out of bed, finds her heavy dressing gown, and goes downstairs, thinking as she passes the dining room the carpenters will be back in three or four hours. They are cutting out a window in the wall facing the land where already she has had a section of the caragana hedge removed. They’re building shelves for her new office too. She goes outside and onto the deck, where she leans on the frost-covered railing and stares out over the glinting silver that is the frozen lawn and the newly thin shadows that are leafless shrubs and trees.
The night is still beyond stillness, hushed beyond quiet. It is familiar to Iris, this magical time in the night, whose quality is different from any comparable hush of the daylight hours. She sees everything out there: the trees, the sky, the stars, the moon, the dormant grass below, the quicksilver air, as one whole, and something that lives. She conceives of all that as if that living presence is listening to her, waiting on her in some calm, eternal, and benevolent way.
An owl begins to call softly from the trees along the far side of the house. In their stark, uneven shadow she can’t pick out the bird, but it sings on softly, as if it means to remind her of something she has forgotten, or to call up something in her spirit that has always been there, but buried under the rush and disorder of life: a link, her connection to this earth. She thinks of the woman she has just dreamt of, recalls the Madonna in the painting on the church wall in Lalibela.
In the clear light from the moon she sees that her hands resting on the railing are veined and rough, becoming the hands of an old woman. She had thought she and Barney would grow old together, and now, here she is, facing old age without him. She feels such yearning now for a man’s love. It troubles her deeply, even though she knows now how much more there is to the world than the love of one man.
She straightens and lifts her eyes to the sky. She doesn’t think she has ever seen so many stars, as if they’ve been multiplying while she has been occupied. They hang above her, the dazzling blooms of the cosmic tree. Somewhere, far out along the river’s edge or at the mouth of the coulee coyotes are howling out their ancient grief — or is it joy? She listens carefully. Their voices make her think of Ethiopia, of the people there who even now may be abandoning their huts, trekking miles across the barren, dusty countryside in search of food. The sound runs through her bones and muscles and blood with all of its primeval yearning. She could lift her head and howl along with them.
The coyotes fall silent and she listens, waiting for them to start up again, but there is no sound, no revelation rushing at her from the crystalline darkness of the centuries. She experiences a second’s piercing loneliness, remembers the frightening dream she had of being cast out alone into the empty universe. It occurs to her now that maybe it was only a memory of her own birth, the inexorable rush from the safety of the womb into this care-laden world. But the dream of Eden, she thinks, it is just as real.
The owl flies up from the bushes, a rustling blur of white wings, an angel, departing suddenly for celestial realms.
Acknowledgements
In November 1995, at the invitation of the CEO, John Martin, and the Board of Directors of USC Canada, I went to Ethiopia to observe their “Seeds of Survival” program, a project which consists of scientists and farmers working together. I travelled to the plots of farmers using USC Canada’s and the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute’s elite landraces (instead of hybrid seeds), and attended lectures about biodiversity with fellow students from all over the developing world, all of whom were involved in agriculture and the preservation of landraces, and thus biodiversity, in their home countries. John Martin and other members of the USC staff in Canada — Laura Breuer and Susan Fisher — and SoS/Ethiopia workers, field manager Hailu Getu, researchers Dr. Mara Tsega and Bayush Tsegaye, and the eminent plant breeders Dr. Melaku Worede and Dr. Tesfaye Tesemma were most generous in answering my endless questions.
Many people gave their time and their expert knowledge about aspects of this novel, in particular, about their experiences in Ethiopia, and about prairie restoration. I also wish to thank retired nurse Mary Howard; Verna Thompson, editor of the Eston Press Review, who sent me material about a controversial land deal in her area; Kathy Baylis of the National Farmers’ Union, who sent me information about plant patenting legislation; John Morriss, editor of the Manitoba Co-operator, who sent me articles concerning food and food security; and Dan Patterson, manager of Saskatchewan’s Farm Land Security Board, who talked with me in a general way about issues the board deals with. Gerald Schmitz, Research Branch, Library of Parliament, took time from his busy schedule to read and comment on the manuscript.
I cannot thank nurse Beth Mathews of Perth, Ontario, enough for her help in describing the camp where she worked in Ethiopia during the Great Famine of 1984–1985, nor Tanys Hickerty Kush, formerly of Eastend, also a nurse, who allowed me to read her diary of the two years she spent mostly in Sidamo, Ethiopia, during the same time.
In a visit to Ottawa I spoke with Bon E. Cummings of CIDA, Gaetane Gascon and Mel Peters of Oxfam-Canada, Oxfam Canada staff, and Alice Doell, all who worked in Ethiopia during the war and the famine, or are working there now. Major (retd.) Ted Itani showed me photos and explained to me how the food drops in 1988 and 1989, which he organized, were done and why. Blaine Marchand of CIDA and Ron Elliott of CUSO answered my questions over the phone, and Nancy Gordon of CARE talked with me in my kitchen one July day about her experiences in Kenya and Rwanda, and aid issues in general. Alison Hancock of the CBC was most helpful, as was Brian Stewart, who was kind enough to answer my questions and to show me videotape, some of which was not shown on television. His prizewinning documentary on Tigrayans during and after the famine and war is the most eloquent testament to the courage of Ethiopians.
Carol Shepstone spent hours digging out up-to-date information about Ethiopia, including the reports of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO), and an account of an October 1995 meeting of a group of American Ethiopianists with Prime Minister Meles, in Washington.
In the matter of prairie restoration, Peter Jonker of the University of Saskatchewan; Don Gayton, a range manager (and author) in British Columbia; the eminent plant geneticist, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas; and a host of other range ecologists, biologists, neighbours, and just plain prairie-lovers put up with my questions. The distinguished and much-loved Professor Emeritus, University of Saskatchewan, J. Stan Rowe, was gracious beyond words, as was Dr. Zoheir Abouguendia of Saskatchewan’s New Pastures and Grazing Project. Both of them, out of their extensive knowledge of prairie ecology and of restoration projects, helped me elaborate on my basic idea.
Others too numerous to name influenced and taught me. The first of these is always my husband Peter who taught me everything of importance that I know about this agricultural life. I am especially grateful to my editor and publisher, Phyllis Bruce, who believed in this book when I’d almost stopped believing in it, and who wouldn’t let me quit too soon. Too often to mention she saved me from myself, and I am endlessly grateful for her wisdom. My agent, Jan Whitford, was encouraging and helpful. I could not have written this book without their help.
Nonetheless, all the views in this novel are my own and no one else’s and I take full responsibility for them, and for any errors or omissions or misinterpretations. Nor are any of these characters or experiences taken directly from real life, but are my own invention.
Copyright
(In writing about Ethiopia I have followed established c
onventions for the English spelling of Amharic words.)
The Garden of Eden
Copyright © 1998 by Sharon Butala.
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by
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