Garden of Eden (48 page)

They drive past one of the town’s oldest houses, a two-storey, rambling frame house. It sits on a corner lot bordered by ancient poplars, some with their upper branches sawed off to accommodate power lines. The house has been freshly painted pale blue with white trim, and she recognizes it as having belonged to James and Aurora Springer. Children’s toys litter the big, grassy yard and an overturned tricycle blocks the path to the house.

“Angela and Orland bought it,” Iris says, not looking at Lannie, as if she divines what Lannie is thinking. “They live there now.”

“Oh,” Lannie says, in as noncommittal a tone as she can muster, but she’s remembering picking up James’s vial of sleeping pills from the table by his bed when she was supposed to be helping Iris clean, slipping them into her pocket.

God, she’s weary. Weary right through her bones. But the small wooden house of her childhood sits right there, and with it come voices, pictures, smells, and sounds. She can hardly believe how much she has pushed aside, buried, not forgotten exactly, but managed not to think about for such a long time. She’d almost succeeded in convincing herself of what she’d claimed to Rob, that she had no history. Now it’s settling on her; weightless for years, she feels herself growing denser, heavier, by the second. She makes an effort to fight it, but she can’t, not anymore.

Panic strikes her, bringing moisture out onto her palms and her upper lip, and she wipes her mouth and rubs her hands on her jeans
to dry them. Now that she has thought this — that she’ll have to face all of it — she wants to stop it at once, but she’s terrified she can’t, that she can’t go back to the way she was.

It’s evening when they finally arrive on the farm. The high late summer sky is deepening, not a cloud mars its brilliance, and the violent wind has died, as it often does in the evening. The air will be perfectly still for a couple of hours. Iris recognizes the habits of her own climate with a mixture of weary satisfaction and annoyance. It’s good to be back, but as they come up the gravel road toward the place that has been her home almost her entire life, it seems not so inevitable as it always has, not so unquestionably right. And this new view of it, instead of worrying her, makes her feel alert, critical. She regrets the loss of her own certainty even as she’s glad of it.

How much more bitter is the pang she feels now for Barney, that he isn’t inside waiting to greet her, that tonight his side of the bed will be empty, that she will never see him again. But the car has to be put in the garage, the luggage taken inside, a snack has to be made and eaten. Humbly, she sets herself to these tasks.

Lily is napping in her wheelchair in front of the television set in the common room off the entrance when Iris and Lannie enter the nursing home. It is Iris’s second visit since her return, but Lannie’s first.

“Mother,” Iris says softly, placing her hand lightly on her mother’s arm. Under its thin covering of flesh the bone seems even narrower and less solid than before. Her mother wakes with a little start.

“You’re back,” she says, and smiles. “Did you find her?” she asks, as Iris kisses her cheek and straightens. Iris nods, unsurprised by her mother’s forgetfulness, turning toward Lannie who waits beside her. “I am so glad to see you,” her mother says, lifting her hand to Lannie. Lannie takes it, smiles, nods with a touch of embarrassment, but doesn’t speak.

“Let’s go to your room, Mom,” Iris says. Lannie falls in beside her as she pushes the wheelchair down the hall. In Lily’s room she helps Iris move her mother onto the lounge chair and cover her with the afghan. When she and Lannie have pulled up chairs, one on each
side of her, her mother says to Iris, “I’ve been hanging on, waiting for your return.” She speaks to Iris, but then she pats Lannie’s hand where it rests at the edge of the afghan.

“Lannie’s been sick,” Iris tells her again. “She’s still far from well, she’s going to need a couple more months of rest, but —”

“But I made it all the way back from Ethiopia,” Lannie says mildly. “So an afternoon trip here is easy beside that.”

“I wanted to see you both again, before …” Lily doesn’t finish her thought, shifts her gaze to the wall, and sighs almost imperceptibly. “Especially you,” she says to Lannie. “You’d be surprised how little you’ve changed since you used to come to my house for Sunday supper when you were a little girl.”

“I liked going to your house,” Lannie says softly. “You used to tell me stories — I’d forgotten that.”

“Now, listen,” Lily says. “Listen to me. Do something with that farm.” When she says nothing more, Iris and Lannie glance in puzzlement at each other, then back to Lily. She has closed her eyes, but her lips move as if she’s talking to herself and her eyes dart behind her eyelids.

“When I was a child it was a beautiful place.” They have to lean close to hear her. “Flocks of snowbirds and horned larks and blackbirds — and the meadowlarks! Singing everywhere … Nights, the fields were full of rabbits … swift foxes … coyotes sang to us all night and in the morning their tracks were all around the house. There were even prairie wolves, and before that — before my time — but not so long ago at all, they say there were grizzlies in the hills, and the buffalo! Millions of them swarmed across the prairie …” She opens her eyes, and looks into some memory-laden space between the two women listening intently to her. “The world was wild once, the air was rich with it. The prairie grass was so thick — it looked like it had been stirred with a stick, and all these little, sweet-smelling flowering grasses — full of birds’ nests in the spring. And over above the coulee there were burrowing owls, popping up from their holes to stare at you when you went by. And a great horned owl nested in the loft in the barn.” She pauses, her eyes lose their distant look and she drops them, gazing down at the afghan that years ago she’d crocheted herself.

Iris is growing more and more upset. She interrupts, “Mother —” “No,” her mother says. “No.” She lifts her eyes to Iris’s, then to Lannie’s. “Put that place back the way it was.” Iris draws back. “You do what you’re told, Iris,” Lily says, as if she knows what Iris is thinking, can see right into her.

Iris’s mind is whirring, trying to get a grip on what her mother is saying. It’s a stunning idea, but she’s wondering, Is that even possible? Abruptly Lannie stirs.

“I think —” Lannie sits up straight. “The land,” she says, about to go on, but Iris’s mother interrupts.

“The men are gone,” she says. “It’s in our hands at last.” Lannie says urgently, “It can be done, Iris. There are people who know how. There are places where it’s been done.” Iris is about to question her, but her mother is speaking again. Her words hang in the air like the peals of small bells: “‘Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin …’”

Iris suddenly remembers the moment her father announced that her parents would move to town: her mother turning away from Iris, turning her face into the shadows, sorrow settling forever into its lines. Never forgetting the betrayal of an uncomprehending — a fierce-willed, selfish young Iris. Never speaking of it to her. But I knew it, Iris thinks. Behind my sweet face — my
little-girl face
that Luke accused me of having — I was as cruel and as implacable as any force of nature. I knew what I was doing and I did it anyway. Because I was young, because I thought the world belonged to me, that anything I wanted I should have: the farm, the land. Not truly loving it herself, she had stolen it away from her mother.

Lannie makes a faint mewing sound, like a kitten. Tears spill down her cheeks; she makes no attempt to wipe them away. It is only when Iris sees the tears that she remembers Lannie never cries, never did even as a child, not even after her mother’s death. She stares in surprise, a warm flush starting in her abdomen and rising up through her chest. She recognizes it as hope.

They are having a barbecue. The picnic table is set under a grove of poplars in a sea of shin-high native grass beside Vance and Ramona’s dilapidated old two-storey frame house. Ramona and Vance, Iris and Lannie, are still sitting on the benches across the table from each other, the dishes with the remains of their hamburgers and cobs of corn are pushed to one end, mugs of hot coffee sit in front of each of them. Off to one side the Norman sons are playing scrub with two of the grandchildren, Kayla and Jason, and a couple of their friends. Every once in a while the crack of the bat hitting the ball rises over the birdsong, accompanied by shouts. Faintly, floating over a rise, they hear a cow bellowing, and sometimes the insistent bleat of a bull. The fire in the stone barbecue behind them has died down to glowing coals. Ramona says, “I guess we should get these dishes into the house.”

“Couple of hours still till dark,” Vance says. “Let the kids play.” There’s a long comfortable silence while Ramona and Vance stare out at Jason who’s running the makeshift bases and Ryan in the outfield, who’s throwing to one of the neighbour’s kids on second. A pair of nighthawks swoop over the picnic table, their cry like the creak of rusty hinges. Iris is thinking of Barney, of that last barbecue their two families had together on Iris and Barney’s deck the previous summer. He hadn’t bought his ranch yet, he hadn’t left her, he hadn’t died. But the signs were there: the signs of the high blood pressure that would kill him, the signs of his discontent. Only I couldn’t see them, I wouldn’t see them, she thinks sadly.

“That land agent been over yet?” Vance asks.

“Maybe he doesn’t know I’m back yet. It’s only been ten days.”

“Hah!” Ramona says. She and Iris exchange a glance that starts out wry and then fills with warmth. How I’ve missed her, Iris thinks, and she doesn’t just mean during her trip; she means since they were in high school together and best friends. “I’m so glad you’re home,” Ramona says to her as if the two of them are alone. “I was scared to death you’d never come back.”

“I was scared to death myself,” Iris tells her.

“And you, Lannie,” Ramona says. “When she got back and you were with her, I just jumped up and yelled. I hope you don’t go running off again the minute you get better.”

“I’m not planning to go anywhere.” Lannie is embarrassed.

“I got something to tell you,” Vance is speaking to Iris. “I made a deal — Ramona and me — we made a deal with that nature organization.” He waits for her to say something and when she doesn’t, he goes on. “Either I sold to that Schiff, or he paid off my note at the bank and took me over. My back was shoved against the wall and —”

“And I found this ad in a magazine,” Ramona tells her. “About saving the landscape? And Vance wasn’t home —” She looks at him, grinning, and he grins too. “And I just up and phoned ‘em.”

Vance says, “Fact is, Iris, that we don’t own this place any more —”

Ramona interrupts Iris’s gasp, “We never did own it. The bank owned it.”

“That nature group — it bought the place and left it in our hands to run it as long as we’re alive — run it the way we always run it.”

“Because we — and Vance’s dad before him — took such good care of the grass, we don’t have to change anything.”

“Just keep running it the same way, and when we’re too old, they’ll take over.”

“Our note’s paid off and we still got the place —”

“But what about the kids?” Iris asks uncertainly.

“Shawna and Debbie are married and gone,” Vance points out. “And Crystal’s going to marry Dave Gallant. They got a big place that’ll be his one day. Cody wants to be a vet, and Ryan —” He turns his head, his grin gone, to look across the wide space of grass to where Ryan is chasing a fly ball. “Lord knows I woulda liked him to
have this place. He’d like it too, but the way things are going in agriculture — They may let him stay on and run it when we’re gone. But we gotta face some truths and better he know now he’s got to find his own way to live. It was this or nothing, Iris,” he says, turning back to her. “He isn’t the only country boy getting kicked off the land these days.”

“At least he’ll have his childhood here to remember all his life,” Ramona says.

Iris contemplates what it must have cost them to finally make this renunciation, what sorrow it will cost their son, in the years to come, how he will have to make his reconciliation with his loss. It’s a minute before she can say “Good for you two!” knowing they do not want her commiserations. And Lannie joins in with “Congratulations.” For the first time this evening she’s showing signs of genuine interest.

“I’ve got something to tell you too,” Iris says. “Mother wants us to put our land back the way it was. That’s what she said.” She and Lannie glance at each other. “And I’ve been thinking that — maybe I will.”

“You mean seed it back to native prairie?” Ramona asks.

“Take this crop off, and then seed it all to grass,” Iris says, nodding.

“What?” Vance says. “Where did you get that notion?”

“You’re the one who taught me, Vance,” she says, although it wasn’t just Vance, it was her mother, it was Barney, it was Lannie, and especially Abubech. She doesn’t think she has ever seen Vance so at a loss, and she’s mightily pleased with herself, although, she tells herself, she’d do this even if he disapproved. Ramona exclaims, “You’re full of surprises too!”

“You still got that land buyer breathing down your neck,” Vance warns her. She ignores him.

“Lannie and I have been talking about whether we could do it and how we’d do it.”

“That’s the problem,” Lannie explains. “It would take a lot of expertise —”

“I know! Talk to the nature people who took over this place. They’d know how,” Ramona interrupts.

“Maybe sell to ‘em?” Vance suggests.

“I won’t sell,” Iris says, more sharply than she meant to.

“It’s called restoration — prairie restoration,” Lannie says. “There are plenty of experts around, and lots of literature, not to mention that there are projects all over the grasslands, although I believe mostly in tallgrass prairie.” Vance and Ramona stare at her and she colours faintly. “It was part of my job to help Abubech keep up on the literature about preserving biodiversity around the world: the temple grounds in Bangladesh, the cemeteries in the American West — that sort of thing. And there are all kinds of private individuals who are saving seeds and replanting parts of their own land.”