Garden of Eden (54 page)

Lannie finds herself moving to Iris’s side. The wind that buffeted them now and then has quietened, and overhead very high in the sky a jet stream arches silently. They stand quietly side by side, looking out over the countryside.

“How could I trust anyone?” Lannie asks. “If my mother and my father both could go away and leave me, how could I trust you and Barney not to do the same? How could I trust anyone or anything at all?” Now she realizes Iris has always known this, and not known what to do, beyond never leaving herself.

She finds herself thinking about Mariam, the little girl she loved so long ago, in the famine camp in Ethiopia. She’d be maybe sixteen now, she would have suffered the trauma of her ritual mutilation. If she had survived it, she might even be a mother herself. Mariam had lost everyone and still she had smiled at Lannie and held out her arms to her. But no, she can’t weigh her own losses against Mariam’s. She long ago gave up such foolish, pointless machinations, as if they might make any difference to the weight of her lot. Fate singled her out; fate chose her.

Now she remembers a long ago visit to the rock churches at Lalibela, a vacation she’d taken with some of the men and women she’d been working with after the crops had begun to grow again, the people had dispersed, and the camp had closed. The painting high on the wall, or perhaps it was the ceiling of one of the churches, of the Virgin Mary spinning as the angel Gabriel announces Mary’s fate to her. She remembers that in the painting Mary is an Ethiopian woman; she gazes up mutely at the angel, who is not in the painting, her black eyes wide with wonder and fear, her left arm arrested high above her shoulder as she draws up the red spinning thread.

“Lannie?” Iris has been speaking to her. Lannie turns to her.

“Do you remember how in the story of the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve are driven out because Eve tempts him with the apple?”

“Of course I do,” Iris says. “It was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and when God comes, Eve blames it on
the serpent, and Adam blames it on her. And then women have to bear children in sorrow, or something, ever since, as punishment.”

“It’s a dumb story,” Lannie declares. “There’s another one that’s just as true. I’m beginning to think it’s truer.”

“Tell me,” Iris asks softly.

Lannie tells her about the maiden Persephone, who had been stolen from her mother by Hades while she was gathering flowers in a meadow, and taken in his chariot down to his underworld kingdom. Her mother, Demeter, had gone to Zeus to beg him to intercede with Hades and return her daughter to her. Zeus agreed, but on the condition that she must not have eaten anything while she was below. But Hades had offered Persephone a pomegranate, and she had eaten some of it, and thus, the Fates decreed that she might return to her mother and the sunlit world of her girlhood for only half the year, while she must spend the other half below as Hades’s sorrowful queen in the realms of the dead.

“Oh, I see,” Iris says. “It’s another kind of Fall — the Fall of maidens stolen from the safety and innocence of their mothers’ world into the world of men.”

“Something like that.”

“I think it’s true,” Iris says. “So men accuse women of stealing their innocence and driving them out of the Garden of Eden, and women accuse men of the same.”

“Only we don’t beat and starve and rape and mutilate men,” Lannie says. “We don’t want to own all the land; we don’t start wars; we don’t —”

She’s thinking of Ethiopia now, of all she was a witness to there, and of all she did. I was not just a voyeur of others’ suffering; if I went there for the wrong reasons, I stayed and worked until I earned the right to be there. A burden she has been carrying lifts with this thought, leaving a strange pleasing lightness.

Iris is speaking. “I know that’s all true, but it seems to me that it’s not the whole truth about men and women. It seems to me the true story is bigger than that.” She falls into a silence.

“What do you mean?” Lannie asks, puzzled. Then she thinks how all her life there has been nothing she wouldn’t give to have had a mother.

Down in this narrow valley there isn’t a breath of wind, the tall pines stand motionless, the leaves of the few deciduous trees dotted among them now turned golden or red. The stream runs past quickly, a moving ribbon of sunlight, so shallow that with the window rolled down Iris hears its passage as a slight, tinkling song. The corrals are empty, there’s not an animal in sight, but the small cabin looks exactly the same as that terrible day she came here through rain and mud with Luke. She shudders, but this is a journey she has to complete.

After the long, dry summer the stream is barely ten feet wide and at its deepest it’s well below her boot-tops. She moves slowly, remembering crossing the swollen stream, a rope looped over her shoulder, falling, half drowning, pulling herself upright, gasping and choking while water coursed over her. As she moves up the slope toward the cabin, she feels a tightening at the bottom of her throat. The place is eery, the sun-and-shade dappling on the cabin walls, its very stillness in the warm fall light, seem to carry a message that she isn’t sure she’d want to read if she could. She reaches the door, lifts the latch, and steps inside.

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 to 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?”