Read Online Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sharon Butala
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and nearly all of it cultivated, unfolding for miles out on each side of the road, tilting upward to a faint line of purple hills at the bottom of the sky. She sets the car on cruise and loosens her grip on the steering wheel. Driving through this vast, open landscape always has this relaxing effect on her, and makes the town seem claustrophobic.
Why won’t Barney come home? When he does, he gets out of the truck and stands for a moment with his back to the house and to her and stares out over the farm: field after field, a rolling green carpet in the late spring, a sea of pale gold by August, shadows dappling its stately, slow-moving waves, in winter a blue-shadowed, gleaming white ocean. Or he looks out to the sky-filled space that is the river valley with its white-flecked cliffs and its steep dun-coloured sides. It’s as if he’s searching for something there that, judging by the puzzled expression he wears when he at last turns to her, he never seems to find. How could he have chosen thick coniferous forest and precipitous hills, a landscape where he can see neither the sunset nor the sunrise, over the heart-stopping vistas of the farm?
That moment of clear sunlight has gone, it has begun to rain again, and, with an exasperated “Damn,” she turns on the wipers. She hasn’t told Barney where she’s going, and for an instant she tenses again — what if she misses his call? She’d have phoned him, but knows it’s hopeless to try to catch him inside. I’ll be home by ten, she tells herself, and he never phones before dark; if I don’t answer, surely he’ll keep trying. She reminds herself, too, that as soon as calving is over in another month at the most, he’ll spend more time at the farm with her, but this thought doesn’t comfort her the way it used to. She no longer holds the key to his heart. He’s retreating from her, growing smaller and smaller, and she doesn’t know how to bring him back.
By the time she reaches the outskirts of the small city spread down the wide, shallow valley and partway up its sides, it has again stopped raining. She drives to the nursing home where it sits high on the sloping valley wall. As she parks, everyone Iris sees around her is astranger. This too is something she can’t seem to get used to. What with the rapid, bewildering changes in the farm economy, bankruptcies and land losses, consolidation of small farms into big ones like her own have emptied out the countryside. Half the people she knows have gone to British Columbia or Alberta, to the cities, to find work, her own once huge extended family reduced to a fraction of what it was when she was a child.
As she approaches the nursing desk to make the obligatory inquiry about her mother — not that they ever have anything to tell her that she can’t see for herself — she meets a handsome woman walking out. The woman glances at her, a glint of something, recognition maybe, passes over her features, but she doesn’t speak or nod. Iris thinks maybe she ought to know her, although she can’t place that assured stride, that smooth cap of fine fair hair, that delicately boned face with its haughty expression.
“Who was that?” she asks the nurse on duty, Rosalie, who’d been a couple of years ahead of her in high school in Chinook. The woman is moving quickly down the steps on the other side of the glass doors.
“Daisy Castle,” Rosalie says. “Don’t you know her? She lives over west on the border. Her dad’s Irv Castle?” Iris remembers now. Wild as a coyote, people said, when she was a girl. “Her mother’s here too,” Rosalie goes on. “Alzheimer’s.” She reaches for Iris’s mother’s chart. “Nothing new here,” she says of Lily. Old people totter past, or roll by in wheelchairs. A TV set in the corner is on too loud, a soap that nobody’s watching. Iris, staring down at Rosalie’s tight bun of grey hair, is thinking vaguely, she ought to colour it, it makes her look so old that way.
Why won’t Barney come home? When he does, he gets out of the truck and stands for a moment with his back to the house and to her and stares out over the farm: field after field, a rolling green carpet in the late spring, a sea of pale gold by August, shadows dappling its stately, slow-moving waves, in winter a blue-shadowed, gleaming white ocean. Or he looks out to the sky-filled space that is the river valley with its white-flecked cliffs and its steep dun-coloured sides. It’s as if he’s searching for something there that, judging by the puzzled expression he wears when he at last turns to her, he never seems to find. How could he have chosen thick coniferous forest and precipitous hills, a landscape where he can see neither the sunset nor the sunrise, over the heart-stopping vistas of the farm?
That moment of clear sunlight has gone, it has begun to rain again, and, with an exasperated “Damn,” she turns on the wipers. She hasn’t told Barney where she’s going, and for an instant she tenses again — what if she misses his call? She’d have phoned him, but knows it’s hopeless to try to catch him inside. I’ll be home by ten, she tells herself, and he never phones before dark; if I don’t answer, surely he’ll keep trying. She reminds herself, too, that as soon as calving is over in another month at the most, he’ll spend more time at the farm with her, but this thought doesn’t comfort her the way it used to. She no longer holds the key to his heart. He’s retreating from her, growing smaller and smaller, and she doesn’t know how to bring him back.
By the time she reaches the outskirts of the small city spread down the wide, shallow valley and partway up its sides, it has again stopped raining. She drives to the nursing home where it sits high on the sloping valley wall. As she parks, everyone Iris sees around her is astranger. This too is something she can’t seem to get used to. What with the rapid, bewildering changes in the farm economy, bankruptcies and land losses, consolidation of small farms into big ones like her own have emptied out the countryside. Half the people she knows have gone to British Columbia or Alberta, to the cities, to find work, her own once huge extended family reduced to a fraction of what it was when she was a child.
As she approaches the nursing desk to make the obligatory inquiry about her mother — not that they ever have anything to tell her that she can’t see for herself — she meets a handsome woman walking out. The woman glances at her, a glint of something, recognition maybe, passes over her features, but she doesn’t speak or nod. Iris thinks maybe she ought to know her, although she can’t place that assured stride, that smooth cap of fine fair hair, that delicately boned face with its haughty expression.
“Who was that?” she asks the nurse on duty, Rosalie, who’d been a couple of years ahead of her in high school in Chinook. The woman is moving quickly down the steps on the other side of the glass doors.
“Daisy Castle,” Rosalie says. “Don’t you know her? She lives over west on the border. Her dad’s Irv Castle?” Iris remembers now. Wild as a coyote, people said, when she was a girl. “Her mother’s here too,” Rosalie goes on. “Alzheimer’s.” She reaches for Iris’s mother’s chart. “Nothing new here,” she says of Lily. Old people totter past, or roll by in wheelchairs. A TV set in the corner is on too loud, a soap that nobody’s watching. Iris, staring down at Rosalie’s tight bun of grey hair, is thinking vaguely, she ought to colour it, it makes her look so old that way.
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