“Come in,” she says, trying to sound welcoming. “Please, sit down.” He hesitates, then comes around the sofa as she comes forward, stopping with the coffee table between them. In the better light flowing through the big window behind her Luke looks every second of his seventy-five years — no, he looks ninety. And his skin has that papery look of the very old, his face grey, as if he’s ill. “Are you all right?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer. Iris suddenly remembers she’s dressed in her housecoat and under it is only her sheer nightie. She reaches up and pulls the lapels of the dressing gown closed across her chest, holds them there with both hands.
“I had three sons,” Luke says. It’s as if his chest hurts and he has to squeeze the words out around the pain. She pulls the lapels tighter, clenches them in her fists. “Three sons,” he says, and puts a hand out to support himself on the back of one of the grey velvet wingback
chairs. “Howard no better than he should be. I know that. Wesley — had a good heart, Wesley, even if there wasn’t nothing upstairs. But the two of ‘em —” He breathes heavily for a minute. “They shamed me.”
Iris’s blood has begun to pound in her ears, and over it there’s a rushing sound, it’s the noise her breath is making as it speeds up and grows thinner. Luke goes on, relentless. “Barney. He was — the one. He was … my boy.” He opens his mouth, he’s struggling with himself, Iris can see his struggle. “It was you.”
At this, she cries out, “Luke!” A plea to him to stop before it’s too late, to not say what she knows he’s going to say, what she has always known he has wanted to say.
“You took my boy from me. You brought him here — You turned him into — your pet —” He casts one hand out in a violent gesture that would annihilate the luxurious living room, the entire house, Iris herself.
“Luke!” Now she’s angry. “He loved me!
He
wanted me!” Her words hurt her throat. She thinks,
He doesn’t like women.
She lets go of the lapels, moves closer to him. “You drove him away yourself with your meanness.”
He staggers back as if she has struck him, drops his eyes to the carpet, half turns away, and she wishes she could take back what she has just said, although for nearly thirty long years she has wanted to say it. Luke and Barney always quarrelled, they were always attacking each other, she’d stood between them lots of time, or Mary Ann did, before it came to blows. He has no right to blame her. But he isn’t finished yet.
“Not even any grandkids. At least Howard had a family.” It’s as if she hasn’t said what she has said. “Where are my grandkids?” Then, his face crumbling, “I got nothing left.”
She’s stunned by his accusation, there’d never been a word between them about grandchildren — unless he’d said something to Barney about it and Barney hadn’t told her. Faltering, she draws on her mother’s haughtiness, although even to her own ears she sounds dismayingly childish.
“That was between Barney and me. It is none of your business.” But suddenly she thinks, Is this what this emptiness is, no matter how hard I work, or how busy I keep myself? Is it that I haven’t our
children to comfort me, now that Barney’s gone? Without willing it, she moves to a chair and collapses into it.
“You think about what I said,” he warns her. He lifts one hand slowly to point at her, his small blue eyes gleaming like lasers, pinning her to her chair. “Because you’ve got through life so far without a mark on you. But I’m telling you, Barney’s gone for good. And that little-girl face of yours don’t work no more. You better just do some thinking.” He drops his arm, turns away. As he makes his way out of the living room and through the dining room, she can hear the heels of his boots smacking across the kitchen vinyl. The back door bangs shut. In a moment his truck starts up and rumbles away down the road, and still she sits on in the chair where he has felled her, as brutally as if he’d struck her with his fist.
“Hi, there, Iris,” Ramona calls as she gets out of their battered halfton that’s pulled to a halt on Iris’s driveway. She bends to retrieve a cake in a square, flat pan from the seat. Vance climbs slowly out of the driver’s seat and the sight of his worn, faded Levi’s, dusty riding boots, plaid, western-cut shirt, and dented, oil-stained stetson makes her heart miss a beat — Barney had returned to dressing this way after he’d gone to live on his ranch. And although Ramona’s been over often since Iris’s disaster, Iris hasn’t seen much of Vance, and when she did he was uncharacteristically subdued, pale behind his windburn, and dressed up in his suit, not looking like himself at all. They climb the steps to her, and Ramona, stooping to kiss Iris on the cheek, goes on cheerfully, “With all the stoppers, I thought you might be running out of stuff.”
Vance bends to brush Iris’s forehead with his lips too, then follows her, as Iris follows Ramona around the corner and into the kitchen. Ramona wears a loose, man’s shirt over her jeans to hide the stomach she has developed since the births of her children; she carries twenty extra pounds on her big-boned, strong frame. In high school she played basketball, volleyball, soccer, and now she handles horses as well as Vance. A tiny part of Iris, although she has no desire at all to have Ramona’s ranch life, envies her physical strength, the way she
handles her body, a sort of ease in it, an acceptance of it that Iris knows she lacks herself and which she doesn’t quite understand, thinks maybe it’s the result of Ramona’s always doing outdoor work like the men.
“What’s all that?” Ramona asks, peering into the dining room where the table has disappeared under stacks of paper.
“Mail. I haven’t touched it since the funeral, and it was just piling up —”
“Big job,” Vance says.
“I started by separating the magazines and newspapers from the letters,” Iris tells them, meaning to make light of the heap. “Then I separated the bills from the cards and letters about Barney. Then I separated the bills I can figure out what to do about — phone, power, fuel, crop spray, fertilizer — from the ones I can’t.”
Vance says, “That’d be all of mine. I can’t figure out what to do with any of ‘em.” The bills for the funeral are there too, and brochures from companies wanting to sell her a tombstone for Barney’s grave.
Ramona says in a firm voice, “What are the ones you can’t figure out?” Iris sees she means to help.
“Oh, Wheat Board documents, forms that have to be filled out from Sask. Agriculture and Agriculture Canada — that sort of thing.”
“You better go see your lawyer about them,” Vance says. “Or Luke could help you.”
Iris shrugs without replying — there’ll be no help from Luke and that last, vicious remark of his repeats itself in her head:
that little-girl face of yours.
She hurries to the coffee machine while they’re arranging themselves in chairs, one at each end of the table, the cake in the centre.
“That cake looks good yourself,” she says briskly over her shoulder. “A lot better than the leftovers I had for you.”
“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” Ramona says bluntly, studying her. Iris looks down at herself: neat beige cotton slacks, flowered blouse in bright pinks and greens whose cheeriness belies how she really feels. “Did you sleep last night?” Iris shrugs, she’s thinking about
Luke, who only a few hours ago had descended on her like an Old Testament prophet, scaring her to death. She says only, “It’s worse at night.”
“Don’t you worry, it’ll all work out. Just time,” Vance says, his voice hearty and a shade too loud.
“I sure wish I could help.” Ramona’s voice catches, and there’s a silence during which Iris is reminded that Vance and Ramona have lost an old, close friend, and she says, her voice also breaking, “I know you miss him.” Blinking, Vance looks away. Ramona swallows, then says, “Isn’t this weather great? Spring at long last.”
“Got any calves yet?” Iris asks, busying herself with the coffee ritual, taking mugs from the cupboard, spoons from the drawer, the cream pitcher from the fridge.
“Lots of ‘em,” Vance says. “Cute little buggers.”
“You should come over and see ‘em,” Ramona says, and there’s that all-too-familiar hint of hurt in her voice, which Iris hears with something between irritation and resignation. She wants to be the friend she used to be long ago, it’s only that — but she can’t change the facts that have spoiled their friendship: that she’s richer than Ramona, that Ramona has five children and now grandchildren too, and she has none.
Without answering, she carries the mugs, spoons, cream, and sugar to the table and sits down between them with her back to the counter where the coffee machine has begun to burble softly. They’ve left the inside kitchen door open and Iris is aware of the scented spring air flowing in through the screen in the outer door. In the trees red-winged blackbirds call to each other. Ramona and Vance lean toward her, listening with such attention that she’s disconcerted. She starts again. “I’ll tell you the truth,” she says, although she isn’t sure she knows what it is, nor does she know why, after all these years, this moment seems the right one to start revealing things — it’s just that they’ve been so good to her over these last few weeks. “You know I’ve always had a busy life —”
“We know, we know.” They nod vigorously. Iris hesitates, drops this tack, hasn’t she just told them she’ll tell the truth? If she can just find the words — “I always felt funny at your place.” It comes out
flat, insulting, and she feels Ramona stiffen. She hurries on. “I felt — It’s the kids,” she says, finally, and stops, her face growing warm.
“It’s true the place was always noisy, and kind of messy.” Ramona’s tone is careful, slightly injured, as Iris was afraid it would be. Now she’s staring at Vance who, in his turn, is gazing at the tabletop with an expression Iris can’t read.
“I mean,” she manages to say, sounding lame even to herself, “because I don’t have any.” She knows Ramona will interpret this as meaning she regrets having none of her own, which isn’t exactly what she intends at all, but she doesn’t know how to say so without making matters worse, since she’s pretty sure it would never occur to them, as it hasn’t to Luke, that there’s any purpose in life for a woman beyond having children. Ramona leans forward, exhaling gently, fastening her green-flecked hazel eyes on Iris’s face.
“Oh, I see!” she says, and Iris knows that Ramona believes Iris just finds it painful to be reminded of her childlessness. It occurs to her that they take it for granted she and Barney are childless because one of them, she bets they think it’s her, is infertile. Did this never occur to Luke? Or did — did Barney tell Luke that she refused to have children? Surely not!
When in her thirties and early forties she had been stricken by a sudden flurry of misgivings — that maybe she’d enjoy a baby like all her friends seem to, that children are a moral necessity in a marriage, that she has no right to deprive her own parents of grandchildren — she’d stopped taking her birth control pills only to find nothing happened. She doesn’t know why, but she felt sure that if she’d really wanted a baby, she’d have gotten pregnant. Then Barney had stopped talking about it, as if he’d finally agreed with her that they didn’t need children. Why suddenly, now, when he’s gone, and long after it had stopped coming up between the two of them, has the question arisen? She drops her head and smoothes her forehead with her fingertips.
“What’re you gonna do about seeding, Iris?” Vance inquires quickly. “I wonder if you shouldn’t try canola this year. Lots of moisture for it. Good price these days, too, and wheat prices are the pits. Hardly pays you to seed.” For twenty years now, every spring and
fall, Vance has let his own work go to help Barney seed and then harvest. There’s nobody left who knows the Thomas-Christie land as well as Vance does. “Got any contracts yet?”
For a second, Iris can’t think what he means, then she remembers. Farmers used to work on a quota system; you had so much cropland, you were entitled to market so many bushels of crop every year. Now they sign contracts to market a certain amount of crop, never mind their land base.
“Barney would only sign contracts after the crop was in the bin,” she says, realizing as she speaks that he has only been searching for a way to talk about the farm, that he and Ramona have come visiting at least partly to give her a nudge about this year’s crop. Ramona intervenes softly, “Vance, maybe we shouldn’t worry her about the farm right now.” Colour rises up from under the collar of Vance’s shirt to flush his tanned face.
“What else do we talk about every spring?” Iris asks. “Anyway, I need advice. I guess,” she adds morosely.
“What does Luke say?” Vance asks. Luke?
He says I’m an evil woman,
she thinks indignantly,
I, who’ve always tried to be a decent person.
When she doesn’t answer, Vance asks, “Got your land rented yet?” not looking at her. She shakes her head no, then realizes that if she’d been thinking of them instead of always herself, she’d have realized that the money Vance earns working for Barney is important to their income. They probably need to know if it’ll be there this spring or not.
“I know I should have talked to you,” she says lamely. “I’m really sorry. I have to figure out what to do.”
“Have people been bothering you?” Ramona asks. Glancing quickly at her Iris knows that the question of their own income has barely occurred to them. Their goodness shames her.
“I have had some offers to buy.”
“I wouldn’t sell yet,” Vance says slowly.
Iris knows he isn’t interested in buying. Vance is from an old ranching family. When everybody around, like Iris’s father, was breaking all his land because for a while there, if you were lucky and had enough land, you could get pretty rich farming, Vance and a few
others like him didn’t say much, but they resisted the trend, and now Vance’s small place is an island of native grass in a sea of farmland. Which is why he’s perpetually broke — his ranch isn’t big enough to start with, and instead of overstocking to pay the bills as so many of them do, he stubbornly understocks to save his grass. He has the best stand of native grass for miles in any direction, but he has had to work for Barney to make ends meet, and looks ten years older than he is from the year-round outdoor work. And Ramona too, Iris thinks. “It’s too soon to take such a drastic step,” he says. “Might be the wrong move right now.”