“Why didn’t someone call me?” Iris asked, visions of another funeral rushing past her, so that she had to put her hands down on the desk to support herself until the fear diminished.
“We tried,” the nurse answered, fixing her with a hostile stare. “It would help if you had an answering machine.”
She wanted to explain about Barney, about the chaos her life had become, but nothing came out except a breathless “How bad is she?” And in the instant before the nurse answered, she saw before her the church where James’s funeral was held. A wooden structure more than seventy-five years old, the oldest church in the district, standing alone now, in the middle of wheat fields. Simple and small with a short, plain spire and three arched windows down each side. She saw the patient air it had acquired, a kind of weary knowingness, as James had, as if nothing could surprise it any more, or hurt it, or change it. His was the last funeral held there, nobody uses it any more. All of the past vanishing, as if it didn’t matter.
“She’s fine,” the nurse told her briskly, and Iris thought of the stone circles on the prairie, still there after hundreds of years. The thought soothed her and her heart slowed to its normal pace. “Goodness knows what upset her. But she was restless and it isn’t good for them to be restless when their hearts aren’t too steady. Doctor Wiebe gave her a little something to quiet her.”
Although Iris sat at her mother’s side for two hours, the “little something” kept her mother asleep the entire time, and dreading her task, Iris couldn’t bring herself even to try to wake her. In the end she’d left without telling her about Barney.
Today, tentatively pushing open the door to her mother’s room, she stops in surprise. The curtains are open, the room flooded with afternoon sun, and on the windowsill the geraniums Iris started herself from seeds and brought when they were only a couple of inches tall are starting to bloom red and pink. Her mother sits in the lounge chair facing the door and the television set, her daisy afghan covering her legs. A large book of photographs is open on her lap and she looks up from it to Iris standing in the open door. She says nothing, though, and her silence disconcerts Iris. “Hi, Mom,” she says. She crosses the room quickly, kisses her mother, sets the guest book
qfrom the funeral reception on the table at her mother’s elbow, and seats herself on the visitor’s chair. She wonders if maybe her mother is looking at her this way because she doesn’t recognize her.
“I have been waiting for you to tell me about your husband’s death,” her mother says, mildly enough, but Iris freezes, she can feel her face flushing; for an instant she’s fourteen years old again, trying to explain away some failure of hers to her mother.
“I tried,” she says hastily. “I came but —”
“I overheard it,” her mother interrupts in that throaty whisper that is all that’s left of her voice. “Two nurses talking outside my door. Thinking I was asleep.” Her gaze doesn’t waver. “It was a nasty shock.”
Iris is caught between surprise at her mother’s clarity and protest at being accused again: she’s a widow, she’s bereaved, why is everyone intent on making her feel guilty?
“I did try to tell you, Mom.” That long-buried anger at her mother’s attitude toward her marriage surfaces again. “You never liked him,” she says and looks away.
“Indeed, I did not,” her mother retorts, and lets her head fall back against the headrest. “Nor did I much like what he became.”
“Which is what?” Iris demands.
“He was false,” she says, in a faintly surprised tone, as if she can’t believe Iris didn’t know this. Iris is about to defend Barney, but this remark makes her pause.
“False?” she asks, her voice coming out rough and unsure. Her mother doesn’t say anything, then her expression softens and she closes her paper-thin eyelids; Iris can see the quick movements of her eyes behind them before she opens them again.
“For a moment I’d forgotten how much in love with him you were,” she says. “It was what I had to keep reminding myself. That you loved him, and — love is blind, they say.” She turns her pale, delicately wrinkled face to Iris’s.
“He was a good man,” Iris says, too surprised to be indignant. “He was a good husband.”
“Indeed,” her mother says again in a newly softened voice.
“He worked hard,” she points out. “He wasn’t lazy, and he was
smart, as smart as Dad. And he took care of Lannie when Howard asked him to … He took her on as a daughter!”
“None of those things,” her mother says.
“What, then?”
“Oh, Iris,” her mother says gently. “Did you never see that he wasn’t happy farming? Didn’t see that it was impossible for our two families ever to blend, that by your marriage you drove a wedge into our family life? Did you never see that Barney — “Of course she knew Barney wasn’t at home in her family, she could hardly miss that, it’s just that it wasn’t Barney’s fault. “Did you not understand the quality of his affection for you?”
“He loved me!” Iris says quickly. Her face is hot again, she can feel her hands beginning to tremble.
“My dear,” her mother says so softly Iris has to lean forward to hear her. Then she sighs, as if she’s lost her train of thought, or maybe decided against pursuing it. “He was a confused, complicated man.” Iris’s anger is again mixed with surprise. How could her mother think such a thing? Barney was as straightforward as the day is long, he was — “I always thought that in the end he would make you unhappy.” Pictures tumble swiftly through Iris’s head: how close she and Barney had been, their few quarrels that were over nothing really, the way in which she’d always felt she could never quite reach his core — and then it’s James she thinks of. Her affair with James, and for one instant it’s clear to her why she risked her good name, her marriage, everything, to be with him: because he held nothing back from her, nor she with him. Because with him she was like a seed lying in fertile earth and he was the warmth and darkness that sheltered and nurtured her and would have helped her grow, if they could have been together all the time, if he had lived longer. While she and Barney —
“I loved him, Mom,” she says, and doesn’t know herself if she means Barney or James. “And he loved me.” She means Barney now, and says this last with all the firmness she can muster. “Loved,” she repeats. “It was love, not … anything else.” But there is no faltering in her mother’s eyes, no admission of error, no regret; instead, there is that old assessing gaze that Iris learned from her childhood to dread. It meant that once again she was not measuring up.
“I am so sorry he died so soon,” her mother says. “You have a hard road ahead of you.” In the long silence between them, Iris feels the sting —
the quality of his affection
— decides her mother won’t reply if she does ask what she means.
But then, suddenly, a scene comes into her mind: sitting at the kitchen table with her father, just before the wedding. “Barney’s marrying a lot of land,” her father said gruffly, then he’d looked at her steadily, from under his thick black eyebrows. “What?” then, “He’s marrying me,” laughing, thinking he was making a joke. “I’m trying to tell you something, girl,” her father had said, still stern. And his message had slowly begun to sink in — Barney was marrying her because some day he’d own the Thomas farm. “That’s absolutely ridiculous!” she’d said, and walked out of the room.
She searches rapidly backward through the years of their marriage and finds no scene, no clue that would tell her her father had been right. No, she insists to herself, he did love me; he married me because he wanted me. All those years he was faithful to me. I was the one who was unfaithful. She thinks of Luke’s remark, that she’d got through life so far without a mark on her. So what if bad things didn’t happen to her — is that something to be ashamed of? She would like to ask her mother, but she doesn’t.
Her mother stirs, closes the heavy book on her lap and gestures to Iris to take it away. Iris uses both hands to lift it off her mother’s lap and set it at the foot of her bed. When she turns back to her, her mother has let her head fall back against the chair, but her eyes are open and she’s watching Iris again in that distant way, as if Iris is a stranger, not the daughter she bore with her own body, and loved, and nourished, and taught.
“I’ve had some time to think now, and I realize that Lannie needs to know about Barney. They loved each other, and she’d want to know. So,” Iris takes a deep breath, “I’ve decided to find her.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” her mother says, as if she’s merely remarking on the weather. “I should imagine by now she’s ready to be found.”
“What?” Again, Iris is taken aback.
“She went away; she failed; she could not bring herself to return.”
Her mother lifts one small-boned, blue-shadowed, thin hand and gives a slow, brief wave. “Too much time has passed; she needs to be found.”
“How do you know that?”
“You told me she left to find her father: but Howard can’t be found.” She laughs softly, wryly. “No, there’s no father to be found in Howard. So she’s out there, wandering the earth, looking for … herself, one supposes,” her mother says, and picks at the yellow centre of a daisy. “Yes, you go find her. And when you do, bring her here to see me. Will you do that?”
“You know I will, Mom,” Iris says, and she reaches out and takes one of her mother’s chilly, skin-and-bone hands and, impulsively, bends and brushes it with her lips. Even if she’s not ready to admit to any of what her mother’s said to her, she is humbled by the acuity of her view, and by her certainty, perhaps even grateful that it is offered since she feels so lost herself these days. She wonders, too, if age will bring such clarity to her.
She has said goodbye to Ramona and Vance and promised to phone Ramona every day and Ramona has promised to visit her mother weekly for her; she has emptied the fridge of perishables, unplugged the television set and turned off the satellite system against electrical storms; her bag is packed and standing at the kitchen door.
But she finds she cannot leave. Up the stairs she goes to wander through the four bedrooms, and down to roam through the basement, past the pool table nobody has played on since last Christmas, past the liquor cabinet full of bottles of alcohol nobody has touched in months and maybe never will again. The television set, the tape player, the table where they’d sometimes had the neighbours in to play cards on winter nights. Everything has a layer of dust on it, and abruptly, like a child, she writes on the piano lid,
IRIS,
then stands back, looking down at what she has done. It’s over, she thinks. My life here is over.
Then she feels a kind of reeling in her head, as if the floor has suddenly tilted sideways; for an instant everything goes black, and when colour comes back into the rug and walls and the old plaid
sofa, a picture goes through her mind so fast it hardly has time to register: she is holding out her wrist and cutting at it with something — but she won’t allow herself to see that. She doesn’t have to go, she can stay if she wants to; nobody is making her go. But that notion has to be cast out too. The emptiness of the house now is unbearable. She’s afraid she’ll never be able to sleep again if she doesn’t find Lannie. She walks slowly up the basement stairs, putting her feet down heavily so that they make a noise on each step, as if to reassure herself by the sound that she exists. She goes into the dining room full of heavy, old-fashioned mahogany furniture that belonged to her parents and, before that, to her grandparents, stopping at the sideboard where her collection of family pictures sits. Women in high-necked dresses with tight bodices and long, full skirts, well-fed, pompous-looking men with drooping moustaches and hard eyes. Barney in a picture that’s not even a year old. He refused to go to a portrait photographer with her so she’d had to resort to framing a snapshot taken by Ramona at one of their joint barbecues. She reminds herself that she should visit his grave, she hasn’t been there yet, but decides to wait till her return. She picks the picture up and slides it into her coat pocket. Lannie’s high school graduation picture is there, but it’s too big to carry, so she leaves it.
She stands a moment longer, but these photos of the dead fill her with a kind of prickly annoyance. All of them, she thinks, and still I’ve come to this: alone, a widow, all the past in the end meaningless. Maybe
they
are what is causing her bad dreams, her sleeplessness, it’s the weight of their deaths dragging her down into their darkness. She turns away abruptly, picks up her suitcase and goes out, pulling the door firmly shut behind her.
Yet, as she turns her car onto the main grid that leads away into the world, she cannot stop herself from a quick glance back. There it is: the house she has lived in most of her life, its dark brown a rich hue in the spring light, the conical peaks of the steel grain bins behind the house rising above the poplars and the caragana hedge to glint in the morning sun. She slows and stares at all of it, tries to fix it in memory, as if by doing so she will secure it forever to the spot where it stands. So it will be there when she gets back.
She turns back to the road ahead of her where above the town, the cliffs of the river valley hover mistily blue and white, and above them is the vast expanse of sky, far too big for her to see all of it in the limits of her windshield. It takes her breath away, and she experiences a moment’s fleeting joy — she’s free — quickly followed by: I’m alone, I have no destination. But though her hands on the steering wheel are damp with her sudden, powerful foreboding, she does not turn the car around and go back.
Once she’s out racing down the highway, it gets easier, and when she remembers that her ultimate destination is shrouded in mystery, she decides instead to think only of the first step: the ranch in the foothills near Calgary. It’s like learning to walk, this trying to find her new way in the world on her own.
It’s cool and windy — it’s always windy in the spring — but the sky is cloudless and an intense blue, and the early May light so lucid that, like a tourist, she can’t stop looking at the fields and hills as she approaches and passes them. The light is merciless; it brings out every colour, every shade, every landform and slough and straggly, neglected, gap-toothed caragana hedge where there was once a settler’s home. In the few places where the old houses still stand, their windows and doors boarded, shingles missing, she feels again her community’s respect, maybe it’s even wonder, that families of six and eight children lived in their tiny confines, without running water or electricity, and braving the horrendous winters with nothing but coal and wood fires. The light gives the shabby, greyed structures beauty, lends them a certain dignity.