Abubech comes. Iris opens the door and when Abubech gets a good look at her, her face changes and she says gravely, “She is very ill, I know it. The doctor will return today, but there really is nothing more that can be done. You are taking the best care for her. No one could do better.” By Abubech’s expression Iris realizes that she has let herself go. It scares her a little: she hasn’t even noticed that her hair is a rat’s nest, she has that musty smell of the unwashed, and her clothes are wrinkled and soiled. She wants to explain to Abubech that if only Lannie would get well, or if that man who’s watching her would go away, Iris would stop being so crazy. But she says nothing, obeys when Abubech makes her bathe and wash her hair while she watches Lannie.
After she has dressed in clean clothes, she finds Abubech has made coffee and wants her to sit with her on the cushions in the front room.
“Do you have children?” Abubech asks her. This is a surprising question coming from an Ethiopian with their exquisite courtesy, but after a second Iris recognizes that Abubech is trying to bring her back to normalcy.
“No, we had no children of our own,” she tells her politely, conversationally, as if what seems like only moments ago she hadn’t been on her knees banging her head against the floor. Then she says, “My husband died a few months ago,” and it’s as if she’d forgotten, because there’s this bang in her chest and things slip sideways, and she has to blink and blink again before they right themselves. And in that instant it is clear to her that she has been mourning Barney.
She can smell the faint residue of the cleaning fluid she’d been using. The factory down the road must be spewing that oily smoke again, because she can smell it in the air too. Sunlight breaks through the glass doors to spill across the floor and lie warm on her bare toes. The room is small and clean and anonymous; it is the residence of someone who does not want to live.
Iris clears her throat, swallows, and continues. “I realized I needed to tell Lannie. I needed to find her. She — we lost touch with her a few years ago,” and is embarrassed again at having to admit that for so long she didn’t even try to find her. She moistens her lips with her tongue, swallows again, before she goes on. “Lannie was very troubled, because of her mother’s death, you know. And then her father — her father left her with us, and took her brother and sister to live with other relatives in the city.” She pauses to listen, but there is no sound from the bedroom. “I was just as glad to have her gone. More than once I wondered if Barney hadn’t begun to love her more than he did me. Mostly, though, I had become so afraid of what was inside her.” In the ensuing silence it surprises Iris a little that she didn’t just admit this to herself a long time ago, instead of all the excuses she’d thought up for why Lannie should stay lost. “If she let it — her real emotions — out, I thought it would destroy us — her, Barney, me.”
Time has stopped; nothing moves; all is silenced. Then horns
honk on the street below, and the familiar roar of traffic rushing by returns. Tiredness, pure exhaustion, sweeps slowly and fully through Iris’s body.
When Abubech speaks finally, the timbre of her voice hasn’t changed at all; it’s as if Iris hasn’t just voiced these shattering things.
“You are a farmer?” she asks gently. Iris nods, opens her mouth and waits to see if she can still speak. Amazingly, the voice that comes is as calm as Abubech’s.
“I was born there, but I didn’t do the actual farming myself. My father did it, and then my husband. But now I’m the one who has to make the decisions about it. Maybe I’ll have to learn how to farm myself, I guess.”
“I believe Lannie said it’s a big farm?”
“It’s the biggest in the district. Everyone is after it now that Barney’s — gone.” Abubech is carrying on with her own thoughts, and a vibrancy that wasn’t there before has entered her voice.
“What a wonderful thing that is,” she says. “A woman with much land. What power! How good it is to think of a woman with power.”
Iris says, with a rueful laugh, “Power? I’m helpless. I need a man to run the place for me.” Abubech gives her a stare so grim Iris has to look away.
“Land is power,” she tells Iris firmly, deliberately. “If you were a woman in this country, you would know it. Men will try to take it from you, but you must hold on to it. You must use it to make changes.”
“But no one wants to steal it, they want to buy or rent … or marry it.”
“But you see, no one wants you to have it, am I right? Men don’t like a woman having land, especially not a lot of land. They think all land is theirs.” When Iris says nothing, Abubech goes on. “In this country someone will take the land away from a woman, even if it is hers legally. If her husband dies, the land will go back to her husband’s family and she will be turned out. Or to stay she will have to marry the husband’s brother. If she has no children, or no son, she’ll be divorced and driven away.” She’s looking hard at Iris, compelling her to listen, to understand. “If women have no enforceable rights to
land, they will never have any power, they will continue to be beaten and starved. Did you know that most of the people who died during the famine, even in the relief camps, were women and children? They were more undernourished to start with and so they died sooner. Even most refugees are men. And women will continue to be circumcised — it may be women who perform the operation, but they do it for men who believe that if women feel no sexual pleasure, they will not be unfaithful. They tell them that the way God made women’s bodies is dirty and ugly.”
She is growing fierce, Iris is a little frightened of her, but most of all, she’s aghast at what she’s hearing. Recognizing that this is more than Iris can handle, Abubech breathes deeply several times. “Forgive me — I talk too much. It is my failing. But — you must think hard about what you have and how to use it.”
After a moment she tells Abubech about the company trying to buy up all the land around Chinook, how she isn’t sure what to do and is giving herself a year to make a final decision.
“It is greed,” Abubech says simply. “Greed for wealth, greed for power that begins with the ownership of land. They are harassing and stealing and undercutting people all over the world to get control of their farmland. Here in Africa it is especially bad. Or if they don’t want to own the land outright, they want to put the farmer in such debt for his chemical fertilizers, his pesticides and herbicides, even his hybrid seeds — in your country for his machinery — that they don’t need to own the land because they have control of it anyway.” Looking away from Iris, she says “There is evil in the world.”
From the other room comes a loud cry in a timbre so strange that Iris’s skin prickles. Both she and Abubech start; they scramble to their feet and run the few steps into the bedroom. Lannie is trying to sit up, her eyes are huge and liquid, searching.
“Where, where?” Lannie asks them, lifting her head from her pillows. “I need — I want —” and then her words break apart into meaningless sounds. Abubech waits at the foot of the bed while Iris, speaking soothingly to Lannie, wipes her face with the cloth she keeps by the bed, and smooths her forehead with one hand while she pulls her pillows into place with the other. At last Lannie relaxes visibly and
her eyelids drop shut. Iris checks to make sure the intravenous needle hasn’t come out of her wrist and that the fluid is running as it’s supposed to.
Abubech says, “It’s late. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Iris sits beside Lannie with a basin of cool water, wiping away her sweat, now and then moistening her lips, and despite the I.V., dropping water with a teaspoon into her parched mouth. Lannie is moaning and tossing again, and Iris moves the basin out of the way before Lannie tips it. She talks to her quietly, “It’s all right. Everything’s fine. You’re going to be fine,” all the time stroking her face or her shoulders or holding Lannie’s hand, so thin now she can see through the bluish skin. Eventually Lannie quiets again, and Iris resumes stroking her face.
She thinks of the men she has loved. She wonders if she really loved Jay. I desired him, she tells herself, and I felt something very strong for him that I thought — that seems to me even now — was love. It puzzles her. I loved James Springer, because he was so full of passion and Barney and I in all our years together never experienced that kind of physical passion for each other. I loved Barney, first because he was a romantic figure — handsome and remote — then I loved him as if he were part of me, as if there was no separation between us. But there was.
Lannie’s always transparent skin is shiny now, stretched tight over the delicate bones of her face. She’s so beautiful, Iris thinks, and I never really noticed it before. I’ve been such a coward, and yet so fierce and desperate, I would not let anything disturb my little paradise — not Lannie’s anguish, not Barney’s struggles, not even my own, unlived life, my Self that was begging to get out. She thinks again of her mother, lets her mind slide back over the years to the picnics the two of them used to have on the grass overlooking the deep coulee, the way her mother changed when she was there, a peace settled over her that used to extend itself to Iris so that she moved inside it too. Her mother would kneel and smell the grasses, she would separate the stalks gently and say to Iris, “See? This one is called speargrass, and this one is blue-joint.” How she loved that land. When we were there, her love of it was in every line of her body, every footstep, every breath she took.
She thinks of her father’s announcement at his birthday dinner:
Your mother and I are moving to town so you two can have the place to yourselves.
Her father did not love the land, no. But her mother did. I drove her out, as surely as if I’d locked the door against her. She prays that she is still alive, so that she, Iris, may admit to her crime, ask forgiveness, and at last try to, in some way, make it up to her mother.
She walks through a palace or a cathedral somewhere in the heart of Ethiopia; this is a building she should recognize, she learned about it in the camps, but she can’t call its name to mind. The building is vast, an endless labyrinth of ruined and half-ruined rooms, some with arches still standing, but no walls on either side, some with walls standing but only raw-edged openings torn in the piled rocks instead of doorways. An icy wind howls through it, moaning some message she can’t quite understand. She keeps walking, stumbling and falling over rocks, cutting herself on their sharp edges, she’s bleeding from her knees and shins and hands. Every step leads her farther down toward the dark centre of the building, which is also a monument, although she doesn’t know what it commemorates.
Now the stones ooze a stinking tarlike liquid; they menace her with their evil. She’s panicky with fear, but she can go only forward, farther down, the way behind her obliterated as she passes, until at last she reaches the centre. Here, in the blackest of all the rooms, an obelisk towers over her, both its zenith and its foundation erased in impenetrable darkness. Its four sides are intricately carved with symbols, interspersed with strange birds and animals. One has the head of a lion, the outspread wings of a great bird, the tail of a lizard. A line of elephants marches nose to tail, a badger flings up dirt, an eagle soars over craggy mountaintops, a giant fish roils a vast, inky sea. The sun sends its burning rays earthward, the moon moves through its stages, all the myriad stars in the sky send out steady beams of crystal light.
As she stares in awe up at the obelisk, the symbols break apart into words, the words dissolve into pictures, the pictures come to life. Armies swarm, roaring, swords clash, guns boom and crash, fountains
of blood spout with heavy, sickening splashes across its surface. Kings, queens, sultans, and emperors pass by, the fringe of their red and purple processional umbrellas swaying over jewelled thrones carried by crews of scarred, naked slaves. Floodwaters pour over cities drowning them, fires consume them before her eyes, hurricanes push up walls of water to swamp flotillas of ships bobbing between mountainous walls of water, avalanches roar down mountainsides to crush screaming villagers. Women, children, soldiers, old people die, swords plunged into their chests, hanging from gallows, blood streaming from bullet wounds, contorted in torture chambers: headless, armless, limbless, begging for food, for mercy, for life.
It is the history of the world; history is a monster.
Lannie cries out wildly, and Iris leaps up from her bed of cushions, getting tangled in the one blanket she’s allotted herself, and clutches Lannie who has managed to stand and seems to be trying to climb up the wall. Iris pulls her down.
“Lannie, Lannie! Stop it, Lannie! Stop it!” She’s at her wits’ end, she doesn’t know what to do. When she has Lannie lying down and covered, the I.V. dangling uselessly at her bedside, out of her need to do something, anything, she takes Lannie’s pulse. For an instant, she can’t find it, and then at Iris’s fingertips laid against her wrist-bone, a tiny bird seems to be struggling: a weak flutter of wings, a pause, another flurry, longer this time, and then a pause so long that Iris is rising from her chair before she feels the quiver of its wings again.
It can’t go on like this for many more hours. Impulses rush through Iris: to run screaming into the street, to lift Lannie into her arms and drag her onto a plane for Canada, to fall, weeping in despair, over her body. To have come all this way to find her, only to have her die in her arms. Because it’s perfectly clear to her at this moment that Lannie is dying.
She will not panic. Instead, she washes Lannie’s face with fresh warm water, rinses it clean of soap and pats it dry. She does the same with her hands, then places her arms carefully by her sides under the bedclothes. She draws up the sheets and blankets, smooths them, and folds them down neatly under Lannie’s chin. She kneels to say a prayer for Lannie’s recovery, the first formal prayer she has said
outside of church in years. She is sitting vigil now, the job of women and priests.
As she waits quietly by Lannie’s bedside, Barney’s funeral begins to march past her eyes. She lets it come, watching as if she hadn’t been there at the time. The gathering in the church vestibule as the funeral director organized the mourners into rows according to closeness to the departed, Iris last, with Howard at her side, behind Barney’s mother and father, his sister Fay and her husband, their four children, Barney’s aunts and uncles and cousins, Iris’s relatives, and ahead of the other relations, Ramona and Vance and their family. How cold the church had been, as the house had been earlier that morning. Even though the sun shone in the open doors of the vestibule, she shivered with the cold.