She and Howard make their way past the people who’d come too late to find seats and who stood in the back, down the wide aisle past crowded pew after crowded pew. There is no one on the side reserved for Iris’s oldest child. It was rightfully Lannie’s place, and Iris feels her absence acutely; she feels naked on that side. Even though Howard walks beside her, supporting her, he has hardly spoken to her. He looks grim, angry even, although his eyes are red. She remembers how on that interminable walk up the aisle Wesley’s funeral came back to her — nobody in the echoing church but a dozen family members, no choir, no banks of flowers. As if his life had been meaningless, his death unimportant. She remembers thinking then that her heart would break over poor Wesley.
As she makes the turn into the first pew under the pulpit, she glances past the rows of family, looking for Ramona. There she is, halfway back, wiping her eyes. In that second, behind Ramona’s family, Iris sees a row of strangers, which puzzles her until she realizes they’re the Castle family — the old man, his son, and his daughter Daisy. It amazes her that she could notice these things with one part of her mind while the other is hollow with the fact of Barney’s death. As she seats herself, the organist begins to play a lugubrious, tuneless noise and Barney’s funeral begins.
She sits crushed against Howard’s bulky arm, not moving away, partly because the row is crowded with the immediate family, and partly because she doesn’t want to leave the safety of his body. On her other side Mary Ann sobs audibly and Luke takes deep, slow breaths that quiver slightly and that everyone can hear. Iris doesn’t cry, although she wants to. Howard doesn’t turn to look at her or to comfort her. She can feel the whole time the strength of whatever it is he’s holding in, she doesn’t know what it is, she doesn’t want to know. She feels small and isolated and half-frozen without Barney there beside her while the twins boys, Barney’s distant relatives, their faces polished to a shine, sing two cowboy hymns in thin, unmusical voices, and Barney’s uncle Len, then the skip of his curling team, and finally Vance Norman give brief eulogies, which Iris can’t remember, only that Vance’s was terse, delivered through tight lips. The people stand to sing or pray, then sit with much rustling of garments, thumps, and coughs.
All the while, just ahead and to her right, she can see the expensive oak casket Ramona picked. She can see the hump of his knuckles where the undertaker had folded Barney’s hands on his chest. She knows Barney is wearing the navy blue pin-striped suit she picked for him, the white silk shirt, the dark red silk tie. She knows he looks perfect, if not the Barney she has been married to all those years.
When it is finally over, she tries to stand, but Howard has to put his hand under her elbow before she can get up. Behind her, she hears the creaks of the mourners getting to their feet. She takes three steps to Barney’s side. Howard and the funeral director stand discreetly nearby, ready to catch her if she falls or tries to get into the coffin with her husband. It seems to her that a wind is blowing through the church with a high, whining noise, engulfing her in its cold breath. She remembers how she put her hand out to touch him, to take his hands in hers, how she bent to put her face against his mouth one last time, but Howard and the funeral director each took an arm and moved her back. She knows that somebody is closing the coffin, but she doesn’t look up, and she doesn’t lift her head as she moves down the aisle behind it. She doesn’t see the pallbearers lift it down the church steps or put it in the back of the limousine. She
doesn’t know if she cried or not. She thinks perhaps she didn’t. She remembers how heavy the pain in her chest was, that she could hardly move because of it.
They are at the open grave high above the town, overlooking the whole valley. She remembers how from up there she could see the pockets of snow still resting in the clefts of the hills, and the returning hawks circling on the wind drafts above the river.
Then she is at the reception, seated at the centre of one side of a long table with Luke on her left and Mary Ann on her right. There is a babble of voices all around her and much laughter from those more distant from the family’s table. Howard stands before very long and walks among the tables, shaking hands and talking to this man and that. Luke doesn’t move, and Fay and Mary Ann speak in low voices to each other and, red-eyed, hand each other tissues. When everyone has eaten their fill of small, triangular sandwiches provided by the church ladies and the cakes shiny with icing, and drunk two cups each of tea or coffee, they form a long line to the table where the family sits.
That is the part Iris dreads most. She stands up, the better to speed the process. One by one the faces of the people of her community confront hers: lined faces, rough faces, faces dark with years in the sun and the wind, faces pale with illness or old age and, startled by grief into clairvoyance, she recognizes immanent death lurking there; she sees the bright inquisitive eyes of the young searching for explanations of this day, for news of the world; she locks eyes with those deepened with mute suffering and finds in those few humble ones mutual recognition, perhaps even comfort; she sees eyes with no shadows behind them, no depth at all, so that she wonders if those people are truly alive or any different from the deer hiding in shrubs or the badger digging a burrow into the earth, or if perhaps that blankness is evil. She shakes hands briefly with each person, tilting her head to receive polite kisses on her cheek, says, “Thank you,” over and over again, until the line dwindles and ends. She does not cry. Then Fay and Barry drive her home to the farm where relatives are waiting, having gone ahead, or, following in their own vehicles, are soon to arrive.
What she cannot forget is leaving Barney behind in his coffin in that hole in the frozen ground. They could drape it with all the fake green blankets they liked, it was still a hole in the ground and she had gone away and left Barney there. And she had not gone back, not even once. When a tombstone-maker had sent her his advertising material, she had thrown it in the garbage without reading it. She sees now that as soon as she gets home it will be necessary to get him a headstone, the most beautiful marble headstone she can find.
And then she understands that Barney is really dead.
Lannie is quiet, her chest rising and falling evenly, and Iris sits by her bedside and cries quietly. When she gets home she will fold Barney’s jackets and trousers and sweaters, shirts and underwear into boxes; she will empty the bathroom cabinet of his shaving lotion, his razors, his deodorant and toothpaste and toothbrush; she will clean out the drawers of his bedside table and throw away all those useless odds and ends he would toss into it every evening for want of a better place. She will keep his picture and his curling trophies; she will give his coin collection to his nephew Quinn whom he had tried and failed to make his son; she will give his framed high school diploma back to Mary Ann and Luke; to Fay she will give — she can’t think what is precious enough to give to the sister he’d stood by through all the vicissitudes of her unhappy life. Maybe the worn leather desk set Fay had given him as a teenager and that he’d used all these years. And his two silver pens.
The vast, rubble-strewn city is utterly silent; the night smothers its motion and noise. In the soothing ambience of this room closed off from the grim reality of the city, she finds something that is, if not exoneration, close to forgiveness of herself for all her many follies and sillinesses, her cruelties, her selfishness. It is, at least, a rueful acceptance of the woman she now recognizes as herself.
The room has grown peaceful, the flow of calm so strong it is tangible. It is something beyond the furniture, the damp and wrinkled sheets and blankets, beyond the unconscious woman, beyond even the shadows in the corners, the dusky ceiling. In this miraculous calm
Iris feels herself clearly: her toes, one by one, her fingers — their tips, their sinews, the flesh of her palms — the muscles in her thighs and calves and arms, the bones of her ankles and wrists, her womb, her breasts, the pulse in her chest and throat, each hair on her head. With relief, flushed with the rich warmth of her own blood, and with simple joy at the shock, the
rightness
of it, she settles down, at last, into her own body.
Some time later she comes awake with a start, lifting her head, trying to identify a distant keening that she knows is not from Lannie. As she listens, it comes again. It is the muezzin calling before sunrise his ancient, lamenting cry from the mosque whose minaret she can just see from the balcony.
Rise up for prayer,
Abubech had translated for her,
There is no God but God.
The sound drifts away into the darkness. Lannie is lying on the bed beside her, her chest rising and falling in the long, slow breaths of someone peacefully asleep, a faint flush of pink colouring her cheeks.
After having stood in at least six line-ups, after having their passports checked and rechecked, their hand luggage searched and the money in their purses counted, after having stepped behind a curtain to endure a body search conducted by a couple of women, Lannie and Iris finally board the plane for Frankfurt and settle into their seats.
As the plane taxis down the runway, then lifts off into the night sky, Lannie looks out the window at the city where she has lived for so long as it recedes below. Its myriad small lights are random dots in the blackness mapping its disordered sprawl, its haphazard scatter down the bushy hillsides, the patches of darkness ravines, streambeds, precipitous slopes, or the electricityless slums crowded together on low areas.
The fact of her leaving still surprises her. She wonders if she has always known at some level that she would eventually leave, even though she told herself countless times she would not. Her heart rises into her throat with the plane’s lift-off and she feels regret. And sadness. And fear, fear of what lies ahead.
It amazes her that Iris should have simply taken it for granted that she would come home with her. It was as if she had not conceived of Lannie’s life in Ethiopia as a real life, one with purpose and direction. Lannie suspects that to Iris her ten years away from the farm and Chinook were only as a long dream, or an error that could be easily scrubbed away. She wonders now, in fact, if they were a mistake.
She thinks about Abubech, who came with them to the airport as far as the compound gate where the sentry stood and through which she couldn’t pass without a ticket. For a moment in the dull single
light bulb over the sentry’s box, Lannie had seen Abubech’s face lose its severity when she bowed formally to her, still stiff after a year of constant companionship, then lifted a hand, her fingers bent, to brush Lannie’s cheek.
“I shall miss you,” she’d said. “I shall not forget you.”
When Lannie had told her she was going, her voice faltering in mid-sentence as she realized what it was she was saying, Abubech had stared into her eyes. “Do what you feel you have to do,” she’d said. “But don’t go because you think I do not need you.” This had so shocked Lannie that she’d had to lower her head to contemplate the sudden possibility of staying.
Abubech had said then, “Forgive me. I do not wish for you to change your plans. I wish you only to understand that you have been a gift to me.” Lannie had looked up at her again, feeling her face grow warm, and Abubech had laughed gently. “Always mistrustful. Never able to believe you make a difference — at least, not for the better. You are quite able to believe that you make a difference for the worse.” Yes, Abubech and her work is the only reason to stay in Ethiopia. And yet, here she is, leaving with Iris the moment Iris arrives, as if she has no will of her own, no sense of where she should be.
It’s true, she doesn’t know where she should be. She’s drifting, has been for years, as if the part of her that is her will, her sense of who she is, has disengaged from the rest of her. She’s going home because — she moves her head back and forth against the seat’s headrest — because one morning soon I will wake up and I won’t be able to will myself out of bed; because I’m at the end of my tether, and Iris, somehow knowing it, has arrived in the nick of time to rescue me.
Her own brush with death interests her, although she can’t remember much about it, just how terribly cold she was, how she ached in every fibre of her body. The pills she swallowed — that time too when she woke up, she had no memory of where she’d been. I am almost the age my mother was when she died, she thinks for the thousandth time: Will I make it past my thirty-third birthday?
She glances speculatively at Iris, noticing that she has lost that adolescent-like plumpness she always carried, a delicate extra layer of flesh to protect her from life’s blows, and that she’s pale, too.
What a shock Ethiopia must have been to her, pampered as she has always been. And me so sick. Yet Iris seems more sure of herself than Lannie remembers, as if with that layer of protective fat gone, she has bumped up hard against the world. Of course, she reminds herself, Uncle Barney’s dead; she has to manage on her own now, how hard that must be for her. But her sympathy is detached, remote from the reality of Iris’s loss.
Ever since Iris finally told her about his death, a couple of days after she’d begun to mend, she’s been trying to stir up some feeling about it. But his death seems far away, a long distance from wherever her heart is. What heart, she thinks, I can’t even mourn Uncle Barney. Since Mother died — but she doesn’t want to go down that road again. Or is it that I was plunged into mourning with my mother’s death when I was only ten and I’ve never been released from it? But this failure too exhausts her too much to think about. Everything exhausts her. The truth is, she’s barely out of the woods. If Abubech had had her way, she and Iris wouldn’t leave for at least another couple of weeks. It was Iris who had insisted, and the doctor had agreed that it would probably be safe for Lannie to travel home, although he’d pointed out that she’d need months of recuperation.