“Just a minute here,” Vance says. “What about money? If you do that, where will you get an income, Iris? And you can’t forget that land buyer. I’m telling you, he’s after your land and I don’t know how you’re going to stop him. And people are selling now, at least he says they are, and that means if you fight him, you’ll be fighting the whole community too. Ramona and me — our place is along the riverbank — we aren’t vital to the deal the way you are. Can you take the pressure?” He stops, out of breath, he has never spoken so much, and when Iris starts to answer, he interrupts her. “Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I’d like better than to see all them acres back in native grass, but it ain’t going to be easy, that’s all.”
“Putting all your land in grass — you don’t want to leave yourself broke in your old age.” Ramona speaks softly, regretfully.
“If I never got another crop,” Iris replies, “I could get along just fine. In Ethiopia —” and then, sobering even more, she says, “I won’t say I don’t like my comforts, but three TV sets and a house big enough for twenty people with only two in it … I’ve spent my whole life taking. It’s time to do a little giving.”
“Not that your neighbours will be grateful to you,” Vance says. “You can trust me on that,” and Iris knows he has had to take plenty of criticism for selling to the feared conservationists.
“If you can just get people to listen,” Ramona says. “We tell ‘em and tell ‘em this is the most threatened landscape in the country, but they just don’t seem to get it.”
“Thoreau said,” Lannie quotes, “‘in wildness is the preservation of
the world.’ All of us came out of wildness; wildness is the source of life — not chemistry laboratories. And if we kill off all our wilderness, we kill off
wildness.
When that happens, we won’t be human any more. We’ll be robots, mechanical creatures in a perfect, clockwork world.”
The others stare at her. She colours, but doesn’t look away. All of them look out over the field of wild grass where the kids’ game of scrub has dissolved into a shouting game of tag.
She can put it off no longer. It’s time to start phoning the agencies Betty Chamberlain suggested to her would be appropriate to tell about what she saw in Lalibela. She has held off until she has been home a couple of weeks, out of jet lag — she wanted to have her wits about her to answer questions — out of her reluctance to face the ridicule she’s expecting, out of her own growing certainty that nothing she can do will make a difference. It takes all her courage to dial the first number.
The voice at Amnesty International, after he has listened to Iris’s long story, tells her he’ll speak with his sources and get back to her. She has to make three phone calls before she finds a development agency with offices nearest to Lalibela, only to find that it isn’t run by a Canadian branch, but by a branch out of England, which runs independently from the Canadian or U.S. branches. She tells her story again. The woman on the phone says she’ll check it out and get back to her. She calls a reporter at a major newspaper. The reporter says, “If this is true, it’s a big story. The victory of the Tigrayans over Mengistu was seen as the victory of right over evil. The whole world celebrated their courage.” Iris is no longer sure it’s true herself. She closes her eyes and remembers the scene: the dust, the drawn looks on the people’s faces and their silence, the farmers saying,
We have nothing to eat,
the grave, tall man bending toward her in the hotel corridor. The reporter goes on, “It seems to me that not long ago the newspapers in Scotland were full of claims like these from a Scottish nurse who’d worked in the south. She smuggled out photos of mutilated bodies lying in fields, and transcripts of tapes of people — I
think it was Oromos — telling stories of disappearances and torture and murder. In fact, there’ve been a few scattered reports like yours coming out.” She says she’ll go to her sources, see what she can find out to verify Iris’s story.
It’s late afternoon when Iris gets off the phone and she feels exhausted. She’s about to fall on the couch in the living room, when she hears car tires crunching over gravel and goes to the window to look out. As soon as she sees the car, a luminous silvery grey, and big, she knows who it is and says “Damn” under her breath at the timing, as Lannie has gone to town to meet the bus that will bring home her sister Misty. She goes out onto the deck, shutting the door firmly behind her.
The car stops opposite the steps. Immediately the driver’s door opens, and she sees it’s the same man who came to her weeks ago: Jim Schiff, from the company that wants to buy her land.
“Welcome back, Mrs. Christie,” he calls up to her. “Was it a good trip?” Iris studies him, not replying.
“You have a new car, I see,” she says in a measured, not-unfriendly way.
“It is a beauty,” he says. “May I come up and talk to you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she says. He has already come around the car and put his foot on the first stair. He stops, frozen in mid-step, then puts his foot back down on the gravel.
“I beg your pardon?” he says, smiling uncertainly.
“No, it isn’t any use,” she says. “My place is not for sale. Not now. Not ever.” He stands looking up at her; she can see him trying to figure out what he ought to say to her now. “You may as well go,” she says, and smiles in what she hopes is a pleasant way. In the back of her mind it registers that the countryside she can see from her deck is beginning to look dry, it’s been almost a month, Vance told her, since the last rain, and that was barely half an inch. She frowns without noticing she is, wondering about the crop. The old dust bowl black humour passes through her:
Remember in the Bible when it rained forty days and forty nights? Yeah? Well, Chinook got a tenth.
“I’d just like to talk to you a little,” he says softly. “No pressure, just to make sure you know what our offer is. I’ll be happy to tell you
what your neighbours are thinking, so that you can evaluate your position.” A magpie lands on the deck railing and struts self-importantly a few steps in their direction, its glossy black feathers gleaming an iridescent purple and turquoise.
“I appreciate that,” Iris says gravely, “but it makes no difference. I’ve decided not to sell.” He lowers his head to stare at the ground in front of his scuffed brown oxfords. She notices that his hair is thinning at the crown of his head, and he seems tired or — suddenly she wonders if this is a ploy, that she should feel sorry for him so that she’ll let him into her house and then —
“Maybe you don’t understand,” he says at last, raising his head, looking first down the deck to where the magpie has fixed him with a glassy, one-eyed stare, and then up to Iris. “We will have all this land. We will have every farm from the other side of you to town. You’ll be isolated, you’ll have no neighbours.” He stops, as if he thinks he’s gone far enough for now.
“That’s not true,” she replies calmly. “You won’t have the Normans’ place either.”
“Hah!” he says abruptly. Suddenly she knows that he is not merely an agent: he’s the real buyer. The magpie screeches, flies up into a poplar branch and sits there, bobbing up and down. “The Normans have no choice. They’re heavily in debt. We’ll buy their note from the bank and take the place over. We’ve done it before.” His tone is faintly amused.
“I believe you’re too late for that,” she says comfortably. “It’s owned by a conservation organization now.” If he’s dismayed, he doesn’t show it, but he’s silent for a moment, gazing around the yard and out beyond it to the dusty fields of ripening crops. At last he says, as if he’s innocently curious, “Why are you so determined not to sell?”
“I don’t like your plans,” she says. “I don’t like what you want to do to us.”
“Your community can only benefit,” he replies, surprised. “Think of the jobs we’ll provide for local people.” The magpie squawks again and Iris glances at it, bemused, before she speaks.
“Where will they live if you’ve taken their land?”
“We’ll build new houses in Chinook for everybody who works for us. The social and cultural life in town will flourish again. It will be the way it was in the twenties, that time you prairie folk are constantly mourning.”
“People owned their own places then,” Iris says. “What you’re proposing sounds like England during the Industrial Revolution, or like Ethiopia under Haile Selassie when all the land in the country belonged to him, and the people worked twice as hard so they could pay their taxes. And mistreated their land just so there’d be something left over for their families. And still they went hungry.” He goes on again as if she hasn’t spoken, and she wonders why she’s still standing here listening when what she wants to do is go inside and lock the doors. But that would look like weakness, so she doesn’t.
“With computerization and satellite link-ups we can do our business from Chinook. In time we’ll use robot tractors and combines. It’s called ‘precision farming’ and it’s the coming thing. We’ll build huge greenhouses and laboratories with our own plant-breeders to do up-to-the-minute experiments to produce new crops as well as improve the old ones. We’ll own the very seeds you plant,” he tells her. “We’ll own those dandelions out there, we’ll own the carrots in your garden.”
His voice is mild enough, but his look is one that in the old days would have frozen her, or sent her running into Barney’s arms, but now she says, reasonably enough, “You have no faith in the people at all, do you? You think none of us will object, that we’ll just let you turn us into slaves, into serfs and peons? People who came here three generations ago and knew nothing but hardship until the middle of this century —” She thinks of the Indians whose land they’d stolen, and she hesitates for just an instant, hopes he hasn’t noticed. “You think we’ll give up our land that easily?”
“Money talks,” he says. “Everybody has his price.”
Something is rising in Iris. She feels dizzy, disoriented, the inner chaos distracting her from the breeze, the birdsong, the smell of crops in the fields.
Then she thinks, Barney died for something. When he left me — it was leaving me, even if he didn’t know it himself — it was to go to
the land; he left me for the land. He was telling me something, but I couldn’t understand it, I was so caught up in myself that I couldn’t even hear it. I suppose he didn’t really understand it himself. Her hands, her face, her chest feel hot, as if she might be glowing, and looking down at him, she begins to feel big, as if she’s gaining a foot or two in height, and expanding in breadth. As if she has, in her travels, acquired something — something that might be power.
“I think you are evil,” she says. “Get off my land.” And when she says
my land
it seems to her that the entire countryside comes to a halt, the wind ceases its murmur, the moving grass stands still, the birds halt in mid-song.
The phone rings, but Iris has been sleeping only lightly and she snaps on the bedside lamp and answers it on the second ring.
“Betty Chamberlain,” a voice says. Iris is alert at once. Her clock says it’s three in the morning.
“What did you find out?” she asks, forgetting even to say hello. Betty laughs, and there’s something in the sound, some imprecision that tells Iris Betty has been drinking. What time is it in California? she wonders. After midnight, at least. She sits up and lifts the phone from the bedtable onto her lap.
“I talked to Frank,” Betty says.
“Yes?”
“Grain has gone in,” she says. “One of the NGOs took in a truckload.” When Iris hears that what she’d wanted has finally happened, it no longer seems like a solution or even much help. A truckload of grain for all those people?
“But what about,” it’s hard for her to say it even now, “the question of — genocide.” In the small pause that ensues Iris thinks she can hear Betty breathing, the sound too deep, muffled, or as if she were cupping her hand around the receiver.
“Iris,” Betty says, “listen. What happened to you happens to firsttime visitors to Third World countries all the time. It’s an old story. It doesn’t mean anything. Forget it.”
“I won’t forget it,” Iris says determined. “I think every time people
hear something like that, they hear the truth. Some kind of truth. There is so much evil in the world.” She can hear Betty draw in a long breath, not wearily, but as if she’s letting some emotion go.
She says a long “Mmmmm” glumly, and then, as if she’s reciting, “They’re fixing the roads, probably for the first time since the war; they’re allowing dissenting newspapers to be published in Addis; they’re trying not to interfere in tribal politics —”
“They’re taking care of Tigrayans,” Iris says.
“I don’t know,” Betty says, in a defeated tone. “People are always trying to kill each other somewhere.” Iris sees how easy it would be to forget the man in the hotel corridor, the beggar child crying in the dirt, the women walking slowly up the road bent double under their burdens, even Abubech and her courage and dignity.
“I spoke to a newspaper journalist about it; I called Amnesty, and an aid agency that has a branch near there. They’ve all called me back and told me to forget it, that I was wrong. One of their so-called sources even said that the Amharas and the Tigrayans love each other.” Her emotion is so strong that she has raised her voice without meaning to.
“Let me tell you,” Betty says, “that if you insist on making a fuss about this,” her voice is louder now, “people will be killed. They will stop that project you told me about, if you’re associated with it. Are you willing to risk that? Do you want that responsibility?”
“What about my responsibility to the people who said they are starving?” she asks Betty. “What about to those who claim people are being imprisoned and tortured and killed in secret? What about their right to a better government, to go about their legitimate business in dignity and without fear, the way we do?” Betty doesn’t say anything and then Iris hears a faint clink, and knows Betty is drinking.
“Some choice,” Betty says finally, but it’s as if Iris has been talking about whether to wear the blue dress or the red. Again, more loudly this time, Iris hears the ringing of the wineglass’s rim against the receiver.