Now Luke’s out of the river, pausing to empty his boots which must be too heavy with water to walk in. He nears the cabin, hesitating again to look up as if whatever he’s looking for might be on the roof or in the tops of the forty-foot pines beside or behind it. Go in, she wills him, for pity’s sake, go in, Luke. Hurry.
Still moving slowly he disappears inside and she stands, her hands pressed flat against her chest, above her breasts, waiting. He doesn’t come out and she waits some more and then, caught in the roar of the water and the wind, she knows something really bad has happened and she finds she can’t stay there any longer. She grabs the rope and reels it in, fishes the soaking loop out of the water and drapes it over her chest and shoulder the same way Luke did and steps down into the water.
Instantly the water is at the tops of her thighs, and freezing cold. It plasters her pants against her legs and lifts her raincoat to float out around her; the stream tugs on it, trying to sweep it away with her inside it. The stream has taken on a fierce, cold soul that insists she go away downstream with it. She makes a misstep, reaching out with her foot to a place where the ground has dissolved in the rush and sweep of water and she’s over and down, being swept away, the water washing over her head, and rushing up her nose and into her eyes. Flailing wildly, she grabs the rope before the water pulls it off her shoulder, and with its resistance finds her footing and stands, coughing and gasping. She’s scared, really scared, but then she tells herself, Smarten up, you’ve got a rope, you won’t drown.
The water has reached her chest and its untamed tugging and pushing is almost more than she can resist. She pushes doggedly on, fighting her way back upstream to get as much length out of the rope as she can, at the same time as she crosses. She tries to keep her eyes on the open cabin door hoping Luke will reappear. Her foot hits a rock and she falls again, but it’s shallow enough here so she pushes herself upright on the stream bottom and realizes it has begun to slope upward, not downward, and that she has reached the far edge of the main channel and she can make it from here all right.
She tries to run, but the current makes her stumble forward, splashing. Suddenly her body gets very light as she rises out of deep water. This surprising lightness makes her stumble again and then she’s jerked back by the rope. She flings it off without looking, the way Luke did, and tries to run up out of the water, off-balance, jerky, her feet are numb with cold, water pours out of her boots with every step, until one simply pulls itself off. She doesn’t stop to retrieve it.
At the cabin door she stops and kicks off her remaining boot. It falls off the railway tie that forms the step into the dripping grass beside it. She hesitates for a second, the wind howls at her back, and behind it the river surges by with a malevolent roar. She puts out stiff fingers to push the partly open door to widen the gap, then steps into blackness.
She can’t discern much, but she doesn’t wait for her eyes to adjust. She knows she’s in the kitchen, knows the way is straight through in the direction of that square of light that is the window on the end wall of the only other room that serves as living room and bedroom. She bumps against the corner of a table, keeps moving, stumbles against a chair, pushes it aside and hears it fall over as she crosses the threshold of the second room.
Slowly she makes Barney out. He’s lying there on the couch, and she’s dimly aware of Luke standing with his back to her, blotting out the light from the other window, his head down, his back bent. Barney is so still. Why doesn’t he get up when he sees her standing there in the doorway, water pouring off her? Why doesn’t he say something?
Luke doesn’t move at all, but there’s a soft sound coming from him, as if he’s caught cold, a kind of snuffling or wheezing. She goes forward, her wet clothes heavy and bending like cardboard, impeding her movement as she goes toward the couch. Get up, Barney, she almost says. Get up! But he just lies there, one arm up above his head, the palm opened to the ceiling. When she reaches him, Luke still hasn’t moved.
“Don’t do this, Barney,” she whispers, as she bends over him. “Please.” She touches him with her fingertips, gently, his cold denim shirt, his dear, familiar face. “Please, I love you,” she whispers. But when she feels how cold his face is, like ice and stiff, not the real Barney at all, when she sees how dead he is, how he has gone away somewhere, he isn’t there, not there — her legs give way and she finds herself kneeling on the cabin floor, leaning against Barney, her arms reaching out across him, her fingers clutching his shirtsleeve where it’s pressed against the back of the couch, as if to pull him back to her.
“Luke,” she says. “Luke —” She means to ask him to explain this thing that has happened, she wants him to make it stop. “Luke!” She knows by the feel of her throat that she has screamed his name and this, too, seems absurd, as absurd as Barney’s deadness, so she calls instead the name she surely meant to call: “Barney!” Behind her Luke’s feet are making the old plank floor creak as he rushes toward her.
“Get up, Iris,” he growls in her ear and the sound is so fraught with rage or anguish, or the two mixed and only half released, that when she feels his arms sliding under hers, his whole strength roughly pulling her to her feet, she’s afraid to resist.
Standing now, she leans into Luke, feeling his body’s rigidity with revulsion. She wants to hit him, she wants to pound his face with her fists. Her anger with Luke and his rage with her is out in the open at last.
With legs that feel heavy and numb as posts, she staggers rapidly away from his reach, letting her breath out carefully, her chest shuddering with it, the sound audible. In her ears the tension in the room is discernible, the sound as high-pitched as the wind’s wild scream through the tall black pines that surround the cabin. Her head filled with its whine and keen, her heart swelling to fill her chest and throat and mouth, she stares down, voiceless, in slowly growing belief, at her husband’s body.
The Promise of Heaven
Iris’s eyes snap open into the half-light of her bedroom, the awareness that it’s morning and she has to get up as immediate as consciousness is. She feels exhausted and strained, yet no dream, no echo of the passing of the night lingers. Something is tugging at her memory though, but whatever it is refuses to dredge itself up and confront her. The room’s shadows are lucid but convey no information. She waits motionless inside the cool sandwich of sheets for that phantom just out of her view to come into focus, glimpses its craggy, horrifying shape, holds back, then edges her hand out to feel the blank sheet beside her, as the spectre moves into reach and slowly encompasses her.
Barney is dead. It’s the day of his funeral. She has wakened this morning a widow, she doesn’t have a husband any more; she can’t quite believe it and would laugh, just a quick snort of surprise, except that she knows she mustn’t laugh because it isn’t funny. If she laughs, she knows she won’t be forgiven. Forgiven for what? For laughing, she tells herself, then, irritated with the nonsense she’s babbling to herself, she wobbles her head back and forth briskly on the cold pillow to clear it out. The room rotates rapidly on an angle, and she holds still until, with scarcely perceptible swishes and thumps, it settles back into place around her.
She sees Barney clearly as she and Luke found him only three days ago, that dear body lying on the old davenport, one arm stretched above his head, his eyes closed, his expression calm. It occurs to her that Luke might have closed his eyes. Had he screamed as death descended on him? Or had the blood vessel in his brain swelled and burst while he was peacefully asleep —
I’ve got to stop this, she tells herself, and lies still, waiting for the full knowledge of his death to overtake her. She tries to call up his face, his straight nose like Luke’s, his thick, golden-brown hair, but even that won’t come and her inability to mourn, even to feel her love for him, makes her uneasy and faintly shocked at herself. All she has that might be called sorrow is an emptiness in her chest that takes up all the space and makes it hard to breathe.
She thinks of oth
er widows she’s known: Poor Marie Chapuis who couldn’t manage a coherent word all through the funeral and the reception for sobbing and had to be led away by relatives, Gladys Warkentin who sat frozen-faced and silent, young Melody Friesen who talked and laughed and then stared into space with eyes so deep nobody could look at them. The thought that today she will have to find a way to be a widow makes her automatically push back the covers and get out of bed.
The room’s too cold. She goes to the closet and takes out Barney’s dressing gown, a thick, deep wine velour that he refused to wear because, he said, it made him feel silly. Said it in such a helpless, baffled, and yet pained way that Iris who had given it to him had to laugh at this display of his untempered maleness, and stopped nagging him to put it on, even if she couldn’t understand what it was that bothered him about it.
She slides her arms into it, wraps it around herself as tightly as it will go, and ties the belt in a knot, then pulls the wide collar snugly up around her neck. It feels warm against her skin, its heaviness comforts her, and the assertive way it flaps against her ankles. On Barney it was knee-length. She looks for her slippers, finds them under the bed and slides her feet into them. She isn’t sure what to do next, caught in the desire to crawl back into bed and refuse ever to get up again, not even for Barney’s funeral. Instead, she goes to the door, puts her hand on the doorknob that’s so cold it feels like fire on her palm, and opens the door silently.
The house is without sound, yet there’s something in the air that reminds her it’s full of people; she can feel them, their sticky bodies, their mingled breaths, their sighs and coughs and their tumbling dreams. Barney’s sister Fay and her teenagers, Iris’s nieces and nephews, are asleep in the guest rooms and in the basement. This house full of people feels strange, oppressive, when for so long now there’s been nobody in it but Barney and herself and then not even Barney.
Now that she’s out in the hall she realizes she needs to use the bathroom and would go back, but hesitates because she’s afraid flushing the toilet would wake everyone, and the thought of them rising, moving up or down the stairs into the kitchen, making toast, pouring cups of coffee, staring at her with measuring eyes is unbearable. She feels dizzy and has to put a hand out to support herself against the wall. It’s probably all the pills they’ve been feeding her. Tranquillizers, she supposes. She’s vague about this, as she is about everything, including where she’s going at this time of the morning on the day of Barney’s funeral.
Somebody is snoring. The door to Lannie’s room is open and she peeks carefully in to see who it is. It’s Fay lying sprawled across the single bed, her blonde hair tangled across the pillow, her long nightgown hitched up to reveal her wide, pale, vein-etched legs. The smell of cigarette smoke and some other unpleasant odour reaches Iris now that she’s closer. It’s that spent alcohol smell; Iris supposes Fay went to bed drunk. She sighs for Mary Ann’s sake, for Fay’s children’s sake, for Barney’s sake, but her ruefulness is mixed with pity. She hasn’t forgotten Fay’s wedding all those years ago, Fay beginning to show with Quinn, Barry sneaking out during the wedding dance for a couple of drinks with his buddies in somebody’s half-ton. Iris backs away softly.
She can’t recall much of the evening before, although there’d been visitors. The women had made her go to bed early, she remembers that. She must have been acting funny. Placing her feet carefully on the stairs, one by one, till she reached the top, Fay on one side of her who kept stumbling slightly, then catching herself, and Ramona on the other. As if I couldn’t walk upstairs myself, she thinks, and decides that she’s not going to swallow any more pills. She hates this fuzziness, this sense of drifting.
She wishes Ramona were here right now; Ramona would know what to say to her. She doesn’t know herself what it is she needs to hear that might fill this hollow in her chest, that might bring the unreality of this day out of the realm of madness and error and back to some kind of normalcy.
She moves quietly down the hall to the top of the stairs and starts carefully down, intending to use the bathroom by the kitchen door. At the halfway point the sickening scent of flowers flows up the stairs to meet her: lilies, roses, irises because it’s spring, God knows what all else. Now, as she reaches the kitchen, the fragrance of squares and cakes brought by neighbours and left on the counter because the deep freeze and fridge are stuffed overwhelms her.
An intense heat has begun to spread itself through her, it has started deep in her centre and radiates outward inexorably, rapidly, building till it reaches her skin and a thin film of sweat breaks out on her forehead, the back of her neck, between her breasts, down her back, even the backs of her knees are slick with it. How can she be so hot when this morning the house is so cold? She crosses the kitchen with quick tapping steps as her slippers slap against her bare heels and bounce off the vinyl floor, tugging at the belt of the heavy dressing gown to loosen it. Flinging open the back door, she steps out onto the deck, the robe wide open, and feels the relief of the pristine early morning air.
The sun hasn’t yet climbed above the horizon and the glow of night still rests in the hollows of the land as it spreads out around her. The caragana hedge, the trees of the yard, block most of the view, but she knows the land is there. It’s imprinted on her psyche; her mind’s eye sees over the deck and the driveway, through the hedge, past the trees, to the peaceful, wide fields that lie beyond her farmyard. It would be utterly silent except for the waking twitter of small birds in the unleafed caragana hedge and the lilacs by the steps. She walks farther out onto the deck, retying the dressing gown tightly around her, as now that she’s outside in the clean, cool air the overwhelming heat is dissipating and she feels the chill.
She kicks off her slippers and steps into her muddy rubber boots that stand by the door. She can’t remember putting them there and doubts she was the one to do it, but it crosses her mind that her boots are witnesses to her plight, they are companions, so she doesn’t mind their cold interior and dampness on her bare feet. In her urgency to be away from the house, she hardly notices.
She crosses the deck, goes down the steps, across the gravelled drive, and hurrying now, she has to do this before the others wake, she squeezes through a gap in the caragana hedge, a shelter belt from the wind, that makes a square around the houseyard except for part of the way across the front where the driveway enters. The house, with its weight of expectations, its sleepers, recedes from her.
Barney has left a strip of grass maybe five feet wide between the hedge and the summerfallow field beside it. She sets out south, following the hedge’s rectangular boundary. The grass, genuine prairie grass, is a dull gold, about a foot high and so fine it has fallen over on itself, so that she walks more on top of it than actually in it. Her boots have a wet sheen now and the hem of her nightgown will be soggy, not that she cares. But the air is so delicious in her head, her lungs, she can feel it filling some of that emptiness in her chest. She forgets about the damp and keeps going, now turning west when the hedge does along the back of the house, past the row of shiny steel grain bins.
As she walks she turns her head left to study the southern horizon. Spread out before her in a long undulating wave is her farm, the biggest farm in the district. It washes slowly away from her, descending as it goes, across faded stubble till it begins to rise again, now a blackened rectangle that reaches out to touch the bottom of the sky. Ahead of her and to her right, less than a half mile away, is the fence-line that marks the border of Ramona and Vance Norman’s ranch. Her eyes follow the barbed wire to the deep coulee that the fence fails to contain, that reaches into Iris and Barney’s land. That quarter had once been pasture, but Barney had broken most of it. She had resisted his plans only when he’d wanted to burn the homestead buildings. An eyesore, he’d said, and she’d closed her mouth tightly in disagreement, mutely refusing consent to his burning them — it was bad enough her father had sold the house to be moved to town. This morning her mother’s parents’ falling-do
wn barn and two decayed sheds are tugging her toward them, as if there’s some comfort to be had on the ground where her grandparents first made a home, where her mother was born and grew up, an explanation maybe, an answer to the question that has emptied her chest: Why?
A noise, not too loud, intrudes and she stops to listen. It’s a distant sound, higher pitched than farm dogs or coyotes, more musical, growing louder by the second. She lifts her head to search the sky, and finds to the east of where she stands, flying not very high, as if they’ve just taken off or are searching for a place to land, a chevron of geese heading in a northwesterly direction. If they keep to their heading, they’ll fly right over her. One arm of their formation is very long, while the other has only about five birds in it. It’s not that this is so unusual, but she wonders why it would be so on this windless morning when it’s nowhere near hunting season.
As they come closer to where she stands a few feet from the hedge, she sees that it’s only the lead goose and the birds in the short wing who are honking. She suspects that soon geese will reply from the far end of the long arm, and in a moment a couple of them near its back do, which satisfies her. Soon they’re just above her, like the skeletal shadow of a phantom airship, breaking into individual birds as she watches. They hold their speed steady, their wing-beats constant and regular so that she feels sure in their view she’s only part of the hedge or tree or rock. Over her they go, one after another. The light is such that she can make out no details of their bodies, just the black shape of bird after bird as they pass overhead in a line that wobbles faintly with their uncoordinated wing-beats.
Then they’re gone and she stands transfixed, still staring up to the section of sky where their bodies were, even though she can hear them receding behind her. When she finally turns to follow their flight, they’re almost out of sight, soon to pass over the river valley to the northwest where the rising blue-shadowed cliffs sweep against the horizon.
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