“Together Mrs. Christie and Mr. and Mrs. Norman own over twelve thousand acres. The Normans have sold to us. As you know, Mrs. Christie is considering making an arrangement with us to turn her land into a grass conservation area.” Iris dares to glance at Vance, who’s staring unblinkingly straight ahead, his jaw firmly set. “Given the size and the drastic nature of Mr. Schiff’s proposal, somebody has to represent those of us who think that enough of the grassland of this region has been ploughed up, enough of it is in the hands of larger and larger entities, driving out the true family farmer and displacing or threatening the existence of too much wildlife, and killing off biodiversity, both plant and animal.”
“Consider the future of your children if we just left the logging companies to take all the trees, the fishermen to fish out the ocean, the farmers to wipe out every last shred of grassland biodiversity. There’ll be no future for your kids then — no clean air to breathe, or water, or new medicines, no —”
Somebody is booing him. From three or four places around the hall voices are rising to challenge him.
“You got no respect for us!” The chairman recognizes the loudest voice, although Iris doesn’t recognize the speaker. “You got no respect for what we’ve accomplished here, not for what we’ve suffered, or what we want — you don’t care what happens to us. Our lives aren’t worth anything to you.” He punches his arm toward the young man with each phrase, and voices rise up around him in angry agreement.
“It’s no skin off your nose when we get shoved out of our jobs or off our land and can’t look after our own families any more. You don’t have to live with the shame of being on welfare. Or all the bad things that happen when a family falls apart — drinking, wife abuse, kids going delinquent because they can’t see a life that makes any sense any more. When they got no future and no place to call home. When you think about it, that’s what happened to the Indians when we came — only a thousand times worse.”
A woman, again Iris can’t see who it is, shouts, “If a kid’s got scurvy, or he’s in jail, it don’t make much difference to him if he’s breathing clean air or not.”
The room is getting rowdier, people are talking out loud to each other, or shouting across the hall. The chairman is calling for order but nobody’s listening. The uproar in the hall swirls around Iris. She’s thinking of all the farm meetings she’s been to over the years: over drought, over the dismantling of the Crow rate, over the government’s desire to take exclusive jurisdiction over the sale of certain grains from the Wheat Board. Each time they were filled with fear, seeing one more blow that might be the one that would finally fell them, but she never saw them as agitated as they are tonight.
She remembers something Vance said, “Our branch line’s gone, our elevators are going. It’s the end of an era and everybody knows it. If you aren’t willing to go the way of the big boys, they’ll drive you out — market forces will drive you out. If all you really want is to stay on your own farm and listen to the birds sing in the morning and smell the fresh air and watch the sunset, you’ll fight any force that tries to take it away. You won’t care what side of the fence it’s coming from.”
It’s Schiff’s turn now, an old rancher is challenging him, questioning him closely, objecting to what he’s told them he wants to do.
“Globalization!” he shouts. “That’s just another word for turning all of us out onto the streets to starve while you get rich. Ain’t you never heard about the camel going through the eye of the needle?” Then he declares belligerently that he’d take the environmentalists any day over the Jim Schiffs of this world. Iris is glad to hear she and Vance aren’t entirely alone after all, that apparently they will have some allies.
But as they shout at each other, argue and debate, she has begun to think about the dust rising off her land, the wind carrying away the topsoil, and the weeds Vance has fought all summer and can barely keep ahead of, she’s thinking about that handful of soil he held in his hand months ago to show her, how it trickled through his fingers like water, no organic matter left in it at all. Dead. Then a face rises up before her eyes: beautiful, stern, clear-eyed, an age of suffering far older than the face itself written in its lines. It is Abubech.
Iris is standing before she quite realizes she is, and when people see her on her feet they hush each other until the hall is silent.
“I know you’ll think it’s easy for me to say, but we’ll all be better off in the long run if we refuse to deal with Mr. Schiff.”
“Louder,” a couple of people call. “We can’t hear you, Iris.” She takes a deep breath, touches the back of the chair in front of her with her fingertips to steady herself. She wants to tell them what she saw in Ethiopia, but knows they wouldn’t listen and, anyway, there’s so much to say she wouldn’t know where to begin. “He represents — for all of us out here on the land — the return of the feudal system, where his company owns all the land and we’d work for him, and he can hire us or fire us and pay us what he wants. But it’s worse than that. He doesn’t just want to own all the land, he wants to own all the seeds too, so that every time we want to plant anything at all, we’d have to buy the seeds from him. He could starve us if he wanted to, make us do what he wants, hungry people will do anything for food. So I’m not selling to him, not now, not ever. And if that means the whole deal falls through, I’m sorry to upset people’s plans, but that’s the way it is.” She sits down into a heavy silence. Ramona squeezes her hand, then lets go. People begin to stir now, to shift their positions, turning to mutter to each other. Someone boos her, someone else hisses at the boo.
A nasal voice she recognizes as Hank Osbourne’s, a man she dated as a girl, long before Barney, calls from somewhere near the door, “Easy for you, Iris. We ain’t all rich, you know, get to do whatever we want with our places.” His voice vibrates with anger. Heads swivel, embarrassed grins on a few faces. Mavis and Ardath, Iris notes with some satisfaction, drop their eyes after they’ve located the speaker, as if they feel distaste for his words.
Royce Cummings, a small farmer whose place is just outside town, gets the chairman’s attention. “I just want to say that I’m one of them wants to sell. All I got for retirement is the price my place will bring and Mr. Schiff here, he’s offering real money. I won’t get that much any place else. I might not even be able to find another buyer the way things are going.” Heads nod, there’s general agreement on this point.
Iris lowers her head, clasps her moist hands together and squeezes them. She knows what Royce says is true; she knows she will be responsible for his and Ruth’s poverty if she refuses to change her mind. Yet, how can she change her mind? In the face of this, how can she carry on with her plans? She thinks of the poverty she saw in Ethiopia. Compared to that, everyone in this room is wealthy. Not that they could be persuaded to see things that way. And what right has she to make the judgement for them? Her mind is so busy that she doesn’t notice somebody has asked her a question until Ramona nudges her and the chairman asks that the question be repeated.
“What would this ‘conservation area’ be all about?” She’s surprised to see it’s Angela’s husband, Orland, until she remembers that Lannie, who has renewed her friendship with Angela, told her that he’d just inherited a half-section of his grandparents’ land. Angela isn’t with him, probably at home with the children. She stands again.
“We’re a long way from having all our project clear yet,” she says. “We plan to fence off a few acres and just leave them to see what comes up, how long it takes it to go back to its original state, although none of us will be alive to see it. Some we’re going to seed to the original prairie grasses, try to get them in the right proportion, and so on. And what we want to do is bring people back to live on the prairie. Remember when every quarter had a family living on it and the towns were thriving, not dying or dead like they are now?” She has everyone’s attention now, the hall is silent as she speaks.
Then somebody shouts, “Pie in the sk
y!” And someone else calls, “You never seeded a square inch in your life, woman. You never ploughed a field, you never ran a combine. Who the hell are you to tell us what to do with our land!” But she knows that voice too. It’s Hanford McKinley, so right wing in his views that most of the community — who are themselves right wing and conservative enough — regard him as too influenced by prevalent attitudes in the American West where his family came from, if not slightly addled, to be paid much attention to.
“What you say is true,” she says, humbly enough. “But I’ve lived on the land my whole life. I’m from a farm family and a farming community. I don’t know any other way of life. And if I don’t know how to run the John Deere or the combine, I do know what the issues are as well as you do.”
“The thing of it is, Iris,” it’s Oskar Halvorsen, a neighbour who is rumoured to have already made a deal with Schiff, “you’re making this decision for all of us. Don’t think you got that right.”
Iris is nonplussed. Oskar is a good man, a friend, if not a close one. People are staring at her, waiting for her answer.
“I don’t mean to be doing that,” she says slowly. “But look, Oskar, isn’t the opposite just as true? If I don’t do what I want to do, it will be because you’re making my decision for me —” She hesitates, hears a few chuckles, is vaguely ashamed, feels she’s falling into silly quibbling. “I mean, it’s really Mr. Schiff, isn’t it? He’s the one who’s trying to run the show. He’s the one who’s turning us against each other. He’s got the money and the power and a dream of his own he’s trying to make happen by using all of us — our lives, our farms, our —” She stops, but she can’t think how else to put it, or what other argument she could make. Slowly, heavily, she sits down, thinking: the hatred has started now. Now I’m an outsider to my own community.
The chairman recognizes the old rancher who made the angry comment about globalization earlier. He’s an old bachelor from the western side of the district, where there’s more ranchland.
“Seems to me we still don’t know what Mrs. Christie’s got in mind for us. I’d like to hear what she and Vance are up to.” Iris glances down the row at Vance, but he’s stubbornly staring straight ahead and she knows he wants her to respond, believing she can speak better than he can. She wants to ask him to stand up and talk himself, but everyone is staring at her, the chairman has already said, “Mrs. Christie?” She rises slowly and begins to speak.
“The thing is, it’s all an experiment. We have to learn as we go, but we heard of a project in Kansas that is trying to find ways to bring people back to fill up the land, and we’re going to visit it as soon as we can. You all know that the bigger the farms get, the fewer people there are living on the land. And you know as well as I do that aside from the Indians we’re the only ones left who really know anything about how nature works: scientists only know about their own speciality. She paused. Now they’ve got something called ecology, but country people have always been ecologists, until machinery got so big. If we don’t keep people out here, the government will stop maintaining our grid roads and we’ll lose them, and then they’ll make power so expensive that we’ll have to have our own power plants, and we’ll wind up back on radio phones, or something, instead of being connected to the phone grid. That’s partly why repopulating the countryside is so important. But mostly it’s because …”
She turns to look at all the people seated in the rows radiating out around her, at those leaning against the wall, at the row of men seated at the front of the hall. She’s not quaking with fear any more. She’s feeling that force again, the one that gave her the courage to refuse Jim Schiff when he last came to her house. And she’s hearing the wind in the grass, seeing the moving cloud shadows on the long grassy hills, smelling the prairie on the air. “We belong to nature. Because every single time we kill off a species or plough up or pave over another piece of ground, a little piece of our humanity dies too.” She sits down firmly, hearing the ringing of her own voice still hanging on the air in the hall. Mavis Miller has turned to watch her. Now she gives Iris a bright stare before she swivels her head back toward the chairman. In it Iris reads new respect.
When they go outside, it’s after midnight and a warm rain is falling on the asphalt parking lot, and under the streetlights the leaves of the trees along the border gleam and slope downward with the rain’s welcome weight. Iris pauses. The rain falls lightly on her hair and trickles down her face. She’s thinking about that moment in the hall when she felt power flowing through her again and she wonders where it came from. Since Barney’s death, she knows, the world has become infinitely larger and also endlessly deep, yet richer than she had ever dreamt. She has found herself, that’s what has happened, and precious and miraculous as it turns out to be, she could nevertheless weep for all that its finding has cost.
The Inconsolable
She is wearing Iris’s leather gardening gloves and they’re stiff with old dirt so that her fingers feel numb as she grasps the piece of soggy cardboard buried in the tall weeds under the front window. A halfton comes down the street, slowing as its driver sees her scrabbling in the grass and weeds at the front of the house she called home when she was a child. She doesn’t lift her head or turn toward the vehicle. After a second she can hear it accelerate down the street. This too is expiation — the curiosity of the villagers, word spreading like wildfire that the crazy Stone girl is back, searching around in the yard of her father’s house. Or perhaps expiation is the wrong word. Not so much penance as expurgation, a cleansing process; at least, she hopes that’s what it will be.
Ever since her return she has dreamt every night about this house, scenes from her childhood. She couldn’t tell if she’d imagined them or if they’d really happened: her mother buttering toast for herself, Dillon and Misty as they sat around the rickety kitchen table, the radio playing country and western in the background, her and Dillon’s schoolbooks piled crookedly on the counter by the door; her father’s heavy boots making the floor creak as he stomped across it to slam the door behind him, his truck roaring to life in the driveway, her mother crying as she ran up the stairs; Dillon scooting his toy trucks and cars back and forth across the worn linoleum floor in the living room, while Misty babbled cheerfully in her playpen, clapping her fat little hands together and bouncing wobbily on her diapered bottom. Sometimes they’re eating hamburgers at a picnic table in the backyard, her father standing at the fence talking to a stranger in a half-ton while her mother watches uneasily, squinting into the sunlight; in the front yard, Lannie in her flowered dress, white ankle socks, and freshly polished white shoes, leaving with her mother to go to church while her father stands in the doorway holding Misty; or her father, back from somewhere, in the cramped little hallway, picking her up and swinging her around, setting her down abruptly and walking away. Always, every night, the house.
Until finally she’d asked Iris who owned the house now and Iris had told her it had gone back to the town for unpaid taxes. “Buy it for me,” Lannie had mumbled, “Please, I mean —”
“Never mind,” Iris said, meaning she needed no explanations, no apologies, nor would she listen when Lannie tried to tell her that one day she’d pay her back.
“If you’re not my daughter, I don’t know who is,” Iris had said firmly, as if she were angry, making them both laugh in embarrassment.
Which has brought Lannie here, this morning, to begin the job of cleaning up the yard and then restoring the house to liveability. Not that she intends to live in it — or does she? One step at a time, she reassures herself at the mixture of distaste and fear that stir when she thinks about the possibility. She is not unaware of the metaphor she has consented to — the cleaning up of her past — it amuses her, yet she’s dogged. Hasn’t she tried everything else? Including eight years on the far side of the world, which she thinks of now with something close to tenderness.
She picks up two tin cans that have been in the yard so long weeds have grown throu
gh the holes rusted in them. She thrusts them into the plastic garbage bag she’s dragging, along with two pop bottles, a broken beer bottle, and some sticks of wood. When she has the yard completely cleaned of refuse, she’ll have the weed-ridden topsoil scraped away and fresh soil brought in before she seeds a new lawn.
On the third morning, just as she’s thinking of taking a break and pouring herself a cup of coffee from the thermos she filled before she left the farm, she hears someone say her name. A shiver runs down her spine. She knows that voice.
He’s standing on the sidewalk in front of Barney’s truck that she has parked at the curb, his own pulled up behind it, scowling at her. She almost says “Dad!” before she remembers that she has vowed not to call him that any more. So she straightens and stands where she is by the driveway near the living-room window and stares back at him. He comes toward her, slowly, trying to smile, but she sees he’s studying her, he’s trying to figure something out. She’s beginning to tremble, and then she remembers the last time she saw him.
He was working for a construction company in Kamloops. She didn’t know which one and had to try three companies before she found him nailing cedar shingles on the roof of a new house on a quiet suburban boulevard. She recognized him by the long, thick black hair and his size compared to the boy working beside him. From up there he must have had a marvellous view of the valley and she wondered if he’d noticed it. Instead of calling to him, she waited in her car parked in the shade across the street until she saw him descend the ladder, his helper following him down, and go to the cab of the new half-ton parked to one side of the house. She got out of her car, crossed the street, and walked nervously up to where he was sitting with his lunch on the grass in the shade of a row of spruces.
All she could think of to say was “Hi — Dad.” He’d already begun to look up at her, and she saw he didn’t look any different from the day he’d dropped her off at Iris and Barney’s and said he’d be back for her.
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