Free Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala Page A

mother’s face an echo of her grandmother’s — her mother’s mother — before it disappears as quickly as she found it. Confused, unable to tolerate so probing a gaze, she blinks and looks away like a guilty child.
    “People grow away from each other,” her mother says, no longer looking at Iris. “Your father and I did.”
    “No!” Iris says, shocked. This is news to her. In her memory her parents were the ideal couple, community leaders, solidly a pair in everything they said or did. She thinks of their brief antagonisms that flared up and then died away as quickly as they’d come — or so it had seemed to her. Now her heart begins to beat faster. It trips in her wrists and throat, tiny thuds that propel too much blood up into her cheeks.
    “When Laurence died, Jack changed forever.” Her mother pauses. Lily — what a lovely, melancholy name, Iris thinks, and wonders if it’s true that your name helps set your destiny, remembering Lannie telling her from her hospital bed that Iris is the goddess of the rainbow. Lily pushes Iris’s hand away, but gently,slowly. Laurence was Iris’s brother, stillborn when Iris was a year old, nothing more than a story, no, a myth, to Iris. “Men want sons,” her mother says. “God knows why,” and she smiles, so that Iris knows she’s making a joke again.
    “How did he change?”
    Her mother stares down at the afghan, then she says, poignantly, “He wasn’t any good at loving any more.” She swallows perceptibly, as if her throat hurts her. “He grew to love land more than anything — more than me or you.”
    Iris sits back startled and puzzled. Her father had stopped loving them? Is that what her mother means? She’d never doubted her father loved her; hadn’t he given her anything she asked for? She knows her mother thought that they had spoiled her. Except that time when she’d asked for a horse. It can’t be. They’d gone everywhere as a family; there’d been no quarrels, no shouting, no cold silences, and when her mother was busy with her church work her father took her with him, even to auction sales where mostly men went.
Thomases don’t sell land,
he often used to say,
Thomases buy it.
When Barney married her, he married that dictum, too. Now it jolts her a little, as if she’s hearing it for the first time, she who’d always taken its sentiment for granted as wise and right, the way the world needed to be. She waits uneasily for her mother to go on.
    “He got land fever,” her mother says, and laughs gently at the old phrase, or maybe it’s that she finds the condition amusing, although the tears still sit, pooled in the wrinkles at the bottom of each eye.
    Land fever? Was that what happened to Barney? But no, she answers herself. Barney’s buying the ranch had to do with — turning away from everything he’d become since he’d left his father’s dirt-poor ranch up in the hills to marry her and become a farmer, for some incomprehensible reason needing to go back to his beginnings. Articulating this for the first time, she feels a cold relief.
    “That’s how you wound up with the biggest farm in the district, Iris,” her mother says. “I guess you should thank him for it. I’m sure Barney does” — that wry, faintly contemptuous note still there after all these years. But Barney doesn’t, not any more, Iris knows.
    “I don’t know how you can say that Dad didn’t love … you,” shesays in wonderment. “You never fought. You always seemed so — comfortable — together.”
    “About this ranch,” her mother says abruptly, as if Iris hasn’t spoken. She drops her eyes from Iris’s and picks at a daisy’s yellow centre. “You haven’t gone with him to live there?”
    “No.” Iris shakes her head, watching her mother’s fingers as they pluck, pluck at the daisy.
    “Why not?” The question is firm, and in its surprising lack of rebuke Iris remembers the gaze of the woman in her dream.
    “It is a beautiful place,”