Free Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala Page B

she says. “It’s over west in Fort Walsh country, you know? It has lots of trees and deep coulees and valleys and streams …” Her mother doesn’t appear to be listening.
    “You better go there, Iris,” her mother says, startling Iris with her firmness as if she knows something Iris doesn’t. She closes her eyes. Her fingers stop their restless picking.
    “I don’t want to,” Iris says bleakly. She hears the hint of anger in her own voice and tries, too late, to soften it. But there it is, out at last. She just doesn’t want to.
    “Why not?” her mother asks in a whisper, her eyes still closed.
    “There’s no running water, no electricity, no decent roads. It’s fifty miles to the nearest town. I’m past fifty, Mom. It’s too late for me to start living like my grandmother did. And I don’t know a thing about cattle, you know I don’t.” She’s trying to find good reasons to tell her mother, explanations nobody could find fault with, but instead she finds herself recalling the dehorning so long ago on the Christie ranch, before she and Barney were married, the blood drenching Luke’s shirt, Barney’s half-brother Howard’s barely concealed rage, the screams of the animals, and Barney trying to hide it all from her, afraid if she really saw it, she’d go away and never come back. And never telling her mother about this, not wanting her to be right. “I still love him, Mom,” she whispers.
    Her mother is asleep. Iris leans toward her and whispers, “Mom? Mother?” There is no response. She peers at her mother’s delicately lined face, the fine skin, the palest flush in her cheeks showing she’s still alive behind her stillness. “Help me, Mother.” Her mother’s eyes are still closed; she moves her head irritably, a tiny, almostimperceptible jerk, and a frown passes across her features and disappears.
    The door opens and a nursing assistant enters the room quietly. She’s carrying the supper tray which she sets down on the table by Iris, snapping on the lamp beside it.
    “Will you feed her or do you want me to?” she asks.
    “I’ll feed her,” Iris says. The nurse bends over her mother.
    “Wake up, Mrs. Thomas, suppertime,” she calls. “When she finishes eating, call me and I’ll help you put her to bed.” Lily says, “Don’t worry, I have the garden planted.” The nurse turns to Iris with a smile and says, “She’s alone too much; all our old people are.” She gives the afghan a little pat, then leaves the room quickly.
    Lily doesn’t want to eat, and when she lifts one thin hand in a gesture of refusal and turns her head away to stare into the shadows at the end of the room, Iris makes no effort to persuade her. After a while she pushes the buzzer at the head of her bed, and together she and a different nursing assistant, this one a dark-skinned, slight woman whose accent Iris can’t penetrate, help her mother into the bed. Lily soon falls back into sleep or wherever it is the very old go when they close their eyes. Perhaps she will die tonight, perhaps this is the last night they, mother and daughter, will spend together. And when she goes, Iris thinks, watching that scarcely discernible quiver in her mother’s chest, who will take her place? For in this instant she understands what she has not known before, that there will never be any kind of loss as whole and irrevocable as the loss of her mother.
    Evening has come and the room is filling with shadows, dissolving the walls and ceiling. Iris sits on, lost in reverie, this place, this room, this woman who bore her, introduced her to life, nursed her and cared for her and taught her, filling the space left by Barney’s defection. She thinks, I could take her home with me, right now, tonight. She tries hard to think what it would be like with her mother at home, but her mind won’t deal with it. Not in the new uncertainty in which she lives with Barney neither fully gone nor fully present.
    She remembers her answer to