Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala

her mother’s
Why not?
A sulky
I don’t want to.
    Suddenly it’s as if an axe has cleaved her bloodlessly in two, from the crown of her head right down through her womb, and in that remorseless opening into her own soul, she sees what she’s been: selfish through and through, a stubborn child blindly wanting her own way. And more: terrified by Barney’s attempt to drag her out of her complacent, comfortable rut of a life. Utterly terrified. And that — that is the real reason she has refused to go.

The Wild
    It’s noon by the time she and Luke set out for Barney’s ranch. Driving home from Swift Current in the darkness last night she had felt her loneliness as close to unbearable. If she could not thank Barney for forcing her into so radical a change in her lifestyle at this late stage in her life, faced with her own childish stubbornness, she knew she had at least to try to meet him halfway. As she drove the wide, curving highway toward Chinook, the damp blacktop eating up her headlights, she thought ruefully and with a touch of something close to shame at her own newly glimpsed wilfulness: if I don’t go to him, our marriage will never be the same again.
    Having made her decision, she has been forced to ask Luke to drive her to Barney’s ranch, since most of the road there is impassable this rainy spring without a four-wheel drive, and Barney has theirs with him. Sitting beside Luke on the hard seat of his scarred and dented old truck, her side of the seat covered with a faded quilt which she knew Mary Ann would have insisted on spreading where Iris would sit — this out of some indissoluble embarrassment at her family’s life even after all the years Iris has been her daughter-in-law — Iris glances quickly at him. The same clean, sharp profile, impossible to tell by it he’s seventy-five, and he’s as handsome as ever, although his handsomeness is forever spoiled for Iris by the implacable set of his face. She’ll never get used to these hardbitten old ranchers with their grim ethic, never smiling for fear somebody might take them for soft, still testing and finding wanting their fifty-year-old sons. It had taken years, no matter what Barney said, before she stopped feeling a bit scared around him.
    At the moment they’re driving down a narrow paved road, for which Iris is grateful, as she needs a respite from being thrown around in the cab by the muddy, deeply rutted roads they’ve had to travel before they reached this twenty-mile stretch of pavement. She rearranges her shiny blue raincoat, pulls her damp silk scarf off her head and spreads it out on her knees to dry. Luke turns on the windshield wipers, spraying the windows with cleaning fluid at the same time. Neither of them can see anything as the lumps of pale brown mud dissolve and smear the view of the narrow black road and the drenched yellow fields stretching away on both sides of it. Bit by messy bit the wipers clear two fan-shaped openings.
    “The sun is shining!” Iris says in amazement. Luke grunts. The sight of the clear blue sky and the sunshine glinting off the puddles on the asphalt ahead of them so encourages her that she makes an effort to talk to Luke.
    “Are you calving?” She can never remember whether Luke calves early or late, the choice being a source of disagreement among certain cattlemen. Of course, Luke calves late. He has nothing but contempt for those who breed their cows so they calve in the middle of blizzards or in forty-below weather in order to have extra-big calves at the fall sales, or because they’re really farmers and don’t want to be calving and seeding at the same time.
    “Couple more weeks,” Luke says. She looks at his knobby hand on the gearshift. In it she sees his life written, his fingers thick with muscle, his skin roughened and tanned even in winter, his knuckles arthritic. If he weren’t so tough, he’d be dead, she thinks and is a little ashamed she has never tried to get closer than