Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala Page B

used to come and stay with her and Barney — and then run away — every single time, back to the city, or to whatever town his father was rodeoing in. Luke shrugs again. She’d like to ask if Fay is still drinking, but of course can’t since it isn’t supposed to be happening. She’s running out of things to say.
    When she’d tried to phone Barney to let him know she and Luke were coming, the phone rang and rang into a muffled silence. Out in the corrals, she supposes, or riding the steep, wooded hills looking for cows. Thank God it’s stopped raining, really seems to mean it this time.
    “How many cows Barney got to calve out?” Luke asks.
    “I think about eighty. He said he’d start small till he got back in the swing of things.” Luke grunts, whether in amusement, exasperation, or agreement, Iris can’t tell.
    “Wolves, grizzlies, all gone from them hills now,” he remarks. “Used to be stories, you wouldn’t believe …” Iris remembers now the importance of waiting. Luke speaks when he’s good and ready and if you interrupt his thoughts, he quits talking, period. “Used to take Howard and Barney when they were kids up to the old Sullivanplace for roundups. A long time ago. Old Man Robinson would be there. Jerretts, Castles would come with all the kids. We’d camp there, three, four days, while we brought in all them cows, sorted them out.” The hint of sadness in his voice makes her risk a glance at him. As far as she can tell, his expression hasn’t changed. “Yeah, Castles’d be Barney’s nearest neighbours. Irv is running the place now. His boy Dennis helps. That Daisy comes and goes.”
    She’s resting her left arm on a sports bag full of clean jeans, shirts, socks, and underwear for Barney that, because of the mud and the other things they’re carrying in the back of the truck, they’ve had to put on the seat between them. In the steel toolbox, besides the bag of Iris’s own clothing, there’s a carton of groceries, fresh baking, fruit, even lettuce and tomatoes for salad, something Barney won’t have seen since he was last home. There isn’t even running water to wash the lettuce in, she’ll have to pump it at the well. Grandma pumped water at the well her whole married life, she tells herself. It didn’t kill her. But there isn’t much comfort in the thought. All those women worked too hard, never had a second to themselves, never got to do anything that was fun or just for themselves and nobody else.
    The truck slows, and Luke turns the wheel west off the highway. He reaches down and jerks the knob that puts the truck back into four-wheel drive. The truck bucks and growls, but it pulls on through the mud. Iris hangs on to the armrest when they slew sideways and appear to be going straight for the ditch. Mud and water spray up and hit the windshield and the side windows, it’s hard to believe anything could get through this mess. She peers through a splattered window and sees a broken landscape of pines and steep, sloping hillsides and knows they’re well into the Cypress Hills. Soon — if they don’t get stuck or slide off the road — they’ll reach Barney.
    “Not far now. Wind’s up. Could be a good drying day,” Luke says. Unexpectedly, he goes on, “I told Howard I’m ready to retire, told him to come home. I think he’s got a woman where he is. ‘Bring her, if she’s a good woman,’ I told him.” His words are broken by the roaring and bumping of the truck. Iris opens her mouth to speak, but abandons the attempt, the truck is making so much noise she’d have to yell. And anyway, she doesn’t know what to say aboutHoward, Barney’s half-brother who is also Lannie’s father. It’s nothing to me, one way or the other, she tells herself, but I’ll never be able to like him, not after the way he dumped poor Lannie on us and walked away and never even looked back.
    She finds herself smiling, remembering Lannie as a little girl, kissing her good night as she