Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala Read Free Book Online Page A

always been this way.
    The scent of the fruit increases in a wave, like heat from an opened oven door, filling Iris’s head with its fragrance. The hint of headache retreats and disappears. She opens the door of the commercial-size fridge that sits along the back wall. Quarts of farm cream the colour and density of mayonnaise fill an entire shelf.
    “I hope there’s enough here,” she says dubiously.
    “If there isn’t, somebody will have to run over to the co-op and buy a few more pints of that thin stuff they call cream,” Audrey tells her.
    More women have arrived — Shirley Austin, Margaret Wolf, Janet McPherson — and before they begin to work they pause to chat with each other, laugh a bit, ask a quick question about family members, how an afghan somebody is crocheting is coming along, did John find his stolen truck? The long table in the centre of the room is covered with cakes now, and their sweet scent rises to mingle with the piquant aroma of the berries. Ardath Richards, with whom Iris went to public school, begins to set the cakes on aluminum carts to take them into the hall where later they’ll be sliced and set on plates to be served. And the cream still has to be whipped, Iris thinks. It’s tricky though, such thick cream will turn to butter in an instant’s inattention.
    “Guess what?” Her young second cousin — or is it third? — Joanne, is speaking from the sink where she’s washing berries. “Jerry and I are building a new house as soon as the ground dries enough to dig a basement.” She turns back to her work, her long brown ponytail bouncing against her back, but not before Iris sees the delight in her eyes.
    “That’s wonderful!” Iris says, remembering how young couples yearn for a new house of their own, even though she never did. She lives in a house built by her parents when she was six or seven years old. “Are you building out on the farm or in town?”
    “In town,” Joanne tells her.
    At the next sink two of the women have opened a tap to fill one of the massive coffee urns and the water gushes noisily out; farther over somebody is emptying the cutlery drawers and clattering forks and spoons onto metal trays to carry out to the hall. Iris has to raise her voice to be heard.
    “When Barney and I got married Mom wanted Dad to build us a new house in their houseyard, but he wouldn’t hear of it either.” She doesn’t explain that Jack hadn’t wanted to use up good farmland. He liked to seed every acre: road allowances, deserted homesteads, slough — waste not, want not, and all that. Her mother Lily who, as she often said, liked grass, was perpetually annoyed with him over that obsession of his. Leave a little for the animals, she’d scold, and he’d smile at her sardonically.
    As Iris cuts neatly, rapidly at each berry with Joanne chattering on beside her about rug colours and whether they should have a bay window or not, she thinks of the first home she and Barney shared: a shabby farmhouse on a small farm her father bought when its owner went under. She remembers how for the first year she hadn’t really noticed its many shortcomings, knowing the big, two-storey, brown-frame farmhouse with its smart cream trim was waiting for her, dreaming of the day when she would be its mistress as her mother was, its chatelaine, and Barney would take over her parents’ and her grandparents’ farm, as soon as — her father said — he knew the place: the names and soil characteristics of each field, the weather patterns over each one, the places first and last to dry in the spring, and the business side of things.
Ranch-raised,
her father said sceptically, when Iris declared her intention to marry him.
Doesn’t know much about farming
… And her mother, shocked and frankly disdainful,
A cowboy from up in the hills!
    A year and a half they’d lived in the old Daniels farmhouse, until Iris began to chafe at facing another winter in it with its freezing floors despite the