Turtle Valley (14 page)

Jude’s kiln shed stood adjacent to his studio and had an open floor plan that made me think of the cookhouses at some government parks. Large garage doors could be opened on three sides to allow the air to flow through. Shelves all around the kiln held glazed pots and vases, ready for the raku firing. A few finished pieces sat here and there on the top shelves.

Inside the open kiln, pots appeared translucent as the glazes swam on their surfaces. Jude lifted one of these vases with a pair of blackened tongs and carried it to a galvanized garbage can. He wore a red flame-resistant Nomex workshirt, and heavy Kevlar gloves that extended up his arms. A cloth smoke mask was strung around his neck, but he didn’t wear it as he worked. His hair was as unruly as ever, but peppered now with grey.

“Anyone ever tell you that you bear a striking resemblance to Harrison Ford?”

He swung around and grinned. “Only you.” He pulled out another pot and placed it in a garbage can and arranged newsprint around it as flames shot up over his gloved hands. “I didn’t think you were coming. I mean, I was just thinking, why would I imagine that you would come? But here you are.”

“It took me a little while to get organized. I was making fudge.”

“You were making fudge in the middle of the night?”

“You’re firing raku when we could be evacuated at any moment?”

“What are we supposed to do? Put our lives on hold? My sister phoned from Vancouver last night, and I told her I was
making linguini and she said, you’re
cooking?
As if that wasn’t the thing to do when the mountain above you is on fire. But you’ve got to eat, right?” He went back to the kiln for another pot. “And I’ve got a show in Vernon next week.”

I leaned against the doorframe to watch him work.

“How can you get away with a firing during this evacuation alert?” I asked him.

“I’m working in a contained area. It’s legal.”

“But is it wise? You could start another fire.”

He grinned at me. “Haven’t yet.”

He closed the kiln to bring it back up to temperature, then lifted each of the garbage-can lids one by one, to let more air in, to stuff more newspaper around the pots, to spritz some with salt water and vegetable oil to further crackle their glazes. Flames blasted up from the garbage cans as he opened them, and bits of burning newspaper swirled up and drifted down to the concrete floor. The insides of the garbage cans were black from countless fires.

“You and Val were working pretty late tonight,” he said.

“We’re still hauling out Mom’s things, and now we’ve got to make room for a hospital bed for Dad. The cancer has spread to his bones. It looks like a matter of weeks.”

He stood straight to face me. “Oh, Katrine.”

“He refuses to stay in the hospital. We hope to bring him home tomorrow. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s what he wants.”

“I’d want to die at home.” His eyes were glistening. I had forgotten this, his ability to feel so passionately, to tear up so readily over another’s heartache. Years before, I had watched him wipe his eyes over newscasts describing the plight of
earthquake victims, or those who had lost their homes to floods. In my ungenerous moments his sentimentality had annoyed me. But now it had the effect of making me weep as well. I wiped the corner of my eye with the heel of my hand and turned away.

“Here,” he said. “Let me put in my next load so we can talk.”

I watched him stack his glazed pots and plates, cups and teapots into the kiln. He closed the lid with gloved hands and flames shot up out of the hole at the top of the kiln.

“So, that story I was telling you about?” I said. “How my grandfather went missing on the mountain? Val told me tonight that he was never found.”

Jude flicked his hot gloves to the ground in one practised motion. His hands were dirty with soot and newspaper ink. “He died up there? Why would they keep that from you?”

“I don’t know. Val made noises about how Mom didn’t want to talk about it, that it was all too painful. And it would have been.” I pulled the manila envelope off the box. “Val found my grandfather’s military files, and his files from Essondale.”

“Essondale?”

“A mental hospital. Evidently he was institutionalized a number of times. He was shell-shocked, but he’d also sustained a brain injury during the First World War.”

Jude rubbed his hands on his pants before taking the files from me.

“It looks like he had paranoid delusions,” I said, “and thought something was following him, out to get him. He didn’t trust his neighbours, Uncle Valentine in particular. Look at this letter he wrote my grandmother. He thought Valentine was sweet on her. But even with all they had to deal with, there was
still passion between my grandparents. He talks here about how she fed him fudge from her fingers.”

I watched his face as he read through the letter and then paged through the Essondale file. “This letter from the doctor who admitted him is pretty interesting,” he said, and he read it aloud:
“Nearly a year ago I considered him insane, but a second certificate was not forthcoming and he was treated at Shaughnessey Hospital and later allowed to go home. He is not safe (in my opinion) to be at liberty at home. He was brought in today by the provincial police after he fired on a neighbour who tried to intervene when Weeks threatened his own family with a gun. His wife had evidently been trying to escape the farm along with her daughter when the incident occurred. His wife is understandably frightened of him. Last year when he was brought in the police—”

I took the letter from him.
“—informed us that he had attempted to kill a hired hand and was nearly successful, though I fancy this was an exaggeration.”
I tapped the letter. “Dad was his hired hand. I wonder if that’s how he got the scar, why Mom and Dad wouldn’t talk about it.”

“What scar?”

“He has a nasty scar on his arm. He and Mom always said it was from a hunting accident, but when I asked about it in the hospital, Dad got the story wrong. Both he and Mom seemed flustered, as if they were hiding something.”

“But why would they lie about any of this?”

“I don’t know.”

He handed me the files. “So, are you going to offer me some of that fudge, or what?”

“I don’t know why I brought it over. It won’t set in this heat. I’ll have to put it in the fridge.”

“I’d like a taste anyway.”

“I don’t have anything to cut it with.”

He handed me a knife that had sat on a plate with a half-eaten apple. “Don’t worry, it’s clean,” he said, when he saw me inspecting it.

I cut into the penuche, wishing I had a spoon instead, and offered him a limp piece. He held up his blackened hands and pointed to his mouth. “You mind?”

As I held it out for him, he grasped the fudge with his lips, taking in my finger as well. The thrill of his teeth on my skin. He held up his hands again. “Let me wash up.”

I watched him pull his T-shirt over his head and drop it to the floor. The slick of sweat over skin, his muscles in motion as he hoisted a bucket up from the floor and spilled water into a white enamelware washbasin. Then he washed, splashing water over his face and hair. He flicked the basin with the nail of his index finger, setting it ringing. “I found this in your uncle’s cabin years ago,” he said.

“It was Valentine’s?”

He picked up a towel to dry his hands and face. “I imagine I should have offered it to your parents, but I liked it.”

I ran my fingers around the rim of the basin until I became aware that he was watching me. His bare chest: the moles like constellations, the dark nipples.

“So, what’s with the box?” he said.

“The stuff in it isn’t mine. Or it’s not all mine in any case.” I opened the flaps, pushed aside the cards and letters Jude had given me, and showed him the sketchbook. On the cover, in Jude’s handwriting, was my name, Katrine. On the first page was a drawing of me, sitting at the table in my mother’s kitchen,
holding a small makeup mirror in my hand. Below the sketch were Jude’s notes:

I didn’t remember the moment he wrote of. I had lost so much of my life. Was I ever capable of that kind of rudeness, playing with my purse mirror and ignoring the guests at my own party, to make my unhappiness with my mother perfectly clear?

She’s so lovely.

“I didn’t know you had noticed me that early on,” I said.

“How could I admit to that? You were just a girl. And I was married.”

I turned the pages in the sketchbook. After that drawing there was a flurry of sketches of me that Jude had done in his studio as Lillian chatted with friends in her kitchen. Under one sketch, he had written,
The smell of her! Vanilla, I think. I’m not sure if it’s perfume or the scent of apple pie or coffeecake she might have eaten. Or even her natural smell. She said she wasn’t seeing anyone. I hope she’s not seeing anyone.

I tapped the note. “Do you think I would have let you kiss me that night if I had had someone?”

“I kissed you and I had Lillian.”

“You startled me, you know, with that first kiss. You had me sitting there, just so, all arranged like you wanted—”

“No. Like I always saw you sitting, with one knee up, and the other foot tucked under.”

“Then you jumped up all of a sudden and marched over to me, still carrying your sketchbook, so I thought you were about to rearrange my hair or my clothing again. But you leaned down and kissed me. Surprised the hell out of me. Your beard stubble tickled my upper lip.”

“I remember thinking,
Her lips are so soft.
”

“You were so, I don’t know … determined.”

“I was scared shitless. I figured if I didn’t make myself kiss you then, that night, while I had the opportunity, I wasn’t going to.”

“Scared?” I said. “Of me?”

“I wanted to kiss you from that first time we got together, when you dropped me and Lillian’s bloody great gothic chair off at the Turtle Valley hall for that dance. Don’t you remember? When I apologized for being such an ass, about what I said about your photographs in the
Observer.
I put my arm over the seat
behind you. Right there, I wanted to kiss you. But there was a hall full of people in front of us. And Lillian.”

I looked down at the sketchbook, and leafed through it, feeling shy. There was sketch after sketch of me. At first I was clothed, then naked, and then my belly was as round and ripe as a pumpkin. Then the sketches ended. I paged through the remainder of the sketchbook, following a progressively thinning trail of my life: a grin-and-grab photo of me flanked by smiling arts council members holding a scholarship cheque to help me on my way back to university, a mug shot next to a little story that said I was leaving, an invitation to my wedding at the Turtle Valley Memorial Hall only a few months later that my mother must have sent Jude, against my wishes. Then many empty pages; more than half the book was left unfilled.

“I had no idea you kept a sketchbook, a scrapbook really, about me, as if I was a subject you were studying.”

“Muse,” said Jude. “You were my muse.”

“I’m not angry. I make similar notes about people myself. It just unsettled me. It’s strange to see yourself through another’s eyes.” I put the sketchbook back in the box and pushed the box toward him. “In any case, this is yours.”

He picked up one of the cards he had given me and read what he had written:
“There were a couple of hot air balloons hovering just above the highway as I got close to Kamloops this afternoon. They looked so peaceful, just hanging there, weightless, at the mercy of the winds, or their lack, able to rise or fall, but nothing more. This is how I am, weightless in your love, and at your mercy.…
God, did I really write this drivel?”

I laughed. “I liked it at the time.”

“I don’t understand how all these cards I gave you got in here.”

“I had stored that stuff at Mom’s. The day after my wedding I left an envelope full of the things you had given me on your doorstep.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. After I saw you at my wedding, I guess I just wanted to say—”

“That you still thought of me too.”

I smoothed a hand over the wedding invitation in the scrapbook. “Why did you come to my wedding?”

“It was a community event; the whole valley was there. Lillian would have wondered why I refused to go. Obviously she had her suspicions.”

“I half hoped Lillian would find that envelope of your cards first.”

“I imagine she did, and stuck them in this box. I never heard anything about it. But then she wouldn’t have said anything. She would have hoped that I would stumble across it myself. Jesus, that woman, she would never just come out and talk to me. It was all cat and mouse.” He waved the card. “But you weren’t much better, leaving those cards on the doorstep for Lillian. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

I grinned. “I guess I did at one time.”

“That explains why you never came over to visit Lillian and me in all those years.”

“Well, how could I?” I said. “After everything we’d been through? I never understood how you got away with coming over to see me when I was back home. How you found the nerve.”

“Ezra was always there, and your parents. We were chaperoned.” He shrugged. “I had to see you.”

I stared up at the fire glowing on the mountainside, not sure how to respond. After a time he ran a hand down my spine to the small of my back. “Mosquito,” he said.