Turtle Valley (16 page)

She looked up at me, but in that moment I didn’t know how to respond, what to say.

“One day Mom and Grandma were in Kamloops shopping, and I was feeding the calves over at Grandma’s, and he caught me in the barn and pushed me down into the hay. I don’t know what got into me, but this time I kicked him hard in the shin. I said, ‘I’m going to tell Dad.’ But he dragged me by the arm out to the yard and then into the greenhouse where one
of the barn cats had just given birth to a litter. He held one of the kittens over a bucket of water and threatened to drown the whole batch if I didn’t keep quiet. I struggled to get away, but he made me watch as he drowned that kitten. It squirmed in his hand, trying to get breath. Then he picked up another kitten and was about to drown that one too when Uncle Valentine came running across the field and into the greenhouse; Valentine held a rake like it was a gun and told him, ‘Put the cat down, John, and let the girl go, or I’ll tell Maud all about this.’ Like he knew, you know, like he knew everything. The next morning I found all those kittens in that bucket, dead.”

“Jesus, Val.”

“Given how much energy Mom puts into her cats, I imagine he must have done exactly the same kind of thing to her. You understand now, don’t you? Why I don’t make a fuss about her cats, why I try to find them homes, why I don’t want you to make an issue of them?”

I nodded.

She patted my thigh. “Speaking of which—can you and Ezra get those barn cats rounded up into cages this afternoon? Then maybe Ezra can drive them to the SPCA shelter at the fairgrounds. I’ll need to stay here with Dad.”

“I’ll have to do it myself. Ezra won’t be able to drive for some time.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I doubt I could keep him focused on the job long enough to help me in any case. He still hasn’t gotten around to butchering that calf.”

A chair scraped against the floor in the kitchen and then Ezra was at the doorway. “Your mother heard every saying,” he
said. “She heard every goddamned word.” He turned on his heel and left the house; I heard the screen door slap shut.

I rubbed my face. “Shit.”

“You should talk to Mom,” Val said. “About what you told me.” When I looked up at her, she said, “Nothing I said was new to her.” She glanced at her watch. “I told the nursing staff at the hospital I’d be picking up Dad about now, so I’d better run. Maybe you can get Ezra to help you move Mom’s bed?” I followed her into the kitchen and she started for the door before turning back. “Mom, you want anything?”

Mom sat within her rocker, fussing with the collar on her blouse as if arranging it for a photograph. Jeremy played with the kitten at her feet.

“Mom?”

“I don’t want anything.”

Val stood a moment fiddling with her keys, then walked up to Mom and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll pick something up for supper,” she said.

I STOOD AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW
with my back to my mother as I watched Val drive off in her truck. Ezra walked toward the house, dragging a green garden hose behind him. He set up a sprinkler near the house and turned it on, to saturate the cedar-shake siding and shrubs around the house as Jude had, I presumed, so embers drifting down from the hills wouldn’t take root.

“What you told Val,” said Mom, “how I walked off on you, it wasn’t like that. I never would have left you.”

When I turned to her, she kept her gaze on Jeremy who played with the kitten at her feet. I handed the cat to my mother,
and took my son’s hand to lead him to the door. “You go help Daddy set up that sprinkler, okay?”

“Sprinkler!” he shouted, and bounded down the steps.

I watched from the window to see that Ezra had taken him in hand before replying to my mother. “I know, now, that you wouldn’t have left me,” I said. “But I didn’t know that then.”

She stroked the kitten within her lap for a moment. “You didn’t like that I wrote.”

“I didn’t like that you disappeared into it. That I couldn’t reach you. But I have the same desire to write everything down, so I’ll remember it.”

She shook her head. “That’s not it at all. When I write my mind is
here,
in the present. I don’t remember the past. I can forget, then. And there’s so much that I want to forget.”

“I don’t understand.”

A bantam hen fluttered up to reclaim its fragrant nest among the sweet alyssum growing in the window box, and my mother carried the kitten to the window to watch the chicken with me. “You remember that rooster we had when you were in your teens,” she said, “the one that stabbed its claws into my thighs every time I tried to feed the chickens? Nasty creature. It got so I dreaded going into the henhouse to get the eggs, and you know how much I love collecting eggs.”

Yes, I knew. The warmth of a chicken’s body beneath her feathery skirt, the smooth weight of a warm egg. The deep satisfaction of a basket of eggs, a treasure sought and found.

“Every day it was a battle with that rooster. I had to carry a bucket ahead of me, like a shield, so he wouldn’t gouge my thighs. When he lunged after me, I tossed the bucket over his head.”

I nodded. I had also carried buckets into the chicken coop to protect myself from roosters, from one in particular, a bird I had named Christmas for his glorious red and green feathers. After he set his talons into my legs I learned to capture him with an upturned bucket. Strange how he sat there under that pail, never trying to move. When I finished setting out the grain and collecting the eggs, and took the bucket away, Christmas just went on sitting there, eyes fixed on a distant horizon. I had to throw a rock at him to get him to move. He had a short life. Tiring of the daily battle with him, I butchered him for soup stock and found his testicles were as large as a man’s. So much luck in such a small body.

“Dealing with my father was like dealing with that bloody awful rooster. I never knew when he might attack. I was so frightened of him, but that’s no excuse. I should have protected myself, and Val, much sooner than I did.”

She put a hand to the window and the chicken pecked at her fingers through the warped glass. “I did my best to make sure Val was never alone with him, and I asked Valentine to watch her if I had to go into town and couldn’t be there when she got home from school. I didn’t tell Gus why until years later, though both he and Valentine guessed, I think. But I didn’t know that my father had gone after Val, not until Valentine told me he had caught my father forcing Val to watch as he drowned those kittens.”

My mother held the kitten close and I reached out to pet its head. “So Val was right?” I asked. “He did hurt you, in that way?”

“One of my earliest memories is finding my teddy bear on my bed with its head cut off just after I had run away from him. I hid the bear under my bed, but my mother found it. She never asked me what happened; she just sewed the head back on.”

“Oh, Mom.” I felt the jag of a long forgotten childhood pain pierce my belly. When I was very young I found my beloved plastic elephant on my bed, similarly destroyed. My mother had yanked the wheels, ears, and three of the legs from it, as punishment for some misdemeanour. I didn’t remember what I had done to enrage her so, but the elephant still existed; it was packed away in a box of toys in my old room.

“He was a terribly wounded man,” Mom said. “Brain-injured. Shell-shocked.

When I visited him during his stays at Shaughnessey—the big veterans’ hospital in Vancouver—I saw men who’d been in hospital since the Great War. Some had only their eyes and forehead left; their lower faces had been blown away. I remember thinking my father was like these men, with bits of himself missing, though you couldn’t see the damage from the outside, not until he started raging, or until the fear took hold of him.

My mother kept a light on in their room at night; if it was dark, even the scurry of a mouse would wake him. He very often woke screaming. Night terrors, my mother told me, memories of the war replaying in his mind. She would never come up behind him without clearing her throat, a little cough, an
ahem,
quite proper, mind you, but loud enough to let him know she was there. If she hadn’t, he would have startled and turned on her. Any loud noise would set him off, like a neighbour blasting stumps. He went wild that day they blew up the Japanese balloon.”

“That was real? The doctor who interviewed him in the Essondale files seemed to think it was a delusion.”

“You read them?”

I nodded.

“Oh, it was real, all right. Your father was the one who found it, early in March 1945. He and Valentine and your grandfather were out logging with the horses when Gus saw a big white blob in the trees up on the hill. Valentine and John hiked up with Gus to investigate. It turned out to be a mat of papery stuff draped over tree branches. The balloon itself, inflated, would have been twenty-five, maybe thirty feet across. Wires all around the bottom, like what you’d see in a truck motor. There’d been rumours about balloons that had been found or had exploded, so we had a pretty good idea what it was. One came down near Squilax that same year. It still had the bomb attached and I guess it blew quite a hole. The Japanese had sent thousands of those balloons loaded with bombs, trying to start fires all over North America. They had to send them in winter, to take advantage of winds that would carry them all the way from Japan. The thing is, that time of year, the balloons landed in snow, and if the bomb did go off, any fire that started just fizzled out. And because the military managed to keep things pretty quiet, and next to nothing was ever reported in the papers, the Japanese figured the plan had failed, and didn’t try again.”

“So did Dad blow it up then?”

“No, no. They all hiked back down to the road, then Valentine and your father drove into town and told the RCMP officer we had around here at the time, DeWitt, and he phoned the army base at Vernon. Then we went back home for lunch. That afternoon three army fellows turned up at the place and Valentine, Gus, my father, and I all led them back up the mountain. One of the men was heavy, must have been an office man. He got across the creek and only about a quarter way up before he played out
and just sat. The other two yanked the balloon out of the tree and took it apart. They kept the metal ring from the bottom, with all the wires. One of the fellows called it a chandelier, I imagine because it had dangled down from the balloon when it was up in the air. Then they stacked the rest of it into a pile and set it off. Good Lord, it made a racket. The blast shook buildings miles away. My father fell to the ground holding his head, crying.”

My mother looked up at me. The ghostly white rims in her eyes. “Oh, Kat, it was so terrible to watch. My father thought he was back in the war, in the thick of fighting all over again; he couldn’t walk, he was shaking so hard. But those wretched army fellows just laughed at him. Valentine and your father and I had to drag him down off that mountain, kicking and screaming, without their help. When we finally got him back to the house, my mother made a pot of penuche for him, as she often did when he was upset, and that settled him down a bit, as it almost always did. That man loved his sweets. Once he was quiet, Valentine walked across the field back home and Gus went back to my father’s hired hand’s cabin, where he was living at the time, to get some sleep.”

She looked up at the mountain. “But then later in the evening I came up behind my father to fill his cup, surprising him, I guess, and he whacked the teapot out of my hand. Scalding tea went down my dress and all over the floor. His face was so pale and his eyes bugged out, in terror. He was shaking so hard. Then he grabbed the 3030 from the gun rack over the door and aimed it at me. I’m sure that at that moment he had no idea who I was.

“Mom stepped in between me and the gun and told me, ‘Keep quiet, walk very slowly into your room, and gather your
things.’ While I did as she told me, I could hear her talking to him, very quietly, soothing him like she always did. By the time I came out with my carpetbag, she had hers packed as well. My father was lying on his bed. She said, ‘Let’s go,’ and she led me down the road. But we didn’t get to the gate before my father came out, levelled that gun at us, and shouted at us to stop.”

She turned to me. “That was what awaited my mother if she ever thought to leave. That gun. When my mother didn’t immediately stop, my father fired over her head. Gus came running out in his long johns to see what was going on, and then Valentine ran across the field from his cabin. He knew what my father was capable of. So he saw my father turn that gun on Gus. Oh! I can remember that night so clearly.
If you’re going to shoot someone, then shoot me,
Valentine told him. So my father turned the gun on Valentine next, and I could see him thinking about shooting him, you know. Valentine just kept on walking toward him with his hands out. That’s when my mother slipped off behind the house and ran over to Petersons’ to get help. I was just frozen, I was so terrified. I couldn’t think what to do other than watch. Gus started walking toward my father too, with his hands out, just like Valentine, and my father swung that gun back on Gus, then on Valentine, back on Gus. All the time my father was backing away, toward the house, and they were getting closer and closer.”