Turtle Valley (17 page)

She brushed her face against the cat’s fur. “It was stupid of them, cornering him like that. My father bumped into the porch and fired at Valentine but missed. Gus charged forward, slammed my father to the ground, and kicked the gun away. While Gus held Dad, Valentine picked up the rifle and kept it trained on him until the police came barrelling down the driveway with the siren
blaring and the lights flashing. Then they bundled my father away for another one of his visits to Essondale. He was gone a year. By the time he got back, your father and I were married and Val was born and there was nothing he could do about any of it.”

I watched Ezra a moment as he set up another sprinkler near the house and turned on the water at the tap by the steps. Jeremy tripping along behind him. “I just don’t understand why your mother married your father in the first place. He was already injured when they met, right?”

She nodded. “Part of his skull had been blown away by the shells that first buried him and then unburied him. My mother told me bits of shrapnel from those explosions were still lodged in his brain. I thought of them as living things, eating away at him, like maggots.”

“So why would she put herself in that position, having to care for this man her whole life, knowing how hard it would be?”

“Oh, I don’t know how much they knew then. They didn’t know much about brain injuries and they certainly didn’t understand shell-shock. They were still tying men to posts in firing range of the enemy for it so they’d be shot; they treated them like deserters, traitors. But the situation was familiar for her, I think. Her own father and mother had been sick throughout much of her adolescence and Mom had nursed them both until their deaths. She’d been taking care of someone for so long that she didn’t know anything else. So my father’s illness gave her a kind of life’s work. Even so, I’m sure there were a great many times when she wished she had never married him.”

I looked up at the clouds of smoke sweeping across the Ptarmigan Hills. “Do you think it came as something of a relief for her then when your father finally died on that mountain?”
When my mother looked up at me, her eyes wide as if frightened, I said, “Val told me last night.”

“What did Val tell you?”

“That he was lost up there, that he never came home.” When she didn’t respond I said, “I don’t understand why you felt you needed to lie about it.”

“I didn’t want to remember that time. I knew you’d ask questions.” The kitten squirmed in her hands and she put it down on the floor. “I wasn’t well for a long time after my father disappeared. My lightning arm would do things, terrible things.”

“I don’t follow.”

She crossed her arms and stared out the window for a time, at Jeremy running back and forth through the sprinkler. “One afternoon, Val came home from school and I asked her to do the dishes but she wouldn’t. She said, ‘Why don’t you do them? You never do anything around here anymore.’ And that’s all it took. My lightning arm took hold of Val’s hand and brought her to her knees; her fingers slid free from my grip one by one until I was holding her little finger and I watched myself bend it backwards, like it was someone else doing it. There was a terrible crack, and her screams, and then your cries as you woke, and Gus yanked me away. He had to hug me from behind, so I couldn’t get at Val.” She turned back to me. “I broke her finger, Kat. I would have done a lot worse if Gus hadn’t stopped me.”

I turned away, to look out the window, feeling queasy. “Jesus, Mom!”

“When I walked away from you, I wasn’t leaving you. Those were the times I was afraid of what I might do.”

In the yard Ezra excitedly pointed toward Jude’s property in order to get Jeremy to look, and I searched the fields as well.
“There’s deer,” I said, pointing them out for my mother, relieved, at that moment, to have something else to focus on. Five does and a young buck in the alfalfa field, tails twitching.

We watched them together for a time. “Remember that night when my father couldn’t bring himself to shoot those deer?” she asked me, as if I had been there when it happened, and so I had been, many times, when she told me this story. I followed her there again now, into the field where the wheat stooks stood silver against the moon, and I waited with her behind my grandfather as he levelled his gun, as he watched three does and a buck come into view. We waited as he waited, and breathed out in relief as he sighed and lowered the gun. The deer grazed for a time on the stooks and then, startled by a rustle in the grass, bounded back into the woods.

My grandfather’s shoulders fell as he turned, and we followed him back to the house, listening to the jingle of his keys within in his pocket, the crunch of barley stubble under his feet. I could see the ridges in the bottom of his boots; the moon was that bright. He sat next to the stove to kick off his boots, and my mother took them outside to knock them against the side of the house to rid them of mud. Then she picked up a broom and dustpan, and swept his footprints from the kitchen floor.

I LAID MY HEAD
on Ezra’s shoulder and breathed in his smell: sawdust and sandalwood, the whiff of coffee from beneath his arm. He pulled me close in his sleep, something he had always done, and I ran my hand down his stomach to touch his penis lying soft on his thigh, which he had once responded to no matter how deeply asleep. But not this time. I sighed, turned away, and curled into myself, and he rolled toward me and hugged me from behind. So he was awake. “It’s not you,” he said. “Kat, glimpse at me.” When I didn’t, he sat up on one elbow and turned my face toward him. “You’re beautiful. It’s not you. I’m tired. All the time I’m tired. And I’m not sure who I am to you anymore. I feel like I’m no use.”

I sat up and put on my robe. “I’m going to get up for a while.”

“Kat, wait.”

As I left the room I heard him getting out of his side of the bed.

Mom was standing at the stove. The lights were out but her figure was clearly lit up by the red glow of the burners. They were all turned on and she held a dishtowel over them. One end of the cloth dangled against the burner and was blackened, smoking. Harrison and the kitten sat at her feet. The cats both looked up at me and meowed as I approached.

“Mom, what the hell are you doing?” I grabbed the dishtowel and threw it into the sink, where it sizzled out among the dishes soaking there. But she still stood at the stove, staring at the burners. I turned them off and took her by the arm. “Mom?” I said. Her eyes were wide open but unseeing. I gave her a little shake. “Mom!”

Then she looked at me. “Oh, hello, dear.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine. A little tired.”

“You were sleepwalking, I think.”

“Sleepwalking?” She looked around the dark kitchen, at Ezra standing like a shadow behind me. “Oh!”

“Can I catch you both anything?” said Ezra.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get her settled.”

“I could gather some hot milk.”

“We’ll be fine.”

He stood a moment, a dark silhouette in the kitchen, and then turned back to the bedroom. Mom leaned down to retrieve the little tabby.

“Let’s get you back to bed,” I said to Mom, and I led her by the arm to her bed in the parlour.

As she lay down, Mom looked up at me with those ghostly eyes. Without her glasses, she searched my face, unable to focus. “Ezra wanted to help you, to be with you,” Mom said. She touched my cheek. “Let him help you.”

“I’ll try.” But I didn’t want to go back to the bed I shared with him. Not now. I ran a hand over her forehead, through her thick grey hair. “You get some sleep.”

I KNOCKED LIGHTLY ON THE DOOR
to my father’s room and opened it. On the hospital bed my father lay in his pajamas, dreaming morphine dreams. His eyes were closed and his face was turned away—already he was distancing himself from us—and yet I could see his old face in the mirror of the bureau, surrounded by the family photos Val had placed there: Val and myself taken when I was two; the last photo of my grandmother as she carried that carpetbag down the streets of Kamloops; the one of Valentine in the garden; Uncle Dan, his face hidden behind a gas mask, taken during the Second World War; my own wedding photo, and my parents,’ one that was obviously taken by a family member or a neighbour, not by a professional photographer. In this photo my father was thin and boyish, with a head of thick red hair, not the balding, corpulent man I had known my whole life, not this frail old man in the bed in front of me. In the photo, he held my mother’s elbow as if to guide her. My mother wore a simple flowered frock, and she looked not up into the camera but down, to the tiny bouquet of yellow violets in her hand.

“How about I take a shift?” I said to Val.

Val yawned. “I’m okay.”

“You need some sleep, and I haven’t had a moment alone with him.”

“All right.” She stood. “He hasn’t been sleeping well.” She leaned into my father and raised her voice. “Kat’s going to sit with you for a bit, all right?”

“Hmm? Kat?” He looked up at me, for a moment confused. “Oh, yes.”

Val kissed him on the forehead and patted my arm as she left the room. Tonight my father’s breath was shallow, erratic. “The smoke getting to you?” I asked.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I used to walk the trails on those hills with a loaded backpack and never got out of breath.”

We both stared out the window for a time, at the fire blazing across the mountain in the night. “That fire isn’t going to give me the luxury of hanging around,” Dad said. “If I’m going to die at home, I better do it quick.”

The fire was close. Throughout the late afternoon and evening, embers had drifted down, starting spot fires up and down the valley. I had put one fire out myself in our sawdust pile that evening, drowning it with water from a garden hose.

“You’ll be with us for a while yet,” I said.

He shook his head. “I wish I hadn’t slept the whole way back from the hospital this afternoon. I wanted to take in as much as I could on the drive. I don’t expect I’ll come by that way again. Not alive, in any case.”

I didn’t reply. His voice was thin and whispery and there was a kind of transparency to the skin of his face, as if he wouldn’t simply die, but grow more and more translucent until he disappeared.

I pointed at the wedding portrait of my parents. “Mom was telling me today that your romance with her all started the day the Japanese balloon blew up, when Grandpa threatened Mom and Grandma with a gun.”

He turned to look at me. “She told you about that?”

I nodded.

“Huh. Well, I think she took notice of me there, all right, as the hero, you know. She started bringing little gifts to the cabin. The funniest things: a scrap of red velvet, a string of bells, little bouquets of violets.”

I waited until he caught his breath again and then asked, “Was that the start of something between your Uncle Valentine and Grandma as well?”

“They were better friends after that, if that’s what you mean. Valentine was over nearly every day, during those months John was in the hospital, helping Maud with the chores and in the garden. Helping in any way he could. Like I said, he built that greenhouse for her. But he made himself pretty scarce after John came back. He didn’t come over much. Though he sent notes to her.”

“He wrote Grandma letters?”

“I was the courier,” he said, and his voice was wheezy, “carrying them back and forth, making very sure your grandfather never knew anything about it, of course. I didn’t even tell your mother about it at the time.”

“But they lived just across the field from each other.”

“They couldn’t see much of each other when John was home; he wouldn’t have allowed it, or understood it. Lord knows Maud and Valentine should have got together. But Maud felt sorry for John, I think. She often wondered aloud how he would ever cope if anything were to happen to her.”

I looked at my own wedding portrait, waiting until his breathing had settled before asking anything more. How would Ezra cope without me? “You think that’s why she stayed with Grandpa?” I asked. “Because she felt sorry for him?”

“Who knows? I never understood why she stayed. I expect she and Valentine might have got together after John disappeared, even at the age they were then. But of course Maud passed away the day she heard the news that the search had been called off. The stress of it all, I imagine.”

“Did you read any of the letters?”

“No, no. Maud must have burned them. What if John had found them?”

“And Valentine? Did he keep Grandma’s letters?”

“Oh, girl, you have so many questions!”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right. Just give me a moment.” I held his hand as he laboured to catch his breath. “We never found any letters when we went through his things after his death,” he said finally. “I expect he would have destroyed her letters or hid them. John was the kind of man who would have looked through Valentine’s things if he had his suspicions. No one locked their doors then, except for John. He carried his keys with him everywhere he went.”

“When I was a kid I came across one of Valentine’s tobacco cans under the floorboards of that old house.”