Turtle Valley (2 page)

When I picked up the extinguisher to replace it, I saw the corner of my grandmother’s carpetbag lying beneath a stack of my mother’s writings in the box. This carpetbag was the one my grandmother carried in that last photograph of her, a picture taken by a street photographer who made a living snapping shots of people as they strode along the sidewalk in Kamloops. She was not expecting to be photographed—her brow was furrowed and her face was tense because, my mother told me, her hips and knees were so badly worn that each step she took was painful. Her outfit was very much of her time: the sensible black shoes, the big round buttons of her coat, the carpetbag slung over one arm. She had sewn the
bag herself from flowered upholstery fabric, and fashioned it with curved wooden handles varnished the colour of butterscotch. Even though it wasn’t quite the sort of valise Mary Poppins carried, as a child I had begged my mother to let me play with it. But she always said no. “My mother was a very private woman,” she told me later, when I was in my twenties. “No one looked in her handbag, not even my father.”

“Surely she wouldn’t have minded us looking at her things once she was gone,” I said.

“I mind.” And she had kept it hidden from me, in her room.

As I pulled the carpetbag out of the box, my grandmother’s billfold and dozens of dead ladybugs fell from inside it to the floor. The insects often overwintered in this house, creeping inside in the fall through the many cracks in the door and window frames, and gathering into swarms within unused dresser drawers, just as they did outside under piles of leaves and other litter. But I had never before seen them in such great numbers.

I picked up my grandmother’s wallet. It was fat with bits of paper: shopping lists and receipts, the obituaries of lady friends, a few of the community notes my mother had written for the Promise paper. A tiny worn photograph—not much bigger than a good-sized postage stamp—was wrapped inside a carefully folded news story. It showed a slim, sharp-featured man, dressed in a white shirt with braces and armbands, leaning on a shovel. On the back, in my grandmother’s hand, was written:
Valentine, June 1945, in his garden.
Valentine Svensson, my father’s uncle. I unfolded the news story. My grandmother had written the date on the clipping:
April 1, 1965.

PRESS-TIME NEWS FLASHES
TURTLE VALLEY MAN MISSING

This newspaper story was about my family. John Weeks was my grandfather and his wife was Maud Weeks, the grandmother who had owned this carpetbag; their daughter, Beth, was my mother. Gustave Svensson—Gus—was my dad. I looked out the window at the Ptarmigan Hills where my father and great uncle had searched for my grandfather. Against the night sky the fire on the ridge was the corona of the sun seen in an eclipse: flames like solar flares licked up into the black. Why hadn’t my parents ever told me the story of how my grandfather was lost? They were both such great storytellers; it seemed so unlikely that they would forget to tell me this.

I searched through the rest of the contents of the purse, looking for other newspaper clippings that would tell me when my grandfather was found, but there weren’t any. Instead I was surprised to find a tiny jar of sweetly scented rouge, something
I never would have guessed my grandmother owned. The blush still carried its vibrant red colour; its perfume was spicy, flamboyant, not words my mother used to describe my grandmother. I hadn’t known her; I was only a few months old when she passed away of a heart attack inside the greenhouse not far from the house.

I put everything back in the bag and went to the window to finish my hot milk. My grandmother would have looked out this window to see Valentine walking across his yard, just as I now saw Jude carrying another box to his truck. My parents had inherited that land on Valentine’s death and even now, more than twenty years after they had sold the place to Jude Garibaldi, they continued to graze their small herd of cattle there, as they had when they farmed the land with Valentine. I could just make out the rooflines of the crumbling log home that had once belonged to Valentine, and a second two-storey farmhouse that had been left incomplete and never lived in, and was badly weathered by the time I played in it as my parents drank coffee with my great-uncle. There were many loose floorboards in that house, and I would pry them up with a hammer, searching for treasure. I found one of my Uncle Valentine’s old MacDonald’s tobacco cans under there once, but it was rusted shut, and I was on the hunt for dimes and marbles, so I left the can where it was, and never thought any more of it.

Movement pulled my attention to my grandmother’s ancient greenhouse, a shadow dancing against the dirty glass walls. The old woman? I hunted through the kitchen junk drawer until I found a flashlight and then slipped on my runners to step out onto the porch stairs. The lilac bush beside me was strung, as always, with clear Christmas lights; I plugged the
cord into the outside socket and the bush lit up, casting a circle of light around me. Jude was crossing his yard, carrying another box to the truck. When he saw the lights on the lilac bush go on, he stopped and shifted the box in order to wave. I waved back. He stopped a moment looking my way before continuing on to the truck.

The potting shed was the entrance to the greenhouse, and as I passed through it, I lifted cobwebs out of my way. “Hello?” I said and shone a light into the corners. The shelves of pots, the crunch of dry soil and pot shards beneath my feet, the smell of dust and smoke. A spider sped over the back of my hand and, after taking a moment to enjoy the panic and tickle, I shook it off. Then I stepped over the threshold into the greenhouse itself. But the place was empty. My mother had not grown anything here since my grandmother’s death; Maud had had her heart attack here, and my father had found her body lying on the dirt floor.

I heard the jingle of keys shaking within a pocket, and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel driveway, and I stepped outside. “Jude, is that you?” The footsteps stopped. I scanned the dark driveway—the haze of smoke in the flashlight’s stream—but couldn’t see anyone. Nevertheless, I heard footsteps, running toward me. I ran onto the porch and into the kitchen, closing the door behind me and locking it, and then listened, breathing hard, for footsteps on the porch. When I finally turned away from the door, I found that my grandmother’s chair was rocking by itself, and every burner on the stove was on, glowing red.

WHEN I BROUGHT MY SON
into the kitchen for breakfast the next morning, I found my mother, Beth, sitting in her mother’s rocker, scribbling with a purple pen that smelled of green apples, a child’s pen, on a pad of sentimental stationery adorned with butterflies. Judge Judy presided from a television set that flickered on a wire trolley in front of her. At her feet the ancient black cat I’d named Harrison wore a harness and was tied, like a dog, to the table leg, so it wouldn’t run out an open door. This cat was my fault. Jude had given it to me when it was a kitten, and a year later, when I moved to Vancouver to go back to school, wishing to keep nothing of Jude or that past, I left
Harrison on the farm with my mother. The cat was now nearly sixteen years old and its hair was dull, sticking up at all angles and falling out, and yet my mother had reported only a month before, in one of her daily faxes, that Harrison had caught eight mice under the porch over a single weekend while tethered to the railing. I wondered about the need for that harness; surely the elderly beast wouldn’t have wandered far. Still, my mother feared it would run out the door and leave her.

Jeremy rubbed his eye with a fist and yawned as I led him by the hand to the kitchen table. “Grandpa!” he cried when he saw my dad, Gus. He settled into my father’s lap, wrapping his arms around him. My father had once been portly and hairy, his eyebrows so long they curled over his glasses, but now he was nearly hairless, and thin. Within his bony face his eyes were especially startling, an unearthly aqua that didn’t look quite real, as if he were wearing coloured contact lenses. A lovely colour that Val inherited. I have deep brown eyes; my grandmother’s eyes, Mom told me.

For twenty years my father had been battling prostate cancer and it appeared that he was now losing that fight. Between our previous visit, in May, and this one in early August, he had lost his ability to walk unaided. Now he required our help to get from his bed to the bathroom, or to the kitchen table. His skin had taken on a yellowed transparency that allowed us to see the deep blue veins that ran like rivers and their tributaries over the backs of his hands.

“Does Grandma get a big hug too?” my mother said, holding out her arms.

I ran my fingers through my son’s blond curls. “How about you give Grandma a hug?”

But Jeremy shook his head and retreated into my father’s embrace, and my mother shrank back into her rocking chair to hide in her writing pad.

“Beth, will you look at that,” my father said, to draw my mother out of herself, I think, and she glanced up to see a huge Martin Mars water bomber appear from the smoke over the Ptarmigan Hills, as if manifested by some elaborate trick. I lifted Jeremy onto a chair to see, and opened the window slightly so he could better hear the deep drone of the plane flying overhead.

“I don’t understand how the fire got so big so fast,” Mom said. “But then it’s been so hot and dry.” She pointed her pen at me. “Kat, you saw the lightning strike that started it, didn’t you?”

“We only just got here last night, Mom. We were in Alberta when the fire began.”

“Oh, of course; what am I thinking?” Her hand fluttered to her mouth as she turned to my father. “Now who was it that saw the lightning strike? Was it Val? Or one of the neighbours? Or was someone talking about it in the paper?” When my father didn’t answer, she went back to scribbling on her pad of paper. I made out the words
lightning
and
forgotten.

I poured Jeremy a bowl of Cheerios and he sat at the table. “I think there might have been someone inside the house last night.”

My mother looked up. “Oh?”

“I saw someone reflected in the window, an old woman in the room behind me.”

“It’s the warped glass,” said my father. “I’ve seen all kinds of things in it. Likely it was your own face.”

“No. It was an old woman, standing beside your door. I thought maybe she was confused, disoriented in the panic of the fire, and had entered our home thinking it was hers.”

Val had told me how many of the elderly in her care, their brains riddled like wormy wood, had roamed away from home. They never went far, because their minds flitted, like a toddler’s, from one fascination to another, from the sparkle of mica flecks in a boulder to the bob of a Steller’s jay feeding on the head of a sunflower. Val said she always found these lost souls within a mile or two of their homes, most often lying on the ground, curled in sleep.

“Like Mrs. Simms,” said my mother.

“Yes.” Mrs. Simms had once babysat me, and now required supervision herself. She had wandered up to my parents’ house one afternoon that past spring. Mom found her standing on the porch looking through the screen door, wavering back and forth unsteadily.
The look on that woman’s face,
my mother had written in her fax as she described this visit,
as if she were a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights.

“When I ran back to the house, all the burners were turned on.”

My mother touched her cheek. “Had you been using the stove?”

“I made myself a hot milk. But I wouldn’t have turned all the burners on.”

“I’ve done that and forgotten,” Mom said. “I must have forgotten.”

“It couldn’t have been you, could it? Turning the burners on?”

“Val says I’m forever doing that. Other times I’ll come into the kitchen and the stove will be on. I don’t remember doing it.
It’s a strange thing to be this forgetful. It’s like there’s another person living in the house, a person I never see, doing things, and then I find them done.”

“A ghost.”

“Boo!” said Jeremy.

“Could it have been Jeremy?” said Dad. “Turning on the burners?”

“The first thing I did was check to see he was okay. He was fast asleep. You were all asleep.” I put a piece of bread in the toaster for myself. “I guess Ezra could have been sleepwalking. He’s done it before.” During the weeks following Ezra’s stroke six years before, he once rose from bed to urinate in our clothes closet, thinking, I suppose, that it was the bathroom. I saw him in the half-light, the erotic stance of a man peeing. In the morning I scrubbed the stain from the carpet with Nature’s Miracle, a cleaner I had picked up at the pet store to remove the stains the previous owner’s dog had left behind. I never told Ezra about that incident. He had already suffered too many indignities.