Turtle Valley (21 page)

We wandered through the house, to the room at the back that would have been the kitchen, and then to the small room off the downstairs bedroom that my father had roughed in, a room that would have become the bathroom. It smelled vaguely of skunk. Someone had spray-painted a “mirror” here, a woman’s face within a frame. Over top of it was written
How much time have you spent here waiting?

“I hope none of them found that can.”

I led Jeremy back into the living room and Jude followed. “So, where was it?” he asked.

I tried to picture the house as I remembered it from my childhood. A floorboard. A marble hidden beneath a joist. A shadow on the wall. Bits of ragged memory. My childhood in tatters. I would lose this time with Jude in the same way. My recollections of the moment I was in now—which seemed so very sturdy—would shake and shift like this old building, and finally fall. In a decade or two I would remember only this plank under my feet, this nail, but not the whole structure, how it stood on this hot summer’s day.

I knelt beside Jeremy, to get a child’s-eye view of the cracks between the boards, the dust, the glittering glass. Then I found
the moment I had been looking for. I gripped the loose floorboard and yanked it up, exposing the joists beneath.

“There it is!” Jude said. The MacDonald’s tobacco tin; much of the paint was worn away and the tin was rusted badly around the lid. When I couldn’t open it, Jude banged it with the hammer and pried it loose. There
were
letters inside. A few of the envelopes and the edges of the letters were water-stained, but for the most part they were in remarkably good shape.

“They
are
my grandmother’s. It’s her handwriting!” I opened one and then another and another. “They’re all notes she wrote to Valentine. Most are just invitations to lunch or thank-you notes for something he helped her with during the times my grandfather was in hospital. Here, look! She’s thanking him for building that greenhouse. Did I ever tell you my grandmother died in that greenhouse? My father found her there. A heart attack.”

He nodded. “You did tell me. You mind if I read a few?”

I gave him a handful and we read.

“This one is curious,” he said. “She writes,
As for your last note, there was no need for reminders. I think of such things daily, hourly. It is necessary to think of such things, in order to get through my day.
That suggests a lot.”

“But what? What was she thinking of?”

“Him?”

“Or a Bible verse, for all I know. Some passage from Psalms she took comfort in.”

“A lot of these look like they were written in response to something he wrote. So there must have been letters from him.”

“There were. Dad told me last night that he carried letters back and forth between them.”

“Did she keep them?”

“Mom says she’s never found any.”

“Huh. The way your grandmother talks to Valentine about your grandfather in this letter, as if your grandfather is a child they are both responsible for. She describes how she and your grandfather were out walking the property, divining for a well site. Then she writes:
You don’t have to tell me again: I know this house will never be built. But if, for a time, with his dream of it he can believe that he is so much better able than he actually is, then it will be a peaceful time for him and for me as well. What he needs is for me to believe he is capable, so he can believe it himself.
”

I took the letter from him. “She felt sorry for him.”

“Like you feel sorry for Ezra.”

I looked up at him. “I’m not sure how he’d survive without me, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes, but how do
you
survive?”

“I don’t want to talk about Ezra in front of Jeremy.”

Jude squatted down beside Jeremy. “Did you see that pumpkin patch? How about you go find the biggest, best pumpkin in the whole patch, and when it ripens, I’ll help you make it into a jack-o’-lantern.”

“Pumpkins!”

I watched from just outside the unfinished house as Jude lifted the barbed-wire fence to allow Jeremy to crawl through, and then led Jeremy through the field toward the vines of the wild pumpkin patch; monarch butterflies lifted from the milkweed as they approached and Jeremy jumped this way and that, chasing after them as they fluttered just out of his grasp.

Jude bent over a milkweed plant and showed Jeremy his prize: a monarch clutched his finger. He returned to the unfinished
house with the butterfly, but it fluttered away as he held it out for me. His mouth as he smiled. I stepped forward and kissed him but he didn’t respond. His stubble was prickly on my lips. I stepped back. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“No. It’s all right. You just surprised me.”

“I can’t believe some of the things I’ve done this week.”

“You mean coming to see me.”

“I feel, I don’t know, possessed.”

“Like those ants.”

“Ants?”

“They’re taken over by a fungus that eats into their brain and forces them to climb up to the top of a plant and impale themselves, so the fungus can grow in the ant’s body and disperse its spores from up high.”

I laughed. “You are so full of it.”

“No, it’s true. They really exist.” He took my hand and led me back inside the unfinished house, where he ran his fingers through my hair and then pulled my chin up so I would look at him. “All those years ago I let you and me slip away,” he said. “I have another chance here, I think.” He waited a moment as if expecting an answer, and when I didn’t say anything he moved forward, tentatively, to kiss me. His hand on my waist. His thigh against mine. But then I heard the sound of keys jingled within a pocket, a rustle in the grass outside. I stepped back. “Someone’s coming.”

We both listened.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I heard keys,” I said.

“It’s just Jeremy.”

“No.”

I turned within the unfinished house, looking from window to window as the rustle through grass moved around us, then stopped. An eye in a knothole. “I can see you!” Jeremy sang. The eye moved to another knothole. “Grandpa can see you!” There was again the jingle of keys as footsteps crunched through the undergrowth.

“Jeremy,” I cried. “Jeremy, come here.” But he hadn’t left his pumpkin patch and the dancing monarchs.

“What is it?” said Jude.

“Didn’t you see him?”

“Who?”

I started around one side of the old house. “Hello?” I said. “Can we help you?”

There was a shadow of a man cast on the ground at the other corner. As I stepped forward the shadow receded into the grasses. I turned this corner, and the next, certain each time that the man would be just around the corner—a trail opened through the grass in front of me and I could hear footsteps and the jingle of keys in a pocket—but when I reached Jude as he came around the opposite side of the house, there was no one else there.

“Did you see where he went?” I asked.

“There wasn’t anyone.”

I glanced at my parents’ house. “Could it have been Ezra?”

He took my shoulders and turned me toward him. “Katrine, there was no one here.”

Jeremy pointed to the side of the house where I had seen the eye in the knothole. He covered his eyes with both hands, then opened them wide. “Peekaboo!”

AS I SEPARATED THE GIMPY CALF
from its mother and herded it down the driveway to the small corral by the barn, a caravan of army trucks rumbled past the farm, heading up the valley. I had heard on the radio earlier that morning that a hundred members of the Canadian Forces had been called in to help fight the fire as, fueled by winds and the beetle-kill that littered the forest, it continued to rage uncontrolled. No doubt the troops were heading to the fire camp on the Jefferson ranch, which was close to one of the logging roads that led up to the mountain and the front lines of the fire. Private pickups loaded with boxes swerved out of the army trucks’ way as they headed in the opposite direction.

As I locked the calf in the corral, a red Ford pickup pulling a stock trailer drove down the driveway and parked in our yard. It was Uncle Dan. He appeared to be younger than my mother, though he was several years older. He still ran his own dairy, but in recent years he’d relied more and more on hired help.

“Kat!” he said, and he hugged me. “Been a while, eh?”

“A couple of years. Thanks for doing this.”

He waved at the Bombardier droning low overhead. “God, I don’t know how you stand this. Drives my Lab nuts. When these bombers fly overhead on their way to the lake, he hides in the closet. You see Sarah Dalton got married Saturday outside at their folks’ place like they planned? Water bombers and helicopters flying overhead, sprinklers going off all around them.” He laughed. “Life goes on.”

“Life goes on here too, I guess. Seems crazy, doesn’t it, to bring Dad home to this?” I nodded at the haze of smoke around us, the ash fluttering down from the burning forest above, the bomber dropping its load on the fire—now more than halfway down the mountain—and the forestry trucks rumbling by.

“Gus in any kind of shape to take a visitor?”

“A nurse is checking him over now,” I said. “He was in a lot of pain so she’s putting him on a higher dose of morphine. He isn’t talking much anymore, but he can still hear you if you want to sit and chat later.” I nodded at the calf. “He was embarrassed about the calf, about not taking care of it himself. He didn’t want you to see it.”

“That’s just dumb. Wish I could’ve been more help these last couple of years.” He looked around the yard. “You got something I can use for a table, put my stuff on?”

“Sure.” Together we carried the patio table over to the corral, the umbrella turning circles as we walked.

“I hear you and Ezra just bought a farm,” Dan said.

“A quarter section without a house, close to my in-laws’ place. We’re using their equipment until we get on our feet.”

“You’re not living with your mother-in-law.”

“No. We’re renting a house a couple of miles down the road.” A farmhouse just five hundred square feet in total, with a musty unfinished basement. A tiny, elderly woman named Alice owned the place. She couldn’t be five feet tall, and her husband had built the house fifty years before to suit his petite wife. Ezra claimed he was now doing the same for me. He hoped to build a house with spacious bathrooms and high ceilings so we would never feel constrained to hunker down. For the time being, though, we lived in a rented house built for another, and my back ached with the effort of stooping to fit this little woman’s world.

I helped Dan cart all he needed from his truck to the table: his .22-calibre rifle, a handsaw, chains, knives and a breadboard to cut the organs on, a sharpening stone, towels and rubber gloves, a bucket to wash his hands in, a pail for the liver and heart.

“Got something to ask you about,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I just found out from Val that Grandpa died on that mountain.” I nodded at the smoke-covered hills. “I came across some newspaper clippings about it last night, how he shot Dad.”

Dan turned away with a pail, to fill it at the tap on the side of the house. I followed. “I was wondering if you could tell me what you remember.”

He bent to turn on the tap, then stretched his back as the bucket filled. “Can’t you ask Beth about that? She’d know more than me.”

“Mom has been … reticent in talking to me about it. I understand that there was a manhunt for your father. That Uncle Valentine led the search.”

He turned to look at me. “You know what I felt when I heard they’d given up the search? Relief. Isn’t that terrible? I was relieved for myself, and for my mother and Beth as well, that none of us had to deal with him any more.” He bent over to retrieve the bucket. “But then after they gave up the search, I wondered for a long time if Dad wasn’t still alive, if he hadn’t simply gotten it into his head to take off. I still wonder that—if he hadn’t started up a whole new life somewhere else.”

I followed him back to the patio table. “Where would he have gone?”

“Hell if I know. Nothing he did made sense. He was a psychotic bastard. I don’t know how many times he beat the crap out of me with a razor strop.
There, there,
Mom always said.
Dad just can’t help it!
I suppose he really couldn’t help it, but I wish to God my mother had found a way to protect Beth and me from him. When I was five years old I dropped a tin my mother kept her loose change in—”

“Mom still has it,” I said. “I saw it in one of the boxes Val packed. A Nabob tea canister full of coins.”

“That’s it. Dad was hanging a picture for Mom when I dropped the tin and it made a hell of a racket. Pennies all over the floor. He swung around and bashed me in the head with the hammer. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill me. As I got older I had bugger-awful headaches and I remember my mother giving my father this
look when I had one, blaming him, you know, and Dad would turn away, and leave the house.”

I watched as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. The scar that was still visible there. “There are a few things about his disappearance that don’t quite make sense to me,” I said.