Turtle Valley (25 page)

LIGHTS BLAZED FROM THE KILN SHED
and the CD player blasted out J.J. Cale’s old tune “Crazy Mama.” Jude moved back and forth at a hectic, choreographed pace. Within the seconds that it took him to move the pots from the kiln to the garbage cans, they faded in colour from that glorious yellow to the orange-red of a stove burner, and then to the browns, yellows, and whites of the glazes.

“Hasn’t some fire marshal come to give you hell yet?” I said.

“A cop came by late this afternoon, told me to shut it down. I said I would as soon as I had finished firing that load.”

“And yet here you are.”

“It’s my last firing before my show next week. In any case, I’m just about done.”

I turned down the volume on the CD player. “You knew I would come. You played our song.”

“It was meant as an invitation. I’ve been playing it on repeat ever since that bizarre little calf-killing episode this afternoon.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t been there for any of it.”

He used the tongs to carry another vase to a garbage can. “I didn’t understand what you were up against until I saw it in action today. You and Ezra are in a rut, stuck in this thing that’s happened to you. You’re both so angry at each other. Just like Lillian and I were before she left.”

I shook my head. “He can’t help his anger. It’s a handicap, a symptom of the stroke.”

Jude put the vase in the can and flames flared up as the newspaper ignited. “But it still pisses you off.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about Ezra,” I said. “I wanted to show you something.”

“I can’t stop to look right now.”

“These are letters Uncle Valentine wrote to my grandmother. They were in the partition wall between the kitchen and Val’s room. And there’s a letter here from my grandmother; she died the night she wrote it so she never had a chance to give it to him. She asks him, ‘What happened that night, the night we kissed? Did you kill John?’”

Jude stopped beside me a moment, tongs in hand, to glance at the letter before heading back to the kiln. “Jesus.”

I followed him. “Here she talks about hearing ‘If You Were
the Only Girl in the World’ on the radio just after Valentine told her they had called off the search, the night she died. The weird thing is, this past week I heard the piano in Mom’s parlour playing that song, but there was no one in the room and the piano was closed. My grandmother says here that it was their song, Maud and Valentine’s song.” I sorted through the other letters in my hand. “My grandmother and Valentine
were
lovers that year my grandfather was in Essondale, after the military blew up the Japanese balloon. Valentine wrote to her, trying to make Maud reconsider after she ended the affair.” I held up the letter. “Here he begs her to leave her husband. But she stayed.”

“And what would you do if I begged you to leave your husband?”

I crossed my arms and looked out the open door. I could make out the lights of my parents’ house, but the smoke was too thick to see who was in the kitchen. The wind swirled the smoke and ash into eddies, creating the effect of a snowstorm on this hot August evening. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Shit!”

I turned back to Jude. He was standing at the kiln, attempting to lift a pot from it. “What is it?”

“I fucked up. I wasn’t focussing on what I was doing and now I can’t get either of these vases out without lifting one or the other out of the way. This is so stupid.”

“Can I do anything?”

“Yes. Get those gloves on.” He nodded at a pair of Kevlar gloves sitting on a stack of bricks behind the kiln. “And that shirt.”

I quickly slid on the Nomex shirt. When I put on the gloves they extended up to my shoulder; they weren’t only dirty brown, but burned.

“I’ll hold this vase to the side while you reach into the kiln and grab this other one by the neck.”

“With my hands?”

“Yes! There’s no time to dick around. Reach in and pull it out in one motion, then set it in one of those cans.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I do it all the time.”

“No.”

“Katrine! Now!”

I reached into the kiln and grabbed the vase by the neck. It glowed yellow, a vessel fashioned from fire, and the molten glazes slipped across its surface like spirits. The heat on my face and chest was incredible, much more intense than the blast from an open oven when I reached in to take out a roast. I felt it through the gloves and tried my best not to touch the stiff material from within; the gloves began to smoke. The smell of burning leather.

“Quick!” said Jude. “Into a garbage can.”

I settled the vase into a nest of newspaper within a can and the paper immediately caught fire, sending flames and smoke up around me. I put on the lid and flicked the burning gloves from my hands. Then I watched as he pulled the remaining vase from the kiln and placed it in a garbage can. He removed his gloves to shut the kiln off.

“You all right?” he said.

“I think so.” It was then I smelled burning hair; I ran a finger over my eyebrows to make sure I still had them.

Jude smiled. “They’re still there,” he said. “Your hair is a little singed, though,” and he tucked my windblown hair back behind my ear, arranging it as he had for my portrait all those years ago. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? If you can handle reaching
into fire like that, don’t you think you can handle striking out on your own?” He grinned. “Don’t you think you can handle me?” But he didn’t let me answer. He kissed me.

“We’re exposed here,” I said, looking over at the road. The wind had shifted, sweeping some of the smoke away. “Someone passing by could see us.” But when he kissed me again, I kissed him back. He pulled me closer and ran a hand up to my breast. I felt him grow against my thigh.

His cellphone rang but he ignored it and kissed my cheek, my neck. “You should answer it,” I said.

“Let it ring.” But the phone didn’t stop. “Damn it,” he said. He picked up the cell from his worktable. “Hello?” he said, then “Sure,” and he held out the phone. “It’s for you.”

“Me?” I took the phone. “Hello?”

“Kat, you better come home.”

“Val?”

“It’s Dad. I think it’s time.”

“Oh, God.”

“And Kat, go to the door and look back at the house.”

Val stood outside on the steps under the porch light. She waved. Inside the kitchen the dark outline of a figure stood at the window, backlit from the lights within. Ezra.

“We can see you, Kat,” said Val. “We can all see you.”

THE FIRE WAS NOW SO LOW
on the hillside that it filled the room with a reddish glow, lighting up the objects on the bedside table: my grandmother’s carpetbag, the fresh towel I had placed there when we arrived, the baby oil, the little teddy bear tucked into the Kleenex box. I had stared at these objects for more than two hours, unable to sleep. Except for my hospital stay when I gave birth to Jeremy, and those two weeks following the stroke when Ezra was in hospital, he and I had never before spent a night in separate beds. And even then, on that first evening, the nurses had placed a cot right next to his bed for me. I didn’t think I would sleep, but I did, and
though Ezra’s mind was so terribly confused, his body turned to hold mine.

Ezra had once told me that the women of his childhood church would comfort a new widow by sleeping with her, on the night of her loss and for a fortnight after, to make the transition into widowhood less lonely. I had thought it an odd practice at the time, but understood it those first few nights I slept by myself while he was in the hospital. I knew even then that I was losing him. Val came to be with me, and once she arrived in Chilliwack I took comfort from her body in bed next to mine. Her heaviness and warmth were a soothing presence.

I got up and shuffled to Val’s old room and pushed the door open slowly so its creak wouldn’t wake Jeremy. Ezra slept on a makeshift bed on the floor next to Jeremy’s; his sheets were kicked down to his feet. I had come with the intention of running a hand along his cheek to wake him, to invite him back to our bed to talk, as we had not been able to the night before, to end this tension that hung in the house along with the smell of smoke. But now that I was here, I found that I could not. I watched the rise and fall of his chest as it became shallower, and when it stopped altogether I bent over him, waiting, listening, willing his breath to begin again. When his breath did surface, a bubble that opened his mouth, I turned and ran a hand down my son’s cheek until Jeremy grunted, turned his face to the wall, and brushed my hand away.

In the kitchen, my mother was asleep in her rocker with Harrison in her lap and the kitten at her feet, the clutch of Grandma and Uncle Valentine’s letters in her hand. I pushed open the door to Dad’s room quietly, so as not to wake her. The room was dark. Only a small table lamp lit up the corner where Val snored lightly in the easy chair beside Dad’s bed. I touched her arm and
she startled and looked up at me, confused in her exit from sleep, her eyes dull and cobwebbed with exhaustion. “My shift,” I said

She stood and I took Dad’s hand and leaned gently against his chest so I could speak into his ear. “Dad, I’m here.”

“He knows you’re here,” said Val. “He can hear you.”

But in the way a sleeper hears the scurry of a mouse, I suspected. The whispers of night sounds were woven into his dreams.

“Has he spoken?”

“At midnight he said,
Mouth,
to get me to take his dentures out. They were in there sideways. He wouldn’t let me take them out before. I should have shaved him, but I don’t want to bother him with that now.”

“His hands are so puffy.”

“I wish I’d insisted he let me take that wedding ring off,” she said. “But he likely won’t swell up much more. The skin on his feet and legs has begun to mottle as the circulation fails. When it reaches his stomach he’ll have maybe a couple of hours. The nurse came by after you went to bed. She thinks he’ll likely pass this morning.”

She drew back the covers to expose the purple web crawling up my father’s shins, very like the mottling that Jeremy sometimes woke with on his hands and feet when he was a baby, as his blood learned to navigate his body. Left to our own devices, it appeared, we eased into death in the same way we eased into life. I had never envisioned death in this way before, as a tide washing up my father’s body as he stood on a disappearing shore.

“Does Mom understand he’ll likely go today?”

Val nodded at my father. “But I think she still half expects him to rally and be out there cutting hay next week.”

“He’s not breathing!” I said.

“He’ll start up again. But the periods of time where he doesn’t breathe will get longer and more frequent. Until he stops breathing altogether.”

I watched the slight movement in his chest, his heart beating, as I counted to myself,
one thousand and one, one thousand and two—as
I did waiting for a thunderclap—reaching twelve before his breath caught. When it did start again, he sounded like an old glass coffeepot percolating on the stove.

“Fluid buildup in his throat,” said Val. “Nothing to worry about. It won’t bother him.” She patted my arm. “I’m going to try to get a few minutes’ sleep. If Dad begins to look at all restless, call me and I’ll give him another shot of morphine.” She closed the door behind her.

My father’s face was turned away but I could see his reflection in the mirror of my mother’s bureau; the half-moon whites of his eyes were showing. With his teeth out his cheeks were sunken and his mouth was a small black hole. If it hadn’t been for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, I would have thought him already dead.

I stared for a time at the familiar objects on his night table. His old Echo harmonica, the ancient deck of cards in a leather holder that he played solitaire with; his favourite cup; his jackknife and the Gillette razor that he had continued to use, preferring it over the electric one I had bought him one Christmas. Aside from his clothes, these objects were the only ones inside the house that I identified as his alone. He defined himself as a man who needed little, like Uncle Valentine, who had raised him. I picked up his harmonica and played “Good Night Irene” softly for him, just as he had when he serenaded my mother to sleep nearly every night for all those years of their marriage, and I found myself tearing up. Very soon this harmonica and these few objects that he had owned,
and the memories they triggered in us, would be all that was left of him. My father’s life would disappear into ash and smoke.

I put down the harmonica and leaned against his chest to whisper into his ear. I could feel his heart beating against my breast. “I have something to ask you,” I said. “I know this isn’t the time, but I don’t think I’ll get the chance again.”

He gave a slight grunt.

“I found the letters Grandma and Uncle Valentine wrote to each other. They were love letters, at least most of them were. Grandma seemed to think Valentine might have killed Grandpa.”

My father’s mouth puckered just slightly, as an infant’s does in sleep.

“Did he?” I asked.