Turtle Valley (29 page)

He stared at me a moment, then he looked at the ground. “Well,” he said. “When you make up your mind, you know where to find me.” And he turned on his heel and walked to his house. I called out, “Jude, wait!” but when he kept walking I didn’t go after him. He hasn’t tried to contact me since, as I half hoped he would. So we are back to where we were before the fire: we lift a hand to each other if our vehicles meet along Blood Road or in the parking lot of Askew’s Foods, but neither of us stops to say hello.

As I carried the burned bike frame back from Jude’s that day, the bantam hen we had not been able to catch appeared, leading a dozen sooty chicks down the driveway and pausing now and again to shake her blackened feathers. Later I found her nest as I walked the yard: a chicken-sized patch of grass in the midst of black near the ashen rubble where the barn had been. I marvel at her survival, at the powerful maternal instinct that kept her tethered to her nest as the fire raged around her. Did she feel the terror I felt at the prospect of either staying or leaving her clutch? Did she shake as I did when the fire raged around her? Every time I tell the story of our exodus, my own fear fades a little further from memory. But even so, when I catch the whiff of a wood fire I’m drawn here again to this place, to the horror I felt as I fled almost all that I had known.

THE REALTOR HAD
put up a
Sold
sticker over the
For Sale
sign at the end of the driveway. The new owners would take possession the next day, though I think all of us gave up possession of that farm with the loss of my parents’ home. The place was naked and strange without it. Nothing but the foundation was left, and
it was crumbling and falling away to expose the stones John Weeks had unwisely mixed in the concrete, presumably to save money. I wondered how the foundation had ever supported the weight of the structure. It was surrounded not by my father’s neatly mown lawn but by a field overgrown with blue-flowering chicory and golden tansy. Several panes in my grandmother’s greenhouse had been cracked or knocked out by the hailstorm earlier that month.

I parked the truck in the yard and my mother and I sat a moment, looking over the orchard. “Well,” I said. “Shall we go for a walk?”

“I’ll wait here,” Mom said. “You go on.”

“This is your last chance to say goodbye to the farm. I don’t imagine the new owners will want us stomping through their property.”

“I’m done here, I think,” she said. “But take a look in the greenhouse, will you? I’m not sure Val ever thought to check if there was anything worth keeping in there.”

Jeremy followed me to the greenhouse, dawdling behind to yank the blue chicory flowers from their hardy stems. For a moment I was unaccountably afraid to go inside, and when I did, I found myself stepping into an awareness of déjà vu, though I’d been inside the greenhouse countless times before and knew it well. There was nothing left to salvage.

Jeremy came inside to hand me his fistful of flowers. “Thank you, honey,” I said.

He pointed at the corner. “There’s a dead bird.” A junco had found its way in but had not found its way out again. A bird flying in the house was an omen, a death in the family, wasn’t it? But what did a dead bird in a greenhouse mean? In any case, this
was no longer our place, our greenhouse. I used a scrap of mouldering newspaper to pick up the bird and carried it outside to place it beneath a lilac bush.

If this last visit to my childhood home had been a dream, how would I have interpreted it? A familiar landscape that was now strange to me. A door I was afraid to open. A dead bird in the corner. But no sign of ghosts.

I’d like to believe that Maud and John Weeks’s souls are finally at rest. At least their footsteps no longer followed me as I walked the fields of the farm that afternoon. I saw no figure by the well, as I half expected I might; in fact, there was no longer any sign of the well itself. At Val’s request, Jude cut down the bush around the well and filled it in. Val then plowed over the area using Dad’s old tractor, planting it in alfalfa so there was no evidence, any longer, of what was hidden underground.

Even so, I did see my grandmother that day, reflected in the greenhouse glass as I strode toward it. Maud couldn’t have been forty, but I recognized her: the long nose, the full mouth, the look of anticipation. For an instant I wanted to call out to her across the decades. In that last photo taken of her, when she carried her carpetbag down the street, she bore her past on her shoulders like an overloaded gunnysack. The bones of her thighs ground in the hollow cups of her hips like painful drums:
I ache, I ache.
But that wasn’t the music of her body on this day. She created whistling breezes with her stride and wore the day like a tiara. She was beautiful.

“ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE
about this place?” Mom asked as we drove back up the driveway. “About what happened here?”

“I’ve already begun.”

“Good. I think my mother wanted that. She led you to that carpetbag the first night you arrived, didn’t she? She wanted you to find out, to tell the story.”

I nodded. My mother, at least, needed to tell it.

She took my hand. “But you won’t show it to anyone quite yet, will you?”

“No, not for a long time yet, I hope.”

As we turned onto Blood Road, she looked out the window at the fields she had farmed first with her father and then with her husband. “It’s strange how it doesn’t feel like home anymore,” she said, “as if it belonged to someone else. I don’t feel
attached
to the memories I have of this place, if you know what I mean. I wonder, now, why I chose to live here all those years.”

“I understand,” I said. In a similar way I struggled to remember Ezra’s smell, the details of his skin, the way he moved, what moved me to love him. But our lives had diverged. He worked the land that we bought without me, and another woman lived with him, a petite farm girl who seemed more comfortable within that tiny rented house. I had moved back home with my son to help my sister care for my mother in her final years. Although I remembered the events of my life with Ezra, or a good many of them, in any case, I didn’t feel the emotions I felt at the time. As my mother said that afternoon, I wasn’t
attached
to my memories of him. Even so, when memories of Ezra surfaced I searched them, hoping to capture something of my feelings for him, to gain some sense of who I was when I was with him. There was a summer sometime after Ezra’s stroke, when Ezra and I drove Mom and Dad down this same road during a visit. Jeremy was just two. “Butterfly!” he said. Sulphur butterflies danced over the yellow alfalfa blossoms along the roadside, and one dinged our windshield.

“Look at all the butterflies hugging the shoulder,” Ezra said, and he pointed out the butterflies that had been hit by cars and gathered by breezes into drifts along the roadway.

“Can I see them?” asked Jeremy.

“Why don’t we stop?” said Ezra, and he parked the truck on the side of the road and helped Jeremy out to look at the butterflies that littered the ground like yellow confetti. Most were dead, but some were injured and still alive, their wings fluttering. Jeremy plucked butterflies from the gravel, and the luminous scales from their wings dusted his fingertips like eyeshadow.

“Can I take some home?” Jeremy asked me.

“Have we got anything to put them in?”

“My hat, I guess,” said Ezra.

As I collected butterflies with Jeremy, Ezra came up to us with his hands cupped as if holding something precious within. Then he opened his hands to show me, palms out as if offering me a gift. It was something I never would have taken the time to notice: a tiny, strange green insect with fragile, tear-shaped, iridescent wings. He brushed the insect into my cupped hand and all at once I was
here,
a witness to the moment I inhabited, aware of the hot sun on my back, the sweet smell of my father’s cattle across the fence, the pop of broom pods bursting. For that instant there was no past or future; I knew only the pleasures my senses offered me, that I was alive.

We placed the hat full of butterflies on the seat between Ezra and me, and as we drove Mom and Dad home the wind coursing through the open window lifted a few of the dead butterflies so that they flitted around our heads. Jeremy tripped as he carried the hat to the house and the hat tumbled from his hands, showering the gravel on the driveway with a drift of yellow butterflies.
A great many of them were blown away on the afternoon wind, and Jeremy and Ezra and I chased after them, struggling to recover them before they were lost in the thick grasses along the field.

I remember that day now as yellow: the sunlight on yellow alfalfa blossoms in the fields and the brilliant golden tansy in the ditches; the field of huge, flowering sunflowers that hid Tammy Dalton’s house from view; the yellow butterflies dancing over the flower heads; the dead ones rolling on the wind like drifts of wisteria petals; the saffron T-shirt Ezra wore, my son’s blond hair. A day a long time ago. I remember that I loved Ezra for stopping to show Jeremy the butterflies, and for giving me that moment cupped within his hands, but I don’t remember what that felt like, and that saddens me, frightens me. My memories are so like that hat full of butterflies, some already deteriorating the moment they are collected, some breathed back to life now and again, for a brief moment, by the scent on a passing wind—the smell of an orange, perhaps, or a whiff of brown-sugar fudge—before drifting away, just out of my reach. How much of myself flits away with each of these tattered memories? How much of myself have I already lost?

AS WE LEFT TURTLE VALLEY
behind that afternoon, we said goodbye to the farm. Jeremy said, “The moon’s following us.”

I glanced back in the mirror to find my son looking out the window at the sky.

“Why
does
the moon follow us?” Mom said.

“What do you mean?”

“Before we turned that corner it was over there,” she said. “Now it’s here. Why does it move with us?”

“Move with us?”

“Why does it follow us?”

I swerved to miss a turtle crossing Blood Road and, glancing into the side mirror, witnessed its death under the tire of the Chevy behind us. The brief spray of wet. I was struck at that moment by a sweet grief, a longing to stay inside that day with my mother, because I knew I was losing her. That afternoon was like one of her parting kisses, the press of her lips to say goodbye fading the instant it was planted on my cheek. I knew that at the end of that day the memory of our time together would already have begun to disappear. I’d be left with a crumbling rose and a pot of faded rouge. So as soon as I returned home with Jeremy, I pulled my notebook and pen from my purse to record the day’s events, to seize the memory within ink before it faded away.

I’D LIKE TO THANK
Mitch Krupp for the time and care he took to create the photographs used in this novel, and for helping me to integrate them into the text. So many other individuals contributed to this novel in so many ways that I couldn’t possibly thank them all here, but I will list a few: Irene Anderson, Cindy Malinowski, Rick Tanaka, Floyd Dargatz, Jake Jacobson, and the many residents who offered their stories about the Salmon Arm fire of 1998. Thanks also to the Canada Council and the British Columbia Arts Council for grants that assisted me in the writing of
Turtle Valley.

Jude’s love note to Kat was written, in good measure, by Mitch Krupp. The recipe for waxing flowers was paraphrased from a recipe I found in my grandmother’s scrapbook. The story “Turtle Valley Is Jarred by Slight Tremor” was taken from the July 5, 1945,
Salmon Arm Observer.
The story “Brilliant Flash Lights Heavens” was taken from the
Kamloops Sentinel,
April 1, 1965. The newspaper depiction of the shivaree is verbatim from an account written by my mother, Irene Anderson. Again, names, dates, and locations of these newspaper stories have been changed. The clippings describing the search for John Weeks are complete fictions.

G
AIL
A
NDERSON
-D
ARGATZ
is an award-winning Canadian author whose bestselling novels have been published worldwide. She currently teaches fiction at the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing Program and lives in the Shuswap Valley, the landscape found in so much of her writing.