Turtle Valley (4 page)

“Yes.” But his eyes were focused on the television.

“Would you mind if we turned the television off for a while?” I asked my mother.

“Gus so likes his Judge Judy,” she said.

“I don’t,” he said. “That’s your show.”

“Ezra can’t concentrate on the conversation if that TV is on,” I said. He had once described the feeling of being bombarded by the sound in nearly any environment as having his shirttail tugged by the hands of hundreds of persistent toddlers, all wanting his attention at once. “Everything is saying,
Look at me! This is important!”
he had told me.

My mother fidgeted with her teacup as her gaze slipped to Ezra. “There’s lemonade in the fridge if you want some,” she said to him.

“Ezra?” I said.

“What?”

“There’s lemonade in the fridge if you want some. Glasses are over the sink.” But he leaned against the kitchen counter instead, absorbed in Judge Judy.

I stood and poured glasses for Ezra, Jeremy, and myself and put them on the table. “Maybe you could sit over here, so you’re not facing the television. So you can join the conversation.” When he still didn’t respond, I sipped my lemonade and watched a helicopter head out of the valley for another load. Sprinklers saturated the area around Jude’s studio and home; the wind cast the water across the yard. But there was no sign of Jude, though both his pickup and his Impala were in the driveway. Likely he was still sleeping after working so late into the night, as he always had in the days leading up to a show.

“He’s sleeping,” said Jeremy.

“Who?”

“That guy.” He pointed at Jude’s house.

I put a hand on my son’s shoulder and glanced at Ezra to see if he had been listening, but he was lost in the television. I didn’t know what to make of these brief tears my son made in the fabric of my reality, where he seemed to reach into my own mind. I hadn’t talked to other mothers about it, or even to Ezra, though I knew he saw it too, as he often raised his eyebrows to me at times like this.

In the pasture surrounding Valentine’s old cabin, a lame calf stumbled far behind my father’s small herd. The calf’s mother
bellowed from some distance away, trying to encourage it to catch up. “What’s the matter with that calf?” I asked Dad.

“Something’s haywire with the ligaments in its front legs. Born like that. I kept meaning to put it down. But now I can’t get out of the damn house. I’ve got to do something about it before the cops come and tell us to get the hell out of here.”

“I’ll do it,” Ezra said.

“What about Ernie?” I asked my father.

“Ernie?” Ezra asked.

“He runs that butcher outfit off Fredrickson Road.”

“I doubt he could get to it any time soon,” Dad said. “At the best of times you’ve got to give him a week’s notice, and with this fire raging there’ll be lots of folks trying to get their animals butchered so they don’t have to find a place to pasture them.”

Jeremy emptied his glass and banged it on the table. “More lemonade!” he sang.

“Just a minute, Jeremy.” I reached across the table to the television set. “Can I at least turn this down?”

Ezra sat at the table. “I said I’d murder the calf. I’ll do it this morning.”

“We’ll be packing, and you’ll need to get some rest.”

“You don’t think I can fly with it.”

“What about Uncle Dan?” I asked Dad. My mother’s brother.

“I don’t want Dan to see that gimpy calf,” Dad said.

“He knows you haven’t been well. No one’s going to judge you for it.”

“I said I’d do it.”

“More!” Jeremy sang out. “More!”

“Jeremy, please stop,” I said. But he banged the glass again, even as I tried to take it away.

Ezra slammed his fist on the table, upsetting my glass; a puddle of lemonade spilled to the floor. “For Christ’s sake stop that!” he cried. “Why do you have to make so much frickin’ noise all the time?”

Jeremy began to wail and I pulled him onto my lap, shushing him.

I saw my parents exchange a glance and then my mother turned off the television and lowered herself to her knees to wipe up the pool of lemonade. When Jeremy wouldn’t stop crying, I turned him toward me, and held his face. “We need to be quiet for Daddy, Jeremy. He loves you. It’s the noise making him mad, not you.”

Jeremy wiped his face with his sleeve. “Yucky smells make Daddy mad too, like Grandma’s perfume.”

I laughed a little in embarrassment. The scent of her lavender powder. It was a thing I had just learned, that ever since the stroke, Ezra had to fight through even the distraction of smell in order to focus on a conversation or task. Until recently, I hadn’t understood that the reason he sometimes withdrew from me, or became overwhelmed to the point of anger, was the scent I wore.

“My father was like that,” Mom said as she pulled herself up from the floor using the table. “Noise overwhelmed him. When he was exhausted, he had to spend whole days lying in bed with those dark green blinds pulled down, otherwise he’d moan and cry out about the light. He expected to be waited on as a sick child does. If he wanted ice cream on a hot day, he got ice cream. My mother would crank our ice-cream maker until she was sweating and her arm gave out, and I would take over. We would do anything to avoid his anger. It was my job to scoop the ice cream out of the maker with that old ice-cream scoop and take him a bowl. I gave that scoop to you, didn’t I?”

I nodded. A wonderful antique scoop with a wooden handle and the brand name
Gilchrist’s
inscribed on the thumb lever. Though its bowl was dented as if it had been used as a hammer, the mechanism still worked smoothly.

Mom sat back in her rocking chair and took up her pad of paper again. “I still don’t like ice cream. It makes me think of him on those bad days.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ezra said. The look on his face, now that the burst of rage had discharged, was like that of a man stumbling from sleep. He pulled Jeremy out of my arms and onto his lap, but in his effort to get away, Jeremy arched his back across his father’s knees until his head nearly touched the floor. When Ezra sat him upright and tried to hug him again, Jeremy bit his hand. “Shit!” said Ezra.

Jeremy leapt around the table. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

“Jeremy, come here!” I said. “We don’t bite. Biting hurts. You say sorry!”

“Sorry, Daddy.”

Ezra held out his hands, but Jeremy retreated into my arms. I looked up at Ezra. “Just give it a couple of minutes. He’ll forget all about it.” And within a moment he had.

Still sitting in my lap, Jeremy tapped the kitchen window behind me and pointed. “Who’s that guy?”

I scanned the yard for what had caught his attention and found a man standing by the old well. When I was a child the site of the well was marked by four fenceposts, but it was now hidden within a small patch of poplars, wild rose, and snowberry bushes in the middle of the field. The man stood within this bush. By the stoop of his shoulders I guessed that he was elderly, and he was dressed in a jack shirt and black fedora, an outfit
better suited to rainy spring days than this smoky August heat. The lenses of his glasses glinted as he looked in our direction.

“Mom, who is that?” I asked.

“Where?”

“There’s an old guy standing by the well.”

“Likely some looky-loo trying to get a better view of the fire,” Dad said. “I expect there’ll be a lot of people stopping along the road to watch.”

My mother sat up to see. “He’s by the well?”

“He was. I don’t see him now. He must have gone.”

“Are there any toys around here?” asked Jeremy.

“Why don’t you go into my old room and see what you can find?” And he skipped off to play with the few old toys of mine that my mother kept there.

“We should be worrying over water places,” said Ezra.

“You mean thinking of water sources.”

“I understood him, dear,” Mom said.

Ezra pointed his chin toward the old well. “Any water there?”

“The well is filled in,” I told him. “Or partly filled in.”

“I remember my father choosing the site for that well,” my mother said. “I was maybe four at the time, five? He got it in his head that he wanted to build my mother a new house, so off we all marched into the field to find water.”

It was a story my mother had told many times. He used a willow stick for his witching, because a willow is always seeking water, but he didn’t have much luck finding any. The divining stick wouldn’t point for him. When he got frustrated and threw it to the ground, my grandmother calmed him down, as she always did, and then used the divining rod herself to find a spot. He dug the well there, by hand. When my mother saw him
inside that hole he’d dug himself into, he didn’t look like the father she knew. He was all face, and his legs tapered down into boots that appeared too small for him. She was used to looking up at her father. But here she was looking down on him.

“Wouldn’t it be painless to find water on this place?” Ezra asked. “There are all those marshes.”

“All he had to do was find poplars,” said Dad. “There’s always water where there’s poplars.”

“He just didn’t seem to have the knack for divining,” said my mother. “It was hard enough for him to see what was
there,
in front of his nose, much less what was hidden underground.” My mother glanced around the room. “In any case he never built that new place. My parents ended up living out their lives in the house we’re sitting in now.”

“So the well is dry,” said Ezra.

“There was water in it once,” she told him. “Though it never ran clear. But he filled the well in.”

“Why would he do that?”

She hesitated a moment, then told him the story of how my grandfather had buried a mule there. A good puller named Nelly that my mother often rode. But as soon as my grandfather took the reigns Nelly would dig in her heels and wouldn’t move. He’d beat her with whatever was handy: a willow switch, a singletree, a two-by-four. When she kicked my grandfather in the leg that last time, he slashed her across the muzzle with a willow switch, then had my mother put a halter on her and lead her to the well while he got his gun, as the mule would do nearly anything that my mother asked of it. He threw off the boards over the well and had her back the mule to its mouth. When Nelly wouldn’t take that last step back into the hole, he whipped the
animal. Her body shuddered as she lost her footing, and she looked up at my mother as she fell, pleading.

My mother tried to pull the gun out of her father’s hands, to shoot the mule, to put her out of its misery, but he yanked the gun from her hands. When she tried to walk away, he dragged her back by the arm and forced her to watch Nelly die. There was about twelve feet of water at the bottom of that well, and nothing on the sides for the animal to get a footing on. My mother couldn’t see much of her, just the flash of her eye now and again, a bit of her muzzle in the water down there in the black. But she could hear her, thrashing and snorting.

“I listened to her drown,” my mother said and she wiped tears from her eyes. “Then he told me to get the shovels and we spent the rest of the day shovelling dirt into that hole to cover her body. It was dark when we went in for supper. That well was deep even with the fill. When those boards that covered it began to rot, I worried you might fall into that hole. I told you, didn’t I, never to go near it?”

“Yes. Many times.” But like any forbidden thing, it was a fascination. I crouched in the grass to pick the shooting stars that grew only around the well’s dark mouth. I threw stones into it, fluttered handfuls of white petals from the field daisies into it, and kneeled to sing into it, to hear my voice distorted by its depth. I thought of that well now in cross-section, the bony face of the mule pointing upwards like an arrow at odds with the layers of sediment around it. The animal’s bones glowing white in the surrounding black. So much time had passed, and yet the well was still there, and the mule was there, the instant of its death locked in soil.

WHEN I LONGED FOR HOME
, it wasn’t my parents’ dark farmhouse that I missed, but those trees and bushes: the poplar, spruce, and cottonwood, pin cherry, and saskatoon that lined the driveway and hemmed the homesite, protecting it from the devilish winds of the valley, winds that blew the trees now and would urge on the fire as well. The lilac, fragrant flowering Russian olive, and bright-berried mountain ash that dotted the yard. The cherry, apple, peach, and nectarines of the orchard. The erotic cleavages of the plums ripening on the tree that Ezra stood on a ladder to prune. The trunk of this tree was deeply scarred from disease, so like the photos I’d seen of the brains of
Alzheimer’s patients; great parts of the curled tissue were dead and black. I had sat within this tree as a child, batting away yellow jackets as I tore the red skin of its fruit with my teeth to get to the warm yellow flesh within. But now plums hung from only two of its gnarled branches.

“What are you up to?” I asked Ezra.

“This plant needs a good prune.”

“It needs to be uprooted and burned.”

“It’s still creating fruit.”

“You have a prairie boy’s sensibility. Not all fruit trees are worth keeping.”