Turtle Valley (5 page)

“Long as it’s got fruit on it, I don’t see the bother in trying to solve it.”

“Can I have one?” Jeremy asked, pointing at the plums.

“Sure you can.” I reached up to press one of the fruit to gauge its ripeness, and burnished the plum on my T-shirt before handing it to him. “It’s not safe to be up on a ladder in these winds.” Ezra didn’t respond. “You promised Dad you would butcher the calf this morning.”

He turned on the ladder to look down at me. “Why are you always trying to halt me from doing what I want?”

“I’m not. It’s just, with the fire we’ve got other things—”

But he turned his back on me. I crossed my arms and looked away, across the field. Jude’s Toyota was still in his yard along with his old Impala. “All right then,” I said. “If you’re taking a break from loading the truck you won’t mind if I head over to Jude’s for a few minutes.” The muscles in his shoulders tensed, but he said nothing, and kept his back to me. “Evidently he’s got a box of mine.” I waited a moment longer, but when he still didn’t respond I held out my hand to
Jeremy and we headed down the worn path that crossed the field to Jude’s place.

“Where are we going, Mommy?”

“To see an old friend.”

THERE WASN’T A NUMBERED SIGN
or a name burned into wood at the entrance to Jude’s driveway, as there was on the other acreages up and down Turtle Valley. Instead there was a metal sign from an old restaurant that Jude had found at some roadside secondhand shop on a trip through the Okanagan: on a red background, in bold white lettering, was the word
Home.

Jude had built the house himself, erecting the post-and-beam structure the year he bought the property from my parents, and had continued to add on as his needs dictated. When his son, Andy, was born he put the bedroom onto the back, and he replaced the stairs with the ramp and veranda when Lillian started using a wheelchair. A brand-new addition now jutted from the roofline over the master bedroom upstairs. He had talked about building something like it years before, to replace the low, angled ceiling of the bedroom, on which he bumped his head.

I led Jeremy by the hand up the ramp to the veranda to knock on the front door. A boy mannequin stood guard at the living-room window. So he had kept the mannequins. I had teased Jude, back then, for being a pack rat, for never throwing anything away. “And you’re too quick to throw things out,” he told me. “When you’re young you think everything is disposable, even friends. You can always get another. But it’s not true, you know. With almost everything I’ve thrown away, I’ve come to regret it later.”

The back seat from a car sat on the veranda as a couch, and an old television was perched on an upturned log in front of it:
the glass, insides, and back panel had been removed so that, looking into that television, I saw a view of my parents’ farm and the burning hills above. Over the mountain the Martin Mars made another drop, casting a splash of lurid pink-red, the peculiar colour of tandoori chicken, across the trees.

I knocked again.

“Look at the lady,” said Jeremy, and I turned first to Jude’s truck, and then to the Impala, the car he had driven when we were together all those years ago. Another one of our mannequins, a woman, lounged in the front seat of the Impala, with her legs crossed and thrust lazily out the passenger window. She wore red stiletto heels.

“Isn’t she funny?” I said.

I followed Jeremy down to the Impala and peered into the car. The pair of baby shoes Jude and I had bought together dangled from the rearview mirror. Aside from these booties and the mannequin, the car was pretty much as it had been when he had taken me out for drives. The sticker in the rear window that read
Don’t believe everything you think.
The red upholstery. No seatbelts in the front seats. He had installed the ones in the back after I left for the coast, for Andy’s car seat. I had felt I was floating, untethered, when I rode with him in that car. Unsafe. Thrilled.

I heard steps inside the house and led Jeremy back to the veranda. Jude opened the door with a sheet wrapped around his waist and legs, the white fabric trailing on the floor behind him. “Katrine!” he said. His chest and arms were still muscular, a gift of the physical nature of his work, though he had a slight paunch above the folds of the sheet. Noting my gaze, no doubt, he pulled in his stomach.

“I’ve woken you.”

“No, it’s okay.”

He stood back to let me in and I stepped into the high, open living space. Jude had cut the beams for this house from the birch on this property. Potted plants hanging from those beams obscured the light from the windows, giving the room a cool, submerged feel, a relief from the oppressive, smoky heat outside. The kitchen floor had recently been stripped down to the subfloor; a pile of new tiles sat in one corner waiting to be installed. There was a new computer on the kitchen table. Otherwise the house was pretty much as I remembered it. There was the same ancient, tiny fridge, the size of a hotel room’s mini-bar, the Fisher wood stove that heated the house in winter, the avocado electric stove for cooking. He’d baked pumpkin soup with aged cheddar in that oven for me, during a visit with him and Lillian, cooked and served within the pumpkin shell.

Above the living room a steep set of stairs led to the balcony of the bedroom. There was no wall between this bedroom and the living room below. I could see the raised ceiling of the new addition, and the bed, from where I stood. The high white ceiling, the wood trim around the new, large windows, the sheer white curtains. It was now a breezy, light-filled room, so different from the dark, cramped bedroom he had shared with Lillian.

“I should have phoned first,” I said.

Jude tucked the sheets more firmly about himself. “No, I’m glad you came.”

“Jeremy, this is Jude.”

“Hello, Jeremy.”

“Hi.”

“I bet you’d like some apple juice,” Jude said.

“Yes, please,” said Jeremy.

“How about you? You want a cup of tea? Or are you drinking coffee now?”

“Just water,” I said.

I watched him walk to the kitchen. The muscles in his back. As he handed the glasses to us, I glanced down at the sheet he wore. He laughed. “I guess I better put something on.”

I took a sip of water and watched him climb the stairs, the sheet sliding upwards with him, then averted my eyes as he let the sheet fall.

“That guy’s naked,” said Jeremy.

“He’s getting dressed. It’s not polite to stare when someone is putting his clothes on. Look at this vase. Isn’t that lovely? Jude made that. And here’s a picture of that funny lady we saw in Jude’s car. I took that photo.”

The year I photographed that mannequin was a dry one, and lake levels had fallen so much that the newly constructed pier extended out into a mud flat rather than into water; the docks where houseboats usually moored were now sitting on mud. I worked as a reporter for the newspaper at the time, and was looking for a photo to gently lampoon this tourist town’s vulnerability to the whims of the weather. So Jude and I talked the curator into giving us a few of the old mannequins stored in the basement of the town’s museum, and we hauled them down to the pier and set them up in the mud as if they were tourists playing. A crowd gathered on the pier above us, cheering and clapping each time we set up a mannequin in a new position. With Jude I did any silly thing, without embarrassment. I could not have talked Ezra into it.

“That’s you, Mommy!”

I looked up to where he pointed, at the wall above, and there she was, my young self, smiling. “Jude painted that,” I said. “He paints, too.”

“I used to,” Jude said from his bedroom above.

“You’ve got a big tummy in that picture,” said Jeremy. “You’re having a baby, like Jeannie.” Jeannie, our neighbour in Cochrane, took care of Jeremy on days when I worked at the paper; she was now eight months along. I’d have to find another sitter, and soon. “That’s me in your tummy.”

“No, honey.” I was never as pregnant as that painting allowed. I never showed much. It was all projection on Jude’s part.

“Where is that baby?”

Jude descended the stairs, tucking his white T-shirt into his jeans. “She flew away,” he said. I shook my head at him, to warn him not to say anything more, but he didn’t understand.

“Where did she go?”

“Someplace happy,” he said.

“Is she at the zoo? Mommy, can we go to the zoo?”

“Sure. Let’s go to the Calgary zoo when we get back home.”

“Will your baby be there?”

“This is me too.” I pointed at the series of paintings along the wall. “And that one. And that one.” Then I turned to Jude. “You kept them.”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t Lillian object?”

“I stored them in my studio, until she left. She took most of the paintings we had put up.” He grinned and scratched behind his ear. “I needed something to cover the walls.”

“You got any toys?” Jeremy said.

“Ask nicely.”

“Please?”

Jude squatted down in front of him. “You like Lego? There’s a box in Andy’s room.”

“Yeah!”

“Right through that door.”

Jeremy looked up at me. “Go on.” Together Jude and I watched as he ran down the hallway into Andy’s room. Then we stood in silence for a time, as we both struggled to come up with something to say. In the other room, Jeremy dumped the Lego onto the floor.

“This fire’s a hell of a thing,” Jude said. “I just keep loading boxes and carting them off to Mike’s place in town, but I don’t know what to take, what to leave behind. Mike picked out a pipe wrench with the bottom jaw missing from one of the boxes, and said, ‘What the hell is this?’ The thing is, I remember taking the damn thing off my workbench in the basement and putting it in the box yesterday. As if it was some family heirloom I had to save.”

I nodded. “I couldn’t talk Mom out of packing her collection of baskets this morning. She bought the works at the thrift shop.”

“Well, I guess we can be forgiven for not thinking straight, given the circumstances.”

We both looked at our feet for a while. Listened to Jeremy’s singsong murmurings in play.

“I should apologize,” I said finally, “for how Ezra behaved, when you came over to visit that last time.”

He shrugged. “I should have known it would cause problems for you. I hope this visit isn’t an issue.”

“No, not really.” I put my glass on the table and sat, and Jude sat with me. I nodded at the Impala. “You kept the baby shoes.”

“I just found them as I was packing stuff out of the basement. It seemed right, somehow, to hang them in the car. All those drives we took.” On back roads, so we wouldn’t be seen together. “She would have been sixteen this coming spring.”

“We never knew for sure it was a girl.”

“You thought so, at the time.”

I pointed out the window at Valentine’s unfinished house. “Every Halloween when I was a girl my great-uncle would fill that old house with jack-o’-lanterns, all lit up with candles, and invite me and my friends in there to tell us a story he’d heard from the Sami in Lapland, about the ghost of an unwanted baby murdered at the hands of his own mother in secret. He said the ghost baby was seen crawling across the snow, hoping for revenge or that the truth of his death would come out; hoping to be named so his soul could rest.”

“The miscarriage wasn’t your fault, Katrine. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

“I still hide it, though. I never told Mom. She hasn’t seen that painting you did of me pregnant, has she?”

He shook his head. “I always go over to their place to visit.”

“Jeremy knows, now. He’ll be asking questions.”

“Does it really matter?”

“I never told Ezra either.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t know how he’d react. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Val, though she guessed about you and me at the time. I imagine the whole valley did. But you were still living with Lillian; I didn’t know what was going to happen between us. And then
I lost the baby, and Lillian got pregnant, and I lost you, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Not with anyone.”

“I’m so sorry, Katrine. You don’t know how many times I thought of phoning you after you left for Vancouver. I felt I had to stay with Lillian but it wasn’t what I wanted.”

“You don’t have to explain it again.” I looked down at my glass. “I only just heard from Mom and Dad that you and Lillian had separated. It must have been hard, to lose them both like that.”

“I drive up to see Andy a couple of times a month. I’d go more often if I could afford it. I phone him nearly every day.” He ran his thumbnail along a crack in the table. “Val told me a few things, about Ezra, what you had to deal with after he had the stroke.”

“He’s much better than he was.”

He looked up. “So he’s not fully recovered?”

“He’ll live with some handicaps for the rest of his life. I doubt he’ll ever be able to teach again.”

“Your dad said he had trouble holding down a job.”

“He’s forgetful, and he has trouble catching on to new things. He often gets caught up in projects that don’t really matter—like right now he’s over there pruning trees—so things that do matter don’t get done. Not many employers will put up with that.”

The day Ezra lost that last dairy job, milking cows, he shuffled the distance between the truck and the garage, where I waited on the steps, and stood on the step beneath me to press his head between my breasts. His arms dangled at his sides and his shoulders heaved as he sobbed. The stink of the dairy around him. “They fired me,” he said. “Ron said I was taking too long, making too many stumbles. I can’t even do a shit job right anymore.”

He had milked cows as a fourteen-year-old at his father’s dairy. Worked the four a.m. shift half asleep, he knew the job so well. And hated it.

“I don’t mean to complain,” I said. “We were very lucky. Right after Ezra had the stroke, his doctor told me he likely wouldn’t be able to talk, if he survived at all. One of the nurses suggested we both learn sign language. Can you imagine? The two of us, with perfect hearing, having to use sign language.”

“Like my uncle after his stroke,” said Jude. “All he could say was
Fuck
and
Apple Jacks.”