Turtle Valley (20 page)

I wiped my eyes and glanced out the window at Ezra. “Just not getting enough sleep.”

I gave Jeremy the plate of apple slices. “I should see if Val needs a break,” I said, and I joined my sister in my father’s room. My father slept even as Val rolled him to slip a new Depends under his buttocks, and as she wiped him clean. I had changed Ezra’s Depends in just this way when he was in the hospital. His moist, limp penis against his thigh, the smell of urine.

“Dad’s breathing is so shallow,” I said.

“That’s to be expected.”

“Did he wake?”

She shook her head. “He’ll sleep much more from now on, and when he does wake he’ll often be confused. There will be times when he won’t recognize you, Kat. Be prepared for that.”

I turned to the window to allow my father some privacy as Val finished changing him. When she was done, she joined me at the window, rubbing her hands with an antiseptic wipe.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For everything you do for Mom and Dad.”

“That’s what I do, take care of people.”

I looped my arm through hers. “But who takes care of you?”

“Oh I’m alright. I take care of myself. Every night I treat myself to a glass of wine and a hot bath.” She nudged my shoulder with her own.

“But who takes care of you? Not Ezra, evidently. Tell me, when was the last time you let him do something for you?”

I hesitated a moment, fingering the note in my pocket that Ezra had written. “The other day, when we were in the store with Mom, Ezra wanted to pick up a few things by himself so he got his own shopping cart. I thought he was just being childish, you know, that he had to do things for himself again, to prove himself, like he does. But then he got tired, so I took him to the bench by the door to wait as we finished shopping. As he was sitting down I noticed a jar of lingonberry jam in his cart, like the jam Uncle Valentine used to give us when we went to his place, but in a wee little jar like what you might get with breakfast at a hotel. I thought, so that’s why he wanted to shop by himself; he wanted to pick up a surprise for me. I said, ‘Is this for me?’

“He said, ‘You like that stuff, don’t you?’

“I hugged him and kissed him and wept over it. It surprised me, you know, to be so very excited by this little gift. The feelings I had were way out of proportion to it. Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time Ezra had bought me a gift, or taken me out on a date without my urging, or even made me a cup of tea. The last time he remembered my birthday was before the stroke. Isn’t that dumb? Getting all weepy over a stupid jar of jam.”

“It’s not dumb,” Val said. “It’s almost impossible to maintain romance when you’re dealing with the symptoms of a stroke day in and day out.”

“Ezra doesn’t want me, you know, in that way.”

“I imagine he’s exhausted a good deal of the time, and he’s reinventing himself. Most couples have difficulty in their sex lives after a stroke.” But then her attention was directed past my shoulder, to the kitchen door behind me.

I turned and found Ezra silhouetted at the screen door. He thumped back down the porch stairs and I slid on my sandals to follow him outside to the truck, where he rearranged boxes. “Why did you have to tell her that?” he said. He was tearing up, and looked so very tired; at that moment I realized just how many years we had been together. The silver hairs at his temples that he had once insisted on plucking, until after the stroke when energy fled him. When I tried to take his hand he pulled his arm away from me and started to walk off. “I’m going to finish carting those boxes.”

The screen door opened and Jeremy came out carrying the little plastic elephant that had been mine when I was a child. The one missing ears, wheels, and legs. “Mommy, all the toys here are broken,” he said.

I wiped my eyes. “I’ll find something for you to play with in a minute, Jeremy. I just need a moment.”

He sat on the steps with me and looked down at the broken elephant. “Is Daddy going away?”

“He’s just getting more boxes from the barn.”

“There’s fire in my head.”

I held him and put my hand to his forehead. “You mean you’re worried about the fire?” When he didn’t respond, I hugged him close. “The fire is scary, but when we’re told to go, I’ll make sure we get out of here before the fire arrives. Okay?”

“Okay.” He wrapped his arms around me, settling his head into my neck, and I rocked him. Jude stepped up to the door of the kiln shed and looked out across the field. When he saw Jeremy and me he waved. I held up my hand to him.

“Can I play with that guy’s Lego?” Jeremy asked. “Can we go to his house?”

I stood and held out my hand to him. “Why don’t we do that? There’s something there I’d like to find. Will you help me?”

He nodded and I led him across the yard, heading for the trail to Jude’s house. I glanced toward the barn once, searching for Ezra. But as soon as I caught sight of him watching us from the door, he turned away and disappeared into the darkness of the barn. The smell of the smoke in the air; a Christmas spruce burned after the holiday was over.

I APPROACHED THE DOOR
to Jude’s studio holding Jeremy’s hand. The inside walls were covered in posters from the many pottery shows he had participated in over the years, and clay dust caked everything: the turned pots and the shelves that held them; Jude’s containers of brushes and tools; the television and VCR in front of his wheel. The shelf of mementoes, presumably from Andy’s childhood, that were stacked one on top of the other: Thomas trains, a remote-control jeep, a porcelain baby cup that Jude had no doubt made himself, airplanes and Hot Wheels, and a black ouija board embossed with the alphabet in red.

Jude stood with his back to the door at one of the long work-tables, dipping what appeared to be the base of a table lamp into a bucket of glaze that was thick and creamy-smooth, the consistency and colour of buttermilk. The lamp base had already been dipped and left to dry once. This was its final, decorative glaze. Years ago I had watched him paint the glazes on, twisting and manipulating the brush with the finesse of a Japanese calligrapher. “You’re not using brushes anymore?” I asked.

He startled and turned, then grinned, before sponging off the bottom of the freshly glazed lamp base and putting it on a rack to dry. He picked up a vase and turned it upside down to dip it into the bucket. “Brushwork is too predictable. All my pots were looking the same. I like the chance happenings, the surprises I get at the end of a firing when I glaze like this.”

“Another firing tonight?”

“The last before the show.” He put the vase on the rack and grabbed a cloth to wipe his hands, then pulled a section of clay from a Rubbermaid plastic bin and handed it to Jeremy.

“Play dough!”

“It’s clay,” I said. “Isn’t it wonderful stuff?”

“Play dough for grown-ups,” said Jude. He lifted Jeremy onto a stool at the worktable so he could model it there.

“You still wedge the clay by hand?” I asked. Years ago he had shown me how to soften the clay into a state in which it could be worked, pushing it down, bringing it up, my whole body rocking; it was very much like kneading a stiff bread dough. My arms had ached for days afterwards.

“Got to do something to stay in shape,” he said. “All that sitting at the wheel makes it hard to keep the weight off.” He patted his belly. “I’ve put on a few pounds.”

I smoothed a hand over my own stomach. “Haven’t we all?”

“You’re perfect,” he said, and gave my hand a little shake for emphasis. “Perfect.” When I looked away at Jeremy, he dropped my hand and said, “How’s your dad?”

“He hardly spoke today.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “He was still quite chatty yesterday, but he’s suddenly withdrawn into himself. Val says she’s worried because he’s got it in his head that he wants to die before the fire forces us out. She says she’s seen it over and over in the clients she works with. They’ll just give up and be dead within days.”

“I’m so sorry, Katrine.” He waved at his potter’s wheel. “Do you have a little time now? Why don’t I set Jeremy up on the wheel so we can talk?”

“Actually, I wonder if I can borrow a hammer and snoop around that unfinished house.”

“A hammer?”

“To pull up the floorboards.”

“I doubt you’ll need one. The cows have ravaged that place.” But he pulled a hammer from a toolbox under the worktable. “What are you looking for?”

“A MacDonald’s tobacco can. I found it there when I was a child. I’m hoping it contains some letters.”

“Let me guess: you think they might be from your grandmother to Valentine?”

When I smiled, he held out his hand to my son. “Well, Jeremy. Let’s go investigate. We’re archaeologists off on a dig.”

Jeremy took Jude’s hand and together they marched off toward the door. “I’m an archaeologist, Mommy!”

A huge pumpkin patch surrounded the bit of unruly pasture Jude kept about the old house. The plants still offered up their
huge yellow flowers but the green pumpkins were already beginning to blush orange. Valentine had planted pumpkins decades before, as a contained garden at the back of his cabin, but after his death the pumpkins had propagated and gone wild, so they now crept over the ancient and rusting bits of farm machinery around the barns and grasped the frame of my old bicycle that leaned against the side of a granary. I had left the bike there just before getting a new one for my birthday when I was a child thirty years before, and it was still locked, wheel to wheel, to itself. I had licked those handlebars when I was a girl; they had tasted salty from my hands, then harsh, metallic.

Uncle Valentine’s cabin was to the far right, nestled within what was now a pasture that bordered on the creek. The building was braced by a couple of posts so it wouldn’t collapse. Much of the caulking between the logs had fallen away, so that at sunset the building was shot through with orange-red light, as if it were on fire from within. During my childhood my parents and I had spent many Sunday afternoons in that cabin with Valentine, eating Peek Frean cookies from the tin and drinking “cooked” coffee, as he called it, coffee grounds boiled right in the pot: gritty, thick stuff, so strong we had to suck it through a sugar cube held between our teeth. There were only two rooms in the place, and no door between them. In the back room the bed was always neatly made, and Valentine’s few shirts and trousers were hung on nails pounded into the log walls. Open shelves over the sink held all that he might need: coffee and flour, sugar and canned milk, dried beans and peas and pastas, and preserves he’d canned himself: beets, pickles, and canned plums and peaches; strawberry, raspberry, saskatoon, and lingonberry jam. The place smelled of woodsmoke from the stove,
and MacDonald’s pipe tobacco, because my great-uncle was rarely without a pipe, and of canned milk and that thick coffee. He had resisted electricity and indoor plumbing, preferring to cart his water inside in a bucket to wash in an enamel basin, and to make use of the outhouse hidden within lilac bushes even into the 1970s. I thought him ancient, a man from another time entirely, my grandmother’s time.

To the side of Valentine’s cabin, the unfinished house was so weathered that it looked like a natural part of the landscape, as if it had grown from the earth. Valentine had never lived in it; no one had. The windows had long ago been broken by hail or thrown rocks. Jude’s big lanky tabby sat on one windowsill, its colours blending with the wood of the wall; if it hadn’t sung for my attention, I wouldn’t have noticed it sitting there. The Bonica roses Valentine had planted here decades before had spread, growing wild and ragged, but still offered sweet red blossoms well into fall.

Inside, the subfloor was strewn with glass shards, torn clothing, and beer bottles. A hornet’s nest was affixed to one corner of the hallway. Under this, graffiti were scrawled in black spray paint:
Death to Cows
and
This is where I live
and
You do not want to disturb me.
The stairwell to the upper story had been removed altogether. Jude was right; the cows had done so much damage to the floorboards that we hardly needed a hammer. There were great holes where they had stepped right through the shiplap boards, exposing the joists beneath.

“I shouldn’t have Jeremy in here.”

“I want to see!”

“We’ll watch him,” said Jude. “He’ll be fine.”

I took Jeremy’s hand and led him over the holes in the floor and into what would have been the living room, where the
floor was in better shape. A mouldy mattress lay under the window. On the far wall, in dripping red letters, was written
Too bad you found your keys.

I pointed at the mattress. “You’ve had visitors, I see.”

“Yeah, well, every so often I have to chase some local kid out of here. An empty house seems to attract them.” We turned to look at the walls around us, at the graffiti there, the glass crunching beneath our feet. One wall read,
Danger!
Another read,
A gradual instant of destruction.
Low on this wall, over a series of knotholes, was written,
I can see you!