Turtle Valley (24 page)
Authors: Gail Anderson-Dargatz
I got down from the ladder and slid my hand along the ridge under the wallpaper, where the board had come loose. “I’d like to open this up,” I said.
“Whatever for?” said Ezra.
“There’s more in here, much more.” I turned to Mom. “Your mother’s sister wrote in that card,
At the very least the lost little fellow will watch over your treasures.
I think your mother was leaving you a clue in that copy of
The Prophet.
She was telling you where to look for her treasures, should anything happen to her.”
My mother stared at the wall a moment and then nodded.
I retrieved the hammer from the junk drawer and, after ripping away generations of wallpaper, I turned the hammer’s claw into the board to yank it loose. Nails screeched and the board popped open and a wash of ladybugs spilled to the floor. Most were dead, but a few crawled up the wall, or took flight around our heads. “Good God!” said Val.
“Ladybug, ladybug, fly ’way home!” said Jeremy.
“Let’s get this cleaned out.” I reached under the sink for the dustpan and broom and began the task of scooping ladybugs and decades of dust and debris into the brown paper bag that Val set before me. When the bag was nearly full, Ezra took it outside and tossed ladybugs across the driveway. Many lifted up and flew away, spiraling over his head.
“Jesus,” said Ezra. “How many bugs are there?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I hit something with the edge of the dustpan.
“What is it?” said my mother.
I lifted a crumbling teddy from the wall. Covered in dust and cobwebs, its stomach had indeed been nested by mice. Its head lolled to the side, attached by just a few remaining threads. “Oh, God!” said Val. She sneezed. “Let’s get it into a garbage bag.”
“No!” said my mother.
“It’s filthy.”
“She hasn’t seen it for nearly seventy years,” I said.
Val handed her the bear and Mom sat in her mother’s chair and rocked, playing with the bear as a child might. Harrison jumped onto her lap.
“There a bear for me?” said Jeremy.
“No. Only for Grandma.”
I turned back to my mother. “Are those letters from Valentine?”
“No, from her sister.”
“Why would she hide letters from her sister?”
“My father was jealous of anything that didn’t involve him.”
“Valentine’s letters must be here,” I said. “I know they’re here.”
I sifted through my grandmother’s treasures at the bottom of the partition. A 1931 Butterick pattern for a peplum frock. A tube
of lipstick. A little bottle of lilac perfume. A
Chatelaine
magazine from 1953 with a string threaded through a hole punched in one corner. On the cover was a photograph of Prince Philip (“in colour for framing”), but the contents were much the same as in the modern version of the magazine. The cover promised a story on how to “Eat all you want and reduce,” “Bargains in glamour vacations,” and “A new complete romantic novelette.” Inside there were advertisements for Sunbeam coffeemakers, Birks, General Electric refrigerators, Gerber’s baby foods.
And then I found the Peek Frean cookie tin. I popped open the lid and there they were: Valentine’s letters to Maud, from 1945 right through until my grandfather’s disappearance.
My mother rose to join me, and her chair went on rocking behind her. We all stood at the table for several minutes, leafing through the letters, scanning them.
“There’s a letter in here that she wrote to
him,”
I said. “She wrote it the day Valentine told her they had given up the search for Grandpa’s body.” I handed my mother the letter.
“My mother died that evening. A heart attack. Gus found her lying on the greenhouse floor.”
“Can I see that again?” I said. My mother handed the letter back to me and I glanced at it before tucking it and all of Valentine’s letters into my grandmother’s carpetbag, where I had put her letters to him. I kissed Jeremy on the forehead. “Jeremy, you stay here with Daddy and Auntie. I won’t be long.” I turned to Val. “Can you keep an eye on him for a few minutes? I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” said Ezra. But I had already closed the screen door behind me and stepped into the night, and I was far enough away to pretend that I hadn’t heard him.
April 2, 1965
Dearest Mrs.,
Forgive me for calling you Mrs. again, Maud, but that’s what you’ll always be to me, my darling, my Mrs. I feel I must apologize for what happened tonight. I know the kiss was stolen, and I know you must feel that you have betrayed your husband again. Please forgive me. But if I do in fact have a second chance with you, then I must know. You
only have to say the word and I’m yours. But of course now is not the time to talk of such things.
Gus is saddling up Star and Pride right now, and Beth just arrived with lunch, so I’ll send this note back with her. We’ll take short trips up the mountain again tonight as we did last night, following the old Indian trails, and keep checking back at the farm. I hate to leave you and Beth and the girls alone here for long, as John’s mental state has likely deteriorated further. But the cops won’t let the other searchers hunt for him in the night, and I don’t want to search for him alone in case we come on him and he thinks I’m “the enemy.” I’ll need Gus’s help to bring him down once we find him, in any case.
My dearest Maud, keep the door barred with a chair, but don’t worry yourself too much. I’ve found every man I’ve searched for, you know that. Try toq sleep, or keep yourself busy, dearest; it is always the best remedy for a troubled mind. Why not make a pan of your wonderful fudge? It will give you something to do while you wait, and distract John once we bring him back home. But save a little for me, will you? Oh, my dearest, I so love your fudge, and your company.
I will be forever your Mr.,
Valentine
April 9, 1965
My dear Valentine,
Thank you for leaving your copy of
The Prophet
on the porch. Beth found it and brought it in. Thank you, also, for volunteering to be the one to tell me the RCMP have called off the search. I know that must have been difficult for you, and I did not make the task easy. You startled me, coming up behind me while I was hanging out the laundry, and then the news rather left me raw. I’m sorry I simply walked off without speaking to you. I cried all afternoon, and even as I milked the cows, but now, it seems that I have been wrung dry.
As I walked to the barn to milk the cows in the twilight, I swore I saw John at the four fenceposts that mark the old well, stooping to pick shooting stars for me as he did each spring without fail. Then he was gone. I imagine it was a hallucination induced by my grief, as you and the others tell me he likely died of exposure in those cold mountain rains. Even so, today after you told me the news, I walked up to the bench land to call his name, as I have done almost every day of the search, thinking that, like a wounded cat, he might come home for me, when he wouldn’t for anyone else. He hasn’t answered my calls, of course, though he has entered my dreams nightly, taking my hand and offering me fistfuls of shooting stars.
Did Beth tell you the kitchen window broke when the meteor hit, just before John disappeared? I was standing at the window—looking over at your cabin, I’m ashamed to say—when I saw that bright light travel across the sky, and then there was a flash like a bomb exploding as it hit the mountain. The meteor lit up the whole of Turtle Valley as if it were day; I could clearly see you walking across your yard with the pitchfork to feed the cows. The initial streak of light surprised me so much that I put my hand to the glass, and I was standing like that when the sound reached us. In the instant before the meteor hit, I saw John’s face reflected in the window behind me; it startled me as I felt he had caught me looking across the field at you, and I feared what he might do. But then there was that bright flash and the boom shook the house, and his scream rang out just as the glass shattered.
John fell to the floor, shrieking, holding his head, just as you described him that day the army came to blow up the Japanese balloon. I knelt on the floor and held his head because I couldn’t think what else to do. But he pulled away from me. His eyes were open, bulging, as they were so many nights when he sat up in bed with the night terrors, but he didn’t see me. I wasn’t there for him; this house, this farm, and everything that was familiar weren’t there for him.
I wish now I had found a way to awaken him from that horrible dream, to bring him back here to
this kitchen. But I thought at the time it was better to let him be, to let the terror flood over him and pass on as it had during all those nights of our marriage. If I tried to touch him, he only became more frightened. So I withdrew, to sit in my rocking chair. I didn’t accompany him down that slide into his nightmare. That was where I first failed him.
He jumped up and grabbed the gun off the rack and put on his glasses, as he did when he was about to go out hunting. I took his arm in some effort to stop him but he pushed me to the floor and lifted the gun over his head. His intent was to hit me with the butt of the gun, but then his eyes focused on me for a moment and he pulled back and headed out the door. “I’m going up there to get the sonofabitches,” he said. I called after him but that was the last I saw of him: marching through the rain in that circle of yard light, wearing his puttees from the war, his jack shirt, and the big black hat, before he disappeared into the night.
As for that kiss the next night, there is nothing to forgive. I was finishing up the dishes when I saw the light in the cabin and saw you feeding the cows, and so I ran right over in the rain, hoping for some news of John. As you told me you had found no sign of John, I felt the panic of a mother whose child has wandered out of her sight. I didn’t know what to do. But then you wrapped your warm coat around me, and pulled me out of the rain, and held me, and let me cry into your chest. I have always
loved the smell of you: pipe tobacco and coffee, hay and the balsam boughs you stuff your mattress with. The kiss was not stolen; it was freely given. It made everything seem all right, as your kisses always have.
But everything isn’t all right, is it? With Beth’s help I replaced the shattered kitchen window with a warped pane of glass we had left over from building the greenhouse all those years ago (so it’s through this memory of you that I now look over at your cabin and the unfinished house). But I fear I can’t fix what else ails this family.
After that kiss, as you and Gus went out to hunt for John, Beth kept watch with me in the kitchen. As you had suggested, I made a pan of fudge and did housework to keep myself occupied. And when that was done, I sat in my rocker with Katrine asleep in her basket at my feet. I must have fallen asleep because Beth told me that when she saw the light in your cabin, she slipped out to take over that pan of fudge, to see what the news was. It was then, she said, that she saw a cougar skulking about the barns.
I woke to gunshots, four shots altogether, and stepped out onto the porch, but I could see very little past the yard light. Your voices were murmurings in the black. Then you walked into the yard light supporting Gus, and his arm was hanging, bloodied, at his side, and I feared the worst at that moment, as I still do. You told me
that you had just shot a cougar that had followed you down off the mountain. You said John had shot Gus on the mountain, and had then fled. But it was a fresh wound to Gus’s arm, not one from even an hour or two before, I’m sure of it. I have seen so many wounds. I was an ambulance driver in the Great War, you remember.
And it is so odd how you have all withdrawn from me this week, how it seems there is an invisible, uninvited guest sitting in on my dealings with Beth, or Gus, or you. Some ghost listening in, who keeps each of you from being candid with me.
Oh, Valentine, I want to cry, because right now, as I’m finishing this letter to you, the radio is playing our song, “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” It is such a strange coincidence, not only because it is our song, but because the lyrics seem to sum up exactly what I am thinking: if it were only you and I, if there were no other considerations, then we could go back to loving in the same old way. But it’s not just you and I, is it? There is this ghost haunting us.
Tonight after I milked the cows, I walked over to your cabin, to say thank you for all your efforts and to offer my apology for my behaviour earlier today, and perhaps to work up the confidence to talk with you about much that I’ve written here. But you weren’t there, and so, thinking you were feeding the cows, I walked over to the pasture by the unfinished house. It was there that I saw something glinting in
the grass by the old house. Valentine, it was John’s glasses. I tucked them away in their case and in an envelope out of view, and I haven’t spoken to Beth or Gus about them. But all this has left me with a question, a terrible question that I barely dare to ask. But I will, my love, because nothing can come of us until it is answered.
What happened that night, the night we kissed? Did you kill John?
