Turtle Valley (28 page)

“But you say your father’s body is in the old well. Why would he lead us here, to this house?”

“This is where he saw them kiss. This is where he died.” She pointed at the graffiti on the wall. “This is where
he
lives.”

Another shadow slid across the wall. I turned to find Jude at the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “Didn’t the cop come to your place?”

“There was an old man, at least we thought there was an old man—”

“You can explain to me as we get in the car. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where’s your pickup?”

“Nelson Dalton dropped me off so I could pick up the Impala.”

“There’s Ezra.”

“We’ll drive over and get him.”

Jude pulled the mannequin and paintings of me out of the car and helped Jeremy into the back seat as I buckled my mother in place. “We can come back with the pickup and get the paintings,” I said.

Jude pointed at the hills above. “No time.” The boiling cloud of smoke that arched over the valley was flame-orange. He turned on the wipers as pieces of ash fell onto the windshield and
accumulated on the road like snow. The wind howled, whipping the timothy grass in the field and forcing the bank of Lombardy poplars into postures of submission. He swerved as one cracked and fell over the road. As we drove into the yard, the umbrella on the patio table on the lawn lifted and twirled, hovering over the table for a few moments before being ripped away.

Ezra was on the roof of the house, nailing sprinklers in place. A blast of wind came up as I ran over to the ladder, forcing him to hunker down and cling to the cedar shingles. “We’ve got to get out of here!” I called up to him.

“What were you attempting at Jude’s?”

“The old man led us there.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ve got to salvage him!”

I glanced at Mom as she made her way over to us. “No, there’s nothing we can do.”

“We can tell the cops.”

“I suppose we can do that. Someday.”

“I don’t grasp it.”

“He wasn’t what I thought. For Christ’s sake, Ezra, come down!”

“You and Mom and Jeremy go away with Jude.”

“No!”

A panicked sparrow shrieked as it swooped past Ezra’s head, nearly hitting him. Then there was another, and another, a flock of terrified birds—sparrows, finches, swallows, and jays, and all screaming as they flew low overhead. Some, confused by the smoke, slammed into the roof and the side of the house, rolling as they were pulled away on the wind.

“My God, the birds,” my mother said.

“They’re fleeing the fire,” said Jude. “We’ve got to leave, Katrine. Now.”

“I can’t leave Ezra here!”

“What are you going to do? Drag him down?”

“If I have to.”

“We’ve got to get Jeremy and your mother out of here!”

I looked up at Ezra. “Go,” he said.

Jude took my arm. “He’s got the truck. For God’s sake, Katrine, he’s not a child.”

Burning pine needles fell from the sky like lit matchsticks that flared up with each gusting wind. They hit my bare arms, curling the hairs, biting briefly like mosquitoes, leaving welts the size of dimes that I wouldn’t notice until later in the day.

“Ezra!” I cried. “Please come down!”

He did climb down, and turned on the tap on the outside of the house, releasing a rain of water from the sprinklers above. Then he led me a short distance away from Jude, so that, in the wind, his voice would be lost to him. “Let me do this for you, Kat,” he said. “Let me do this for us. I can show you. I can do
something.
”

“You want to be the hero.”

“No, I just want you to see that I’m capable. An adult. What Jude said just now, you see me as a child, not your husband. We can’t survive like that.”

His language was uncluttered by stumbling, the voice of my old Ezra and his eyes were free of the confusion and anger that so often yellowed them. I stood a moment, holding his hand, enjoying the relieving rain from the sprinkler. Then the shower stopped.

“The power’s cut to the pumphouse,” he said.

“The fire’s got the lines,” Jude shouted. “It’s close.”

A blast of heat hit us first as a huge cloud of smoke and fire roared down the valley toward us; its vibrations in my chest felt like those of a jet engine powering up. A propane tank exploded at the Petersons’ place, sounding like a bomb. “Look!” Jeremy said, pointing at the fireball. “Stars falling on us.”

Chunks of burning wood, some the size of a man’s fist, fell from the sky. Several landed in the alfalfa field that enclosed the old well, and within seconds the field was alight, as if it had spontaneously combusted. Driven by winds that came at us from all directions, the fire zigzagged first one way and then another. On Blood Road a truck pulled a trailer that was on fire. The driver stopped and got out to unhook the trailer, then drove several feet away before jumping out again to swat at the flames with his jacket. When that had no effect, he stepped back and watched his things go up in smoke. A firetruck with lights and siren blazing screamed past him.

“I’ve got to get water on the barns!” Ezra said, and he started toward the outbuildings, but my mother took his hand in both her own.

“Ezra,” she said. “There’s no power.” When he looked back at the barn, she put a hand to his cheek to get him to focus on her. “Sometimes,” she said, “the only thing you can do is accept things, as they are.” She patted his hand. “It’s time to go.”

I expected him to pull away, to dig in his heels and refuse to leave, as Jeremy would when he refused to go to bed, as Ezra himself had when he fought my counsel so many times before. But he walked hand in hand with my mother to the truck, steadying her when she stumbled, and then sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead as Jude put Jeremy in his car seat and I helped my mother fasten her seatbelt in the back of the pickup.

“Let’s stay together!” shouted Jude as he got in his car. “In case of problems.”

“Yes,” I said. He held my gaze a moment longer, as he had held it all those years ago at my wedding, and then he ducked into the car and was off. I turned on the air conditioning in the pickup and followed the Impala up the driveway, feeling the winds push at the vehicle as I drove. Someone up the valley had let loose his horses. They galloped ahead of us as we turned onto Blood Road. Jude and then I slowed our vehicles so we didn’t panic the horses further, and they ran along either side of us, their manes flowing. When I turned briefly to watch them as we passed, I caught sight of smoke billowing from the back of our pickup. “Oh, shit, Ezra. Our stuff is on fire.”

I pulled off to the side of the road near Jude’s driveway and we both jumped out. Stepping into that blast of hot wind was like sticking my face into Jude’s kiln. I struggled to find breath, and held onto the door of the truck to avoid being blown over. “We’re not going to get this fire out before we lose everything,” I yelled.

“No.”

“Mom, get out,” I said. As Ezra unfastened Jeremy from his car seat, I leaned into the cab and honked the horn to get Jude’s attention, and he slowed the Impala and turned around. Then I pulled what little I could from the burning truck: my grandmother’s carpetbag; the shoebox containing my father’s jackknife, cup, razor, wallet, and harmonica; the set of kitchen scales on which my grandmother had weighed her bread dough, an object we had almost forgotten on the top of the kitchen cupboard.

I held those scales close, as if they were a beloved pet I had saved, and we all stepped away from the truck, clinging to each other to keep our footing in the buffeting wind as burning
debris pelted down around us. The lawn around my parents’ home exploded into flame and bits of burning letters and photos from the boxes belonging to Ezra and me were carried up from the truck by the wild winds. Some swirled back down again, landing on the ground at my feet, and I scrambled to save whatever I could. An early love letter from Ezra, Jeremy’s drawing of a snowman, a photograph of Ezra just shortly before the stroke. As Jude pulled the car up beside us, I picked up a photo of our little family taken when Jeremy was three, and brushed the cinders off the edges before tucking it into my jeans pocket.

Jude pushed open the passenger-side door. “Get in!” he said.

I unloaded the few items I had salvaged onto the front seat, then buckled Jeremy and my mother, who held Harrison and the kitten, into the back. “I’ll sit in the back,” I said.

“No,” said Ezra. “Sit in the front.”

“Katrine, in the front, now!” said Jude.

I reached instinctively for the seatbelt, but there was none. As Jude sped off, overtaking the galloping horses once again, I felt I was floating, untethered, unsafe, thrilled. I felt cold, despite the intense heat, and as I clutched my grandmother’s scales to my chest, I shook as hard as I had in childbirth. Harrison yowled and clawed my mother as she tried to hold it. Trees on either side of us burned. Embers and pieces of flaming wood and pine cones pummelled us, bouncing off the hood of the car. Jude clicked on the headlights as the smoke of the firestorm blackened out the sun, and I turned in my seat to watch, with my mother and Ezra, as the farmhouse was engulfed by fire, as the truck burst into flames, as our past burned away.

JEREMY AND I PICKED UP
my mother at her apartment at Rotary Gardens and drove her out to Turtle Valley to say goodbye to the farm one last time. The remains of trees on the Ptarmigan Hills were charred sticks exposing the lay of the land underneath, but the rock of those mountains was still there, substantial, faithful; the mountains themselves hadn’t collapsed under the weight of the catastrophe, as I had somehow imagined they would. But they were smaller, less imposing, less secretive, without their trees. I wondered now why finding a lost soul within those hills had seemed so difficult.

Jude was in his kiln shed as we passed by, prepping his
garbage cans for a raku firing, presumably for the summer pottery show coming up next week in Sorrento. I waved but he didn’t see me, or more likely he pretended he didn’t see me. On the other side of the road his neighbours, Tammy and Nelson Dalton, were putting up siding on their new home. They’d been living in the house since spring. The fire was capricious in its hunger: it consumed the Daltons’ home, leaving nothing but the chimney, and yet their flag still flew. It took Valentine’s cabin and the unfinished house, but not Jude’s or his studio or kiln shed. It consumed my parents’ home, but not my grandmother’s greenhouse or the orchard only a few yards away.

The day after the firestorm, when Ezra, Val, Jeremy, and I drove Mom out to the farm, we found my parents’ house distilled to three inches of ash in the basement. I salvaged a frying pan that was half melted; the metal base from one of my mother’s lamps; the burned-out frame of my childhood bicycle, left leaning against Valentine’s granary all those years before Jude bought the place. In the fallout of the fire, these objects became, for me, beloved treasures, links to a lost past, and even when I left Ezra and moved to my rented house in Salmon Arm, when I threw so much away, I kept them.

As I salvaged the bike frame that day, Jude parked his Impala in the driveway and walked through the blackened field to meet me. “What you got there?” he asked.

I laughed, expecting him to make fun of me. “The bike was mine when I was a kid. I was wondering if I could have it.”

“Of course,” he said.

I nodded toward my parents’ farm, the burned fields, the foundation of their still smoking house. “This the first you’ve seen of it?”

“No, I came out this morning.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I can’t believe my house and studio are still standing.” Then he turned back to me. “I’m so sorry about your dad, Katrine, and about your folks’ house.”

“I’m sorry for everyone,” I said, as I looked at the smoke-filled valley around us. The firestorm had roared down into the valley bottom and up the opposite mountain range at speeds of ninety miles an hour or more, burning down a half-dozen homes and countless outbuildings.

“At least no one was killed,” said Jude.

“But a lot of livestock was lost. Alex Hamilton was talking on the radio about how he shot his emus so they wouldn’t suffer a terrible death. The fire moved on his house so fast he couldn’t get them out in time.”

“No one expected the fire to go up his side of the valley.” He put his hands in his jeans pockets and looked down at the charred earth. “So, what now? Are you heading back to Alberta?”

“No, for the meantime at least, I need to help Val look after Mom.”

“Does that mean you’ll move back here?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

He took my hand. “Why not stay with me for a while as you figure things out?”

I shook my head.

“Why?”

I glanced across the field at my mother, Val, Jeremy, and Ezra wandering around the yard. The smoke was dense, but they could see us. “You excite me,” I said. “You make me do things I wouldn’t have the courage to do otherwise. You always have.”

“And you want to give that up?”

“I don’t want to rush into anything,” I said. “Not this time.” I shook my head. “I just don’t know what I want, yet.”