Turtle Valley (6 page)

“Apple Jacks?”

“His favourite cereal. He ran his business for years on those few words, with the help of his sons. They learned how to interpret. With just a change in intonation he could make
Fuck
and
Apple Jacks
mean just about anything.” When I laughed he said, “There are all kinds of ways to get your message across. You remember I told you about that trip I took through the Canary Islands?”

I nodded. Some hazy recollection.

“There are people there who have a language of whistles, so they can communicate across the valleys. Their whistles overlap like the songs from a bank of mud swallows.”

“That has got to be one of your tall tales,” I said. “A tribe of whistlers on the Canary Islands?”

“It’s true!” After our smiles faded he continued to hold my gaze.

“Kiss!” Jeremy called out from Andy’s room.

Jude grinned. “I guess he heard us.”

“Heard what?”

“Andy used to pick up on what I was thinking all the time when he was that age.”

I blushed and shook my head. “Jeremy wasn’t reading my mind.”

“Then he was reading mine.”

I sat back in my chair. “I hear you have a box for me.”

“It’s there, on the coffee table. Mostly cards and letters from our time together, I think. Don’t worry. I didn’t snoop. When I saw they were your things I closed the box.”

“I’m not sure I want to look. I’ll look at it later, when I’m alone.”

He clapped his hands together. “So, shall I show Jeremy my studio? Get him on the wheel? Kids love the muck.”

“No, we’ve got to go.”

“So soon?”

“Mom was making lunch.” I stood. “I’ll help Jeremy pick up the Lego.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

I retrieved the box from the coffee table. “Jeremy,” I called. “Time to go.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Now, honey.”

“Okay, okay!”

Jeremy came out carrying a turret made of Lego blocks. “That stays here,” I said, and he slumped back into Andy’s room with it.

Jude and I both looked out the window at Valentine’s unfinished house as we waited. One of my parents’ cows stood at the doorway of the old house, like a vacationer stepping out to admire the view.

“It was Gus’s uncle who started building that place, right?” Jude asked. “It must have been. He homesteaded the property, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Valentine began building it when he got engaged to Mary Peterson. Do you remember old Mrs. Samuels, Mary Samuels?”

He shook his head. When I was a child, I had visited Mrs. Samuels with my mother. She offered me ginger cookies, and brought out her autoharp for me to play with. The weight of the harp in my lap, the pick in my fingers, the thrill of strings thrummed.

“Evidently she broke the engagement with Valentine and married Charlie Samuels and that was that; my great-uncle stopped working on the house. I suppose he might have finished the thing if he’d found someone else to share it with. But he was one of those men, like my father, who never seemed to need much. He was happy in his occupations and his own company. Like you.”

Jude grinned.

“I found a newspaper clipping last night that says Valentine led a search for my grandfather when he went missing. Mom and Dad never talked about that with you, did they?”

“No. Never.”

“The clipping was in my grandmother’s wallet, wrapped around a picture of Uncle Valentine.”

“Ah-hah! There’s got to be a story behind that. You’re going to write about it, of course.”

“I don’t know.” I hadn’t written much in the way of fiction in the six years since Ezra’s stroke. There simply wasn’t the time or energy for it. Instead I jotted down ideas in the notebook I carried in my purse, whenever I had a spare moment.
When this notebook was full I would squirrel it away with the others in a shoebox in my closet, thinking that one day I would lower a bucket into this reservoir and from it another novel would emerge.

“Jeremy,” I called. “Come on. Time to go.”

“When are you heading back to Alberta? I’d like to see you again.”

“It depends on what happens with this fire.”

“Mind if I pop over to the farm for a cup of tea?”

“It would be uncomfortable,” I said, “with Ezra.”

He nodded. “Then bring Jeremy over here, to see the studio. I’ll show him how to throw a pot on the wheel.”

“I don’t know if I can get away.”

“Try.”

AS JEREMY AND I HEADED
back across the field, I saw Ezra walking the trail toward us, carrying what at first looked like two olive green dinner plates, one overturned to keep the other warm. “Now what the heck is your daddy doing?” I said, and laughed.

It was a painted turtle he carried, its head and legs tucked within its shell. The creature was mature, about a foot long, and painted, as its name suggested, with bright red on its belly shell. Ezra grinned at me as he squatted to put the turtle down on the ground to show Jeremy, and the turtle ventured out of its shell to reveal the brilliant yellow stripes on its head, neck, legs, and tail. I wanted to take Ezra’s hand, to let him know he was a dear man, but I didn’t, thinking of the bacteria the turtle undoubtedly harboured. “I suppose we shouldn’t let Jeremy touch it,” I said.

“It’s just a turtle. He can purify his hands.”

“Please, Mom?”

I squatted down in front of Jeremy. “They carry salmonella. That’s a nasty bug. It could make you very sick.”

Ezra stared down at me a moment, the muscles in his jaw tensing, then turned to Jeremy. “I’ll find it a good home,” he said and started to walk away with it.

“Mom will have lunch ready,” I said, raising my voice into the wind as I stood.

“I’m going to close that tree first.”

“Can’t you finish it later? Your lunch will get cold.”

“Fuck!” he said, turning. “Can’t you just get off my back?”

“Fuck!” said Jeremy. He laughed. “Fuckity-fuck! Fuck-a-duck!”

I shot a look at Ezra, warning him to watch his language around our son, and took Jeremy’s hand. “All right, that’s enough. Let’s go back inside.”

“Can I draw some pictures?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll draw you a duck, Mommy.”

From inside the house I watched Ezra prune branches from the tree, feeling my frustration and anger dissolve like a lozenge on my tongue. He was beautiful. His long torso and legs, his shoulders moving under the fabric of his black T-shirt as he tended that dying plum. From this distance I could almost believe that nothing about him had changed.

DAD SAT FORWARD IN HIS CHAIR
at the kitchen table to look out the window at Ezra with me. His cards were spread out in front of him in a game of solitaire; they were the same pack of cards he’d used for nearly fifty years. Jeremy sat beside him, drawing with crayons. “Now what the heck is Ezra doing?” Dad said.

“Pruning that dying plum.”

“Is he planning on butchering that calf today or not?”

I held out my hands and shrugged. What could I do?

“There isn’t time for screwing around. They were just saying on the radio how the wind we got today spread the fire from just under a couple of hundred acres to more than seven hundred.”
He nodded at the windsock blowing over the barn. “What if the wind turned like it does this time of year and pushed the fire down that slope? The fire could be on us in minutes.”

“I told him.”

Dad collected his cards to shuffle them before laying them out for a new game. “You’re going to have to take the lead with him,” he said.

“He would disagree. He thinks I try to control him too much.”

“Doesn’t matter what he thinks. You won’t get nothing done around that farm of yours letting him run things like you do.”

I glanced at Jeremy, then back at my father, to caution him not to say anything more about Ezra in front of our son. “He’s a good man, Dad.”

He shook his head. “I just hate seeing you dealing with him all the time. It’s wearing you down.”

“Where’s Mom?” I asked, to change the subject.

“Out getting some eggs. She got lost in her writing and burned the hamburgers, so she’s going to make us fried eggs instead.”

“She’s getting worse, isn’t she?”

“It’s those damn sleeping pills she’s been taking. Makes her groggy and forgetful. Anyway, your mother’s always been a little squirrelly.”

“Not this squirrelly.”

“You don’t think so, eh?” He reached for his wallet, which sat on the table, and pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping. “You take a look at that.”

“What’s this?”

“Our shivaree. Your mother wrote that and sent it into the paper, like she did all the community news for the valley.”

“What’s a shivaree?” said Jeremy.

“A kind of party,” I said.

“Can I see?” he asked.

“I’ll read it to you.”

NEWLYWEDS FETED

“I remember Mom telling me about this.”

“Well, she may have told you that version, but I bet she didn’t tell you what really happened. We were living in the hired hand’s cabin on Valentine’s place at the time. Burned down the year you were born. I kept promising her I’d get around to finishing that house of Valentine’s for her. But I never did.” He pointed at the newspaper clipping. “We were just back from Vancouver that day, and came home to a yard full of cars. All those folks thought we were already back and had planned to bang on pans outside, to make a ruckus so we’d come out. But then we weren’t home so they just went on inside to wait. They were dancing when we got there.”

“Dancing?”

“There was always dancing. Sometimes we’d scratch up a platform and dance under the stars if the weather was good. I never went to anyone’s house without my harmonica in my pocket. You had to make your own entertainment then. Wasn’t like there was television. That night Dennis found my mouth organ, Rodney Nicoll found my fiddle, and my Uncle Valentine played his banjo. That cabin of ours had nothing but a rough lumber floor, uneven, full of cracks, so when we danced, dust billowed up from the ground underneath.” He paused to catch his breath. “Beth was no housekeeper even then and the place was a muddle from us moving her things in. No place to boil coffee for that many people, so they’d just gone ahead and cleaned out a crock of pickled cabbage and boiled coffee in that. Tasted like the devil. Somebody brought matrimonial cake and ham sandwiches, but it wasn’t enough to feed that troop, so I cooked up a mess of bannock on a fire outside. Served it up with Valentine’s lingonberry jam.”

My father’s bannock was nothing but lard, flour, salt, and baking powder patted into big rounds and cooked on sticks over a campfire. I’d tried to duplicate the stuff in my kitchen, but it was a disappointing bread when made in the oven. Taken with coffee over an open campfire, though, it was something else altogether: an event, a communion that inspired storytelling.

“All the while I’m making bannock and entertaining those folks, your mother was hiding in the outhouse. I told them she wasn’t feeling well and Dennis joked that she was already pregnant and it was a shotgun wedding, which got a pile of laughs as everyone knew John Weeks, the times he threatened God knows how many neighbours with a gun. But the truth was,
Beth couldn’t face all those people. She thought they’d judge her for the jumble in the house, like any of them dancing fools cared. When it came down to it, it wasn’t the mess that bothered her. She was just scared.”

“Of what?”

“Doubt she knew herself. But it kept her from enjoying herself.”

I handed my father the clipping. “Sounds like she came out of that outhouse eventually.”

“Not until everybody left.”

“But it says everyone circled around and sang.”

“They circled around the outhouse singing while I tapped on the door and tried to convince her to come out. Never did get her to open that damn door. Eventually everyone left and I went to bed, and when I woke up I found her on her knees in the kitchen cleaning those dusty floorboards, as if all that scrubbing was ever going to get them clean.”

The screen door opened and my mother set her egg basket on the kitchen counter. She heated up a pan as she washed her hands. “What did Ezra find out there?” she asked. “I saw him carrying something.”

“A turtle.”

“Wonderful! When I was a girl, the turtles crossed that road to lay their eggs in such numbers you couldn’t drive without running over them. Mona Moses told me that this was how Blood Road got its name: it was stained with the blood of turtles. My father wouldn’t drive over them. He’d stop the buggy and have us lift the turtles out of the way. He could be terribly kind, at times.” She dried her hands on a dishtowel. “Now there are so few turtles.”

Jeremy handed me a sheet of paper scrawled with crayon. “I drew you a picture, Mommy!”