Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  “Do you remember,” I said, “in the hospital, just after your stroke, when you couldn’t quite wake up?” I had to talk him up to the surface; he was like a spider trapped in a bathtub, the sides too shiny to climb. “One night you told me, I’m drowning in mushroom soup.” I laughed, a little, but Ezra didn’t laugh with me. We had both laughed at the time. It had to be funny then, otherwise it would have scared us both to death.

  Ezra nodded at my mother. “I don’t know how she can gather her slumber.” She startled in her sleep as Jeremy called out, her eyes fluttering, but she didn’t wake.

  “I imagine it’s the sleeping pills she’s taking. It worries me that they knock her out like that.”

  “Weird,” Ezra said, pointing at my mother and then at Jeremy. “It’s like they’re singing the same dream.”

  Indeed, just a moment before Jeremy’s cries rose back up to screams, my mother’s face tensed as if in pain and her arms and legs jerked repeatedly—as dogs do when they run in their dreams—as if she was trying to escape. “Go away!” Jeremy cried.

  Ezra rubbed his forehead. “The racket’s too hard,” he said. “I need to go back to bed.”

  “I understand. It’s okay.”

  I wished that he had chosen to stay despite my protests, that he had continued to hold me as we waited out this storm. But he touched my shoulder and left the room.

  From my corner next to Jeremy, I watched my mother for a few minutes, the fear in her brow, her half-open eyes moving in dream. I glanced into the shadows where she looked, almost expecting to see what frightened her so. Then her face relaxed and her eyes closed, and just like that, Jeremy’s screams ended as well. I carried him to the bed, covered him with a sheet, and smoothed his sweaty forehead until I was sure he was fast asleep. So like the barn cats, terrorized by a chasing coyote one minute, snoozing on the porch the next.

  I closed the bedroom door behind me and went into the kitchen to look out the window at the fire. As I watched, trees ignited and candled, flaring in the night, as the fire progressed along the ridge and down the slope. A U-Haul van and truck and trailer passed by the farm in the night, neighbours from up the valley rushing the contents of their homes out of the path of the fire. I ached for these uprooted souls as I ached for myself. Since our move to Cochrane, I had felt disoriented; it was the feeling of waking in a strange hotel and not knowing where I was. I had in fact awoken from sleep in our rented house thinking I was in my home in Chilliwack. I soon figured out where I was, but the odd feeling that accompanied this experience lingered. It was as if my soul hadn’t caught up with me yet, as if it had stalwartly refused to leave what had been home for more than a decade and, its leash now pulled taut, was forced to follow me in this venture. There were those stories of pets that had found their way home over great distances despite outrageous odds. I thought of my soul in this way, as a lost cat struggling through unfamiliar territory to find its owner, and I tried to help it along. I unpacked boxes in that tiny rented house, searching for those dear possessions that defined who I was: the originals of the cartoons I had drawn for the Salmon Arm Observer when I worked there as a junior reporter; the tiny yellow cap Jeremy had worn in the hospital the day he was born, before the nurse had bathed him; the little heart-shaped silver pin with a pink rhinestone at its centre that had belonged to my grandmother; the raku vase that held my pens on my writing desk, the only vestige of Jude that I kept in my house. I foraged through the litter of moving, hunting for the familiar, searching for my lost self.

  “Jeremy okay?” Val said from my parents’ room, and I joined her there.

  “Night terrors,” I said. “He’s back to sleep.”

  “I remember you having those on occasion when I came home for visits. Awful to watch.”

  I picked up a garbage bag as Val swept a pile of debris into the dustpan. “Those sleeping pills really knock Mom out,” I said. “She slept through all of Jeremy’s crying.”

  She nodded. “They worry me as well. I was thinking that we should set Mom up in the parlour for the duration. Make it easier on her, and you.” She yawned. “We should get some sleep ourselves. What is it, eleven o’clock?”

  “Twelve-thirty.”

  I stuffed yet another handful of mouldering paper into the bag. In order to make room for the hospital bed, Val and I had been sorting through the contents of this room for most of the day and into the night, ever since I had driven my mother, Ezra, and Jeremy home from town, and yet all around us bags of my mother’s writings were stacked higgledy-piggledy to waist level. Both Val and I stopped our sorting from time to time to scan the letters, but there was nothing scandalous in what I read. One letter described one of my father’s visits to the hospital, and my mother’s fears as she waited in the emergency room with him. Another letter, all seven pages of it, chronicled the birthing of a litter of kittens.

  “Ezra had a room like this in our house in Chilliwack,” I said. “After his stroke his office was a complete disaster; he just couldn’t keep it organized. But then as he got better, his office grew more ordered by degrees. It was like watching one of those films of a teacup being dropped on the floor and breaking, but in reverse, and in slow motion.” The bits of teacup pulling themselves together and the teacup returning itself, whole, to the table.

  “In Mom’s case the room is getting worse,” Val said. She reached to the floor and picked up a teddy bear dressed in a bright red hoodie with BEAR written across the front. “I found this under the bed. She stole it from the toy box I keep at home for Kerry and Samantha when Jennifer comes to visit. Can you imagine? A woman her age snitching her great-grandkids’ toys for herself.”

  I shook my head, but I could imagine it. I had taken over one of my son’s bears as my own, and had even brought it with me on this trip. It sat on the night table in my old bedroom now, and watched over me as I slept. I was shamed by this little totem of mine, this tiny pink bear, only two inches high, that I had found at the thrift shop a couple of months before, thinking I was buying it for Jeremy. It was an old thing, with movable arms joined to its body by wires. I felt the same need to care for it as I used to when I fussed over my dolls as a child, tucking it into the tissue box on my night table at bedtime. When I worried over this compulsion aloud to Ezra he said, “Maybe it’s hormones. Like that cow we had that lost its baby and tried to take over that other cow’s calf.”

  “I have a child to care for,” I said.

  “People bustle over their dogs. What’s the trouble in taking care of a teddy bear?”

  He was reassuring. Still, I worried about myself.

  “Did you see this?” Val said. She handed me a photograph, a picture of Val and myself, a formal portrait. She was already nearly a woman, and I was just a baby in her arms.

  I took it from her. “You were still living here, on this place, when this was taken, right?”

  “Our place over at Valentine’s had burned down that spring, so you and I and Mom and Dad were all crowded into that cabin by the barn.” She nodded toward the window in the direction of the cabin that had once housed my grandfather’s hired hands.

  “So you were living here when Grandpa went missing.”

  She took the photo back and put it in the box she had found it in. “I was here.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He went squirrelly and got himself lost.”

  “What do you mean he went squirrelly?”

  “He’d stand at the kitchen window shaking, scared shitless of something out there, though he’d never tell us what. If I dropped a cup, he jumped and screamed at me. He grabbed me by the shoulders once and shook me until Dad pulled him off. My big crime was banging the dishes together in the sink as I washed them. I got really wary, you know, careful, waiting for the next blowup. It got so waiting for one of his rages was worse than the outburst itself. You see it in Mom, right? You can’t walk up to her from behind without her startling.”

  “What was wrong with him? Was it shell s
hock?”

  “Hang on a minute and I’ll show you.” She opened a box and swept away some dust before sifting through a stack of writings, my mother’s flowery, elderly script on stationery rimmed with cats, seagulls, or roses. “I was vacuuming in here last fall and that cat freaked and knocked a stack of papers to the floor. As I was picking them up I found this.” She pulled out a large manila envelope. “Grandpa’s files from the psychiatric hospital at Essondale, and his military files. It looks like Grandma requested them at some point.”

  “He was in a mental institution?”

  “Many times.”

  I took the envelope into the kitchen and slid the contents onto the table beside Jeremy’s drawings from earlier that day. My grandfather’s files from Essondale Mental Hospital, his military files and medals, a razor, a pair of glasses in a case. A photograph of a man landed on top; he was pale, his cheeks were drawn, and his eyes were wide, staring, empty, as if they were not seeing what was in front of him. Like a man just roused from sleep but still engaged in a dream, or a nightmare. This was the face of a sleepwalker.

  “Spooky, isn’t it?” said Val. “His eyes seem, I don’t know, dead.”

  “I’ve never seen a picture of him.”

  “There weren’t many to begin with. Mom took them all down after Grandma passed away, including Grandma and Grandpa’s wedding photo. She threw them in the burn can and burned them.”

  “You know why?”

  Val didn’t answer. She picked up the medals, the glasses. “All these things were in the envelope when I first found it. I assume they were all his. The glasses certainly were. I remember him putting them on when he was about to go out hunting.” She picked up the ancient razor. “God, I remember him shaving with this, leaning over the kitchen sink, peering into a tiny mirror that he hung there for that purpose. I hated being in the house when he shaved. I was always afraid he’d nick himself and yell at me for it.”

  “Why would he blame you?”

  “That’s what he did. If I made a noise, distracted him. Noise of nearly any kind set him off.”

  I inspected the medals as she rifled through the pages in the military file. She handed me a photocopy. “You see this? Discharged by new disease supervening—n.y.d. shell shock. Shell shock was a new disease. They still didn’t know what the hell they were dealing with.”

  I read out loud. “Hesitation in speech. Marked tremor of hands. Trembles and shivers while talking to strangers. Speech is halting. Memory very poor for retention and impressibility for recent events.”

  “He was in several hospitals, over the course of a year,” said Val. “Here it says he is in Victoria, then Kamloops.”

  “Why would they send him all the way to British Columbia?” I asked. “He was British.”

  “He’d already been living in B.C. for some time before the war, so he joined the Canadian army. They were shipping him home.” She handed me another sheet. “Look at this. Cause of disability: shell concussion—buried. The guy’s buried alive and that’s all they have to say about it.”

  “He was buried alive?”

  “Evidently a shell hit close by, burying him within a foxhole, and then a second shell uncovered him but sprayed him with shrapnel. I remember Grandpa and Grandma talking about it when I was a kid. I imagine he was just one of thousands, hundreds of thousands, injured in that way.”

  “Or killed.”

  “He had some kind of plate in his head, to replace part of his skull that was destroyed during that second explosion.”

  I looked up at her. “He was brain-injured?”

  “Brain-injured. Shell-shocked. Whatever the case, he was nuts.” She picked up the razor and stared at it for a time, then stuffed it back in the envelope along with the medals and glasses, and closed the flap. “A kid should be sad when her grandfather dies,” she said. “When he disappeared on that mountain, I was just glad he was gone.”

  “He died on that mountain?”

  “His body was never found.”

  “Mom said he died of a heart attack.”

  “Like I said, she’s getting more and more forgetful.”

  “Dad didn’t correct her.”

  “Likely he didn’t hear.”

  “It was the story she always told me,” I said. “Why would she lie? Why didn’t you or Dad ever tell me about it?”

  She laid the envelope on the table. “Look, it wasn’t like we were hiding anything from you. It was pretty clear from the start that Mom didn’t want any of us talking about it. The story of Grandpa’s disappearance was spread all over the papers. And of course the neighbours all pulled out their stories about Grandpa, what a crazy bastard he was. I took a lot of crap for it at school. After it was all over I think Mom just wanted to shut it out of her mind. I know I did.”

  I picked up the photo of my grandfather and stared at it a moment.

  “I should get home, get some sleep,” said Val. “We’ve got a lot to pull together tomorrow before we bring Dad home.” She headed for the door, then turned to me. “Don’t go stirring this up for Mom and Dad, all right? God knows they’ve already got enough to worry about right now.”

  I watched from the window as Val got in her truck and started the engine. The truck’s lights shone two paths down the road through the smoky night.

  Across the way, fire flared up in Jude’s kiln shed as he removed glowing pots and vases from the kiln with tongs, and placed them into the metal garbage cans filled with newspaper; the pots themselves set the newspaper on fire before he jammed the lid on to starve the fire of oxygen. It was a process called reduction, and the result of this, and the raku firing itself, would be the glorious red, purple, blue, metallic, black, and crackled finishes of raku ware. But just one of those scraps of burning newspaper drifting from the garbage cans could set the dry grass of the surrounding field alight. I stood by the window and watched him for a time as he moved back and forth from the kiln to the cans in a practised dance, fire and smoke billowing around him. Then I spread John Weeks’s Essondale files across the kitchen table and, with Harrison sleeping on my feet and the face of my dead grandfather staring up at me, I read them.

  9.

  TO: Mrs. Maud Weeks

  Turtle Valley, B.C.

  May 4, 1945

  FROM: John Weeks

  Mental Hospital

  Essondale, B.C.

  My dear Girl

  This is Sunday & I am so lonely & continually thinking of home & you dearie. I ate the box of fudge you sent already. it reached me, the staff here didnt eat it as I thought they would & each piece made me think of you, how you test the fudge rolling it between your fingers in a bowl of water & how you feed it to me in the kitchen if Beth isnt there. how you let me lick that sweetness from your fingers. there! let the staff here read that & be scandalized!

  How is Beth keeping and yourself, donot work too hard, & if you wish it why not put on music for yourself it will cheer you anyway, but not for the neighbours, for you donot know just how rotten they are, say nothing to them ignore anything they may say & be careful of the new man. keep him out of the house.

  You shouldnot have let Valentine build that greenhouse I said I would get to it & I would have if these headaches hadnot set me low. you donot think I am capable of finishing things but I am if you give me the chance. now Valentine’s gone and built that greenhouse and I cannot do it for you he had no right. don’t invite him in for tea any more you might be innocent to his intentions, but I am not.

  Listen to me, my dearest: stay out of the bush & at very least carry the .22 with you when you bring in the cows, you don’t know the terrible things that will catch you out there unawares.

  Things are not too bad, its quiet here and I am left alone & I am able to write to you, last year I could not do that much for the Bromide the doctors filled me with took away what sight I have & made me like a drunken fool.

  Well, sweetheart I must draw this to a close, so bye bye my dear Girl, ever your lover
/>   “J. Weeks”

  Ward Notes

  REG. NO. xx, xxx

  NAME DATE OF ADMISSION

  J. Weeks March 17th, 1945

  1945

  March 17th This patient was admitted from Promise, B.C., March 17. He was given a bath and allowed up and about the ward. He seems apprehensive and nervous, continually shaking and trembling and starts violently at the least unusual sound. Complains of severe headache. Keeps his eyes closed and strokes head continually. He resists questioning, asking “to be left alone.” He is very irritable. Disoriented as to time and place. He seems to feel that he is still fighting in the Great War.

  March 18th This patient was today transferred to the Infirmary.

  March 28th Since admission, this patient is showing some improvement. He is very nervous and apprehensive and has apparently been this way for some considerable length of time. He believes that the neighbours are all against him and, as a result, was threatening to shoot a neighbour named Valentine and was accordingly admitted to this institution. Evidently this Valentine was trying to intervene when Weeks threatened his wife and daughter with a gun. His wife is understandably afraid of him. His delusions of persecution against his neighbours are firmly fixed. When asked if any of his neighbours had actually harmed him, his family or his property, he said, “If they did I’d kill the sons o’ bitches.”

  April 15th This man continues to show a slow improvement. He says that he likes the quietness of the ward and feels better. He claims that he was continually hounded by someone or something that followed him about the farm, threatening him harm, and that here he is “left alone.” When questioned further about the nature of this person or thing that was following him, the patient refused to answer.

  May 4th In a letter to his wife today, this patient shows marked persecutory ideas in regard to the people in their vicinity. He asks her not to associate with them as they are all rotten. He also warns her to stay out of the bush, that there is something out there that might harm her. His physical condition remains fairly good.