June 15th This patient was again brought to the attention of the Clinic today. DIAGNOSIS: TRAUMATIC PSYCHOSIS. For verbatim, see separate sheets.
Ward Notes
REG. NO XX, XXX
NAME DATE OF ADMISSION
J. Weeks March 17th, 1945
Verbatim taken by Dr. Spears
1945
June 15th
Q. Where were you born?
A. In England. Nottingham, Nottinghamshire.
Q. Is your father dead or alive?
A. I never knew him.
Q. And your mother?
A. She died giving birth to me. My grandmother raised me.
Q. Any siblings?
A. No.
Q. What is your wife’s name?
A. Maudie. Maud.
Q. How many children have you?
A. Two. Beth and Dan. Dan joined up last year.
Q. Is Beth still in school?
A. No. She’s seventeen. She works with me on the farm.
Q. How long did you go to school?
A. I was taken home to work when I was twelve. I was milking morning and night. Then my grandfather died when I was fourteen and the farm was sold to pay debts so I went to Eastwood Collieries and served my time there.
Q. What for?
A. No, no, not jail! I was in the mines, driving the ponies down into the pits. Into the bloody dark. You had to force the ponies down, you see, anyway you could. Kick them, poke them, whip them down. But I had one named Charlie that would only go down for me, and not for the other drivers. I kept sugar cubes in my pocket for him. But then a runaway dram got him. The both of us heard it rumbling at us but there was only time enough for me to press myself up against the rock before it rammed past me; I couldn’t get Charlie out of the way. The dram flung away the oil lamp I was holding and thundered right into Charlie. I could hear him groaning in the dark until they found us. After that I came to Canada.
Q. Where did you go to first?
A. I went to a place called Toronto. But I couldn’t find work that paid so I came west to work in the mines. Then I got it in my head to go back home to find a wife, so I joined up here and they sent me over.
Q. You were injured in the war?
A. A shell hit close by, and buried me. There was dirt in my mouth, in my nose. I thought I was dead. But then a second shell exploded and tossed me out of that hole and shot me through with shrapnel. There were a lot of men buried that way.
Q. You say shrapnel hit you?
A. Tore open my head. They put a metal plate in. Here, you can see the scar.
Q. And you convalesced in England?
A. At first, yes. That was how I met my wife. She was an ambulance driver, you see. Drove me from one hospital to another.
Q. I gather that was the end of the war for you.
A. They sent me back here to convalesce. My wife joined me some time later, after the war ended. She’s had to look after me ever since. We got this farm at Turtle Valley—
Q. Turtle Valley?
A. It’s a valley between Salmon Arm and the village of Promise, where I would be out of the way, where I wouldn’t cause trouble. It’s been hard for her, you know, to care for me all these years. I wish to God I’d been blown to bits in the war and been done with it.
Q. You don’t mean that.
A. Yes, I do! What use am I to anyone? What use am I to Maud? I can’t even build her that damn greenhouse, much less a decent house. If I could just get that house done for her.
Q. You’re building her a house?
A. I had the plans drawn up, you see. But we need a good well. I keep digging on the place. If I could just find a good well, then I could start building the house for Maudie. For Maudie and me. And Beth, and Dan if he comes home. He’d come home, I think, if we had a decent house. Something I could leave him. That Maud could be proud of. She’d see I was worthwhile then.
Q. You don’t think she sees that now?
A. The whole problem is that the people who live near me are such ignoramuses. They do things to make me look bad in front of my wife, to make me look incapable.
Q. How so?
A. Like Valentine. He knows Maudie wants a greenhouse. So he takes advantage of this situation, me being in here, to build it for her. I was going to build it for Maudie. I was getting to it. I just have all these headaches, and then I have to spend the day in bed. But I can do it. I would have done it. Now he’s gone and built the thing and made me look bad in front of Maudie, made it look like I can’t ever finish things.
Q. I understand you’ve been quite frightened; that you felt someone was following you. This neighbour perhaps?
A. No, not him.
Q. Then who?
A. I don’t know. It’s something, in the bush, always watching me, following me, coming after me. Never letting me get a moment’s peace. I just can’t stand it. I get so I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want Maudie going outside either, but she does. The cows have to be brought down, you see, for milking. I don’t want her going into the bush.
Q. So, was that what frightened you this time?
A. Well, there was that thing in the bush.
Q. The thing you just mentioned? Following you?
A. No, no. It was one of them Japanese balloons. A spy balloon, come to watch me.
Q. To watch you?
A. And it crashed, I guess, before it could report back with whatever it found out about me. Then some men came and blew it up, to hide the evidence.
Q. Men came to blow the balloon up. That was spying on you.
A. Yes! It made a terrible noise. I don’t remember much after that.
Q. Your daughter and your wife are frightened of you … Mr. Weeks? I said your wife is frightened of you.
A. I heard you.
Q. That comes as a surprise?
A. Why would Maud be scared of me?
Q. I understand you threatened her and your daughter with a gun.
A. No!
Q. The police report says they were frightened of you and tried to leave and that you threatened them with a gun.
A. I wouldn’t hurt Maudie! She knows I wouldn’t hurt her! Why would she be scared of me?
Q. Evidently you also threatened your neighbour.
A. Valentine came at me and I thought he was going to shoot me and I just lost control of myself.
Q. What did you do?
A. I don’t know. That’s what I would like to find out.
10.
I READ MY GRANDFATHER’S LETTER to my grandmother again: … 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. It seemed so unlikely that my grandmother would do this; these weren’t the actions of the reserved woman my mother had painted in her stories.
I tucked my grandfather’s files back in the envelope, then retrieved the carpetbag from the box and turned it upside down so the contents spilled to the table. The little pot of rouge. The wallet. The photo of Valentine. The newspaper clipping. A tube of lipstick. A makeup compact. A comb. Her glasses case. A handkerchief with her initials, M.W. Her coin purse and a handful of coins. A water-warped copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, landed on top of it all. When I leafed through it, the book fell open to a yellowed envelope tucked into the chapter On Marriage, to a page where a section was underlined: You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Inside the envelope was a tattered Christmas advent card from my grandmother’s sister, dated April 6, 1932:
Dearest Maud,
Here is a teddy bear to replace the one John dispensed with. I can’t imagine a father doing such a thing! Perhaps, at the very least, the lost little fellow will watch over your treasures. Tell me, if you can sometime dear sister, just why it is that you stay? I mean no disrespect. My concern is genuine. I worry for your well-being, and that of your sweet daughter and son. We all
have our reasons for the things we do. I simply wish to understand. In any case I hope this finds you well, and I do hope little Elizabeth Ann makes grand friends with this new teddy.
Your loving sister, Sara
I closed my great-aunt’s card. On the front Santa, dressed in green and not red, stood beside a Christmas tree lit with candles. Tiny numbered flaps covered the whole of the card; each lifted to reveal a picture—of a reindeer, a soldier, a horn, a spinning top—one for each day of December leading up to Christmas. Why would Sara suggest that my grandmother leave her husband? My grandfather’s illness would have been a difficult load for her to bear, but I wouldn’t have expected a woman of that time to leave a sick husband. In any case, with two young children to care for, where would she go? What would she do? Yet here was this card from her sister, a woman of her own time, who had assumed differently, that she had a choice. I opened the makeup compact and looked in its mirror. Had she contemplated leaving?
Sweet, I wanted something sweet. I went through my mother’s pantry. A yellow tin of Colman’s Prepared Mustard. Heinz sandwich spread. Marmite. Bird’s custard. I shifted the cans around and found a bag of brown sugar. That was what I wanted, penuche, brown-sugar fudge. Searching for the recipe that I knew it contained, I tugged my grandmother’s scrapbook from the top of the fridge and found the page with the tortoiseshell butterfly pressed between its pages, its wings tattered and torn away. The penuche recipe called for:
2 cups brown sugar
½ cup heavy cream
1½ teaspoons vanilla
4 tablespoons butter
1½ cups walnuts or pecans
I buttered the sides of a saucepan near the top, to stop the penuche from sticking as it boiled, and put the sugar and cream into it, stirring with a wooden spoon until the sugar dissolved. Fudge-making was always a finicky process. I never bothered to make it during rainy weather as it would simply soak up the moisture and wouldn’t set properly. But even in hot, dry weather like this, I couldn’t predict how the candy would turn out until it was done, and often found making it frustrating. And yet, perversely, I was compelled to make the stuff, and to eat it. Eating was now an instinctive act. I ate quickly, mindlessly, and when I was done, I looked down at my plate and thought, When did I eat this? I wasn’t present in the act of eating, even when I ate the things I loved, though my body was there, reaching out to plate and fork, to the sweets I made myself, to cooked chicken and buttered bread, to salad greens fresh from our garden, to skinned peaches bathed in their own juices.
In my late teens, walking beside the boy I loved then, I found myself stooping for soil and licking the dirt from my fingers, just as I had seen deer licking the soil on roadsides, for the salt. On the farm our cows ate dirt looking for the minerals they lacked. Lyle asked, “What are you doing?”
I said, “I don’t know,” and from then on hid this strange craving from him and everyone else. When I finally took my compulsion to the doctor I found I was anemic; I ate the red dirt of Blood Road because my blood was thin. It was horrific to find my body so driven, to find that my mind was not at the helm, to discover that an animal instinct for nourishment took precedence over will. To see my own hand reaching out, not in my control, possessed as if by another entity, even if that entity was saner than me, wiser in its fleshly understanding of my needs. Now I craved penuche, brown-sugar fudge. Just as it was when I hungered for dirt to find iron, my body was on a search. What I lacked now I could only guess at.
Across the field a light blinked, and I turned off the kitchen light so I could better see. In his kiln shed, Jude flicked his fluorescent lights on and off. His figure was silhouetted in the open garage door, waving me over.
I switched the light back on, aware, now, that he was watching me move about the kitchen, and turned up the heat to bring the penuche to a boil. Then I waited by the stove, staring out the window at the kiln shed lighting up the night, resisting the urge to test the fudge too soon. I had ruined candy in the past by taking it from the pot too early. I had to guard against this tendency within myself to rush things, both small and large. I had rushed into Ezra, despite both Val’s and my father’s objections that we were moving too fast. I had moved in with him less than a month after I met him, and we married only five months after my affair with Jude had ended, long before my feelings for Jude had dissipated. And before Ezra I had rushed into Jude, disregarding the fact that he was another woman’s husband. I hardly knew him that evening I saw him walking a few yards past his own gate on his way to the dance, carrying his wife’s ornately carved, thickly upholstered chair over his shoulders, his body thrust forward with the weight of it. The chair was the only one Lillian could comfortably sit in, and I often saw Jude carrying it past my parents’ farm on his way to functions at the Memorial Hall; he and Lillian drove the Impala and the chair wouldn’t fit inside. He was just a neighbour then, another city artisan who’d bought himself a bit of cheap acreage in Turtle Valley, and a riddle for my young mind: a handsome man so bound to a heavy and handicapped woman that he would carry her chair nearly a mile down the road.
I stopped the Chevy and leaned across the cab to open the door after he’d hoisted the chair into the truck bed. “Should we go back for Lillian?” I asked.
“No, she’s already there. She took the Impala.”
I drove off. “Your seatbelt’s to the side,” I said.
“I don’t wear them.”
I raised my brows to him but he wouldn’t allow me to catch his eye; he stared out the windshield. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock and it was still light, though the sun had set behind the steep valley walls long before. The poplars by the road rattled as the wild valley winds blew a thunderhead toward us. Peterson’s horses, excited by the coming storm, raced along the fenceline, nearly keeping pace with the truck.
“Kat is short for Katherine, I take it.”
“No, Katrine. I don’t like being called Kat.”
“But your mom—”
“Everyone calls me Kat. I just don’t like it.” My mother had called me Katrine, I’m sure, so she could give me the pet name Kat. I hated it, but disliked the alternative—Katie—even more. And in any case it was useless to try to make my family call me anything but my childhood name. Jude was the only one who ever called me by my name. In return I never called him Jujube, as members of his family did.
“Katrine.” I looked over at Jude, expecting him to ask me something, before I realized he was rolling my name over his tongue. “Pretty,” he said. He nudged my camera bag with the toe of his work boot. “Planning on taking pictures at the dance?”
“I keep my camera in the truck in case I come across something, even on my days off. We’re always looking for photos to fill the paper on a slow week.”
“Cute kids, pretty horses, that sort of thing?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I looked back in the rearview mirror at Peterson’s horses. I had in fact considered stopping to take a photo of them.
“What the hell?” Jude said, and pointed.
A moose and its calf launched through the bushes beside us, leapt onto the gravel road, and galloped in their ungainly way in front of us, nearly matching, then exceeding the speed of the truck. “Grab my camera,” I said. He pulled it from the bag and I took it from him. “Here, take the wheel.”
“What?” he said.
“Take the wheel!”
I accelerated to catch up to the animals and snapped a couple of photos through the windshield before unwinding the side window. “Put your foot on the gas for me, will you?” I said. “This is great!”
He pressed his foot on the gas against mine and leaned into me in order to drive as I hung out the window to get my shots. “Look at them go!” I let out a whoop.
“There’s a truck coming,” Jude said.
“Huh?”
“Truck coming! Behind us!”
I took the wheel and handed him the camera, and he slid back across the seat as the truck passed us. The moose charge
d through an open gate and fled across a field, disappearing into a patch of bush.
Jude shook his head. “You’re one crazy mama, aren’t you?”
“Why?”
He laughed.
I turned into the Memorial Hall driveway and parked next to my father’s Ford, but when I unfastened my seatbelt, Jude didn’t immediately get out of the truck. He put his arm over the back of the seat, filling the air with the smell of Ivory soap and cumin. “I didn’t mean to offend you earlier,” he said. “You do some good work for the paper.”
“I’d take more care with the photos if I had the time, but when you’re a reporter on a small paper like the Observer, you’ve got to do everything. Tomorrow morning I cover a baseball tournament. Tuesday I sit in court. Wednesday afternoon I’ve got to take photos up at the pool. I’d like to see you get a good shot of seniors’ aquatic square dancing.”
Jude laughed and I watched his mouth as his smile faded. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’d better get this chair inside and head back home before it gets dark.”
“You’re not staying?”
“Lillian can’t dance, and I don’t like sitting around, shouting over the music. That’s her thing.”
“I won’t be staying long either, but I promised my father a polka or two. Mom never goes to these dances.”
“Maybe I’ll have a beer then, and drive back with you. Unless I’m taking you away … unless you’re meeting someone.”
“No, no.”
Tables filled with people lined each side of the old hall. The place smelled of cedar and cigarette smoke and its hardwood floorboards were deeply scarred by decades of dancing. After repairing damage from countless acts of vandalism, the hall committee, of which my dad was a member, had elected to remove the glass and board up the windows permanently. There was a small stage at one end where a band played: a drummer, a guitarist, and a singer on a keyboard. They were all young men about my age, but I didn’t recognize any of them. On this stage many years before, my father had played the fiddle and harmonica and my Uncle Valentine had played the banjo. I had read all about it in the Turtle Valley community notes my mother had written for the Promise paper and collected as clippings in her scrapbooks. My father had rarely played the fiddle after I was born—arthritis was already knotting the bones of his hands by then—but he played his harmonica for my mother most nights to help her sleep, and so until I left home I very often fell asleep to his harmonica serenades of “Down in the Valley” or “Good Night Irene.”
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