Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Mom sat within her rocker, fussing with the collar on her blouse as if arranging it for a photograph. Jeremy played with the kitten at her feet.

  “Mom?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  Val stood a moment fiddling with her keys, then walked up to Mom and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll pick something up for supper,” she said.

  13.

  I STOOD AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW with my back to my mother as I watched Val drive off in her truck. Ezra walked toward the house, dragging a green garden hose behind him. He set up a sprinkler near the house and turned it on, to saturate the cedar-shake siding and shrubs around the house as Jude had, I presumed, so embers drifting down from the hills wouldn’t take root.

  “What you told Val,” said Mom, “how I walked off on you, it wasn’t like that. I never would have left you.”

  When I turned to her, she kept her gaze on Jeremy who played with the kitten at her feet. I handed the cat to my mother, and took my son’s hand to lead him to the door. “You go help Daddy set up that sprinkler, okay?”

  “Sprinkler!” he shouted, and bounded down the steps.

  I watched from the window to see that Ezra had taken him in hand before replying to my mother. “I know, now, that you wouldn’t have left me,” I said. “But I didn’t know that then.”

  She stroked the kitten within her lap for a moment. “You didn’t like that I wrote.”

  “I didn’t like that you disappeared into it. That I couldn’t reach you. But I have the same desire to write everything down, so I’ll remember it.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not it at all. When I write my mind is here, in the present. I don’t remember the past. I can forget, then. And there’s so much that I want to forget.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  A bantam hen fluttered up to reclaim its fragrant nest among the sweet alyssum growing in the window box, and my mother carried the kitten to the window to watch the chicken with me. “You remember that rooster we had when you were in your teens,” she said, “the one that stabbed its claws into my thighs every time I tried to feed the chickens? Nasty creature. It got so I dreaded going into the henhouse to get the eggs, and you know how much I love collecting eggs.”

  Yes, I knew. The warmth of a chicken’s body beneath her feathery skirt, the smooth weight of a warm egg. The deep satisfaction of a basket of eggs, a treasure sought and found.

  “Every day it was a battle with that rooster. I had to carry a bucket ahead of me, like a shield, so he wouldn’t gouge my thighs. When he lunged after me, I tossed the bucket over his head.”

  I nodded. I had also carried buckets into the chicken coop to protect myself from roosters, from one in particular, a bird I had named Christmas for his glorious red and green feathers. After he set his talons into my legs I learned to capture him with an upturned bucket. Strange how he sat there under that pail, never trying to move. When I finished setting out the grain and collecting the eggs, and took the bucket away, Christmas just went on sitting there, eyes fixed on a distant horizon. I had to throw a rock at him to get him to move. He had a short life. Tiring of the daily battle with him, I butchered him for soup stock and found his testicles were as large as a man’s. So much luck in such a small body.

  “Dealing with my father was like dealing with that bloody awful rooster. I never knew when he might attack. I was so frightened of him, but that’s no excuse. I should have protected myself, and Val, much sooner than I did.”

  She put a hand to the window and the chicken pecked at her fingers through the warped glass. “I did my best to make sure Val was never alone with him, and I asked Valentine to watch her if I had to go into town and couldn’t be there when she got home from school. I didn’t tell Gus why until years later, though both he and Valentine guessed, I think. But I didn’t know that my father had gone after Val, not until Valentine told me he had caught my father forcing Val to watch as he drowned those kittens.”

  My mother held the kitten close and I reached out to pet its head. “So Val was right?” I asked. “He did hurt you, in that way?”

  “One of my earliest memories is finding my teddy bear on my bed with its head cut off just after I had run away from him. I hid the bear under my bed, but my mother found it. She never asked me what happened; she just sewed the head back on.”

  “Oh, Mom.” I felt the jag of a long forgotten childhood pain pierce my belly. When I was very young I found my beloved plastic elephant on my bed, similarly destroyed. My mother had yanked the wheels, ears, and three of the legs from it, as punishment for some misdemeanour. I didn’t remember what I had done to enrage her so, but the elephant still existed; it was packed away in a box of toys in my old room.

  “He was a terribly wounded man,” Mom said. “Brain-injured. Shell-shocked.

  When I visited him during his stays at Shaughnessey—the big veterans’ hospital in Vancouver—I saw men who’d been in hospital since the Great War. Some had only their eyes and forehead left; their lower faces had been blown away. I remember thinking my father was like these men, with bits of himself missing, though you couldn’t see the damage from the outside, not until he started raging, or until the fear took hold of him.

  My mother kept a light on in their room at night; if it was dark, even the scurry of a mouse would wake him. He very often woke screaming. Night terrors, my mother told me, memories of the war replaying in his mind. She would never come up behind him without clearing her throat, a little cough, an ahem, quite proper, mind you, but loud enough to let him know she was there. If she hadn’t, he would have startled and turned on her. Any loud noise would set him off, like a neighbour blasting stumps. He went wild that day they blew up the Japanese balloon.”

  “That was real? The doctor who interviewed him in the Essondale files seemed to think it was a delusion.”

  “You read them?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, it was real, all right. Your father was the one who found it, early in March 1945. He and Valentine and your grandfather were out logging with the horses when Gus saw a big white blob in the trees up on the hill. Valentine and John hiked up with Gus to investigate. It turned out to be a mat of papery stuff draped over tree branches. The balloon itself, inflated, would have been twenty-five, maybe thirty feet across. Wires all around the bottom, like what you’d see in a truck motor. There’d been rumours about balloons that had been found or had exploded, so we had a pretty good idea what it was. One came down near Squilax that same year. It still had the bomb attached and I guess it blew quite a hole. The Japanese had sent thousands of those balloons loaded with bombs, trying to start fires all over North America. They had to send them in winter, to take advantage of winds that would carry them all the way from Japan. The thing is, that time of year, the balloons landed in snow, and if the bomb did go off, any fire that started just fizzled out. And because the military managed to keep things pretty quiet, and next to nothing was ever reported in the papers, the Japanese figured the plan had failed, and didn’t try again.”

  “So did Dad blow it up then?”

  “No, no. They all hiked back down to the road, then Valentine and your father drove into town and told the RCMP officer we had around here at the time, DeWitt, and he phoned the army base at Vernon. Then we went back home for lunch. That afternoon three army fellows turned up at the place and Valentine, Gus, my father, and I all led them back up the mountain. One of the men was heavy, must have been an office man. He got across the creek and only about a quarter way up before he played out and just sat. The other two yanked the balloon out of the tree and took it apart. They kept the metal ring from the bottom, with all the wires. One of the fellows called it a chandelier, I imagine because it had dangled down from the balloon when it was up in the air. Then they stacked the rest of it into a pile and set it off. Good Lord, it made a racket. The blast shook buildings miles away. My father fell to the ground holding his head, crying.”

  My mother looked
up at me. The ghostly white rims in her eyes. “Oh, Kat, it was so terrible to watch. My father thought he was back in the war, in the thick of fighting all over again; he couldn’t walk, he was shaking so hard. But those wretched army fellows just laughed at him. Valentine and your father and I had to drag him down off that mountain, kicking and screaming, without their help. When we finally got him back to the house, my mother made a pot of penuche for him, as she often did when he was upset, and that settled him down a bit, as it almost always did. That man loved his sweets. Once he was quiet, Valentine walked across the field back home and Gus went back to my father’s hired hand’s cabin, where he was living at the time, to get some sleep.”

  She looked up at the mountain. “But then later in the evening I came up behind my father to fill his cup, surprising him, I guess, and he whacked the teapot out of my hand. Scalding tea went down my dress and all over the floor. His face was so pale and his eyes bugged out, in terror. He was shaking so hard. Then he grabbed the 3030 from the gun rack over the door and aimed it at me. I’m sure that at that moment he had no idea who I was.

  “Mom stepped in between me and the gun and told me, ‘Keep quiet, walk very slowly into your room, and gather your things.’ While I did as she told me, I could hear her talking to him, very quietly, soothing him like she always did. By the time I came out with my carpetbag, she had hers packed as well. My father was lying on his bed. She said, ‘Let’s go,’ and she led me down the road. But we didn’t get to the gate before my father came out, levelled that gun at us, and shouted at us to stop.”

  She turned to me. “That was what awaited my mother if she ever thought to leave. That gun. When my mother didn’t immediately stop, my father fired over her head. Gus came running out in his long johns to see what was going on, and then Valentine ran across the field from his cabin. He knew what my father was capable of. So he saw my father turn that gun on Gus. Oh! I can remember that night so clearly. If you’re going to shoot someone, then shoot me, Valentine told him. So my father turned the gun on Valentine next, and I could see him thinking about shooting him, you know. Valentine just kept on walking toward him with his hands out. That’s when my mother slipped off behind the house and ran over to Petersons’ to get help. I was just frozen, I was so terrified. I couldn’t think what to do other than watch. Gus started walking toward my father too, with his hands out, just like Valentine, and my father swung that gun back on Gus, then on Valentine, back on Gus. All the time my father was backing away, toward the house, and they were getting closer and closer.”

  She brushed her face against the cat’s fur. “It was stupid of them, cornering him like that. My father bumped into the porch and fired at Valentine but missed. Gus charged forward, slammed my father to the ground, and kicked the gun away. While Gus held Dad, Valentine picked up the rifle and kept it trained on him until the police came barrelling down the driveway with the siren blaring and the lights flashing. Then they bundled my father away for another one of his visits to Essondale. He was gone a year. By the time he got back, your father and I were married and Val was born and there was nothing he could do about any of it.”

  I watched Ezra a moment as he set up another sprinkler near the house and turned on the water at the tap by the steps. Jeremy tripping along behind him. “I just don’t understand why your mother married your father in the first place. He was already injured when they met, right?”

  She nodded. “Part of his skull had been blown away by the shells that first buried him and then unburied him. My mother told me bits of shrapnel from those explosions were still lodged in his brain. I thought of them as living things, eating away at him, like maggots.”

  “So why would she put herself in that position, having to care for this man her whole life, knowing how hard it would be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know how much they knew then. They didn’t know much about brain injuries and they certainly didn’t understand shell-shock. They were still tying men to posts in firing range of the enemy for it so they’d be shot; they treated them like deserters, traitors. But the situation was familiar for her, I think. Her own father and mother had been sick throughout much of her adolescence and Mom had nursed them both until their deaths. She’d been taking care of someone for so long that she didn’t know anything else. So my father’s illness gave her a kind of life’s work. Even so, I’m sure there were a great many times when she wished she had never married him.”

  I looked up at the clouds of smoke sweeping across the Ptarmigan Hills. “Do you think it came as something of a relief for her then when your father finally died on that mountain?” When my mother looked up at me, her eyes wide as if frightened, I said, “Val told me last night.”

  “What did Val tell you?”

  “That he was lost up there, that he never came home.” When she didn’t respond I said, “I don’t understand why you felt you needed to lie about it.”

  “I didn’t want to remember that time. I knew you’d ask questions.” The kitten squirmed in her hands and she put it down on the floor. “I wasn’t well for a long time after my father disappeared. My lightning arm would do things, terrible things.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  She crossed her arms and stared out the window for a time, at Jeremy running back and forth through the sprinkler. “One afternoon, Val came home from school and I asked her to do the dishes but she wouldn’t. She said, ‘Why don’t you do them? You never do anything around here anymore.’ And that’s all it took. My lightning arm took hold of Val’s hand and brought her to her knees; her fingers slid free from my grip one by one until I was holding her little finger and I watched myself bend it backwards, like it was someone else doing it. There was a terrible crack, and her screams, and then your cries as you woke, and Gus yanked me away. He had to hug me from behind, so I couldn’t get at Val.” She turned back to me. “I broke her finger, Kat. I would have done a lot worse if Gus hadn’t stopped me.”

  I turned away, to look out the window, feeling queasy. “Jesus, Mom!”

  “When I walked away from you, I wasn’t leaving you. Those were the times I was afraid of what I might do.”

  In the yard Ezra excitedly pointed toward Jude’s property in order to get Jeremy to look, and I searched the fields as well. “There’s deer,” I said, pointing them out for my mother, relieved, at that moment, to have something else to focus on. Five does and a young buck in the alfalfa field, tails twitching.

  We watched them together for a time. “Remember that night when my father couldn’t bring himself to shoot those deer?” she asked me, as if I had been there when it happened, and so I had been, many times, when she told me this story. I followed her there again now, into the field where the wheat stooks stood silver against the moon, and I waited with her behind my grandfather as he levelled his gun, as he watched three does and a buck come into view. We waited as he waited, and breathed out in relief as he sighed and lowered the gun. The deer grazed for a time on the stooks and then, startled by a rustle in the grass, bounded back into the woods.

  My grandfather’s shoulders fell as he turned, and we followed him back to the house, listening to the jingle of his keys within in his pocket, the crunch of barley stubble under his feet. I could see the ridges in the bottom of his boots; the moon was that bright. He sat next to the stove to kick off his boots, and my mother took them outside to knock them against the side of the house to rid them of mud. Then she picked up a broom and dustpan, and swept his footprints from the kitchen floor.

  14.

  I LAID MY HEAD on Ezra’s shoulder and breathed in his smell: sawdust and sandalwood, the whiff of coffee from beneath his arm. He pulled me close in his sleep, something he had always done, and I ran my hand down his stomach to touch his penis lying soft on his thigh, which he had once responded to no matter how deeply asleep. But not this time. I sighed, turned away, and curled into myself, and he rolled toward me and hugged me from behind. So he was awake. “It’s not you,” he said. “Kat, gli
mpse at me.” When I didn’t, he sat up on one elbow and turned my face toward him. “You’re beautiful. It’s not you. I’m tired. All the time I’m tired. And I’m not sure who I am to you anymore. I feel like I’m no use.”

  I sat up and put on my robe. “I’m going to get up for a while.”

  “Kat, wait.”

  As I left the room I heard him getting out of his side of the bed.

  Mom was standing at the stove. The lights were out but her figure was clearly lit up by the red glow of the burners. They were all turned on and she held a dishtowel over them. One end of the cloth dangled against the burner and was blackened, smoking. Harrison and the kitten sat at her feet. The cats both looked up at me and meowed as I approached.

  “Mom, what the hell are you doing?” I grabbed the dishtowel and threw it into the sink, where it sizzled out among the dishes soaking there. But she still stood at the stove, staring at the burners. I turned them off and took her by the arm. “Mom?” I said. Her eyes were wide open but unseeing. I gave her a little shake. “Mom!”

  Then she looked at me. “Oh, hello, dear.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, fine. A little tired.”

  “You were sleepwalking, I think.”

  “Sleepwalking?” She looked around the dark kitchen, at Ezra standing like a shadow behind me. “Oh!”

  “Can I catch you both anything?” said Ezra.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get her settled.”

  “I could gather some hot milk.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  He stood a moment, a dark silhouette in the kitchen, and then turned back to the bedroom. Mom leaned down to retrieve the little tabby.