Val took the scrapbook from me. “Why would Grandma keep a scrapbook about Dad’s uncle?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? They knew each other for a long time before the Japanese balloon was blown up, before that night when Grandpa went nuts and Valentine intervened.” I reached over and opened the scrapbook to the first news story and tapped it. “But she started this scrapbook about him here, with this story.
“You’re suggesting they were lovers?”
“I’m not sure what to think. But something started this night, for Uncle Valentine and Grandma, and it went on for twenty years. This scrapbook ends with the stories about Grandpa’s disappearance in 1965.”
I turned the pages to the back of the scrapbook to show Val the full front page of a Kamloops Sentinel from 1965. “This is the same story I found in Grandma’s wallet, at the bottom of the page. It’s just a tiny little story, but at least it made the front page.”
“He’d only been missing a day, by the looks of it,” said Val. “Nothing to compete with this.” She tapped the lead article of the week:
“COUNTRY AT WAR?” CALLERS ASK RCMP AS
BRILLIANT FLASH LIGHTS HEAVENS
Hysterical women asking if the country was at war telephoned Promise police station last night, following a brilliant flash and loud explosion in the night skies. RCMP Cpl. Ted Robinson, NCO in charge of the Promise detachment, said shortly after the flash and blast he received several calls from women thinking the country was at war.
Immediately after the flash there was a loud noise and all the buildings started to shake. Promise streets immediately filled with people.
Meanwhile from over a wide area came reports of sightings of a brilliantly lit object travelling south to north, lighting up the landscape, and a subsequent loud explosion.
“There were articles in the paper at the time to the effect that it might have been a U.S. spy satellite falling back to earth. But it was a meteor. Scientists sweeping with magnets found tiny fragments of it on the shores of Shuswap Lake. And then some hunter found a hunk of it in a burned-out area where it had hit, up in those hills.” She nodded at the Ptarmigan Hills. “That meteor was what set Grandpa off that night he disappeared. When it hit the sky lit up and the whole house shook. Grandpa thought we were being bombed.”
“Looks like a lot of people thought that,” I said. “I guess the war was still pretty fresh in everyone’s mind.” I looked up at her. “I don’t remember any of you talking about this.”
“The story of the meteor was all wrapped up with Grandpa’s disappearance. Mom didn’t want us talking about it.” She nodded at the hills. “He went up there to find it. Or rather, he went up there to find the enemy. In his head that mountain was the front and he was going up to root the enemy out.”
I looked up to the hills, the fire blazing there, as Val paged through the scrapbook.
“Here’s the news story where they gave up the search for Grandpa,” she said, and handed it to me.
GUNMAN PRESUMED DEAD AFTER SHOOTING
SON-IN-LAW
Turtle Valley resident John Weeks is presumed dead after an extensive week-long search throughout the Ptarmigan Range turned up no sign of him. Weeks became the object of an RCMP search after he shot and wounded his son-in-law, Gustave Svensson, in the arm. Svensson is now recovering in Kamloops General Hospital and is reported to be in stable condition.
At the time of the shooting, Gustave Svensson and his uncle, well-known area woodsman Valentine Svensson, were attempting to find Weeks within the Ptarmigan Range. Weeks initially went missing April 1 after sighting the meteor that lit up area skies. Evidently Weeks, who had been receiving ongoing psychiatric treatment and was apparently delusional at the time, saw the flash of the meteor and, in a state of confusion, felt that he and his family were under attack. Family members say he became determined to find the “enemy” that he felt was hiding in the Ptarmigan Range and headed up into the hills with his gun. He was improperly clothed for mountain conditions and carried no rations. His wife, Mrs. Maud Weeks, alerted Valentine Svensson of the situation and he and his nephew, Gustave Svensson, attempted to track Mr. Weeks throughout the night and the next day.
When the two men continued the search the following night, they came upon Weeks and tried to talk him into coming down with them. However Weeks, still in a confused state, shot at them, hitting and wounding Gustave Svensson in the arm. Fearing further bloodshed, Valentine Svensson abandoned Weeks and brought his injured nephew back down the mountain trail.
The search for John Weeks over the following days has been hampered by rain mixed with snow that has continued to fall on the mountain since Weeks disappeared, washing away evidence of his whereabouts. Searchers have also been faced with steep and rocky slopes, as there are no logging roads to the area. Svensson says access to this rough terrain is limited to ancient and now largely unused Indian trails.
RCMP Cpl. Ted Robinson says he finally made the decision to give up the search for Weeks on the advice Valentine Svensson, who lead the search and is an expert tracker often used by the RCMP. Svensson says heavy rainfalls, high winds and the freezing temperatures overnight in the mountains have made it highly unlikely that Weeks survived. “The weather conditions and the difficult terrain have made the search treacherous,” he says. “We can no longer justify putting the searchers in danger.”
Although Robinson says he can’t rule out the possibility that Weeks made it off the mountain himself and may have retreated to another area, he says the next search will be undertaken with the aim of recovering his body once weather conditions improve.
“So that’s how Dad got that scar. Why would he and Mom lie about that? Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Like I said, Mom didn’t want us talking about it.” She tapped a tiny newspaper clipping beside the story of my grandfather’s disappearance, one of my mother’s contributions to the paper. “I remember hearing these shots the night after he went missing,” she said.
LARGE COUGAR SHOT ON
FARM AT TURTLE VALLEY
Turtle Valley—A large cougar was shot by Valentine Svensson on his property midweek. The cat was approaching the barnyard where there were some newly arrived calves. Tracks of these animals and also of bobcats and lynx are frequently seen in the area.
“Uncle Valentine had just brought Dad down off the mountain,” said Val, “after Grandpa shot him, and there was a cougar following too close, attracted by the scent of blood, I imagine. So Valentine shot the cat out by the unfinished house.”
“Why would Mom write about this and not about how her father had gone missing? Or about Dad being shot?”
“All that was already in the papers.”
“Why would she write anything at all during that terrible week?”
“It’s what she does. She’d sit and write if the house was burning around her.”
I rubbed my face. Even during the terrible weeks following Ezra’s stroke, I had never felt so tired. “What are you doing up now anyway?” I said. “It’s, what, twelve-thirty?”
“Just after one. Couldn’t sleep. So I took a few more boxes out to the truck.” She pulled a note from her jeans pocket and handed it to me. “I found this tucked into the doorjamb just now,” she said. “I was hesitating over whether to give it to you. Good thing I found it and not Ezra.”
The paper was folded in half and my name was written on the front, in Jude’s handwriting. I saw you were up and came by hoping you’d see me out the window, but I didn’t want to knock. Please come over, any time. I’ll wait up for you.
“What are you doing, Kat?”
“I don’t know.” I looked up at her. “So much of what I’ve done this week makes no sense. I just waltzed over to Jude’s in the middle of the night last night with a batch of fudge. Oh, God, Val, he makes me feel exactly like he made me feel back then. Desirable, you know? No, more than that. Brave.”
“So here you are, suddenly saddled with a choice: Ezra or J
ude.”
“It’s not that simple.” Or was it? I looked back down into my lap, to my grandmother’s scrapbook about Valentine. What had she done? What choices had she made? There were clues here, in this scrapbook, I was sure of it. The warped and yellowed newsprint, the lines of Maud’s handwriting where she had included recipes or remedies on the pages that surrounded the clippings. Something of my grandmother was sealed here in ink: in her careful, controlled penmanship, in the choices she made over what to set down. She had preferred a fountain pen over a ballpoint; the evidence was here, in the flow of ink from a fountain pen, as she wrote this recipe on how to preserve a rose: Dip the whole blossom and stalk in melted wax, coating completely to seal from the action of air and the passage of time. If memory were a colour, it would be this blue, the colour of the ink my grandmother used to preserve her treasured memories from the wasting effects of time.
So Valentine had given her that rose.
Val nodded Jude’s way. “He’s over there now, waiting for you,” she said. “Are you going?”
16.
JEREMY PLAYED ON THE HAY BALES beside me as I rummaged through the boxes that we had left in the barn during our move to Alberta that past spring. That morning I had discovered that these boxes contained the better part of my married life: our wedding photos and certificate of marriage, birthday cards and photos from vacations, scraps of paper from Ezra’s desk and mine, our tax records, and envelopes full of bills paid. In one box I had found my wedding dress and the baby dish that had been mine as a child, one that my mother had given me when I was pregnant with Jeremy. Jeremy had eaten his first solid food from it.
The box I looked at now was marked simply Papers, in Ezra’s handwriting. My first Mother’s Day card was in it, one Ezra had made for me less than a year after his stroke: Jeremy’s handprints as a baby were in blue on the front and back of it. The card opened, like an accordion, to the length my son’s arms were at the time. Inside Ezra had written, I love you this much and my arms are still growing! I had caught Ezra just after he made the card, trying to wash blue food colouring off Jeremy’s hands in the bathroom sink. My son was naked except for his diapers and he was crooked under Ezra’s arm; his little hands attempted to grip the stream of water from the tap. Ezra hadn’t thought to use the water-soluble poster paint we had in the house, and Jeremy’s hands were blue for a day afterwards. Blue under the half-moons of his tiny nails. Ezra had tried so hard to please me. He always tried so hard.
I held the card out to show Jeremy. “This was how long your arms were when you were a baby.” He took the card from me and folded and unfolded it as I looked through the box. There I found a sheet of foolscap in Ezra’s handwriting. It began with my name and I thought for a moment it was an old love letter:
Kat. I wish I could make her grasp my story. A picture jumps into my skull in the day, or I dream it at night: a bird trapped in a glass box, thumping its wings against the sides. I’m that bird. I can glimpse where I need to go, but I can’t reach there. Something shadowy blocks me and I can’t grab why I can’t get out. I don’t have a long-ago because I can’t learn by heart what happened this morning. I have no tomorrow because I can’t plot it out, can’t see it. I’m snared in this confusing present just as much as Kat is stuck in yesterday. She can’t see me now. She only sees me then, when I was sick. I’m trouble to her, someone she’s got to nurse, like a child, always scolding me what to do, what to say. I’m scared I’ve plummeted out of love with her.
I stared at the page. I’m scared I’ve plummeted out of love with her. I turned it over, looking for any indication of when Ezra had written it, but there was none. A bird trapped in a glass box, thumping its wings against the sides. I understood because an image popped into my head daily, during any quiet moment: I hung on a trapeze in the middle of a void, nothing but black above and below, and I had to figure out a way to stay on that swing and not fall off into oblivion.
“What’s that, Mommy?” said Jeremy, pulling at Ezra’s note.
“Nothing, honey.”
“Is it a card from Daddy?”
“Yes, it’s from Daddy.”
I folded the sheet and put it in my pocket, then carried the box to the pickup along with the baby dish, with Jeremy following behind. “What’s up?” Ezra asked. He had been loading the boxes as I chose them, as the fire was now only two miles away. We expected the evacuation order at any time.
I stood with the box in hand a moment, staring across the field at Jude’s place. “Nothing,” I said finally. I put the box down, but hung onto the baby dish. “I’m taking Jeremy inside. Snack time.”
Jeremy held out the Mother’s Day card to show him. “I love you this much!” he said.
Once inside, I slid off my sandals and put the dish down on the table. Mom immediately picked it up. “You found it!” she said.
I started to chop up an apple for Jeremy at the kitchen counter. “I didn’t want it to get lost again in all those boxes.”
“This was the first thing I bought for you.” She turned it, admiring the figures painted around its edges. “I wanted you so much. I ached for you, before I knew for sure I was pregnant.”
I knew that ache. I had felt it in my belly even before I had conceived Jeremy; it had begun in the hospital, immediately following Ezra’s stroke. A desire unlike anything I’d ever felt before, to be with Ezra, to create a life with him. The scent of a child billowed around me like a sheet thrown over a clothesline on a March afternoon. Peach and powder, warm sun, it licked up one side of me and down the other, a dawning remembrance as if I had left something behind at a café, a glove or a pair of sunglasses. No, something far dearer than that: my grandmother’s wedding ring, left in the bunched paper in the waste-basket of the ladies’ room.
“You all right, dear?” my mother asked.
I wiped my eyes and glanced out the window at Ezra. “Just not getting enough sleep.”
I gave Jeremy the plate of apple slices. “I should see if Val needs a break,” I said, and I joined my sister in my father’s room. My father slept even as Val rolled him to slip a new Depends under his buttocks, and as she wiped him clean. I had changed Ezra’s Depends in just this way when he was in the hospital. His moist, limp penis against his thigh, the smell of urine.
“Dad’s breathing is so shallow,” I said.
“That’s to be expected.”
“Did he wake?”
She shook her head. “He’ll sleep much more from now on, and when he does wake he’ll often be confused. There will be times when he won’t recognize you, Kat. Be prepared for that.”
I turned to the window to allow my father some privacy as Val finished changing him. When she was done, she joined me at the window, rubbing her hands with an antiseptic wipe.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
“For everything you do for Mom and Dad.”
“That’s what I do, take care of people.”
I looped my arm through hers. “But who takes care of you?”
“Oh I’m alright. I take care of myself. Every night I treat myself to a glass of wine and a hot bath.” She nudged my shoulder with her own.
“But who takes care of you? Not Ezra, evidently. Tell me, when was the last time you let him do something for you?”
I hesitated a moment, fingering the note in my pocket that Ezra had written. “The other day, when we were in the store with Mom, Ezra wanted to pick up a few things by himself so he got his own shopping cart. I thought he was just being childish, you know, that he had to do things for himself again, to prove himself, like he does. But then he got tired, so I took him to the bench by the door to wait as we finished shopping. As he was sitting down I noticed a jar of lingonberry jam in his cart, like the jam Uncle Valentine used to give us when we went to his place, but in a wee little jar like what you might get with breakfast at a hotel. I thought, so that’s why he wanted to shop by himself; he wanted to pick up a surprise for me. I said, ‘I
s this for me?’
“He said, ‘You like that stuff, don’t you?’
“I hugged him and kissed him and wept over it. It surprised me, you know, to be so very excited by this little gift. The feelings I had were way out of proportion to it. Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time Ezra had bought me a gift, or taken me out on a date without my urging, or even made me a cup of tea. The last time he remembered my birthday was before the stroke. Isn’t that dumb? Getting all weepy over a stupid jar of jam.”
“It’s not dumb,” Val said. “It’s almost impossible to maintain romance when you’re dealing with the symptoms of a stroke day in and day out.”
“Ezra doesn’t want me, you know, in that way.”
“I imagine he’s exhausted a good deal of the time, and he’s reinventing himself. Most couples have difficulty in their sex lives after a stroke.” But then her attention was directed past my shoulder, to the kitchen door behind me.
I turned and found Ezra silhouetted at the screen door. He thumped back down the porch stairs and I slid on my sandals to follow him outside to the truck, where he rearranged boxes. “Why did you have to tell her that?” he said. He was tearing up, and looked so very tired; at that moment I realized just how many years we had been together. The silver hairs at his temples that he had once insisted on plucking, until after the stroke when energy fled him. When I tried to take his hand he pulled his arm away from me and started to walk off. “I’m going to finish carting those boxes.”
The screen door opened and Jeremy came out carrying the little plastic elephant that had been mine when I was a child. The one missing ears, wheels, and legs. “Mommy, all the toys here are broken,” he said.
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