Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  I lowered the gun and set it back on the patio table. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, this is so stupid,” I said. “Somebody has got to do something about that calf.”

  The calf fell once again to its knees and bawled in pain. Then I heard the click of the gun. The blast. The calf fell and kicked. Blood at its forehead. I turned and my mother was there beside me at the patio table, with the gun at her shoulder.

  “What the hell?” Dan said.

  Val glanced at me and raised her eyebrows.

  My uncle picked up the knife. “I guess I’ll get to work, then.” He slit the calf’s throat with the knife my grandfather had used for that purpose, then jumped back to avoid the animal’s kicking. The stunned calf’s thrashing was the mindless reflex of a dying body, but could still break a man’s leg.

  Mom lowered the gun and placed it on the table. “There,” she said. “Now, what was I doing?” She touched the hot barrel of the gun and caught sight of the calf kicking as the life wound out of its body. “Oh!” she said. Val took her arm to steady her. “I think I’ll take a little nap before lunch,” she said, and she turned to the house, holding onto Val’s arm. I watched alongside Dan and Jude as my mother limped away, opening and then closing her right hand into fist, and shaking out the numbness from her lightning arm.

  20.

  THE FIRE WAS SO CLOSE that the valley outside the parlour window was white with smoke, as if a fog had settled in. Even now that I was inside, the smoke still stung my eyes and the taste of it was thick on my tongue. I could hear the helicopters flying back and forth overhead almost constantly, but I couldn’t see them. I had heard on the radio earlier that evening that a total of twenty helicopters had now been assigned to this fire, as it continued to burn out of control.

  “What the hell are we going to do if we have to evacuate and Dad is still with us?” I asked Val. She had been rifling through Mom’s things in the parlour behind me, searching for any last items that we should salvage and spirit out of the fire’s path. Jeremy sat beside her on my mother’s bed, playing with the kitten. The smoke made him cough.

  “We’ll wheel him out on the bed and load him onto the back of the pickup if we have to,” said Val. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “I’ve got to think about getting Jeremy out of this smoke.”

  “Can Ezra take him somewhere, while we wait this out with Dad?”

  “He can’t drive now.”

  “Of course. I keep forgetting.”

  She walked up to me carrying a box and glanced through the door into the kitchen before talking to me in a near whisper. “I’m sorry I didn’t keep Ezra inside this afternoon, like you asked. I had no idea he would make such a fuss about the calf.”

  I shook my head. “I should have taken him into town and asked Uncle Dan to butcher while we were away.”

  “He still would have been angry.”

  “At me, yes, but in private.”

  “Is he like that often?”

  I nodded and rubbed my neck. The tension there. “I am so tired of coming up with strategies and solutions for dealing with him. Trying this and trying that. I’m just so tired of it all.”

  Val was quiet for a moment; like my friends at home, she was uncertain what to say. Then she placed the box on the piano bench. “Here,” Val said. “I have something that will cheer you up.” She placed the box on the piano bench. My name was scrawled along the side of the box in black marker, and inside there were photos of me as a baby, and at church camp, my arm around a buddy in a cowboy hat. A photo of me at my sister’s wedding, where I was dressed as a flower girl. In another I was dancing by the lilac bush outside the house, my face a swirl of white, my hand up in the air catching rain. I remembered this day. It was summer and Val was visiting, staying in her old room. She gave me one of her slips as a present, to play in, and I put it on and ran out into the summer rain and danced until I was wet through. The feel of the nylon against my legs, the rain on my arms, the movement of my body. I didn’t know that Val watched through the window, and pulled my mother over to see, or that they took this picture. I wasn’t quite five, still young enough that I only thought about the sense of things: the smell of the rain hitting the ground, the feel of moss under my feet, the sharp ping of rain hitting my arms as I swirled round and round.

  I tucked the photos back in the box and reached down through the layers of the years to find a softness that I knew immediately.

  “Huh,” said Val as I pulled out the teddy. “Pooh Bear. I remember having to find it for you or you wouldn’t go to sleep.” She lowered her voice again. “Better not let Mom see it or she’ll add it to her collection.”

  I smiled at her.

  Ezra leaned into the doorway. “Kat, the oven music just went off.”

  “I’ll be right there.” I put the bear back in the box. “Can you leave this out for now?” I asked Val. “I’d like to take another look at it after supper.”

  “Sure.”

  The kitchen was bare except for the table and chairs—we had removed all the bags and boxes to Val’s garage in Canoe—and my eye now found the peeling paint, and the lines beneath the wallpaper on the partition where the board underneath had begun to pull away. I had never been fond of this house. It was too dark and sullen, too small, too sad. I had often found excuses to avoid bringing childhood friends home, not only because of my mother’s messes but also because of the odd layout of the house. Its haphazard arrangement of added-on rooms spoke of poverty, of a disordered mind.

  “The house is so naked now,” I said.

  My mother looked around the kitchen with me and nodded. “I don’t feel like myself without my clutter,” she said. “Much of the time I think I’m in my mother’s house, all those years ago.”

  I pulled the roast beef from the oven and found my mother’s meat knife in the drawer, its blade so often sharpened that it was now only a slim crescent of steel.

  “Every Sunday we had to have Yorkshire pudding with roast beef or there’d be hell to pay,” she said. “My father had to have things just so. He couldn’t bear to divert from his routine. This was his recipe.” She tapped the scrapbook that was open on the counter in front of her. “He loved his Yorkshire pudding, but it had to be made just so. Flour to cover the bottom of the bowl.” And she used my grandmother’s old sifter. “Salt.” She shook salt from the shaker into the palm of her hand and pinched some into the bowl, throwing the remainder over her shoulder to keep the devil at bay. “Milk to mix to pouring state. Then one egg, and beat.”

  I handed my mother the elderly eggbeater she used.

  “No,” she said. “With a spoon, never an eggbeater. There. Now add another egg. And beat, beat, beat!” She whisked with the spoon. “I think it pleased him to see my mother or myself so committed to beating this to suit him. Of course if he was away, in the fields or in the barn, then we’d use the eggbeater. One of us watched out the window in case he headed toward the house.”

  I wondered if she didn’t half expect her father to walk up to the screen door now, and see her whisking with a spoon, not a beater, and throw her a bone of praise.

  Jeremy came into the kitchen carrying my Pooh Bear under his arm, and holding a clutch of baby photos of me from the box we had just found. “Is that your baby?” he said.

  “That’s me when I was a baby,” I said.

  “Where are the pictures of your baby?”

  I lowered my voice. “I don’t have any.” I took the photos from him and placed them up on the windowsill. “These aren’t for playing with, honey. But you can hold the teddy for a few minutes if you’re careful with it. Go sit at the table. We’re about to have supper.”

  “What baby?” said Ezra.

  I took plates down from the cupboard.

  Ezra turned to our son. “Jeremy, what baby?”

  “Mommy’s baby. The one in her tummy in those pictures over at that guy’s house.” He pointed at Jude’s.

  “You fashioned a c
hild with Jude?” Ezra asked me.

  Val peeked around the corner of the parlour to look at me. I turned my back on her and put plates on the table. “I lost her,” I said. “When she was four months along.” Ezra lowered himself into his chair as I took a fistful of cutlery from the drawer. “We can talk about it later.”

  “I want to till it over now.”

  “There’s really nothing to discuss.” I laid down a fork, knife, and spoon in front of him. “I lost the baby. Lillian got pregnant. I lost Jude. End of story.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Would you be tied with Jude now if the baby had breathed?”

  I paused. “I don’t know.”

  “You still have feelings for him!”

  I looked out the window at the darkening sky. The smoke boiling around us.

  “Would it really matter to you if I did?”

  “Of course! You’re my wife. I love you!”

  “Do you?” I pulled the note I had found in the barn from my purse and watched as he read his own handwriting. I’m scared I’ve plummeted out of love with her. “Do you mean this?” I asked.

  He hesitated a moment. “It was what I was mulling at the time. We’d been butting horns.”

  “When was this?”

  “As we were stacking our things for the move. You must have tumbled the same thinking some time in all our troubles.”

  “I’ve never stopped loving you. What else do I have to do to prove it to you? I carry earplugs in my purse for when you need a rest. I do your tractor work when you’re tired. I keep house even though I’m the one bringing in a wage. For God’s sake I even lay out your clothes so you don’t have to decide what you’re going to wear in the morning.”

  “That’s exactly it. I’m not passion anymore. I’m work, something to worry about.” When I didn’t respond he said, “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I’m just tired, Ezra.”

  He carefully folded the note and put it in his pocket.

  My mother patted my arm. “This is something best discussed in private,” she said and she turned to Jeremy. “What do you have there?”

  “Mommy’s funny bear.”

  “I had a bear like this once,” Mom said. “It was the only real toy I had at the time, that was store-bought, at least. I don’t know how many times Dan and I threw that teddy over the partition wall from my bedroom to the kitchen and back again. It was a game, back and forth, back and forth, over the wall. It never once fell in the gaps between the studs.”

  “You mean there’s no top to that partition?” I asked.

  “No, no. It was never meant to be a permanent wall, you see. My father put it up when I was born. Val’s room was my old bedroom. He didn’t put much effort into its construction. He always planned to build a whole new house for us.” She looked back down at the bear. “I was sitting on my bedroom floor one day, singing, pretending the bear was singing. I don’t know why I didn’t hear my father come in. Maybe he’d taken his boots off outside for once. So I was singing, you see, when he came in the house, and he hated that, couldn’t stand it. He snatched the bear from me and threw it up into the partition, inside, to the space between the studs. On purpose. He meant it to stay there.” She handed the bear back to Jeremy. “I imagine it’s still there.”

  I thought of this little bear slumped between the studs of that old wall all those years, coated with dust and cobwebs, its belly a nursery to mice. “Watch over your treasures,” I said, aloud.

  “What was that?” said Mom.

  I opened the junk drawer and rummaged for the flashlight and set it down on the table before bringing in the stepladder from the hall.

  “What’s going on?” said Val.

  I set the ladder next to the partition wall and climbed. I could see into Val’s old room through the foot-high space between the partition and the ceiling. “Can you hand me the flashlight, and that dishtowel?”

  Val passed them up to me.

  I cleaned away a thick layer of cobwebs, dust, and cat hairs that had accumulated at the top of the partition and shone the flashlight down into the wall. Strings were tied to nails on the studs, strings that dangled down into the dark. “I don’t think your mother was dusting all those times you saw her up here,” I said to Mom. I pulled up one of the strings and found a bundle of letters tied to the end. I wiped the dust from the bundle with the dishtowel before tossing them down to my mother, then pulled up another string and another, but whatever they had held had long since fallen to the bottom of the wall.

  I got down from the ladder and slid my hand along the ridge under the wallpaper, where the board had come loose. “I’d like to open this up,” I said.

  “Whatever for?” said Ezra.

  “There’s more in here, much more.” I turned to Mom. “Your mother’s sister wrote in that card, At the very least the lost little fellow will watch over your treasures. I think your mother was leaving you a clue in that copy of The Prophet. She was telling you where to look for her treasures, should anything happen to her.”

  My mother stared at the wall a moment and then nodded.

  I retrieved the hammer from the junk drawer and, after ripping away generations of wallpaper, I turned the hammer’s claw into the board to yank it loose. Nails screeched and the board popped open and a wash of ladybugs spilled to the floor. Most were dead, but a few crawled up the wall, or took flight around our heads. “Good God!” said Val.

  “Ladybug, ladybug, fly ’way home!” said Jeremy.

  “Let’s get this cleaned out.” I reached under the sink for the dustpan and broom and began the task of scooping ladybugs and decades of dust and debris into the brown paper bag that Val set before me. When the bag was nearly full, Ezra took it outside and tossed ladybugs across the driveway. Many lifted up and flew away, spiraling over his head.

  “Jesus,” said Ezra. “How many bugs are there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then I hit something with the edge of the dustpan.

  “What is it?” said my mother.

  I lifted a crumbling teddy from the wall. Covered in dust and cobwebs, its stomach had indeed been nested by mice. Its head lolled to the side, attached by just a few remaining threads. “Oh, God!” said Val. She sneezed. “Let’s get it into a garbage bag.”

  “No!” said my mother.

  “It’s filthy.”

  “She hasn’t seen it for nearly seventy years,” I said.

  Val handed her the bear and Mom sat in her mother’s chair and rocked, playing with the bear as a child might. Harrison jumped onto her lap.

  “There a bear for me?” said Jeremy.

  “No. Only for Grandma.”

  I turned back to my mother. “Are those letters from Valentine?”

  “No, from her sister.”

  “Why would she hide letters from her sister?”

  “My father was jealous of anything that didn’t involve him.”

  “Valentine’s letters must be here,” I said. “I know they’re here.”

  I sifted through my grandmother’s treasures at the bottom of the partition. A 1931 Butterick pattern for a peplum frock. A tube of lipstick. A little bottle of lilac perfume. A Chatelaine magazine from 1953 with a string threaded through a hole punched in one corner. On the cover was a photograph of Prince Philip (“in colour for framing”), but the contents were much the same as in the modern version of the magazine. The cover promised a story on how to “Eat all you want and reduce,” “Bargains in glamour vacations,” and “A new complete romantic novelette.” Inside there were advertisements for Sunbeam coffeemakers, Birks, General Electric refrigerators, Gerber’s baby foods.

  And then I found the Peek Frean cookie tin. I popped open the lid and there they were: Valentine’s letters to Maud, from 1945 right through until my grandfather’s disappearance.

  My mother rose to join me, and her chair went on rocking behind her. We all stood at the table
for several minutes, leafing through the letters, scanning them.

  “There’s a letter in here that she wrote to him,” I said. “She wrote it the day Valentine told her they had given up the search for Grandpa’s body.” I handed my mother the letter.

  “My mother died that evening. A heart attack. Gus found her lying on the greenhouse floor.”

  “Can I see that again?” I said. My mother handed the letter back to me and I glanced at it before tucking it and all of Valentine’s letters into my grandmother’s carpetbag, where I had put her letters to him. I kissed Jeremy on the forehead. “Jeremy, you stay here with Daddy and Auntie. I won’t be long.” I turned to Val. “Can you keep an eye on him for a few minutes? I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” said Ezra. But I had already closed the screen door behind me and stepped into the night, and I was far enough away to pretend that I hadn’t heard him.

  21.

  April 2, 1965

  Dearest Mrs.,

  Forgive me for calling you Mrs. again, Maud, but that’s what you’ll always be to me, my darling, my Mrs. I feel I must apologize for what happened tonight. I know the kiss was stolen, and I know you must feel that you have betrayed your husband again. Please forgive me. But if I do in fact have a second chance with you, then I must know. You only have to say the word and I’m yours. But of course now is not the time to talk of such things.