Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Chunks of burning wood, some the size of a man’s fist, fell from the sky. Several landed in the alfalfa field that enclosed the old well, and within seconds the field was alight, as if it had spontaneously combusted. Driven by winds that came at us from all directions, the fire zigzagged first one way and then another. On Blood Road a truck pulled a trailer that was on fire. The driver stopped and got out to unhook the trailer, then drove several feet away before jumping out again to swat at the flames with his jacket. When that had no effect, he stepped back and watched his things go up in smoke. A firetruck with lights and siren blazing screamed past him.

  “I’ve got to get water on the barns!” Ezra said, and he started toward the outbuildings, but my mother took his hand in both her own.

  “Ezra,” she said. “There’s no power.” When he looked back at the barn, she put a hand to his cheek to get him to focus on her. “Sometimes,” she said, “the only thing you can do is accept things, as they are.” She patted his hand. “It’s time to go.”

  I expected him to pull away, to dig in his heels and refuse to leave, as Jeremy would when he refused to go to bed, as Ezra himself had when he fought my counsel so many times before. But he walked hand in hand with my mother to the truck, steadying her when she stumbled, and then sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead as Jude put Jeremy in his car seat and I helped my mother fasten her seatbelt in the back of the pickup.

  “Let’s stay together!” shouted Jude as he got in his car. “In case of problems.”

  “Yes,” I said. He held my gaze a moment longer, as he had held it all those years ago at my wedding, and then he ducked into the car and was off. I turned on the air conditioning in the pickup and followed the Impala up the driveway, feeling the winds push at the vehicle as I drove. Someone up the valley had let loose his horses. They galloped ahead of us as we turned onto Blood Road. Jude and then I slowed our vehicles so we didn’t panic the horses further, and they ran along either side of us, their manes flowing. When I turned briefly to watch them as we passed, I caught sight of smoke billowing from the back of our pickup. “Oh, shit, Ezra. Our stuff is on fire.”

  I pulled off to the side of the road near Jude’s driveway and we both jumped out. Stepping into that blast of hot wind was like sticking my face into Jude’s kiln. I struggled to find breath, and held onto the door of the truck to avoid being blown over. “We’re not going to get this fire out before we lose everything,” I yelled.

  “No.”

  “Mom, get out,” I said. As Ezra unfastened Jeremy from his car seat, I leaned into the cab and honked the horn to get Jude’s attention, and he slowed the Impala and turned around. Then I pulled what little I could from the burning truck: my grandmother’s carpetbag; the shoebox containing my father’s jackknife, cup, razor, wallet, and harmonica; the set of kitchen scales on which my grandmother had weighed her bread dough, an object we had almost forgotten on the top of the kitchen cupboard.

  I held those scales close, as if they were a beloved pet I had saved, and we all stepped away from the truck, clinging to each other to keep our footing in the buffeting wind as burning debris pelted down around us. The lawn around my parents’ home exploded into flame and bits of burning letters and photos from the boxes belonging to Ezra and me were carried up from the truck by the wild winds. Some swirled back down again, landing on the ground at my feet, and I scrambled to save whatever I could. An early love letter from Ezra, Jeremy’s drawing of a snowman, a photograph of Ezra just shortly before the stroke. As Jude pulled the car up beside us, I picked up a photo of our little family taken when Jeremy was three, and brushed the cinders off the edges before tucking it into my jeans pocket.

  Jude pushed open the passenger-side door. “Get in!” he said.

  I unloaded the few items I had salvaged onto the front seat, then buckled Jeremy and my mother, who held Harrison and the kitten, into the back. “I’ll sit in the back,” I said.

  “No,” said Ezra. “Sit in the front.”

  “Katrine, in the front, now!” said Jude.

  I reached instinctively for the seatbelt, but there was none. As Jude sped off, overtaking the galloping horses once again, I felt I was floating, untethered, unsafe, thrilled. I felt cold, despite the intense heat, and as I clutched my grandmother’s scales to my chest, I shook as hard as I had in childbirth. Harrison yowled and clawed my mother as she tried to hold it. Trees on either side of us burned. Embers and pieces of flaming wood and pine cones pummelled us, bouncing off the hood of the car. Jude clicked on the headlights as the smoke of the firestorm blackened out the sun, and I turned in my seat to watch, with my mother and Ezra, as the farmhouse was engulfed by fire, as the truck burst into flames, as our past burned away.

  25.

  JEREMY AND I PICKED UP my mother at her apartment at Rotary Gardens and drove her out to Turtle Valley to say goodbye to the farm one last time. The remains of trees on the Ptarmigan Hills were charred sticks exposing the lay of the land underneath, but the rock of those mountains was still there, substantial, faithful; the mountains themselves hadn’t collapsed under the weight of the catastrophe, as I had somehow imagined they would. But they were smaller, less imposing, less secretive, without their trees. I wondered now why finding a lost soul within those hills had seemed so difficult.

  Jude was in his kiln shed as we passed by, prepping his garbage cans for a raku firing, presumably for the summer pottery show coming up next week in Sorrento. I waved but he didn’t see me, or more likely he pretended he didn’t see me. On the other side of the road his neighbours, Tammy and Nelson Dalton, were putting up siding on their new home. They’d been living in the house since spring. The fire was capricious in its hunger: it consumed the Daltons’ home, leaving nothing but the chimney, and yet their flag still flew. It took Valentine’s cabin and the unfinished house, but not Jude’s or his studio or kiln shed. It consumed my parents’ home, but not my grandmother’s greenhouse or the orchard only a few yards away.

  The day after the firestorm, when Ezra, Val, Jeremy, and I drove Mom out to the farm, we found my parents’ house distilled to three inches of ash in the basement. I salvaged a frying pan that was half melted; the metal base from one of my mother’s lamps; the burned-out frame of my childhood bicycle, left leaning against Valentine’s granary all those years before Jude bought the place. In the fallout of the fire, these objects became, for me, beloved treasures, links to a lost past, and even when I left Ezra and moved to my rented house in Salmon Arm, when I threw so much away, I kept them.

  As I salvaged the bike frame that day, Jude parked his Impala in the driveway and walked through the blackened field to meet me. “What you got there?” he asked.

  I laughed, expecting him to make fun of me. “The bike was mine when I was a kid. I was wondering if I could have it.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  I nodded toward my parents’ farm, the burned fields, the foundation of their still smoking house. “This the first you’ve seen of it?”

  “No, I came out this morning.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I can’t believe my house and studio are still standing.” Then he turned back to me. “I’m so sorry about your dad, Katrine, and about your folks’ house.”

  “I’m sorry for everyone,” I said, as I looked at the smoke-filled valley around us. The firestorm had roared down into the valley bottom and up the opposite mountain range at speeds of ninety miles an hour or more, burning down a half-dozen homes and countless outbuildings.

  “At least no one was killed,” said Jude.

  “But a lot of livestock was lost. Alex Hamilton was talking on the radio about how he shot his emus so they wouldn’t suffer a terrible death. The fire moved on his house so fast he couldn’t get them out in time.”

  “No one expected the fire to go up his side of the valley.” He put his hands in his jeans pockets and looked down at the charred earth. “So, what now? Are you heading back to Alberta?”

  “No, for the meantime
at least, I need to help Val look after Mom.”

  “Does that mean you’ll move back here?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  He took my hand. “Why not stay with me for a while as you figure things out?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why?”

  I glanced across the field at my mother, Val, Jeremy, and Ezra wandering around the yard. The smoke was dense, but they could see us. “You excite me,” I said. “You make me do things I wouldn’t have the courage to do otherwise. You always have.”

  “And you want to give that up?”

  “I don’t want to rush into anything,” I said. “Not this time.” I shook my head. “I just don’t know what I want, yet.”

  He stared at me a moment, then he looked at the ground. “Well,” he said. “When you make up your mind, you know where to find me.” And he turned on his heel and walked to his house. I called out, “Jude, wait!” but when he kept walking I didn’t go after him. He hasn’t tried to contact me since, as I half hoped he would. So we are back to where we were before the fire: we lift a hand to each other if our vehicles meet along Blood Road or in the parking lot of Askew’s Foods, but neither of us stops to say hello.

  As I carried the burned bike frame back from Jude’s that day, the bantam hen we had not been able to catch appeared, leading a dozen sooty chicks down the driveway and pausing now and again to shake her blackened feathers. Later I found her nest as I walked the yard: a chicken-sized patch of grass in the midst of black near the ashen rubble where the barn had been. I marvel at her survival, at the powerful maternal instinct that kept her tethered to her nest as the fire raged around her. Did she feel the terror I felt at the prospect of either staying or leaving her clutch? Did she shake as I did when the fire raged around her? Every time I tell the story of our exodus, my own fear fades a little further from memory. But even so, when I catch the whiff of a wood fire I’m drawn here again to this place, to the horror I felt as I fled almost all that I had known.

  THE REALTOR HAD put up a Sold sticker over the For Sale sign at the end of the driveway. The new owners would take possession the next day, though I think all of us gave up possession of that farm with the loss of my parents’ home. The place was naked and strange without it. Nothing but the foundation was left, and it was crumbling and falling away to expose the stones John Weeks had unwisely mixed in the concrete, presumably to save money. I wondered how the foundation had ever supported the weight of the structure. It was surrounded not by my father’s neatly mown lawn but by a field overgrown with blue-flowering chicory and golden tansy. Several panes in my grandmother’s greenhouse had been cracked or knocked out by the hailstorm earlier that month.

  I parked the truck in the yard and my mother and I sat a moment, looking over the orchard. “Well,” I said. “Shall we go for a walk?”

  “I’ll wait here,” Mom said. “You go on.”

  “This is your last chance to say goodbye to the farm. I don’t imagine the new owners will want us stomping through their property.”

  “I’m done here, I think,” she said. “But take a look in the greenhouse, will you? I’m not sure Val ever thought to check if there was anything worth keeping in there.”

  Jeremy followed me to the greenhouse, dawdling behind to yank the blue chicory flowers from their hardy stems. For a moment I was unaccountably afraid to go inside, and when I did, I found myself stepping into an awareness of déjà vu, though I’d been inside the greenhouse countless times before and knew it well. There was nothing left to salvage.

  Jeremy came inside to hand me his fistful of flowers. “Thank you, honey,” I said.

  He pointed at the corner. “There’s a dead bird.” A junco had found its way in but had not found its way out again. A bird flying in the house was an omen, a death in the family, wasn’t it? But what did a dead bird in a greenhouse mean? In any case, this was no longer our place, our greenhouse. I used a scrap of mouldering newspaper to pick up the bird and carried it outside to place it beneath a lilac bush.

  If this last visit to my childhood home had been a dream, how would I have interpreted it? A familiar landscape that was now strange to me. A door I was afraid to open. A dead bird in the corner. But no sign of ghosts.

  I’d like to believe that Maud and John Weeks’s souls are finally at rest. At least their footsteps no longer followed me as I walked the fields of the farm that afternoon. I saw no figure by the well, as I half expected I might; in fact, there was no longer any sign of the well itself. At Val’s request, Jude cut down the bush around the well and filled it in. Val then plowed over the area using Dad’s old tractor, planting it in alfalfa so there was no evidence, any longer, of what was hidden underground.

  Even so, I did see my grandmother that day, reflected in the greenhouse glass as I strode toward it. Maud couldn’t have been forty, but I recognized her: the long nose, the full mouth, the look of anticipation. For an instant I wanted to call out to her across the decades. In that last photo taken of her, when she carried her carpetbag down the street, she bore her past on her shoulders like an overloaded gunnysack. The bones of her thighs ground in the hollow cups of her hips like painful drums: I ache, I ache. But that wasn’t the music of her body on this day. She created whistling breezes with her stride and wore the day like a tiara. She was beautiful.

  “ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE about this place?” Mom asked as we drove back up the driveway. “About what happened here?”

  “I’ve already begun.”

  “Good. I think my mother wanted that. She led you to that carpetbag the first night you arrived, didn’t she? She wanted you to find out, to tell the story.”

  I nodded. My mother, at least, needed to tell it.

  She took my hand. “But you won’t show it to anyone quite yet, will you?”

  “No, not for a long time yet, I hope.”

  As we turned onto Blood Road, she looked out the window at the fields she had farmed first with her father and then with her husband. “It’s strange how it doesn’t feel like home anymore,” she said, “as if it belonged to someone else. I don’t feel attached to the memories I have of this place, if you know what I mean. I wonder, now, why I chose to live here all those years.”

  “I understand,” I said. In a similar way I struggled to remember Ezra’s smell, the details of his skin, the way he moved, what moved me to love him. But our lives had diverged. He worked the land that we bought without me, and another woman lived with him, a petite farm girl who seemed more comfortable within that tiny rented house. I had moved back home with my son to help my sister care for my mother in her final years. Although I remembered the events of my life with Ezra, or a good many of them, in any case, I didn’t feel the emotions I felt at the time. As my mother said that afternoon, I wasn’t attached to my memories of him. Even so, when memories of Ezra surfaced I searched them, hoping to capture something of my feelings for him, to gain some sense of who I was when I was with him. There was a summer sometime after Ezra’s stroke, when Ezra and I drove Mom and Dad down this same road during a visit. Jeremy was just two. “Butterfly!” he said. Sulphur butterflies danced over the yellow alfalfa blossoms along the roadside, and one dinged our windshield.

  “Look at all the butterflies hugging the shoulder,” Ezra said, and he pointed out the butterflies that had been hit by cars and gathered by breezes into drifts along the roadway.

  “Can I see them?” asked Jeremy.

  “Why don’t we stop?” said Ezra, and he parked the truck on the side of the road and helped Jeremy out to look at the butterflies that littered the ground like yellow confetti. Most were dead, but some were injured and still alive, their wings fluttering. Jeremy plucked butterflies from the gravel, and the luminous scales from their wings dusted his fingertips like eyeshadow.

  “Can I take some home?” Jeremy asked me.

  “Have we got anything to put them in?”

  “My hat, I guess,” said Ezra.

&nbs
p; As I collected butterflies with Jeremy, Ezra came up to us with his hands cupped as if holding something precious within. Then he opened his hands to show me, palms out as if offering me a gift. It was something I never would have taken the time to notice: a tiny, strange green insect with fragile, tear-shaped, iridescent wings. He brushed the insect into my cupped hand and all at once I was here, a witness to the moment I inhabited, aware of the hot sun on my back, the sweet smell of my father’s cattle across the fence, the pop of broom pods bursting. For that instant there was no past or future; I knew only the pleasures my senses offered me, that I was alive.

  We placed the hat full of butterflies on the seat between Ezra and me, and as we drove Mom and Dad home the wind coursing through the open window lifted a few of the dead butterflies so that they flitted around our heads. Jeremy tripped as he carried the hat to the house and the hat tumbled from his hands, showering the gravel on the driveway with a drift of yellow butterflies. A great many of them were blown away on the afternoon wind, and Jeremy and Ezra and I chased after them, struggling to recover them before they were lost in the thick grasses along the field.

  I remember that day now as yellow: the sunlight on yellow alfalfa blossoms in the fields and the brilliant golden tansy in the ditches; the field of huge, flowering sunflowers that hid Tammy Dalton’s house from view; the yellow butterflies dancing over the flower heads; the dead ones rolling on the wind like drifts of wisteria petals; the saffron T-shirt Ezra wore, my son’s blond hair. A day a long time ago. I remember that I loved Ezra for stopping to show Jeremy the butterflies, and for giving me that moment cupped within his hands, but I don’t remember what that felt like, and that saddens me, frightens me. My memories are so like that hat full of butterflies, some already deteriorating the moment they are collected, some breathed back to life now and again, for a brief moment, by the scent on a passing wind—the smell of an orange, perhaps, or a whiff of brown-sugar fudge—before drifting away, just out of my reach. How much of myself flits away with each of these tattered memories? How much of myself have I already lost?