“Does Grandma get a big hug too?” my mother said, holding out her arms.
I ran my fingers through my son’s blond curls. “How about you give Grandma a hug?”
But Jeremy shook his head and retreated into my father’s embrace, and my mother shrank back into her rocking chair to hide in her writing pad.
“Beth, will you look at that,” my father said, to draw my mother out of herself, I think, and she glanced up to see a huge Martin Mars water bomber appear from the smoke over the Ptarmigan Hills, as if manifested by some elaborate trick. I lifted Jeremy onto a chair to see, and opened the window slightly so he could better hear the deep drone of the plane flying overhead.
“I don’t understand how the fire got so big so fast,” Mom said. “But then it’s been so hot and dry.” She pointed her pen at me. “Kat, you saw the lightning strike that started it, didn’t you?”
“We only just got here last night, Mom. We were in Alberta when the fire began.”
“Oh, of course; what am I thinking?” Her hand fluttered to her mouth as she turned to my father. “Now who was it that saw the lightning strike? Was it Val? Or one of the neighbours? Or was someone talking about it in the paper?” When my father didn’t answer, she went back to scribbling on her pad of paper. I made out the words lightning and forgotten.
I poured Jeremy a bowl of Cheerios and he sat at the table. “I think there might have been someone inside the house last night.”
My mother looked up. “Oh?”
“I saw someone reflected in the window, an old woman in the room behind me.”
“It’s the warped glass,” said my father. “I’ve seen all kinds of things in it. Likely it was your own face.”
“No. It was an old woman, standing beside your door. I thought maybe she was confused, disoriented in the panic of the fire, and had entered our home thinking it was hers.”
Val had told me how many of the elderly in her care, their brains riddled like wormy wood, had roamed away from home. They never went far, because their minds flitted, like a toddler’s, from one fascination to another, from the sparkle of mica flecks in a boulder to the bob of a Steller’s jay feeding on the head of a sunflower. Val said she always found these lost souls within a mile or two of their homes, most often lying on the ground, curled in sleep.
“Like Mrs. Simms,” said my mother.
“Yes.” Mrs. Simms had once babysat me, and now required supervision herself. She had wandered up to my parents’ house one afternoon that past spring. Mom found her standing on the porch looking through the screen door, wavering back and forth unsteadily. The look on that woman’s face, my mother had written in her fax as she described this visit, as if she were a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights.
“When I ran back to the house, all the burners were turned on.”
My mother touched her cheek. “Had you been using the stove?”
“I made myself a hot milk. But I wouldn’t have turned all the burners on.”
“I’ve done that and forgotten,” Mom said. “I must have forgotten.”
“It couldn’t have been you, could it? Turning the burners on?”
“Val says I’m forever doing that. Other times I’ll come into the kitchen and the stove will be on. I don’t remember doing it. It’s a strange thing to be this forgetful. It’s like there’s another person living in the house, a person I never see, doing things, and then I find them done.”
“A ghost.”
“Boo!” said Jeremy.
“Could it have been Jeremy?” said Dad. “Turning on the burners?”
“The first thing I did was check to see he was okay. He was fast asleep. You were all asleep.” I put a piece of bread in the toaster for myself. “I guess Ezra could have been sleepwalking. He’s done it before.” During the weeks following Ezra’s stroke six years before, he once rose from bed to urinate in our clothes closet, thinking, I suppose, that it was the bathroom. I saw him in the half-light, the erotic stance of a man peeing. In the morning I scrubbed the stain from the carpet with Nature’s Miracle, a cleaner I had picked up at the pet store to remove the stains the previous owner’s dog had left behind. I never told Ezra about that incident. He had already suffered too many indignities.
“We better lock things up tonight,” Dad said. “There’s always the chance of looters at a time like this.”
“Was anything missing?” Mom asked.
I waved at the bags and boxes on the floor around us. “How would we know?”
Mom staggered up from the rocker, setting it rocking, and grabbed the broom from the corner. As she began to sweep the space not occupied by boxes, cat hairs lifted into the spill of light from the window. From the television Judge Judy ranted on. “I meant to tidy up before you came.”
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“The cleaning ladies haven’t come for a couple of weeks.”
“It’s actually been a couple of months. I’m sorry I had to cancel them.”
“Oh, well, it’s better they aren’t coming. Val can always come over and help. You know it costs her nearly two hundred dollars a month to keep Penny and Carol coming?”
I glanced at my father, who gave a little nod as if to say, I know. I had no idea Mom had become so forgetful. “I paid for the housecleaners, Mom,” I said. “I just couldn’t afford to anymore after Ezra lost his last job.”
“The house is looking better, though,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
I looked around the room with her but didn’t say anything. With almost each trip home I found Mom had made changes. She’d thrown out a couch and put two chairs in its place, or painted the bathroom walls green, only to repaint them blue before my next visit. This time she had put up wallpaper trim along the top of the kitchen wall: sunflowers and roosters. Layer after layer of my mother’s renovations hid the home my grandmother knew. Yet there were vestiges of that past here: the white damask linen on the table under the clear plastic tablecloth; the elderly green kitchen scales that sat on top of the cupboard; the round, beautifully carved breadboard that hung on the partition wall that separated the kitchen from Val’s old room. My grandfather built the wall, but he didn’t have it meet the ceiling. It was meant to be a temporary wall, my mother had told me, and at the time John Weeks built it, he intended to put on an addition that would have been my mother’s room. He would then have taken down the partition, to enlarge the kitchen to its original size. But he never got around to starting the project.
I took the breadboard down from this wall. “We can’t forget to take this.” Specks of dried dough from my grandmother’s last day of bread-making were trapped within the elaborately and deeply carved foliage that rimmed its edge. Except for times when Mom took it down to accommodate her renovations, the breadboard had hung on that partition, unused, since the day of my grandmother’s death nearly forty years before. The surface was sliced and nicked, as one would expect, but the marks were in the direction of the grain more often than not. My grandmother’s habits were recorded there in wood.
“I’ve never been able to keep house,” my mother said. “My mother always kept this place spotless. It seemed like every time I came in the house I’d find her on the stepladder, wiping off the top of that partition, as if anyone was ever going to see the dust up there. She was so very organized, like you, Kat.” Mom leaned on her broom for a moment and nodded at me. “You came into this world to replace your grandmother.” Because I was born just a few months before she died, and I looked so much like her, my mother had given me Maud’s wedding band. But Val had known our grandmother, as she was fifteen the year Maud died and I was born, and I’m sure she resented me getting that ring. I wore it next to my own wedding band.
“I came across Grandma’s carpetbag in that box last night.” I pointed to where the bag sat now, on top of the box. “It was full of dead ladybugs. I guess a swarm of them overwintered in it.”
“My mother always called me her ladybird,” said Mom. “Even when sh
e was in her seventies, I was still her little ladybird.”
“Lady bird,” Jeremy said and laughed. “It’s not ladybird, it’s ladybug. Ladybug, ladybug, fly ’way home!” he sang. “Your house is on fire. Your children all gone.”
“That’s what they call them in the old country,” my mother told him.
I glanced at my mother. “I took a look through the carpetbag.”
She pushed the small pile of dirt into the corner before propping the broom up there as well. “I wish you hadn’t. Those were her private things.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I was just curious.” I watched her as she brushed crumbs off the counter to the floor with a dishcloth. “There was a photo of Uncle Valentine in her wallet. It was wrapped up in a newspaper story that says Grandpa was lost in those mountains and Dad and Uncle Valentine went to find him. Why didn’t you ever tell me about that?”
My father coughed, and I patted his back. “The smoke,” he said, and coughed again, holding his chest. I closed the window.
“How long was he lost?” When my mother didn’t answer I said, “Your father was found, wasn’t he? He died of a heart attack, right?”
“Yes, his heart.”
I could form no mental image of my grandfather’s face. There were no pictures of him in the house and so I had no idea what the man had looked like, though my mother claimed to have inherited his lantern jaw, a fact she was unhappy about.
“So why didn’t you ever tell me that he’d gone missing?”
Dad reached over and took my mother’s hand so she’d stop fidgeting with the dishcloth. “Wasn’t anything to tell,” he said.
“Why would Grandma carry Valentine’s picture?”
“Valentine and Maud were old friends long before your mother and I married,” Dad said. “He built that greenhouse for her.”
“Yes, but why would she carry his picture and not others, not of her own husband or children, or grandchildren for that matter?”
My mother picked up her pad of paper and pen and sat back in the rocker. “Every spring Valentine would hunt out the wild yellow and purple violets and bring her a little bouquet. I remember my mother once glancing at me as she told my father that I’d picked those violets while I was bringing in the cows. It’s the only real lie I can remember her telling.”
“Were she and Valentine more than friends?”
My mother looked up at me. Her cataracts made her blue eyes milky, ghostly; she appeared to be looking not at me but through me. “My mother was a very handsome woman. Even when she was in her sixties she attracted the attention of men as she walked down the streets in Kamloops. I remember one day just before you were born, when she and I were shopping and she happened to smile at a gentleman who opened a door for her—just a courteous smile, there was nothing flirtatious about my mother—and he turned and followed her, and attempted to strike up a conversation. She rebuffed him, politely, of course.”
I tucked my hands in my jeans pockets, and looked out at Valentine’s cabin and the unfinished house. Then I found myself staring at my own face mirrored faintly in the window, where the lilac boughs blocked the light. The imperfect glass created an image that was rippled and hazy, but I could still make out my long nose and full mouth, dark hair and brows. My reflection was the likeness of Maud as a young woman, and yet over the course of these six years since Ezra’s stroke, I had lost all confidence that I could inspire passion in the way she evidently had.
“But you’ve got to remember the times they were living in,” Mom said. “I can’t remember Valentine ever calling her anything other than Mrs.”
I turned. “Mrs.?”
“Just Mrs.”
My mother began scribbling again. She wrote of the conversation we had just had, I know. It was her habit to chronicle even the smallest details of her life immediately after they transpired, but she wasn’t present for these moments any more than tourists who view their vacations through the lens of a camcorder. Nevertheless, if I understood little else about my mother, I thought I understood this, because writing was one thing we had in common. I assumed she wrote to preserve the moment, to stop its fleeting, to stop its loss. Of course these were only projections. I had never asked her why she wrote so obsessively. I assumed she was driven to write down the details of her life for the same reasons I wrote: to make sense of things, to give the random events of life meaning, and to remember—as memory was such a mercurial companion, and one not to be counted on.
3.
I POURED JEREMY ANOTHER BOWL of Cheerios, and then stood near the window eating my toast as my parents watched Judge Judy. In the yard, Ezra rearranged the boxes and bags of my mother’s things in the back of our truck, trying to make more room. A T-shirt and jeans had become his new uniform, now that he was farming again. They replaced the dress shirts and pressed pants he had worn to teach English at the college before he’d suffered the stroke. But even when he taught for a living, he had moved with the sureness of one accustomed to physical labour; his big farmer hands never lost their calluses as he continued to garden and keep a few chickens and sheep on our acreage in Chilliwack.
A few months after his stroke, he had carved in wood a life-size likeness of one of his callused hands, and had given it to me as a gift, a hand nearly twice the size of my own. The muscled back of that hand; the bulging scar on the thumb where he had cut himself chopping wood. The carving of the hand felt very much like Ezra’s real one: rough, warm, and protective. On his good days. This carving stood on its wrist on the wooden table that served as my writing desk, a table Ezra had also made for me. He had fashioned both from pine and left them unvarnished, so the hand appeared to be one with the table, as if someone had been caught within, drowning in wood.
Yet another helicopter flew toward us, dragging an orange bucket by a tether. As it flew overhead it shook the windowpane, and I pressed my hand against the glass to feel the vibrations. All morning, helicopters and air tankers had made one run after the other, from Shuswap Lake at Salmon Arm, where they filled up with water, to this valley where they dumped their loads on the fire. Two more helicopters dropped their buckets on the hills above now. Below, at the foot of the mountain, a flatbed truck carrying a bulldozer rumbled along the road heading up the valley to the fire. Regular traffic had been diverted away from Turtle Valley and only local traffic and firefighters were permitted on Blood Road. Driving in the opposite direction to the flatbed truck, a string of pickups, loaded with personal possessions, were heading out of the valley.
My mother left her television program to stand by the window with me. “My father would have hated this,” she said. “All this noise. It’s like a war zone.” She stared for a time at Jude’s yard, at Valentine’s cabin and the unfinished house, then she turned to me. “Jude stopped in just before you arrived yesterday, asking for you. He heard from Val that you’d be coming down. I didn’t want to tell you in front of Ezra.”
“What did he want?”
“There was something—I should have written it down. I imagine he wants you to phone him back.”
“He has a box of yours,” said Dad. “Something he found in his basement as he was packing up his stuff.”
Mom sat back in her rocker. “Yes, a box, that’s right.”
“I can’t remember leaving anything with him. Why didn’t he just drop it off when he came?”
“I imagine he wants to see you again,” said Mom. “Val must have told you Lillian left.”
“When?”
“Last winter. She moved to Calgary. Her mother lives there, evidently.”
“And Andy?”
“He went with his mother,” Dad said. He pointed at his room. “Grab my wallet, will you? And bring my cards while you’re at it.” I retrieved his wallet and deck of cards from his bedside table, where he kept the few items that were his alone—his razor, his jackknife, his harmonica, his wallet, his deck of cards—as his bed was where he now spent the better part of his days. When I handed him his wallet h
e leafed through it until he found a business card. “Jude said to give you this. He wants you to pop over if you see the pickup in the driveway.”
I looked down at the card. The Jude Garibaldi Pottery. High-fired functional pottery and raku. Distinctive masks, lamps, vases and wall pieces. He had written his cellphone number on the back. “He’s not trying to sell his paintings anymore?” I asked.
“Hasn’t for years,” Dad said. “No money in it.”
“But he’s doing okay?”
“It shook Jude up pretty bad that Andy made the decision to live with Lillian. He makes the trek up to see the kid every couple of weeks. So he’s been keeping to himself a lot lately. We see him over in his studio or kiln shed, working all the time. He never goes to the dances at the hall anymore.” Dad sighed. “But then neither do I.”
The ancient screen door squeaked open and I slipped the card into the front pocket of my jeans. As Ezra entered, my mother jumped up from her rocker like a child caught in a forbidden act. “I should be packing. You want coffee?”
But Ezra’s attention was seized by the flickering images on the television set, Judge Judy lecturing.
“Ezra?” I said. “Mom asked if you want coffee.”
“No, thanks. The day’s flaming.”
Since the stroke, Ezra spoke of his world with descriptions that were often more apt than common phrases. “It’s too hot, you mean,” I said, offering him the words as Ezra’s speech therapist had told me to in the early months of his recovery, in an effort to help him regain his facility with language.
“Yes.” But his eyes were focused on the television.
“Would you mind if we turned the television off for a while?” I asked my mother.
“Gus so likes his Judge Judy,” she said.
“I don’t,” he said. “That’s your show.”
“Ezra can’t concentrate on the conversation if that TV is on,” I said. He had once described the feeling of being bombarded by the sound in nearly any environment as having his shirttail tugged by the hands of hundreds of persistent toddlers, all wanting his attention at once. “Everything is saying, Look at me! This is important!” he had told me.
Turtle Valley Page 2
