Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  My mother fidgeted with her teacup as her gaze slipped to Ezra. “There’s lemonade in the fridge if you want some,” she said to him.

  “Ezra?” I said.

  “What?”

  “There’s lemonade in the fridge if you want some. Glasses are over the sink.” But he leaned against the kitchen counter instead, absorbed in Judge Judy.

  I stood and poured glasses for Ezra, Jeremy, and myself and put them on the table. “Maybe you could sit over here, so you’re not facing the television. So you can join the conversation.” When he still didn’t respond, I sipped my lemonade and watched a helicopter head out of the valley for another load. Sprinklers saturated the area around Jude’s studio and home; the wind cast the water across the yard. But there was no sign of Jude, though both his pickup and his Impala were in the driveway. Likely he was still sleeping after working so late into the night, as he always had in the days leading up to a show.

  “He’s sleeping,” said Jeremy.

  “Who?”

  “That guy.” He pointed at Jude’s house.

  I put a hand on my son’s shoulder and glanced at Ezra to see if he had been listening, but he was lost in the television. I didn’t know what to make of these brief tears my son made in the fabric of my reality, where he seemed to reach into my own mind. I hadn’t talked to other mothers about it, or even to Ezra, though I knew he saw it too, as he often raised his eyebrows to me at times like this.

  In the pasture surrounding Valentine’s old cabin, a lame calf stumbled far behind my father’s small herd. The calf’s mother bellowed from some distance away, trying to encourage it to catch up. “What’s the matter with that calf?” I asked Dad.

  “Something’s haywire with the ligaments in its front legs. Born like that. I kept meaning to put it down. But now I can’t get out of the damn house. I’ve got to do something about it before the cops come and tell us to get the hell out of here.”

  “I’ll do it,” Ezra said.

  “What about Ernie?” I asked my father.

  “Ernie?” Ezra asked.

  “He runs that butcher outfit off Fredrickson Road.”

  “I doubt he could get to it any time soon,” Dad said. “At the best of times you’ve got to give him a week’s notice, and with this fire raging there’ll be lots of folks trying to get their animals butchered so they don’t have to find a place to pasture them.”

  Jeremy emptied his glass and banged it on the table. “More lemonade!” he sang.

  “Just a minute, Jeremy.” I reached across the table to the television set. “Can I at least turn this down?”

  Ezra sat at the table. “I said I’d murder the calf. I’ll do it this morning.”

  “We’ll be packing, and you’ll need to get some rest.”

  “You don’t think I can fly with it.”

  “What about Uncle Dan?” I asked Dad. My mother’s brother.

  “I don’t want Dan to see that gimpy calf,” Dad said.

  “He knows you haven’t been well. No one’s going to judge you for it.”

  “I said I’d do it.”

  “More!” Jeremy sang out. “More!”

  “Jeremy, please stop,” I said. But he banged the glass again, even as I tried to take it away.

  Ezra slammed his fist on the table, upsetting my glass; a puddle of lemonade spilled to the floor. “For Christ’s sake stop that!” he cried. “Why do you have to make so much frickin’ noise all the time?”

  Jeremy began to wail and I pulled him onto my lap, shushing him.

  I saw my parents exchange a glance and then my mother turned off the television and lowered herself to her knees to wipe up the pool of lemonade. When Jeremy wouldn’t stop crying, I turned him toward me, and held his face. “We need to be quiet for Daddy, Jeremy. He loves you. It’s the noise making him mad, not you.”

  Jeremy wiped his face with his sleeve. “Yucky smells make Daddy mad too, like Grandma’s perfume.”

  I laughed a little in embarrassment. The scent of her lavender powder. It was a thing I had just learned, that ever since the stroke, Ezra had to fight through even the distraction of smell in order to focus on a conversation or task. Until recently, I hadn’t understood that the reason he sometimes withdrew from me, or became overwhelmed to the point of anger, was the scent I wore.

  “My father was like that,” Mom said as she pulled herself up from the floor using the table. “Noise overwhelmed him. When he was exhausted, he had to spend whole days lying in bed with those dark green blinds pulled down, otherwise he’d moan and cry out about the light. He expected to be waited on as a sick child does. If he wanted ice cream on a hot day, he got ice cream. My mother would crank our ice-cream maker until she was sweating and her arm gave out, and I would take over. We would do anything to avoid his anger. It was my job to scoop the ice cream out of the maker with that old ice-cream scoop and take him a bowl. I gave that scoop to you, didn’t I?”

  I nodded. A wonderful antique scoop with a wooden handle and the brand name Gilchrist’s inscribed on the thumb lever. Though its bowl was dented as if it had been used as a hammer, the mechanism still worked smoothly.

  Mom sat back in her rocking chair and took up her pad of paper again. “I still don’t like ice cream. It makes me think of him on those bad days.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Ezra said. The look on his face, now that the burst of rage had discharged, was like that of a man stumbling from sleep. He pulled Jeremy out of my arms and onto his lap, but in his effort to get away, Jeremy arched his back across his father’s knees until his head nearly touched the floor. When Ezra sat him upright and tried to hug him again, Jeremy bit his hand. “Shit!” said Ezra.

  Jeremy leapt around the table. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  “Jeremy, come here!” I said. “We don’t bite. Biting hurts. You say sorry!”

  “Sorry, Daddy.”

  Ezra held out his hands, but Jeremy retreated into my arms. I looked up at Ezra. “Just give it a couple of minutes. He’ll forget all about it.” And within a moment he had.

  Still sitting in my lap, Jeremy tapped the kitchen window behind me and pointed. “Who’s that guy?”

  I scanned the yard for what had caught his attention and found a man standing by the old well. When I was a child the site of the well was marked by four fenceposts, but it was now hidden within a small patch of poplars, wild rose, and snowberry bushes in the middle of the field. The man stood within this bush. By the stoop of his shoulders I guessed that he was elderly, and he was dressed in a jack shirt and black fedora, an outfit better suited to rainy spring days than this smoky August heat. The lenses of his glasses glinted as he looked in our direction.

  “Mom, who is that?” I asked.

  “Where?”

  “There’s an old guy standing by the well.”

  “Likely some looky-loo trying to get a better view of the fire,” Dad said. “I expect there’ll be a lot of people stopping along the road to watch.”

  My mother sat up to see. “He’s by the well?”

  “He was. I don’t see him now. He must have gone.”

  “Are there any toys around here?” asked Jeremy.

  “Why don’t you go into my old room and see what you can find?” And he skipped off to play with the few old toys of mine that my mother kept there.

  “We should be worrying over water places,” said Ezra.

  “You mean thinking of water sources.”

  “I understood him, dear,” Mom said.

  Ezra pointed his chin toward the old well. “Any water there?”

  “The well is filled in,” I told him. “Or partly filled in.”

  “I remember my father choosing the site for that well,” my mother said. “I was maybe four at the time, five? He got it in his head that he wanted to build my mother a new house, so off we all marched into the field to find water.”

  It was a story my mother had told many times. He used a willow stick for his witching, because a willow is always
seeking water, but he didn’t have much luck finding any. The divining stick wouldn’t point for him. When he got frustrated and threw it to the ground, my grandmother calmed him down, as she always did, and then used the divining rod herself to find a spot. He dug the well there, by hand. When my mother saw him inside that hole he’d dug himself into, he didn’t look like the father she knew. He was all face, and his legs tapered down into boots that appeared too small for him. She was used to looking up at her father. But here she was looking down on him.

  “Wouldn’t it be painless to find water on this place?” Ezra asked. “There are all those marshes.”

  “All he had to do was find poplars,” said Dad. “There’s always water where there’s poplars.”

  “He just didn’t seem to have the knack for divining,” said my mother. “It was hard enough for him to see what was there, in front of his nose, much less what was hidden underground.” My mother glanced around the room. “In any case he never built that new place. My parents ended up living out their lives in the house we’re sitting in now.”

  “So the well is dry,” said Ezra.

  “There was water in it once,” she told him. “Though it never ran clear. But he filled the well in.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  She hesitated a moment, then told him the story of how my grandfather had buried a mule there. A good puller named Nelly that my mother often rode. But as soon as my grandfather took the reigns Nelly would dig in her heels and wouldn’t move. He’d beat her with whatever was handy: a willow switch, a singletree, a two-by-four. When she kicked my grandfather in the leg that last time, he slashed her across the muzzle with a willow switch, then had my mother put a halter on her and lead her to the well while he got his gun, as the mule would do nearly anything that my mother asked of it. He threw off the boards over the well and had her back the mule to its mouth. When Nelly wouldn’t take that last step back into the hole, he whipped the animal. Her body shuddered as she lost her footing, and she looked up at my mother as she fell, pleading.

  My mother tried to pull the gun out of her father’s hands, to shoot the mule, to put her out of its misery, but he yanked the gun from her hands. When she tried to walk away, he dragged her back by the arm and forced her to watch Nelly die. There was about twelve feet of water at the bottom of that well, and nothing on the sides for the animal to get a footing on. My mother couldn’t see much of her, just the flash of her eye now and again, a bit of her muzzle in the water down there in the black. But she could hear her, thrashing and snorting.

  “I listened to her drown,” my mother said and she wiped tears from her eyes. “Then he told me to get the shovels and we spent the rest of the day shovelling dirt into that hole to cover her body. It was dark when we went in for supper. That well was deep even with the fill. When those boards that covered it began to rot, I worried you might fall into that hole. I told you, didn’t I, never to go near it?”

  “Yes. Many times.” But like any forbidden thing, it was a fascination. I crouched in the grass to pick the shooting stars that grew only around the well’s dark mouth. I threw stones into it, fluttered handfuls of white petals from the field daisies into it, and kneeled to sing into it, to hear my voice distorted by its depth. I thought of that well now in cross-section, the bony face of the mule pointing upwards like an arrow at odds with the layers of sediment around it. The animal’s bones glowing white in the surrounding black. So much time had passed, and yet the well was still there, and the mule was there, the instant of its death locked in soil.

  4.

  WHEN I LONGED FOR HOME, it wasn’t my parents’ dark farmhouse that I missed, but those trees and bushes: the poplar, spruce, and cottonwood, pin cherry, and saskatoon that lined the driveway and hemmed the homesite, protecting it from the devilish winds of the valley, winds that blew the trees now and would urge on the fire as well. The lilac, fragrant flowering Russian olive, and bright-berried mountain ash that dotted the yard. The cherry, apple, peach, and nectarines of the orchard. The erotic cleavages of the plums ripening on the tree that Ezra stood on a ladder to prune. The trunk of this tree was deeply scarred from disease, so like the photos I’d seen of the brains of Alzheimer’s patients; great parts of the curled tissue were dead and black. I had sat within this tree as a child, batting away yellow jackets as I tore the red skin of its fruit with my teeth to get to the warm yellow flesh within. But now plums hung from only two of its gnarled branches.

  “What are you up to?” I asked Ezra.

  “This plant needs a good prune.”

  “It needs to be uprooted and burned.”

  “It’s still creating fruit.”

  “You have a prairie boy’s sensibility. Not all fruit trees are worth keeping.”

  “Long as it’s got fruit on it, I don’t see the bother in trying to solve it.”

  “Can I have one?” Jeremy asked, pointing at the plums.

  “Sure you can.” I reached up to press one of the fruit to gauge its ripeness, and burnished the plum on my T-shirt before handing it to him. “It’s not safe to be up on a ladder in these winds.” Ezra didn’t respond. “You promised Dad you would butcher the calf this morning.”

  He turned on the ladder to look down at me. “Why are you always trying to halt me from doing what I want?”

  “I’m not. It’s just, with the fire we’ve got other things—”

  But he turned his back on me. I crossed my arms and looked away, across the field. Jude’s Toyota was still in his yard along with his old Impala. “All right then,” I said. “If you’re taking a break from loading the truck you won’t mind if I head over to Jude’s for a few minutes.” The muscles in his shoulders tensed, but he said nothing, and kept his back to me. “Evidently he’s got a box of mine.” I waited a moment longer, but when he still didn’t respond I held out my hand to Jeremy and we headed down the worn path that crossed the field to Jude’s place.

  “Where are we going, Mommy?”

  “To see an old friend.”

  THERE WASN’T A NUMBERED SIGN or a name burned into wood at the entrance to Jude’s driveway, as there was on the other acreages up and down Turtle Valley. Instead there was a metal sign from an old restaurant that Jude had found at some roadside secondhand shop on a trip through the Okanagan: on a red background, in bold white lettering, was the word Home.

  Jude had built the house himself, erecting the post-and-beam structure the year he bought the property from my parents, and had continued to add on as his needs dictated. When his son, Andy, was born he put the bedroom onto the back, and he replaced the stairs with the ramp and veranda when Lillian started using a wheelchair. A brand-new addition now jutted from the roofline over the master bedroom upstairs. He had talked about building something like it years before, to replace the low, angled ceiling of the bedroom, on which he bumped his head.

  I led Jeremy by the hand up the ramp to the veranda to knock on the front door. A boy mannequin stood guard at the living-room window. So he had kept the mannequins. I had teased Jude, back then, for being a pack rat, for never throwing anything away. “And you’re too quick to throw things out,” he told me. “When you’re young you think everything is disposable, even friends. You can always get another. But it’s not true, you know. With almost everything I’ve thrown away, I’ve come to regret it later.”

  The back seat from a car sat on the veranda as a couch, and an old television was perched on an upturned log in front of it: the glass, insides, and back panel had been removed so that, looking into that television, I saw a view of my parents’ farm and the burning hills above. Over the mountain the Martin Mars made another drop, casting a splash of lurid pink-red, the peculiar colour of tandoori chicken, across the trees.

  I knocked again.

  “Look at the lady,” said Jeremy, and I turned first to Jude’s truck, and then to the Impala, the car he had driven when we were together all those years ago. Another one of our mannequins, a woman, lounged in the front se
at of the Impala, with her legs crossed and thrust lazily out the passenger window. She wore red stiletto heels.

  “Isn’t she funny?” I said.

  I followed Jeremy down to the Impala and peered into the car. The pair of baby shoes Jude and I had bought together dangled from the rearview mirror. Aside from these booties and the mannequin, the car was pretty much as it had been when he had taken me out for drives. The sticker in the rear window that read Don’t believe everything you think. The red upholstery. No seatbelts in the front seats. He had installed the ones in the back after I left for the coast, for Andy’s car seat. I had felt I was floating, untethered, when I rode with him in that car. Unsafe. Thrilled.

  I heard steps inside the house and led Jeremy back to the veranda. Jude opened the door with a sheet wrapped around his waist and legs, the white fabric trailing on the floor behind him. “Katrine!” he said. His chest and arms were still muscular, a gift of the physical nature of his work, though he had a slight paunch above the folds of the sheet. Noting my gaze, no doubt, he pulled in his stomach.

  “I’ve woken you.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  He stood back to let me in and I stepped into the high, open living space. Jude had cut the beams for this house from the birch on this property. Potted plants hanging from those beams obscured the light from the windows, giving the room a cool, submerged feel, a relief from the oppressive, smoky heat outside. The kitchen floor had recently been stripped down to the subfloor; a pile of new tiles sat in one corner waiting to be installed. There was a new computer on the kitchen table. Otherwise the house was pretty much as I remembered it. There was the same ancient, tiny fridge, the size of a hotel room’s mini-bar, the Fisher wood stove that heated the house in winter, the avocado electric stove for cooking. He’d baked pumpkin soup with aged cheddar in that oven for me, during a visit with him and Lillian, cooked and served within the pumpkin shell.