Above the living room a steep set of stairs led to the balcony of the bedroom. There was no wall between this bedroom and the living room below. I could see the raised ceiling of the new addition, and the bed, from where I stood. The high white ceiling, the wood trim around the new, large windows, the sheer white curtains. It was now a breezy, light-filled room, so different from the dark, cramped bedroom he had shared with Lillian.
“I should have phoned first,” I said.
Jude tucked the sheets more firmly about himself. “No, I’m glad you came.”
“Jeremy, this is Jude.”
“Hello, Jeremy.”
“Hi.”
“I bet you’d like some apple juice,” Jude said.
“Yes, please,” said Jeremy.
“How about you? You want a cup of tea? Or are you drinking coffee now?”
“Just water,” I said.
I watched him walk to the kitchen. The muscles in his back. As he handed the glasses to us, I glanced down at the sheet he wore. He laughed. “I guess I better put something on.”
I took a sip of water and watched him climb the stairs, the sheet sliding upwards with him, then averted my eyes as he let the sheet fall.
“That guy’s naked,” said Jeremy.
“He’s getting dressed. It’s not polite to stare when someone is putting his clothes on. Look at this vase. Isn’t that lovely? Jude made that. And here’s a picture of that funny lady we saw in Jude’s car. I took that photo.”
The year I photographed that mannequin was a dry one, and lake levels had fallen so much that the newly constructed pier extended out into a mud flat rather than into water; the docks where houseboats usually moored were now sitting on mud. I worked as a reporter for the newspaper at the time, and was looking for a photo to gently lampoon this tourist town’s vulnerability to the whims of the weather. So Jude and I talked the curator into giving us a few of the old mannequins stored in the basement of the town’s museum, and we hauled them down to the pier and set them up in the mud as if they were tourists playing. A crowd gathered on the pier above us, cheering and clapping each time we set up a mannequin in a new position. With Jude I did any silly thing, without embarrassment. I could not have talked Ezra into it.
“That’s you, Mommy!”
I looked up to where he pointed, at the wall above, and there she was, my young self, smiling. “Jude painted that,” I said. “He paints, too.”
“I used to,” Jude said from his bedroom above.
“You’ve got a big tummy in that picture,” said Jeremy. “You’re having a baby, like Jeannie.” Jeannie, our neighbour in Cochrane, took care of Jeremy on days when I worked at the paper; she was now eight months along. I’d have to find another sitter, and soon. “That’s me in your tummy.”
“No, honey.” I was never as pregnant as that painting allowed. I never showed much. It was all projection on Jude’s part.
“Where is that baby?”
Jude descended the stairs, tucking his white T-shirt into his jeans. “She flew away,” he said. I shook my head at him, to warn him not to say anything more, but he didn’t understand.
“Where did she go?”
“Someplace happy,” he said.
“Is she at the zoo? Mommy, can we go to the zoo?”
“Sure. Let’s go to the Calgary zoo when we get back home.”
“Will your baby be there?”
“This is me too.” I pointed at the series of paintings along the wall. “And that one. And that one.” Then I turned to Jude. “You kept them.”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t Lillian object?”
“I stored them in my studio, until she left. She took most of the paintings we had put up.” He grinned and scratched behind his ear. “I needed something to cover the walls.”
“You got any toys?” Jeremy said.
“Ask nicely.”
“Please?”
Jude squatted down in front of him. “You like Lego? There’s a box in Andy’s room.”
“Yeah!”
“Right through that door.”
Jeremy looked up at me. “Go on.” Together Jude and I watched as he ran down the hallway into Andy’s room. Then we stood in silence for a time, as we both struggled to come up with something to say. In the other room, Jeremy dumped the Lego onto the floor.
“This fire’s a hell of a thing,” Jude said. “I just keep loading boxes and carting them off to Mike’s place in town, but I don’t know what to take, what to leave behind. Mike picked out a pipe wrench with the bottom jaw missing from one of the boxes, and said, ‘What the hell is this?’ The thing is, I remember taking the damn thing off my workbench in the basement and putting it in the box yesterday. As if it was some family heirloom I had to save.”
I nodded. “I couldn’t talk Mom out of packing her collection of baskets this morning. She bought the works at the thrift shop.”
“Well, I guess we can be forgiven for not thinking straight, given the circumstances.”
We both looked at our feet for a while. Listened to Jeremy’s singsong murmurings in play.
“I should apologize,” I said finally, “for how Ezra behaved, when you came over to visit that last time.”
He shrugged. “I should have known it would cause problems for you. I hope this visit isn’t an issue.”
“No, not really.” I put my glass on the table and sat, and Jude sat with me. I nodded at the Impala. “You kept the baby shoes.”
“I just found them as I was packing stuff out of the basement. It seemed right, somehow, to hang them in the car. All those drives we took.” On back roads, so we wouldn’t be seen together. “She would have been sixteen this coming spring.”
“We never knew for sure it was a girl.”
“You thought so, at the time.”
I pointed out the window at Valentine’s unfinished house. “Every Halloween when I was a girl my great-uncle would fill that old house with jack-o’-lanterns, all lit up with candles, and invite me and my friends in there to tell us a story he’d heard from the Sami in Lapland, about the ghost of an unwanted baby murdered at the hands of his own mother in secret. He said the ghost baby was seen crawling across the snow, hoping for revenge or that the truth of his death would come out; hoping to be named so his soul could rest.”
“The miscarriage wasn’t your fault, Katrine. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“I still hide it, though. I never told Mom. She hasn’t seen that painting you did of me pregnant, has she?”
He shook his head. “I always go over to their place to visit.”
“Jeremy knows, now. He’ll be asking questions.”
“Does it really matter?”
“I never told Ezra either.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t know how he’d react. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Val, though she guessed about you and me at the time. I imagine the whole valley did. But you were still living with Lillian; I didn’t know what was going to happen between us. And then I lost the baby, and Lillian got pregnant, and I lost you, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Not with anyone.”
“I’m so sorry, Katrine. You don’t know how many times I thought of phoning you after you left for Vancouver. I felt I had to stay with Lillian but it wasn’t what I wanted.”
“You don’t have to explain it again.” I looked down at my glass. “I only just heard from Mom and Dad that you and Lillian had separated. It must have been hard, to lose them both like that.”
“I drive up to see Andy a couple of times a month. I’d go more often if I could afford it. I phone him nearly every day.” He ran his thumbnail along a crack in the table. “Val told me a few things, about Ezra, what you had to deal with after he had the stroke.”
“He’s much better than he was.”
He looked up. “So he’s not fully recovered?”
“He’ll live with some handicaps for the rest of his life. I doubt he’ll ever be able to teach again.”
“Your dad said he had trouble holding down a job.”
“He’s forgetful, and he has trouble catching on to new things. He often gets caught up in projects that don’t really matter—like right now he’s over there pruning trees—so things that do matter don’t get done. Not many employers will put up with that.”
The day Ezra lost that last dairy job, milking cows, he shuffled the distance between the truck and the garage, where I waited on the steps, and stood on the step beneath me to press his head between my breasts. His arms dangled at his sides and his shoulders heaved as he sobbed. The stink of the dairy around him. “They fired me,” he said. “Ron said I was taking too long, making too many stumbles. I can’t even do a shit job right anymore.”
He had milked cows as a fourteen-year-old at his father’s dairy. Worked the four a.m. shift half asleep, he knew the job so well. And hated it.
“I don’t mean to complain,” I said. “We were very lucky. Right after Ezra had the stroke, his doctor told me he likely wouldn’t be able to talk, if he survived at all. One of the nurses suggested we both learn sign language. Can you imagine? The two of us, with perfect hearing, having to use sign language.”
“Like my uncle after his stroke,” said Jude. “All he could say was Fuck and Apple Jacks.”
“Apple Jacks?”
“His favourite cereal. He ran his business for years on those few words, with the help of his sons. They learned how to interpret. With just a change in intonation he could make Fuck and Apple Jacks mean just about anything.” When I laughed he said, “There are all kinds of ways to get your message across. You remember I told you about that trip I took through the Canary Islands?”
I nodded. Some hazy recollection.
“There are people there who have a language of whistles, so they can communicate across the valleys. Their whistles overlap like the songs from a bank of mud swallows.”
“That has got to be one of your tall tales,” I said. “A tribe of whistlers on the Canary Islands?”
“It’s true!” After our smiles faded he continued to hold my gaze.
“Kiss!” Jeremy called out from Andy’s room.
Jude grinned. “I guess he heard us.”
“Heard what?”
“Andy used to pick up on what I was thinking all the time when he was that age.”
I blushed and shook my head. “Jeremy wasn’t reading my mind.”
“Then he was reading mine.”
I sat back in my chair. “I hear you have a box for me.”
“It’s there, on the coffee table. Mostly cards and letters from our time together, I think. Don’t worry. I didn’t snoop. When I saw they were your things I closed the box.”
“I’m not sure I want to look. I’ll look at it later, when I’m alone.”
He clapped his hands together. “So, shall I show Jeremy my studio? Get him on the wheel? Kids love the muck.”
“No, we’ve got to go.”
“So soon?”
“Mom was making lunch.” I stood. “I’ll help Jeremy pick up the Lego.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
I retrieved the box from the coffee table. “Jeremy,” I called. “Time to go.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Now, honey.”
“Okay, okay!”
Jeremy came out carrying a turret made of Lego blocks. “That stays here,” I said, and he slumped back into Andy’s room with it.
Jude and I both looked out the window at Valentine’s unfinished house as we waited. One of my parents’ cows stood at the doorway of the old house, like a vacationer stepping out to admire the view.
“It was Gus’s uncle who started building that place, right?” Jude asked. “It must have been. He homesteaded the property, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Valentine began building it when he got engaged to Mary Peterson. Do you remember old Mrs. Samuels, Mary Samuels?”
He shook his head. When I was a child, I had visited Mrs. Samuels with my mother. She offered me ginger cookies, and brought out her autoharp for me to play with. The weight of the harp in my lap, the pick in my fingers, the thrill of strings thrummed.
“Evidently she broke the engagement with Valentine and married Charlie Samuels and that was that; my great-uncle stopped working on the house. I suppose he might have finished the thing if he’d found someone else to share it with. But he was one of those men, like my father, who never seemed to need much. He was happy in his occupations and his own company. Like you.”
Jude grinned.
“I found a newspaper clipping last night that says Valentine led a search for my grandfather when he went missing. Mom and Dad never talked about that with you, did they?”
“No. Never.”
“The clipping was in my grandmother’s wallet, wrapped around a picture of Uncle Valentine.”
“Ah-hah! There’s got to be a story behind that. You’re going to write about it, of course.”
“I don’t know.” I hadn’t written much in the way of fiction in the six years since Ezra’s stroke. There simply wasn’t the time or energy for it. Instead I jotted down ideas in the notebook I carried in my purse, whenever I had a spare moment. When this notebook was full I would squirrel it away with the others in a shoebox in my closet, thinking that one day I would lower a bucket into this reservoir and from it another novel would emerge.
“Jeremy,” I called. “Come on. Time to go.”
“When are you heading back to Alberta? I’d like to see you again.”
“It depends on what happens with this fire.”
“Mind if I pop over to the farm for a cup of tea?”
“It would be uncomfortable,” I said, “with Ezra.”
He nodded. “Then bring Jeremy over here, to see the studio. I’ll show him how to throw a pot on the wheel.”
“I don’t know if I can get away.”
“Try.”
AS JEREMY AND I HEADED back across the field, I saw Ezra walking the trail toward us, carrying what at first looked like two olive green dinner plates, one overturned to keep the other warm. “Now what the heck is your daddy doing?” I said, and laughed.
It was a painted turtle he carried, its head and legs tucked within its shell. The creature was mature, about a foot long, and painted, as its name suggested, with bright red on its belly shell. Ezra grinned at me as he squatted to put the turtle down on the ground to show Jeremy, and the turtle ventured out of its shell to reveal the brilliant yellow stripes on its head, neck, legs, and tail. I wanted to take Ezra’s hand, to let him know he was a dear man, but I didn’t, thinking of the bacteria the turtle undoubtedly harboured. “I suppose we shouldn’t let Jeremy touch it,” I said.
“It’s just a turtle. He can purify his hands.”
“Please, Mom?”
I squatted down in front of Jeremy. “They carry salmonella. That’s a nasty bug. It could make you very sick.”
Ezra stared down at me a moment, the muscles in his jaw tensing, then turned to Jeremy. “I’ll find it a good home,” he said and started to walk away with it.
“Mom will have lunch ready,” I said, raising my voice into the wind as I stood.
“I’m going to close that tree first.”
“Can’t you finish it later? Your lunch will get cold.”
“Fuck!” he said, turning. “Can’t you just get off my back?”
“Fuck!” said Jeremy. He laughed. “Fuckity-fuck! Fuck-a-duck!”
I shot a look at Ezra, warning him to watch his language around our son, and took Jeremy’s hand. “All right, that’s enough. Let’s go back inside.”
“Can I draw some pictures?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll draw you a duck, Mommy.”
From inside the house I watched Ezra prune branches from the tree, feeling my frustration and anger dissolve like a lozenge on my tongue. He was beautiful. His long torso and legs, his shoulders moving under the fabric of his black T-shirt as he tended
that dying plum. From this distance I could almost believe that nothing about him had changed.
5.
DAD SAT FORWARD IN HIS CHAIR at the kitchen table to look out the window at Ezra with me. His cards were spread out in front of him in a game of solitaire; they were the same pack of cards he’d used for nearly fifty years. Jeremy sat beside him, drawing with crayons. “Now what the heck is Ezra doing?” Dad said.
“Pruning that dying plum.”
“Is he planning on butchering that calf today or not?”
I held out my hands and shrugged. What could I do?
“There isn’t time for screwing around. They were just saying on the radio how the wind we got today spread the fire from just under a couple of hundred acres to more than seven hundred.” He nodded at the windsock blowing over the barn. “What if the wind turned like it does this time of year and pushed the fire down that slope? The fire could be on us in minutes.”
“I told him.”
Dad collected his cards to shuffle them before laying them out for a new game. “You’re going to have to take the lead with him,” he said.
“He would disagree. He thinks I try to control him too much.”
“Doesn’t matter what he thinks. You won’t get nothing done around that farm of yours letting him run things like you do.”
I glanced at Jeremy, then back at my father, to caution him not to say anything more about Ezra in front of our son. “He’s a good man, Dad.”
He shook his head. “I just hate seeing you dealing with him all the time. It’s wearing you down.”
“Where’s Mom?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Out getting some eggs. She got lost in her writing and burned the hamburgers, so she’s going to make us fried eggs instead.”
“She’s getting worse, isn’t she?”
“It’s those damn sleeping pills she’s been taking. Makes her groggy and forgetful. Anyway, your mother’s always been a little squirrelly.”
“Not this squirrelly.”
“You don’t think so, eh?” He reached for his wallet, which sat on the table, and pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping. “You take a look at that.”
Turtle Valley Page 4
