“What’s this?”
“Our shivaree. Your mother wrote that and sent it into the paper, like she did all the community news for the valley.”
“What’s a shivaree?” said Jeremy.
“A kind of party,” I said.
“Can I see?” he asked.
“I’ll read it to you.”
NEWLYWEDS FETED
A merry time was had on Saturday evening when a large number of friends and relatives resident in the Turtle Valley district gathered at the new home of Mr. and Mrs. Gustave Svensson. The party was a complete surprise to the young couple who had recently returned from a honeymoon in Vancouver. The evening was enjoyably spent with singing and old-time dancing. After the refreshment period the merrymakers circled Mr. and Mrs. Svensson and sang “For They Are Jolly Good Fellows.”
“I remember Mom telling me about this.”
“Well, she may have told you that version, but I bet she didn’t tell you what really happened. We were living in the hired hand’s cabin on Valentine’s place at the time. Burned down the year you were born. I kept promising her I’d get around to finishing that house of Valentine’s for her. But I never did.” He pointed at the newspaper clipping. “We were just back from Vancouver that day, and came home to a yard full of cars. All those folks thought we were already back and had planned to bang on pans outside, to make a ruckus so we’d come out. But then we weren’t home so they just went on inside to wait. They were dancing when we got there.”
“Dancing?”
“There was always dancing. Sometimes we’d scratch up a platform and dance under the stars if the weather was good. I never went to anyone’s house without my harmonica in my pocket. You had to make your own entertainment then. Wasn’t like there was television. That night Dennis found my mouth organ, Rodney Nicoll found my fiddle, and my Uncle Valentine played his banjo. That cabin of ours had nothing but a rough lumber floor, uneven, full of cracks, so when we danced, dust billowed up from the ground underneath.” He paused to catch his breath. “Beth was no housekeeper even then and the place was a muddle from us moving her things in. No place to boil coffee for that many people, so they’d just gone ahead and cleaned out a crock of pickled cabbage and boiled coffee in that. Tasted like the devil. Somebody brought matrimonial cake and ham sandwiches, but it wasn’t enough to feed that troop, so I cooked up a mess of bannock on a fire outside. Served it up with Valentine’s lingonberry jam.”
My father’s bannock was nothing but lard, flour, salt, and baking powder patted into big rounds and cooked on sticks over a campfire. I’d tried to duplicate the stuff in my kitchen, but it was a disappointing bread when made in the oven. Taken with coffee over an open campfire, though, it was something else altogether: an event, a communion that inspired storytelling.
“All the while I’m making bannock and entertaining those folks, your mother was hiding in the outhouse. I told them she wasn’t feeling well and Dennis joked that she was already pregnant and it was a shotgun wedding, which got a pile of laughs as everyone knew John Weeks, the times he threatened God knows how many neighbours with a gun. But the truth was, Beth couldn’t face all those people. She thought they’d judge her for the jumble in the house, like any of them dancing fools cared. When it came down to it, it wasn’t the mess that bothered her. She was just scared.”
“Of what?”
“Doubt she knew herself. But it kept her from enjoying herself.”
I handed my father the clipping. “Sounds like she came out of that outhouse eventually.”
“Not until everybody left.”
“But it says everyone circled around and sang.”
“They circled around the outhouse singing while I tapped on the door and tried to convince her to come out. Never did get her to open that damn door. Eventually everyone left and I went to bed, and when I woke up I found her on her knees in the kitchen cleaning those dusty floorboards, as if all that scrubbing was ever going to get them clean.”
The screen door opened and my mother set her egg basket on the kitchen counter. She heated up a pan as she washed her hands. “What did Ezra find out there?” she asked. “I saw him carrying something.”
“A turtle.”
“Wonderful! When I was a girl, the turtles crossed that road to lay their eggs in such numbers you couldn’t drive without running over them. Mona Moses told me that this was how Blood Road got its name: it was stained with the blood of turtles. My father wouldn’t drive over them. He’d stop the buggy and have us lift the turtles out of the way. He could be terribly kind, at times.” She dried her hands on a dishtowel. “Now there are so few turtles.”
Jeremy handed me a sheet of paper scrawled with crayon. “I drew you a picture, Mommy!”
“It’s beautiful. Thank you.” Two people, both of them looking rather unhappy, stood in front of a rough red square with a triangle on top scratched all about with red lines, a house on fire. Above it a zigzag in black.
“Grandma and Grandpa,” he said, pointing. “They don’t like their house.”
“Oh? How come?”
“It’s a bad house.”
“Why is it bad?”
“I don’t know.”
I pointed at the zigzag. “What’s this?”
“Lightning. The boom makes Grandpa mad so he runs away.”
“I was struck by lightning,” Mom told him.
“Wow! Really?”
“I was bringing in the cows when I saw it hit the ground, and then it rolled toward me. When it hit, my right arm went numb. I couldn’t use it properly for some time after that, and even when I got better, my arm would fly off and do things by itself.”
“Grandma calls it her lightning arm,” I said. “Isn’t that funny?” A story I never knew whether to believe or not.
“Is Grandpa afraid of lightning?” Mom asked Jeremy.
“I’m not scared,” said Jeremy. “Grandpa’s scared. Grandpa doesn’t like big noises. Noises bug him, like they bug Daddy.”
“Only when he’s wearing a hearing aid,” I smiled at my mother. “Most of the time he doesn’t bother to wear it.”
“Not live Grandpa,” said Jeremy. “Dead Grandpa.” He pointed out the window. “Loud noises scare Dead Grandpa.” He clapped his hands. “Boom!”
I looked out the window in the direction Jeremy pointed. The patch of bush surrounding the old well. The fields of alfalfa beyond. Jude’s home. Valentine’s cabin and the unfinished house. “Where, honey?”
“Boom!”
But there was only Ezra. He came in the house and took his shoes off.
“You finished pruning?” I asked him.
He bent over and undid his runners but said nothing.
“Looks like you did a good job.”
“We’ll have fruit on it next year,” Mom said.
Dad scratched his cheek and glanced at me. “If it survives the fire.”
Ezra looked at me and away, and I felt my throat tighten as I anticipated another argument. But as Ezra sat at the table, something bashed against the kitchen window and we all startled. I saw a tumble of feathers and a flash of red as a bird fluttered backward and then dropped from view. “Oh, Kat, see if that bird is all right, will you?” my mother said.
“Sure. Jeremy, let’s go outside.” I led my son by the hand to hunt through the grass by the house, remembering the many times I had joined my mother in her search for birds that had crashed into the windows. She had cradled them in her warm hands until they fluttered to the lilac bushes, where they sat, dozy, until fully revived. I could walk right up to these dazed birds and stroke them and they would only nip drowsily at my fingers. My mother guarded them from the cats until they rose high enough in consciousness to fend for themselves. She knew about sick things, was at her best, most confident, with sick things.
I found the bird, a male house finch with red cap and breast, suspended on a lower branch of a lilac, unconscious but still alive. Its quick Timex heartbeat, the unbelievable lightne
ss of its body. I cradled it in my hands to show Jeremy, waiting for the moment when it would begin to revive, when I could let it loose among the lilac boughs, but instead the bird arched in seizure, giving a last spread of its wings.
“That bird’s flying,” said Jeremy.
“I think it’s dying.”
“We’ll feed that bird some birthday cake. That will make it happy.”
“Once it’s dead it won’t eat anymore. Or fly.”
Before I could stop him he touched the belly of the bird, and I lifted the finch out of his reach, fearing—what? Lice? The germs wild things carried.
“Grandpa’s dead,” he said.
“He’ll be with us for a while yet.”
“No, that Grandpa.” He pointed at the bush that marked the site of the old well. The old man was there again, turned toward the house, looking our way, though I couldn’t make out his face at that distance.
Ezra opened the kitchen window. “Something’s unhinged with Gus,” he said. Inside, my mother stood with an arm around my father. He was doubled over in his chair, coughing and moaning, with both hands clasped across his chest. His face was grey. Many of the cards he had been playing solitaire with were now on the floor. “I’ll phone for a hospital truck,” said Ezra.
“An ambulance will take half an hour to get here. It’s quicker if we drive him ourselves. Can you start getting Mom organized? She’ll need her pills.”
Ezra nodded and closed the window.
“That bird’s dead?” said Jeremy.
“Just about.” I held the bird a moment longer, as I suspected no other creature would mourn its passing. Its heartbeat slowed until I could feel a pause after each beat. I waited for the next tick. And then the next. But the bird’s chest was still.
6.
MY FATHER GROANED, AND TURNED as best he could in the hospital bed to vomit on the emergency-room floor. I knelt with my mother to clean up the mess with paper towelling. “What am I going to do if he dies?” Mom whispered.
“He isn’t going to die,” I said.
“How do you know?” She looked up, hopeful, as if I had some prescient knowledge. When I didn’t answer, she yanked the paper towel from my hand and pushed me away. I sat back in the chair next to Ezra and watched her as she wiped the floor. I remembered this rage; when Ezra was in hospital in the days following his stroke, I told the nurse that I would be the one to wash my husband’s body, and not her. He was my husband. I had to do something.
That nurse. Jamaican. Always in pink. Pink tunics, pale pink crepe-soled shoes. She kept an Okanagan McIntosh in the pocket of her tunic, and cursed the avocados I brought Ezra as ugly fruit. A joke, she told me. They grow on trees in pairs, like testicles. We feed them to the pigs. She left the basin of warm water and the washcloth by Ezra’s bed, and when she was gone I tugged the curtains around us. The sun shining through the windows lit up the cloth of the curtains so they seemed to glow from within. I had the sensation that I was alone within this noon-filled room, that Ezra was no longer with me, that I was washing my beloved’s dead body. I smoothed the cloth over his nearly hairless chest, the soft skin of his belly, and washed the line of silky, innocent skin between his thigh and scrotum, lifting the pouch to wash beneath, taking note of the details of his skin, making them mine, as if I were touching him for the last time.
This was not mere remembrance. I was there, in that Chilliwack hospital room. I could feel the warmth of the water, the rough texture of the hospital washcloth in my hand as I wrung it out.
Then I was here, in this emergency room in Salmon Arm, surrounded by curtain, sitting beside my father’s bed. I was, for a brief moment, disoriented. How had I gotten here? How could so much time have elapsed? What had I been doing?
My mother tossed the soiled paper towels in the garbage, wiped her hands with an antiseptic wipe, and sat back in an orange plastic chair, squeezing the handles of her handbag with both fists. Ezra leaned against the wall beside her, holding Jeremy.
“I’m bored,” said Jeremy.
“I know,” I said. “We just have to wait a little longer.” I rummaged through my purse and handed him the tiny flap book I kept there for times when we had to wait.
My father was hooked up to a heart monitor. I realized at that moment that I had rarely seen him without a shirt. I had never seen him swim, or go shirtless on a hot day as other men might. When he changed from the work clothes he wore around the farm into a clean shirt and pants for town, he did so behind the closed door of my parents’ bedroom. The skin on his chest and arms, kept from the sun all those years, was shockingly white and youthful, as if his elderly head, hands, and forearms had been affixed to this young body. His nipples were tiny, just dots. There was a large scar on his left arm. The skin around it puckered when he moved.
“You got that scar in a hunting accident, right, Dad?”
“I was cleaning my gun in the toolshed when I dropped it and it went off.”
“Boom!” said Jeremy.
I shushed him and turned back to my father. “Weren’t you carrying it over a fence when it discharged?”
He looked over at my mother. “Yes, of course, that’s right.”
I didn’t pursue the story. There was so much pain in my father’s face. He winced and exhaled a jagged breath. “I don’t understand why it has to hurt so bad,” he said.
“It doesn’t,” said Ezra, and he handed me Jeremy before disappearing behind the curtain. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where’s Daddy going?”
“I don’t know, honey. I’m sure he’ll be right back.” I gave him my notepad and a pen. “Here, draw Mommy a picture.”
Mom took out her writing pad. “Did I do something to offend him?” she asked.
“Ezra? No. Why?”
“He was so angry with Jeremy this morning, when he banged his glass for more lemonade. That was this morning, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I thought maybe I’d done something to annoy him. That he was taking it out on Jeremy.”
“He wasn’t angry with you, or even with Jeremy. He was just overwhelmed.” In fact, he might not even have felt the anger he demonstrated. The counsellor I had talked to at the hospital following Ezra’s stroke had told me that very often a stroke victim would not feel sad when he cried, or angry when he shouted; rather, he was stuck in a behaviour and couldn’t get himself out.
“He hasn’t ever hurt you or Jeremy, has he?” my mother asked.
“No.”
She scribbled the word Emergency on the top of her writing pad and underlined it. “Are you still thinking about having another child?”
“We’ve been trying to conceive. I’ve been hoping to, in any case.”
“I was wondering, after this morning, do you think Ezra could cope with another child?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would be hard on him. But harder on Jeremy and the new baby to have to deal with those outbursts of his, to have to be quiet all the time. My mother was forever telling my brother and me, Do be quiet. Daddy’s not well today. We were made to feel it was our job to keep him calm. Most of the time my brother and I hardly dared talk, unless our father was off the property. It left its mark on me, I think.”
I nodded. I had never known her to yell, though when I was a child, she was quick to anger. Instead, as if growing up quiet had stolen her voice, she whispered her rage.
She turned back to her pad and wrote down the events of the morning, the bird that bashed into the window, the flight into town with my father, the wait in the emergency room. I glanced down at her writing now and again, curious about her take on things, but it was little more than a factual account, and held no revelations.
Ezra returned carrying heated blankets. He uncovered my father and laid the warm blankets over him, then packed the others on top, to keep the heat in. “When I felt pain, the hot was good,” he said.
My father eased a bit, relaxing into the pillows. His breathing
was less laboured. “It’s nice.”
I took Ezra’s hand. “Thank you,” I said. He nodded and lifted Jeremy from my lap.
A doctor pulled back the curtain. “Hello again, Gus. Just couldn’t stay away, eh?”
“This is our daughter Kat,” Mom said. “And her husband, Ezra.”
“Yes, the writer. We’ve met before.” He held out his hand to us both. “Michael Ellis,” he said, and he turned back to my father. “So, let’s take a look at you, Gus. You’ve been having some chest pain?”
My father touched his ribs. “Here.”
The doctor gently probed my father’s ribs and my father flinched.
“The doctor’s hurting Grandpa!” Jeremy said.
I reached over to hold his hand. “No, he’s taking care of Grandpa.”
“Can you describe the pain?” Dr. Ellis asked. “Sharp? Intense?”
Dad sucked in air and nodded. “It’s worse when I move.”
“He was coughing when it started,” I said.
“I wonder if this rib isn’t broken.” Dr. Ellis pulled the covers back up over my father’s chest. “We’ll get you X-rayed right away.” He smiled and was gone through the curtains.
“How long will that take?” Dad asked.
“I’m sure someone will be here right away,” I said.
My father coughed and then grunted. “It hurts so bad,” he said.
“They’ve got to give him something for the pain,” Mom said, and she was off through the curtains, limping between the beds of the emergency room, in search of a nurse.
“Mom, wait.” I caught up with her just as she reached the nurses’ station.
“Do something!” my mother told the nurse standing there. An elderly man in a wheelchair looked up to watch her. “He’s in such terrible pain that he can’t breathe!”
I expected the nurse to calm my mother, to lay a hand on her arm and soothe her as she would a distraught child, but instead she was set in motion by my mother’s panic. “We’ll get him to X-ray,” she said, and followed my mother with a wheelchair. As the nurse and I helped my father up from the bed, Dad’s knees buckled under him and he nearly fell. He winced and held his ribs, grunting and moaning as he settled into the chair.
Turtle Valley Page 5
