I wiped my eyes. “I’ll find something for you to play with in a minute, Jeremy. I just need a moment.”
He sat on the steps with me and looked down at the broken elephant. “Is Daddy going away?”
“He’s just getting more boxes from the barn.”
“There’s fire in my head.”
I held him and put my hand to his forehead. “You mean you’re worried about the fire?” When he didn’t respond, I hugged him close. “The fire is scary, but when we’re told to go, I’ll make sure we get out of here before the fire arrives. Okay?”
“Okay.” He wrapped his arms around me, settling his head into my neck, and I rocked him. Jude stepped up to the door of the kiln shed and looked out across the field. When he saw Jeremy and me he waved. I held up my hand to him.
“Can I play with that guy’s Lego?” Jeremy asked. “Can we go to his house?”
I stood and held out my hand to him. “Why don’t we do that? There’s something there I’d like to find. Will you help me?”
He nodded and I led him across the yard, heading for the trail to Jude’s house. I glanced toward the barn once, searching for Ezra. But as soon as I caught sight of him watching us from the door, he turned away and disappeared into the darkness of the barn. The smell of the smoke in the air; a Christmas spruce burned after the holiday was over.
17.
I APPROACHED THE DOOR to Jude’s studio holding Jeremy’s hand. The inside walls were covered in posters from the many pottery shows he had participated in over the years, and clay dust caked everything: the turned pots and the shelves that held them; Jude’s containers of brushes and tools; the television and VCR in front of his wheel. The shelf of mementoes, presumably from Andy’s childhood, that were stacked one on top of the other: Thomas trains, a remote-control jeep, a porcelain baby cup that Jude had no doubt made himself, airplanes and Hot Wheels, and a black ouija board embossed with the alphabet in red.
Jude stood with his back to the door at one of the long work-tables, dipping what appeared to be the base of a table lamp into a bucket of glaze that was thick and creamy-smooth, the consistency and colour of buttermilk. The lamp base had already been dipped and left to dry once. This was its final, decorative glaze. Years ago I had watched him paint the glazes on, twisting and manipulating the brush with the finesse of a Japanese calligrapher. “You’re not using brushes anymore?” I asked.
He startled and turned, then grinned, before sponging off the bottom of the freshly glazed lamp base and putting it on a rack to dry. He picked up a vase and turned it upside down to dip it into the bucket. “Brushwork is too predictable. All my pots were looking the same. I like the chance happenings, the surprises I get at the end of a firing when I glaze like this.”
“Another firing tonight?”
“The last before the show.” He put the vase on the rack and grabbed a cloth to wipe his hands, then pulled a section of clay from a Rubbermaid plastic bin and handed it to Jeremy.
“Play dough!”
“It’s clay,” I said. “Isn’t it wonderful stuff?”
“Play dough for grown-ups,” said Jude. He lifted Jeremy onto a stool at the worktable so he could model it there.
“You still wedge the clay by hand?” I asked. Years ago he had shown me how to soften the clay into a state in which it could be worked, pushing it down, bringing it up, my whole body rocking; it was very much like kneading a stiff bread dough. My arms had ached for days afterwards.
“Got to do something to stay in shape,” he said. “All that sitting at the wheel makes it hard to keep the weight off.” He patted his belly. “I’ve put on a few pounds.”
I smoothed a hand over my own stomach. “Haven’t we all?”
“You’re perfect,” he said, and gave my hand a little shake for emphasis. “Perfect.” When I looked away at Jeremy, he dropped my hand and said, “How’s your dad?”
“He hardly spoke today.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “He was still quite chatty yesterday, but he’s suddenly withdrawn into himself. Val says she’s worried because he’s got it in his head that he wants to die before the fire forces us out. She says she’s seen it over and over in the clients she works with. They’ll just give up and be dead within days.”
“I’m so sorry, Katrine.” He waved at his potter’s wheel. “Do you have a little time now? Why don’t I set Jeremy up on the wheel so we can talk?”
“Actually, I wonder if I can borrow a hammer and snoop around that unfinished house.”
“A hammer?”
“To pull up the floorboards.”
“I doubt you’ll need one. The cows have ravaged that place.” But he pulled a hammer from a toolbox under the worktable. “What are you looking for?”
“A MacDonald’s tobacco can. I found it there when I was a child. I’m hoping it contains some letters.”
“Let me guess: you think they might be from your grandmother to Valentine?”
When I smiled, he held out his hand to my son. “Well, Jeremy. Let’s go investigate. We’re archaeologists off on a dig.”
Jeremy took Jude’s hand and together they marched off toward the door. “I’m an archaeologist, Mommy!”
A huge pumpkin patch surrounded the bit of unruly pasture Jude kept about the old house. The plants still offered up their huge yellow flowers but the green pumpkins were already beginning to blush orange. Valentine had planted pumpkins decades before, as a contained garden at the back of his cabin, but after his death the pumpkins had propagated and gone wild, so they now crept over the ancient and rusting bits of farm machinery around the barns and grasped the frame of my old bicycle that leaned against the side of a granary. I had left the bike there just before getting a new one for my birthday when I was a child thirty years before, and it was still locked, wheel to wheel, to itself. I had licked those handlebars when I was a girl; they had tasted salty from my hands, then harsh, metallic.
Uncle Valentine’s cabin was to the far right, nestled within what was now a pasture that bordered on the creek. The building was braced by a couple of posts so it wouldn’t collapse. Much of the caulking between the logs had fallen away, so that at sunset the building was shot through with orange-red light, as if it were on fire from within. During my childhood my parents and I had spent many Sunday afternoons in that cabin with Valentine, eating Peek Frean cookies from the tin and drinking “cooked” coffee, as he called it, coffee grounds boiled right in the pot: gritty, thick stuff, so strong we had to suck it through a sugar cube held between our teeth. There were only two rooms in the place, and no door between them. In the back room the bed was always neatly made, and Valentine’s few shirts and trousers were hung on nails pounded into the log walls. Open shelves over the sink held all that he might need: coffee and flour, sugar and canned milk, dried beans and peas and pastas, and preserves he’d canned himself: beets, pickles, and canned plums and peaches; strawberry, raspberry, saskatoon, and lingonberry jam. The place smelled of woodsmoke from the stove, and MacDonald’s pipe tobacco, because my great-uncle was rarely without a pipe, and of canned milk and that thick coffee. He had resisted electricity and indoor plumbing, preferring to cart his water inside in a bucket to wash in an enamel basin, and to make use of the outhouse hidden within lilac bushes even into the 1970s. I thought him ancient, a man from another time entirely, my grandmother’s time.
To the side of Valentine’s cabin, the unfinished house was so weathered that it looked like a natural part of the landscape, as if it had grown from the earth. Valentine had never lived in it; no one had. The windows had long ago been broken by hail or thrown rocks. Jude’s big lanky tabby sat on one windowsill, its colours blending with the wood of the wall; if it hadn’t sung for my attention, I wouldn’t have noticed it sitting there. The Bonica roses Valentine had planted here decades before had spread, growing wild and ragged, but still offered sweet red blossoms well into fall.
Inside, the subfloor was strewn with glass shards, torn clothing, and beer bottl
es. A hornet’s nest was affixed to one corner of the hallway. Under this, graffiti were scrawled in black spray paint: Death to Cows and This is where I live and You do not want to disturb me. The stairwell to the upper story had been removed altogether. Jude was right; the cows had done so much damage to the floorboards that we hardly needed a hammer. There were great holes where they had stepped right through the shiplap boards, exposing the joists beneath.
“I shouldn’t have Jeremy in here.”
“I want to see!”
“We’ll watch him,” said Jude. “He’ll be fine.”
I took Jeremy’s hand and led him over the holes in the floor and into what would have been the living room, where the floor was in better shape. A mouldy mattress lay under the window. On the far wall, in dripping red letters, was written Too bad you found your keys.
I pointed at the mattress. “You’ve had visitors, I see.”
“Yeah, well, every so often I have to chase some local kid out of here. An empty house seems to attract them.” We turned to look at the walls around us, at the graffiti there, the glass crunching beneath our feet. One wall read, Danger! Another read, A gradual instant of destruction. Low on this wall, over a series of knotholes, was written, I can see you!
We wandered through the house, to the room at the back that would have been the kitchen, and then to the small room off the downstairs bedroom that my father had roughed in, a room that would have become the bathroom. It smelled vaguely of skunk. Someone had spray-painted a “mirror” here, a woman’s face within a frame. Over top of it was written How much time have you spent here waiting?
“I hope none of them found that can.”
I led Jeremy back into the living room and Jude followed. “So, where was it?” he asked.
I tried to picture the house as I remembered it from my childhood. A floorboard. A marble hidden beneath a joist. A shadow on the wall. Bits of ragged memory. My childhood in tatters. I would lose this time with Jude in the same way. My recollections of the moment I was in now—which seemed so very sturdy—would shake and shift like this old building, and finally fall. In a decade or two I would remember only this plank under my feet, this nail, but not the whole structure, how it stood on this hot summer’s day.
I knelt beside Jeremy, to get a child’s-eye view of the cracks between the boards, the dust, the glittering glass. Then I found the moment I had been looking for. I gripped the loose floorboard and yanked it up, exposing the joists beneath.
“There it is!” Jude said. The MacDonald’s tobacco tin; much of the paint was worn away and the tin was rusted badly around the lid. When I couldn’t open it, Jude banged it with the hammer and pried it loose. There were letters inside. A few of the envelopes and the edges of the letters were water-stained, but for the most part they were in remarkably good shape.
“They are my grandmother’s. It’s her handwriting!” I opened one and then another and another. “They’re all notes she wrote to Valentine. Most are just invitations to lunch or thank-you notes for something he helped her with during the times my grandfather was in hospital. Here, look! She’s thanking him for building that greenhouse. Did I ever tell you my grandmother died in that greenhouse? My father found her there. A heart attack.”
He nodded. “You did tell me. You mind if I read a few?”
I gave him a handful and we read.
“This one is curious,” he said. “She writes, As for your last note, there was no need for reminders. I think of such things daily, hourly. It is necessary to think of such things, in order to get through my day. That suggests a lot.”
“But what? What was she thinking of?”
“Him?”
“Or a Bible verse, for all I know. Some passage from Psalms she took comfort in.”
“A lot of these look like they were written in response to something he wrote. So there must have been letters from him.”
“There were. Dad told me last night that he carried letters back and forth between them.”
“Did she keep them?”
“Mom says she’s never found any.”
“Huh. The way your grandmother talks to Valentine about your grandfather in this letter, as if your grandfather is a child they are both responsible for. She describes how she and your grandfather were out walking the property, divining for a well site. Then she writes: You don’t have to tell me again: I know this house will never be built. But if, for a time, with his dream of it he can believe that he is so much better able than he actually is, then it will be a peaceful time for him and for me as well. What he needs is for me to believe he is capable, so he can believe it himself.”
I took the letter from him. “She felt sorry for him.”
“Like you feel sorry for Ezra.”
I looked up at him. “I’m not sure how he’d survive without me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes, but how do you survive?”
“I don’t want to talk about Ezra in front of Jeremy.”
Jude squatted down beside Jeremy. “Did you see that pumpkin patch? How about you go find the biggest, best pumpkin in the whole patch, and when it ripens, I’ll help you make it into a jack-o’-lantern.”
“Pumpkins!”
I watched from just outside the unfinished house as Jude lifted the barbed-wire fence to allow Jeremy to crawl through, and then led Jeremy through the field toward the vines of the wild pumpkin patch; monarch butterflies lifted from the milkweed as they approached and Jeremy jumped this way and that, chasing after them as they fluttered just out of his grasp.
Jude bent over a milkweed plant and showed Jeremy his prize: a monarch clutched his finger. He returned to the unfinished house with the butterfly, but it fluttered away as he held it out for me. His mouth as he smiled. I stepped forward and kissed him but he didn’t respond. His stubble was prickly on my lips. I stepped back. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“No. It’s all right. You just surprised me.”
“I can’t believe some of the things I’ve done this week.”
“You mean coming to see me.”
“I feel, I don’t know, possessed.”
“Like those ants.”
“Ants?”
“They’re taken over by a fungus that eats into their brain and forces them to climb up to the top of a plant and impale themselves, so the fungus can grow in the ant’s body and disperse its spores from up high.”
I laughed. “You are so full of it.”
“No, it’s true. They really exist.” He took my hand and led me back inside the unfinished house, where he ran his fingers through my hair and then pulled my chin up so I would look at him. “All those years ago I let you and me slip away,” he said. “I have another chance here, I think.” He waited a moment as if expecting an answer, and when I didn’t say anything he moved forward, tentatively, to kiss me. His hand on my waist. His thigh against mine. But then I heard the sound of keys jingled within a pocket, a rustle in the grass outside. I stepped back. “Someone’s coming.”
We both listened.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“I heard keys,” I said.
“It’s just Jeremy.”
“No.”
I turned within the unfinished house, looking from window to window as the rustle through grass moved around us, then stopped. An eye in a knothole. “I can see you!” Jeremy sang. The eye moved to another knothole. “Grandpa can see you!” There was again the jingle of keys as footsteps crunched through the undergrowth.
“Jeremy,” I cried. “Jeremy, come here.” But he hadn’t left his pumpkin patch and the dancing monarchs.
“What is it?” said Jude.
“Didn’t you see him?”
“Who?”
I started around one side of the old house. “Hello?” I said. “Can we help you?”
There was a shadow of a man cast on the ground at the other corner. As I stepped forward the shadow receded into the grasses. I turned this corner, and the next, certain each tim
e that the man would be just around the corner—a trail opened through the grass in front of me and I could hear footsteps and the jingle of keys in a pocket—but when I reached Jude as he came around the opposite side of the house, there was no one else there.
“Did you see where he went?” I asked.
“There wasn’t anyone.”
I glanced at my parents’ house. “Could it have been Ezra?”
He took my shoulders and turned me toward him. “Katrine, there was no one here.”
Jeremy pointed to the side of the house where I had seen the eye in the knothole. He covered his eyes with both hands, then opened them wide. “Peekaboo!”
18.
AS I SEPARATED THE GIMPY CALF from its mother and herded it down the driveway to the small corral by the barn, a caravan of army trucks rumbled past the farm, heading up the valley. I had heard on the radio earlier that morning that a hundred members of the Canadian Forces had been called in to help fight the fire as, fueled by winds and the beetle-kill that littered the forest, it continued to rage uncontrolled. No doubt the troops were heading to the fire camp on the Jefferson ranch, which was close to one of the logging roads that led up to the mountain and the front lines of the fire. Private pickups loaded with boxes swerved out of the army trucks’ way as they headed in the opposite direction.
As I locked the calf in the corral, a red Ford pickup pulling a stock trailer drove down the driveway and parked in our yard. It was Uncle Dan. He appeared to be younger than my mother, though he was several years older. He still ran his own dairy, but in recent years he’d relied more and more on hired help.
“Kat!” he said, and he hugged me. “Been a while, eh?”
“A couple of years. Thanks for doing this.”
He waved at the Bombardier droning low overhead. “God, I don’t know how you stand this. Drives my Lab nuts. When these bombers fly overhead on their way to the lake, he hides in the closet. You see Sarah Dalton got married Saturday outside at their folks’ place like they planned? Water bombers and helicopters flying overhead, sprinklers going off all around them.” He laughed. “Life goes on.”
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