Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  “Life goes on here too, I guess. Seems crazy, doesn’t it, to bring Dad home to this?” I nodded at the haze of smoke around us, the ash fluttering down from the burning forest above, the bomber dropping its load on the fire—now more than halfway down the mountain—and the forestry trucks rumbling by.

  “Gus in any kind of shape to take a visitor?”

  “A nurse is checking him over now,” I said. “He was in a lot of pain so she’s putting him on a higher dose of morphine. He isn’t talking much anymore, but he can still hear you if you want to sit and chat later.” I nodded at the calf. “He was embarrassed about the calf, about not taking care of it himself. He didn’t want you to see it.”

  “That’s just dumb. Wish I could’ve been more help these last couple of years.” He looked around the yard. “You got something I can use for a table, put my stuff on?”

  “Sure.” Together we carried the patio table over to the corral, the umbrella turning circles as we walked.

  “I hear you and Ezra just bought a farm,” Dan said.

  “A quarter section without a house, close to my in-laws’ place. We’re using their equipment until we get on our feet.”

  “You’re not living with your mother-in-law.”

  “No. We’re renting a house a couple of miles down the road.” A farmhouse just five hundred square feet in total, with a musty unfinished basement. A tiny, elderly woman named Alice owned the place. She couldn’t be five feet tall, and her husband had built the house fifty years before to suit his petite wife. Ezra claimed he was now doing the same for me. He hoped to build a house with spacious bathrooms and high ceilings so we would never feel constrained to hunker down. For the time being, though, we lived in a rented house built for another, and my back ached with the effort of stooping to fit this little woman’s world.

  I helped Dan cart all he needed from his truck to the table: his .22-calibre rifle, a handsaw, chains, knives and a breadboard to cut the organs on, a sharpening stone, towels and rubber gloves, a bucket to wash his hands in, a pail for the liver and heart.

  “Got something to ask you about,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I just found out from Val that Grandpa died on that mountain.” I nodded at the smoke-covered hills. “I came across some newspaper clippings about it last night, how he shot Dad.”

  Dan turned away with a pail, to fill it at the tap on the side of the house. I followed. “I was wondering if you could tell me what you remember.”

  He bent to turn on the tap, then stretched his back as the bucket filled. “Can’t you ask Beth about that? She’d know more than me.”

  “Mom has been … reticent in talking to me about it. I understand that there was a manhunt for your father. That Uncle Valentine led the search.”

  He turned to look at me. “You know what I felt when I heard they’d given up the search? Relief. Isn’t that terrible? I was relieved for myself, and for my mother and Beth as well, that none of us had to deal with him any more.” He bent over to retrieve the bucket. “But then after they gave up the search, I wondered for a long time if Dad wasn’t still alive, if he hadn’t simply gotten it into his head to take off. I still wonder that—if he hadn’t started up a whole new life somewhere else.”

  I followed him back to the patio table. “Where would he have gone?”

  “Hell if I know. Nothing he did made sense. He was a psychotic bastard. I don’t know how many times he beat the crap out of me with a razor strop. There, there, Mom always said. Dad just can’t help it! I suppose he really couldn’t help it, but I wish to God my mother had found a way to protect Beth and me from him. When I was five years old I dropped a tin my mother kept her loose change in—”

  “Mom still has it,” I said. “I saw it in one of the boxes Val packed. A Nabob tea canister full of coins.”

  “That’s it. Dad was hanging a picture for Mom when I dropped the tin and it made a hell of a racket. Pennies all over the floor. He swung around and bashed me in the head with the hammer. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill me. As I got older I had bugger-awful headaches and I remember my mother giving my father this look when I had one, blaming him, you know, and Dad would turn away, and leave the house.”

  I watched as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. The scar that was still visible there. “There are a few things about his disappearance that don’t quite make sense to me,” I said.

  “There’s a lot about that story that doesn’t make sense. Like how’d he get lost in the first place? He knew those hills like the back of his hand.”

  “So you don’t think he was ever actually lost?”

  Dan shrugged. “Lots of people have gone missing in that bush over the years. During the war several kids on the reserve disappeared; there were stories about something in the bush picking them off one by one. A bear killed that girl—what was her name now?—Sarah Kemp, around that time. Plenty of others died of exposure up there. There was that herder who worked for old man Peterson. He just disappeared one day. I guess most of the men in the valley were out looking for him, including me, just like they all went out looking for my father. We finally gave up when the snows came. Next spring another herder found the guy’s shirt and his bones scattered around a downed log. Looks like the guy had gotten lost and crawled into the space under this fallen tree to get some shelter and died there.” He looked up at the mountain. “Yeah, plenty of folks have gone missing in those hills.”

  “But you don’t think your father was one of them.”

  “There were so many things that didn’t add up. There were shots that night after he disappeared, here on Valentine’s place, when Dad was supposed to have shot Gus up in them hills. Valentine said he shot a cougar that was following him and Gus. But folks up and down the valley heard four shots and I never knew Valentine to waste more than two bullets on an animal. He always went for a clean kill; he’d give up a hunt if he couldn’t get it.”

  “It was dark.”

  “Sure. But then you tell me how Gus survived that trek down from the hills that night with a gunshot wound. When I was in school, there was that McPherson kid who was shot in the arm by Jimmy Walters. They were messing around, playing soldiers. Gun went off as Jimmy was lowering it. Bam, right in the arm. Severed an artery. That kid was dead in the time it took Jimmy to run from the field to the house for help.”

  “So—what? You think Valentine was covering things up with the story about the cougar? You think he killed your father?”

  “I didn’t say that. Your father was the one who took the shot to the arm.” When he saw the look on my face he said, “It was just something folks wondered about at the time, that maybe Gus shot my father to protect himself. I’m not saying he did. Or they figured it was Valentine who shot Dad. There were rumours over the years of a thing going on between him and Mom. Valentine was forever walking over to Mom’s while Dad was away on one of his little ‘vacations.’”

  “And nobody told your father?”

  “Hell no. I imagine they were all glad Mom was getting a little pleasure out of life. Whatever form it took. I’m not saying there was any hanky-panky between her and Valentine, though there were plenty of folks in the valley who were sure that was going on too. Mom was such a dignified lady, always very polite and careful. She wouldn’t have lowered herself to anything like that. Given what my father was capable of, she would have been terrified to. But she was friendly with Valentine. And she needed that, living with my father. Nobody faulted her for that.”

  “I don’t understand. If things didn’t add up the way you say, why would the RCMP believe Valentine?”

  “Valentine had worked with the cops for years; any time somebody went missing in these hills, he led the search. He knew all the guys at this detachment. And nobody in the valley was going to say a word against him to the cops. Everybody liked Valentine. Most of the valley owed him for some favour. I remember when Mona Moses was sick with pleurisy, Valentine lent her enoug
h to cover the hospital bills, and helped out with her field work besides. On the other hand, nobody missed my father when he disappeared. Mona Moses always said someone should take a gun to him and put him out of his misery, though you know, she still made Dennis and Billy drink all that milk they took from his cows.”

  “What do you mean, they took milk from his cows?”

  “Beth never told you that story?” Uncle Dan laughed. “Dennis and Billy were a couple of Native boys Dad had working for him, both of them about my age. One night they got it into their heads to get up early, milk out his cows before Dad had a chance to milk them himself, so he’d wake to a bunch of dry udders and wonder what the hell was the matter with them. Jesus, the things they did just to drive him crazy.”

  “This Billy and Dennis you’re talking about, was either of them the hired hand your father fired at?”

  He nodded and pointed at the outbuildings, the old hired hand’s cabin disintegrating into the ground. “You can still see the bullet hole where my father shot through the door, but he managed to miss Billy altogether.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, I think he thought Billy and Beth were going at it in there.”

  “Was that a possibility?”

  He laughed. “You’ll have to ask your mother about that.”

  I glanced toward the kitchen where my mother sat. “I imagine Billy left at that point.”

  “Beth asked him to. She was afraid, for Billy and herself, of what Dad might do. So Billy joined up, got himself killed in the Netherlands instead. Good thing for Gus that Dad was away in the nuthouse for that whole year when he and Beth hooked up; they were married before Dad got back so he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. My father would have driven any of Beth’s suitors away.”

  I watched him for a time as he sharpened his butchering knives. I thought I knew my family, and yet here were all these stories I had never heard before. Hearing them now, from Uncle Dan, left me feeling like an outsider, uncertain of my place within my family.

  “I understand from your father’s files and what my Mom says that he was shell-shocked, and brain-injured.”

  “Yeah, well, those doctors they send you to like to complicate things, make you talk about your feelings and all that. But I figure what hit me after my war, what hit my father after his, was no more complicated than what hit this barn cat I got. He was a cocky tom, strutting around, terrorizing every other cat. Then he gets hit by a car in front of our place. So I take him inside the barn, put him in a cage. You know how cats are. They’ll heal themselves if you keep them locked up. In a couple of months his bones mended. But the fear didn’t; it stayed in that cat’s bones. He wasn’t cocky no more. Now he jumps when I go by him with the wheelbarrow. Fear like that stays inside you forever if you don’t find a way to get rid of it.” He looked up at a helicopter flying overhead. “I showed you that postcard that Dad took off the body of a young German soldier he killed, didn’t I? It’s still got the mud of the trenches on it.”

  “Did your mother ever say why she stayed with your father?”

  “No, no. She never talked like that, how women do today, about their feelings. It would have been the best thing for all of us if she had left when we were still young. The best thing for my father too, I think. You use a crutch long enough, you never get rid of your limp, eh? He was like a child in so many ways. Mom made it worse by covering for him. I often think it would have been better for him if she’d just let him get himself into real trouble. Well, he did, of course. But then she was always there to clean things up for him, make things right.”

  “But what would he have done?” I asked. “If she’d left him?”

  “I don’t know. I should have done something to take care of her. Him too, I suppose.” Dan looked down at his feet. “You know, I’d meet Mom in Kamloops or phone her every so often, but I only saw my father once in all those years after I left home, and that was by accident. I walked into a café in Kamloops with my boys—they were maybe eight and ten at the time—and there he was, standing at the counter with a cup in his hand, giving the waitress hell because she hadn’t used a decent tea. Nabob tea was the only one he’d drink. The poor girl was just dumbfounded, of course. She didn’t know why this man was yelling at her. I put my hand on his arm and he swung around with his fist up like he was going to punch me. I said, ‘Whoa, Dad. Take it easy.’ He looked at me like he was trying to figure out who the hell I was. Then I said, ‘Thought you might want to meet your grandsons.’ You know what he said? ‘There’s two things I hate: one is this dishwater they try to pass off as tea. The other is kids.’ He threw change down on the counter, grabbed that big black hat of his from the rack, and stomped out of the café. That’s the last I saw of my father.”

  Ezra had acted that badly with waitresses and service staff at times following his stroke. We had once planned a late lunch out together without Jeremy, but when we arrived the restaurant we had chosen was closed. A waiter who was sweeping the floor opened the door to tell us the place would open again at five p.m. “What the fuck kind of spot is this?” Ezra said to him. “What kind of shithouse eating place closes at two o’clock?” I dragged him away from the door, mumbling that it didn’t matter, we could go to another place, but he swore on, kicking stones from the sidewalk as the waiter looked on.

  “You’re supposed to love your father,” said Uncle Dan. “But how do you love a man who acts like that?”

  19.

  THE SCREEN DOOR SQUEAKED OPEN and Ezra followed my mother and Val outside carrying his coffee cup. I had asked Val to keep him inside while we butchered the calf. When I caught her eye, looking for an explanation, she glanced at Ezra and shrugged by way of apology. “Where’s Jeremy?” I asked Ezra.

  “He got groggy watching cartoons. I tucked him into bed.” He pointed with his chin at the field. “What does he want?”

  I turned to find Jude walking past the old well towards us. “I don’t know.” I watched him as he approached, hoping for some indication of what he was up to, but he kept his eyes to the ground.

  My mother handed Dan a cup of coffee and took a sip from her tea. “Thanks for taking the cattle, Dan. I don’t know what we would have done otherwise.”

  “No skin off my nose,” he said. “Got to keep myself busy. Don’t know what the hell I’m going to do when the dairy sells. You get attached to things, you know, your animals, or your farm or truck or whatever, even when you think you aren’t, even when they’ve been a whole lot of trouble. You find that out when you try to get rid of them.” He looked over my shoulder. “Looks like you got company.”

  When Jude reached us he nodded at Val and my mother, but didn’t look at me or Ezra. Instead he directed his attention to Uncle Dan. “I saw the trailer. Figured you might need help loading the cattle.”

  “I’ll butcher that calf first,” Dan said. “Don’t want to load the cows up too soon and have them all crowded in there on a hot day like this.”

  Ezra took my arm and held on too tight. “You jostled Dan into killing that calf?” Ezra said.

  “Please don’t make a scene.”

  My mother glanced at Ezra and away. “I hate butchering time,” she said.

  “Well, no wonder.” Dan spoke to Jude as he loaded his rifle. “Our dad took the advice of an old German butcher not to stun a cow, but to cut its throat and let it bleed. He always said the animal bled cleaner that way, that the meat wouldn’t be riddled with bloody cuts. The poor creature stumbled around, slowly bleeding to death, until it collapsed to its knees. Horrible to watch.” He picked up a knife with a broken handle. “This was the knife he used. It’s one of the few things of his that I’ve got. Best butchering knife I’ve ever found.”

  “I could never kill an animal,” said Mom. “Even when my father ordered me to.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Val. “Remember that time that turkey tom went after me? I was, what, four? There I was running with this bird chasing after me. Mom was chopping firewood at the time and
she threw her axe, maybe just to scare the bird, but the axe hit it, cut its head clean off. The bird’s head went one way and its body kept on running after me.”

  I laughed. “Mom, warrior princess.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  Dan took a last sip from his coffee and put the cup on the patio table. “Well, I better get at it.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Ezra. He turned to me. “I told you I would do it.”

  “Uncle Dan is here now. He’s got the equipment set up.”

  “You muddled this up for me.”

  “We just had to get it done. It couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “You’re scrambling to make me look poor, in front of Jude.”

  Jude leaned against the fence with his head turned away as if he wasn’t listening. I lowered my voice. “Does that really make sense to you? Why would I do that?”

  “I know I’m a gimp. You don’t have to keep telling me and everyone else about it.”

  “You’re not a gimp. You’ve got a handicap, that’s all. I wish you’d let me help you find a way to manage it.”

  “Manage it, or fix it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m never going to bustle the way you want. I’m never going to be how I was. Why don’t you just shoot a gun to my head. That’s what you do to gimps, isn’t it?”

  I put a hand to the back of my head. The pain there. Two hands squeezing a melon. I started to cry. “I can’t do this! I can’t do this anymore!”

  My mother patted my shoulder to comfort me or caution me against further outbursts, but I pulled away, wiping my face. “Let’s just get on with it.”

  My uncle put the gun down on the table and held both hands up. “I don’t want to get in the middle of this.”

  I looked up at Ezra but his jaw was clenched and his face was mottled with rage. He shook his head and strode back to the house.

  “Fine,” I said. “Fuck! I’ll do it.” I picked up the gun and trained it on the calf as it stumbled this way and that, kicking up its legs haphazardly before falling. Its mother bawled for it from an adjacent field where I’d put it so it wouldn’t have to watch, and I thought of the barn cat we’d had in Chilliwack, leaping around my legs as I held an armful of kittens I had just discovered, their tiny, tender bodies, their bones through fur, the tick of their heartbeats. I couldn’t drown them in the bucket of water, though I had been certain that I could. The last thing we needed was more cats. But the insistence of the mother cat, its yowling. Its paws against my thighs, not its claws; it wasn’t threatening. It was pleading.