Gus is saddling up Star and Pride right now, and Beth just arrived with lunch, so I’ll send this note back with her. We’ll take short trips up the mountain again tonight as we did last night, following the old Indian trails, and keep checking back at the farm. I hate to leave you and Beth and the girls alone here for long, as John’s mental state has likely deteriorated further. But the cops won’t let the other searchers hunt for him in the night, and I don’t want to search for him alone in case we come on him and he thinks I’m “the enemy.” I’ll need Gus’s help to bring him down once we find him, in any case.
My dearest Maud, keep the door barred with a chair, but don’t worry yourself too much. I’ve found every man I’ve searched for, you know that. Try toq sleep, or keep yourself busy, dearest; it is always the best remedy for a troubled mind. Why not make a pan of your wonderful fudge? It will give you something to do while you wait, and distract John once we bring him back home. But save a little for me, will you? Oh, my dearest, I so love your fudge, and your company.
I will be forever your Mr.,
Valentine
April 9, 1965
My dear Valentine,
Thank you for leaving your copy of The Prophet on the porch. Beth found it and brought it in. Thank you, also, for volunteering to be the one to tell me the RCMP have called off the search. I know that must have been difficult for you, and I did not make the task easy. You startled me, coming up behind me while I was hanging out the laundry, and then the news rather left me raw. I’m sorry I simply walked off without speaking to you. I cried all afternoon, and even as I milked the cows, but now, it seems that I have been wrung dry.
As I walked to the barn to milk the cows in the twilight, I swore I saw John at the four fenceposts that mark the old well, stooping to pick shooting stars for me as he did each spring without fail. Then he was gone. I imagine it was a hallucination induced by my grief, as you and the others tell me he likely died of exposure in those cold mountain rains. Even so, today after you told me the news, I walked up to the bench land to call his name, as I have done almost every day of the search, thinking that, like a wounded cat, he might come home for me, when he wouldn’t for anyone else. He hasn’t answered my calls, of course, though he has entered my dreams nightly, taking my hand and offering me fistfuls of shooting stars.
Did Beth tell you the kitchen window broke when the meteor hit, just before John disappeared? I was standing at the window—looking over at your cabin, I’m ashamed to say—when I saw that bright light travel across the sky, and then there was a flash like a bomb exploding as it hit the mountain. The meteor lit up the whole of Turtle Valley as if it were day; I could clearly see you walking across your yard with the pitchfork to feed the cows. The initial streak of light surprised me so much that I put my hand to the glass, and I was standing like that when the sound reached us. In the instant before the meteor hit, I saw John’s face reflected in the window behind me; it startled me as I felt he had caught me looking across the field at you, and I feared what he might do. But then there was that bright flash and the boom shook the house, and his scream rang out just as the glass shattered.
John fell to the floor, shrieking, holding his head, just as you described him that day the army came to blow up the Japanese balloon. I knelt on the floor and held his head because I couldn’t think what else to do. But he pulled away from me. His eyes were open, bulging, as they were so many nights when he sat up in bed with the night terrors, but he didn’t see me. I wasn’t there for him; this house, this farm, and everything that was familiar weren’t there for him.
I wish now I had found a way to awaken him from that horrible dream, to bring him back here to this kitchen. But I thought at the time it was better to let him be, to let the terror flood over him and pass on as it had during all those nights of our marriage. If I tried to touch him, he only became more frightened. So I withdrew, to sit in my rocking chair. I didn’t accompany him down that slide into his nightmare. That was where I first failed him.
He jumped up and grabbed the gun off the rack and put on his glasses, as he did when he was about to go out hunting. I took his arm in some effort to stop him but he pushed me to the floor and lifted the gun over his head. His intent was to hit me with the butt of the gun, but then his eyes focused on me for a moment and he pulled back and headed out the door. “I’m going up there to get the sonofabitches,” he said. I called after him but that was the last I saw of him: marching through the rain in that circle of yard light, wearing his puttees from the war, his jack shirt, and the big black hat, before he disappeared into the night.
As for that kiss the next night, there is nothing to forgive. I was finishing up the dishes when I saw the light in the cabin and saw you feeding the cows, and so I ran right over in the rain, hoping for some news of John. As you told me you had found no sign of John, I felt the panic of a mother whose child has wandered out of her sight. I didn’t know what to do. But then you wrapped your warm coat around me, and pulled me out of the rain, and held me, and let me cry into your chest. I have always loved the smell of you: pipe tobacco and coffee, hay and the balsam boughs you stuff your mattress with. The kiss was not stolen; it was freely given. It made everything seem all right, as your kisses always have.
But everything isn’t all right, is it? With Beth’s help I replaced the shattered kitchen window with a warped pane of glass we had left over from building the greenhouse all those years ago (so it’s through this memory of you that I now look over at your cabin and the unfinished house). But I fear I can’t fix what else ails this family.
After that kiss, as you and Gus went out to hunt for John, Beth kept watch with me in the kitchen. As you had suggested, I made a pan of fudge and did housework to keep myself occupied. And when that was done, I sat in my rocker with Katrine asleep in her basket at my feet. I must have fallen asleep because Beth told me that when she saw the light in your cabin, she slipped out to take over that pan of fudge, to see what the news was. It was then, she said, that she saw a cougar skulking about the barns.
I woke to gunshots, four shots altogether, and stepped out onto the porch, but I could see very little past the yard light. Your voices were murmurings in the black. Then you walked into the yard light supporting Gus, and his arm was hanging, bloodied, at his side, and I feared the worst at that moment, as I still do. You told me that you had just shot a cougar that had followed you down off the mountain. You said John had shot Gus on the mountain, and had then fled. But it was a fresh wound to Gus’s arm, not one from even an hour or two before, I’m sure of it. I have seen so many wounds. I was an ambulance driver in the Great War, you remember.
And it is so odd how you have all withdrawn from me this week, how it seems there is an invisible, uninvited guest sitting in on my dealings with Beth, or Gus, or you. Some ghost listening in, who keeps each of you from being candid with me.
Oh, Valentine, I want to cry, because right now, as I’m finishing this letter to you, the radio is playing our song, “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” It is such a strange coincidence, not only because it is our song, but because the lyrics seem to sum up exactly what I am thinking: if it were only you and I, if there were no other considerations, then we could go back to loving in the same old way. But it’s not just you and I, is it? There is this ghost haunting us.
Tonight after I milked the cows, I walked over to your cabin, to say thank you for all your efforts and to offer my apology for my behaviour earlier today, and perhaps to work up the confidence to talk with you about much that I’ve written here. But you weren’t there, and so, thinking you were feeding the cows, I walked over to the pasture by the unfinished house. It was there that I saw something glinting in the grass by the old house. Valentine, it was John’s glasses. I tucked them away in their case and in an envelope out of view, and I haven’t spoken to Beth or Gus about them. But all this has left me with a question, a terrible question that I barely dare to ask. But I will, my love, because nothing c
an come of us until it is answered.
What happened that night, the night we kissed? Did you kill John?
22.
LIGHTS BLAZED FROM THE KILN SHED and the CD player blasted out J.J. Cale’s old tune “Crazy Mama.” Jude moved back and forth at a hectic, choreographed pace. Within the seconds that it took him to move the pots from the kiln to the garbage cans, they faded in colour from that glorious yellow to the orange-red of a stove burner, and then to the browns, yellows, and whites of the glazes.
“Hasn’t some fire marshal come to give you hell yet?” I said.
“A cop came by late this afternoon, told me to shut it down. I said I would as soon as I had finished firing that load.”
“And yet here you are.”
“It’s my last firing before my show next week. In any case, I’m just about done.”
I turned down the volume on the CD player. “You knew I would come. You played our song.”
“It was meant as an invitation. I’ve been playing it on repeat ever since that bizarre little calf-killing episode this afternoon.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t been there for any of it.”
He used the tongs to carry another vase to a garbage can. “I didn’t understand what you were up against until I saw it in action today. You and Ezra are in a rut, stuck in this thing that’s happened to you. You’re both so angry at each other. Just like Lillian and I were before she left.”
I shook my head. “He can’t help his anger. It’s a handicap, a symptom of the stroke.”
Jude put the vase in the can and flames flared up as the newspaper ignited. “But it still pisses you off.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about Ezra,” I said. “I wanted to show you something.”
“I can’t stop to look right now.”
“These are letters Uncle Valentine wrote to my grandmother. They were in the partition wall between the kitchen and Val’s room. And there’s a letter here from my grandmother; she died the night she wrote it so she never had a chance to give it to him. She asks him, ‘What happened that night, the night we kissed? Did you kill John?’”
Jude stopped beside me a moment, tongs in hand, to glance at the letter before heading back to the kiln. “Jesus.”
I followed him. “Here she talks about hearing ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ on the radio just after Valentine told her they had called off the search, the night she died. The weird thing is, this past week I heard the piano in Mom’s parlour playing that song, but there was no one in the room and the piano was closed. My grandmother says here that it was their song, Maud and Valentine’s song.” I sorted through the other letters in my hand. “My grandmother and Valentine were lovers that year my grandfather was in Essondale, after the military blew up the Japanese balloon. Valentine wrote to her, trying to make Maud reconsider after she ended the affair.” I held up the letter. “Here he begs her to leave her husband. But she stayed.”
“And what would you do if I begged you to leave your husband?”
I crossed my arms and looked out the open door. I could make out the lights of my parents’ house, but the smoke was too thick to see who was in the kitchen. The wind swirled the smoke and ash into eddies, creating the effect of a snowstorm on this hot August evening. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Shit!”
I turned back to Jude. He was standing at the kiln, attempting to lift a pot from it. “What is it?”
“I fucked up. I wasn’t focussing on what I was doing and now I can’t get either of these vases out without lifting one or the other out of the way. This is so stupid.”
“Can I do anything?”
“Yes. Get those gloves on.” He nodded at a pair of Kevlar gloves sitting on a stack of bricks behind the kiln. “And that shirt.”
I quickly slid on the Nomex shirt. When I put on the gloves they extended up to my shoulder; they weren’t only dirty brown, but burned.
“I’ll hold this vase to the side while you reach into the kiln and grab this other one by the neck.”
“With my hands?”
“Yes! There’s no time to dick around. Reach in and pull it out in one motion, then set it in one of those cans.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I do it all the time.”
“No.”
“Katrine! Now!”
I reached into the kiln and grabbed the vase by the neck. It glowed yellow, a vessel fashioned from fire, and the molten glazes slipped across its surface like spirits. The heat on my face and chest was incredible, much more intense than the blast from an open oven when I reached in to take out a roast. I felt it through the gloves and tried my best not to touch the stiff material from within; the gloves began to smoke. The smell of burning leather.
“Quick!” said Jude. “Into a garbage can.”
I settled the vase into a nest of newspaper within a can and the paper immediately caught fire, sending flames and smoke up around me. I put on the lid and flicked the burning gloves from my hands. Then I watched as he pulled the remaining vase from the kiln and placed it in a garbage can. He removed his gloves to shut the kiln off.
“You all right?” he said.
“I think so.” It was then I smelled burning hair; I ran a finger over my eyebrows to make sure I still had them.
Jude smiled. “They’re still there,” he said. “Your hair is a little singed, though,” and he tucked my windblown hair back behind my ear, arranging it as he had for my portrait all those years ago. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? If you can handle reaching into fire like that, don’t you think you can handle striking out on your own?” He grinned. “Don’t you think you can handle me?” But he didn’t let me answer. He kissed me.
“We’re exposed here,” I said, looking over at the road. The wind had shifted, sweeping some of the smoke away. “Someone passing by could see us.” But when he kissed me again, I kissed him back. He pulled me closer and ran a hand up to my breast. I felt him grow against my thigh.
His cellphone rang but he ignored it and kissed my cheek, my neck. “You should answer it,” I said.
“Let it ring.” But the phone didn’t stop. “Damn it,” he said. He picked up the cell from his worktable. “Hello?” he said, then “Sure,” and he held out the phone. “It’s for you.”
“Me?” I took the phone. “Hello?”
“Kat, you better come home.”
“Val?”
“It’s Dad. I think it’s time.”
“Oh, God.”
“And Kat, go to the door and look back at the house.”
Val stood outside on the steps under the porch light. She waved. Inside the kitchen the dark outline of a figure stood at the window, backlit from the lights within. Ezra.
“We can see you, Kat,” said Val. “We can all see you.”
23.
THE FIRE WAS NOW SO LOW on the hillside that it filled the room with a reddish glow, lighting up the objects on the bedside table: my grandmother’s carpetbag, the fresh towel I had placed there when we arrived, the baby oil, the little teddy bear tucked into the Kleenex box. I had stared at these objects for more than two hours, unable to sleep. Except for my hospital stay when I gave birth to Jeremy, and those two weeks following the stroke when Ezra was in hospital, he and I had never before spent a night in separate beds. And even then, on that first evening, the nurses had placed a cot right next to his bed for me. I didn’t think I would sleep, but I did, and though Ezra’s mind was so terribly confused, his body turned to hold mine.
Ezra had once told me that the women of his childhood church would comfort a new widow by sleeping with her, on the night of her loss and for a fortnight after, to make the transition into widowhood less lonely. I had thought it an odd practice at the time, but understood it those first few nights I slept by myself while he was in the hospital. I knew even then that I was losing him. Val came to be with me, and once she arrived in Chilliwack I took comfort from her body in bed next to mi
ne. Her heaviness and warmth were a soothing presence.
I got up and shuffled to Val’s old room and pushed the door open slowly so its creak wouldn’t wake Jeremy. Ezra slept on a makeshift bed on the floor next to Jeremy’s; his sheets were kicked down to his feet. I had come with the intention of running a hand along his cheek to wake him, to invite him back to our bed to talk, as we had not been able to the night before, to end this tension that hung in the house along with the smell of smoke. But now that I was here, I found that I could not. I watched the rise and fall of his chest as it became shallower, and when it stopped altogether I bent over him, waiting, listening, willing his breath to begin again. When his breath did surface, a bubble that opened his mouth, I turned and ran a hand down my son’s cheek until Jeremy grunted, turned his face to the wall, and brushed my hand away.
In the kitchen, my mother was asleep in her rocker with Harrison in her lap and the kitten at her feet, the clutch of Grandma and Uncle Valentine’s letters in her hand. I pushed open the door to Dad’s room quietly, so as not to wake her. The room was dark. Only a small table lamp lit up the corner where Val snored lightly in the easy chair beside Dad’s bed. I touched her arm and she startled and looked up at me, confused in her exit from sleep, her eyes dull and cobwebbed with exhaustion. “My shift,” I said
She stood and I took Dad’s hand and leaned gently against his chest so I could speak into his ear. “Dad, I’m here.”
“He knows you’re here,” said Val. “He can hear you.”
But in the way a sleeper hears the scurry of a mouse, I suspected. The whispers of night sounds were woven into his dreams.
“Has he spoken?”
Turtle Valley Page 18
