She stayed inside as I stepped out to watch the police car park in our yard. A woman officer in a yellow jacket opened the door of the car to yell over the wind. “Mrs. Svensson?”
“I’m her daughter.”
“An evacuation order has been issued. You have ten minutes to leave the area.”
“My father just passed away this morning. They came to take his body only a couple of hours ago. It’ll take us a little bit to gather ourselves.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked back at the house. “Just you and your mother here?”
“My sister left about an hour ago. My son is napping. My husband must be in the barn.”
“That fire is on the move. You need to get out of here. Now.”
“I understand.”
My mother’s face disappeared from the screen door as the police car drove off. When I entered the kitchen I found her sitting in the rocker in the kitchen, pen and paper in her lap, scribbling.
“Mom, we don’t have time for that now,” I said, but she went on writing. I started for Val’s room, to wake Jeremy. Thinking better of it, I turned to the door, intending to alert Ezra first, but there was an old man there, standing on the porch. “Shit!” I said, then, “Can I help you?”
He wore a huge black hat and his face was in shadow. His glasses reflected the light so that I couldn’t see his eyes. He just stood there, wavering back and forth a little as if he was unsteady on his feet.
My mother stood up, setting her chair rocking. “Someone’s here?” Then she took a step back. “Oh, my God.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just that old guy who’s been hanging around.” When I turned back to the door, he was gone. I stepped through the screen door and onto the porch. “Hello,” I said. “Can I help you?” But there was no one in the yard. My mother cam up behind me. “At least we don’t have to be afraid of him anymore,” I said. “He seemed out of it, like he didn’t know where he was. Some kind of dementia, I imagine. You acted like you knew him. Is he a neighbour?”
“No.”
“But you do know him.”
“My father always said he would stay on this farm after his death, and never leave it. My mother often said the same thing, that she imagined she would be with my father after her death, roaming around this farm.”
“She had something to that effect underlined in the copy of The Prophet I found in her carpetbag: You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. You think she really wanted that?”
“It wasn’t so much what she wanted as how she imagined things must be. I don’t think she could conceive of a time when she wouldn’t care for my father. I remember her worrying over that, what would happen to my father should anything happen to her. She knew I couldn’t handle him, and it was obvious that Dan was never going to be around to help.”
“So, what? You’re saying that old guy was your father? A ghost?”
She glanced up at me, then away, to the bush around the old well site.
“Well, on the off chance the old guy isn’t a ghost, I’ll get Ezra to take a look for him while I get you and Jeremy loaded into the truck.”
I strode toward the barn, leaning into the wind, to meet Ezra as he headed out of the building carrying boxes. When I got close enough that I could hear over the wind, he said, “What did the cop want?”
“The fire is coming our way. We have to leave.”
We headed back to the house. “I’ll set the stream up on the roof. There’s a chance we can recover the house if the roof is wet.”
“The sprinkler, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“There was an old guy here just a moment ago. He seemed confused. Can you take a look for him first? I’d hate to see him wandering around in this.” I waved at the soup of smoke that surrounded us, blotting out Jude’s home from view.
I went inside to help Mom gather her things, then carried Jeremy outside to the truck, where I tossed the carpetbag in the front seat. My mother fastened Harrison’s harness to the inside so the cat wouldn’t get away when we opened the door, but allowed the kitten to hop from the seat to the floor, where it chased bits of dried mud.
“Ezra!” I called out. “Ezra?” But my voice was carried off by the wind. The smoke darkened the day into twilight and obscured even our own barns.
“There he is,” said my mother. She pointed at the old well, the figure that appeared and disappeared, revealed and then hidden again by the swirling clouds of smoke. I could hear the crackle of the trees burning on the hills above.
“Ezra?” I said, squinting.
“No.”
“The old guy. I guess I better go get him.”
“It’s no use,” said Mom. “You won’t find him.”
“I’m sure I can catch up to him.”
“He’s not what you think.”
“You don’t really think he’s a ghost?” I took her hand as well as Jeremy’s. “Come with me. He’s just an ancient soul, confused by the fire. You can help me lead him back.” But when we reached the well, the old man was gone. I searched the poplars, wild rose, and snowberry bushes that waved in the wind around the well, the rotting boards that covered it. “Where’d he go?” I said.
“There.” Jeremy pointed toward Jude’s place, a dark figure in the smoke.
“You see,” Mom said. “We’ll never reach him.”
“Hey!” I called out. “Wait!”
I walked faster now, taking deep, rapid breaths to get enough air in the smoke. When I reached Jude’s yard I waited for Jeremy and my mother to catch up. “Now where the hell did he go?”
“The unfinished house,” said my mother.
He stood at the door, his wide-brimmed hat silhouetted by the light coming through the window behind him. “We’ve got him now,” I said. But when we reached the house it was empty. The graffiti on the wall: This is where I live.
“You see,” said my mother.
“He must be here.”
“No,” she said. “It was my father.”
“Mom, your father has been dead for nearly thirty-five years.”
I held Jeremy’s hand and followed Mom into what would have become the living room, certain that the old man would be there, but he wasn’t. The mouldy mattress on the floor. The graffiti on the walls. Too bad you found your keys.
“It was strange how my father’s mind worked,” she said. “After that meteor hit, he thought that the war was still raging and he was a soldier again, hunting down the enemy on that mountain.” She turned to me. “And yet some part of him brought him back here, to this house, where the real threat to his world lay.”
“You mean Valentine.”
She nodded. “Valentine and Gus had been up in the hills looking for him, even after dark when the police and other searchers had given up. About eleven o’clock we saw lights in Valentine’s cabin, so we knew he and Gus were back. I was breastfeeding you at the time, so Mom went over alone to see what the news was. But as soon as you were asleep, I put on a coat and left you with Val. On my way over, I could see Gus moving around in the cabin, but my mother wasn’t there. She was in this old house with Valentine. I saw them kiss.”
“Did you confront your mother?”
“No. I went to Valentine’s cabin to talk to Gus. A little later Valentine and Mom came in, and we ate together before the men headed back up into the hills to continue the search.”
She stepped up to the doorway to look at a huge flock of starlings that had swooped out of the smoke and swelled low overhead, black confetti against a dishwater sky. “It’s a strange thing to see someone you thought you knew so well, suddenly in a very different light. It was as if my world had cracked and nothing made sense.” She turned back to me. “If it was like that for me, for a daughter, think what it was for my father, to see his wife in another man’s arms.”
“How do you know he saw them?”
“Because I saw him later that night. My mother and I waited in the
kitchen, doing what we could to keep ourselves occupied. Eventually, my mother dozed in her rocker but I couldn’t sleep, so I saw the light come on in Valentine’s cabin. I let my mother sleep and carried the pan of fudge that she had made earlier, along with a carving knife to cut it with, across the field. As I was nearing the cabin, I heard my old cat Midnight following behind me, the jingle of his collar. I leaned down to scratch him and then there was another jingle, of keys within a pocket, and I knew my father was there, in the shadow of this house. He said, ‘Come here.’ When I didn’t, he stepped out of the black and grabbed me by the arm, making me drop the fudge and the knife, and dragged me into this house.
“‘You bring that sonofabitch in here,’ he said.
“‘Valentine?’
“He looked over at the cabin a moment, then said, ‘No, you bring your mother here first, and tell her Valentine wants her to wait. Then you bring him over. I would have had them both before if you hadn’t turned up.’
“So you see what he had in mind, what he had seen. He planned to kill them both, together, in that house. I bolted for the door and he ran after me. Oh, God! The sound of his keys jingling in his pocket behind me! When he couldn’t catch me he yanked Midnight back by the tail, so the cat yowled. I stopped when I heard that.
“‘This is Katrine,’ he told me, ‘if you don’t bring your mother and Valentine here.’ Then he stretched Midnight out like he would to break a rabbit’s neck, and dropped it. I knelt down to hold Midnight in my arms. Its head fell backward loose in my hands, but its heart still beat under my fingers. I couldn’t think what else to do, to stop its suffering. So I picked up that knife I brought for cutting the fudge, and I cut its throat, like my father would a calf’s, to bleed it. I killed that cat!”
“You put it out of its misery.”
“I heard the horses then, and looked up to find Valentine and Gus on their horses with their guns trained on my father, just as he had his aimed at them. Valentine said, ‘Put the gun down.’ When my father didn’t, he fired, not to hit him, but over his head, to scare him. Took out that window.”
I looked over at the window. Whatever glass had remained had long since been pulled out.
“My father fired back and hit Gus in the arm, knocking him from his horse. When I crawled over to him, I saw his gun glinting there on the ground beside him.”
We both listened as a Bombardier droned low overhead, issuing a piercing warning like an air-raid siren, warning us to get the hell out. Jeremy held his ears and cried. I held him and tucked his head into my chest. “We’ve got to get out of here, Mom.”
“I must have picked up that gun, though I don’t remember firing it, any more than I remember throwing that axe at the turkey, or shooting that calf yesterday.” She looked down at her lightning arm and stretched her hand as she did when she was in pain. “But Gus and Valentine told me I fired and hit my father twice, once in the chest and once in the head, and I remember walking toward my father with that gun trained on him. The barrel was hot in my hands.”
She turned to wander through the house and after a moment I followed her, carrying Jeremy. She stopped in the little room that would have become the bathroom: the painted “mirror” and the face. How much time have you spent here waiting?
“After I fired those shots, my mother came out of the house and stood on the porch, squinting into the dark. Val came out a few moments later. Neither of them could see us from the house because the yard light was too bright. My mother said, ‘What’s going on?’
“‘I just shot a cougar,’ Valentine called out. ‘I expect it was attracted to the scent of blood, from Gus’s wound, and followed us down. John shot Gus in the arm, while we were up in the hills. We’ve got to get him to the hospital.’ He helped Gus walk toward the house. I stayed where I was, looking down at my father’s body.
“Mom said, ‘But where’s John?’
“‘He’s still in the hills,’ Valentine said. ‘You and Beth get Gus to the hospital and get him fixed up. I’ll phone the cops to let them know what happened, then I’ll head back up into the hills to look for John.’
“‘I don’t want you going up alone,’ Mom said.
“‘I’ll wait until the cops and the others arrive.’
“Mom took Gus into the house, to tend to his arm, and Valentine came back to the field for me. ‘Beth,’ he said, and he made me look at him. ‘You’re going to go with your mother now to take Gus to the hospital. He’s going to be all right.’ Then he nodded at my father’s body. ‘You don’t say anything to anybody about this, ever. You understand? It was a cougar we shot here tonight.’”
“He lied to your mother,” I said. “To protect you.”
“He lied to protect my mother. He buried my father’s body in that well so she wouldn’t have to know what I’d done, or why I’d done it. He knew it would have all come out. All those things my father did to me, and to Val.”
“But your mother must have suspected something of it.”
“She didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know or I would have seen it much sooner in Val. Valentine forced me to see it. You don’t know what it’s like, knowing what I allowed Val to go through. How would my mother ever have forgiven herself? How could she ever have forgiven me?”
“Oh, Mom, you weren’t responsible for what your father did.”
Jeremy pointed at the corner, at a shadow there. “Grandpa’s crying.”
I squinted to make out what the corner held, and the darkness took on the shape of a man. The shadow moved; it was as if someone had pencilled the outline of a man in the air, and then animated the sketch. It did indeed appear to be a man crying.
Mom stood beside me. “You see him too, don’t you? You saw him here when you were a child. It’s not just in my head like Val thinks.”
“But you say your father’s body is in the old well. Why would he lead us here, to this house?”
“This is where he saw them kiss. This is where he died.” She pointed at the graffiti on the wall. “This is where he lives.”
Another shadow slid across the wall. I turned to find Jude at the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “Didn’t the cop come to your place?”
“There was an old man, at least we thought there was an old man—”
“You can explain to me as we get in the car. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Where’s your pickup?”
“Nelson Dalton dropped me off so I could pick up the Impala.”
“There’s Ezra.”
“We’ll drive over and get him.”
Jude pulled the mannequin and paintings of me out of the car and helped Jeremy into the back seat as I buckled my mother in place. “We can come back with the pickup and get the paintings,” I said.
Jude pointed at the hills above. “No time.” The boiling cloud of smoke that arched over the valley was flame-orange. He turned on the wipers as pieces of ash fell onto the windshield and accumulated on the road like snow. The wind howled, whipping the timothy grass in the field and forcing the bank of Lombardy poplars into postures of submission. He swerved as one cracked and fell over the road. As we drove into the yard, the umbrella on the patio table on the lawn lifted and twirled, hovering over the table for a few moments before being ripped away.
Ezra was on the roof of the house, nailing sprinklers in place. A blast of wind came up as I ran over to the ladder, forcing him to hunker down and cling to the cedar shingles. “We’ve got to get out of here!” I called up to him.
“What were you attempting at Jude’s?”
“The old man led us there.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve got to salvage him!”
I glanced at Mom as she made her way over to us. “No, there’s nothing we can do.”
“We can tell the cops.”
“I suppose we can do that. Someday.”
“I don’t grasp it.”
&
nbsp; “He wasn’t what I thought. For Christ’s sake, Ezra, come down!”
“You and Mom and Jeremy go away with Jude.”
“No!”
A panicked sparrow shrieked as it swooped past Ezra’s head, nearly hitting him. Then there was another, and another, a flock of terrified birds—sparrows, finches, swallows, and jays, and all screaming as they flew low overhead. Some, confused by the smoke, slammed into the roof and the side of the house, rolling as they were pulled away on the wind.
“My God, the birds,” my mother said.
“They’re fleeing the fire,” said Jude. “We’ve got to leave, Katrine. Now.”
“I can’t leave Ezra here!”
“What are you going to do? Drag him down?”
“If I have to.”
“We’ve got to get Jeremy and your mother out of here!”
I looked up at Ezra. “Go,” he said.
Jude took my arm. “He’s got the truck. For God’s sake, Katrine, he’s not a child.”
Burning pine needles fell from the sky like lit matchsticks that flared up with each gusting wind. They hit my bare arms, curling the hairs, biting briefly like mosquitoes, leaving welts the size of dimes that I wouldn’t notice until later in the day.
“Ezra!” I cried. “Please come down!”
He did climb down, and turned on the tap on the outside of the house, releasing a rain of water from the sprinklers above. Then he led me a short distance away from Jude, so that, in the wind, his voice would be lost to him. “Let me do this for you, Kat,” he said. “Let me do this for us. I can show you. I can do something.”
“You want to be the hero.”
“No, I just want you to see that I’m capable. An adult. What Jude said just now, you see me as a child, not your husband. We can’t survive like that.”
His language was uncluttered by stumbling, the voice of my old Ezra and his eyes were free of the confusion and anger that so often yellowed them. I stood a moment, holding his hand, enjoying the relieving rain from the sprinkler. Then the shower stopped.
“The power’s cut to the pumphouse,” he said.
“The fire’s got the lines,” Jude shouted. “It’s close.”
A blast of heat hit us first as a huge cloud of smoke and fire roared down the valley toward us; its vibrations in my chest felt like those of a jet engine powering up. A propane tank exploded at the Petersons’ place, sounding like a bomb. “Look!” Jeremy said, pointing at the fireball. “Stars falling on us.”
Turtle Valley Page 20
