Turtle Valley Read Online Free

face mirrored faintly in the window, where the lilac boughs blocked the light. The imperfect glass created an image that was rippled and hazy, but I could still make out my long nose and full mouth, dark hair and brows. My reflection was the likeness of Maud as a young woman, and yet over the course of these six years since Ezra’s stroke, I had lost all confidence that I could inspire passion in the way she evidently had.
    “But you’ve got to remember the times they were living in,” Mom said. “I can’t remember Valentine ever calling her anything other than Mrs.”
    I turned. “Mrs.?”
    “Just Mrs.”
    My mother began scribbling again. She wrote of the conversation we had just had, I know. It was her habit to chronicle even the smallest details of her life immediately after they transpired, but she wasn’t present for these moments any more than tourists who view their vacations through the lens of a camcorder. Nevertheless, if I understood little else about my mother, I thought I understood this, because writing was one thing we had in common. I assumed she wrote to preserve the moment, to stop its fleeting, to stop its loss. Of course these were only projections. I had never asked her why she wrote so obsessively. I assumed she was driven to write down the details of her life for the same reasons I wrote: to make sense of things, to give the random events of life meaning, and to remember—as memory was such a mercurial companion, and one not to be counted on.
     

3.
    I POURED JEREMY ANOTHER BOWL of Cheerios, and then stood near the window eating my toast as my parents watched Judge Judy. In the yard, Ezra rearranged the boxes and bags of my mother’s things in the back of our truck, trying to make more room. A T-shirt and jeans had become his new uniform, now that he was farming again. They replaced the dress shirts and pressed pants he had worn to teach English at the college before he’d suffered the stroke. But even when he taught for a living, he had moved with the sureness of one accustomed to physical labour; his big farmer hands never lost their calluses as he continued to garden and keep a few chickens and sheep on our acreage in Chilliwack.
    A few months after his stroke, he had carved in wood a life-size likeness of one of his callused hands, and had given it to me as a gift, a hand nearly twice the size of my own. The muscled back of that hand; the bulging scar on the thumb where he had cut himself chopping wood. The carving of the hand felt very much like Ezra’s real one: rough, warm, and protective. On his good days. This carving stood on its wrist on the wooden table that served as my writing desk, a table Ezra had also made for me. He had fashioned both from pine and left them unvarnished, so the hand appeared to be one with the table, as if someone had been caught within, drowning in wood.
    Yet another helicopter flew toward us, dragging an orange bucket by a tether. As it flew overhead it shook the windowpane, and I pressed my hand against the glass to feel the vibrations. All morning, helicopters and air tankers had made one run after the other, from Shuswap Lake at Salmon Arm, where they filled up with water, to this valley where they dumped their loads on the fire. Two more helicopters dropped their buckets on the hills above now. Below, at the foot of the mountain, a flatbed truck carrying a bulldozer rumbled along the road heading up the valley to the fire. Regular traffic had been diverted away from Turtle Valley and only local traffic and firefighters were permitted on Blood Road. Driving in the opposite direction to the flatbed truck, a string of pickups, loaded with personal possessions, were heading out of the valley.
    My mother left her television program to stand by the window with me. “My father would have hated this,” she said. “All this noise. It’s like a war zone.” She stared for a time at Jude’s yard, at Valentine’s cabin and the unfinished house, then she