Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Author:Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307368324
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2007-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

13.

I STOOD AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW with my back to my mother as I watched Val drive off in her truck. Ezra walked toward the house, dragging a green garden hose behind him. He set up a sprinkler near the house and turned it on, to saturate the cedar-shake siding and shrubs around the house as Jude had, I presumed, so embers drifting down from the hills wouldn’t take root.

“What you told Val,” said Mom, “how I walked off on you, it wasn’t like that. I never would have left you.”

When I turned to her, she kept her gaze on Jeremy who played with the kitten at her feet. I handed the cat to my mother, and took my son’s hand to lead him to the door. “You go help Daddy set up that sprinkler, okay?”

“Sprinkler!” he shouted, and bounded down the steps.

I watched from the window to see that Ezra had taken him in hand before replying to my mother. “I know, now, that you wouldn’t have left me,” I said. “But I didn’t know that then.”

She stroked the kitten within her lap for a moment. “You didn’t like that I wrote.”

“I didn’t like that you disappeared into it. That I couldn’t reach you. But I have the same desire to write everything down, so I’ll remember it.”

She shook her head. “That’s not it at all. When I write my mind is here, in the present. I don’t remember the past. I can forget, then. And there’s so much that I want to forget.”

“I don’t understand.”

A bantam hen fluttered up to reclaim its fragrant nest among the sweet alyssum growing in the window box, and my mother carried the kitten to the window to watch the chicken with me. “You remember that rooster we had when you were in your teens,” she said, “the one that stabbed its claws into my thighs every time I tried to feed the chickens? Nasty creature. It got so I dreaded going into the henhouse to get the eggs, and you know how much I love collecting eggs.”

Yes, I knew. The warmth of a chicken’s body beneath her feathery skirt, the smooth weight of a warm egg. The deep satisfaction of a basket of eggs, a treasure sought and found.

“Every day it was a battle with that rooster. I had to carry a bucket ahead of me, like a shield, so he wouldn’t gouge my thighs. When he lunged after me, I tossed the bucket over his head.”

I nodded. I had also carried buckets into the chicken coop to protect myself from roosters, from one in particular, a bird I had named Christmas for his glorious red and green feathers. After he set his talons into my legs I learned to capture him with an upturned bucket. Strange how he sat there under that pail, never trying to move. When I finished setting out the grain and collecting the eggs, and took the bucket away, Christmas just went on sitting there, eyes fixed on a distant horizon.

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