Excerpt: Turtle Valley

This newspaper story was about my family. John Weeks was my grandfather and his wife was Maud Weeks, the grandmother who had owned this carpetbag; their daughter, Beth, was my mother. Gustave Svensson – Gus – was my dad. I looked out the window at the Ptarmigan Hills where my father and great uncle had searched for my grandfather. Against the night sky the fire on the ridge was the corona of the sun seen in an eclipse: flames like solar flares licked up into the black. Why hadn’t my parents ever told me the story of how my grandfather was lost? They were both such great storytellers; it seemed so unlikely that they would forget to tell me this.

I searched through the rest of the contents of the purse, looking for other newspaper clippings that would tell me when my grandfather was found, but there weren’t any. Instead I was surprised to find a tiny jar of sweetly scented rouge, something I never would have guessed my grandmother owned. The blush still carried its vibrant red colour; its perfume was spicy, flamboyant, not words my mother used to describe my grandmother. I hadn’t known her; I was only a few months old when she passed away of a heart attack inside the greenhouse not far from the house.

I put everything back in the bag and went to the window to finish my hot milk. My grandmother would have looked out this window to see Valentine walking across his yard, just as I now saw Jude carrying another box to his truck. My parents had inherited that land on Valentine’s death and even now, more than twenty years after they had sold the place to Jude Garibaldi, they continued to graze their small herd of cattle there, as they had when they farmed the land with Valentine. I could just make out the rooflines of the crumbling log home that had once belonged to Valentine, and a second two-storey farmhouse that had been left incomplete and never lived in, and was badly weathered by the time I played in it as my parents drank coffee with my great-uncle. There were many loose floorboards in that house, and I would pry them up with a hammer, searching for treasure. I found one of my Uncle Valentine’s old MacDonald’s tobacco cans under there once, but it was rusted shut, and I was on the hunt for dimes and marbles, so I left the can where it was, and never thought any more of it.

Movement pulled my attention to my grandmother’s ancient greenhouse, a shadow dancing against the dirty glass walls. The old woman? I hunted through the kitchen junk drawer until I found a flashlight and then slipped on my runners to step out onto the porch stairs. The lilac bush beside me was strung, as always, with clear Christmas lights; I plugged the cord into the outside socket and the bush lit up, casting a circle of light around me. Jude was crossing his yard, carrying another box to the truck. When he saw the lights on the lilac bush go on, he stopped and shifted the box in order to wave. I waved back. He stopped a moment looking my way before continuing on to the truck.

The potting shed was the entrance to the greenhouse, and as I passed through it, I lifted cobwebs out of my way. “Hello?” I said and shone a light into the corners. The shelves of pots, the crunch of dry soil and pot shards beneath my feet, the smell of dust and smoke. A spider sped over the back of my hand and, after taking a moment to enjoy the panic and tickle, I shook it off. Then I stepped over the threshold into the greenhouse itself. But the place was empty. My mother had not grown anything here since my grandmother’s death; Maud had had her heart attack here, and my father had found her body lying on the dirt floor.

I heard the jingle of keys shaking within a pocket, and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel driveway, and I stepped outside. “Jude, is that you?” The footsteps stopped. I scanned the dark driveway – the haze of smoke in the flashlight’s stream – but couldn’t see anyone. Nevertheless, I heard footsteps, running toward me. I ran onto the porch and into the kitchen, closing the door behind me and locking it, and then listened, breathing hard, for footsteps on the porch. When I finally turned away from the door, I found that my grandmother’s chair was rocking by itself, and every burner on the stove was on, glowing red.

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Excerpted from Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. Copyright 2007 by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

For more information about this book and others, please visit RandomHouse.ca.

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