AS WE LEFT TURTLE VALLEY behind that afternoon, we said goodbye to the farm. Jeremy said, “The moon’s following us.”
I glanced back in the mirror to find my son looking out the window at the sky.
“Why does the moon follow us?” Mom said.
“What do you mean?”
“Before we turned that corner it was over there,” she said. “Now it’s here. Why does it move with us?”
“Move with us?”
“Why does it follow us?”
I swerved to miss a turtle crossing Blood Road and, glancing into the side mirror, witnessed its death under the tire of the Chevy behind us. The brief spray of wet. I was struck at that moment by a sweet grief, a longing to stay inside that day with my mother, because I knew I was losing her. That afternoon was like one of her parting kisses, the press of her lips to say goodbye fading the instant it was planted on my cheek. I knew that at the end of that day the memory of our time together would already have begun to disappear. I’d be left with a crumbling rose and a pot of faded rouge. So as soon as I returned home with Jeremy, I pulled my notebook and pen from my purse to record the day’s events, to seize the memory within ink before it faded away.
Acknowledgments
I’D LIKE TO THANK Mitch Krupp for the time and care he took to create the photographs used in this novel, and for helping me to integrate them into the text. So many other individuals contributed to this novel in so many ways that I couldn’t possibly thank them all here, but I will list a few: Irene Anderson, Cindy Malinowski, Rick Tanaka, Floyd Dargatz, Jake Jacobson, and the many residents who offered their stories about the Salmon Arm fire of 1998. Thanks also to the Canada Council and the British Columbia Arts Council for grants that assisted me in the writing of Turtle Valley.
Jude’s love note to Kat was written, in good measure, by Mitch Krupp. The recipe for waxing flowers was paraphrased from a recipe I found in my grandmother’s scrapbook. The story “Turtle Valley Is Jarred by Slight Tremor” was taken from the July 5, 1945, Salmon Arm Observer. The story “Brilliant Flash Lights Heavens” was taken from the Kamloops Sentinel, April 1, 1965. The newspaper depiction of the shivaree is verbatim from an account written by my mother, Irene Anderson. Again, names, dates, and locations of these newspaper stories have been changed. The clippings describing the search for John Weeks are complete fictions.
GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ is an award-winning Canadian author whose bestselling novels have been published worldwide. She currently teaches fiction at the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing Program and lives in the Shuswap Valley, the landscape found in so much of her writing.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2008
Copyright © 2007 Gail Anderson-Dargatz
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2007. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Anderson-Dargatz, Gail
Turtle Valley / Gail Anderson-Dargatz.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36832-4
I. Title.
PS8551.N3574T87 2008 C813′.54 C2007-906938-X
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright