Free Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page A

home.”
    “The decision is entirely up to you, but I don’t advise it,” Dr. Ellis said. “Why don’t you discuss it further with your family and I’ll check in later.”
    After he left we all looked at the floor for a time, saying nothing.
    “How long will it take to get Dad into that palliative care room?” I finally asked Val.
    My father slapped the table beside him, upsetting the urinal and his glass. Water slid off the laminate to the floor. “I’m not going to die in a damn hospital! I want to go home.”
    “All right, Dad,” said Val. “If that’s what you want, I’ll make it happen.”
    “Nobody’s asking me what I want,” said Mom. “I want him to live! He won’t get better at home.”
    Dad took my mother’s hand in both of his. “You remember how Valentine went?”
    I had visited Uncle Valentine in the hospital with Mom during his final illness. He was curled into himself, his body as thin and out of proportion with his head as a fetus’s. My mother pulled the blanket back up to my uncle’s chest and we stood for a time at his bedside, listening to him whisper in Swedish. “What’s he saying?” I asked.
    “I don’t know.” She picked up his round brush from the bedside table and brushed his hair in the way she so often brushed mine, not to preen, but to comfort; to comfort herself as much as me. Valentine’s hair had grown long in his illness; his white locks fell about his shoulders as she brushed them. “People often return to their pasts when they’re dying,” she said. “I imagine he’s in his childhood, talking with his family.”
    Valentine had told me stories about his childhood in Lapland, of the Sami in their richly ornamented blue, yellow, and red costumes who herded reindeer through his father’s farm in winter, camping out in tents on the snow-covered fields and buying hay from his father to feed the reindeer. These families travelled on skis and
on pulkas,
sleds pulled behind
harks,
castrated reindeer. “They went like the dickens,” Valentine told me.
    As a child I had imagined myself as one of these Sami on a sled, hanging onto the reins of a reindeer as it snorted in the effort to run through snow, its breath clouding the night air under crystal stars and northern lights. I liked the idea that Valentine had returned to these winter fields and was flying over snow with the Sami into an endless, starry night.
    “I hate the thought of drifting away slowly like that,” Dad said, “spending months in hospital drugged up because of the pain. I want it to be over fast.”
    “I’ll arrange for a hospital bed,” said Val, “and for the nurses to come in to back me up. But I can give you most of the care you need.”
    “And if the fire does threaten the place?” I asked.
    “Then we’ll wheel Dad out to the truck and get him the hell out of there.”
    “You have to work.”
    “I’ll take time off.” Val put a hand on Dad’s shoulder. “I’ll need a day to get things set up. Make some room for a hospital bed. But I’ll get you home. All right?”
    Dad, still grasping Mom’s hand, lay back into the pillows. “All right.”
     

7.
    AS WE HEADED TO SALMON ARM after dropping the load off at Val’s place in Canoe, Ezra nodded at the SUV riding our tail. “They should hammer together signs that you can bolt to your truck,” he said. “So you can flash messages at the car behind you, like
Back off asshole!”
    I glanced at Jeremy and then at my mother, to see if they had heard, then looked away. Ezra acted like this when he was tired. I knew he shouldn’t be driving now, that we were courting disaster, but I’m ashamed to say I was afraid to take the wheel. There had been a time when I would drive off by myself with no particular destination in mind; I was just out for the pleasure ofthe drive. But after Ezra had the stroke it became important to us both that there was some aspect of our lives together where he took the lead. So when he was allowed to