Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

beside Jeremy’s drawings from earlier that day. My grandfather’s files from Essondale Mental Hospital, his military files and medals, a razor, a pair of glasses in a case. A photograph of a man landed on top; he was pale, his cheeks were drawn, and his eyes were wide, staring, empty, as if they were not seeing what was in front of him. Like a man just roused from sleep but still engaged in a dream, or a nightmare. This was the face of a sleepwalker.
    “Spooky, isn’t it?” said Val. “His eyes seem, I don’t know, dead.”
    “I’ve never seen a picture of him.”
    “There weren’t many to begin with. Mom took them all down after Grandma passed away, including Grandma and Grandpa’s wedding photo. She threw them in the burn can and burned them.”
    “You know why?”
    Val didn’t answer. She picked up the medals, the glasses. “All these things were in the envelope when I first found it. I assume they were all his. The glasses certainly were. I remember him putting them on when he was about to go out hunting.” She picked up the ancient razor. “God, I remember him shaving with this, leaning over the kitchen sink, peering into a tinymirror that he hung there for that purpose. I hated being in the house when he shaved. I was always afraid he’d nick himself and yell at me for it.”
    “Why would he blame you?”
    “That’s what he did. If I made a noise, distracted him. Noise of nearly any kind set him off.”
    I inspected the medals as she rifled through the pages in the military file. She handed me a photocopy. “You see this?
Discharged by new disease supervening—n.y.d. shell shock.
Shell shock was a new disease. They still didn’t know what the hell they were dealing with.”
    I read out loud.
“Hesitation in speech. Marked tremor of hands. Trembles and shivers while talking to strangers. Speech is halting. Memory very poor for retention and impressibility for recent events.
”
    “He was in several hospitals, over the course of a year,” said Val. “Here it says he is in Victoria, then Kamloops.”
    “Why would they send him all the way to British Columbia?” I asked. “He was British.”
    “He’d already been living in B.C. for some time before the war, so he joined the Canadian army. They were shipping him home.” She handed me another sheet. “Look at this.
Cause of disability: shell concussion—buried.
The guy’s buried alive and that’s all they have to say about it.”
    “He was buried alive?”
    “Evidently a shell hit close by, burying him within a foxhole, and then a second shell uncovered him but sprayed him with shrapnel. I remember Grandpa and Grandma talking about it when I was a kid. I imagine he was just one of thousands, hundreds of thousands, injured in that way.”
    “Or killed.”
    “He had some kind of plate in his head, to replace part of his skull that was destroyed during that second explosion.”
    I looked up at her. “He was brain-injured?”
    “Brain-injured. Shell-shocked. Whatever the case, he was nuts.” She picked up the razor and stared at it for a time, then stuffed it back in the envelope along with the medals and glasses, and closed the flap. “A kid should be sad when her grandfather dies,” she said. “When he disappeared on that mountain, I was just glad he was gone.”
    “He died on that mountain?”
    “His body was never found.”
    “Mom said he died of a heart attack.”
    “Like I said, she’s getting more and more forgetful.”
    “Dad didn’t correct her.”
    “Likely he didn’t hear.”
    “It was the story she always told me,” I said. “Why would she lie? Why didn’t you or Dad ever tell me about it?”
    She laid the envelope on the table. “Look, it wasn’t like we were hiding anything from you. It was pretty clear from the start that Mom didn’t want any of us talking about it. The story of Grandpa’s disappearance was spread all over the papers. And of course the neighbours all pulled out their stories about