The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  Bill had heard everything from the top of the stairs. When he heard their vehicles start up, he quietly crept to his bedroom and pressed his face to the window, watching the exhaust trail behind Ernie’s truck and then the officers’ sedan. Bill had just gotten a letter from his brother dated January 10, 1968. It was still January 1968. If the soldiers couldn’t find his brother’s body, then that meant that James was not dead. James was hiding somewhere on that hillside until it was safe to leave. Or maybe the soldiers couldn’t find his brother because the Viet Cong had taken him prisoner.

  No, Bill thought, shaking his head. His brother had been too good at navigating the woods. James knew just where to hide and where to find what had been hidden. Even their neighbor Ernie Morriseau said that James was one of the best woodsmen he’d ever seen. He just now heard Ernie say that it didn’t mean that James was dead. It was a matter of waiting, even if that meant years before the war was over. Before his brother was able to come home.

  His nose dribbled on the glass. He was wiping the window clean with his shirtsleeve when a sudden movement from across the driveway snagged his attention. Sitting behind the faded red snow fence that separated the driveway from the oat field next to it was Angel, their neighbor’s black dog. Bill pounded lightly on the window, hoping to scare the dog away before Bill’s father came home from work. The dog peered up through a hole in the snow fence to locate the noise. Bill watched as the dog focused on the window and then on him. He pressed his flat hand against the glass in greeting. Angel lifted his muzzle as if to scent Bill through the glass.

  I LEANED AGAINST THE DOOR and closed my eyes. I had to think. Think about what to do. My husband would or would not be home. It was hard to tell. It might be his night to spend at Pete’s Bar and Grill, and if so, he would be there until the early-morning hours. I prayed that he would stick to his usual routine and not come home. There was some relief in that, one less thing to think about, to consider.

  I heard the stairs creak and opened my eyes. Bill had crept down the stairs and was sitting on the bottom step.

  “Is James coming home?”

  I opened my mouth to frame the words carefully so that they wouldn’t be so rough. But my mouth hung open, and I grew desperate, unable to explain what I could barely understand.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and walked toward my younger son.

  Bill didn’t cry. Nor did he talk. No whys, no hows, no ifs. Just a blank speechlessness. I rocked him in my arms at the kitchen table, his body stiff and uncomprehending. He would not eat any supper, and finally, I picked him up, bulky and unevenly heavy in my arms. I negotiated the stairs slowly, reaching the top with barely enough energy to carry him into his bedroom. Bill was asleep by the time I reached his bed. I was too exhausted to undress him, so I tucked his limp body underneath the sheets and blankets, his head falling into the pillow. Placing my cheek next to his mouth, I waited until I felt the proof of warm breath upon my skin. When I lifted my head away from his face, I could detect the faint smell of mouse urine even though I had scrubbed the bedroom with bleach that fall. Much to Jimmy’s relief, I had forbidden the housing of animals in the boys’ bedroom in the winter. With Jimmy gone, the room seemed cold and lonely without the rustling of mice and gerbils in their cages.

  I padded down the hallway and began to open the door to each room upstairs, looking in, sometimes walking to a window. In addition to the bedroom I shared with my husband and the boys’ room, there were two other bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor of our old farmhouse. The last door I opened was the bedroom that still housed the crib, now standing in the middle of boxes containing old clothes. Terrified of imaginary feet pinchers under the bed and the shadows cast on the walls by the pines outside, Bill had not wanted his own bedroom. As soon as Bill could learn to walk, he clung to Jimmy. They ended up sharing a bedroom, its walls witness to the angry words of brotherly fights, long pauses of quiet petulance, and often laughter. I stood in the doorway and stared at the peeling teddy bear applique on the headboard of the crib.

  Just over a year ago Jimmy and I had attempted to clean out this room, going through odds and ends, throwing away clothes too old and too worn, and packing those still useful into boxes for the church charity drive. Normally Jimmy would not have helped me, preferring instead to go fishing or hunting or to listen to his records in the barn loft. He would do anything to get away from the house. He suffered from the sporadic and nearly uncontrollable anger of adolescence, and anything I said set him off. Even the most innocent words acted like a match on the gasoline of his hormones. I used my words sparingly, flinging them out into the air like a lasso in a last attempt to get him to do his chores, to show respect, and to behave like his size: big-shouldered and grown. He bucked my words, my wishes. We fought and retreated, fought and retreated, our wills battering each other like bulls. Periodically we reached a point of mutual exhaustion, and a lull in our fighting took place. It was during such a lull on a quiet Saturday morning that Jimmy offered to help me clean out the room. I had been sitting on the floor, sorting through baby clothes, when I heard the clank of metal and looked up to see Jimmy trying to pry open a green tin box with his jackknife.

  “Where’d you find that?”

  “Up there.” Jimmy nodded toward the closet. “On the shelf.”

  The lock on the box was old, and it didn’t take long for him to spring it. I continued to fold baby clothes but listened as Jimmy sorted through the contents. Then my son whistled.

  “What?”

  “Read this,” he said, handing me a sheaf of yellowing papers.

  They were my husband’s discharge papers from the military. He had received an honorable discharge, but not, as he had led us to believe, from fighting in World War II and not as a Marine. He had been in the Army for the last six months of the war, and he had never left the States. The third page of the papers praised him for his skills as a quarterback, playing for the Army team. I was dumbfounded. What of the medals he dangled in front of us when he was drunk? The Bronze Star? The Purple Heart? The stories of fighting in Europe?

  Jimmy slapped one of his thighs. “Can you believe it?” He howled with laughter. “Dad played football! No wonder he can’t shoot straight. They must have stood by the goalpost with a beer and said, ‘C’mere, boy, here it is. Jus’ throw us the football and we’ll give you the bottle.’ ”

  “But the medals?”

  “Don’t you get it, Mom?”

  I shook my head.

  My son gasped between bouts of red-faced laughter. “He must have bought those medals in a pawnshop. Or stole them off of some other guy.”

  I watched my son laugh himself into a fetal position on the floor and was astonished that he took it so well. After all, my husband had dangled those medals plenty of times in front of Jimmy, always drunkenly insinuating that Jimmy would never amount to what those medals represented. I had painfully endured those episodes with Jimmy, winking at him behind John’s back when Jimmy’s face became tight and flushed. I had mouthed the words Ignore him.

  I listened as Jimmy’s merriment slowly diminished.

  My husband couldn’t have been a soldier. We moved to the tiny German Catholic town of Olina because land was cheap and because John’s father thought that northern Wisconsin was where the good life was. It was a twist on Basil Lucas’s definition of Gemütlichkeit, that life was good as long as the beer was flowing and somebody else was doing the work. As though the north were a big beer garden where dreams could be obtained easily. I could hear my father-in-law in my husband as he argued for what he thought was the one true life for a man: farming, hunting, fishing, and, unspoken at the time, drinking. John failed dismally at his dream, flopping as a farmer. His hunting and fishing skills meant shooting the bark off trees and catching nothing but lily pads and the occasional sun-fish. How could he have farmed, hunted, and fished? Nobody had taught him how. All three required work of some sort, work that my husband wasn’t prepared to do. But he
kept up his belief in his rural dream, fortified by a growing dependence on Pete’s Bar and a temper turned physical. Jimmy, on the other hand, seemed born with an innate ability and desire for rural life, his instincts guided by our neighbor Ernie Morriseau. While my husband’s paycheck seemed to dwindle, Jimmy kept our freezer filled with ruffed grouse, venison, ducks, geese, and fish. The older and better skilled he became, the more Jimmy grated against my husband like a steel file. I was terrified. Such knowledge would provoke a violent fight between my son and my husband. If something happened, Jimmy would be the one to pay. Not my husband.

  “Jimmy,” I warned, “there must be some reason for this. You have to promise me that you won’t say anything about this. Not to your father, not to Bill, not to anyone. Please. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” he said, his cheeks wet from tears of laughter. He wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. We silently resumed our work of sorting through boxes. But the next time I glanced over at him, Jimmy was studying the green metal box. I could see he was working a thought, his dark brown eyes full of wondering.

  We never did finish cleaning out the room, spending the last moments of our time putting the green box together the way we found it and tucking it as far back on the closet shelf as possible. I reached for the doorknob. I had almost closed the door when the realization hit me.

  I pushed the door open again and stared back into the room.

  Jimmy had warned me. He had threatened many times to leave home, and I blatantly dismissed it as being the angst of a teenager.

  “I’ve had it!” he yelled during one of our fights. “After I graduate, I’ll be gone. The old man will be happy! And you won’t have to nag me anymore!”

  “Where are you going to go?” I challenged him. “You need money! Training! A job! If you think it’s that easy, then you’ve got another guess coming! You think”—I threatened back—“that you’re the first one around here to think of leaving?”

  Why hadn’t I paid attention to the way his eyes contemplated the green box, the tremendous aha! of his laughter? What a glorious way for Jimmy to leave home, to humiliate his father as his father had humiliated him. He would join one of the toughest branches of the military. He would go to war and, having all the confidence of a teenager, be convinced that he would come home not only alive but as a hero who had earned his medals. He would return a soldier who had actually hit the ground because of combat and not because he was sliding across some manicured grass field making a touchdown. Not only would he humiliate his father, but he would become the opposite of him. Jimmy would come home with respect. With honor.

  I shut the door so hard that the sound startled me. I waited. Nothing stirred from Bill’s room. My stomach reared, throwing bile and bits of food up to burn the back of my throat and coat my tongue.

  I moved blindly toward the staircase and completely miscalculated the distance. I missed the first step and stumbled down the next three steps before catching myself on the railing. I kept both hands on the railing like a toddler and placed my feet slowly down on each step. When I reached the bottom, I stretched my arms out in front of me and followed the marker of light radiating from the kitchen. I grabbed the nearest chair, my fingers suckering tight to the wood.

  I sat at the kitchen table under the yolk-colored light and waited for the tears to come. My head ached, swollen with the relentless replay of that afternoon’s visit. From time to time I fingered the report, tried to keep it from brushing against the peanut butter smears on the table, and listened for the small noises of the house: the clank of the furnace, the whining of the pipes when I stood up and turned on the kitchen faucet to make more coffee. Listened for the small footsteps of my son should he wake up.

  I leaned forward and cupped my head in my hands. If I forgot about the events of the day, it could have been any night from years ago when Jimmy and Bill were babies. My breasts swollen and wet from nightly feedings. Chicken pox or measles. My hands caked with calamine lotion. My fingernails stained pink for days afterward. The parental magic of making the monsters of night dreams disappear. Exhaustion so deep that it made my hearing acute, my ears pricked to the slightest whimper, the creak of bedsprings above my head. The call for Mamma firing through any light sleep, producing a sudden hit of energy to my veins and causing me to leap out of bed with maternal devotion. I stared down at the mottled Formica specks on the table’s surface and concentrated on my breathing, on the sound of it in my ears. I thought I could hear the house itself breathing, creaking as though it shifted on the foundation with each breath taken. I could smell the mustiness of my housedress and the earthy smell of my skin. No wonder the officers had cringed at my appearance. I had given up looking at myself, and it was only when I was mirrored in the face of others that I thought about how I looked.

  I rubbed my forehead. My son had kept everything from me.

  “You weren’t old enough last winter. Why did you have him sign those papers?” I demanded of Jimmy the night before he was to board the bus.

  “Because,” Jimmy said, snapping his fingers. “I knew he’d do it just like that. I used him. Dad thinks he’s getting rid of me. But he’s not. I’m comin’ back. Besides,” he said, breaking into a disarming grin, “Elvis was in the Army, and nothin’ happened to him.”

  “That’s because there wasn’t a war going on when Elvis was in the Army! I thought you said,” I added, forcing some humor, “that you were leaving and never coming back.”

  “Oh, Mom.” He feigned exasperation. “I was just mad when I said that. I would never leave you and Bill for long. Don’t worry.” He joked, jostling my arm. “Nothin’ is gonna happen to me. I’ll be okay. I really will. Don’t be mad. Laugh.”

  “Laugh!” I pinched one of his ears hard enough to hurt. “This isn’t funny, Jimmy. This isn’t like going duck hunting.”

  My son just fell back on the bed, rubbing his ear and giggling as if nothing truly were going to happen to him. As if he were Elvis, and this was a brief but necessary stint in the career of his life.

  For a few months after he left, I tried to believe in Jimmy’s optimism. I worked outside, weeding and troweling in my flower beds and my vegetable garden. I listened intently for all signs of life: the frogs at twilight in the pothole at the east end of the forty acres nearest the house; the swallows chattering in the barn; Bill, as he shouted threats and stirred up dust with his bare feet, engaging in imaginary fistfights. My husband put in overtime at the mill and was gone so much that I didn’t feel he lived with us anymore except for the meager amount of money I wrestled from what was left of his paycheck and the inevitable fights that followed.

  The optimism began to ebb when September came. I stood outside with Bill fretfully hugging my waist and watched the geese pass over, crying over the trumpeting of their calls. All the birds flocked up and left; the swallows first, then the blackbirds, the wrens, and finally the robins. October was the month and color of dying leaves falling easily some days and ripped from the trees by strong winds on others.

  November arrived, producing unexpected snowstorms, dumping five feet of snow, and leaving a shock of plunging temperatures in their wake. The snowstorms felt violent to me after the cocoon of summer and fall. The weather hermetically sealed me inside the house and not only turned the world outside uninhabitable but also rendered my inside world devoid of humanity. Bill was in school all day. The small sounds of housecleaning could not overcome the ominous silence that made my mind twist with worries. In desperation to hear a human voice, I made the mistake of turning on our rickety black-and-white TV in the hopes of having something cheery to watch while I cleaned. The black screen lightened to gray, and then Dan Rather’s face loomed before me with the United States flag on one side of him and the Republic of Vietnam flag on the other side. He was standing in front of a large building that I dimly recognized as the United States Embassy in Saigon. His face was barely shaved, but I didn’t listen to what he was saying because I was staring at the flags. As
they could only do on TV, little boxes of information were superimposed on them. I looked closer. On the American flag was a box with the growing number of dead American soldiers. On the Vietnamese flag was a box listing the mounting number of dead Vietnamese Republic soldiers. And then a third box marked “Enemy” contained the number of their dead. For a brief moment the TV screen looked as though it was a board game like Monopoly. No money in the bank though. No investments. All dead. I pulled so hard on the switch that it snapped off into my hand. I didn’t want the TV to be turned on ever again. I removed one of the vacuum tubes from the back of the set and hid it in the porch closet. Later that night I explained to Bill that the television set was broken and that we couldn’t afford to fix it.

  “We’ll get more library books from town,” I said curtly when Bill whined. “Reading is better than watching TV anyway.” I watched as my son silently and sadly clocked off the shows he would miss: Petticoat Junction, Flipper, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, Jonny Quest.

  Life inside the house became suffocating. I found myself one morning sitting in front of the living room window, tapping the glass with the heel of one of my Sunday pumps, wanting to see how hard I could hit the window before it would crack. I stopped after the fifth tap, realizing that a broken window might mean a broken arm. So I got up and went to the closet and wrapped myself in warm clothes. I left the house and began to walk up and down our long driveway, hearing that necessary breath again and talking to the air and to the Norway pines that lined the driveway.