The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  It became a habit. I volunteered to walk Bill out to the bus in the morning, ignoring his protests and the pained and embarrassed look on his face. When he was safely on board the bus, I would turn around and begin walking and talking my way back to the house. I waited impatiently to walk down the driveway again at noon, when I saw the mailman’s white Chevy Impala pull away from the mailbox.

  A letter from Jimmy would send me into happy action, storming through the house in a fit of housecleaning and cooking, dreaming of his final trip home. I believed that everything would change when Jimmy came home. I repeated it like a prayer, taking my rollers out and brushing my hair into curls like a normal woman. I was making plans.

  “Just hang in there, kiddo,” I said to the air and the pines along the driveway. The farm would be worked by family and not rented out to our neighbors the Edelmans for planting and grazing. I would hire a lawyer and end the farce that was my marriage, peel it off my body like my musty, dusty housedresses and have it judicially burned. I would get a job in town, hold picnics, and visit my neighbors more often. Maybe develop some real friendships.

  But when there hadn’t been a letter since January 2, my hopeful enthusiasm had died down. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed my housedress, and my hair rollers felt as natural on my head as my ears or nose.

  I crossed my arms on the table and rested my head on them, intending to nap for a few minutes.

  The next time I looked up, it was 11:00 P.M. My husband hadn’t come home. The wind whistled as it cut around the corners of the house. I had hurt that officer. His words would have given any normal person hope. Missing in action could mean that Jimmy was alive and taken prisoner. But that officer flinched several times as though he could disguise the doubt on his face. Ernie’s hands were shaking. I knew the odds were too high to have any hope.

  “The Marines!” I said to Jimmy. “Couldn’t you have picked the Navy or the Army? Or even the Coast Guard? The Marines!”

  “They offered the best package,” was his response. Then he added, and I didn’t think about it until later, “The Marines take care of their own.”

  I was not stupid or naive. The chances of Jimmy’s being alive were nil. Missing in action was the bureaucratic middle ground. A comma indicating a pause until they could finish the sentence with his remains. When the wind whistled again, it occurred to me that I was waiting out of habit and that this paper in front of me told me that the waiting was done now.

  I picked up the report, folded it, and tucked it into the pocket of my housedress before pushing back my chair. I walked to the back door with such deliberateness that it wasn’t until I had put on my socks, boots, and winter coat that I thought of Bill sleeping upstairs. I paused, listened for sounds of his young body: a thrashing of legs against the sheets, a crusty cough, maybe a murmur that said Mamma. I heard nothing. Deciding it was safe to leave him, I gathered the tools I would need: a kerosene lamp, a handful of wooden matches, and a long, wood-handled spade. I lit the kerosene lamp and let the flame lap at the glass before turning it down to a small arc of yellow. Then I opened the door.

  Even late at night it was still surprisingly warm. I heard the drip of melting ice falling from the eaves of the house. The path to the barn was muddy, and my boots sank down with each step, mud cresting over the green, rubbery toes. The kerosene lamp swung like a warning in my hand, the yellow light rhythmically flashing upon the barn before casting its light behind me on the return swing.

  I did not stop until I was directly behind the barn. Twenty feet behind me was the wooden fence separating the barnyard from our forty-acre field to the northeast. The boys considered it a good spot. Both my children played there, close enough to hear my calling voice, yet blocked from my vision so that they could conduct whatever mischief seized them that day. When Jimmy became a teenager, he moved inward and upward, creating his own hideaway in the barn loft. He wired in a stereo and speakers and hauled up the ladder three chairs that he had found at the town dump, one of which still bore the teeth marks of a hungry black bear.

  I looked at the upper part of the red barn. Jimmy didn’t need to tell me what he wanted to be when he grew up. It blared out of the barn loft. The culture and music lagged behind the rest of the world in our small town of Olina. If it was 1968 elsewhere, it was 1958 in Olina. The stereo loudly announced what Jimmy could not say, and the stereo had only one volume setting. Jimmy called it high and I called it impossible. I’d hear Jerry Lee Lewis howl “Grrrreat BALLS of FIRE!” and before I could finish clipping two shirts to the clothesline, all the small brown bats that should have been sleeping in the barn rafters came flying out of the broken upper windows in panicked droves. While the music only irritated me, it made my husband furious. John would run toward the barn with every intention of catching Jimmy in the act of disrupting the peace, only to find the hayloft empty and the records gone, Jimmy having slipped away and laughing at his own slyness.

  The music even caused our dog to act strangely. Every time Jimmy played “Jailhouse Rock,” the dog would chase his tail, whirling like a tornado across the yard until the song ended. Then he’d drop to his belly by the porch door, sucking in air and wheezing as though his lungs were collapsing. The funny thing about it was that my son did look a lot like Elvis, and he could sing too. I discovered after Jimmy had left that I missed hearing the harmoniously joined voices of Jimmy and Elvis crooning a love song that sailed in waves across our fields.

  I set the kerosene lamp down on a bare patch of ground before grabbing the spade with two hands and wedging the tip of it into the ground. With one foot on the shoulder of the spade’s blade, I shoved it deep, then bit and lifted the first clump of dirt out. I kept at it, stopping only once to take off my winter coat and to pin three rollers back into place on my sweaty head. I had to quit digging when I couldn’t reach the layer beyond two feet because the warm weather had not penetrated the frost line that far. I dropped the spade and reached into my housedress pocket for the report. I knelt beside the lamp, opened the folded papers, and read them one more time. Not a clipping of his hair, a fingernail, or a smear of blood. Just ink on paper, words that by their presence tried to prove everything yet could not prove anything. Those officers had come all that way from Madison to carry a report that was supposed to substitute for Jimmy.

  A report.

  I folded the papers into thirds and tucked them into the bottom of the hole. They gleamed against the black soil, so falsely pure in color that I didn’t wait to use the spade. I grabbed handfuls of dirt and furiously filled in the hole.

  Those stupid advertisements. “Serve your country and see the world at the same time. Experience new cultures.” The one I hated most was the recruiting poster I found in his bedroom not long after he left. “The Marine Corps Builds Men.” The irony of it. As though my purpose in life was simply to give birth to him and they of course would build him into being a man. Made him believe that he was less of a man because he was not in the Marine Corps.

  Well, my son hadn’t seen the whole world, but he did experience a new culture, and it killed him.

  “The Marines take care of their own.” Jimmy had said more than he realized. He wanted to belong. So he joined an even tougher family. A brotherhood that his family could not provide, that promised him a place in the world with a name that was not his father’s.

  I stood up and tamped down the dirt with my feet. I stepped off the mound and stood beside it, lifted my head to the sky, and opened my mouth. What came out sounded unearthly even to my ears: a long, thin moan. When the first cry ended, I opened my mouth again and again. I cried until I was exhausted. My skin tingled. I remembered my coat only when I looked down and saw that my hands had become grayish white with cold. I put it on but did not make any effort to leave, slipping instead into a numbing euphoria of feeling nothing. It felt so good to feel nothing that I almost got trapped by it. I turned to look at the snow-covered forty acres. I could walk the field until I felt sleepy.
Then I would nest myself into a bed of snow. Once asleep, I would be able to step out of my frozen body, and the sky that brought all of that warm wind would take me. I would fly over to the highlands in Vietnam, a frozen Wisconsin mother looking for her disappeared son. I let my coat drop from my shoulders and used the sleeves to tie it around my waist. Then I began to walk toward the melting whiteness of the field.

  But before I had walked twenty feet, my swollen eyes caught the hint of something red perched on top of the fence post at the entrance to the field. It jarred me awake. I reached forward and snatched the cap that belonged to my younger son, spun around and ran toward the house, slipping and falling twice into the icy mud. I was so mad that I swore at his waste of a good piece of clothing. If it hadn’t been for the day we’d had, I would have yanked him out of his bed to yell at him.

  I heard it after I opened the screen door. Something. Enough to make me stop. I listened, trying to hear above the pulsing sound of my own heart, my own breathing. I thought the sound had come from the house, from Bill sleeping upstairs. But the house was quiet. I turned around and looked back at the barn and field. At first it was that old sound, what I’d heard a thousand times in past winters: the high cry of a cold and forceful wind as it swept across the field and negotiated a path through the big red pines next to the house. Somewhere in the threads of its current was a higher, sharper cry. The wind made another go-around, picking up speed as it crossed the field and cut through the pines. I heard it again, a short yelp that resonated like the cry of a child. Mamma. I had one of those sudden pains in my chest, the kind that holds your breath for a few minutes. When I could breathe again, I let go of the door and walked halfway into the yard, staring at the barn and field.

  I was on the verge of yelling, “Who’s out there?” when a flicker of motion appeared near the lamppost by the barn. Another flicker, then a third. What moved flirted briefly with the light a fourth time before stepping fully inside the illuminated circle.

  Billy’s fox. The animal returned my stare, its black tufted ears framing its luminescent eyes. Tentatively placing one paw forward, the fox lifted its narrow muzzle to scent me. Its fur was still mangy, but the bare patches were growing back, and the animal had put on weight, its eyes bright and alert. It had also regained some of its natural wariness, its head cocked sharply for any sound that might indicate danger.

  When the animal continued to sniff the air, the purpose of the stocking cap in my hand became clear. Bill had left an article of clothing, a territorial marker of goodwill so that the fox would associate the scent with the bearer of food. Despite my grief, I was amazed at the animal’s survival and my son’s ingenuity.

  When Bill woke up in the morning, I would have something to tell him, however small a victory it would be in the enormity of our pain. He would be upset that I had removed the cap, and I briefly considered returning it to the fence post. I could almost hear Jimmy’s voice, his repeated counsel that a wild animal grown used to people was a dead animal, that the DNR routinely had to kill some of the black bears at the town dump when they became aggressive and moved beyond the dump, showing up at houses, looking for food. When Bill objected to his brother’s advice, Jimmy caustically told him that not everyone treated wild animals with his same good intentions.

  “But I don’t kill them!” Bill had shouted at his older brother. “They don’t attack me!”

  The fox sat on its haunches. I gazed at the fox and thought about what I would say. I would tell Bill that I had seen the fox, that he had saved it and that it would survive on its own now without his red stocking cap, without the food Bill had so patiently placed behind the barn. I would tell him that he would have to believe that the fox survived even if he never saw it again.

  I tucked the cap into my coat pocket before stepping forward and waving my arms. “Psssst!” I hissed loudly.

  I began running toward the fox, waving my arms. “Run!” I shouted. “Run!”

  The fox appeared so startled by my sudden and rapid approach that it didn’t move, and I thought I was going to run right into it. But in a movement so sleek and calm that it appeared magical, the fox lifted itself up from its haunches, turned, and slipped away into the darkness.

  ERNIE COULD NOT SLEEP. He walked outside without a jacket but went as far as his toolshed and no farther.

  He gazed through the dark at the Lucas farm and noticed a light bobbing back and forth, moving with whoever was carrying it. It was near midnight. Normally he would call or drive over to any of their neighbors if he suspected something was wrong. But Claire’s silence that day was final. She would not ask for help and made it clear that it was not wanted. His wife was right. There was privacy, and then there was a freakish need to keep secrets that were visible anyway.

  Ernie owned and rented many fields. He turned and looked at the field most familiar to him. Everything he had seen, touched, smelled, or found in that field since he was born was real. If the field and the land around it were unpredictable, they were only so much as the weather was unpredictable and the animals that lived in their area were occasionally unpredictable. But natural.

  When he was seven years old, he had witnessed at the far end of the field two bucks that had locked antlers in their duel over a doe and had spent hours trying to disengage from their combat. He disobeyed his father and followed his father and his uncle as they approached the two deer. The bucks were exhausted and down on their front knees, their eyes bulging and their tongues lolling. The two men carried long iron poles taken from one of the hay wagons. They put a pole to the shoulder of each buck and shoved so that the animals went down on their sides. Then his father and uncle walked around to the animals’ backsides so as to avoid being kicked. Ernie’s mouth fell open as he watched his father pull a handsaw out of his hunting jacket and work the teeth back and forth through the tangled forks holding the two sets of antlers together. When his father finished cutting through, the two men stepped away slowly, keeping their eyes on the two rutting bucks just in case they found the energy to rise and charge. After twenty minutes the winded bucks realized they were free from each other and scrambled up. His uncle shouted a long “HEYYYYY!” and the bucks scattered, one bounding into the nearby white pines and the other clearing the fence to the adjacent north field.

  He popped up from the grass, curiosity overriding his father’s authority. “Why didn’t you shoot them?”

  His father frowned at his son’s obvious disobedience, but his uncle laughed and winked at Ernie. “We’ve got more than enough venison. You gotta have bucks if you want more deer next year!”

  He took a pack of Camels from his coat pocket and tapped one out, then raised his shaking hands to light it. Ernie watched the smoke blow out of his mouth and nostrils. He’d been trying to quit, but did it matter anymore? He looked up at the sky. He still had not told Rosemary what he had seen. Ernie had kept only one other thing from Rosemary in all the years of their marriage, and that was his grief and anger over her inability to bear children. He knew it wasn’t right, that it wasn’t her fault and that it grieved her worse than it did him. But he couldn’t let go of the resentment of having been cheated out of being a father.

  Now for the second time in his life he would be unable to tell his wife something so important to him. He tried to understand what he had seen three days ago, but it was the confused yet questioning expression on the young man’s face that Ernie could not interpret. Or the way Jimmy took off his helmet—and did Ernie imagine it, or did Jimmy momentarily hold the helmet as though saluting Ernie before he dropped it? Then the way Jimmy turned and walked away from Ernie without speaking.

  The pain of that day suddenly struck his chest, and he bent over for a few minutes. Ernie took deep breaths and after a few minutes slowly straightened up. He dropped the cigarette to the ground and smashed it with his boot.

  He felt betrayed. His own land had produced something beyond the unusual and explainable. He would never be able to work that field witho
ut sweaty palms and without looking over his shoulder. He could not know it then, but his dread would slowly deepen in the coming years. He wanted to tell Rosemary, but he suddenly wasn’t sure that she would believe him. There was only one person he could think of who might have been able to help him, who would have been able to explain what it was Ernie saw and what he should do. But Claude Morriseau was long dead.

  WHEN MY LITTLE BROTHER WAS four, he became fascinated by the way the burners on our gas stove burst into blue flames when he turned the dials and how he could adjust the flames with a slight turn of the dials. I caught him one day and shook him.

  “Your face could get burned!” I yelled. “Do you know what would happen if the stove suddenly went nuts? It would blow up on you!”

  Then I turned on one of the burners and stuck my finger in the flame for a second. It hurt. Christ, it hurt, but it did what I wanted it to. I had scared Bill enough to make him cry.

  Then I put my finger in my mouth to cool it off. I pulled it out and showed Bill the blistering skin on the tip of my finger and the blackened fingernail.

  “This is what happens. Only worse.” I shook my finger in front of his face. I could smell my own burned flesh, and I could tell the smell got to him too. Bill gagged and threw up on the floor before he started crying like he always did. A deep breath and then a drum-roll building up.

  “You’re scaring me!” he cried.

  “You damn right I’m scarin’ you. I’m doin’ it for your own good. Don’t play with the stove! I better never catch you doing it again or I’ll stick your finger in the burner!”

  For some odd reason this is what I thought about when I first became aware that I was on fire. I was burning, and not even screaming can make the sound that would tell someone how terrible it feels. How napalm is like being covered with scalding jelly and how it sticks to the skin, burning and burning until there is nothing left. Then that sudden rise, as though the ground had become a trampoline. It wasn’t a bouncing Betty. I had been thrown too high into the air for one of those evil fuckers. I don’t know if I was hit by one of our own shells or if I stepped on an NVA land mine. It was definitely a lot bigger than a grenade and gave off a cloud and a familiar smell. White phosphorus. All I know is that I was shot straight up into the air. The rush of air felt good, and the burning stopped instantly. I saw the flaming boot from my right foot, and it took me a few seconds to realize that my right leg was attached to it, glowing like a fluorescent lightbulb. It flipped end over end like a stick tossed through the air for a dog to retrieve. I looked down at myself, and everything that was me was no longer. Pieces of my body were blown everywhere. I didn’t think I’d leave Vietnam without some kind of wound, but I had hoped it would be a million-dollar one. I didn’t even get peanuts, our word for wounded in action. I got Kool-Aid. Killed in action. And I was doing what we joked about when we were stoned or drunk. When we were scared but wouldn’t admit to it. I was fertilizing Hill 881N. I could look down and see Lieutenant Miller’s body. I could see my buddy Marv. I could hear him screaming until the rest of the guys from the Fifth Division tackled him so that he’d shut up. “I lost Lucas! I can’t find Lucas! Goddamn motherfucker! He ran ahead of me!”