The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  “Mamma.”

  As if recognizing him for the first time, she turned from the window and in a burst of sudden anger viciously shook him.

  “What were you doing out of bed? Huh?”

  She grabbed his hair in her fist and pulled his head back so that his trembling face was exposed.

  “I wanted-d a glass of water-r-r-r,” he stuttered, his chest heaving between hiccups.

  She slapped his face and shoved him toward the door. “Go to bed now! And quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

  Bill stumbled out of the room and into the hallway, where he fell into his brother’s arms. His brother lifted him and carried him into their bedroom. He remembered James stripping him of his wet pajama bottoms before tucking him into bed. Remembered the feel of cold sheets against his wet butt. He watched as his brother reached into their closet and pulled out his Marlin .30-30 rifle with a scope mounted on top. He reached into the closet again and pulled a box of bullets from the top shelf. Bill watched as James knocked the lever up and opened the chamber. He listened as his brother loaded the rifle with seven long-nosed bullets. He would never forget that peculiar clink as they fell into place in the gun’s chamber.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Shsh. Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  His brother carried the rifle with the barrel pointed to the floor, cautiously opened the door, and vanished from the room. Bill later learned that James, perched on the lid of the woodbox, sat up for the rest of the night near the back porch door.

  After his brother left, Bill did his best to protect her. When his father’s wood-nicked hands began to strike his mother, Bill ran in between them, slapping and kicking his old man into chasing him around the house and away from her. With his father thundering up the stairs behind him, Bill would dash into his room, lock the door, and push a chair against it. Then he would wrap his brother’s bedspread around him, even covering his head with it to muffle his father’s yelling and pounding on the door. The bedspread would protect him even if his father managed to break down the door. Bill wrapped himself around and around into a cotton cocoon. Even if his father did break down the door, he would not be able to find a beginning or end to yank his son out of his protective shroud. Bill didn’t even think his father would try. The bedspread’s whiteness glowed. His drunken father would be frightened of such an ethereal illumination, the way people long ago had been frightened by the paleness of the moon.

  IT WAS TEMPTING TO KEEP Bill home from school, to ease the intensity of those days and break the jags of crying. It was my motherly sense of doing what was right for Bill even though I could not participate in it myself. I forced my son back into the outside world. On weekends I looked out the living room window and watched Bill play by himself, building snow forts. Sometimes he just sat on the snowbanks and stared at some destination beyond the house.

  Our neighbor Rosemary Morriseau called several times, inviting us both over for dinner. She repeatedly offered help, but I declined. Jimmy had spent so much time over at the Morriseaus’ that it hurt me. He admired Rosemary Morriseau in a way that I could not compete with. He did not see my short experience as a teacher as comparable to her experiences as a wartime nurse. Bill had begun to spend time over there as well, as though I didn’t exist and was not his mother. I insisted he stay at home. I would not lose another son in that way. But there was a deeper motive in my not keeping contact with Ernie and Rosemary Morriseau. I wanted to keep at bay the questions I could not answer, did not want to talk about the voices I thought I heard and talked back to. I did not want Rosemary, a sharp and intuitive woman, to read what I suspected was true.

  I was not just going crazy. I was crazy.

  LIKE AN ANNUAL APRIL FOOL’S day joke, the first gnats of the season came out in black clouds. Bill could not play outside without being tormented by them. Black and small. Biting. Always biting. He spent a day or so swiping them with his hands, blowing them out of his nose before resigning himself to them as he did every year. He ignored them as they tried to crawl into his eyes and crowded together in the wells of his ears, biting and then dying in clumps. Bill was so overjoyed with the early miraculous warmth of spring that tolerating the bugs was made easier in the late orange light. He stole one of his mother’s gossamerlike hairnets that she used to hold her hair in place before going somewhere, covered his face with it, and pinned it to his short hair with a few of her black bobby pins. In this way he could walk through the woods and swamp with some protection as the fine netting shielded his mouth, nose, and eyes.

  On April 4 he joyfully jumped from the school bus and ran toward the house to change into play clothes for another evening outside. He was out of breath by the time he reached the kitchen and so did not hear her at first. He was halfway up the stairs when he became aware of the radio’s drone and of her weeping somewhere downstairs. He found her in the living room, lying on the davenport. The radio on the end table produced mostly static. He could discern a faint voice, could tell it was the afternoon news, but the static was so bad that he turned the radio off.

  “Mamma,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  She pushed herself up just enough to rest on one elbow. He saw the ribbing from the brown davenport cushions imprinted on her face.

  “Dr. King has been shot.”

  The pressure from her crying raised the blue veins in her forehead. Not knowing what else to do, Bill wedged his butt between his mother’s legs and the edge of the davenport and patted her shoulder. He sat with her for an hour, listening to her deep sobs, feeling them as they racked her chest and tunneled up through her shoulder into his hand. He stared out of the window at the bird feeder, at the warm and sun-filled yard beyond the bird feeder, the deep green pine boughs dusted with the incandescent light of a falling sun. He could dimly understand the significance of what had happened, but Dr. King was not related to them. He could not understand his mother’s intense reaction.

  When she became too exhausted to cry any longer, he nudged and prodded her into sitting up and finally into standing. He wrapped one arm around her waist and helped her climb the stairs. He maneuvered her until she was in front of the bed, and then he gently pushed her until she sat down. He pulled off her house slippers and tucked her under the blankets. He ran back downstairs, made toast, and heated up a can of chicken soup with mushy noodles. He put the bowl of soup and toast on a tray that was meant for the luxury of eating in bed but had never been used for that. He gingerly carried the tray upstairs. She swallowed the spoonfuls he offered her. Chewed on the pieces of bread that Bill broke apart and fed to her in bits as though she were a pigeon. When she would eat no more, he took the tray back to the kitchen. Climbed the stairs again. This time he wet a clean washcloth with cold water and wiped his mother’s face, holding it against her swollen eyelids. Af ter she gradually fell asleep, Bill got up from the bed and stood in front of the bedroom window. He stared at the setting sun behind the barn.

  Bill spent the next few weeks getting up an hour earlier than what was normal for him. He dressed and then slipped into her bedroom to shake her awake. Every morning he cajoled her out of bed, pushed her pink bedroom slippers onto her feet, and guided her downstairs ,to the kitchen. She sat while Bill made toast and oatmeal and coffee. That was when he learned to make coffee, to drink coffee, and to love coffee. His mother drank her coffee black but appeared not even to smell its presence until he pressed the edge of the cup against her lips to make her drink. He poured coffee into his cup halfway, filling the rest of the cup with evaporated milk. The milk became less and less of a component until he was drinking his coffee black as well. Bill made sandwiches at night, taping notes to the refrigerator so that she would eat them while he was at school.

  By the middle of May she could get up by herself in the mornings although she still relied on Bill at night. He washed her hair as she bent over the bathroom sink, rinsing it and then toweling it dry. She s
at on the toilet seat, holding a jar of Dippity-Do in her lap while Bill combed and parted her hair into thin sections. He held each section with one hand while dipping the tips of his fingers from his other hand into the jar of green gel. He smeared it onto the section of hair to be rolled around the pink sponge curlers his mother always used. When he was finished and her hair was wound into neat pink rows on her head, he tied on the blue hairnet that would hold them in place while she slept. Then Bill helped his mother into bed and talked to her until she fell asleep.

  “What the hell is wrong with your mother!” his father bellowed one evening, angry over another dinner of Campbell’s soup.

  “She’s just tired and kinda sick,” Bill answered, bent over his bowl of soup. “I’m taking care of her.”

  His father brooded for a few minutes. Bill felt his father’s bloodshot eyes bore into him. Bill knew that if his mother stayed sick, his father would keep away from the bedroom. His father hated illness.

  “So you think you’re the man of the house now,” he rasped, reaching over and poking Bill disdainfully in the arm.

  Bill lowered his head and didn’t answer. To say something would only enrage his father and give him reason for taking further action. Bill silently ate his soup and prayed that his father would leave the house soon.

  The last day of school did not bring its customary release of screaming-with-joy children. They heard muffled crying and even some wailing from the hallway. The children fearfully looked at one another. Sister Agnes walked to the front of the classroom.

  “Children—” she wavered, her face wet with tears “—we must go to church and pray. Senator Kennedy has been shot.”

  Bill solemnly walked with the other children to the Sacred Heart Church a block away. He felt sick to his stomach and worried that he might throw up in the pew.

  When he got home, he found his mother spread out on the davenport again, facedown into the cushions. He pushed her over and saw that she had been crying. But she was not asleep. She was drunk.

  Bill repeated his routine of early April, adding to it housework. He vacuumed floors, washed dishes, dusted, washed windows, stripped beds, and learned how to operate the washer and dryer. Once a day he pulled his mother out of the house and, holding her hand, took her on a walk through the woods, hoping that the summer warmth would crack her catatonic state. He learned how to drive that summer, putting two pillows on the driver’s seat so that he could see above the wheel of the station wagon. They exchanged places just before they reached town. Once his mother was done with her grocery shopping, she drove a half mile outside town, where they exchanged places again. Bill drove the rest of the way home.

  By the beginning of August his mother seemed to revive and take her place in the day. Bill was free to play for a few hours. He ran for the woods, the swamp, and the river with the desperation of regaining some of his former life. On rainy days he hid in the barn loft and occasionally pulled out his jar of money. He had once been elated over how much money the jar contained, thrilled that his brother had entrusted him with holding the money. He wearily fingered the bills before stuffing them back into the jar. He could not think of what to do with them.

  He stuck the jar of money back into the corner of the barn and piled the loose hay on top of it. He climbed down from the top of the stacked hay bales and sat on the very hay bale where his brother and he had sat the night before his brother left. The ashtray was still full of his brother’s cigarette stubs. He dipped one finger into the ashes and ran it across his forehead. He dipped his finger three times more, creating a slash of ashes down each of his cheeks and across his chin. Then he fell asleep.

  THAT STRANGE WEATHER OF JANUARY was an omen. Anyone who might have brought peace was killed. To strive to be good and to do good were dangerous. It was as though an undeclared hunting season had been established. In April of that year it was the shooting of Martin Luther King. Then in June, Robert Kennedy was shot in California. I crumbled, sensing that it was not just my life, but that life in general was out of control on a grand scale, and nothing I did or said could stop it.

  I made it through the rest of that winter and spring because of my son. I had taught Bill too, as soon as he could walk, to listen for that breath and pulse that were outside. He had absorbed it even better than Jimmy had. Knowing that walking, just walking, might make me feel more alive, he dragged me outside even when I didn’t want to go. Some days I couldn’t hear anything, stumbling along the path that the boys had made in the woods. But I was always aware of his small hand, warm and moist, clutched tightly around my own hand. Tugging me along like a listing ocean liner when I slowed down or tried to stop.

  One morning I sat at the kitchen table and watched as Bill made coffee and breakfast. As he pressed the cup to my lips and the hot coffee spilled into my mouth, it was as though I had been slapped. I woke up and saw what I was doing to Bill. How tired he looked. How ashamed I felt. I had to get better. By early August the tide of my grief had gone down enough so that I could do basic chores and Bill could play once again.

  When I could not do housework, the long days of light allowed me to walk the perimeter of our field. Sometimes I walked it twice until my legs felt rubbery, until I was exhausted from talking aloud. I would walk home with a hoarse voice, climb into bed, and fall asleep instantly.

  One evening I was scrubbing the porch floor and trying to find some breathable air above the ammonia fumes and the suffocating humidity and heat of August when I thought I heard someone talking. Thinking I had unexpected company and not wanting any, I raised my head just enough to peep out the porch window. There was no one out there. I stood up and peered out the window at the rest of the yard.

  It was seven-thirty, and Bill was already in bed, suffering from a mild case of heat stroke from having been out all day without a hat or enough water. I looked beyond the yard and at the forty-acre field behind the barn.

  Our neighbor to the south of us hadn’t cut the field yet for a second baling of hay, and the tall grasses, dry and wheat-colored from the sun, rippled in waves as though the wind were skimming water. I leaned over the sill.

  I had helped hay that field dozens of times. Looked at it every day during the boredom of household chores and gratefully walked its edges. I thought I knew every inch of that ground, but it didn’t look the same. The field appeared to flow from the setting sun and toward me, announcing itself. My mind emptied itself of everything: of Jimmy’s death, of Bill floating through his days in make-believe, of the loneliness I’d grown used to, and of the sweat trickling between my breasts and down my face. I dropped the ammonia-soaked rag in my hand and opened the porch door.

  By the time I reached the barn, I had unbuttoned my cotton shirt and pulled it free from the waistband of my baggy khaki pants. I stood by the fence post for only a moment. Using my arms to sweep aside the grass in front of me, I plunged into the field as though wading into a deep lake. Timothy weed and brome seeds scattered themselves across my sweaty belly, and some of the grass slapped back hard enough to deposit some of their seeds on my face.

  I heard a whoosh of exhaled air and then a bleat before I saw her. I froze. A doe scrambled up from the anonymity of the grass thirty feet in front of me. I held my breath and waited, waited for the brief whistle, the stamp of a hoof, and the white flagging of the tail. The doe remained standing although her flanks rippled with muscular tension.

  I had seen plenty of deer before, sometimes as close as the doe. But after the initial moment of discovery, they bounded into the woods within seconds of having been seen. Never had I seen one this close for so long.

  The long lashes. The eyes reflecting blue inside their blackness. The velvet and tawny brown ears, brown flanks, and white underside. The muscles and cabled tendons in her slender legs that appeared so thin as to be brittle when in fact they were strong and with deceptively dainty black hooves that could slice like a knife. Jimmy had killed does as well as bucks during deer season. I had eaten such bea
uty. I had longed for such beauty. I did not have it and did not have to look at myself to know what was there.

  My shirt flapping open in the wind. The overwashed bra that trapped sagging breasts and shaped them into torpedoes, holding them up with a Cross Your Heart elastic that pinched. My head, covered with ridiculous pink sponge curlers, and my hands, wrinkled and peeling from scrubbing the porch floor. The small ring of fat that would never go away and rode my hips and waist like a tricycle tire. The slightly pouched belly that would never give birth, again. My own face. I had lost so much weight that every bone in my face threatened to cut itself out of my skin, and my skin was as waxy and as pale as a diabetic’s. My eyes were sunken, the eyeballs appearing to float in ponds surrounded by ocular bone cliffs.

  “Did you call me?” I opened my mouth to ask, but I reacted instead by stepping forward. That was when I saw the fawn. It scrambled to its feet, and I could see the fading spots on its body. The doe whistled and flagged her tail, leaping across the field in bursts with her fawn following her. She chose a section of the fence that was down so that her baby could clear it and not become entangled in wire. They both disappeared into the white cedars that bordered the swamp. I walked to where they had bedded down in the grass and knelt. With the palms of my hands, I touched the flattened grass and felt the warmth from their bodies. Rocking forward, I pressed the side of my face into the grass. Then I remembered Bill. He was alone and sleeping in the house. This time I wouldn’t forget him.