The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  The picture helped Bill remember the movie star sensuousness of his brother’s full lips and the flint-colored eyes, so like their mother’s. But he could no longer recall his brother’s voice.

  He lay on his bed for a couple of hours but could not sleep. Leaning over the side, he reached under the bed and pulled out a six-pack of beer that he had filched from his father’s stash in the barn a month ago. Bill drank all six cans. Instead of causing the dreamy stupor that he had hoped for, the beer hooked him, creating for Bill an illusion of clear thinking.

  The last American troops were pulled out in 1973. President Ford had announced last year that the war in Vietnam was finished. Their father was now dead. There was nothing to keep his brother away from home.

  His brother was back, Bill drunkenly reasoned, because he felt him. But Bill never sensed him near the house. James would not come near the house because it was stained with their father’s presence, even after death. Away from the house, though, Bill had a hunch that he was being watched and even touched. He could smell something, too. On a clear morning in the woods or on a hot and dry summer’s day his face would become cold and moist as though mist had fallen. Or fishing off the bridge at the river, he would smell smoke and, walking up and down both sides of the river for a ways, could not find the source of it.

  He would go looking for his brother tonight. But where would James be? He might be down at the Chippewa River, among the big birches bordering the water there. Bill ruminated on several favorite spots along the river and then reconsidered. It was too far away from the farm. James wouldn’t go there. Bill picked up the Polaroid picture and looked at it again. There was only one place his brother could be.

  He put the picture back into the shoebox and thrust the box into the dresser drawer. One by one, he quietly placed the empty beer cans back underneath the bed. Then he padded out of the bedroom and down the stairs, stopping for a few seconds to listen for any sounds that might indicate that his mother was awake. Donning his blue sweatshirt and green rubber boots, he slipped through the barely opened screen door and walked just outside the perimeter of the yard light. Once his eyes adjusted to the dark, Bill broke into a dogtrot and headed toward the hump of land that rose out of the middle of the swamp on the edge of their farm.

  I HEARD BILL WALK DOWN the stairs and watched out my bedroom window as he left the house. I would have been worried if we had lived in a city like Chicago or Milwaukee, where I had grown up and gone to college. But he was seventeen, a big boy, and there was nothing in the swamp or woods that he did not know about or that would hurt him. It didn’t bother me either that it was midnight or that Bill appeared a little unsteady on his feet. He had gotten hold of something to drink, and it was more than likely that it came from our own land, which was pockmarked with my dead husband’s hidden caches, bottles of beer and whiskey that he hid in the barn or buried in various spots, squirreling them away just in case he couldn’t get to town. Although his death that day was a jolt to both of us, I was sure that it did not cause my son’s drinking. Or my insomnia. It did not cause us grief. Bill’s face registered relief almost immediately when I confirmed his father’s death. I too felt only relief and could not summon any appropriate feeling about my husband of twenty-eight years. There was not the expected emotion such as tears or the howling of grief, the fear of an unknown future or compassion. I could not even draw up pity. I felt hot and sticky. It was nearly ninety degrees. My hair was wet, and it dripped perspiration into my eyes. The relief of John’s death subsided much quicker than I would have ever thought. In my many years of wishing him dead, I dreamed of savoring the relief for days and months. But it arrived fleetingly and went. In its place came desire.

  Ernie Morriseau had driven over that afternoon because he was having his land reassessed and did not want John to mistake the surveyors working along our shared fence line for trespassers. I had been hanging bedsheets on the line and humming a vague rendition of “Moon River,” made even more vague by the two clothespins stuffed into my mouth. The moment his truck pulled up, I stopped humming and did not reach down to the basket for another sheet.

  “Hello, Claire. Is John around?”

  That sonorous and silky voice. I pulled the clothespins out of my mouth.

  “Behind the barn.”

  I watched him walk to the barn. Put one clothespin back in my mouth and bit down, chewed on it a little. Rubbed my sweaty hands down the front of my housedress. I looked terrible, my short black hair uncombed and dirty. The cheap rubber sandals on my feet. I looked down at my bare legs. For some absurd reason, I had shaved them that morning, sitting on the edge of the tub. I was happy that at least my legs were smooth, even if the smoothness showed all my purple and blue spider veins.

  It was the way Ernie emerged from behind the barn alone. How he stopped and looked back for a few seconds before turning around to look at me. He kept his eyes steadily on me as he approached, as if to make sure that I would stay put. When he stopped, he reached forward and clasped one of my hands. He didn’t waste words.

  “John’s dead. I think he suffered a heart attack. He’s back there,” Ernie said, nodding toward the barn, “lying against one of the tractor wheels.”

  It had been a few hours since I’d seen him. I rarely went behind the barn when I knew my husband was back there. He’d been using the tractor as an excuse for years to sit back there and drink. Even if he had fixed the tractor, what would he have done with it? Why would I go back there? Why go looking for a fight?

  I shrugged. “Should I call Sheriff Meyer?”

  “I think so.”

  It was my turn to move, to turn around and walk into the house and call Al Meyer. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want Ernie to let go of my hand.

  “Do you want me to call him?” he asked.

  He was considerate in the way he pulled his hand away slowly so that it didn’t feel insulting. My mouth felt dry and tasted of wood. I tried to think of something to say just so I could look at him.

  When we first moved up to Olina and were still reasonably social, we drove over to the Morriseau farm and introduced ourselves. We did not go into the house for a cup of coffee although they repeatedly invited us to. We simply wanted to say hello so that they knew who was now living on the place next to theirs. Ernie smiled and held out his hand. I was instantly captivated. He was the dark and handsome man of dreams. There was a calmness about him that was charismatic although I was sure that he did not realize it. My mouth was dry then too, but the rest of me became wet. I felt the sweat trickling under my arms. Could taste it on my upper lip. I wanted to leave right away, so sure that my husband and Ernie could see what I could not control. Then Rosemary stepped out of the house. She was tall and lithe with long black hair and skin like a model in a Rossetti painting. I could see that my husband was taken aback, that he had not expected our neighbor’s wife- to be so beautiful. They both were extraordinarily beautiful.

  How little Ernie had changed. He smelled faintly of cedar and a freshly laundered shirt. He was still brown and muscled and ruggedly handsome, made even more so by hard work. My right hand lifted, and as if to stop an impending sin, my left hand caught it and brought it down before I could do what would have been embarrassing. To run a fingertip over his lips, before pressing one of my cheeks to his face. I crossed my arms obediently against my chest.

  “Will you stay here until the sheriff arrives?”

  “Absolutely. You better call Bill too.”

  I turned when I reached the screen door.

  “Do you want something to drink?”

  “A glass of water would be wonderful. Thank you, Claire.”

  I would never forget his answer. “Thank you, Claire.” My newly dead husband lying against the hub of the tractor wheel never said thank you. Bill, in the way of all children who take their mothers for granted, never said it either.

  As I was filling a glass with ice and water, I remembered a day during the summer when Jimmy was t
welve. I had walked across our field and the adjacent Morriseau field to fetch Jimmy It was hot that day too, and I needed Jimmy to do chores. Rounding the corner of the Morriseau barn, I saw Ernie bent over the engine of his truck without a shirt on. The perspiration on his upper torso glistened like dew and collected in the hollows and curves of his muscled back and chest before trickling down. I could not say anything to announce my presence, overwhelmed by my desire to palm his broad chest with my hands. To bend my knees and catch the tributaries of sweat with my mouth before they reached the waistband of his jeans.

  I took the glass outside and gave it to him. Watched him gratefully drink the entire glass before wiping his mouth dry with a clean handkerchief. That’s when I felt grief.

  I couldn’t remember the sound of love or the feel of it.

  It certainly wasn’t taught to me by my own parents’ example. Although my mother ceased to talk about how she came to meet my father or chose to marry him while I was still very young, I surmised later that she married my French-American father in a small moment of rebellion and because of love. Who could not have fallen in love with my father, Michel Chappeau? I looked at their wedding photograph and two other photographs of my father as a young man, and I thought he could easily have beaten Rudolph Valentino in looks and charm. My father had black, curly hair and dark, long-lashed Gypsy eyes. His lips were full and sensual, and in later years he wore a mustache with the ends waxed and turned up into a handlebar. His cheekbones were high and slightly wide, and his large nose, although arched, was refined and not blunt or pugnacious like those of so many of the German men I’d seen in Milwaukee. My father joked about his looks, saying it was impossible for any French family who had been in America for at least a hundred years to avoid having some Indian blood. It gave him the kind of sultry looks attributed to Latino men. He was easygoing and loving, which didn’t seem to fit what he did for a living. He was a banker. Clearly he was in love with my Irish mother, and she with him.

  She was beautiful too, with strawberry blond hair that fell to her tiny waist and dare-me blue eyes. In later years the blue of her eyes became as cold as ice, and she could silence anyone with a sharp glance. I imagined their attraction to each other. But it didn’t last.

  My father wanted a large family. My mother often said she never wanted to be a broodmare, dying young from childbirth or from just being worn out. My mother wanted only two children, a boy and a girl. As if willing it, she had my brother, Andre, and then me, and that was it. No more lovemaking. My mother’s God was the feared and wrathful old man of the Old Testament. My father was Catholic too, but his New World French Catholicism was less dogmatic and filled with the light and love of the New Testament God. They would not divorce for religious and social reasons, but my father found other ways to obtain the love he cherished. He was, for the most part, discreet so as not to hurt my mother, but she knew anyway and became more enraged through the years that her husband did not follow her example of celibacy. I used to think that if they had had access to the modern birth control of today, they might have remained a loving couple. But my mother’s Catholicism was too rigid even for that, and she had a willfulness that increased with age and did not serve her well, eventually turning into hatred.

  I once saw my father with another woman. A beautiful brown-haired woman who was at least a foot taller than my father. I was a freshman in high school and, having gotten my period, had left school early one day. I was sick with cramps, and one of the nuns suggested that the walk home might ease them. I had just shut the gate to the schoolyard behind me and turned to face the park across the street. It was then I saw my father sitting on one of the polished granite benches in the middle of the day, his arm around a woman’s shoulders. He was kissing her, and it was clear that they would leave the park soon to seek a more private spot. Although I was almost doubled over with cramps, I could not stop staring at them, at the intensity with which my father kissed the woman’s lips, cheeks, and neck and how she responded in kind, unbuttoning the top of her blouse so that he could reach her breasts. I saw for the first time what passion was and how it could overwhelm all inhibitions and judgment.

  My father did not see me. I was not hurt for my mother’s sake but for my own. My brother, André, physically took after my mother’s side of the family. But I was my father’s daughter. I looked and was every inch a Chappeau, and my father loved me for it, calling me his petite chérie. When I began to menstruate, my mother was no longer able to hide her hatred. She saw me as she did my father’s women. He was generous with me, kissing and hugging me often and giving me beautiful dresses and small presents that my mother immediately took away. When I turned sixteen, he gave me one of the most beautiful dresses I’d ever seen.

  “Stop it! She’ll get conceited! She already thinks too much of herself!” she shouted at my father. “Do you want her to end up doing nothing with her life except to become some man’s plaything?”

  My father was about to leave the house when she began shouting at him. He turned around at the door and said quietly, “Is it so terrible to have some joy? Or to give joy? Am I not allowed to give my daughter what a father should give her? Claire’s too smart to end up being anyone’s plaything. But love. I would never deny her that. What happened to you, Sylvia?”

  Although my father loved me, he was not stupid. When I came of age and was noticed by boys, he became strict and fiercely protective, frightening the boys who came to our door.

  “Claire,” he said, two weeks before I was to graduate from high school with honors, “it shames me to say this, but most men are evil. Particularly toward women. And you are both pretty and smart. It is the rare man who can appreciate that combination in a woman. Don’t give yourself away. Think well of yourself, and choose carefully.”

  He was smoking a cigar, and I noticed that my father didn’t look well. His lovely olive-colored skin was washed out. I did hear his words, but I could not forget the sight of him kissing that woman in the park. Or the rapture on her face. I wanted to be touched like that.

  I made love on the sly to a young medical student when I was nineteen and in college. It was all that I dreamed of. God, it was bliss. It was like going to heaven or how I imagined going to heaven would feel. It was passionate and crazed, and I learned that my young body could bend and turn in ways I never thought possible. We made love in the wildest of places: closets, empty classrooms, in a park near campus late at night, and once in one of the medical school’s laboratories with cadavers in the refrigerated room next door. I laughed later, thinking it was a kind of anatomy class for him, and wondered how in the world I didn’t get pregnant. But he was near the end of his formal studies and went back to New York to fulfill his residency. He did not ask me to marry him, and I did not presume that I could ask him. I was supposed to wait to be asked. I was supposed to be a good girl—unassuming and sweet, just like my name.

  My father died just before I met John. A burst blood vessel, the doctor said, or more accurately now, a cerebral hemorrhage. He was found slumped over his large banker’s desk with blood coming out of his nose and mouth. I imagined my father looking at accounts and concentrating on balances when that small explosion in his brain suddenly made the world go dark for him, and then nothing. I cried for so long that my mother couldn’t stand it anymore and yelled at me. Then I grieved silently. I think there were women privately crying all over Milwaukee. That was an odd comfort to me. Whatever my father’s sins may have been, seeking love was not one of them. If my mother would not mourn him, then his daughter and all his lovers would.

  I was so vulnerable when I met John. He promised to renew my dreams and ambitions, and I believed him.

  The funny thing is, John wanted the dream of a farm, but it didn’t want him. He never caught on to the basic idea of living a rural life: that it took patience. He expected instant success and when it didn’t happen, when the boys and I couldn’t provide it, his disappointment came crashing down on us. It enraged him, I th
ink, that I provided all our vegetables from the garden, eggs and chickens from our coop, and that I excelled at those things. And that Jimmy, not he, provided so much fish and meat for our freezer.

  I realized I hadn’t really fallen in love with John. What I had fallen in love with was a uniform, for what I thought it stood for: someone to protect me, someone with respect and honor, and someone who was brave and who respected freedom. My freedom. I stumbled for years, thinking that he had to know he was hurting me and hurting our sons. I had been taught to believe that every person has an inherent sense of remorse or a conscience. But in time I found out that one-dimensional people can often act three-dimensional when they are in pursuit of something. When they get what they want, they settle back down into their shallow personalities and do ugly and shallow things.

  After that our life together began its slow descent except for the two times I gave birth. My mother refused to hear of my unhappiness just as she refused to acknowledge her own. She was as clichéd in her statements as any staunch Catholic mother of her time could be.

  “You were married in the church. You took a vow,” she said venomously, clearly happy that her daughter had done even worse than she had and would suffer the same fate of going without love. “There is no going back. Just make the best of it.”

  My generation of women was never told what to do if the marriage went bad. We were the new generation, the progressive generation just after World War II. Marriages were not supposed to go bad for us.

  We still had some feelings toward each other when Jimmy was conceived. But I’m not sure how Bill happened. A drunken roll over the top of my body one night when I was asleep? Bill was certainly not conceived in love, although I adored both my sons from the moment they were born, considering them the only worthwhile things that ever came out of my husband. I looked at my husband after Bill was born and realized that he was no longer handsome, no longer lovable in any way.