The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  By the time of Bill’s birth I had ceased to think about love as being related to sex. Forgotten the swelling of breath or the rapid chest pounding of desire until I saw Ernie Morriseau.

  Just two weeks before John’s death I had dreamed of Ernie’s fingertips walking the bumps of my spine with the delicacy of a cabbage moth. I woke up. The room was dark, and I was alone in my bed. I cried, unable to recall what it was like to have such hands on my body. To have a sensual and welcome interruption to my sleep. Just to be touched.

  Then the shame of it. Rosemary Morriseau had been nothing but kind to me. For years I wanted to stone Rosemary for her lucky twist of fate, for her movie star beauty and strength, and for what appeared to be a hardworking but charmed life. For having a husband with such a voice and such kindness. For having a man who was as handsome as she was beautiful. I often stood transfixed, staring at him until I had to look away before he became aware of it.

  But crying can last only so long and then comes exhaustion. And after that a tranquillity and a thankfulness. I had slept alone ever since that August night when I heard the voice in the field and obeyed it. A long peal of laughter. Voiced hilarity that trumpeted out of the dark and terrified my husband so much that shit had poured down his legs. I found his pants the next day by the bird feeder. Who would have thought that laughter could be as effective as a gun? That it could deflect my husband’s desire to terrorize me. After that night, if John slept at home, it was on the couch in the living room. I did not have to endure his body next to me in bed any longer. His sour, oily touch. His sallow skin and fleshy, loose horse lips. He could not in fact summon the courage even to hit me after that night.

  He was afraid of me.

  I stared out the window long after Bill was gone. I considered it a blessing that Bill was drunk in the hope that it might cause him to cry. He had never cried over his brother’s disappearance, so sure that he was alive. That was the worry that weighed me down over the past eight years.

  If drinking caused him to cry, then it would also relieve me of that ugly and shameful part of my history that I thought was over but that loomed in front of me like a necessary ghost. Necessary because I would repeat that history if I had to, to make my son cry. I would hit him as I did years ago when he was a little boy and didn’t deserve to be shaken like a rag doll or have his hair pulled until his small head was wrenched back, all because Bill had, maybe, spilled a glass of milk.

  What child, I thought bitterly, wouldn’t spill milk, wouldn’t shit in his pants or wet the bed, wouldn’t act out in a household where threats hung in the air like wet laundry until fists pulled them down?

  I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheets up despite the heat. I always cried after I hit Bill, cried when I heard his terrified sobs, cried because my little boy had done nothing wrong except exist to be a receptor of a long line of pain. And I cried too because I felt almost powerless to stop it. When Jimmy left, the truth finally locked my fists to my sides and found its way out of my mouth. I walked away, talking aloud to myself and the invisible whoever and whatever inhabited the space around me.

  Bill had always been an introspective child. A different child. Unlike his brother, who could be verbally picked at and teased into a rage, Bill remained quiet and nearly impenetrable to verbal taunts. After Jimmy left, my husband tried the same humiliating tactics on our younger son. He pulled out those medals and dangled them off his fingertips when he was drunk, most often during a meal, and proceeded to tell stories I knew were lies. Bill calmly ate his food heedless and undeterred by the nearly indecipherable words of his father. When he did look at his father, it was with a momentary lift of his eyebrows and brief detached interest. Sometimes Bill looked at John with puzzlement, but most often he noticed him with an “oh there you are” attitude. Eventually my husband would give up, his lips pursed with confusion, his eyebrows wrinkled with thwarted anger. John was unable to determine whether Bill was spurning him or mocking him or simply didn’t care or was too stupid to react. Knowing my husband, I watched him wordlessly reach the conclusion that Bill was too daft to understand the concept of the medals or what they stood for. What they meant to becoming a man, to being a man. What they meant to John.

  Since John paid little attention to the details of our children’s lives, he did not know that his younger son had an astonishing IQ. That Bill read books and painted pictures and could memorize whole songs just like his brother after hearing the song only once or twice. When he was quite young, he sat like a meadowlark on the fence railing by the chicken coop and sang songs he had learned from the nuns who spent time with the smaller children after church. Wistful and fluty songs. Robust and affectionate songs. I taught him the French songs I had learned in Catholic school, and I could hear his little voice from the house. “Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines, ding dong ding, ding dong ding.”

  My husband did not observe or know of Bill’s loves. He did not know that Bill had learned to survive by merging with what he loved best: the sky, the birds and animals that lived on or near the fringes of our farm, and even the soil itself underneath his nails. He tirelessly took care of wounded or orphaned animals, watching for hours the menagerie of animals he kept in his bedroom until they were well enough or old enough to live on their own. The large animals that lived in our woods could not be caught or did not need Bill’s ministrations, and so he did not have the same chance to observe them. Instead I occasionally watched Bill study his father when John wasn’t aware of being stared at or ruminated over. I imagine Bill considered his father a large and incomprehensible species of being, a kind of animal gone bad that not even Bill could feel compassion for. Bill’s professorial concentration, his pale and thoughtful face constantly reminded me of something.

  It came to me one evening when Bill was ten. Silently defeated by the lack of response from Bill or me, my husband had left the dinner table. He went outside to the car, to drive to Pete’s Bar, where someone was always drunk enough to listen to him. I dried the dishes and watched Bill draw in his sketchbook at the cleared table. I put a cup away in the cupboard. A porcelain cup with many cracks in the glaze. Looking at that cup caused me to turn around. Despite the smoothness of his kissable, cherubic cheeks, the pale brown of his long lashes or the fineness of his light brown hair, and the cowlick near his forehead that refused to lie flat, my son looked old. Not just old but sagacious. He paused in his sketching and looked up at me. I silently stared back at him. With the robes of an ancient Nazarene around him, my ten-year-old would look exactly like an apostle. Better yet, a prophet. A man of God.

  I suppose some women would like to think of their sons as God or sons of God. I had no such ambition, nor did I want my sons crucified. Looking at Bill that night, I was afraid. I had a ten-year-old holy man on my hands. How do you raise such a son? Bill had even been born unconventionally I had not wanted to be put under, as I had for Jimmy’s birth, not knowing or seeing what they were doing down there. So I endured the labor pain, the episiotomy to accommodate his head, and the painful stitching afterward, just to see Bill emerge. One of his tiny hands was clenched around the umbilical cord as though the placenta were his blanket and he was determined to drag it with him. They pried his fingers away from the cord and cut it. And he cried.

  “Well!” the attending nurse said. “He didn’t like that.”

  I always thought it would be Bill who would turn out fragile enough to lose his life. As did other people, I mistook his quietness, his observation of the world for fragility and helplessness. He had vulnerability. That was true. But of such a quality as to make people step away from him, not toward him. As though he possessed an understanding of them that they didn’t want seen. I knew that look. I saw myself reflected in my son’s eyes all the time.

  But Bill lost the magic somewhere in the spurt of adolescence and simply became old. He encased himself so that it became increasingly difficult for me to talk to him,
to sense his thoughts. He didn’t laugh anymore. He reminded me of those chicks in the incubator that, for reasons of uneven temperature and humidity, were conceived into shells too hard for them to break through. I often found them too late, the tip of the egg tooth on the beak peeking through a small hole in the shell. “Died While Pipping” was one of the categories under “Problems in Incubating” in my chicken handbook. On occasion I triumphed, delicately peeling away the shell from a still-alive chick so that it could stretch out and fluff up into activity and into life.

  Bill was all I had left. I could not fight the cultural demons, tangible and intangible, that had killed my older son. But I could fight that which I had inadvertently taught to Bill: to deny the truth in order to endure the small horrors of our daily lives. I was sure that if I had summoned the courage to leave my husband years ago, there would never have been such a string of events in our lives. My older son would never have enlisted. My husband, left alone to his self-destructive ways, might have died sooner, thereby freeing up the farm for us. Bill would have been a happy, normal teenager and not a boy so deaf to the reality of life that he was at that moment wandering in the dark woods sleepless and drunk.

  I turned on my side and stared at the window again. It all was a matter of timing. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to do it. To peel around the small opening of the egg tooth too soon might hurt the chick inside. But I would risk it because I knew. Better to live with some hurt than die silently in a shell.

  ERNIE WAS UNCOMFORTABLE around Claire although he was careful not to show it. He had the sense that she saw some extraordinary goodness in him that he did not believe existed. True, he was far from being like her husband, but men like John Lucas were the extreme. John Lucas made other men squirm. Men who tried to be good, who lived every day with those intentions. Ernie felt that way too, but he was unable to name it until he cautiously walked to the back of the Lucas barn. He saw the green Oliver tractor with its missing steering wheel and the open toolbox tipped against one wheel.

  “John?”

  When there was no answer, Ernie ran his hand across the ridges of the big tire facing him. He did a half turn and looked down at the power takeoff, noted how greasy and dirty it was. Then he tapped the top of the other big tire before doing another half turn. His foot stopped in midair, and he sucked in his breath. John Lucas was slumped against the wheel hub with his mouth hung open as if to yell and his eyes staring out into his own field. Ernie didn’t need to touch him to know he was dead. He could smell him. That sour bowel of a chronic boozer.

  “Yup, he’s dead,” Alfred Meyer commented matter-of-factly after he had arrived and ambled out to the barn with Ernie.

  “Natural causes?”

  Meyer snorted.

  “Are you joking? Smell him. Yeah, I would say natural causes with a little help. Probably a heart attack. He’s lucky he died this way” Meyer added, spitting out a stream of tobacco juice. “He’s borrowed money from anybody and everybody, but they were always too afraid to ask for it back. I always thought he’d end up dead from a fight in Pete’s Bar.”

  “He’s always been like that. Troubled, I guess.”

  “I suppose. I noticed Claire doesn’t seem too heartbroken. Can’t say as I blame her. I never did like him.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Ernie stepped around John until he stood in front of the dead man. He stared down at him. He could not understand John Lucas’s seeming ingratitude at having two sons, nor did he ever understand the fate that bestowed children on a man who didn’t want them. It was, Ernie reflected, as though John had lived in his own world, his own time zone, his own age. It was then that Ernie understood what it was about John Lucas that bothered him and that bothered other men, who, in brief conversations when John Lucas’s name was mentioned, could not find the words to describe the man. John Lucas had stopped time in his head so that he was a cemented twelve-year-old. He was a reminder of secret deeds done in boyhood and even in early manhood. Ugly acts of bullying or cruelty. Men felt that old violence anytime they happened to glance at John Lucas. That tall and mean drunk was a persistent pinch, a twang in their heads that reminded them that they had possibly not outgrown those mean displays of machismo. That one day they would embarrass themselves or hurt their families because it would bubble up unexpectedly. An old hormonal response they were incapable of controlling. Claire Lucas bothered them too. The scarves and sunglasses that hid her bruised face and the wariness she displayed whenever she was in town made them feel ashamed as grown men that they stood by and felt powerless to stop her pain. John Lucas walked their streets like a film character, haunting them when they saw him in the bar, working at the mill, or driving on the road. He was a wrong turn personified. A wrong turn they might have taken, might still take.

  Looking down at John Lucas, Ernie knew that one did not need to die to become dead.

  “He stinks. Charlie won’t have to use embalming fluid on him,” Al Meyer commented before leaving Ernie and lumbering back to his car.

  He would always remember seeing Claire as he walked to the house after his discovery of her husband. The wooden clothespin in her mouth. How she took it out as he approached her. Her smallness. Claire had been pretty once. He imagined her as a vivacious young woman who went dancing every Saturday night, who could have been at any number of the dances in Milwaukee that kept people occupied during the war. He imagined her as a daring dancer, small enough to be swung and cradled in her partner’s arms, energetically covering the floor, doing the jitterbug. He imagined her laughing with girlfriends, enjoying every minute of that release they all felt after the war.

  He wanted to hold her then because of the secret slaughter of her life. It was visible in her prematurely wrinkled face, the cheap and ugly housedresses that she wore, and the shuffle of her bare feet in dime-store rubber sandals. Her hunched shoulders. How her eyes reflected despair as though her life were a rope insidiously slipping through her fingers and she was falling and falling. Ernie felt his own depression settle deeper within him when he saw her walk the perimeter of her field and saw her gesturing to the air and talking. She did not have the frank toughness of his own wife, nor had she been blessed with Rosemary’s beauty. But she had her own life, and she did not deserve the way it had turned out.

  He thought about it for a few seconds. If he reached forward, would she run away? Even if she didn’t run away, he wondered, would she break like thin crystal if he touched her? He decided against it. He was afraid that hugging her would only make things worse, and it might frighten her.

  Her reaction to her husband’s death did not surprise him as it might have shocked and surprised others. If Ernie had not seen death up close or been responsible for killing, he might have been shocked too. But he believed that there were some people who deserved to be dead, who inflicted unnecessary pain, who were impossible to mourn but easy to breathe a sigh of relief over. People who were in such deep pain themselves that a quick bullet to the head would be as merciful as killing a rabid dog before it bit others. Whatever had happened to make them that way could not be undone after a certain age. It was the only compassion he could feel toward John Lucas. A general feeling of pity.

  IT WAS AS MUCH A shock to me as it probably was to my mother when I spoke out loud, when I realized that I could speak and be heard. I have feelings too, which is weird. Although not pain in the physical sense. I have the memory of pain, the burning of my body. My mother once said the same thing about giving birth: that she could remember the pain but could no longer feel it. But humor has never left me. Sometimes my laughter echoes through the trees although I’m not sure anyone can hear it.

  I laugh a lot. The history of my short life is fuckin’ funny. Joining the Marines was not the smartest move I could have made. I was so conned. At first I thought the Marine Corps and my drill sergeant were just an extension of my old man, and in some ways they were. I was never good enough for him either, and he reminded me of it si
nce the day I was born. Somehow he thought it would toughen me up. I believed him before I figured it out. I had hoped that at some point I would be good enough for him and then he would love me. Well, once I learned to shoot at twelve and got bigger at fifteen, I figured out part of it, and that took care of that. I refused to believe in his lies, in his little stories. I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me. After fifteen he didn’t scare me anymore, and in fact I scared him. But he’d done his damage. If it hadn’t been for Ernie, I wouldn’t have thought I was worth being alive. I might have ended up dead anyway like Terry. Besides being a 4-F because of all his smoking, Terry was generally just a lowlife. I can see that now. I watched him get drunk that spring of 1968, hit the gas, and plow his car into a telephone pole. I would never have wanted him in Nam with me. Terry would never have protected me. He only would have watched out for himself. Most bullies do that.

  I was one of the most physically fit grunts, but still the first six weeks of basic training were beyond, hell. I got the piss beaten out of me through every sadistic drill the Marines had thought up over the years. Sergeant Davidson called me a pussy so many times that I got paranoid, as though the continual suggestion might actually make it true. I would look at myself every now and then just to make sure I still had a dick. Davidson threatened to write me up as unsatisfactory, which was nothing new. My old man’s vocabulary never extended that far although he said the same thing when he called me a dumb-ass. We all were treated as though we were a dented can of peas that couldn’t be put on the shelf for sale.

  That changed when we got down to serious rifle training.

  I blew their minds. I picked up a rifle, any rifle. I could shoot with my eyes closed. I could see through thick woods and cover and focus on the smallest target in the time it took Davidson to raise his finger and pick his nose. A marshmallow on a branch. Half a marshmallow. Then half of a half of a marshmallow.