Marv persisted. “Yeah, I know that. But they want it. At least the Vietnamese do. I’m not sure about the Yards. I don’t know what the hell Communism really is,” he said again. “So, really, why are we here?”
Marv had been in college for one year when he got drafted. He was smart. He was just shell-shocked and not thinking. Ignorance was bliss in some situations and probably necessary. I had Huck Finn on the brain at that moment, so I broke it down into terms that I thought would get a laugh out of Marv.
“Beeecuz,” I wisecracked in a southern drawl, “a bunch of ol’ men have der hands in dis cookie ja. And we aw heah to make sho each one of dem gets a cookie.”
“What do we get?”
“Medals.”
“I’m suppose to get bombed for a medal?”
“ ’Fraid so,” I said.
When he didn’t answer, I looked at him. His mustache was ragged-looking, and it appeared as though the razor had skipped over his face rather than made a smooth run. Despite his beard growth, he looked as young as my brother. And as sad. It’s funny how you can love someone so much in such a short period of time. When you know you shouldn’t because he could die at any time. And that’s what we were there for. To kill and be killed. At least Marv didn’t have a choice. But I did it to myself. Like signing a contract with the devil. Rick had enlisted too. I was the stupid fucker that let the devil get him.
“Listen,” I said, shutting my book and holding it out to him, “read Huck Finn. It will take your mind off of things. Reading is good for you.”
“But will it save my life?” Marv asked sarcastically.
“Well,” I answered somewhat seriously, “yes and no. Yes and no.”
A MONTH AFTER ERNIE HAD accompanied the Navy chaplain and the other officer to the Lucas farm, he told another lie. He told his wife that he was making a day trip to Madison to get some parts for their Farmall tractor that he couldn’t get anywhere else. To make sure that the trip would not be in vain, he called the reserve office and made an appointment with the officer who had not gotten out of the car to say good-bye.
“I can’t tell you without the family’s permission.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” Ernie replied.
He leaned forward and put his elbows on Hildebrandt’s desk. “His father never gave a shit about him. I know you didn’t tell his mother everything. I’m not leaving until you tell me.”
“It’s not that easy—”
“I fought in the Philippines.”
Ernie stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, and peeled it off. He turned around so the officer could see his back.
“I was not in the Marines. I was in the Army. I won’t talk to any jarheads if that’s what you’re worried about. Does that help?”
Ernie put his shirt back on and turned around. He managed a small smile. “I assume that the Marines and the Army still don’t get along real well.”
Hildebrandt opened the file in front of him and unfolded a map. “These are just some notes from basic training and from the field. Private Lucas belonged to the Fifth Marine Division and was a member of India Company, Third Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines.”
He pointed to a section. Quang Tri.
“He was at the Khe Sanh Combat Base. On January twentieth,” Hildebrandt said, moving his finger slightly, “the Fifth Division, Bravo Company, temporarily lost hold of Hill Eight-eighty-one North, and the Fifth Division, India Company, moved from Hill Eight-eighty-one South to Eight-eighty-one North to help gain Hill Eight-eighty-one North back. Private Lucas was apparently right behind Lieutenant Miller as they stormed up the western side of the hill. The report says it was foggy that day, and in the early afternoon the fog lifted. That’s when they discovered they were surrounded by the North Vietnamese Army. Lieutenant Miller was shot and killed. Private Marvin Martinson reported seeing Private Lucas running after Miller and then ahead of him. That’s when Martinson lost sight of him. An F-four dropped napalm, and it was so close that it singed Private Martinson’s mustache. Martinson said he heard an explosion too.”
Ernie stared down at the desk. “What else does it say?”
“His record states that Private Lucas excelled in basic training and was one of the best marksmen to pass through Camp Pendleton. A Captain Kendall noted that Private Lucas would have done well at Annapolis and that he was surprised that Private Lucas was not college-educated. He was a sniper in Vietnam. It appears he was extraordinarily good at it. He was very well liked.”
There was a long pause. Ernie could hear movement out in the hallway.
“Listen, I have to be straight with you. I think Private Lucas is dead,” Hildebrandt added, his voice wavering. “I think he took a direct hit of napalm. I pray to God that he was shot first.”
Bile crept up the back of Ernie’s throat, and he coughed to clear it. “Were you in Vietnam?”
“Yes. Ironically, I was at the Khe Sanh Combat Base in ’65 and ’66. The base sits on a plateau. But around the plateau are the highlands. If you didn’t know what was hidden in all that beauty, you would think that you landed in paradise. Since I left,” he said, “they’ve been fortifying the base camp with more and more Marines. Have you seen the papers?”
Ernie shook his head.
“Khe Sanh was only a preliminary target. The NVA was massing up toward Hue. All hell is breaking loose right now.”
Ernie stood up. “I appreciate your honesty. I’m sure you were very helpful to the men in your unit.”
Hildebrandt stood up as well. “I don’t know about that. I am a priest, and I was a makeshift medic. I was not supposed to engage in combat or carry a weapon. But I did carry a forty-five.”
Hildebrandt ran a hand over his bristly crew cut. “I thought being in Vietnam was bad. But these visits I have to make . . .”
“You must be close to being discharged. Can’t you find a parish somewhere?”
“Actually I could have been discharged a few months back. So it’s voluntary at this point. And I’ll be volunteering to get out very soon.”
Hildebrandt walked around the desk so that he could usher Ernie out.
“You cared a great deal about James Lucas.”
“I did.”
Ernie stopped just outside the chaplain’s office door. He turned and looked at the chaplain. “I’m the one who taught him how to shoot so well.”
He watched Ernie Morriseau walk down the narrow hallway until he turned the corner and was gone.
In a week he would inform the bishop of his archdiocese and then file his discharge papers from the Navy Chaplain Corps. He didn’t know what he’d do after that. It was as though the visit to the Lucas home had opened a hole in his brain and Marcus had crawled through it. He was on Hildebrandt’s mind every day, and he felt the weight of Marcus as surely as if he were carrying the man on his back. He heard the words of St. James: “and the prayer of faith shall save the sick man, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him. ”
He shut his office door and sat back down at his desk. Stared out the window. He remembered being given Marcus’s dog tags so that he could wash them before they were placed back with the body and zipped into a body bag. The chain necklace draped over his hand and fingers in a familiar pattern, and he stared at it as the water washed the blood and little bits of tissue away. He stared at the rectangular metal plate with Marcus’s ID number. The tag that represented Marcus. A man’s life on a metal tag.
The bizarreness of it. He had dog tags too. He was a priest and a soldier. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Thought about it before. The military unwittingly issued necklaces with tags that represented only five of the fifteen Mysteries. Not the five Joyous or the five Glorious. But the five Sorrowful, punched into the metal by a machine and given to each man. Or, in Marcus’s case, to each boy.
Just yesterday he was on the University of Wisconsin, Madison campus and had to dodge demonstrators. The protests were growing daily. There was one sign he
ld up not by a young student but by a middle-aged woman. He assumed, even before reading the sign, that the official military picture pasted on the tag board was her son. The sign said:
DEAR PRESIDENT JOHNSON, MY SON DIED FOR YOUR SINS.
That sound of humming in his ears. Hildebrandt listened as though Private Marcus were right next to him, buzzing that familiar tune in his ears. A nursery rhyme. “Down will come baby, cradle and all.”
Ernie left Madison, knowing what he already had known but having it more or less officially confirmed. Jimmy had died a horrible death, burning until he was nothing but ash scattered across that hill. He thought nothing could hurt him as much as what he’d seen in World War II. The friends like Frank LaRue who died there. But the knowledge that it had happened to Jimmy stabbed him with a pain like no other. He drove home, hunched over the steering wheel of his truck, trying hard to breathe evenly against the information he had been told that afternoon.
“Ernie,” Rosemary had repeated to him last week, “listen to me again. At that age children think they are immortal. They do the exact opposite of what you want them to do. My mother said I was unnatural and selfish. My father said he never thought he’d see a daughter of his go to war. Your parents were very unhappy when you enlisted. And so happy when you came home alive.”
He knew Rosemary was right. There was nothing he could have done or said that would have changed Jimmy’s mind. The simple fact that Ernie and Rosemary had survived the war was encouragement enough for Jimmy to think he could do the same.
“Bill,” she reminded him, “is still alive. We could try to see him.”
Looking down at Bill, Ernie knew they had almost waited too long.
He heard Bill moan and saw more tears trail down his face. Bill looked like his father, but Ernie would not believe, could not believe that he had his father’s traits. Not the small boy he remembered. That wooden sword. The huge turtle shell encapsulating his left arm so that it looked as though he had no arm at all. The shy Oliver Twist smile of yearning and the small face pressed into the screen of their porch door at lunchtime.
He stroked Bill’s forehead and remembered something else. He used to be able to locate Bill anywhere on his place just by listening. The aria of a child’s voice in song, fading in and out.
Ernie rocked him for the next three hours until his crying died down to an occasional whimper. When Bill fell completely asleep, Ernie moved from beneath him. He gently pushed Bill off his chest onto the ground. Ernie stood up and stretched the cramped muscles in his arms and legs. He looked down the slope and saw his rifle on the ground and the old Remington leaning against the tree. He’d have to leave the rifle and the shotgun and come back for them. Squatting down, Ernie hefted Bill into his arms, amazed by the initial lightness of his tall but impoverished frame, and began the long walk home.
THE DAY STARTED OUT SUNNY and then went gray at noon. At 4:00 P.M. the light began to fade as it does in November. I was dull and slow from lack of sleep. I was staring out the window, remembering Ernie’s hands on my breasts, when I pared the skin off my left thumb while peeling potatoes. I dropped the peeler and shook my hand like a child trying to throw the stinging pain away. While I was holding my thumb under cold water from the faucet, I heard the dog whining and scratching at the back door.
Angel had been gone all night. It was a good thing he came home when he did. The minute I opened the door the wind slapped me, and I slammed the door shut after the dog was inside. The temperature was dropping. I didn’t notice the blood until the dog walked across the kitchen floor to his watering dish. He left a trail of red beads on the linoleum. I bent down and examined him while he noisily lapped up water. He shifted his weight slightly when I touched his right side. He had been peppered with birdshot, the little BBs wedged into his skin. I watched in astonishment as our dog finished drinking and then, circling nose to tail three times, dropped into a relaxed heap on his blanket. I was shocked. Someone had shot our dog.
My nursing bag was in the truck. I knew I’d have to wait until Ernie was home, to hold the dog down while I squeezed the BBs out with my smallest forceps, but I pulled my barn jacket on anyway and went outside.
The first flakes of what turned out to be a snowstorm hit me in the face, and I turned sideways to avoid the needle-pricking feel of them. It was then that I saw the remote but recognizable figure of Ernie at the far end of our field. I remember smiling, thinking that Ernie must have had a successful day because of the way he was walking. So slow. I reached into the truck and grabbed my nursing bag and started back to the house. Something made me look again. I realized there was something odd about the way Ernie was walking. His pace was so labored. I stood and waited. He was carrying something large, and I thought that was too strange to ignore. He usually came home first and got the truck to haul his tagged deer home from the edge of the field. I wondered what possessed him to carry his deer. How could he do it? Two hundred pounds of deer?
I waited. My vision became clearer as Ernie made progress across the field. That was when I cried out. I clutched the nursing bag to my chest and began to run. I had on only my household slippers. When I reached the barn, I simultaneously heard Ernie shout and fell down. My nursing bag dropped into the muddy snow, and my arms flailed like the wings of a wounded duck before I hit the ground. I pushed myself up and heard Ernie shout again.
“Go back!” he yelled. “Get ready to open the door!‘
I slipped and slid my way back to the porch, shaking my slippers free of snow when I reached the steps. My feet burned. I trotted in place to keep them from going numb while I waited. Ernie stopped every so often to shift the weight of the man in his arms. The wind picked up speed, and the snow began to fall more heavily, coming down in white sheets. I could barely see Ernie even though he had reached the barn.
Just in time, I thought.
THAT NIGHT AND THE WEEKS that followed gave rise to our private scars and unspoken grief, some of it floating in the air of the house, some visible enough like braille on our faces and bodies so that it could be read with fingertips. Some of it spoken aloud.
I shall always remember the way Ernie had to swing sideways because Bill was so tall and how even then one of Bill’s boots caught on the tension spring of the screen door and stretched it as if it were a rubber band. I squeezed between the two men and the screen door and, with a clenched fist, hit the heel of the boot, popping the foot loose above the spring.
Ernie placed Bill on the same twin bed he had slept in when he was a child and was permitted to spend a few rare nights sleeping over. Then Ernie slumped into the yellow chintz-covered rocking chair in the corner. His arms were so sore, he said, that he wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to lift them above his shoulders again. I had to hold my breath as I pulled off Bill’s rank outer clothes, then his boots, socks, pants, and shirt. I fingered each piece of clothing before dropping them to the floor and then looked at Bill’s nearly naked body. No blood anywhere.
“He’s not shot.”
“I never said he was. I found him on the ridge,” Ernie said, and sighed. “Or I should say he found me. He’s dead drunk.”
I considered Bill as being closer to dead. The pelvic bones jutting up like river bluffs. The lower abdomen so sunken that it could have held water and a few minnows. There was little fat on him. Even his butt cheeks were as flat and as thin as Swedish pancakes. His underwear would have slipped down his legs effortlessly if I had stood him up. I looked at his face. The cracked and chapped lips and hair as dry as ripe corn tassels. The white spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth. The swollen eyelids red-rimmed and crusted with eye sand. His was not the body of a happy drunk, a drunk of evenings and parties. He did not even have the body of a middle-aged drunk. Bill reminded me of those men I saw as a child. Impoverished and despairing men of the Depression, homeless and starving slowly because they had no will to live and no appetite for food. Whatever money they acquired all went for beer, wine, whiskey, and toward
the end raw alcohol, which often killed them. They were found dead on the outskirts of Cedar Bend, sometimes in the alley behind the old hotel, and once a group of them were found frozen to death in Washaleski’s barn. They all had that pickled-in-formaldehyde look, green-tinged white skin from their self-inflicted drowning. I ran the years in my head. Bill was twenty-three years old.
I drew a hot bath for Ernie while he set up an electric heater on one of the bedside tables. Before I shut off the faucets, I filled a large bowl with sudsy water and carried it into the bedroom. Ernie had brought up a chair from the kitchen for me to sit on, and I took out a washcloth and bath towel from the linen closet. As my hand pressed the green washcloth below the surface of the warm water, I could hear Ernie groan as he lowered himself into the tub and then whistle as his cold limbs hit the steaming water.
The Turtle Warrior Page 25