The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  I began washing Bill’s head, tilting it from side to side, stopping to place two fingers on one of the arteries of his neck. His pulse was weak but not as bad as I thought it would be. Bill’s eyes rolled underneath his eyelids, but they did not open.

  There are the normal ABCs of the human body. What should be there from birth and then a record of normal life experiences as they impact the body. A scraped knee scar from climbing a tree, the fleshy bumps left from chicken pox pustules that were scratched repeatedly, and the pincushion of a vaccination shot on the upper arm. The last time I’d seen Bill naked was when he was six years old. He sheepishly allowed me to undress him and give him a bath after a day of play spent in our muddy farmyard. The shivering thighs and the small bud of a penis contracting so that it was almost hidden between his legs. The sweet timidity of a little boy.

  I didn’t bother to pull Bill’s underwear off. His briefs were so grimy that I took the scissors from the bedside drawer and cut them free. I tilted the shade on the bedside lamp so that I could see Bill better. I bent down and wet the washcloth again and then stood up. It was only when I heard Ernie washing himself, the splash of water as he soaped up his own washcloth and rubbed it vigorously over himself, that I realized that I hadn’t made contact with Bill’s skin. That the washcloth in my hand was dripping soapy water onto his genitals. I stared as the water trickled over the skin and disappeared between his thighs.

  A naked body can also tell stories to the practiced eye. After what we’d been through the previous summer, I wanted to be free from the weight of secrets and bad dreams. I wanted Ernie to be well, and I wanted peace. And here was yet another secret. One that burned my eyes and hurt so bad that I couldn’t detach from it. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do.

  I heard more splashing from the bathroom. I wasn’t sure how long Ernie would stay in the tub. I quickly finished washing Bill. I remember how the heat came out in waves from the red coils of the old heater. How it emitted a sound that was like a baby’s rattle. I had to take my red cardigan off because the sweat was pouring down my face and stinging my eyes. I ducked into our bedroom and grabbed a pair of Ernie’s pajama bottoms from a dresser drawer. I swabbed Bill down with the towel, slid the pajama bottoms over his feet and up his legs. His legs were so long that the pajama bottoms ended just below his knees. I brought the cotton blankets up from the foot of the bed and tucked them under and around his long body until he was swaddled so tightly that only I would be able to uncover him.

  I remember walking down the stairs to the kitchen to get two cups of coffee. The dog slept as though the birdshot sprinkled on his sides were a forgotten irritation. I wrote a note to myself and taped it to the refrigerator door: “Angel—shot of penicillin tonight. BBs in A.M.”

  I walked up the stairs and handed a cup to my husband soaking in the tub before I sat on the toilet cover and watched him. His chest glistened with water and did not reveal his fifty-eight years as it did on some men. His pectoral muscles were taut from hard work, his shoulders and arms contoured and firm. If our night had been different, I would have stripped and stepped into our large antique tub, and eased myself down until my back was against his chest. As I had done in the old days after making love. I mindlessly lifted the cup to my lips. The first sip burned the roof of my mouth.

  Ernie took a drink of his coffee before resting the cup on the edge of the tub. Leaned his head back and gazed at me.

  “Now we know what he was doing out there all this time.”

  I thought of what I’d just seen and could not fully take in or even speak of.

  “Well,” I murmured, “we know some of it. We may never know all of it.”

  Ernie took another sip of coffee before placing the cup down on the tile floor. I stared at the familiar keloid scars on his brown skin from shrapnel wounds. I could see two gray bumps on his right shoulder, the skin stretched thin as though they were erupting pimples. After taking care of the dog in the morning, I would then go to work on Ernie. I always lanced the bumps with a razor blade and squeezed out the nugget of metal. I was the archaeologist of my husband’s body, extracting history from thirty-nine years ago. It seems perverse, but I save those nuggets, putting them in a jelly jar and keeping the jar on the shelf with my other preserves.

  I turned and stared out the bathroom window. The snow was coming down faster, so white that I wouldn’t have known it was nighttime. It was a November storm that would cover everything, all the gut piles left in the woods from the first day of hunting. It would have covered Bill if Ernie had not found him. Or if he had not found Ernie.

  I had the equipment and the saline bags to start an IV in Bill. When he could eat without throwing up, I’d have to start him on something mild for his stomach. Cream of rice or cream of wheat. We would have to take turns sitting with him. The delirium tremors would start in a day or maybe sooner. If we were lucky, he’d have only mild ones, given that he was so young and not a career alcoholic yet. Until I could figure out what to do or what to say, I would be the only one to wash and dress Bill. I was thinking of asking Ernie if we should take Bill to the detox center in Cedar Bend in the morning when he spoke.

  “Have you called Claire?”

  I shall never forget how at that moment, as though Ernie’s voice had summoned her, Claire banged on our back door.

  How she walked inside the kitchen almost unrecognizable, dressed in her late husband’s outdoor clothes. Huge Sorel boots on her feet, men’s red-and-black-checked wool pants with suspenders, and an oversize parka covered with snow. I reached forward and pulled back the hood.

  “I need help. I can’t find Bill.”

  That breaking of fine china voice. A mother’s voice near the point of hysteria.

  “We have him. Ernie found him.”

  Claire remained motionless and stared at me. I repeated it a little louder as though she were deaf.

  “We have him. Ernie found him.”

  I cautiously reached forward and grasped the zipper of the parka. When Claire showed no resistance, I unzipped the parka, took it off, and threw it across the kitchen table. I unbuckled the suspenders on Claire’s wool pants and removed the thick leather mittens and their woolen liners from her hands. Claire lowered herself into one of the chairs so I could pull off the oversize boots.

  “Lift up.”

  She obediently braced her hands against the sides of the chair and lifted her rear. I rolled the pants down from the waistband. Then I grabbed one of Claire’s hands, felt how cold they were.

  “How did you get here?”

  “My car got stuck at the farm. I walked across the fields.”

  I got up and poured another cup of coffee.

  “I want you to drink this,” I said, putting the cup in Claire’s hands, “and then I’ll take you upstairs to see Bill.”

  CLAIRE AND I DRANK THREE pots of coffee that night and didn’t sleep at all. She sat in the chintz-covered rocker on the right side of the bed. Ernie sat in another rocking chair at the foot of the bed, and I sat on the left side, on the kitchen chair.

  Ernie replied to Claire’s questions with as little detail as possible but enough to soothe her. That he had found Bill on the ridge while he was hunting. That Bill was drunk and crying, and that when he calmed down and fell asleep, Ernie was able to carry him to our place. Just as the snowstorm was beginning to hit.

  “Bill was out there by himself?” she asked.

  Ernie sat up, smacked out of his exhaustion for a moment. I didn’t dare look at him.

  “Yes, he was. Was Bill hunting with someone else?”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “He didn’t hunt. He just liked being in the woods. I was just worried because this is hunting season and people do trespass on our land.”

  We let it drop at that. I could tell Ernie was bothered by Claire’s question, but he was exhausted and struggling to stay awake. The warmth of the bath, the rhythmic rattling of the electric heater had put him in a hypnotic stat
e. Finally I watched as his eyelids dropped and then shut. He slumped, his head falling to one shoulder, and was out.

  We sipped our coffee in silence at first. Claire occasionally reached out to caress Bill’s cheek. I had brought my knitting up from the wicker basket in the living room and pretended to concentrate on adding rows to the sweater I was making.

  How strange it was. In all the years that we lived less than a mile apart, this was the longest time I had ever spent with Claire. The first time I’d ever been that physically close to her. She always declined my invitations to come over for dinner, my offers to help, and she never returned my waves when I saw her in town. Even so, I knew we were alike in some ways. We were not the barrel-shaped, knee-slapping women sitting at Clemson’s Bar and Bowling Alley, having one too many beers and laughing in rough, smoky voices, waiting for their league’s turn to bowl. Nor were we women who participated in 4-H or the PTA. We didn’t wear our hair in towers of shellacked meringue that got washed and styled only once a week. Beehive hairdos that had gone out of style years ago except in Olina. Some of those women stretched their styling and washing to once every two weeks, and it would not have surprised me if bugs were hidden in the honeycombs of those columns. Claire used to have black hair like me. But it had turned completely white, and she wore it in a short pageboy that was becoming to her. My own hair was a mix of silver and black. I had always kept it long because Ernie liked it that way.

  We had the same taste in books. I know because I saw her name on the library cards of the same books that I borrowed from the bookmobile.

  There were differences between us, though. I had gone to nursing school, which was an education and a trade in those days. From what little I picked up from the boys when they were young, Claire had gone to a private liberal arts college in Milwaukee. She still went to church on Sundays. Ernie and I hadn’t stepped into a church in years. I had, all things considered, a wonderful husband. She had had the husband of a B-rated horror movie.

  But Claire had children. I did not.

  I watched her out of the corners of my eyes. Watched her sip her coffee.

  I had wondered for years what her story was and why we never saw company at their place. Company, as in relatives. You would have thought that some of her family would have visited after Jimmy was declared MIA. Or at John’s death. The boys never mentioned grandparents or aunts and uncles. I didn’t ask them. They were children, and I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.

  I had sisters and made yearly trips to visit them in Oregon, or they came to visit us. I wrote to girlfriends from the service, and we often called one another at holidays. But then I thought about my parents. My mother. The brothers that I never saw.

  My mother had lived just twenty miles away in Cedar Bend, and I visited her only when I absolutely had to. It was a relief when she died. Her cruelty was in her passive acceptance of wrongs committed against us and in her failure to love her three daughters as she did her sons. She didn’t think we were as worthy as our three brothers. Her expectations of us were to stay put, get married, work like beaten horses, have a houseful of kids, and take care of her and Dad in their old age. The farm was never to be ours.

  My older sister, Betty, was the first to leave. A week after she graduated from high school in 1935, she got up early one morning and dressed and left a note on the kitchen table. Her note said she’d contact us once she got settled wherever it was she was going, and she signed it “Betty.” That note was a code to Jeannie and me. Like a honky-tonk song, Betty was really saying, “I’m looking for love and someone who’ll want me.” But she did love her sisters. When we woke up that day, we saw two chocolate bars propped up against the mirror on the dresser. We cried and then ran out to the hayloft to eat our precious chocolate. I learned then that sometimes leaving is sweet.

  A few years later Jeannie and I did the same thing. Left early one morning and didn’t look back.

  That’s why I understood Jimmy’s decision even though it gave me grief.

  I was as hell-bent to get out of Cedar Bend as he was to get out of Olina. I worked my way through nursing school and then did the unexpected. I joined the Army in ’43. I wanted to travel, and it made me feel proud to serve my country. I was going to show my mother and father that I was smarter and braver than my spoiled-rotten brothers, all of whom found a way to dodge joining up. I was initially trained for nursing in North Africa. But in the eleventh hour they sent us to the South Pacific. I worked from Guam to the Admiralty Islands and then to Leyte, becoming part of the Fifty-eighth Evacuation Hospital.

  I hadn’t planned on returning to northern Wisconsin. I came back to Milwaukee, where I had gone to school, to look for a civilian nursing job. I was no longer so proud or so brave. I felt sad and hollowed out. I thought I had fallen in love with a doctor. But after the war he returned to his wife. The wife I didn’t know about. He had given me a pair of silk stockings as a good-bye gift. In my grief, I blew some money on a wickedly beautiful dress and shoes to match in San Diego. When I arrived in Milwaukee, I heard there was a VFW dance for returning veterans. So I put on my dress and shoes and went to the dance to sap over my wounds and memories. I didn’t want to meet anyone. I just wanted to get drunk. In style.

  After the doctor I did not believe in fairy-tale love. I thought love was something that had to get built up over time like a house that needed constant remodeling. Lust was different. It helped ease the loneliness at night just like a good bottle of wine. A temporary bandage on the brain and a lot of fun between the legs. But when I looked at Ernie and heard his voice, a lot of what I thought I knew about myself disappeared. I just knew I had met the man I would marry. If he hadn’t asked me, I would have asked him. In those days they called it fate. Now they call it chemistry or pheromones. We fizzed and popped at first, but we’ve never gone flat. Maybe underground but not flat.

  Ernie insisted that we stop in Cedar Bend first and see my parents. I didn’t want to, but Ernie felt it was only right. I think he knew what would happen.

  “How could you?” my mother growled when we were alone.

  I had predicted that she would shit peanuts, but it wasn’t over the dress. I had married an Indian. Even worse, a local Indian. It was bad enough growing up feeling worthless as a girl, but facing that German prejudice and arrogance after all that I’d seen and been through was the last straw. Her words bounced off me because I didn’t care what she thought. But it would be over my dead body before I’d let her hurt Ernie.

  “Too late now,” I smarted off, holding up my left hand. “I thought you might be happy for me.”

  “You girls never did have the sense God gave you!”

  I marched through the kitchen to the door. “Don’t worry,” I said sarcastically, slamming the screen door on the house I’d grown up in and hated, “we won’t visit and embarrass you. My last name is now Morriseau, not Niedemeyer.”

  Ernie drove to Olina with one hand on the wheel and the other hand wiping the tears from my face. I was afraid to meet his parents after that. After all, racism goes both ways. I was afraid they would not think me good enough for their son. How wrong I was.

  You would have thought I was the one who had brought their son home alive. His mother had a face as round as the moon and copper penny eyes. When she smiled, it radiated through the darkness I felt, and she laughed right away as though Ernie had brought them a huge surprise. I towered over her, but she reached up anyway and hugged me around my waist. His father was more reserved, but when his big hands wrapped around mine, it was with such strength that I didn’t think he’d let me go.

  The sweetness of having such parents. His mother gave me a lifetime of maternal love in the five years that I knew her. Even while she was dying from congestive heart failure and I was caring for her, she would rub my hands from time to time.

  “The babies will come,” she whispered. “Maybe a little late like Ernie, but don’t worry. They’ll come.”

  I glanced at Cla
ire. I thought about her own mother. Did she talk to her? Did she talk to her sons?

  Jimmy had pestered me to tell him stories about the war. Tagged after me with the tenacity of a badger. So I told him the funny stories and not the bad ones, although I did tell him that I’d been sick for a good six weeks when we were on Leyte. I told him how we used our helmets to wash our underwear in, to carry water in, and how the nurses even used their helmets like shovels, digging small tunnels underneath the zigzags of low-grounded barbed wire. How we would wake up with snakes on the dirt floors next to our cots and how I had to kill the first snake with one of my boots so that the other nurses would feel brave enough to do it. How once we ran out of containers to carry our rations of rice and I took off my bra, put my shirt back on, and had them fill the cups of my bra so that I could carry my rice back to the hospital. Jimmy went into giggling fits on our kitchen floor when I told him that. He was fascinated by the fact that I had gone through basic training too and could shoot a carbine rifle. That I outranked Ernie, being a lieutenant while Ernie was a corporal.

  And he asked me to tell him the story of how I met Ernie over and over again. He thought it was magic that Ernie and I grew up twenty-five miles from each other, were in the Philippines at the same time, and didn’t meet until that dance in Milwaukee. He wanted to know what we wore and what we talked about. I had kept that dress and opened the closet to show him. He called it my movie star dress. When Jimmy was still small, I sometimes caught him looking into our closet and holding the hem of that dress. I even had to tell him the songs we danced to, which of course wasn’t easy. I couldn’t remember, and I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d been really drunk. So I told him some of the songs that everybody danced to then: “Jivin’ the Vibes,” “This Love of Mine,” “Take the A Train,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” I pulled out my albums and played them on the record player. Jimmy loved music.

  I wondered why Jimmy craved our stories so much. Didn’t Claire tell him stories? Or was her life so painful that she could not repeat it or remember any of the good times? I knew there was a complexity to abusive marriages, that the women in them did not enjoy the suffering. Did not ask for it and often found themselves trapped before they knew it. But I often wondered: Did he ever push her too far? Far enough where Claire picked up a skillet or a hammer and tried to smash his skull in?