“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?”
We were in bed talking in the dark. It was two nights after Ernie found out. I had rubbed ointment into the bloody split on his lip.
“Because,” I answered, feeling fragile myself and near tears, “I was afraid of what it would do to you.”
I wasn’t happy either. I resented being the one who knew, who had to tell. It reminded me of writing letters for dying soldiers. Putting their last words to their families on paper in my penmanship. I was sick of being the body through which bad news had to pass. It wasn’t entirely true, though. Ernie had been the one who had had to tell Claire about Jimmy and then about John.
But there was another reason I hadn’t told Ernie. A very good one. Bill did not tell me or give me permission. I stumbled on it while he was unconscious. I had no right to speak of it until Bill did. That’s what Ernie had to know.
“Bill had to tell you,” I whispered into his neck. “Not me.”
But I did tell Claire. Or rather I showed her. That fourth day while Bill was still drifting in and out of consciousness. We were sitting across from each other, in our same chairs, listening to Bill’s breathing. I stopped knitting.
“Claire,” I said, standing up, “I have to show you something.”
I slowly rolled the blankets down. Unsnapped the top of Bill’s pajama bottoms and tugged them down his legs. She stared at his bared hips.
“What is that?” She reached forward and touched one of the red marks with a fingertip.
“Those are burn scars. I think, from a cigarette.”
She cupped his penis in her hand for a moment.
“I didn’t ... I didn’t ... know,” she said in a small voice. “Bill would never let me see him naked. I don’t remember when he got funny that way about it. He would never wear shorts,” she continued in a daze, “even on the hottest days.”
I heard Ernie rustling around in the kitchen downstairs. I pulled Bill’s pajama bottoms back up and covered him once again with the blankets.
“C’mon,” I said, “let’s go for a walk. We need some fresh air.”
Claire stumbled going down the stairs, and I caught her by the arm. I had to put her coat and boots on. Her mittens. Then I dragged her outside with me. When we waded through the snow to the garden, she fell against me, and I caught her again. Her lips opened, and her teeth bit down into the fabric of my coat. I felt the sound in my shoulder before I heard it. That intense wail of a mother in pain. She began to slip from my arms, and I didn’t have the strength to hold her up. So we went down on our knees.
It was almost as I feared. When I saw the small article in the Olina Herald about the vandalism of John Lucas’s grave, I knew exactly who had done it. The headstone was severely chipped and cracked down the middle. The front was smashed so that John’s name was obliterated from the stone. Sheriff Meyer was quoted as saying that he thought it was someone that John had owed money to years ago but that he didn’t have any leads.
I went through the motions of the day Ernie smashed John’s headstone, smiling like an idiot as though nothing were happening and making lunch and dinner. Talking to Bill, who was severely hung over. Bill asked me where Ernie had gone, and I lied, saying he had gone to look at a used tractor for sale near Rice Lake. I had no idea what Ernie was up to that day or where he was, but I knew what had happened the night before. The dog’s barking woke me up. I watched from our bedroom window and bit my knuckles, wondering if Bill and Ernie would fight some more and whether I should go down there to break it up. I couldn’t have predicted what happened next. But it made sense. How do you explain something like that? Bill could not say what was done to him. He had to show Ernie.
I was grateful that John Lucas was already dead. I know Ernie would have killed him. I don’t know how—hanging him from a rope, beating him, and then maybe shooting him—but he would have killed him. And I would have lost Ernie for doing what was only right, what was just. Still, killing John Lucas wouldn’t have relieved Ernie or erased the physical remnants of what had been done to the most consecrated part of a little boy.
Claire said nothing to us about the wrecked headstone. But she told the priest that she would not pay for another one.
Ernie had trouble getting out of bed again, and he had that dead fish look about him for a while. But he did get up. He had to. Bill was with us, and that was a blessing. Sometimes you can do the impossible for another person when you cannot do it for yourself.
While Ernie spent time with Bill, I spent time with Claire. We walked our field and her field countless times, wading through snow and then through the mud of spring. I had lived in this area all my life and on the Morriseau farm for nearly forty years. But I never took the time just to amble through it. I let Claire lead us on the walk, and it was always the same. She could name all the birds, knew what plants grew on the edge of the fields and why some of the cedars grew in their twisted way. Claire wordlessly showed me how walking the same route over and over again had a meditative effect. How she had survived those years of loneliness and pain by putting her feet on the ground and moving forward. It hit me that walking in a circle means you never come to a dead end. You just keep walking the circle over and over until whatever it was or is that bothered you slows down or becomes unwound. And then, maybe, drifts away.
I finally understood why she had stayed after her husband’s death and had not returned to her hometown of Milwaukee. It was never his home. It was hers.
THEIR HOUSEHOLD THAT WINTER, SPRING, and summer of 1983 became one in which three people resided at the Morriseau place with a fourth, Claire, drifting between the two farmhouses, staying some nights with Rosemary, Ernie, and Bill. Rosemary had a short bout with her own polluted memories. They drifted up through her sleep and caused her to kick the covers off the bed. One night, before he realized what was happening, she had pushed Ernie off the bed with such force that he hit his head on the bedside table before landing on the floor. Then there was Bill’s constant flood of nightmares. One of them, both of them, and sometimes all three of them found themselves running into Bill’s bedroom when they heard him crying loudly in his sleep.
A week after he smashed the headstone, Ernie borrowed a six-bladed plow meant for cutting deep furrows and began the hard work of unearthing what amounted to liquid grenades left by John Lucas in the field. He wired a wooden box behind the seat of the tractor. Whenever he unearthed a bottle or the blades sliced into and smashed a bottle, Ernie stopped the tractor and let it idle while he picked up the bottle or the pieces of glass and put them into the wooden box. If there were any contents in a bottle, he used a glass cutter to slice off the rusted top and drained it into the soil. Only half of the field was pockmarked with booze, and for that he was grateful. Most of the bottles containing less than 80-proof alcohol had shattered. But that half was so loaded with buried forts of shattered bottles and then some bottles that were miraculously intact that Ernie filled six empty oil drums with bottles and glass.
“You won’t be able to walk barefoot in that field for a few years,” he warned Bill and Claire, knowing that he had left numerous shards of glass.
While he monotonously worked the field over, he tried to grasp a way to begin again with Bill. He envisioned what his own father would do. Watching the blades cut and fold the top layer of dirt, snarled with brome and timothy weed roots, he realized that his boyhood had been happy and peaceful because Claude Morriseau did not dwell on the actions of others, particularly if they meant him harm. His father was not without compassion. But rather than let hatred eat him, Claude Morriseau stepped away from people who could not be helped, distancing harm so that it petered out on its own volition or turned back and bit its owner.
In those days and especially among his father’s people on the Heron Reservation, such an act toward a child was dealt with in a manner consistent with the horror of the act itself. The reservation was a sovereign nation and had its own court system. Even then the perpetrator was often not
brought forward. They made sure, of course, that the guilty was indeed guilty. And then they made sure that he disappeared.
HOW COULD I LOOK MY SON in the face, knowing it was I, his mother, who should have protected him? I never thought I would face pain as terrible as that day when I was notified that Jimmy was missing in action. Of not knowing what had gone through his mind before he died. Or how long he had suffered.
This was worse in some ways. I threw up for days afterward and could not eat. I tried to remember if there were any clues that I hadn’t picked up on. What hadn’t I seen?
What possesses a man to torture an area of the body meant for pleasure and for giving life? A sacred area. How could he do it to a little boy? His own son?
It would shock people to hear me say it, but my dead son has benefits that my living son does not have. It would have been kinder to have just killed Bill rather than calculate and deliver this secret torture night after night. To leave him with visible scars and a humiliation and pain that would deny him the right to seek love. There were clues, though. I have scars too. They call it rape, but back then I thought of it as survival. To squeeze my eyes shut and let him do what he wanted. It never occurred to me that he would do the same to Bill.
I could not bear to think of Bill’s nights. I did the only thing I could think to do, as a bulwark against such knowledge. I walked at night, around and around our field and then sometimes the Morriseau field. I walked down the driveway and once that spring all the way to the river. I contemplated my life that night, leaning over the bridge. Hearing the dark water below and wondering if my body would float unimpeded all the way to Eau Claire or get snagged on a submerged log just a mile or so down the river.
I was walking back from the river in the dark when I heard footsteps on the gravel walking toward me. Then I saw the light from one of our kerosene lamps.
“Mom. What are you doing out here?”
“I needed to go for a walk.”
“In the dark, Mom?”
I said nothing. He lifted the lamp higher to look at me.
“Are you mad at me?”
Was I mad at him? That was too much. I cried so suddenly and so hard that I could not stand up. Everything that tormented me ran to the front of my brain and pounded until my forehead, my cheeks, and my eyes bulged with pain. I went down like a tripped kid onto my hands and knees. I didn’t have to look to know that my palms and knees were scraped and bleeding and that I had pebbles jammed into my skin. I was grateful that the gravel hurt so much. It was not enough suffering. I deserved to feel pain for what I did not do, and I wanted Bill to be angry with me.
“It is,” I choked out, blindly reaching forward to grab one of his ankles, “the other way around. You should be mad at me.”
“Those Lucases,” people would say if word got out that we were seen sitting and crying on the side of the gravel road near our farm in the middle of the night. “They have always been crazy.”
“The worst,” he whispered to me, “is that I can’t figure out how he got into my bedroom. I locked the door every night and put a chair in front of it.”
I wondered too. I remembered John as being gone most days and evenings. Did he come back at night when we were asleep? Or maybe he never went to work but hid underneath Bill’s bed?
When I asked him how long he thought it went on for, Bill said, “I don’t remember. It stopped, I think, when I was being carried somewhere. And then someone laughed.”
My son released me with those words. Such a gift. That he could remember that night and that laughter. I had at least, unknowingly, ended his torture. I almost told him about the voice in the field, the voice that told me to laugh. But Bill had enough to struggle with, and I did not want to burden him with the additional thought that his mother was really crazy.
“How can I help Bill?”
It was such a humble question. As if bringing him home from a near death of hypothermia in the woods were not enough. Ernie was in such deep misery that it announced itself in his body. He walked as though physically gnarled and twisted from torture. I did not have to be told who had smashed John’s headstone.
I didn’t want him to have a headstone in the first place. We could hardly afford it. Nor did he deserve to be buried in consecrated ground. That was when what little Catholicism I had left in me reared up like a spurred horse.
“Your husband was baptized a Catholic.” Shocked at my vague suggestion that John not be buried in the Sacred Heart Cemetery, Father Wallace admonished me. Of course Father Wallace was thinking of himself. His puffy face with its explosion of broken red and purple capillaries was a strong sign of his own excess. If he could deny it in himself, then he could certainly bless a fellow drunk with the same blindness.
It was on the tip of my bitter tongue. “Throw him,” I very nearly said, “into potter’s field.”
I had to think of the outcome, though. Social norms in Olina dictated that I should bury my husband in the proper way. Father Wallace would take up a collection for the headstone if I didn’t come up with the money. That would cause gossip, and I had to think of Bill. I did not want people to poke my son with painful questions.
I envied Ernie. I understood why he had done it. I only wish I had thought to do it as well.
When John was alive, I visualized murdering him every day. How to do it and not get caught. It was only right. We deserved to live our lives with the release and pleasure his death would bring. There was no court of law that could know how we lived or what he did to us. They could not exact justice on him in the way I could, or Bill could, or Jimmy could, if he had come home. Or even Rosemary and Ernie.
I thought a lot about Ernie’s question because I asked myself the same thing.
I could have helped Bill much sooner. Those years I kept him to myself. Those years when I did not allow him to wander over to the Morriseau place. As if to punish me for my selfishness and my fear, fate allowed Ernie to find him when I could not. I did not tell Ernie and Rosemary what I did before I walked through the fields to their house. I did not tell them that I trudged through the swamp and woods. It was beginning to freeze, and I had to grab the lower branches on some of the trees, if there were any, to walk up one side of that ice-covered ridge. Most of the time I had to crawl, and when I reached the top, he was not there. I walked sideways going down the other side, but I fell anyway and slid straight down. I was desperately trying to grab at anything to stop my descent when I hit something hard midway down and felt it through the rear of my pants. I could barely see it, but after I wiped the snow off it and read its shape with my leather mittens, I knew it was a gun.
You can imagine what went through my head. I tried calling for Bill. I became frantic and screamed his name. It is useless to do so in a northern snowstorm. Snow muffles sound and buries it like it does everything else.
“Help me, help me,” I kept saying, but all that ever answered me was the wind. There is that moment that has happened to me many times in my despair and that always feels new with each crisis. I sit there feeling small and unable to think. Feeling stupid and ashamed. Crying because I don’t know what to do. Then something takes over in my body. Instinct, I think. I just got up and started moving as fast as I could. I fell again and slid the rest of the way down that slope. I stood up and hiked through the freezing swamp bedding. It was cold, and the snow was coming down in blankets. It is a miracle that I didn’t get lost and die out there.
I reached the Morriseau porch feeling much like Zhivago when he finally makes his way, frozen and exhausted, back to Lara in that little village in the Urals. I pounded on their door. Rosemary opened it, and that butter yellow light that seems to inhabit country kitchens filled my face. I was speechless with gratitude and nearly out of my mind with terror.
Another thought came to me one day that May when I was cleaning up after dinner at their house. It did not feel like work. The evening sun was warm on my face as I cleared the table, and I was basking in the simple pleasur
e of a shared meal, thinking of how wonderful it was to sit and eat and talk and laugh like normal people at a dinner table. Although Bill was in a good mood and told jokes, there was a moment when something surfaced in his face during dinner that reminded me of how he had looked after Jimmy’s death. Of how wise I used to think he appeared.
We ate dessert, and then Bill and Rosemary went outside to weed the garden.
I caught Ernie by the arm before he went outside to join them. “You want to know how to help Bill,” I said. “He has never been a child. What would you do to make a little boy happy? To help him?”
AFTER A LONG HOT DAY of putting new siding on the Lucas farmhouse, Bill took Ernie up to his bedroom and showed him the bed Jimmy had slept in and his own bed. He took out his shoebox of mementos, and they sat together on the bed and looked wordlessly at the Polaroid of Bill’s brother. At the leather pouch containing the fringe from the bedspread. A mud turtle’s shell. The worn leather collar from a dog Bill and Jimmy once had. The thick packet of letters sent from Vietnam.
“He never told me until the night before he left that he was leaving.”
“That’s the same night we found out,” Ernie said. “Remember you ate at our house and your dad came to pick you up?”
Bill flipped the picture over and stared at the writing on the back. “He told me that he had signed up that winter and that he never thought the day would come when he’d have to leave. That never made any sense to me. How could you sign up and not know you were going to leave?”
“I don’t know, Bill,” Ernie answered. “Your mom says she didn’t know until that night as well. I can’t figure that one out. It didn’t seem like something your brother would do. I don’t mean enlisting. I mean, not telling anyone.”
The Turtle Warrior Page 29