The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  “I thought he 1-1-left,” Bill stammered, his voice cracking, “because he didn’t 1-1-like us anymore. Because we w-w-weren’t ever happy.”

  Ernie pulled Bill’s head to his shoulder. “Nah, Bill. That wasn’t it.”

  Ernie thought of all the trite sayings they listened to during their Monday night AA meetings. “Let go and let God” was the worst one. It made Bill squirm and Ernie bite his lips. The meetings were good in that Bill got to see other local people struggling to keep sober just as he was. But the heavy emphasis on God needled Ernie so badly one night that he thought he’d have to leave. Bill must have sensed Ernie’s irritation. He calmly asked, “What if you don’t believe in God?”

  “Hey! That’s a good question. I was wonderin’ the same thing,” a brawny woman about Ernie’s age chimed in.

  “Well,” one of the senior members said, not comfortably, “think of it as a higher power then.”

  Bill decided to focus on “One day at a time.” Ernie thought that was a better idea too. After all, that was the unofficial creed of life in northern Wisconsin, where jobs were seasonal at best and the tourist trade fluctuated with people’s desires and pocketbooks. It could be said of farming as well with a slight modification: “One rock at a time.”

  “That’s where,” Bill said, pointing to the small cemetery they always drove by on the outskirts of Cedar Bend on their way home, “the ‘Let go and let God’ people are.”

  “Lucky bastards,” Ernie cracked, thinking of the dismal price of beef and whether or not he’d have enough hay for the coming winter.

  Ernie gazed up at the bookshelf above Jimmy’s bed while Bill cried. Walden Pond. The Ballad of the Sad Café. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Go Down Moses. Everything That Rises Must Converge. Catcher in the Rye.

  “Hey,” he said nodding to the bookshelf, “where’s Huckleberry Finn? And there’s another book that’s missing. Oh, I know. The Man Who Killed the Deer.”

  “I don’t know. Those books didn’t come back with his other stuff.”

  Bill got up and put the shoebox back into his dresser drawer. He sat down next to Ernie on the bed.

  “I gave him those books. Have you ever read them?”

  “No. James was more of a reader than I am.”

  Bill was telling a white lie. Ernie remembered seeing him read books and carry books. Remembered how he had snuggled next to Rosemary as she read books aloud to him.

  “That’s not true. I used to see you reading all the time.” He nudged Bill good-naturedly.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? I know. You should start again. It would take your mind off things.”

  Then Bill got up again and opened the closet. He took out the Marlin .30-30 rifle and handed it to Ernie.

  “It used to be James’s. I don’t hunt. I think the rifle probably needs cleaning.”

  HE HAD LIED TO ERNIE. Of course he used to read books. His mother had always read books and continued to read books. His brother had read voraciously. And Bill used to lose himself in books as well. He just stopped reading his senior year of high school. If Ernie had pressed him, he would have shaped and stretched the lie and told Ernie that he didn’t know why he stopped. But he did.

  He couldn’t hold a book with shaking hands. He didn’t want to read when he felt numb and weightless. A book would have crashed through all that. He did try. The beer bobbing in his veins caused a throbbing in his eyes. The words appeared to skip across the page and not make any sense.

  Late that August his mother and Rosemary went on a shopping trip to Madison. His mother was so excited. She waved her hand out of the open car window all the way down the Morriseau driveway. Ernie made Bill go to bed that night, saying that he would stay up for them. They came home late. Sometime in the night she must have entered his room. He woke up the next morning and saw a book on his bedside table. Death Comes for the Archbishop.

  He thanked her at breakfast and was startled when she beamed. It wasn’t until a week later, when a thunderstorm kept them all inside, that he picked up the book.

  “One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine Hills, overlooking Rome....”

  He read through the night.

  Bill could feel the dust of the Acoma mesa. He wanted to crack piñon nuts between his teeth and stand on top of the mesa, all ten acres of it, and look at all that blue sky and the distance. The seemingly unending distance.

  Huddled in his bed, Bill was only vaguely aware of the rain that slapped the window glass. The thrashing of the pine boughs in the wind. He was in Acoma. He could feel the night coming on there after a hot day and the slow gathering of the Acoma people. Their singing and chanting. How they gathered as a large family and approached the abusive priest reading his breviary. How they bound his hands and feet. He tried to imagine those small people carrying that obese man and throwing him off a cliff.

  He reread that book several times. Then he moved on to the books on his brother’s shelf. Ernie gave him new copies of Huckleberry Finn and The Man Who Killed the Deer.

  He had forgotten the interior pleasure of sitting quietly and absorbing a story that lifted him effortlessly away from his own life and at the same time strangely affirmed that his own life was real to him. People shared his own feelings long ago. Books held those people whose lives were not so far from his own. Books said that life mattered in its beauty and its ugliness. His life.

  “I want you,” his mother said one evening, “to go to college. I wanted Jimmy to go to college. He was smart, and so are you. College,” his mother said with a dreamy look, “is not at all like high school. It is like having the world brought to you, and you can study anything you like.”

  She got up and opened one of the kitchen cupboards. Placed a jarful of money on the table. “I found this when I was cleaning out the barn. You can use this to buy your first semester of textbooks.”

  He stared at the jar. So many nights when he was short of cash for beer or cheap whiskey, it never once tickled his memory. That money hidden in the corner of the barn.

  “I think your dad probably hid this and forgot all about it. Funny, isn’t it?” His mother giggled. He looked up at her. She had a satisfied “I-got-him” look on her face. He had a flash of that look from long ago. Things will get better.

  Her giggle snagged him. It was a joke. A joke on him. And so funny.

  “Not Dad,” he gasped, slapping the tabletop. “James. I got that money from James. I forgot all about it.”

  “He sent you money?” His mother was stunned.

  “Yeah. All of that,” he said, wiping his face on his shirtsleeve.

  “When you were eight and nine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you kept it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good Lord!” His mother covered her mouth. She tried to hold it back with her hand, but her giggling bubbled through the crevices between her fingers.

  Bill howled. “James told me not to let Dad use it on a beer dream!”

  That did it. His mother dropped her hand from her mouth and let loose with raucous laughter. Bill slapped the table again and joined her.

  A somber mood settled over them when they both were too tired to laugh anymore.

  “I want you to understand something,” his mother said. It was her choice of words that once again conveyed her intent. It made him sit up and listen.

  “Small towns are often like chicken coops. They don’t like or accept difference or change. If one hen is molting or is hurt and the rest of them aren’t, they will peck at that bird until she is bloody. I’ve seen hens that were molting,” his mother said, “get pecked to death.”

  She ran her hands down the sides of the large jar. Rubbed it up and down as though it were a genie’s bottle.

  “In a small town,” she said, “talk is like that. It can kill you if you let it. Sometimes you need
to leave and finish your changing somewhere else before you can come back. Then they have nothing to say about it because they don’t know where you’ve been. That frightens them. Then they shut up.”

  She pushed the jar into the center of the table and then leaned toward Bill. “Will you at least try a year of college? I think you’ll be surprised.”

  He glanced at the jar of money.

  “I’ll try.”

  BILL WAS NOT A HUNTER like his brother. But he loved the river. Loved water.

  They sat one morning, their legs dangling off the old logging bridge above the Chippewa, and ate fried egg sandwiches that they had made before leaving the house.

  “We used to come down here. Except Terry was with us most of the time.” Bill peered down at the water. “We never did go fishing. James said he’d teach me to fly-fish, but he never did.”

  Then he lifted his head and smiled at Ernie. “James always said you were the best.”

  “Best gone to rotten. I haven’t fished in a long time. But I’ll teach you how to fly-fish. Do you still want to learn?”

  Ernie started him on an old fly rod right away and watched in the evenings as Bill clocked the rod back and forth. He had a natural swing to his cast, a flick of his wrist that made him appear to be waving a wand. Within two weeks, Bill had mastered the rudiments of fly-fishing and was well on his way to becoming far better than Ernie. Nearly every night they fished either the Chippewa or the deep and clear kettle lake near the ridge that was a trout heaven. Ernie went foolish with his money, just as he had for Jimmy, and bought Bill a six-hundred-dollar Orvis fly rod and reel. Before midsummer they had expanded their fishing territory by taking weekend trips to the same spots Ernie had taken Jimmy: the Namekagon, the Brule, the Flambeau Flowage, and Lake Superior. On weekday evenings they crouched over newspapers laid out on the ground behind the barn, gutting and cleaning fish. They glanced up every now and then to watch Claire and Rosemary walk through the fields before dinner. Once Ernie heard a shriek from the field, and only when it was followed by his wife’s familiar laughter did he relax. Ernie had never heard Claire laugh before. As if reading his mind, Bill commented, “Mom’s been lonely for a long time.”

  The silver from his new braces glinted in the sun. Ernie smiled. It was an incongruity to see teeth braces on a grown man. Bill filled out his frame of six feet, five inches and towered over Ernie far more than Jimmy had.

  Ernie took Bill to a doctor in Madison that summer. Ernie went in first to talk to the doctor, and then Bill was summoned in for a physical exam.

  As Ernie sat in the waiting room, he thought about Bill’s life and where it would go. Bill had perhaps chosen the more difficult path in life. Ernie knew Bill could have escaped this grief, left home like his brother, left it all behind. Ernie thought of how he viewed his own classmates who had stayed in Olina and never gone anywhere: provincial, cowardly, redneck, and small. To go away and then come back was something different. A person gained perspective that way. But Ernie had to think twice about his notion when it came to Bill. To stay in one place required discipline in many ways more rigorous than holding yourself together when surrounded by a new land and new people. It might be harder just to stay and live with the foundation your family might have laid for you, rotten or not.

  The doctor came out of the examining room and gestured to Ernie to come into his office.

  “His genitals function normally in that he can pass urine and get an erection. But,” the doctor said, shaking his head, “I doubt he will ever be able to have children. Testicles damaged like that can barely produce any sperm. I can run more tests, but I can tell you just by looking at him that they would be a waste.”

  “What about surgery?” Ernie asked

  “To open the ducts from the testicles?”

  Ernie nodded.

  “There’s not even a fifty-fifty chance. And why put him through that?”

  He came close to telling Bill about Jimmy several times but at the last minute backed down. Ernie wavered between whether it would do more harm than good, and Bill didn’t appear to want to talk about it.

  There were several times that late summer and early fall when Ernie happened to glance at Bill, especially when they fished the Chippewa, and saw Bill reel in his line and pause. Watched him stare and focus on something down the river. Ernie quietly inched his way through the brush in the hope of glimpsing whatever it was that Bill seemed mesmerized by. Once Ernie thought he heard whistling. He looked up from the fly he was tying on his line to locate it. He felt a cold mist settle on his face and thought it was river spray. But when he wiped his face with a handkerchief and then looked down, he saw that he was standing in shallows that threw no water, no mist.

  When they weren’t fishing, they hiked the ridge. Stood on its pinnacle and looked down at the lake on its north side. It happened more than once, his nostrils picking up the sharpness of it. Finally he asked Bill, “Do you smell smoke?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Bill looked at the lake and chewed his lower lip.

  “Huh,” Ernie grunted, thinking it was the new guy who bought the neighboring farm just beyond the lake. Ernie thought he was burning leaves or wood, except that the smoke had a sulfuric edge to it.

  HE HAD ONCE INHABITED his mother.

  Bill thought about this as he watched her eat. They were having supper alone as they had in the old days. Mesmerized by the motion of her hand, by the clink of the fork as the tines hit the plate when she pierced a piece of broiled chicken, he stopped eating. He watched as her arm brought the food up to her mouth. It was one of those things he could not remember. His mother eating. It slowly dawned on him that he had no memory of it because he had not seen her eating food. She always sat and watched him as he ate his meals. When did she eat? he wondered. She must have eaten something or else she would have starved and would not be sitting with him at the table now. He gazed at her face. She was thin in those days. As a child he had often thought she was hollow. In those days she appeared to be sustained only by coffee and by the invisible reserves in her own body, her flesh eating upon itself.

  He had once gnawed on her as well. Wasn’t it true that babies were parasites on their mothers? He had lived in her once. Small as a pea, he had floated in her habitat. She had been his soil, sky, water, and air. Now through testing and ultrasound, women could know the sex of the babies they carried. But did his mother have a sense back then that she was a woman walking with a baby boy inside her? That twice in her life, for nine months, she was both male and female?

  He watched her sip from her glass of water. Their silence was pleasant and comfortable. It had almost always been just the two of them. He could dimly remember James at the dinner table, his joking or sometimes his quiet anger. But mostly it was just the two of them.

  His mother was right. There was a side effect in trying to stay sober in their small town that he did not like. He noticed people more—what they said and what they did—and it was generally a painful and bewildering experience. They identified him in town as that Lucas boy. Not like his brother, the dead Vietnam vet who had looked so much like Elvis, who had been the Romeo of his class, and who had moved with ease and jocularity among others. Bill was pointed out as the other one. The son of John Lucas who still generated bar talk seven, almost eight years after his death.

  Now there was talk in town about him.

  Wally Wykowski took him back. Working at the Standard station did not make him feel proud or accomplished as it had when he was seventeen. It was boring and simultaneously irritating, even hurtful at times. Local people he’d been familiar with all his life kept their distance, and he could hear their whispers. Saw their elbow nudges. They didn’t have to say it to him directly. It was apparent when they visibly chewed him over and then dismissed him. Like father, like son.

  “Ignore ’em,” Ernie told him. “And they wonder why they don’t make ends meet. Should flap their tongues less and work their hands more.”


  So Bill tried. He considered them as he did his father. Bothersome elements like tornado warnings or heavy winds. But he had never belonged to his father and was persistently perplexed that people connected them just because of his drinking.

  “Whose little boy are you?” He remembered being teased by Mrs. Schaefer, who owned the hardware store with her husband, Sheldon. Bill was still quite young, just barely out of his white toddler walking shoes. It was during a rare moment when both his parents were present. He took his thumb out of his mouth and silently pointed at his mother.

  Bill had always thought of himself as the son of Claire Lucas. As though his father had had nothing to do with his creation. He was her son. She was his mother. She was the country in which he had grown up and still lived in. It may have been a country full of rocks, seas whose tidal waves threatened to drown him, periodic droughts, and seasons that shifted from hot to cold and sometimes warm. But simultaneously it was a country full of wonder and promise and mystery. Always a place that never let him forget that he was native to it and wanted him despite the upheaval.

  It was to his mother he went after that night in September.

  The new elementary school teacher in town had brought her Volvo in for a prewinter tuneup. Then she came back for some windshield wiper fluid, and after that, a pack of cigarettes. She finally asked him out, and he shocked the rest of the men in the station by casually saying yes. She was of average height with shoulder-length blond hair and bluebird-blue eyes. They went out for a couple of weeks, and he thought they had fun together. That she liked him. It was long enough for him to feel somewhat safe with her. To let down his guard.

  Her mouth on his neck. The unbuttoning of his shirt. Then she removed her blouse, revealing a lacy bra. He fumbled, trying to unhook her bra from the back.