The bus wasn’t due for another half an hour, so they waited inside the station on rickety green plastic chairs. Bill passed the time by pushing his nose up against the dirty picture window, allowing him to see the cars that drove up next to the gas pumps for refueling. Their father leaned back in his chair and dozed, the bristly hair in his nostrils quivering every time he inhaled and exhaled. Their mother nervously fanned herself with a tattered Wisconsin road map even though it wasn’t that hot, and James sat as though frozen to his chair. Bill watched the two service station attendants scurry between the cars before fixing his eyes on a Volkswagen parked behind the station’s red tow truck.
It was the third time he’d seen one of those little cars that did indeed look like beetles. Nobody in town owned one. “Hippie cars,” his father sneered once. It was covered, front to back, with bumper stickers and Bill squinted to catch the print on some of them. One said “I don’t wanna know your name ’cause I don’t like your game,” and another one said “Flower Power.”
Bill thought that one was pretty funny. “Flower Power.” He giggled, and his mother momentarily stopped fanning herself to see what amused her son. He squinted again. Some of the stickers were too small for him to make out. Then for the first time, he noticed the huge sticker on the driver’s door: “Get Out of Vietnam!”
Vietnam. That’s where James was going. He tugged on his brother’s sleeve and pointed to the car. “The door,” he whispered.
James craned his neck around Bill’s head and stared. He stared for a long time.
When James finally pulled his head back, it was in slow motion, as though his eyes had had to take minutes each to look from the car to the glass wall, to the gas station attendants still hurrying between cars, and finally, to resting upon a pile of magazines stacked up against the glass in front of him. Bill watched as his brother swallowed, his Adam’s apple rising and dropping like a fishing bobber.
“The bus,” their mother said, pointing with the map at the gray whale-size vehicle turning into the station. Bill hopped up and followed his parents to the door. He was almost out of the door when he realized that James was still sitting in his chair. He squeezed through the rapidly closing door and ran back to his brother.
“C’mon! You’ll miss your bus!” Bill grabbed James’s bandaged hand. His brother got up slowly. Bill felt his brother’s hand tighten around his own, and he tugged insistently, leading James out of the door. Their father stood by the gas pumps.
“Better move along now. I already gave your duffel bag to the driver.”
Their mother hugged James, secretly slipping a twenty-dollar bill into his jacket pocket. Bill watched as James returned the hug with such vigor that it lifted their mother off her feet.
The bus driver motioned that he had to get going.
“You’ll be okay,” John Lucas said, stifling a yawn.
“Send us your picture and address,” their mother added tearfully.
James released his arms from around their mother. He turned to Bill and abruptly swept him up into his arms, squeezing Bill’s chest so hard that he could barely breathe.
“I told Terry and the other guys that if they touched you at all, I’d beat their heads in,” he whispered. Bill could feel the hot breath from his brother in his ear. “And listen,” he whispered again, “don’t be like me.”
Then he lowered Bill to the ground and walked toward the bus.
James put one foot up on the first step when he turned around and waved. Bill raised his hand to wave back but stopped when he spotted something shadowing his brother’s head. Bill stepped forward and tilted his head. He quickly turned around to see if his father and mother appeared to notice anything. They didn’t seem to and continued waving. Bill thought the bright morning sun was playing tricks on his eyes or that it was the rays shining off James’s greased black hair. When Bill looked back at his brother, it was gone.
James got on the bus, and they watched him select a seat, waving again once he was seated. “Go Greyhound,” the panel on the side of the bus stated, and Bill looked at the skinny gray dog running in front of the words. With an eruption of black diesel exhaust, the bus began its roll south down the highway. The excitement he had felt moments before had chilled, and his stomach felt queasy.
Bill and his mother continued to stare at the bus until it became a speck on the black and yellow-ribboned highway. They waited until it finally disappeared from their sight.
“C’mon. I don’t have all day,” John Lucas muttered irritably.
Bill’s mother took his hand, and they walked slowly to the car. Bill paused before opening the car door and watched his mother open hers.
“Yeah, they’ll probably ship him out to Vietnam after six weeks. He’ll be okay,” his father was saying when Bill crawled into the backseat.
Bill looked over at his mother. Her eyes were shut, and she was slumped down in the front seat as though asleep, but Bill could see her lower lip trembling. He lay across the backseat to settle his upset stomach.
“He’ll be okay. He always is,” his father drawled again to no one in particular, draping one arm across the top of the steering wheel.
Bill folded his arms over his chest and watched the blurred green scenery go by as they sped down the highway. He shut his eyes.
When the car stopped moving, he opened them and realized they were home. Without a word to his parents, he scrambled out of the car and ran to the toolshed for his sword and shield. He lured the dog into the shed with a dog biscuit and locked him inside so that he wouldn’t follow Bill. Then he cut through the woods, staying off the gravel road and following the edge of the big swamp until he reached the Chippewa River. The sand had remained clawed up, and the blood was still there, soaked into the sand. A red-brown stain. Bill scooped up the bloody sand and put it inside the shell. He threaded his sword under the rope lengthwise, front to end, on the carapace.
He picked up the shell filled with the bloody sand and balanced with his sword and waded into the river up to his knees. He placed the upturned shell in the water and watched as it bobbed in the strong current. It floated toward the middle of the river where the watery movement was the strongest. There the current seized the shell and pushed it down the middle of the river, going south.
MY HUSBAND PARKED THE STATION wagon underneath the elm by the chicken coop. The moment the car came to a halt, I felt Bill come to life in the backseat. I watched as my younger son scrambled out of the station wagon and ran toward the barn. I did not have the energy to call after him, to find out where he was going. It took everything I had just to clasp the door handle, to push open the door. Before I could swing my legs out, my husband reached over and tapped me on the shoulder.
“He has to do this, you know. He has to serve his country. He can’t be your mamma’s boy anymore. Vietnam,” he said, exhaling smoke, “will make him grow up.”
He waited to see my reaction. His face cracked into that grin that always followed after he tried to hurt me. On a small child such a smile would be welcome—the happiness of having accomplished something after a lot of hard work, such as working round blocks into round holes and square blocks into square holes—but such a smile on a grown man is sinister and foreboding. He had played tricks like this before, trying to provoke a fight. It took me a few years, but I had learned to display nothing of what I was feeling. I had learned the passive tactics of defense.
When no reaction appeared, he sat as though pondering what he thought was the wisdom of his own words, smoking his cigarette and flicking the ashes out of the window.
The exhaustion I felt disappeared. My husband’s words thundered and struck like lightning, leaving the burned remains of his twisted logic tattooed on my brain. They opened a vein of strength I had no idea existed within me until that moment.
I looked at my hands. I felt the clarity of purpose in my hands.
I opened the door but held on to the top edge to steady myself. Then I began to walk alongside the ca
r. One hand over the other, each hand placed palm side down and flat against the hot hood of the blue station wagon. I leaned my head back and stared at my husband through the windshield but did not stop the cat walk of my hands. John pulled his cigarette from his mouth and let his arm and hand dangle outside the door. His mouth fell open. I turned so that I faced the front of the station wagon and pawed my way across it, my eyes never shifting from their focus. He squinted and tilted his head back. His fingers dropped the cigarette on the ground.
When I reached his door, I bent down so that my face was level with his. At the same time I ground the burning cigarette into the gravel of the driveway with the toe of my shoe.
“What in Christ’s name is wrong with you all of a sudden?”
“Be careful,” I warned him in a voice so low that it sounded like the territorial rumbling in a cat’s chest.
I stood up and looked down at him.
“Be careful. ”
I took the chance and waited. He could have opened the door and slammed it into me. Grabbed me by my hair. But he was spooked. He moved away from the window, and I saw his shaking hands pull out another cigarette from the pack of Salems on the dashboard.
“You’re crazy!”
I turned around and walked toward the house. He had started the engine before I even reached the door, and I watched as he backed the car out the driveway. One straight and fast shot backward, then the squeal of tires as he straightened the car out of the driveway entrance and gunned it for town. I knew I had scared him. At least for a while.
I went in the house, got a cup of coffee, and then sat on the porch steps. I wondered where Bill had gone, and I decided I would give him an hour. Then I would get up and look for him.
I tried to remember when things were different. When I first saw my husband.
I met John at a dance. It was after the war, and it seemed like everybody met their future husbands and wives at a VFW dance. He was tall and blond and handsome in his uniform, as all the men were. He leaned forward when he talked to me, as though my answers to his questions were as deeply meaningful as Aristotle’s. He had big plans. He was intent, he told me, on going to college on the GI Bill. I mistook that for a healthy ambition, and so I said yes to his proposal. I thought I was in love. He said our marriage vows almost tearfully, as though I were the greatest gift he could ever have been given. I believed that I was set for life and that he would fulfill his prescribed role as provider and loving husband just as I would be a loving wife and good mother. But he quit college after a year, and it was a year into our marriage. I had a college degree and had taught high school for two years. He resented it although he wouldn’t come out and say so. His rationale for my quitting teaching was that I didn’t make enough money at it and we would be better served by my staying at home. He laughed at my visits to the library, how many books I read, the kinds of books I read, and made fun of my expensive liberal education. Within six months of our marriage his voice gradually stopped being loving, and as he spoke, his words became more and more coated with sarcasm. Only when he wanted to move up north did some of his former charm return, and he continually worked on me until I gave in. I told myself that our marriage would become better and that farming might bring forth some of my own hidden desires as well as some much-needed space from my mother, who had made my life in Milwaukee, in some ways, as unendurable as John’s father had made his.
I remember when I first saw the farm. It seemed so northern. So wild. It was early fall, and I walked the place with old Mrs. Hausherr. I gasped when I saw the giant white pine stumps in the fencerow.
“Ja,” she said, acknowledging my shock. “This place once had big pine. But it needed to be cleared so we could farm it. Those big timbers in the barn are white pine.”
Some of the pine stumps were six feet in diameter. They shocked me as much as if I had witnessed an execution, and my recollection of French history suddenly became vivid. The stumpy remains of the white pine resembled the eighteenth-century illustrations of men and women after their heads had been sliced off by the guillotine. The bloody, pulpy necks. The sap had oozed up just as blood would have and had covered the stumps’ surfaces. Much of it was no longer sticky but hard and brown and on its way to becoming amber.
The Hausherrs were in their seventies, and their sorrow at leaving was visible. Their children wanted them to come to Milwaukee because they were tired of making the long trip back and forth to make sure their parents were all right. I thought it was ironic that we were trading directions. They were going south for an easier life, and we supposedly were headed north for an easier life.
While Emil Hausherr talked to John, Anna Hausherr showed me the house and surrounding yard. “There is new plumbing!” she proudly announced.
“Oh. When did you have the plumbing replaced?”
“Replaced? We never had plumbing before that!”
She guided me to the porch, and we looked out of the window. That was when I noticed the tall and narrow shack not far from the chicken coop.
“Two years ago we were still using the outhouse. Or—” she joked, her hooded eyes crinkling—“the Schmidt house, as Emil calls it after we saw a cartoon in the Milwaukee Journal. It had Santa and all the reindeer perched on top of an outhouse and Santa was saying, ‘Rudolph! I said the Schmidt house. Not the shit house!’ We laughed pretty hard over that one. You see, our neighbors to the south are the Schmidts. We never did get along with them.” She gestured with her head toward the south.
“You should keep it,” she added, “in case of emergencies. I’m still not sure about that plumbing ... our kids chipped in and had it done for us, but I didn’t mind using the outhouse.”
She was proud of her house, but it was when she showed me her garden that her voice caught and she covered her mouth from time to time.
“There is rocks,” she said. “Always rocks. I think they grow here. Every year I had to rake out more rocks, and the children, when they were younger, hated picking rock. But I could grow good lettuce and tomatoes and good, good potatoes. Flowers too. Zinnias, marigold, some daisies. Imogene Morriseau showed me how to use a cold frame to get them started early. Her husband, Claude, showed Emil how to do maple syruping.”
When we went back inside the house, she took me downstairs into the basement to show me the housewarming gift she had left for us: rows and rows of canned vegetables, pickles, maple syrup, and berries. The jars glistened like jewels even under the dull light of a single bulb. Dark blueberries, ruby-colored beets, and the green of pickled cucumbers.
“Oh, my,” I said, overwhelmed and thinking of my mother’s advice never to take food from people I didn’t know, “don’t you want to take these with you? Your husband will want them and your children too.”
“Ach!” she exclaimed. “My children only like store-bought food. It is good food,” she said as though reading my mind. She smiled proudly. “I have a cabinet shelf full of ribbons from the county fair for my canned goods.”
I knew she had many children—nine, I think—and so I wondered why none of them wanted the farm.
“Well, we did have a son,” she said haltingly, “who wanted the farm. Our youngest boy, Joseph. He was my late-in-life baby, and he loved this place. But he enlisted and went to France. He died there.”
“I’m sorry.”
We stood in the basement for a long time in silence. Then she grabbed my hand and led me back upstairs and out of the house. She must have sensed my nervousness and my fear of so much wildness.
“It will come to you. You’ll see.” She patted my cheek. “Your children will love it, and so will you.”
She turned away slightly and watched John as he talked to her husband in the driveway.
“Your husband,” she commented dryly, “does he know much about farming?”
I remembered her hands, so calloused and thick from hard work. Her legs were wrapped in Ace bandages to help ease the pressure from varicose veins. Her face was ruddy and full of
little wrinkles that folded her skin inward. The blue plates of her eyes underneath the cowl of skin that draped over them. The look on her face when she spoke of her youngest son. She had probably said good-bye to her son on the very porch steps I was sitting on.
Does a house come with pain? I wondered, thinking of the way Anna Hausherr patted my face and looked at me so kindly as if to give me bread for a long journey.
I drank the rest of my coffee. I knew I would have to take a nap. I had not slept the night before, and I felt as tight as a bowstring ever since seeing Jimmy board the bus. My head hurt, and I heard a buzzing noise.
I thought of John’s smile. That malevolent look on his face. I was so angry I thought I could almost smell the smoke from the invisible lightning that had struck me a half an hour before. I could not believe what my husband had said.
Vietnam will make him grow up.
I felt something snap.
EVER SINCE HIS BROTHER LEFT for Vietnam, Bill had the same dream. Only it wasn’t as much a dream so much as it was a sensation. It beat across the insides of his eyelids, and he could see the slits of sunlight as the white feathers expanded to soar on a current of air. He was underneath, but he couldn’t see anything except the feathers. The wind whistled in his ears, and the feathers flapped against the bright yellow sunlight. He was being carried, but Bill could not see where, and he could not turn his head because it was held in a viselike, even painful grip. While he was listening intently to the melodious whistling, it became shrill, and he was suddenly dropped. His arms beat frantically against the wind, but they were useless. He heard the sound of his own voice, but it did not say what he had intended, what would have been natural. It did not say “Mamma!” or “Help!” It said:
“Billy!”
His mother’s voice cut through his fall.
The Turtle Warrior Page 4
