Love from your brother,
Billy Baboon
P.S. I will pray for your buddy Rick.
Bill folded the letter and placed it on top of his notebook so he wouldn’t forget it in the morning. He climbed into bed, curled himself into a fetal position, and stared at the shadows on the wall made by the snow-laden pine boughs in the moonlight. Christmas was going to be extra hard without James. But he sent money, and that would help some. Bill’s father, John Lucas, had been drinking more and working less, but for the past two weeks he had been gone most of the time, logging for the lumber mill in Olina. He would be back for Christmas, however. Bill pulled the covers up over his face and shut his eyes tightly to bring back the dream. But water squeaked through, and he cried himself to sleep instead.
“What does he write when he writes to you?”
Bill looked up from his oatmeal. It was Saturday and he was in no hurry to eat his breakfast. His mother’s face was hollow-looking and colorless as though she had not slept. She propped her elbows up on the table and rested her face in her hands.
“What does he write when he writes to you?” she repeated.
“Jus’ letters,” Bill mumbled. He swallowed another spoonful of his oatmeal.
His mother sighed heavily. “I know something isn’t right. But he always says he’s fine when he writes to me. And he sends so much money.”
Bill almost stopped his spoon in midair but caught himself and neatly guided it into his mouth. He felt the blanket of his mother’s gaze cover him.
“Billy. Can I read the letters he sends to you? I promise I won’t say anything.”
Bill quietly placed his spoon on the table. He was hoping she wouldn’t ask that. He looked up and silently scrutinized his mother’s face. He watched for any sign, a false smile, or too many tears, or even one tear, that might signal her betrayal, signal her old anger that would pull him across the kitchen by his hair if he said no. There was nothing. Nothing but exhaustion so pure it rendered his mother a sagging shell, and he thought he could almost see through her to the kitchen sink.
“I’ll give ‘em to you at lunch. But you gotta give ’em back before—”
But he didn’t have to finish because his mother knew. She nodded, reaching out slowly to touch her small son’s teak-colored hair. Bill’s mouth fell open as he watched her arm extend itself toward him, toward his quivering face, and all he could see and feel was a thin finger of sunlight gently touch his head.
Pray for me.
He always thought of the Sacred Heart Church as a large brick cave. Except that it was dry, not damp, and the cavernous ceiling was covered with frescoes of trumpeting angels and the ascension of the Virgin Mary into heaven, painted by the German immigrant artists who first settled Olina. It was surprisingly empty even for a Saturday afternoon. He tagged after his mother in the enormous hush of the empty church, trying to keep his bulky winter boots from thumping. There were two votive light stands on either side of the church, placed before the steps to the altar. Four rows of twelve short white candles, most of them unlit, filled the ornate wrought-iron stands. Each stand had a small iron box with a slit in it for dimes. A dime to light one candle, one lit candle to pray for a beloved’s soul, a piece of fire to keep the prayer alive.
As if by silent agreement, Bill and his mother parted ways at the top of the aisle, and she went to the votive stand on the left while Bill knelt at the one on the right. He heard the clink of her dime as she inserted it into the box. She took a long, thin taper and held it in the flame of an already lit candle until it caught fire. Then she lit her own chosen candle. Bill listened to the low hum of her voice carry through the church as she began to chant the Hail Mary and Our Father. He waited until he was sure she was engrossed in prayer before pulling out a ten-dollar bill from his jeans pocket. He folded the bill into fourths and quickly tucked it through the slit in the box.
He glanced over at his mother. Her head was bent, and her voice, although wavery, didn’t stop. He took a taper and held it in the flame of the only lit candle at his stand. He let it burn while the words of Sister Agnes came to him: “These candles are for votive prayers. That means to pray or make a vow, usually for someone else, but you can pray for your own soul. The flame of these candles means your prayer burns eternal.”
Eternal meant forever. He lifted his wooden taper and reached across the back row of candles. He lit one, two, three ... and finally all twelve in that row. Then, after snuffing out the taper because it burned too close to his fingers, he reached for and lit another one. He lit the second row of twelve candles, then the third row, and finally, the fourth row of eleven. He snuffed out the last taper and clasped his hands. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of his brother and his brother’s buddies Rick and Marv. The whistling filled his head. He smiled. “My baby does the hanky panky.” His face burned, and he stopped smiling. He tried to think of a prayer. But the formal prayers of the church didn’t mean anything to him. Then it came to him. He whispered the only thing he could think to say. “Come home, come home, come home, come home—”
“Billy, did you have to light all of them?”
He lifted his head, his face flushed red from the heat of the candles, the eternal flame of forty-eight candles blurred in his eyes. “Pray for me,” his brother had said.
“Yes,” he answered, the s trailing through his teeth like a snake.
The snowflakes skipped and skidded across the watery blue hood of the car on the way home. The sky was an ancient pearly gray, and Bill felt strangely happy. His mother drove, not saying a word, but he could sense that she too felt the same as her small son. They had stopped at the drugstore in Olina before driving back out to the farm. She bought him a new shirt and a pair of jeans and a giant solid chocolate Santa. It was as though she had read his mind when she gave the druggist, Bogey Johnson, a radiant smile and said, “Mr. Johnson, my son would like one of those Santas. Do you think we can oblige him?”
His mother hummed to herself. Bill bit into the fat arm of his Santa and watched the snow-covered fields and woods go slowly by as the car crunched over the new snow. Just as the chocolate elbow was melting into the roof of his mouth and they were nearing the farm, his mother braked the car in a series of small jerks and finally stopped it on the shoulder of the road right after they’d cleared the curve. She pulled the packet of letters out of her Wrigley’s Doublemint-perfumed purse and laid them on the seat between herself and Bill. The chocolate trickled down the back of his throat.
“Thank you, sweetheart, for letting me read those,” she said. She shifted in the car seat so that she faced him. Her face sparkled like the new snow, and for the first time that day he noticed that she had taken her pink rollers out. Her black hair was brushed and sprayed into full curls around her face. She could be, Bill realized, staring dumbfounded at his mother, very pretty.
“You know somethin’,” she said matter-of-factly. “Jimmy is gonna come home. I feel it.” She placed a clenched hand against her chest and repeated, “I feel it. ”
“You know somethin’ else,” she said almost gleefully, huddling down in the seat to look Bill in the face.
He shook his head, his eyes fixed on his illuminated mother. He absently bit off the tassel on his Santa’s hat.
“Things—” she emphasized the word confidently—“are gonna get better. Lord, they can’t get much worse. But you and me and Jimmy can run this farm and make it go. Don’t you think so?”
Bill couldn’t answer and quietly pushed his bitten-up Santa back into the bag. He cautiously looked back up at his mother. She didn’t seem to notice his lack of response and had shifted forward in the car seat again. But her face was no longer jubilant; it was sad, and tears ran down her face.
“You know I love you boys ... very much. But,” she said softly, looking through the windshield at their house in the distance nestled among the red pines, “if I’d have had wings, I would’ve been gone a long time ago.”
Dec-67
Dear Bill,
I know this letter is coming pretty fast right after the last one, but Lt. Miller said there would be a special pickup for holiday mail. It’s raining, and I’m writing this inside a bunker. Remember how much I used to love the sound of rain on the roof? Except Beans always howled like he was dying or something when it rained. I’m sorry that I threw my boot at him that time and hit him in the head. Then he really started howling, remember? Anyway, it rains like it’s going to flood here. Listening to it makes me kind of sleepy. I pretend sometimes, when we can’t hear any shooting or bombing, or even when the jets (we call them warbirds) are gone for a little while, that I’m home. Or when that doesn’t work, I pretend this is a real country. It is a real country, but sometimes I feel like I’m floating just above the ground and I can’t touch it. And other times I feel like I’m in a dollhouse—cause American soldiers are so big, me included. The Yards—the mountain people who live here and who help us and who are NOT Vietnamese—are the size of you, Bill. I’m a giant compared to them. I guess you could have joined the Marines with me after all (ha-ha). Speaking of big, you should see the RATS. I’m sorry I ever made fun of your mice. The rats here are like something out of the movies, and they BITE. Marv shoots any rats he sees with his .45. That’s how much he hates them. So do I. Don’t get upset. They’d EAT you.
We were cutting trail through some jungle two days ago, and I barely missed stepping into a punji pit. The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong dig these holes and then put bamboo spikes in the bottom. They cover the holes up with leaves and even buffalo shit so you can’t see them. If you step in one, the spikes go right up through the bottom of your boots and up into your legs. It scared the shit out of me.
Don’t tell Mom, but I caught some shrapnel in my arm. The medic just cleaned it up and gave me a shot of penicillin. It’s not that bad. Is Mom okay? Her last letter was strange.
Thanks for your letter—it was great! And it got here pretty fast too. You can wear my hat, and I don’t care if you wreck it. I’m not going to wear it again anyway. Hey! I’m glad I don’t have chicken wings—they’d never get me off the ground.
The other day I saw a really big bird flying. Like a heron, only bigger. I asked one of the ARVNs what it was. (ARVN stands for Army of the Republic of Vietnam—one of the Vietnamese fighting on our side.) He said it was a crane and laughed at me. He said didn’t you ever see a crane before? I guess we have them in northern Wisconsin, but they usually stay in southern Wisconsin. They’re beautiful, Bill. I hope I see more of them. But they must get hit in the crossfire and bombing. I wish I could have wings like a crane. Seeing that crane reminded me of the geese in the fall. I really missed seeing the geese this year.
Here’s a picture of me. I look pretty dirty, but that’s the way it is when we’re out here. Thanks for the presents and the fruitcake. Well, little man, I’ve got to go. Give Mom a hug for me. Tell the old man to piss off (just kidding—don’t do it). Say hi to the Morriseaus if you see them.
Love James
Bill stared at the Polaroid of his brother under the night-light. He had his helmet on, so Bill couldn’t see how short his hair was, but the rest looked reasonably enough like James. Except his smile wasn’t real. His mouth looked as though invisible fingers had taken his lips prisoner and pulled them sideways, the skin unnaturally tight underneath his nose. His eyes were sunken and dark, and it was clear that his brother had lost some weight. Besides the picture there was more money still, and Bill counted five ten-dollar bills. He leaned back against the wall. Little man. That’s how he felt, as though when his brother left, all the unspoken reasons for James’s leaving had suddenly descended upon Bill, and in his awareness of them, he had become old.
It was a week past Christmas. Bill’s father had come home, had drunk and slept through Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day, getting up only to eat the holiday meal. It surprised Bill, covertly watching his father eat his turkey, how little he knew or cared about the tall, pasty-skinned man at the head of the table. His nine-year-old life had revolved so intensely lately around his daily struggle to survive at school, the strained wait for his brother’s letters, the fields, the woods, the swamp, and the sky of their farm, and lastly, the fragile web of his mother’s world that he had forgotten to be cautious around the beer-reeking presence that he’d been avoiding, it seemed, since he was born. He silently ate a forkful of stuffing before catching his mother’s eye. A small conspiratorial smile passed across her lips. Her dark eyes had lost their dull captive look and shone. Things are gonna get better. He glanced down again to the far end of the table where his father sat and felt an unfamiliar stab of pity. James was thousands of miles away from them in a country that even Bill in his enormous capacity for imagination could not imagine but only carried with him in the word Vietnam. A country of purple mountains, man-made woodchuck holes that stabbed, wriggling barbed-wire bombs, a bird that flew bigger than a Canada goose, and hot metal that flew like a bird. Yet Bill knew it was his father, not his brother, who was in a strange country he’d never get out of, a country where only he thought as he did, and whose borders he broke through occasionally to hit his wife, to despise his sons.
Still, now that John Lucas was home for the holidays, Bill wondered how he was going to survive without his brother there to shield him, to shield her. But in his small head he knew, survive he must. James would come home. And James would tell the priest that what he preached at the Christmas mass was wrong. The loving brotherhood of man did not exist.
Sunday
Dear James,
Mom and me prayd for you. I ate alot of choclate at Christmas and got sick. Dad got fird and is home now. Me and Mom went sledding. She lost some of her curlers but did not get mad. She sat in front so I wouldnt get hit by snow. I am back at school. Sister says to look for Janury stars. Do you have stars over there? We saw a big white owl sittng on the fence by the barn. Mom says it is a snowi owl from canada. She says he came to visit us becase he ran out of food in canada. Mom cryd. She says you shoulda went to canada to. I said, mom, if they dont got any food, why should James go there.
Bill stopped. He could hear his mother shouting in the kitchen and the banging of pots and pans. His father’s deep, rumbling voice answered her. Bill tensed up. Then he heard a heavy thump. His mother shouted some more. Bill sighed.
Can they let you out earli?
Bill raised his pencil from the paper. Now he could hear his mother sobbing.
Please come home. I am scard. I like your picture. Can I have your helmit when you come home? Mr. Moriso says he will take me and you to show us the crans. He says they fly by lake superier. They say hi. If they let you out earli will you come home? I got to go to bed now.
Love Bill
He put his notebook down. His mother’s crying was ebbing. Bill crawled back into bed and covered his ears against the muted notes of her sorrow. It was the middle of January, the middle of a freak midwinter thaw. The chickadees had broken into their spring song that day. Bill had opened his window to the unseasonably warm wind, and it blew the ivory curtains into midnight dancers. He felt both elated and ashamed, having betrayed his fear to his brother. But as much as he wanted to destroy what he had written, he also felt sure that it would bring his brother home. Maybe, he thought, listening to the melting ice drip from the eaves, he could even persuade his mother to call the Marines and tell them that James was needed at home. That he had made a mistake by enlisting.
Bill turned to lie on his right side. He tried not to think of tomorrow. Tomorrow was school. Tomorrow meant Merton. He stared at the dancing curtains. Their fluttering hypnotized his already tired eyes, and combined with the soothing plunk, plunk of the melting ice, his eyes closed. Tomorrow was not now.
The wings flapped, enclosing Bill for a few seconds and brushing his face and chest. They opened again, lifting upward against the surging wind, and he raised his eyes to see that the white wings spanned an enormous length from si
de to side. His bare legs swung back and forth, and he was held this time by his shoulders. The air was heavy and moist, so moist that he felt slippery like a fish and as helpless as one, clutched in the talons of an eagle. But his shoulders felt no pain, just roped and secure. He dropped his head against his chest and looked below.
They were passing over the Morriseau farm with its two silos and big duck pond. The eighty-acre field behind their house was filled with little clouds of dust, each one exploding like spores from the head of a smashed puffball mushroom. Poof! Poof! Poof! Little black specks were chaotically running through the field, and every time a speck hit one of the clouds, it burst into flames, becoming a ball of fire. He could hear shouting and the deep pop and zing of rifles going off. The air became thick and choking with dust. Bill’s small chest caved in, and his lips quivered. He coughed hard, and his hands jerked up toward his mouth.
The Turtle Warrior Page 6
