The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  Father Wallace was a good example of church hypocrisy. Our priest did not sip the blood of Christ but drank it by the bottle before, during, and after mass. It was not Mogen David wine either but a rather expensive French merlot. I had suspected it, and Jimmy confirmed it during the two years he was an altar boy. He brought home one of the empty wine bottles to show me. Like most self-righteous people, Father Wallace railed against the very thing he practiced. Sin. I wondered why the rest of the parish never thought to question why the priest had a large color TV and drove a Cadillac or that the name Wilson—Elizabeth Wilson, Robert Wilson, Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson, Alvira Wilson—scripted nearly all of the stained glass windows might have something to do with it. Wilson Lumber owned a large portion of our lives, the mill being the only place to work in the area and then only seasonally.

  Our first year here I went to mass as a way of feeling at home, a ritual that was familiar to me and gave me the only place to wear the closetful of pretty dresses, suits, shoes, and hats. Olina didn’t have any social occasions that demanded such attire. I bundled Jimmy up and went to mass every morning at six-thirty, just to get out of the house before my husband did. At that hour there were very few men in church. It was mostly women, sitting in the back pews, their rosaries wound through their hands. Many of them belonged to the Daughters of Isabella, a charitable group that attended every funeral mass, even for the most wretched and forsaken. They said the Hail Mary and Our Father, chanting in rhythm until the priest nodded and the funeral mass could begin.

  Jimmy slept on the pew next to me. Sometimes the older women would peek at him and softly coo over his curly black hair and red cheeks. I took a rosary out of my purse. I was not as skilled as some of those stocky German and Slavic women. Their hands were the opposite of their bodies. They worked the beads through their fingertips with the agility they possessed in crocheting and knitting. Knit ten Marys, purl one Father. Their dry and pleated lips moved silently as they sat in trances, their eyes focused on the huge crucifix hanging on the wall behind the altar. I did not think they were fools. Or particularly faithful. It was the only time of the day those women could have an hour to themselves. The church was impenetrable except in cases of extreme emergency. No husband or child dared violate the sanctity of their time in church. Although those women would never admit it, they were praying to keep their minds and to avoid dwelling on their daily unhappiness. I knew this because my mother had gone to church every day when I growing up. And I knew why.

  When the weather shifted in January from what was normal, I did not see it as an omen but as a celestial gift that might indicate that the New Year of 1968 would bring a sense of peace and milder winters unlike the previous years.

  I lifted my face to the wind and shut my eyes. I was Catholic in my habits only. That first year, home alone with a toddler during the week, I became aware of a breath. Of breathing. I walked in the interior of it, and it became the sound against which all other sounds were placed. I would hear crows cawing back and forth as I pushed the buggy up and down the dirt road in an effort to get Jimmy to sleep. One family in one tree and what appeared to be another but related family in another tree. Sometimes their cawing became intense and sharp as though they were quarreling. Other times their voices took on a comic ha-ha-ha as though one of them had told a joke. But at least once a day and often more I heard a deeper voice. A rattling but deep croak that scattered the crows. A raven. Its voice always cleaved the quiet as if it were a pronouncement, sometimes spoken in a frightening and foreboding tone, sometimes a hoarse chuckle, but mostly in a comforting manner as the large, black bird, perched high up in a white pine like a northern wizard, told the rest of us that all was well. A deep gong to announce sunrise, noon, and sunset.

  Then the call of a barred owl at dusk. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Some nights the howling of coyotes. The dog we had then would get excited and try to announce his own presence. His poor voice, a crackling howl, could never reach the higher, purer octaves of the coyotes. He tried and tried until they stopped, probably disgusted that our lowly dog had ruined their reverent song to the moon.

  But always that breathing. Always that pulse.

  The year Jimmy was four, I went to the bookmobile in Olina as usual, but this time I signed out books on the flora and fauna of where we lived, the geology of where we lived. I wanted to know what was underneath my feet when I walked down the driveway to collect our mail. I wanted to know what I heard and what I felt. I knew Jimmy felt it too. The way he cocked his little head and stared at the trees before slipping his thumb into his mouth as if to think on it.

  What an enormous comfort it was when I found it. We lived on the Canadian Shield, a thick layer of rock so old and tough that not even the last glacier scouring its surface could reach down and break it. It was what some geologists called the ancient heart of North America. No wonder northern Wisconsin couldn’t be farmed on a big scale. There was very little soil between that tablet of rock and my feet. It was not meant for farming but for praying. I stopped going to church during the week. When the weather was mild, I waited until my husband left for work. Then I took Jimmy outside with me, and together we would press our hands against the ground and I would explain to him how that ground was created. About the heart underneath our feet. Sometimes after I put him down for his afternoon nap, I would go outside and do it again. Press my hands to the ground. Beneath that bedrock heart, I imagined the soul. Liquid and fiery. How it warmed that enormous tablet and the unseen commandments written there so that those voices could rise to the surface. That was where the pulse and the breath came from. The heart and the soul.

  It was this place, this boreal forest and stumpy cedar bog-land, that eroded my city girl ways. That exposed the artifice of my religion. That gave me the mothering I never had. My trips to Milwaukee to visit my mother and relatives became less frequent because I could not stand the pity in their eyes and at the same time their refusal to acknowledge my pain or to help me with what had turned out to be a disastrous choice in husbands. I needed help that was older and wiser and not judgmental when I did not feel brave. When I cried. When I confessed my fears and my sins. The breath did not lie, did not tell me to say ten Hail Marys and everything will be all right. The pulse radiated up through the house on nights when I was tired of fighting loneliness, despair, and what I saw as a life wasted. When I felt lost. On those nights I looked at the veins in my wrists and thought of how easy it would be. But that larger pulse penetrated through the quiet of the house and reminded me that I had one of my own and that it was too sacred to cut. The tributaries of my veins flowed into the river in my body. My life had some value, some meaning, however small it seemed.

  That was when I knew that the power of life was something bigger than a man-made God even when it tested me beyond reasonable endurance. It was evidenced once again by that untimely January warmth, by the smell of soil thawing. I took a deep breath. It was a good sign that the weather had let up and let us breathe without freezing our lungs.

  A week later I was head deep into scrubbing out the oven, listening and simultaneously pooh-poohing the radio announcer’s proclamation of the weather as unnatural when my younger son ran into the house.

  “Mamma! There’s a fox sitting by the barn! Just sitting there! C’on!”

  Bill grabbed my hand and pulled me outside. Both of us stumbled over the muddy ruts in the yard until we reached the barn. There next to the fence post by the southeast corner of the barn sat the fox as though it were a farm dog. I walked hesitantly toward the animal, keeping my son behind me. It occurred to me too late that I should have brought a gun in case the animal was sick. The fox appeared indifferent to my approach. When I was close enough to see better but far enough away to remain safe, I saw why.

  Rather than the luxurious red-brown winter coat of fur it should have had, the fox had patches of fur missing. Even its tail was ratlike and scaly. I was sure I could have walked right up to it and grabbed the animal
by the scruff of its neck, the fox so weak with hunger, so sick with mange that it would have shown no resistance. The fox was not the only one suffering.

  Just before Christmas, Bill and I had seen a snowy owl perched on the snow fence along the driveway. We rarely saw those big white birds, and I knew immediately what it meant. The owl was having trouble finding food in Canada, its normal terrain, and had ventured south in an effort to survive. I shuddered. Something was wrong if a fox and an owl were starving during what was a rich season for predators. The fox’s obvious hunger began to ruin my rare good spirits.

  “Poor thing,” I said to my son, peering out from behind me. “I think it must be a young one that is having a hard time hunting. But we can’t help it. We have to let nature take its course.”

  My son didn’t answer, his face pulled down with sadness. I stroked the top of his head with the fascination I had so often felt in the past at the difference between my younger and older sons. My older son would have shot the fox, kindly ending the animal’s suffering. He would have been justified, merely expediting the process of nature. But Bill’s heart beat for the wounded and the very young. He believed with a comic book hero’s vision that he could rescue anything from the brink of death, and his bedroom in the spring and summer was living proof that he often could. It overflowed with orphaned and injured birds, mice, rabbits, and once a ball of entwined, newly hatched garter snakes that needed no care and proved it by disentangling themselves and spreading throughout the house. I was in a constant state of anxiety for months, once reaching into the sugar jar only to find a snake coiled there. My older son barely tolerated the zoo that their bedroom had become, and fights broke out frequently. I always listened from wherever I was in the house. If I thought the fight was rising to a level of physical danger, I would run upstairs and into their bedroom to break it up. They were often so mad at each other that they didn’t notice me until I inadvertently became the target of something flying through the air. Once it was a balled-up sock that struck me in the head. A shoe in my backside another time.

  I tugged on his hand. “Let’s go.”

  That night I pretended that I didn’t see Bill take leftovers out of the refrigerator and stuff them inside his jacket before silently ducking out of the house. For the next three days I cooked a steady supply of venison Jimmy had stored in our freezer from the winter before until the refrigerator bulged with an abundance of meat. Over a period of days the refrigerator gradually lost its contents.

  I stopped myself from asking Bill if the fox ate the food, if it was lulled into brief domesticity by his kindness, and I wondered, noting his bare head and hands, where he had left his red stocking cap and mittens. Instead I waited until my son left the house. Then I watched him from the back porch window, watched as my nine-year-old ran toward the barn, his hands cradling the bottom of the jacket. He did not speak of the fox again. I was sure that it had died and that all the food Bill had piled out behind the barn had gone to waste or been eaten by coyotes.

  THE SUNSET HAD BEEN AN unusually spectacular orange-red like the sunsets of late summer that day and was streaked with clouds shaped like scattered fleece. He had been shoveling manure for about an hour behind the barn, adding to the pile already banked up against the outside wall, when he stopped to have a smoke and ponder the sunset. The temperatures during the day had reached the low forties for the past week. But now dusk was rapidly taking over, and the temperature was dropping. Ernie put out his cigarette and hurried to get the job done because in another half hour he wouldn’t be able to see or feel his hands on the shovel. As he worked, he could hear the family dog inspecting and exploring the thick wet snow around the barn.

  Ernie was straining to lift an enormous shovelful of shit when he heard the dog stop prowling and give a quick snort. Thinking the dog had just found an unlucky mouse under the snow, Ernie tossed the manure onto the pile and was about to shovel up some more when he realized that the dog had stopped moving completely. He straightened up and was trying to locate the dog when he heard him. A long, high howl broke the farmyard quiet. Ernie shivered and involuntarily dropped the shovel. Then the dog streaked right past him, jumping over the shovel, and ran about fifty yards into the snow-crusted field behind the barn. Ernie had turned in the direction the dog took, wondering what had spooked him, when he saw that the large black animal had stopped again and stood rigidly still with his head and nose held high. He looked beyond the dog, and that was when he saw Jimmy Lucas.

  At first Ernie thought that Jimmy had been discharged early from the Marines and was finally home from fighting in Vietnam. But he was wearing his combat helmet and fatigues and carrying an M-16 rifle. Ernie stepped forward, sinking into the deep snow, and raised his arm.

  “Jimmy!” he yelled, and waved his hand.

  Jimmy Lucas didn’t answer and instead reached up and took off his helmet, which he dropped into the snow. The helmet rolled as though it had hit hard ground instead of snow, and Ernie noticed that Jimmy was standing on top of the snow instead of sinking into it the way Ernie and the dog had. Suddenly Ernie knew it was and wasn’t Jimmy Lucas and why he was standing in the Morriseau eighty-acre field behind the barn.

  Ernie sank to his knees. “Oh, no, Jimmy,” he whispered. “No, no.”

  Jimmy dropped his rifle too and slowly turned around. The dog snorted again but did not move. Then Jimmy walked away from them and continued walking until he reached the big swamp that bordered the Morriseau and Lucas farms. The very moment that Jimmy disappeared into the swamp, the dog howled again and took off running, floundering through the snow until he too reached the swamp.

  An hour went by before Ernie was able to rise to his feet. He threw the shovel into the toolshed and reluctantly approached the house. He ate dinner methodically and silently before trudging up the stairs to bed. Thinking it was exhaustion, his wife only asked where the dog was and didn’t question her husband’s decision to go to sleep early.

  When he woke up the next morning, Ernie surrendered what he had seen to the effects of working too hard. He’d been tricked by the warm weather and from working outside without a jacket or gloves. His hands had gone numb, and he reasoned that he’d had the beginnings of hypothermia, which always made a person feel dreamy. He looked out his bedroom window. It was another freakishly warm day. Water dripped from the eaves of the house.

  His wife made breakfast and then kissed him good-bye because she had errands to run in town. He spread hay for his beef cattle, watered and fed the chickens, changed the filter and oil on his truck, and went back to work on the manure pile.

  It was near noon, and Rosemary hadn’t come back yet. Ernie was making himself a bologna sandwich and brewing another pot of coffee when the phone rang. He thought it might be Rosemary, calling to ask if there was anything he needed from town, so he picked up the phone casually.

  “Morriseau’s.”

  “Is this Ernest Morriseau?”

  “It is.”

  “Mr. Morriseau, my name is Lieutenant Hildebrandt. I’m from the Naval Chaplain Corps. I’m calling from the reserve base in Madison. I’m calling you at the request of Private James Lucas, who listed you as the contact on his record of emergency form.”

  Ernie’s chest constricted, and he began breathing as though he had been running. He stretched the phone cord so that he could pull a chair over from the kitchen table. He sat down.

  “Mr. Morriseau, are you still there?”

  “I am.”

  Ernie paused, then said, “Jimmy’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “No, Mr. Morriseau. Private Lucas is missing in action.”

  “That means he could be alive?”

  “That is our hope. They haven’t found him yet. I will be driving up with another officer tomorrow to notify his family—” he paused, and Ernie could hear the rustling of papers—“and he requested that you accompany us. Do you live near the Lucas home?”

  “Farm. They have a farm. I own the farm next to theirs.”
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  “Private Lucas left very detailed instructions on his form. He specifically requested you. And he didn’t want us to visit the family in the evening but rather during the day. Can you go with us tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Of course I can.”

  “I will need directions to your farm, and we’ll meet you at your place tomorrow at about ten A.M.”

  Ernie gave the officer directions and hung up the phone. His hands were shaking. He thought of the way the helmet had hit the snow, how it had rolled but had not tipped upright.

  When Rosemary came home half an hour later she found Ernie still sitting by the phone.

  “I’ve been yelling from outside. Didn’t you hear me? I needed help carrying in the groceries,” she said, dumping two bags on the kitchen table.