The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  “There goes your friend,” I say softly, but of course the dog can’t hear me through the window.

  Bill stops then. Just stops and stands there and faces the big swamp. Angel continues to watch him silently. He lifts his nose. I turn my head for just a minute, and that’s when Angel barks, once. I look back just in time to see Bill get swallowed into the thick cover of those swamp cedars. This is the fifth time this summer I’ve seen him disappear like that into the swamp. I stand up on my toes to catch a glimpse of him, but he’s gone, and the only thing I see now is my husband by the toolshed, watching Bill just like me, just like the dog. Once last summer I saw Bill up close at the Standard station where he works and was shocked by the oily stubble and savage look of his face. His eyes are no longer the soft gray color they were when he was a kid. They are a rock gray now, and like a split rock, they are small but with jagged edges.

  We wait and watch, but nothing. Ernie’s shoulders sag when he realizes that Bill will not reappear, and he trudges off toward the barn, fifty-eight years of exhaustion in every step.

  We will not talk about this. My husband does not know that I know he watches the Lucas place, looking for signs of life, a vigorous wave of a hand or the yellow halo of the yard light when night falls. The little boy who used to visit our farm, eat dinner with us, and play with the dog grew into a remote and painfully shy young man. We see him rarely and almost always at a distance. And the oddest thing is that his name is never spoken between us ... as though he were dead instead of his brother, Jimmy. Which is nonsense because we do see him, working, walking, or driving, even if it isn’t often. It hurts Ernie that Bill does not come to our place anymore or accept visits easily from us. But Ernie doesn’t talk about that either. He deals with his pain like most men, treating it as though it doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be talked about.

  I, on the other hand, have never been known to stay quiet. When I’m in pain, I cry a blue streak, and when I’m angry, I yell like hell. And when something is bothering me, I talk. A lot.

  But I don’t have another person to talk to easily outside of Ernie, who has been punishing me with silence for the past two weeks and who has even struggled to keep his feet from touching mine while we sleep. I don’t even know what I’m being punished for, that’s how nonexistent our conversations have been. I’ve given up trying, fearful that I might use the most intimate details that people who have lived together for a long time can carry like swords. But I still need to talk to somebody. Most of our neighbors are a good two, three miles away and busy farmers like us. So I talk to the dog, whose eyes have taken on a kind of old man wisdom to match his graying muzzle.

  Some days it’s hilarious. Angel patiently trails behind me as I do the housework, ducking behind a chair when I vacuum, sitting by the bathroom door as I scrub the toilet and floor, or lying on the porch while I peel vegetables or count eggs, all the while listening to the constant run of my mouth.

  It is only at night when I let Angel out of the house that he leaves me for a few hours, running out the door and into the nearest patch of woods with the determination of a reconnaissance pilot, his black coat giving him a natural camouflage at night. In the past I had only an inkling of what he did on these forays, what any male dog would do, and him especially, pent up all day in the house with me. But lately I’ve suspected that Angel’s nightly journeys are not meaningless wanderings or chance matings, and if he could talk, he would tell me things that my husband never does. It frightens me. Other women who are isolated and lonely drink or pick fights with their silent husbands or take up with other men or maybe just suffer silently. I talk to the dog. And watch a little boy who was never mine and who has long since grown up and abandoned me.

  Then this morning at breakfast, my husband, who has borne like a Buddhist monk the hardships of being a World War II veteran, a farmer, and a mixed-blood man in northern Wisconsin, does talk to me, only to hurt me. He put down his coffee cup and said, “I just can’t do it anymore, Rose. I used to be able to lift a bale of hay in each hand, and now I can barely lift one with two hands. I can’t sleep worth a shit, and things that used to mean so much to me don’t anymore. I just don’t give a damn.”

  What could I say? For other people the meaning of life does not rest on being able to lift a bale of hay. But we’re farmers. Everything rests on that bale of hay. Actually it was the look on his face, not what Ernie said, that did me in this morning. The message was loudly broadcast with those dark brown, bloodshot, and tired eyes. That bale of hay should have been passed on to younger hands. We are Rosemary and Ernest Morriseau, good farmers, but farmers without children.

  I sat as though slapped speechless. My lips moved, but no sound came out. Ernie stood up as though he didn’t notice, maybe he didn’t care, and walked out the kitchen door.

  “I give a damn,” is what I couldn’t spit out. “I tried.” And it got worse as the day went on. I could barely keep my head up, could barely talk for fear of tears.

  Now the dishes are done, and the dog is scratching to be let in. I open the door, and Angel strolls through the doorway, his nails tapping like drumsticks on the linoleum. Then, my only friend, he sits and looks up at me.

  Suddenly I can’t look at the dog, and I can’t breathe. I stumble out of the kitchen and into the living room, but Angel trails me. When I reach for and slump into the old brown recliner by the window, I am temporarily relieved of the burden of Ernie’s words, of Ernie’s silence. I cry, hiccuping and sputtering like a three-year-old. I cry for hours until it gets dark, until my eyes become puffy and my head aches. Angel rubs his scarred head against my knee for a while before settling down next to the chair. I’m grateful for even that touch.

  I love this dog, and this dog loves me. But when did my husband and I stop doing the dance of love? What have I done, what crime have I committed, that warrants being ignored? That justifies not being touched? And when will I stop being punished for the children I could not give birth to?

  I met Ernie at a VFW dance in Milwaukee. I was an Army nurse who had just finished a two-year stint in the Philippines, and Ernie was a shrapnel-filled soldier. I was sipping my favorite drink of depression, a gin and tonic, and spiraling downward when I smelled cedar. I turned around to stare into a pair of the most velvety brown eyes I’d ever seen. He had a chest like a gladiator and thick black hair. His voice was warm and deep.

  “War’s over. Wanna dance?” he asked, and smiled that enormous slow smile that made me put down my drink, suddenly crazed to wrap my arms around that huge, cedar-smelling chest and hold on for as long as I could.

  We both held on like two long-lost buddies from childhood. He was from northern Wisconsin like me. We got married and left Milwaukee to take on his family farm in Olina. Then I tried having babies.

  The doctor said my uterus was damaged, but he couldn’t figure out how. I told him I’d been sick, on and off in the Philippines, with what was thought to be some kind of intestinal flu.

  “Well,” he commented nonchalantly, “maybe that did it,” and motioned for me to get dressed. Then he said to quit trying. But I tried.

  Just when I would start to think that this one was going to hold and would get ready to shop for baby clothes, I’d feel that damn ache in my lower back. Then the contractions would come on fast, and before I could get to the hospital, twenty miles away, my lovely baby would slip and fall out, looking like clotted peony petals shaken from the stem into a pool of blood.

  I remember the last baby. I was in the bathroom, feeling that downward pull and squeezing my thighs together to hold it in.

  “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me,” I kept saying. Chanting it, Ernie said, long after the baby was gone and he’d taken me to the hospital. Ernie had been kind enough after the first three miscarriages. But as they continued, he made love distantly, his body going through the motions as if vaguely to obey the adage that hope springs eternal. But what sprang from him died in me.

  Then Ernie and I got
two sons by default, at least for a short time, and Ernie and the ghosts of our own children were temporarily appeased. First Jimmy and then Bill, driven out of their house by their father’s rageful drinking and their mother’s mental descent into another world, began to visit us. I didn’t give a damn about John Lucas, but Claire was like too many women I’d seen and grown up with. Women with brains three times the size and depth of their fathers and husbands, but trapped and nowhere to go with that kind of intelligence but sideways or down. I tried for a long time to get close to Claire, but she avoided me as though I were painful to her. I used to watch her walk in one continuous circle around the edge of their back forty acres while Jimmy was in the Marines and Bill was in school, her hands talking to the air and her face slanted toward the sky.

  “She’s losing it,” I said to Ernie once when we discreetly watched her from behind our barn.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” my husband said, surprising me. “Maybe she really is talking to someone.”

  “Do you see anybody else out there?” I asked sarcastically.

  “I’m just sayin’ there’s a lotta things we don’t know about,” Ernie answered, and shrugged.

  “Especially in that family,” I cracked, and even Ernie had to nod.

  But I felt lousy saying it and shut up after that, not wanting to tempt the spirits. There but for the grace of God, I thought, go I.

  Long before Jimmy left, I rationalized the boys’ time at our house as thinking that Claire probably needed a break from the kids, and I willingly opened up our house and my arms to Jimmy and Bill, letting the love pour. But that was not enough. Jimmy became a teenager so hell-bent on escaping his old man that enlisting in the Marines looked like a sure chance in a million-dollar lottery in comparison to his life in Olina. Then Jimmy lost the lottery. In her grief, Claire Lucas woke up and, realizing that she had another son, kept little Bill close to home after that. And Ernie and I lost both of them. I don’t know who I cried more for, Ernie and me or Jimmy and Bill.

  Then, when Bill was seventeen, his father died of a heart attack. I could not find any warmth in that kid’s hand when I shook it after the funeral mass. It was as though he didn’t know or remember me. But the look on his face was one that couldn’t be mistaken. While Claire appeared bewildered and exhausted, her son was obviously relieved instead of sad.

  “You’d be relieved too! He won’t have that stinkin’ mean drunk for a father anymore,” Ernie commented bitterly on the drive home.

  When Bill turned eighteen, he began working full-time for the Standard station. Not long after John’s death Claire became the receptionist for the Forest Service. She seems much better now, but she still won’t return a wave or accept any sign of friendship from me.

  I’m almost ready to drift off to sleep when I hear the steps creak. Angel wakes up and cocks his head toward the staircase. I wait and watch. My husband’s shuffling body fills the doorway. He is wearing what he always wears to bed, a pair of blue pajama bottoms and nothing else. It’s too dark for me to see his face, but I know something is wrong by the way his big shoulders are slumped forward.

  “You know,” he begins quietly, “my grandma Morriseau told me before I was shipped out to the Pacific, that I would know if anyone close to me had died. Here at home or over there. I told her I didn’t wanna know. She said, want to or not, I would just know, especially if I kept my mind open to it. I thought it was just old Indian superstition. Nothin’ ever happened during my service that made me think about what she said. Except my buddy Frank. His old French-Canadian Catholic mother told him almost the same thing. We laughed about it.”

  Either I’m so tired or it’s really been a strange day. This morning he tells me he doesn’t care anymore, and now it’s almost midnight, and he’s telling me about his reservation grandmother, who’s been dead for almost forty years.

  “But,” he says, his voice dropping an octave, “I had a bad feeling when Jimmy left for basic training.”

  I am instantly wide awake.

  “Jimmy?” I ask. “What about Jimmy?”

  Ernie goes on as though he hasn’t heard what I said.

  “I didn’t pay any attention to it,” he says. “I figured I felt that way because of the kind of war it was. But when I saw him, I knew I had done a bad thing. I could’ve invited him over to dinner with Billy that night, remember? Before he shipped out the next day? But I didn’t ’cause of what he did to that turtle with that stupid-ass Baker kid he used to hang out with. I could’ve gone after him, talked to him about what he was getting himself into. I could’ve talked him out of it. I came so close,” he says, and then repeats, “so close.”

  “Ernie,” I say. “Don’t you remember? We didn’t know that Jimmy had even enlisted until that night Billy came over for dinner. Remember, when John came over to pick up Billy, he told us. Remember you were so mad because John was proud of it, and you said he was just getting rid of his son before the kid took him down. Don’t you remember?”

  “I saw Jimmy,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper, “the day before we heard about him. Remember, it was so warm that winter? I was shoveling manure. Well ... that’s when I saw him. Angel”—he gestures toward the dog—“saw him first and howled like crazy. Jimmy was standing in the back field. But he didn’t say a word, not a word. He just took off his helmet and dropped his gun. Then”—Ernie swallows—“he turned around and walked into the swamp. That’s when I knew ... that Jimmy had died.”

  My husband, by nature, does not exaggerate. Still, I find his words hard to believe until I remember that Ernie didn’t cry like me when we heard the news that Jimmy was MIA. At the time I thought it was because he had accepted it as a consequence of war. He’d fought. He knew the chances. Now it all makes sense. For the past fourteen years, he has been trudging through his daily life not silenced by hard, solitary work but by grief.

  “I wanted to tell you,” he says, suddenly shaking so much that the air seems to crack around him. “Then this morning when I saw the look on your face ... so lonely, so lonely, it hit me what a goddamn bastard I’ve been. I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so sorry.”

  Then Ernie covers his face with his hands and, hunching over, lets out a long, deep sob that echoes through the room. My heart hits the wall of my chest.

  I don’t remember the last time Ernie cried. It must have been years ago. I’ve cried plenty, and I’ve heard lots of other women cry too. But women cry even in their worst pain, with hope and relief. They cry like wolves and coyotes do, howling to talk to their mates as well as to the rest of the pack. But there is something about the way men cry that sounds so hopeless, so anguished, as though the very act of crying were killing them.

  I can feel the tears start up fresh in my eyes. “C’mere,” I say, and open my arms to stop the waters. My husband stumbles toward me. The recliner moans under our weight as Ernie sinks into my arms. Angel bolts up and trots over by the TV Alert but oddly calm, he hunkers down in front of the TV He lifts his nose to sniff the air and then opens his mouth to taste it. Our big black dog, satisfied with what his nose and tongue read, lowers his lopsided head to rest in a pool of moonlight on the floor. I wrap my arms tighter around Ernie, touching with my fingertips the scars and pointed shrapnel still under his skin. He nuzzles his face deep into the crook of my neck to hide it while he cries.

  I wish there were some way I could tell Jimmy that Ernie cries for him. I wonder if John Lucas ever grieved so for what was his flesh-and-blood son. We thought not at the time. He’d brag in town about Jimmy’s being a war hero and tell stories as though he’d actually been there with Jimmy, fighting in Vietnam. Ernie and the other veterans in town never talked like that. They’d done it. They knew war wasn’t a movie. It was hell personified, and for them to talk about it was to give it new life, to raise the dead. And I’d covered up so many shattered bodies in the hospital in the Philippines that I had dreams. Terrible dreams that lasted for twenty years. I dreamed that my limbs were bein
g torn off or that I was being held at gunpoint, unable to speak Japanese, finally being bayoneted through the chest. My worst dream, though, was of a large white sheet descending on me from above, and I was still alive and fighting to keep that endless white cotton from smothering me. John Lucas just couldn’t know. Whatever it was that made him drink, it wasn’t the crap of war.

  The dog exhales a deep lungful of air, but his eyes stay open, luminescent in the white light. I stare at him until I realize that I have forgotten to let him out for his nightly wandering. Then it dawns on me that he has not made the slightest familiar sign of wanting to go outside.

  My head suddenly clears from years of shameful and cloudy debris, and my skin prickles.

  Oh, yes, I want to say out loud. Yes, yes, yes.

  Grandma Morriseau was right about such things.

  Up until now I would’ve traded Angel to have had at least one child come out of my rickety womb. I was at one of the lowest points in my life when we found Angel lying in that ditch. I believed, since the first time I saw him all shot up and spared him an early death, that I had saved him. That all my stored-up and unused maternal love and care could at least save him, a mere dog. I was determined to save him. But all the tears in the world can’t hide the truth.

  If anyone was saved, it was me.

  When I have given and given and danced with love until I am exhausted, when my husband has remained silent and, some days, as bitter and brittle as a winter’s day, this dog has given to me. When I have felt fragile and vulnerable, when I have wondered if Ernie would still fight for me and over me, over an aging fifty-seven-year-old farm wife instead of the slender and long-legged beauty that I once was, it is Angel who sits beside me in the cab of the truck while I sell eggs to homes on some of the worst back roads in this county; it is Angel who guards the farm and me from aggressive salesmen, from all the possible evil that people are capable of bestowing out of the blue. It is Angel who has kept me from talking to the air like Claire Lucas and whose very presence has kept to a distance the haunting ghosts of my never-born children. It is Angel who circles the perimeter of the farm at night, black and mysterious, who tastes the wind and listens for sounds that we cannot hear. And it is Angel who saw Jimmy Lucas first, and who I suspect, because I will never really know, is able to talk to Bill Lucas while Ernie and I cannot. It is this big, black, scarred-up dog lying in front of us that has for years carried a spirit that is not his own.