The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  My husband has stopped crying but makes no move to uncoil himself from my arms. Someday I shall tell Ernie what I know. I shall tell him that it was a good thing, not a bad thing, that he saw Jimmy. That Jimmy chose him. That we cannot save anyone. That we choose to be saved ourselves.

  “Love,” I shall tell my silent husband, “is never wasted.”

  And I shall tell him, looking at Angel, now sleeping by the TV, that we have never been alone.

  IF HE STAYED VERY STILL and gave no indication that he was awake, Bill could see through one cracked eyelid the black dog passing between the trees about ten yards away. He was not frightened, only cautious that any sudden movement would scare the dog away. He was familiar with his neighbors’ dog, had played with him when he was a boy, had seen him roaming the boundaries of his farm in the early morning, and indeed knew the dog shadowed him whenever Bill was in the woods. He was an old dog now. Even from the distance of ten yards, Bill could see the frost of age on his muzzle. The dog’s appearance gave Bill an inexplicably eerie yet familiar feeling. But he was never afraid.

  Not like the night during the previous summer, when Bill had awakened halfway through his drunken slumber only to see a party of coyotes staring at him in the moonlight from the south end of the ridge, their eyes iridescent and haunting. His resting heart jerked like a cranked lawn mower, and he jumped up, shouting and waving his arms. The coyotes yipped and scattered down both sides of the ridge. Bill listened until he could no longer hear the papery sound of their paws on top of dried pine needles. When he calmed down, he realized it was only a group of yearling pups from that spring’s litter by a female that had denned successfully at the base of the ridge for several years now despite a trap-crushed leg that had healed crookedly. They were curious and not threatening.

  What had frightened him so badly was the sense of waiting he felt when he first saw them, motionless between the trees. The same silent waiting of crows and ravens in the treetops as they watched a winter-beaten doe die after giving birth in the spring.

  He had spent many nights on the ridge during the past six years. It was the only high, dry land on his family’s property that faced the deep kettle lake on the north side, rising out of the surrounding cedar swamp like the massive back of a brontosaurus long dead, and covered with red and white pines and birch.

  “Search and destroy! Search and destroy!” James would cry as he chased Bill up the ridge in a mock game of war. Armed with his turtle-shell shield and wooden sword, Bill could never make it to the top with his brother chasing him. James would grab his ankles while Bill tried to keep from being pulled down the slope, releasing his sword and clawing the ground with his hands. Then his brother would run his fingers up Bill’s legs, up to his chest, and tickle Bill under his arms until the towering red and white pines echoed with the sputtering and hiccuping laughter of a little boy. That was if his brother was feeling good.

  If his brother was feeling mean, he would drag Bill down the slope until Bill’s face was skinned and bleeding and his hands were raw. Breathing hard, James would crouch over him and yank the turtle shell from Bill’s right arm and steal the wooden sword out of Bill’s right hand. James would run up the slope until he reached the top. Turning around to stare down at his whimpering brother below, James would raise the turtle shell and sword and breathlessly chant a portion of the Eucharist prayer. Only James would change the possessive pronoun. “The kingdom and the power and the glory are mine, now and forever!”

  The prayer, never meaning much to Bill in church, radiated with meaning as the God that was his brother, that looked like Elvis, shouted it from the top of the ridge. To Bill, trembling with fear and love below, the power of his brother’s deep voice caused the woods to become silent. Caused the ridge to become a mountain and the mountain to become sacred. The ridge was his brother’s, and it was where his brother would live forever.

  Although Bill was a grown man now, he still clung to his childish belief. It was here on the plateau of the ridge that he slept most nights within a stand of four red pines that seeded themselves in almost perfect geometric harmony with one another, forming a natural square room. If he wasn’t sleeping, then he was drinking and finally sleeping some more. He had his brother’s shotgun, a Remington 870 Wingmaster pump, which he kept with him whenever he was in the woods, the barrel nuzzled against his cheek when he slept. It was the gun that Ernie Morriseau had given to his brother when he was twelve years old. He was not old enough to go along when his brother joyfully left their house, dressed in hunting clothes and carrying the shotgun. In his jealousy, Bill went over to the Morriseau place anyway and spent time making cookies or helping Rosemary in the kitchen.

  He had a vague sense of why he always took the gun with him. Someday the pain might become so bad that he could not outdrink it. His life was going nowhere, and even the simple pleasures he had loved as a child held nothing for him. Even worse, the very thing that had kept him alive, kept his hopes up, seemed to have disappeared even at night. Bill had not dreamed since he was nine years old. When he looked in the mirror, he saw the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. His skin was gray, and when he pounded on his chest, it sounded hollow. All he had left was the numbness of beer and the remaining physical sensation of something out there.

  “What are you looking for?”

  It was a foggy gray morning two days ago when his mother appeared, standing at the edge of the field nearest the barn and holding a kerosene lamp even though it was daylight. She startled Bill when he emerged from the cedars, wet, cold, and hung over. At first he could only stare at her, not entirely sure that she wasn’t an apparition. She worked as a receptionist for the Forest Service, but their paths coming and going on the farm rarely crossed. He knew she was there, though. His clothes were always washed and put in his drawers; there was always food cooked and ready to be eaten in the refrigerator. The house was clean.

  It shocked and simultaneously amazed him that she knew exactly where he would exit from the swamp, that she had apparently waited and had not gone to work. It also made him angry.

  “The sun,” he answered sarcastically, pointing up at the sky. “Haven’t seen the damn thing in days.”

  Her dark eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head back slightly.

  “Wally Wykowski,” she said as her son walked past her, “told me that you’re going to lose your job and that it is a shame because you do excellent work.”

  Bill stopped and turned around. “Wally can fuck off.”

  “Bill—” she sighed “—I wish you wouldn’t use that language. This is a small town. There aren’t many jobs. We might be forced,” she continued, waving her hand toward the house and barn, “to sell this place if you can’t earn a living and help me. You know I can’t pay the taxes on it alone.”

  His head hurt so badly that he could barely hear her. He looked down at his feet but not before noticing that she was wet and shivering and had a streak of mud on her cheek.

  “I never see you,” she said. “You’re never home. Do you need anything? Money?”

  “I don’t need any money!”

  “Look at me,” his mother commanded. She grabbed Bill’s arm. “I know,” she said tersely, “what you’re looking for. I live here, remember?” Her fingers pressed into his arm. “It’s not worth it to drink yourself to death.”

  In an effort to divert her, he laughed. A fake and horsy laugh. “I told you,” he said, shaking his arm loose, “I’m looking for the sun.”

  He felt a sudden urge to puke. In an attempt to quell his stomach, he stared back at his mother and realized that her hair was completely white and not its former black color and that she was stooped. He saw the misery in her face. The defeat in the way her arms hung limply. Then his stomach erupted, and he bent over, emptying into the wet grass what little liquid was left in him. Bill felt her hand cup the back of his head.

  “Yes,” he heard his mother say through his spitting and coughing, “you are.”

  ER
NIE MORRISEAU WAS CAUTIOUSLY SCALING the barn’s gambrel roof that morning, hammering the tar-coated shingles so that they overlapped and were waterproof, when he heard the distant brassy honking of geese above him. In his haste to look up, he fumbled with his hammer and lost it. He watched it slide down across the shingles before falling to the barnyard below. He swore loudly before looking up in time to see a very small flock of Canada geese pass over him on their way south. He thought he’d counted twelve of them until Ernie noticed that something was amiss about their flight pattern, and he rapidly re-counted the flock. Eleven. There was an obvious gap in the right string of the V-shaped flock between the fourth and fifth birds. A lost bird.

  Ernie listened as each goose intermittently sounded off, the cracked bell of their voices calling out as if to leave a trail of sound like bread crumbs for their lost member to follow. He knew the geese would maintain this space for the missing goose for the rest of their migration. As Ernie watched them, he wanted to believe too that the lost goose would find the others. But it was November, and the entire flock was unusually late in migrating. The more probable truth was that the goose was dead. Ernie continued to stare at the geese even as tears blurred his vision and the flock resembled a strand of hair floating in the distance.

  He raised his arm to wipe his face on the upper part of his sleeve but stopped when a movement in his neighbor’s field caught his attention. Ernie hoisted himself up for a better look and settled his body halfway over the pinnacle of his barn roof. He knew who it was before he saw him, and he watched intently as Bill Lucas’s tall and gangly figure emerged from the corner of Ernie’s field. He watched as Bill swung one long leg and then the other over the fence into his own forty-acre field. This was the first time Ernie had seen him emerge in the morning. Usually he saw Bill at dusk. It had become a twilight ritual begun last spring, Bill walking the field and Ernie watching him.

  He was mildly relieved. It had always bothered Ernie that he never saw Bill come back out, although he knew the young man was fundamentally safe in the woods and swamp. In Ernie’s mind, Bill would always be the sensitive and inquisitive boy who used to visit his farm with his older brother, Jimmy. He could not quite reconcile this image with the Bill Lucas who was a Standard station car mechanic, who still lived with his mother and was rumored to have inherited his father’s absorbency of beer. Ernie had acted on his worry only once, waiting until Bill disappeared from sight before walking across his own field in an attempt to follow Bill. He stopped when he reached the middle of his field, his stomach cramped with memorable fear and apprehension. He turned around and walked back to his barn, telling himself that to follow Bill was a terrible invasion of his privacy.

  Perched on top of his own barn like a swallow, Ernie timidly raised one hand as if to wave, fanning his fingers out to let the wind pass through them. But then his chest began its slow rumble of grief. As he began to shake, Ernie quickly dropped his hand to steady himself on the barn roof.

  Moments later his wife stepped out of their farmhouse to find out what had caused her husband’s swearing, only to see the silhouette of his weeping body draped over the top of the barn roof.

  “It will get better,” his wife said later that night, both of them squeezed together in the old brown recliner like two loaves of bread. “Think of crying,” she whispered into his ear, his face burrowed into the crook of her neck, “as medicine. It feels bad now, but it will make you feel better in the long run. There is nothing wrong with crying.” Ernie felt the vibration and muffled rise of sound in his wife’s throat before it enunciated itself in his ear. She was right, but he was still appalled that at the age of fifty-eight, he should cry with the same painful urgency as a newborn with colic. It was as if the grief had stored itself up, a small lake behind his eyes that had reservoired in his chest for years, its shoreline slowly rising until it overflowed the upward barrier of bones and tissue and gravity. He rested in his wife’s arms until she gently pushed him out of the chair and guided him upstairs to bed.

  The exhaustion of crying coupled with his work on the barn roof caused him to sleep deeply for only a couple of hours. He woke up feeling the pleasant warmth of Rosemary’s thigh against his own. She shifted in her sleep to lie on her side, and he aligned his body with hers, slipping one hand underneath her exposed arm so that he could caress her breasts and belly. She woke up and turned over to face him. They made love leisurely. Then he had slipped into that watery, vague state of early-morning sleep most apt to produce dreams when he thought he heard a shotgun go off. Although she never woke up, his wife stirred in her sleep as though she had heard it too. He sleepily opened his eyes just enough to see that it was two-thirty and then drifted back to sleep. When he woke up again, it was to the hammering ring of his alarm clock at five-thirty.

  He sat up and shivered. It was the opening day of deer season, and although he looked forward to it, getting up in the cold darkness still took some effort. He quietly got out of bed and groped his way down the unlit staircase to the kitchen. He had stuffed most of his hunting clothes into a large plastic bag filled with cedar boughs and left the bag in a corner of the kitchen the week before. He discovered, after opening the bag, that he had forgotten to include a pair of thick wool socks and quietly felt his way up the stairs to the bedroom. He was blindly feeling through the dresser drawer when he heard the sheets rustle and the click of the bedside lamp.

  “What are you looking for?” his wife asked behind him.

  “My wool socks,” Ernie answered at the same moment he spied them in the far corner of the drawer. “Found ’em.”

  He turned around and held up the socks as if they were trophies. His wife smiled, her long salt-and-pepper hair fanned out like a spiderweb against the pillow.

  “I better get rollin’,” Ernie said, bending down to give her a kiss. She reached up and held the bottom half of his face in her hand. He patiently waited, caught by the pressure of her fingers on his cheeks. “Do you want me to stay home?”

  DID I WANT HIM TO stay home? Yes and no. I contemplated his question. Looked into his dark brown eyes and stared at his cheeks and chin with its mix of black and gray stubble. My face was chapped from the stubble on his face, from hours before, when I had awakened to his hands cupping my breasts. He asked me while I could still taste him in my mouth, always that taste and smell of sweat and cedar. The first taste of him when we made love the night we met. I wanted to say, “Yes. Stay home with me. In bed.” It had been so long since we’d made love, and I felt dreamy and luxurious from his touch. Girlish.

  But it was a good sign that he wanted to go hunting. This past summer I lived in daily fear that I might walk into the barn and see him hanging from the rafters. I watched him struggle to get out of bed in the mornings, unable to raise his face to a beautiful sunny day. I fought to keep from being sucked down into the eddy he had become and, at the same time, wanted to reach down and pull him out, even when he lashed out unintentionally and hurt me.

  Every marriage re-forms itself over and over again with each crisis. We’ve been lucky. Most of our years were spent under fairly happy circumstances except for the lack of children and the wound that festered from it. Thinking about it now, I think it was appropriate that our breaking point would come during the season of summer. Like heat rash, every painful truth and secret in our life together surfaced under the searing light of the summer sun. One of the biggest secrets of all. None of our friends had any inkling of what we’d been through. Not just this past summer but the whole fourteen years before. If they knew, they would say that I was crazy to let Ernie go alone in the woods with a gun. If they really knew, they would say that Ernie was crazy, period.

  Once he started crying, I knew he would survive. I make sure that I am never very far away. Ernie cries when he needs to, sometimes once a day. And soon he will surface completely from his tears. From what causes those tears.

  I would be more worried if he hunted with other men. Thank God, Ernie prefers to hunt a
lone except for years ago, when he hunted with his father and his uncles and then with Jimmy Lucas. In the Morriseau family, hunting meant something very different, and it bears little resemblance to the craziness of deer season in these times: Sundays spent hunting in the morning, stopping for the noontime NFL game and several six-packs of beer, and then going back out to hunt until dark. I can’t tell you how many hunting accidents happen on Sundays.

  I’ve seen the aftermath of accidental shootings because I’m a volunteer nurse and paramedic, riding with the Olina ambulance whenever a call comes through. I’ve seen shotgun blasts at close range where a deer slug makes a quarter-size tunnel through a human body. That’s to be expected with a shotgun. But rifle bullets are different, and even then there is little similarity between a .22 rifle bullet and a .30-‘06 bullet. With a high-powered .30-30 rifle and a scope, a hunter can shoot an animal at a considerable distance, sitting comfortably on top of a truck or in a deer stand. At first all you see is a clean hole in the chest of the man or boy who has been shot, but a strong clue is the large puddle of blood he is lying in. It is when I turn the body over that the devastation can be seen and smelled. A .30-’06 long-nosed rifle bullet without a full metal jacket enters the body neatly and almost pierces it with the fineness of a sewing needle. But when it exits the body, it does so with such force that it blows open a crater, splintering the spine and exposing spilled and ruptured intestines. The fresh smell of blood and bowel can make whatever you’ve eaten crawl up into your throat instantly. It is even worse when the victim has caught the bullet in the face and head. Then he is almost unrecognizable. I lost three new volunteers the year before, after they saw the shattered head of the Penter boy.