The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  It had been the right thing to do.

  College filled a part of him that had been starving. He felt himself rise with each challenging course. He loved studying. It was the best drink of his life. Every A he earned was a sword against the real and imaginary enemies in his head. He wanted them off the cliff that was his life. He wanted his brain to be free of all the unwanted garbage that was buried in it. The only dirt he wanted near him was the real thing. As if she could read his mind, his mother sent him a pint-size pickle jar full of dirt from the farm. He placed it on the windowsill above his dorm room desk, and it solidified what he would do with the rest of his life. He double-majored in soil science and wildlife biology. They were the two things that never betrayed him: animals and where they lived, what they walked on.

  He thought about going out west, but the pull to go home was stronger. He heard the words in his sleep: Don’t ever leave here. He knew his chances of getting a job with the U.S. Fish and Game Service in northern Wisconsin were almost impossible because it usually assigned its new biologists elsewhere. But he had a plan. He sent in his first application during his freshman year in college, and he applied every year until he graduated. He specialized in the flora and fauna of northern Wisconsin. He was born to it, he argued in his cover letters. He knew exactly what the damage was and how he intended to undo it. He decided that he would study constantly, that he would not date and thereby keep anyone away from pushing him off his chosen road.

  Elizabeth had red hair. He could not name its particular shade, and he pondered it frequently when they talked. She accused him of not paying attention to her, but he was listening. There was something familiar about that particular shade of red hair and her amber brown eyes.

  He liked her too much. It made him afraid. They met in a soil science class, and despite his fear, he was drawn to her. She was double-majoring in soil science and geology. She liked dirt just like his mother did, and although they shared some other things in common as women, they were different. He told her he just wanted to be friends.

  “You are full of layers,” she said one day. They were eating pie and drinking coffee at Vescio’s restaurant in Dinkytown near the East Bank of the campus.

  “Don’t dig too deep,” he answered cynically, “or you won’t like what you find.”

  The grin vanished from her face. “Every time we start to have fun, you say something like that. Why?”

  “Sorry. I just meant”—he fumbled—“that I’m not a saint. I have my bad elements.”

  “I wasn’t talking about elements,” she retorted.

  He didn’t answer and ate the last piece of his lemon meringue pie. He thought the meringue resembled and tasted like plastic. The waitress dropped off their bill.

  “Is this real meringue?” he asked.

  “No. It’s called flacto-macto,” she replied curtly, and was gone. Flacto-macto. He looked at the crumbs left on his plate. What was that? What had he just eaten?

  Elizabeth persisted.

  “I wasn’t talking about elements,” she repeated. “I was talking about layers. Good and bad. Everything,” she added as though daring him to contradict her, “grows from layers.”

  He liked her too much. He was more than afraid. He was terrified.

  But one night it occurred to him that although he never needed people much, there would be a day when his mother would die. When Ernie and Rosemary would die. The three most important people still living in his life would not live forever.

  They were friends for a year before they became lovers, and then two years later they married. Looking back, Bill was amazed that Elizabeth kept trying. He pushed her away and pushed her down with the weight of words thrown hard, only to pull her back up in confusion, to soften his tone and apologize frantically.

  One night they were sitting together on her couch, drinking Seven-Up and relaxing after having seen a movie. Elizabeth was talking about her parents’ divorce and the fact that she never saw her father much. She stopped in midstream during her monologue about her father. “Huh. I just thought of something. You never talk about your father. Or a father. Did you have a father?”

  He had told her about his mother and about Ernie and Rosemary. He had talked about his brother as though James were still alive. When he told stories about James, he never tripped over his words. It wasn’t as though he didn’t feel pain. Of course he felt pain. His brother was dead, and the loss of him was a tragedy that did not diminish. But Bill did not believe in heaven or hell. He believed in systems, natural and unnatural. He believed in zones. And there was more than one zone of death.

  He realized that people who were much loved and who died had a way of clinging. Rather than fade, they grew in another dimension, became epizoic, although not harmful like a disease. He had helped that process by casting his brother in a fertile zone that he knew best. In his mind, his brother had crossed the river and was walking in woods. It was his natural habitat.

  But his father? In those silent minutes before he began speaking to Elizabeth again, he imagined that Holocaust survivors or anyone who had been tortured, nearly murdered, or hurt in ways by other people filled with hate had to do something with those unforgettable memories in order to survive. As he had done without realizing it. Just as he had willed his brother to love and life, he had willed his father to death. He put him in a most unnatural place in his mind. A museum’s airless closet where his father’s remains became mummified. Where none of Bill’s memorial juices could hydrate him again.

  Still, it was hard to find the words to describe what was marked on him. He did not look at her while he talked. When he did turn his face toward her, expecting to see disgust, he saw something else.

  Awe.

  “GIVE THE DOG A REST!” he calls out to his small son.

  His son is so happy today. As though nothing has happened. Last night he had a bad dream. The same bad dream as always. His cries are so piercing that it takes only one or two to wake Bill up. As his son suckered to his chest, Bill wondered, as he always did when he got up to soothe his son, if the boy remembered the first eighteen months of his life. If the mystery of those months would be known someday.

  Most of the time he rocks his son back to sleep. But sometimes Bill has to crawl into his son’s bed and hold him until he goes to sleep again.

  He remembered the night he fought with Ernie. How he woke up beside him the next morning. To see a male face inches from his own, sound asleep and rough with silver-tipped stubble like an old bear. On rare occasions James would crawl into Bill’s bed when he was having really bad dreams. When he felt Ernie’s breath on his face that morning, he remembered the hot comfort of his brother’s breath.

  He woke up this morning, feeling his dark-eyed son pat his cheeks and smelling the chocolate cookies on his breath from the night before.

  “Wake up, Daddy,” he sang.

  Through persistence and complete stubbornness, Bill did get the job he wanted in northern Wisconsin, alternating fieldwork with grant writing to keep his research projects alive. Liz lucked out as well, acquiring a job as a soil scientist with the County Extension Service. After they were married, Liz did not use birth control in the hope that maybe Bill was not sterile. But nothing happened. He was secretly relieved.

  “We could adopt,” she said.

  He shook his head. She would not let it go, and it led to one of their few bad fights.

  “You will not turn into a monster. Or your father,” his wife whispered to Bill that night in bed. He was glad it was dark and she could not see his face.

  e said nothing.

  Her sigh was as heavy as water.

  “This big place needs kids. Your mother needs grandchildren. And some child,” she said, walking one hand up his chest until she could tap his chin with a finger, “deserves to have you as a father. No one,” she added, and her voice drifted above him, “expects you to be perfect. Except you.”

  They did not speak about it the next morning, eating the
ir breakfast in silence. It was Sunday, and he and Ernie had planned to fish the Chippewa before the really cold weather had set in.

  They pushed north on the river against the current in Bill’s new ultralight canoe. Bill could see that Ernie was favoring his left arm, and he knew that Ernie’s right shoulder hurt from paddling. Ernie was in his seventies, and Bill wanted him just to sit and enjoy the river for once and let Bill do the steering and paddling. But Ernie insisted on paddling too.

  They no longer entered the river at the old logging bridge, preferring to drive in on an old fire lane farther south. It meant backtracking a bit on the water, and they eventually paddled past the sandbanks and shoreline that Bill and his brother haunted as children. It was quiet except for the noise their paddles made cleaving the water. As they approached the banks, Ernie pulled his paddle in and stared at the shoreline.

  “You know, this past spring I came down here to see if the turtles had nested,” he said over his shoulder to Bill, “but I went there for five days straight, and I didn’t see one snapper. Not even any drag marks or signs of digging. I guess,” he went on before Bill could say anything, “I didn’t think it would change. They’ve nested there since I was a kid. But maybe something is wrong with the river.”

  Not the river, Bill thought. The logging bridge had always been a place for teenagers to hang out, but in addition to beer cans littered on the road, Bill found used condoms, syringes, cigarette butts, and the scant remains of joints. Then there was that persistent rural belief that snapping turtles were unwanted predators like badgers, wolves, and coyotes. Many of the locals shot snappers on sight, always justifying their actions by saying the turtles were hurting the walleye population or preying on too many wild ducklings. Bill also surmised that kids had raided the nests for years now, throwing the eggs against the bridge for sport, and that any of the old females that would have returned were probably dead.

  “Not the river,” he said out loud, “although the water quality could be better. Our water biologist, Charlie, says snappers can survive in some pretty funky water. They still live in the Mississippi in Minneapolis.”

  Ernie shrugged and put his paddle back in. They glided under the bridge. The noise of their paddling echoed, and Bill thought he could hear their breathing bounce off the rusty brown sides. They paddled for quite a ways until Bill saw the slump of Ernie’s shoulders.

  “Hey! Let’s shore up first,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  They sat in a grove of white-barked birches, lovely even without their leaves. Ernie chewed on the venison sausage sandwich that Liz had made, tasting the tang of cheddar cheese against the peppery meat. Bill watched him.

  “Were you ever afraid to be a father? I mean, whenever Rosemary got pregnant, did it scare you?”

  “Nooo,” Ernie answered slowly. He paused from eating. “I was afraid after the first miscarriage and then every time she reached about the fourth month. One time she even made it to six months. I was more afraid that Rose would die from complications of a pregnancy or that another one wouldn’t make it. And after a while I got angry and blamed her. It was stupid of me. It wasn’t her fault. Fear”—he sighed—“and disappointment can make you do stupid things.”

  Bill took a bite of his sandwich, but he could feel Ernie watching him. “Liz wants to adopt children,” he said at last. “We’ve been arguing over it.”

  Ernie nodded. He had resumed eating, and Bill could hear the slight grinding noise of Ernie’s jaws. Ernie lifted his coffee cup and took a drink.

  “Well”—he coughed to clear his throat—“I think it’s natural for her to want a family. But if you don’t want to be a father, then you shouldn’t be one. Or,” Ernie added quietly, “are you afraid?”

  Bill stared down at this boots. “I don’t know exactly. I don’t know....” His voice trailed off.

  Bill didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He poured more coffee into his cup from the thermos. Then he remembered something, spurred by their earlier conversation as they passed the sandbanks.

  “Do you remember what you told me the night you killed that turtle?”

  Ernie put his cup down. He shook his head.

  “You said that your father told you that turtle made the world,” Bill said, taking a sip from his own cup. “I’ve wondered about that for years. How did a turtle make the world?”

  “I don’t remember killing a turtle,” Ernie said, bewildered. “Are you sure I killed a turtle?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain it later. You didn’t kill her in the way you are thinking. Just tell me the story.”

  Ernie pressed a hand to his aching shoulder. “That’s one story I can remember well. It was my favorite story when I was a kid. My father could always make me laugh. I tried to memorize it, but he told it to me so often that I remember it or at least most of it. My father said not to worry, that each storyteller adds a bit of himself in telling it.”

  Ernie thrust out his cup. Bill poured coffee from the thermos into the tin cup and, nudging Ernie’s arm, dropped two ibuprofen tablets into his hand. Ernie swallowed the pills and washed them down with hot coffee.

  “You know,” he said slyly, “I had to go to the kitchen and get something sweet for my father before he’d tell me the story.”

  Bill shook his head. “Your blood pressure. Rosemary would kill me,” he said, reaching inside his field jacket and pulling out a Hershey bar.

  “A Hershey bar! I always carried Hershey bars when I went hunting with your brother.”

  Ernie popped the chocolate into his mouth and took another drink of his coffee, savoring the melting taste of chocolate and coffee. He stared out over the river and briefly waved a hand toward it.

  “This used to be all water once. Either a big lake or an ocean. At that time all the animals lived in water, but many of them could ride the waves or would surface like mayflies to breathe and look up at the sky. They knew a spirit woman lived there. Sky Woman is what they called her.

  “One day a moist wind blew across their faces, and they knew it was her breath and that she had been crying. They looked up and could see that she was tired and unhappy. That made them all feel bad. They got together and tried to think of ways to make her happy again. Then they thought of something, but before they did anything, they asked Loon to go beneath the water and call for giant Turtle, who lived below. Loon had to go down several times to persuade Turtle to help them. Finally Turtle rose to the surface of the water and agreed to offer his back as a home for Sky Woman.”

  Ernie put out his cup for more coffee.

  “That sky,” he said, nodding upward, “is the gray that always tells me I’ve got work to do on the house before winter.”

  He took a sip of his coffee.

  “All the water creatures called up to the sky and invited Sky Woman to come down and live with them. She agreed and left her house in the clouds and settled on Turtle’s back. They all climbed up on Turtle’s back as well. Once she had made herself comfortable, she turned to the animals around her and asked, ‘Who of you can get me a handful of dirt from the bottom?’

  “Beaver volunteered right away and dived down. He soon came back up, coughing for air and saying he couldn’t do it. Then Fisher tried, but he couldn’t do it either. Marten and Mink tried too, but they said the water was too deep. They urged Loon, knowing that he could stay under the water for a long time, and Loon dived down. He stayed under for quite a while, but then Loon too came popping up like a cork. He said it was too dark down there and that he couldn’t see where he was going, much less find the bottom. They all hung their heads down because they were so ashamed. Here they had invited Sky Woman down from the sky, and they could not perform her one request.

  “Then they heard a small voice. ‘I will try.’

  “It was little Muskrat, and they started laughing.

  “ ‘You! Ha!’ said Mink. ‘I’m a lot stronger than you. I have more oil to make me glide through the water. And I smell the best!’ />
  “ ‘You mean, you stink the best,’ said Muskrat, because like Mink and Fisher and Marten, they all had musk glands. But while Muskrat was proud of his musk, he realized that only others of his kind thought the smell was beautiful.

  “ ‘Mink is right,’ said Fisher. ‘We are much stronger than you, and we couldn’t do it. You are the weakest among us. It isn’t possible. Don’t cause us to waste time.’

  “Sky Woman looked at little Muskrat. Muskrat looked at her.

  “ ‘I will try,’ he repeated, and with that said, he dived off Turtle’s back and plunged beneath the waves. They laughed and joked while waiting for Muskrat to come up just as they had done, with no dirt to offer. But time passed. They kept joking, but their laughter began to sound hollow. Finally they became afraid and felt bad that they had picked on Muskrat because they feared he had drowned. When they had just about given up hope and were ready to apologize to Sky Woman, Muskrat floated to the surface, and it was only the quivering of his whiskers that told them he was alive. In one paw was the lump of soil that Sky Woman needed.

  “While Mink and Fisher and Marten patted Muskrat on the back to get the water out of his lungs, Sky Woman took the dirt and painted the rim of Turtle’s back. Pursing her lips, she breathed upon it and gave it life. The animals couldn’t believe their eyes. The soil grew and covered Turtle’s back and formed an island where even more creatures could live, and eventually the People. Sky Woman spoke to Turtle.

  “ ‘Thank you for helping me build my home. I shall call this place Mishee Mackinokong, which means the Place of the Great Turtle’s Back. As a reward, I shall give you the ability to understand and speak the languages among the other beings, great and small. They will come to you so that you can interpret their thoughts and send them to others. This must be done slowly and with the clearness of spring water. Everyone will know that it is through you that thoughts should be given and shared.’