The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  “Turtle bowed his head with honor and then swam away.”

  Ernie paused and sat up so that he could relieve the cramp that had now traveled to his lower back.

  Bill involuntarily shivered and drew his legs up to his chest to stop it. “What about Muskrat?” he asked. “Didn’t he get anything?”

  Ernie laughed. “I asked my father the same question. He said Sky Woman winked at Muskrat. Never”—he grinned, wagging a finger at Bill—“underestimate a muskrat. When the beaver and the rest of them move out looking for better places, the muskrat stays and survives all the same.”

  Ernie looked up at the sky again and then back at Bill. “We better get moving if we’re gonna do any fishing today.”

  They hadn’t even gone a quarter of a mile toward the oxbow where they fished when Ernie spoke over his shoulder. “Say, whatever happened to that turtle shield you used to have as a kid? And that wooden sword Jimmy made for you?”

  He hadn’t meant to, but Ernie’s sudden recollection kicked Bill and threw him back. For a few seconds he was not thirty-nine years old but eight again. The grief erupted so unexpectedly that he could not speak. Grateful that the pain in Ernie’s shoulder prevented him from turning around to look at him, he lowered his face and clenched his teeth.

  He could almost feel the wooden sword in his hand, the spin of his body, and the hot dust under his feet. The rope of the shield as it rubbed against the skin of his forearm. The bright yellowness of the sun in his eyes until he moved his arm. The larger-than-life shadow cast on the ground by his shield and how protected he used to feel, hovering inside that shadow.

  He heard wood hit the side of the canoe.

  “Billy! You’re losing your paddle.”

  The broad end of the paddle was bobbing alongside the canoe. He grabbed the handle before it slipped into the water too and pulled the paddle up. Ernie had managed to turn around enough so that he could see Bill out of the corner of his eye. Bill was on the verge of saying “I don’t know” when he stopped and remembered how the shell had traveled down the river as though pushed delicately by many hands, the sword held under the rope. How he had watched it until he couldn’t see it anymore. He was about to answer Ernie when the older man spoke.

  “You know, Billy,” Ernie said over his shoulder, “we haven’t talked about some things, mostly because I didn’t wanna push you. But I have to tell you this. Life has to go on. You think you can stop it, but you can’t. I tried to stop seeing what was right in front of me for those fifteen years after your brother died. And I ended up hurting Rosemary and you and even your mother. And I hurt myself.”

  He sighed.

  “I should have told your brother a lot of things. I should’ve driven over to your place that night your dad told us Jimmy had enlisted and stopped him. I have to live with the things I didn’t do. Or didn’t say. But I’m telling you not to make the same mistake. Don’t be afraid. You’re a good man,” Ernie added. “My father would have thought so too. And he would have told you to live life.”

  HE AND LIZ HAD TRAVELED quite a bit in the few years after they were married, with their honeymoon being the first long road trip they took across the United States.

  But nothing had prepared him for Bogotá. As if it were a premonition, Bill had hiccups from time to time on their flight down to Colombia. He could only remember the flight and parts of the trip, perforated by the visceral memory of those chest-pounding hiccups. Their cab ride from the airport to their hotel gave him the disquieting feeling of being lost and out of control. The cabbie drove with speed and a lack of rules. Driving in Bogotá was simply about getting from point A to point B, even if it meant hitting someone or something.

  If they had gone with the intention of finding a child, they were mistaken. Their children found them. The two girls drew them within days, the magnetism on their little faces so strong that Bill felt as if he and Liz were compelled to take them. It was as though they had been chosen and did not have a choice. The babies knew they were coming and could smell them as parents when Bill or Liz picked them up. Isabella squawked whenever they left her crib side, so they spent their first two days soothing her, unaware that they were being seduced. It was the opposite with Maria. She was three cribs away from Isabella, and her wispy brown curls were charmingly attractive. She looked at them sleepily and contently but loudly passed gas in their presence, smiling as though she had released perfume. Her eyes never completely shut when they were there, and she casually looked from Liz to Bill and then back to Liz. Both girls were alert and even smiled when tickled. Both were six months old. Bill helped Liz with most of the paperwork but could not sit for long and got up to wander through the orphanage. His height frightened some of the older children, so he walked slowly and spoke softly.

  The orphanage was segregated by age, and he found himself walking most often down the corridor that he thought of as the Peninsula of Babies. He walked the corridor at least four times up and down before he became aware of a noise behind the sniffles and intermittent crying. He could hear a small body lurch from one side of the crib to the other as it followed Bill’s movements.

  Bill stopped midway down the corridor and saw the eighteen-month-old boy. He held on to the railing of his crib as though it were a boat about to be launched. The toddler did not move as Bill approached the crib. When Bill gently rubbed the boy’s knuckles, he lifted the hand Bill had touched only for a moment before clasping the wooden railing again. The boy did not speak or cry. Bill ran his fingers through the boy’s curly black hair, smiled, and caressed one of the boy’s brown cheeks. He dabbed with his handkerchief at the white crust of formula on the boy’s lips. But nothing Bill did could elicit anything other than seriousness on the child’s face.

  That night Bill dreamed that he saw the boy inside the crib floating on an unfamiliar surface of water. The crib bobbed. The boy silently held on to the railing, his almond-shaped eyes wary yet expectant.

  “I want that boy too.” He pointed toward the crib the next day. Elizabeth, fluent enough in Spanish to conduct conversations, asked the caseworker about the boy. The caseworker said the child had been abandoned by the service entrance to the building six months before and been nearly unconscious from dehydration and hunger when he was found. He did not speak and had only recently learned to pull himself up into a standing position. The caseworker tried to dissuade Bill. The boy was sick, the caseworker said, tapping his head.

  Bill was sure the boy was not autistic or sick in the way the caseworker implied. He could not even explain it to his wife. Every day he went there, and every day the little boy was standing up and holding on to the crib railing. Every day he tried to get the boy to smile and failed. Their last month in Bogotá was spent haggling over the little boy. It was against the rules. Two children were the maximum for adoption. Bill called the adoption agency they had worked through in Milwaukee, which then referred him to an attorney who specialized in foreign adoptions. After many more phone calls and wiring their bank for more money, the orphanage was persuaded to make an exception and let them have three children.

  He was only dimly aware of the cramp in his legs on the flight home. Liz held the two sleeping girls for the first hour while the boy stood up on Bill’s thighs and braced his hands against Bill’s chest. They stared at each other for half an hour. Then, for the first time since Bill had seen him, the boy’s eyelids began to drift downward. His legs gave way, and he gave in, slumping against Bill’s chest to sleep.

  “He’s stubborn,” Liz commented. She shifted the two girls in her arms. Then she laughed. “My God! I don’t know what to expect next from you. We were going to adopt only one child. Now we have three. We have a litter. This,” she exclaimed, “from a man who was terrified to be a father! How are we going to do this?”

  Bill shrugged. He couldn’t explain what had come over him. He felt almost beatifically calm. “We’ll just do it.”

  HIS SON IS WINDING DOWN, unable to keep up with the dog. His br
own feet are even browner, covered with the dust from the sun-warmed and scuffed-up soil of the barnyard.

  “Wear your shoes,” his mother used to say to Bill. “Or else”—she followed up with the threat—“you’ll get worms.”

  His son did have worms. Bill was changing his diaper on a couch in the Tampa airport and saw what looked like rice on the child’s butt cheeks and in his feces.

  “We’ll have to wait,” his wife said, “until we get home. I don’t want to drive around Tampa looking for a doctor or a clinic. I just want to get home. Even if we got the medication now, we might end up with a very sick kid on the flight into St. Paul.” She squeamishly wrapped the diaper in a small garbage bag and put it in the trash bin in the women’s rest room.

  All three of them were slightly malnourished, and for a worrisome two days of testing, they thought the two girls might have tuberculosis. Three months after they brought the children home, his son spoke. Or rather he chortled. He had pulled himself up to the low windowsill in the living room one day and ecstatically pressed his face into the glass. Bill quietly crept up behind him and looked out the window.

  Birds. Birds feeding at the bird feeder.

  His son, dirty and sweaty, flops into Bill’s arms to rest. They sit together on the porch steps and watch the dog gratefully settle underneath the shade of the big elm by the chicken coop. His son has the endearing legs of most little boys. Thin pieces of wire with bone knots for knees.

  Bill can’t remember ever being able to walk up to his father as his son just did. With the knowledge of what to expect. Knowing Bill will hold him and touch him safely. He rubs his cheek against his son’s black hair. He can hear his mother and his wife talking inside the house. Hears his mother’s shrieking laugh and then his wife’s low chuckle. He thinks about the way Liz touches him.

  His wife caresses him, and he experiences pleasure and his body feels good then. She aligns her body with his and slides underneath him like a canoe. He is lifted, and at the moment of climax, he feels as though he has transcended the white clapboard house and is flying. He feels holy in that moment. Afterward his wife rubs the liquid from both of their bodies into his groin, and the smell is both sweet and salty. She is careful, when she awakens him from sleep, to touch him someplace else before working her fingers across his body. Only then does she cup and fondle his penis.

  His testicles remain small, but the burn scars are fading with age. Still, it does not release him from the self-loathing that surfaces on occasion. As if his body were still dirty. He fears touching his wife, his children at those moments. He tenses up when the children touch him. He tries to hide it from them, but they work harder to get his attention. They hug him forcefully and more often. They reach for his hands and pull on his thumbs. He is amazed at what they inherently know. That if they touch him, they can lift him out of the isolation that would lead him backward and lead him to drink again, burying bottles like his father. They crawl into his lap before their baths and crowd his chest. He can smell the milk on their breaths and the loamy dirt in their ears. His fingers scratch against the grit in their hair, and he knows they will leave a small sandbar in the tub after the water has drained away. Their fingers travel over the land of his face as if they have walked a long way to speak to him.

  It is not just Bill.

  He watches as they touch his mother. She has become a woman he does not entirely recognize from his youth. Elizabeth sensed Bill’s need to help his mother and was adamant that she not move out of the house. They remodeled and added onto the house so that his mother could have her own set of rooms, but those doors are rarely shut. His mother kisses and hugs her grandchildren every day. She greets them with the freedom to know she can. Even if she’s been away for only a few hours, they surround her as if she were the sun and they little moons that had drifted out of her orbit. They have fights over which one of them gets to sit on her lap.

  “You can take turns,” she says, obviously delighted at being so treasured as to be fought over. They bring her stacks of books, and she reads to them tirelessly.

  Every now and then, though, he will catch his unknowing mother as she watches the children at dinner or in the bathtub or at play. He sees a sudden stricken look, a quick but paralyzing pain that freezes her face for seconds. Or when Liz hugs him or kisses him, he sees the small envy on his mother’s face as she witnesses their casual affection.

  Still, his mother tells him daily how happy he has made her. Sometimes in the noise around them, the constant talk at the dinner table and occasional cries of childish disappointment, he locks eyes with her. Or when they are on a walk through the woods with Liz and the kids, he falls into step with her. He knows that they remain as they always have been. Just the two of them. They know each other’s histories and the wounds they still carry. Scars that can be torn open with a wrong word or a gesture meaningful only to them. They are aware, even when they hug each other, of that space between them that was once filled with someone else.

  His two daughters skip out of the house, and suddenly his son regains his energy and lifts himself free of Bill’s arms. His children chase one another, running so hard that he can see the deep red in their faces as they gulp for air on the run. Sometimes they get so absorbed in their surroundings and one another that they do not hear their parents calling them. He knows exactly what they feel. Invisible and invincible. Immortal. Their imagination conquers all. For that period of time they are lost in a world of their own making and want for nothing else.

  It is a hot and humid day, and he has no energy to do much of anything. Still, it is pleasurable just to sit and think and watch what is going on around him. He looks at the dust in the driveway, at the tiger lilies that bend languorously, heavy with their finger-length buds that will bloom soon. He closes his eyes for a moment, and he can see himself as an eight-year-old again, playing in the yard. He can almost hear his brother’s record player blaring from the barn. He dreams often, sometimes during the day like this but most often at night. The dreams that disturb him the most are the ones that cause him to wake up with a question that he loses in the second after he reaches consciousness. He knows something was asked of him, yet he can’t remember or answer it.

  He opens his eyes.

  His children laugh, and the sound spirals upward. Bill watches them run toward the faded red barn and then behind it. He knows they play in the exact same spot where he and his brother used to play. Where they cannot be seen but can be found. They have discovered this on their own.

  His children’s curiosity is endless, and in their roaming, their little fingers touch everything. Grass, trees, flowers, fences. Every inch of the barn they explore again and again. The lake and river water they tickle and splash with their hands. Their fingertips on his skin. Although he can still look at the barn or specific places on the farm and see painful images from the past, they are fading, and the farm is becoming a new place every day because of his children. Because of their touch.

  It will not be long and they will be asking the questions that will be difficult for him and Liz to answer.

  In the Darwinian world of his work, where only the strongest survive, they belong to the enigma of humans. He knows that Isabella’s and Maria’s mothers left them at the orphanage and, not long after, were found dead. He assumes it is the same with his son’s mother, and soon enough he will have to explain the harshness of the world to them. The despair and poverty that destroy the conscious act of love. He will also tell them of the kindness of people. They are alive because biology does not always determine destiny and goodness can arise from the most hellish of conditions. Even the natural world is not as ruthless as it seems. Hollow logs allow raccoons an escape from a predator. Skunks can spray those that threaten them. There are even places in the woods where small children can hide if they need to. His children have discovered this too without being taught it. Their need to hide is all in fun, either from one another or to pop out and scare their parents. They have to wo
rk harder to hide from their grandmother. Bill is amazed that his mother often knows just where the children are in the woods.

  What he will have trouble articulating to them is what he didn’t know until recently. That children flower out of any soil that will nourish them. That his wife was right. That the layers of his life have enough nutrition in them for his children to take root and that at times he has only to be present and his children siphon what they need from him without his being fully aware of it. He cannot imagine life without them. They redeem and make holy everything they touch. They redeem and bless him.

  There is a burst of laughter and his three children suddenly come into view. They run toward him as though he were the prize.

  He has told his wife nearly everything about his life. But not everything.

  Bill watches as a breeze that he does not feel on his own face suddenly lifts his son’s curly black hair.

  Somewhere he hears a deep barking he thinks is coming from his own dog, but when he locates Enrique—he doesn’t know how the children came up with that name—the dog is sound asleep or in his favorite spot under the tree by the chicken coop.

  One day his two daughters, standing ankle deep in the river and holding on to their cane poles, began to whistle. He did not teach them. Neither did Liz. Ernie said nothing, but he tilted his head back. Bill knows that Ernie heard it too. That third whistle, high above the girls’ halting notes.