The Turtle Warrior (23 page)

“What the hell is wrong with your mother!” his father bellowed one evening, angry over another dinner of Campbell’s soup.

“She’s just tired and kinda sick,” Bill answered, bent over his bowl of soup. “I’m taking care of her.”

His father brooded for a few minutes. Bill felt his father’s bloodshot eyes bore into him. Bill knew that if his mother stayed sick, his father would keep away from the bedroom. His father hated illness.

“So you think you’re the man of the house now,” he rasped, reaching over and poking Bill disdainfully in the arm.

Bill lowered his head and didn’t answer. To say something would only enrage his father and give him reason for taking further action. Bill silently ate his soup and prayed that his father would leave the house soon.

The last day of school did not bring its customary release of screaming-with-joy children. They heard muffled crying and even some wailing from the hallway. The children fearfully looked at one another. Sister Agnes walked to the front of the classroom.

“Children—” she wavered, her face wet with tears “—we must go to church and pray. Senator Kennedy has been shot.”

Bill solemnly walked with the other children to the Sacred Heart Church a block away. He felt sick to his stomach and worried that he might throw up in the pew.

When he got home, he found his mother spread out on the davenport again, facedown into the cushions. He pushed her over and saw that she had been crying. But she was not asleep. She was drunk.

Bill repeated his routine of early April, adding to it housework. He vacuumed floors, washed dishes, dusted, washed windows, stripped beds, and learned how to operate the washer and dryer. Once a day he pulled his mother out of the house and, holding her hand, took her on a walk through the woods, hoping that the summer warmth would crack her catatonic state. He learned how to drive that summer, putting two pillows on the driver’s seat so that he could see above the wheel of the station wagon. They exchanged places just before they reached town. Once his mother was done with her grocery shopping, she drove a half mile outside town, where they exchanged places again. Bill drove the rest of the way home.

By the beginning of August his mother seemed to revive and take her place in the day. Bill was free to play for a few hours. He ran for the woods, the swamp, and the river with the desperation of regaining some of his former life. On rainy days he hid in the barn loft and occasionally pulled out his jar of money. He had once been elated over how much money the jar contained, thrilled that his brother had entrusted him with holding the money. He wearily fingered the bills before stuffing them back into the jar. He could not think of what to do with them.

He stuck the jar of money back into the corner of the barn and piled the loose hay on top of it. He climbed down from the top of the stacked hay bales and sat on the very hay bale where his brother and he had sat the night before his brother left. The ashtray was still full of his brother’s cigarette stubs. He dipped one finger into the ashes and ran it across his forehead. He dipped his finger three times more, creating a slash of ashes down each of his cheeks and across his chin. Then he fell asleep.

THAT STRANGE WEATHER OF JANUARY was an omen. Anyone who might have brought peace was killed. To strive to be good and to do good were dangerous. It was as though an undeclared hunting season had been established. In April of that year it was the shooting of Martin Luther King. Then in June, Robert Kennedy was shot in California. I crumbled, sensing that it was not just my life, but that life in general was out of control on a grand scale, and nothing I did or said could stop it.

I made it through the rest of that winter and spring because of my son. I had taught Bill too, as soon as he could walk, to listen for that breath and pulse that were outside. He had absorbed it even better than Jimmy had. Knowing that walking, just walking, might make me feel more alive, he dragged me outside even when I didn’t want to go. Some days I couldn’t hear anything, stumbling along the path that the boys had made in the woods. But I was always aware of his small hand, warm and moist, clutched tightly around my own hand. Tugging me along like a listing ocean liner when I slowed down or tried to stop.

One morning I sat at the kitchen table and watched as Bill made coffee and breakfast. As he pressed the cup to my lips and the hot coffee spilled into my mouth, it was as though I had been slapped. I woke up and saw what I was doing to Bill. How tired he looked. How ashamed I felt. I had to get better. By early August the tide of my grief had gone down enough so that I could do basic chores and Bill could play once again.

When I could not do housework, the long days of light allowed me to walk the perimeter of our field. Sometimes I walked it twice until my legs felt rubbery, until I was exhausted from talking aloud. I would walk home with a hoarse voice, climb into bed, and fall asleep instantly.

One evening I was scrubbing the porch floor and trying to find some breathable air above the ammonia fumes and the suffocating humidity and heat of August when I thought I heard someone talking. Thinking I had unexpected company and not wanting any, I raised my head just enough to peep out the porch window. There was no one out there. I stood up and peered out the window at the rest of the yard.

It was seven-thirty, and Bill was already in bed, suffering from a mild case of heat stroke from having been out all day without a hat or enough water. I looked beyond the yard and at the forty-acre field behind the barn.

Our neighbor to the south of us hadn’t cut the field yet for a second baling of hay, and the tall grasses, dry and wheat-colored from the sun, rippled in waves as though the wind were skimming water. I leaned over the sill.

I had helped hay that field dozens of times. Looked at it every day during the boredom of household chores and gratefully walked its edges. I thought I knew every inch of that ground, but it didn’t look the same. The field appeared to flow from the setting sun and toward me, announcing itself. My mind emptied itself of everything: of Jimmy’s death, of Bill floating through his days in make-believe, of the loneliness I’d grown used to, and of the sweat trickling between my breasts and down my face. I dropped the ammonia-soaked rag in my hand and opened the porch door.

By the time I reached the barn, I had unbuttoned my cotton shirt and pulled it free from the waistband of my baggy khaki pants. I stood by the fence post for only a moment. Using my arms to sweep aside the grass in front of me, I plunged into the field as though wading into a deep lake. Timothy weed and brome seeds scattered themselves across my sweaty belly, and some of the grass slapped back hard enough to deposit some of their seeds on my face.

I heard a whoosh of exhaled air and then a bleat before I saw her. I froze. A doe scrambled up from the anonymity of the grass thirty feet in front of me. I held my breath and waited, waited for the brief whistle, the stamp of a hoof, and the white flagging of the tail. The doe remained standing although her flanks rippled with muscular tension.

I had seen plenty of deer before, sometimes as close as the doe. But after the initial moment of discovery, they bounded into the woods within seconds of having been seen. Never had I seen one this close for so long.

The long lashes. The eyes reflecting blue inside their blackness. The velvet and tawny brown ears, brown flanks, and white underside. The muscles and cabled tendons in her slender legs that appeared so thin as to be brittle when in fact they were strong and with deceptively dainty black hooves that could slice like a knife. Jimmy had killed does as well as bucks during deer season. I had eaten such beauty. I had longed for such beauty. I did not have it and did not have to look at myself to know what was there.

My shirt flapping open in the wind. The overwashed bra that trapped sagging breasts and shaped them into torpedoes, holding them up with a Cross Your Heart elastic that pinched. My head, covered with ridiculous pink sponge curlers, and my hands, wrinkled and peeling from scrubbing the porch floor. The small ring of fat that would never go away and rode my hips and waist like a tricycle tire. The slightly pouched belly that would never give birth, again. My own face. I had lost so much weight that every bone in my face threatened to cut itself out of my skin, and my skin was as waxy and as pale as a diabetic’s. My eyes were sunken, the eyeballs appearing to float in ponds surrounded by ocular bone cliffs.