The Turtle Warrior (27 page)

About forty feet behind them and apparently unnoticed by everyone except Bill sat the Morriseaus’ dog, Angel. When Bill parked his car alongside Ernie’s truck, the dog silently loped into the tall grass next to the barn.

“I’ll be all right,” Bill heard his mother say to the two men as he got out of the car. “Bill’s home now.”

“Are you sure?” Al Meyer asked.

“I’m sure. We’ll be all right.”

“Billy,” Ernie Morriseau said, lightly clasping Bill’s upper arm, “call us anytime if you or your mother need help.”

It was only after the two men had left, their vehicles spewing pillows of dust as they drove away from the Lucas farmhouse, that Bill’s mother spoke to him.

“Your father is dead. Ernie found him. He came over to talk to your father. I told him I didn’t know where he was. But I said to check behind the barn. And sure enough,” his mother said, shrugging her shoulders, “that’s where he was. Heart attack, they think. Maybe a stroke too,” she added as though Bill had asked.

She stood next to Bill with a tired but composed face. Bill had already known it was his father when he saw the ambulance lumber out of the driveway. What was inevitable had finally happened. Bill was unable to react because he had no emotions to react with except one. He glanced at his mother with curiosity.

“Well, Mom,” he asked hesitantly, digging the heel of his boot into the ground, “do you want me to do something?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Neither do I. It’s already been done.”

That night Bill opened his bottom dresser drawer and pulled out a shoebox of childhood memorabilia. He sat on the floor next to his brother’s bed and habitually wrapped one arm up into a corner of the bedspread. He rifled through the box’s contents with his other hand until he found what he wanted. It was the last picture he had of his brother, the one James had sent Bill from Vietnam. Bill turned the Polaroid over and reread the message he knew by heart.

“These are the highlands I was telling you about—a lot bigger than our ridge, huh? They’re pretty, though,” James had written in his heavy block-style print. “It’s too bad they’re in Vietnam. I’ll tell you more about them when I come home. Love, James.”

The picture helped Bill remember the movie star sensuousness of his brother’s full lips and the flint-colored eyes, so like their mother’s. But he could no longer recall his brother’s voice.

He lay on his bed for a couple of hours but could not sleep. Leaning over the side, he reached under the bed and pulled out a six-pack of beer that he had filched from his father’s stash in the barn a month ago. Bill drank all six cans. Instead of causing the dreamy stupor that he had hoped for, the beer hooked him, creating for Bill an illusion of clear thinking.

The last American troops were pulled out in 1973. President Ford had announced last year that the war in Vietnam was finished. Their father was now dead. There was nothing to keep his brother away from home.

His brother
was
back, Bill drunkenly reasoned, because he felt him. But Bill never sensed him near the house. James would not come near the house because it was stained with their father’s presence, even after death. Away from the house, though, Bill had a hunch that he was being watched and even touched. He could smell something, too. On a clear morning in the woods or on a hot and dry summer’s day his face would become cold and moist as though mist had fallen. Or fishing off the bridge at the river, he would smell smoke and, walking up and down both sides of the river for a ways, could not find the source of it.

He would go looking for his brother tonight. But where would James be? He might be down at the Chippewa River, among the big birches bordering the water there. Bill ruminated on several favorite spots along the river and then reconsidered. It was too far away from the farm. James wouldn’t go there. Bill picked up the Polaroid picture and looked at it again. There was only one place his brother could be.

He put the picture back into the shoebox and thrust the box into the dresser drawer. One by one, he quietly placed the empty beer cans back underneath the bed. Then he padded out of the bedroom and down the stairs, stopping for a few seconds to listen for any sounds that might indicate that his mother was awake. Donning his blue sweatshirt and green rubber boots, he slipped through the barely opened screen door and walked just outside the perimeter of the yard light. Once his eyes adjusted to the dark, Bill broke into a dogtrot and headed toward the hump of land that rose out of the middle of the swamp on the edge of their farm.

I HEARD BILL WALK DOWN the stairs and watched out my bedroom window as he left the house. I would have been worried if we had lived in a city like Chicago or Milwaukee, where I had grown up and gone to college. But he was seventeen, a big boy, and there was nothing in the swamp or woods that he did not know about or that would hurt him. It didn’t bother me either that it was midnight or that Bill appeared a little unsteady on his feet. He had gotten hold of something to drink, and it was more than likely that it came from our own land, which was pockmarked with my dead husband’s hidden caches, bottles of beer and whiskey that he hid in the barn or buried in various spots, squirreling them away just in case he couldn’t get to town. Although his death that day was a jolt to both of us, I was sure that it did not cause my son’s drinking. Or my insomnia. It did not cause us grief. Bill’s face registered relief almost immediately when I confirmed his father’s death. I too felt only relief and could not summon any appropriate feeling about my husband of twenty-eight years. There was not the expected emotion such as tears or the howling of grief, the fear of an unknown future or compassion. I could not even draw up pity. I felt hot and sticky. It was nearly ninety degrees. My hair was wet, and it dripped perspiration into my eyes. The relief of John’s death subsided much quicker than I would have ever thought. In my many years of wishing him dead, I dreamed of savoring the relief for days and months. But it arrived fleetingly and went. In its place came desire.

Ernie Morriseau had driven over that afternoon because he was having his land reassessed and did not want John to mistake the surveyors working along our shared fence line for trespassers. I had been hanging bedsheets on the line and humming a vague rendition of “Moon River,” made even more vague by the two clothespins stuffed into my mouth. The moment his truck pulled up, I stopped humming and did not reach down to the basket for another sheet.

“Hello, Claire. Is John around?”

That sonorous and silky voice. I pulled the clothespins out of my mouth.

“Behind the barn.”

I watched him walk to the barn. Put one clothespin back in my mouth and bit down, chewed on it a little. Rubbed my sweaty hands down the front of my housedress. I looked terrible, my short black hair uncombed and dirty. The cheap rubber sandals on my feet. I looked down at my bare legs. For some absurd reason, I had shaved them that morning, sitting on the edge of the tub. I was happy that at least my legs were smooth, even if the smoothness showed all my purple and blue spider veins.

It was the way Ernie emerged from behind the barn alone. How he stopped and looked back for a few seconds before turning around to look at me. He kept his eyes steadily on me as he approached, as if to make sure that I would stay put. When he stopped, he reached forward and clasped one of my hands. He didn’t waste words.

“John’s dead. I think he suffered a heart attack. He’s back there,” Ernie said, nodding toward the barn, “lying against one of the tractor wheels.”

It had been a few hours since I’d seen him. I rarely went behind the barn when I knew my husband was back there. He’d been using the tractor as an excuse for years to sit back there and drink. Even if he had fixed the tractor, what would he have done with it? Why would I go back there? Why go looking for a fight?

I shrugged. “Should I call Sheriff Meyer?”

“I think so.”

It was my turn to move, to turn around and walk into the house and call Al Meyer. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want Ernie to let go of my hand.

“Do you want me to call him?” he asked.

He was considerate in the way he pulled his hand away slowly so that it didn’t feel insulting. My mouth felt dry and tasted of wood. I tried to think of something to say just so I could look at him.

When we first moved up to Olina and were still reasonably social, we drove over to the Morriseau farm and introduced ourselves. We did not go into the house for a cup of coffee although they repeatedly invited us to. We simply wanted to say hello so that they knew who was now living on the place next to theirs. Ernie smiled and held out his hand. I was instantly captivated. He was the dark and handsome man of dreams. There was a calmness about him that was charismatic although I was sure that he did not realize it. My mouth was dry then too, but the rest of me became wet. I felt the sweat trickling under my arms. Could taste it on my upper lip. I wanted to leave right away, so sure that my husband and Ernie could see what I could not control. Then Rosemary stepped out of the house. She was tall and lithe with long black hair and skin like a model in a Rossetti painting. I could see that my husband was taken aback, that he had not expected our neighbor’s wife- to be so beautiful. They both were extraordinarily beautiful.

How little Ernie had changed. He smelled faintly of cedar and a freshly laundered shirt. He was still brown and muscled and ruggedly handsome, made even more so by hard work. My right hand lifted, and as if to stop an impending sin, my left hand caught it and brought it down before I could do what would have been embarrassing. To run a fingertip over his lips, before pressing one of my cheeks to his face. I crossed my arms obediently against my chest.

“Will you stay here until the sheriff arrives?”

“Absolutely. You better call Bill too.”

I turned when I reached the screen door.

“Do you want something to drink?”

“A glass of water would be wonderful. Thank you, Claire.”

I would never forget his answer. “Thank you, Claire.” My newly dead husband lying against the hub of the tractor wheel never said thank you. Bill, in the way of all children who take their mothers for granted, never said it either.

As I was filling a glass with ice and water, I remembered a day during the summer when Jimmy was twelve. I had walked across our field and the adjacent Morriseau field to fetch Jimmy It was hot that day too, and I needed Jimmy to do chores. Rounding the corner of the Morriseau barn, I saw Ernie bent over the engine of his truck without a shirt on. The perspiration on his upper torso glistened like dew and collected in the hollows and curves of his muscled back and chest before trickling down. I could not say anything to announce my presence, overwhelmed by my desire to palm his broad chest with my hands. To bend my knees and catch the tributaries of sweat with my mouth before they reached the waistband of his jeans.