The Turtle Warrior (55 page)

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 work 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.

IT NEVER FAILS TO AMAZE me what people can survive. Wars, disease, affairs, gossip, unemployment, drinking, husbands and wives, their parents, their children—good and bad—or their lack of children. Or, thinking of Angel, what animals have to live with, being at the mercy of humans. How they survive people period or even show what we think are signs of love for us.

I thought Bill would be a bachelor for life, consumed by his research and career and of course too damaged to seek love. But we underestimated him. He shocked us his senior year when he brought a woman home for Thanksgiving. A red-haired spitfire who was down-to-earth. We all liked her right off the bat. And she was crazy about Bill.

Six years ago we pooled our money with Claire so that Bill and Liz could fly down to Colombia and spend the few months it took processing the paperwork before they could bring home what we thought would be one child.

When we picked them up from the Minneapolis—St. Paul airport, they had two six-month-old baby girls and an eighteen-month-old boy.

“We had no choice.” Bill pantomimed helplessness, throwing up his hands. “I can’t speak or read Spanish. We signed the papers before we knew. How was I to know that tres means ‘three’?”

“Do you have names?” Claire asked after recovering from her laughter.

“Not yet,” Liz said.

We have a picture on our fireplace mantel of the day they were baptized. Bill told us to dress up, but he didn’t say where we were going. Ernie, Claire, and I were in our car, and we followed Bill and Liz in their van.

Claire and I gamely followed them in our heels down a sandy slope to the Chippewa River, holding on to each other so that we would not fall down like undignified broads on our aging asses. Ernie sweated and tugged at the tie he hadn’t worn in years and frowned at the new loafers on his feet. Bill’s best friend from college, Alan Willis, who is a landscape photographer, joined us.

There is nothing more blessed than standing near a river in spring. Especially one that is still somewhat wild. I have struggled for years to name the color of spring. That green. It is a yellow green, but even that doesn’t describe it accurately. And on that day the sun played off the leaves in such a way as to make you wish you could live forever.

I was given one little girl to hold, and Claire was given the other. Then Liz placed the baby boy in Ernie’s arms. While the photographer took pictures, Bill filled a pottery cup with river water. He was never one for long speeches. He poured a little bit of water over each child’s head.

“Water is life,” is all he said.

Then they shamelessly reduced the elderly to tears. The girls were named Isabella Rosemary and Maria Claire. The little boy they named James Ernest.

All three of them are the luscious color of milk chocolate, and it is visibly apparent when they are with their mother and father that they are adopted. But when we go out of town or go out to eat as a whole group, it is Ernie that people think the children really belong to.

Still, Ernie is not happy.

Jimmy remains a mystery.

Happy endings are like buying lottery tickets. It’s a crapshoot, and you can keep buying them in the hope of winning, but it doesn’t happen very often. Still, you can die hoping.

There are some happy endings. The happy ending you want may not be the happy ending you get or need. I did get to be a mother and then a grandmother through circumstances I could never have foreseen or predicted, through the default and then generosity of first one woman and then two. Ernie is the only grand-father those children will have via Bill, and although he is not as demonstrative as I am, I know he treasures Bill and his family more than his own life.

But there is that lost child.

I watch Ernie sit on the porch and shiver. He stares at our field. He’ll catch pneumonia at his age. He is still troubled, and there seems to be nothing I can say to him to ease his conscience. For years he read everything he could about Vietnam. To try to understand it and therefore gain some peace of mind, but it only made it worse.

“I just want to see him one more time. I want to know why,” Ernie said to me the other night after dinner. He was wrapped up in a shawl I made for him. “How come I’ve never seen Frank LaRue? Patterson or McDougal? Or Scofield and Krenshaw? They were my best friends. They all died young. In the war.”

Ernie went on before I could answer. Angry this time.

“That goddamn Westmoreland. All of them. Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger. Even Kennedy in the beginning. But Westmoreland and Johnson just had to have their battle at Khe Sanh. What dumb-asses. The North Vietnamese must have laughed like hell over that one. We bombed the shit out of that area and threw away lives. Westmoreland just couldn’t get past World War Two and the big battles. After two hundred years of history he never did understand fighting Indian-style. Giap did, though. He loaded up that area with soldiers so that Westmoreland thought the big threat was there. Westy took the bait. Left Saigon and the lower half of Vietnam wide open. Like lifting a blanket off a baby in a crib. Jimmy and the rest of those guys were just
bait,”
he spit out. “Jimmy died for
nothing.
Jesus Christ!” he cried. “By 1966 they knew it was wrong.
Why didn’t they stop?
”