The Turtle Warrior (12 page)

“What’s that?” I asked, not recognizing the song.

He stopped. “You really
are
from the backwoods, aren’t you?” he said. Marv was from Philadelphia. “There is other music in the world. Have you heard of the Beatles?”

“Shut up. Of course I have.”

“What about Beethoven?”

“Now you can really shut the fuck up there. My mother loves Beethoven. My mother used to be a teacher. She went to a private college in Milwaukee. Shit. I grew up listening to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy. You know. The classics.”

“The classics.” He smirked. “Where did you go wrong?”

I threw an empty beer can at him. He ducked and laughed. It was good to hear him laugh again after what happened to Rick. Then he started to sing.

That was the first time I really paid attention to Simon and Garfunkel. That song stuck to me. For the rest of January I sang it under my breath like a prayer.

I THOUGHT 1967 WOULD NEVER END. December held with such ferocity that it became officially memorable, creating temperatures and conditions that meteorologists would use as a yardstick in the coming years. The winter began with an avalanche of snow from the November skies and unusually large gales on Lake Superior. When December came, the temperature became a steady twenty-five degrees below zero. The wind only made it worse, possessing the days with its icy force and torturing even such winter-hardy animals as coyotes, sometimes forcing them to find shelter in a surprised farmer’s hay barn.

Then January 1968 arrived, and it cracked open that cold blue sky. A warm and wet wind came out of Canada and gave northern Wisconsin a most startling midwinter thaw. The chickadees sang their spring love songs and collected twigs and exposed grass for building nests. I hung laundry outside one day. After pinning the last shirt to the line, I turned into the wind and let my bathrobe flap open.

When we moved up from Milwaukee to this 250-acre farm-stead filled with swamps, rocks, and pines in northern Wisconsin seventeen years ago, I didn’t know the history or understand why the land was so cheap. I didn’t think to ask Emil and Anna Hausherr because it was clear they had been happy here. We moved near a town with a Swedish woman’s name, Olina, even though almost everyone was German in origin. I went from being surrounded by people, close to most of my own family and friends, to nearly complete isolation. Not only isolation but also a journey back into time.

The rural area of Olina was inhabited by the grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants who had been lied to by the Department of Agriculture and the lumber industry. By the time they discovered the logged-over soil and cold temperatures could not support big farming, they had drained all their savings and had no money to leave. Their children and the children after them learned to live on very little, and it became a twisted kind of life. They stoically toughed it out and spent their Sunday mornings listening to Father Wallace intone the master plan of God and pontificate his own views that people often brought tragedy upon themselves because of their lack of, or their misguided, spiritual lives. By Father Wallace’s definition, sinners were people who did not conform to Olina’s standards and traditions, the main tradition being depression. It was a sin, for example, to expect or want happiness. To expect love. I went to church because it had been fed to me since birth and had become as instinctual as breathing. I was afraid that if I missed a mass, something terrible would happen. It was a kind of voodoo that my mother had frightened me into believing, and she had done a good job. Although I sat in the pew and listened, I refused to believe that bad things happened only to people the church saw or defined as sinful.

Father Wallace was a good example of church hypocrisy. Our priest did not sip the blood of Christ but drank it by the bottle before, during, and after mass. It was not Mogen David wine either but a rather expensive French merlot. I had suspected it, and Jimmy confirmed it during the two years he was an altar boy. He brought home one of the empty wine bottles to show me. Like most self-righteous people, Father Wallace railed against the very thing he practiced. Sin. I wondered why the rest of the parish never thought to question why the priest had a large color TV and drove a Cadillac or that the name Wilson—Elizabeth Wilson, Robert Wilson, Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson, Alvira Wilson—scripted nearly all of the stained glass windows might have something to do with it. Wilson Lumber owned a large portion of our lives, the mill being the only place to work in the area and then only seasonally.

Our first year here I went to mass as a way of feeling at home, a ritual that was familiar to me and gave me the only place to wear the closetful of pretty dresses, suits, shoes, and hats. Olina didn’t have any social occasions that demanded such attire. I bundled Jimmy up and went to mass every morning at six-thirty, just to get out of the house before my husband did. At that hour there were very few men in church. It was mostly women, sitting in the back pews, their rosaries wound through their hands. Many of them belonged to the Daughters of Isabella, a charitable group that attended every funeral mass, even for the most wretched and forsaken. They said the Hail Mary and Our Father, chanting in rhythm until the priest nodded and the funeral mass could begin.

Jimmy slept on the pew next to me. Sometimes the older women would peek at him and softly coo over his curly black hair and red cheeks. I took a rosary out of my purse. I was not as skilled as some of those stocky German and Slavic women. Their hands were the opposite of their bodies. They worked the beads through their fingertips with the agility they possessed in crocheting and knitting. Knit ten Marys, purl one Father. Their dry and pleated lips moved silently as they sat in trances, their eyes focused on the huge crucifix hanging on the wall behind the altar. I did not think they were fools. Or particularly faithful. It was the only time of the day those women could have an hour to themselves. The church was impenetrable except in cases of extreme emergency. No husband or child dared violate the sanctity of their time in church. Although those women would never admit it, they were praying to keep their minds and to avoid dwelling on their daily unhappiness. I knew this because my mother had gone to church every day when I growing up. And I knew why.

When the weather shifted in January from what was normal, I did not see it as an omen but as a celestial gift that might indicate that the New Year of 1968 would bring a sense of peace and milder winters unlike the previous years.

I lifted my face to the wind and shut my eyes. I was Catholic in my habits only. That first year, home alone with a toddler during the week, I became aware of a breath. Of breathing. I walked in the interior of it, and it became the sound against which all other sounds were placed. I would hear crows cawing back and forth as I pushed the buggy up and down the dirt road in an effort to get Jimmy to sleep. One family in one tree and what appeared to be another but related family in another tree. Sometimes their cawing became intense and sharp as though they were quarreling. Other times their voices took on a comic ha-ha-ha as though one of them had told a joke. But at least once a day and often more I heard a deeper voice. A rattling but deep croak that scattered the crows. A raven. Its voice always cleaved the quiet as if it were a pronouncement, sometimes spoken in a frightening and foreboding tone, sometimes a hoarse chuckle, but mostly in a comforting manner as the large, black bird, perched high up in a white pine like a northern wizard, told the rest of us that all was well. A deep gong to announce sunrise, noon, and sunset.

Then the call of a barred owl at dusk.
Who cooks for
you?
Who cooks for
you? Some nights the howling of coyotes. The dog we had then would get excited and try to announce his own presence. His poor voice, a crackling howl, could never reach the higher, purer octaves of the coyotes. He tried and tried until they stopped, probably disgusted that our lowly dog had ruined their reverent song to the moon.

But always that breathing. Always that pulse.

The year Jimmy was four, I went to the bookmobile in Olina as usual, but this time I signed out books on the flora and fauna of where we lived, the geology of where we lived. I wanted to know what was underneath my feet when I walked down the driveway to collect our mail. I wanted to know what I heard and what I felt. I knew Jimmy felt it too. The way he cocked his little head and stared at the trees before slipping his thumb into his mouth as if to think on it.

What an enormous comfort it was when I found it. We lived on the Canadian Shield, a thick layer of rock so old and tough that not even the last glacier scouring its surface could reach down and break it. It was what some geologists called the ancient heart of North America. No wonder northern Wisconsin couldn’t be farmed on a big scale. There was very little soil between that tablet of rock and my feet. It was not meant for farming but for praying. I stopped going to church during the week. When the weather was mild, I waited until my husband left for work. Then I took Jimmy outside with me, and together we would press our hands against the ground and I would explain to him how that ground was created. About the heart underneath our feet. Sometimes after I put him down for his afternoon nap, I would go outside and do it again. Press my hands to the ground. Beneath that bedrock heart, I imagined the soul. Liquid and fiery. How it warmed that enormous tablet and the unseen commandments written there so that those voices could rise to the surface. That was where the pulse and the breath came from. The heart and the soul.

It was this place, this boreal forest and stumpy cedar bog-land, that eroded my city girl ways. That exposed the artifice of my religion. That gave me the mothering I never had. My trips to Milwaukee to visit my mother and relatives became less frequent because I could not stand the pity in their eyes and at the same time their refusal to acknowledge my pain or to help me with what had turned out to be a disastrous choice in husbands. I needed help that was older and wiser and not judgmental when I did not feel brave. When I cried. When I confessed my fears and my sins. The breath did not lie, did not tell me to say ten Hail Marys and everything will be all right. The pulse radiated up through the house on nights when I was tired of fighting loneliness, despair, and what I saw as a life wasted. When I felt lost. On those nights I looked at the veins in my wrists and thought of how easy it would be. But that larger pulse penetrated through the quiet of the house and reminded me that I had one of my own and that it was too sacred to cut. The tributaries of my veins flowed into the river in my body. My life had some value, some meaning, however small it seemed.

That was when I knew that the power of life was something bigger than a man-made God even when it tested me beyond reasonable endurance. It was evidenced once again by that untimely January warmth, by the smell of soil thawing. I took a deep breath. It was a good sign that the weather had let up and let us breathe without freezing our lungs.