The Turtle Warrior (13 page)

A week later I was head deep into scrubbing out the oven, listening and simultaneously pooh-poohing the radio announcer’s proclamation of the weather as unnatural when my younger son ran into the house.

“Mamma! There’s a fox sitting by the barn! Just sitting there! C’on!”

Bill grabbed my hand and pulled me outside. Both of us stumbled over the muddy ruts in the yard until we reached the barn. There next to the fence post by the southeast corner of the barn sat the fox as though it were a farm dog. I walked hesitantly toward the animal, keeping my son behind me. It occurred to me too late that I should have brought a gun in case the animal was sick. The fox appeared indifferent to my approach. When I was close enough to see better but far enough away to remain safe, I saw why.

Rather than the luxurious red-brown winter coat of fur it should have had, the fox had patches of fur missing. Even its tail was ratlike and scaly. I was sure I could have walked right up to it and grabbed the animal by the scruff of its neck, the fox so weak with hunger, so sick with mange that it would have shown no resistance. The fox was not the only one suffering.

Just before Christmas, Bill and I had seen a snowy owl perched on the snow fence along the driveway. We rarely saw those big white birds, and I knew immediately what it meant. The owl was having trouble finding food in Canada, its normal terrain, and had ventured south in an effort to survive. I shuddered. Something was wrong if a fox and an owl were starving during what was a rich season for predators. The fox’s obvious hunger began to ruin my rare good spirits.

“Poor thing,” I said to my son, peering out from behind me. “I think it must be a young one that is having a hard time hunting. But we can’t help it. We have to let nature take its course.”

My son didn’t answer, his face pulled down with sadness. I stroked the top of his head with the fascination I had so often felt in the past at the difference between my younger and older sons. My older son would have shot the fox, kindly ending the animal’s suffering. He would have been justified, merely expediting the process of nature. But Bill’s heart beat for the wounded and the very young. He believed with a comic book hero’s vision that he could rescue anything from the brink of death, and his bedroom in the spring and summer was living proof that he often could. It overflowed with orphaned and injured birds, mice, rabbits, and once a ball of entwined, newly hatched garter snakes that needed no care and proved it by disentangling themselves and spreading throughout the house. I was in a constant state of anxiety for months, once reaching into the sugar jar only to find a snake coiled there. My older son barely tolerated the zoo that their bedroom had become, and fights broke out frequently. I always listened from wherever I was in the house. If I thought the fight was rising to a level of physical danger, I would run upstairs and into their bedroom to break it up. They were often so mad at each other that they didn’t notice me until I inadvertently became the target of something flying through the air. Once it was a balled-up sock that struck me in the head. A shoe in my backside another time.

I tugged on his hand. “Let’s go.”

That night I pretended that I didn’t see Bill take leftovers out of the refrigerator and stuff them inside his jacket before silently ducking out of the house. For the next three days I cooked a steady supply of venison Jimmy had stored in our freezer from the winter before until the refrigerator bulged with an abundance of meat. Over a period of days the refrigerator gradually lost its contents.

I stopped myself from asking Bill if the fox ate the food, if it was lulled into brief domesticity by his kindness, and I wondered, noting his bare head and hands, where he had left his red stocking cap and mittens. Instead I waited until my son left the house. Then I watched him from the back porch window, watched as my nine-year-old ran toward the barn, his hands cradling the bottom of the jacket. He did not speak of the fox again. I was sure that it had died and that all the food Bill had piled out behind the barn had gone to waste or been eaten by coyotes.

THE SUNSET HAD BEEN AN unusually spectacular orange-red like the sunsets of late summer that day and was streaked with clouds shaped like scattered fleece. He had been shoveling manure for about an hour behind the barn, adding to the pile already banked up against the outside wall, when he stopped to have a smoke and ponder the sunset. The temperatures during the day had reached the low forties for the past week. But now dusk was rapidly taking over, and the temperature was dropping. Ernie put out his cigarette and hurried to get the job done because in another half hour he wouldn’t be able to see or feel his hands on the shovel. As he worked, he could hear the family dog inspecting and exploring the thick wet snow around the barn.

Ernie was straining to lift an enormous shovelful of shit when he heard the dog stop prowling and give a quick snort. Thinking the dog had just found an unlucky mouse under the snow, Ernie tossed the manure onto the pile and was about to shovel up some more when he realized that the dog had stopped moving completely. He straightened up and was trying to locate the dog when he heard him. A long, high howl broke the farmyard quiet. Ernie shivered and involuntarily dropped the shovel. Then the dog streaked right past him, jumping over the shovel, and ran about fifty yards into the snow-crusted field behind the barn. Ernie had turned in the direction the dog took, wondering what had spooked him, when he saw that the large black animal had stopped again and stood rigidly still with his head and nose held high. He looked beyond the dog, and that was when he saw Jimmy Lucas.

At first Ernie thought that Jimmy had been discharged early from the Marines and was finally home from fighting in Vietnam. But he was wearing his combat helmet and fatigues and carrying an M-16 rifle. Ernie stepped forward, sinking into the deep snow, and raised his arm.

“Jimmy!” he yelled, and waved his hand.

Jimmy Lucas didn’t answer and instead reached up and took off his helmet, which he dropped into the snow. The helmet rolled as though it had hit hard ground instead of snow, and Ernie noticed that Jimmy was standing on top of the snow instead of sinking into it the way Ernie and the dog had. Suddenly Ernie knew it was and wasn’t Jimmy Lucas and why he was standing in the Morriseau eighty-acre field behind the barn.

Ernie sank to his knees. “Oh, no, Jimmy,” he whispered. “No, no.”

Jimmy dropped his rifle too and slowly turned around. The dog snorted again but did not move. Then Jimmy walked away from them and continued walking until he reached the big swamp that bordered the Morriseau and Lucas farms. The very moment that Jimmy disappeared into the swamp, the dog howled again and took off running, floundering through the snow until he too reached the swamp.

An hour went by before Ernie was able to rise to his feet. He threw the shovel into the toolshed and reluctantly approached the house. He ate dinner methodically and silently before trudging up the stairs to bed. Thinking it was exhaustion, his wife only asked where the dog was and didn’t question her husband’s decision to go to sleep early.

When he woke up the next morning, Ernie surrendered what he had seen to the effects of working too hard. He’d been tricked by the warm weather and from working outside without a jacket or gloves. His hands had gone numb, and he reasoned that he’d had the beginnings of hypothermia, which always made a person feel dreamy. He looked out his bedroom window. It was another freakishly warm day. Water dripped from the eaves of the house.

His wife made breakfast and then kissed him good-bye because she had errands to run in town. He spread hay for his beef cattle, watered and fed the chickens, changed the filter and oil on his truck, and went back to work on the manure pile.

It was near noon, and Rosemary hadn’t come back yet. Ernie was making himself a bologna sandwich and brewing another pot of coffee when the phone rang. He thought it might be Rosemary, calling to ask if there was anything he needed from town, so he picked up the phone casually.

“Morriseau’s.”

“Is this Ernest Morriseau?”

“It is.”

“Mr. Morriseau, my name is Lieutenant Hildebrandt. I’m from the Naval Chaplain Corps. I’m calling from the reserve base in Madison. I’m calling you at the request of Private James Lucas, who listed you as the contact on his record of emergency form.”

Ernie’s chest constricted, and he began breathing as though he had been running. He stretched the phone cord so that he could pull a chair over from the kitchen table. He sat down.

“Mr. Morriseau, are you still there?”

“I am.”

Ernie paused, then said, “Jimmy’s dead, isn’t he?”

“No, Mr. Morriseau. Private Lucas is missing in action.”

“That means he could be alive?”

“That is our hope. They haven’t found him yet. I will be driving up with another officer tomorrow to notify his family—” he paused, and Ernie could hear the rustling of papers—“and he requested that you accompany us. Do you live near the Lucas home?”

“Farm. They have a farm. I own the farm next to theirs.”

“Private Lucas left very detailed instructions on his form. He specifically requested you. And he didn’t want us to visit the family in the evening but rather during the day. Can you go with us tomorrow?”

“Yes. Of course I can.”

“I will need directions to your farm, and we’ll meet you at your place tomorrow at about ten A.M.”

Ernie gave the officer directions and hung up the phone. His hands were shaking. He thought of the way the helmet had hit the snow, how it had rolled but had not tipped upright.

When Rosemary came home half an hour later she found Ernie still sitting by the phone.

“I’ve been yelling from outside. Didn’t you hear me? I needed help carrying in the groceries,” she said, dumping two bags on the kitchen table.

He turned to look at her. It took him a minute to hear the irritation in her voice, even to recognize that she had come home.

“I just got a call,” he said.

His wife stiffly walked to the kitchen sink and, leaning over it, stared out of the window. He gazed at her and at the expression on her face. His thoughts shifted so that he concentrated on her. He knew what was happening in himself, how the body protected itself against this kind of injury. This was the kind of news that caused a shock, which quickly turned into denial. He understood denial as a biological response, a survival tactic. It was necessary at first so that the unspeakable could be absorbed more slowly. He looked at his wife and thought of something else. What seemed an inappropriate thought at such a time was indeed appropriate. His mind filtered past the news as if to seek a safer place to stay, and it settled upon one of his happiest memories.

Of the night he met his wife.

After he was released from the hospital in Hawaii, he flew to San Diego and took the train from there. He got off the train in Milwaukee for a short hiatus before the final leg home. He had no civilian clothes with him, only a second, dressier uniform, which the Pfister Hotel promised it would have cleaned and pressed by that evening. He wanted to hunt up some old friends or news of them, hoping that they had come home alive. When he heard about the VFW Hall dance on East Wisconsin Avenue just a couple of blocks from the hotel, he went there, thinking he might run into someone familiar. The large rectangular hall was packed. He pushed through the crowd of dancers, bought a beer, and sat down at a table in the corner. He immersed himself in the anonymity of the crowd. In the general joy bordering on much-needed amnesia, which alcohol and a local swing band, in imitation of Benny Goodman, helped instill.