The Turtle Warrior (18 page)

I shut the door so hard that the sound startled me. I waited. Nothing stirred from Bill’s room. My stomach reared, throwing bile and bits of food up to burn the back of my throat and coat my tongue.

I moved blindly toward the staircase and completely miscalculated the distance. I missed the first step and stumbled down the next three steps before catching myself on the railing. I kept both hands on the railing like a toddler and placed my feet slowly down on each step. When I reached the bottom, I stretched my arms out in front of me and followed the marker of light radiating from the kitchen. I grabbed the nearest chair, my fingers suckering tight to the wood.

I sat at the kitchen table under the yolk-colored light and waited for the tears to come. My head ached, swollen with the relentless replay of that afternoon’s visit. From time to time I fingered the report, tried to keep it from brushing against the peanut butter smears on the table, and listened for the small noises of the house: the clank of the furnace, the whining of the pipes when I stood up and turned on the kitchen faucet to make more coffee. Listened for the small footsteps of my son should he wake up.

I leaned forward and cupped my head in my hands. If I forgot about the events of the day, it could have been any night from years ago when Jimmy and Bill were babies. My breasts swollen and wet from nightly feedings. Chicken pox or measles. My hands caked with calamine lotion. My fingernails stained pink for days afterward. The parental magic of making the monsters of night dreams disappear. Exhaustion so deep that it made my hearing acute, my ears pricked to the slightest whimper, the creak of bedsprings above my head. The call for Mamma firing through any light sleep, producing a sudden hit of energy to my veins and causing me to leap out of bed with maternal devotion. I stared down at the mottled Formica specks on the table’s surface and concentrated on my breathing, on the sound of it in my ears. I thought I could hear the house itself breathing, creaking as though it shifted on the foundation with each breath taken. I could smell the mustiness of my housedress and the earthy smell of my skin. No wonder the officers had cringed at my appearance. I had given up looking at myself, and it was only when I was mirrored in the face of others that I thought about how I looked.

I rubbed my forehead. My son had kept everything from me.

“You weren’t old enough last winter. Why did you have him sign those papers?” I demanded of Jimmy the night before he was to board the bus.

“Because,” Jimmy said, snapping his fingers. “I knew he’d do it just like that. I used him. Dad thinks he’s getting rid of me. But he’s not. I’m comin’ back. Besides,” he said, breaking into a disarming grin, “Elvis was in the Army, and nothin’ happened to him.”

“That’s because there wasn’t a war going on when Elvis was in the Army! I thought you said,” I added, forcing some humor, “that you were leaving and never coming back.”

“Oh, Mom.” He feigned exasperation. “I was just mad when I said that. I would never leave you and Bill for long. Don’t worry.” He joked, jostling my arm. “Nothin’ is gonna happen to me. I’ll be okay. I really will. Don’t be mad. Laugh.”

“Laugh!” I pinched one of his ears hard enough to hurt. “This isn’t funny, Jimmy. This isn’t like going duck hunting.”

My son just fell back on the bed, rubbing his ear and giggling as if nothing truly were going to happen to him. As if he were Elvis, and this was a brief but necessary stint in the career of his life.

For a few months after he left, I tried to believe in Jimmy’s optimism. I worked outside, weeding and troweling in my flower beds and my vegetable garden. I listened intently for all signs of life: the frogs at twilight in the pothole at the east end of the forty acres nearest the house; the swallows chattering in the barn; Bill, as he shouted threats and stirred up dust with his bare feet, engaging in imaginary fistfights. My husband put in overtime at the mill and was gone so much that I didn’t feel he lived with us anymore except for the meager amount of money I wrestled from what was left of his paycheck and the inevitable fights that followed.

The optimism began to ebb when September came. I stood outside with Bill fretfully hugging my waist and watched the geese pass over, crying over the trumpeting of their calls. All the birds flocked up and left; the swallows first, then the blackbirds, the wrens, and finally the robins. October was the month and color of dying leaves falling easily some days and ripped from the trees by strong winds on others.

November arrived, producing unexpected snowstorms, dumping five feet of snow, and leaving a shock of plunging temperatures in their wake. The snowstorms felt violent to me after the cocoon of summer and fall. The weather hermetically sealed me inside the house and not only turned the world outside uninhabitable but also rendered my inside world devoid of humanity. Bill was in school all day. The small sounds of housecleaning could not overcome the ominous silence that made my mind twist with worries. In desperation to hear a human voice, I made the mistake of turning on our rickety black-and-white TV in the hopes of having something cheery to watch while I cleaned. The black screen lightened to gray, and then Dan Rather’s face loomed before me with the United States flag on one side of him and the Republic of Vietnam flag on the other side. He was standing in front of a large building that I dimly recognized as the United States Embassy in Saigon. His face was barely shaved, but I didn’t listen to what he was saying because I was staring at the flags. As they could only do on TV, little boxes of information were superimposed on them. I looked closer. On the American flag was a box with the growing number of dead American soldiers. On the Vietnamese flag was a box listing the mounting number of dead Vietnamese Republic soldiers. And then a third box marked “Enemy” contained the number of their dead. For a brief moment the TV screen looked as though it was a board game like Monopoly. No money in the bank though. No investments. All dead. I pulled so hard on the switch that it snapped off into my hand. I didn’t want the TV to be turned on ever again. I removed one of the vacuum tubes from the back of the set and hid it in the porch closet. Later that night I explained to Bill that the television set was broken and that we couldn’t afford to fix it.

“We’ll get more library books from town,” I said curtly when Bill whined. “Reading is better than watching TV anyway.” I watched as my son silently and sadly clocked off the shows he would miss:
Petticoat Junction, Flipper, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, Jonny Quest.

Life inside the house became suffocating. I found myself one morning sitting in front of the living room window, tapping the glass with the heel of one of my Sunday pumps, wanting to see how hard I could hit the window before it would crack. I stopped after the fifth tap, realizing that a broken window might mean a broken arm. So I got up and went to the closet and wrapped myself in warm clothes. I left the house and began to walk up and down our long driveway, hearing that necessary breath again and talking to the air and to the Norway pines that lined the driveway.

It became a habit. I volunteered to walk Bill out to the bus in the morning, ignoring his protests and the pained and embarrassed look on his face. When he was safely on board the bus, I would turn around and begin walking and talking my way back to the house. I waited impatiently to walk down the driveway again at noon, when I saw the mailman’s white Chevy Impala pull away from the mailbox.

A letter from Jimmy would send me into happy action, storming through the house in a fit of housecleaning and cooking, dreaming of his final trip home. I believed that everything would change when Jimmy came home. I repeated it like a prayer, taking my rollers out and brushing my hair into curls like a normal woman. I was making plans.

“Just hang in there, kiddo,” I said to the air and the pines along the driveway. The farm would be worked by family and not rented out to our neighbors the Edelmans for planting and grazing. I would hire a lawyer and end the farce that was my marriage, peel it off my body like my musty, dusty housedresses and have it judicially burned. I would get a job in town, hold picnics, and visit my neighbors more often. Maybe develop some real friendships.

But when there hadn’t been a letter since January 2, my hopeful enthusiasm had died down. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed my housedress, and my hair rollers felt as natural on my head as my ears or nose.

I crossed my arms on the table and rested my head on them, intending to nap for a few minutes.

The next time I looked up, it was 11:00 P.M. My husband hadn’t come home. The wind whistled as it cut around the corners of the house. I had hurt that officer. His words would have given any normal person hope.
Missing in action
could mean that Jimmy was alive and taken prisoner. But that officer flinched several times as though he could disguise the doubt on his face. Ernie’s hands were shaking. I knew the odds were too high to have any hope.

“The Marines!” I said to Jimmy. “Couldn’t you have picked the Navy or the Army? Or even the Coast Guard? The Marines!”

“They offered the best package,” was his response. Then he added, and I didn’t think about it until later, “The Marines take care of their own.”

I was not stupid or naive. The chances of Jimmy’s being alive were nil. Missing in action was the bureaucratic middle ground. A comma indicating a pause until they could finish the sentence with his remains. When the wind whistled again, it occurred to me that I was waiting out of habit and that this paper in front of me told me that the waiting was done now.

I picked up the report, folded it, and tucked it into the pocket of my housedress before pushing back my chair. I walked to the back door with such deliberateness that it wasn’t until I had put on my socks, boots, and winter coat that I thought of Bill sleeping upstairs. I paused, listened for sounds of his young body: a thrashing of legs against the sheets, a crusty cough, maybe a murmur that said Mamma. I heard nothing. Deciding it was safe to leave him, I gathered the tools I would need: a kerosene lamp, a handful of wooden matches, and a long, wood-handled spade. I lit the kerosene lamp and let the flame lap at the glass before turning it down to a small arc of yellow. Then I opened the door.

Even late at night it was still surprisingly warm. I heard the drip of melting ice falling from the eaves of the house. The path to the barn was muddy, and my boots sank down with each step, mud cresting over the green, rubbery toes. The kerosene lamp swung like a warning in my hand, the yellow light rhythmically flashing upon the barn before casting its light behind me on the return swing.

I did not stop until I was directly behind the barn. Twenty feet behind me was the wooden fence separating the barnyard from our forty-acre field to the northeast. The boys considered it a good spot. Both my children played there, close enough to hear my calling voice, yet blocked from my vision so that they could conduct whatever mischief seized them that day. When Jimmy became a teenager, he moved inward and upward, creating his own hideaway in the barn loft. He wired in a stereo and speakers and hauled up the ladder three chairs that he had found at the town dump, one of which still bore the teeth marks of a hungry black bear.