The Turtle Warrior (2 page)

HE STOOD NEXT TO HIS yard light and looked at his watch. It was 8:00 P.M., and he did not want to wait a moment longer, to cause them worry. He turned the light switch on and then off, waiting for a few seconds before doing it again: on and off. It was a signal to his younger neighbor that all was well at the Morriseau farm. A nightly ritual.

It was dark and cold, but rather than go into the house, he leaned against the light post. Autumn again. It was the season in which the memories of his father were most visceral. His father had been dead for fifty years. Ernie was now seventy-six. Autumn made him more aware of his mortality, yet his chest swelled with excitement, with the change arousing his senses. The spice and funk of wet bark and wet leaves, the papery fertility of dried grass and the astringency of pine. The leaves like varying shades of fire. The first October storm that released them like smoke. The surprising loveliness of bare branches reaching upward as though the sky had pulled their shirts off to get them ready for bed.

Autumn briefly transcended the truth of his age and allowed him to dwell in the memory of being a treasured late-in-life child. He had loved and respected his mother and father; had been the child of, and witness to, an extraordinary marriage. In trying to be what he thought was a good son, a citizen of the world, he had made choices that hurt his parents and caused them worry and pain, some of them inevitable but others selfishly ill considered. He hadn’t paid attention. He only half listened in the evenings when his father told stories and anecdotes while they did chores. Stories of his father’s life on the reservation, stories of why the moon was full once a month, why birds go south, the creation of butterflies. He understood and listened to his parents speak in what should have been his first language, Ojibwe. Ernie knew only a half dozen words, as his generation was not allowed to speak their native language in school. If he had listened more closely and learned, he might have solved the riddle that his father unwittingly left him with and that troubled him for years.

They had been deer hunting that day and had stopped to drink some water and eat their packed sandwiches.

“Spring,” his father commented out of the blue, looking up at the treetops, “is the season of women and birth. Fall is the season of men and hunting.”

Ernie was sixteen then and did not think to question its meaning, but it was odd enough for him to remember.

His father suffered a stroke two weeks after Ernie came home from fighting in the Pacific in 1944. Ernie had gotten married just before returning to Olina. Rather than have a honeymoon, he and his wife were suddenly faced with the responsibility of his family’s subsistence farm and the care of his aging parents as well. In those long days of work there never seemed to be time to discuss much of anything except what was necessary. He was hesitant to do so anyway; afraid that he might upset the old man by forcing him to speak when it was so difficult for his father to ask for the simplest needs and wants. His wife’s nursing of his father and her patience with the daily physical therapy required appeared to have nearly restored him. Just when it seemed his father had regained all of his speech and could walk without help, he suffered a fatal stroke one night in his sleep.

Ernie told his mother, not long before she died two years later, what his father had said, in the hopes that she would know the intent of the words. Her usually good-humored face folded in confusion.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what he meant.”

He would have given anything to talk to his father again. To ask the older man if he had really understood what he had said: that women belonged to life and that men belonged to death and that men killed in the fall what women gave birth to in the spring. Even if it was not literally true, the metaphor was a terrifying one.

He put his bare hands in his coat pockets and looked up at the night sky with its many stars and constellations. He shivered. Peace did not come with old age. The new millennium meant nothing to him. He and his wife had gone to bed early on New Year’s Eve, ignoring the national fear of being bombed, of terrorism striking anywhere and everywhere. They did not, as some of their neighbors did, buy cases of water, load up on canned goods, buy huge power generators, or turn their basement into a bunker. They slept, knowing that whatever would happen would happen regardless of what they did.

His right hand fingered the handkerchief in his pocket. If he had learned something profound in his life, it was this: that to ask a question could be the most rebellious of acts and the most necessary. That allowing words to go unspoken could cause not only harm to oneself but harm to another.

He tasted it every day in his mouth. As though he had bitten down on a prickly ash berry. The sudden infusion of wild citrus flavor before it numbed his gums and tongue. Not even water seemed to wash it away.

Bitterness.

SOMETHING NUDGED BILL WHEN THE firecrackers went off in the snapper’s jaws. It told him to pay attention to the queasy feeling in his stomach and remember. Bill saw his brother and his brother’s best friend, Terry, laughing at the turtle’s gaping mouth and mutilated jaws. His brother’s hand was clutched around a Pabst beer. Blood from his bitten thumb trickled across the blue ribbon on the brown bottle and dripped onto the sand as they stood on the shore of the Chippewa River near the old logging bridge.

“Damn! That sucker nearly took my thumb off.” James raised his hand to his mouth and began licking the blood.

“Don’t lick your own blood!” Terry said, his lips wrinkled with disgust. He took a swig of beer from his own bottle.

“You lick it then!” James held out his bloodied thumb, taunting his friend.

“Get away from me! I ain’t no vampire.”

James walked toward him and jabbed his thumb into Terry’s face, causing him to back up awkwardly. The older boys jostled up the bank away from the river, shouting and laughing at each other.

Bill watched them goof around for a while before turning his attention back to the snapper. It was a big female. She moved laboriously toward the river, her front claws digging into the sand to pull her forward. Her lower jaw dragged, and pieces of it fell away as she crawled. Then she stopped and dropped her head upon the sand. She made a strange noise. Not a cry like many other animals would make in pain. More like an anguished groan. Tears watered Bill’s eyes.

Snapping turtles were like nothing else Bill knew. Not like humans or animals. Not even like their cousins the box and mud turtles. Snappers were sometimes algae-covered or muddy or even mossy-looking at times. They appeared ugly, wise, and ancient all at once. The combination lifted them to a transcendent beauty, an otherworldly magnificence that thrilled Bill. They were the nearest thing to a dragon that he would ever experience. They couldn’t move their bodies very fast on the ground. It was their heads and jaws that gave them their name. The head could suddenly shoot forward and snap down on prey with jaws that could not be pried apart. Bill liked to put his bare feet on top of the empty shells of the turtles his mother had used to make soup and feel with his toes the ridges and leathery points of the carapaces. Like most turtle shells, snapping turtle’s shells were not round but slightly oval, some of them with one distinct ridge running straight down the middle from the head opening to the rear of the shell, where the turtle’s tail protruded. He had picked the largest shell and asked his brother to drill a hole on the right and left side of the shell, where it was the widest to protect the vulnerable skin between the turtle’s front and back feet. Bill threaded and knotted one end of a rope through the one hole, then pulled the rest of the rope across the interior of the shell and through the opposite hole so that it was taut. He cut off the excess rope and knotted it. He could then insert his left arm up through the inside of the shell so that it functioned as a shield.

His small feet danced and dodged around his imaginary enemies on the packed-down dirt of the barnyard. He held the turtle shield high to keep the sun out of his eyes, and its jagged edges cast a shadow over his face. He rarely had to use his shield as protection for his face and chest. His sword moved too fast for him to learn the names of his enemies before they died. But they knew his name. Bill imagined that his enemies called him the Turtle Warrior, and swinging the wooden sword that James had made for him, he punctured their chests and sliced their hearts in two. Bill knew that almost nothing, not even bears, bothered a snapping turtle. So, he reasoned, nothing would mess with the Turtle Warrior either.

The snapper began moving again. He grabbed the back of her shell and pulled her away from the water. There was a large stain of blood from where she had laid her head. He didn’t know why he pulled her away from the water. Whether she was in or out of the water didn’t matter. She was going to die. Without her powerful beaked jaws, she had no way of catching fish or eating carrion or any other food the river had to offer. Four firecrackers had doomed her to a slow death from starvation if they left her here. The turtle groaned again. Bill helplessly watched as she crawled toward the river.

James was baby-sitting his younger brother that June day just a week after school had let out. It was warm but not hot yet, and James had just finished his chores on their farm when his friend Terry Baker stopped by.

“Mom?” James yelled, poking his head inside the kitchen door. “I’m done with my chores. Can I go fishing with Terry at the river?”

Bill was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk. Their mother was washing dishes, and she didn’t turn around at the sound of her older son’s voice. Bill saw Terry standing behind his brother. Terry tapped James on the shoulder.

“Beer,” he mouthed silently. He grinned and raised his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.

“If,” their mother answered over her shoulder, “you take Bill with you.”

She turned around from the sink. Claire Lucas had bluish winged shadows under her brown eyes that made them appear larger. The corners of her mouth sagged, and her lips were pale except for the faded red lipstick along the lip line. She wiped her hands on the dish towel hanging from the belt of her blue housedress and stared at James. Bill didn’t want to go with his brother and Terry, but instead of protesting, he gazed absently at his mother’s onionskin hands. If he whined, she might slap him across the face in front of the big boys. The sting would go away, but the embarrassment and smell of dirty dishwater would linger for a long time. James nodded reluctantly. Bill slid off the chair and followed his brother outside.

“Come home before dinner. Do you hear me?” she yelled after them.

When they had walked a quarter of a mile down the dirt road away from the Lucas farm, James turned around and savagely shook his little brother.

“Don’t you tell Mom we’re drinking beer or we’ll hang you from a bridge again. Only this time we’ll let go.” He bent down and pushed his face into Bill’s.