The Turtle Warrior (22 page)

“Jimmy! He’s gonna kill me!” she screamed through the door while Bill hunched down in the corner by the toilet. He peed involuntarily, and it pooled underneath his butt cheeks, soaking his pajama bottoms.

His brother was sixteen then but nearly full grown at six feet three. He stood at the top of the stairs and watched as their father attempted to climb the steps. Bill held his breath, and even his mother became silent, pressing her head against the door. They could hear his brother’s voice through the door. It was his deadliest voice. Even and quiet.

“Better stop right there. Or I’ll beat the shit outta you if you come up here,” his brother said. “And you know I can do it.”

They heard John Lucas stumble back down the steps. Listened as he groped through the unlit kitchen for the back porch door, opening and slamming it with such force that the tremors shook the beams up in the bathroom.

Bill’s mother pulled him out of the corner and picked him up by the waist like a sackful of chicken feed. She carried him out of the bathroom and into her bedroom. She dropped him before standing in front of the window but kept one clenched and trembling hand wound in the fabric of Bill’s pajama top, pulling his small chest out at a painful angle. Bill watched as she rested her forehead against the glass and began weeping.

“Mamma.”

As if recognizing him for the first time, she turned from the window and in a burst of sudden anger viciously shook him.

“What were you doing out of bed? Huh?”

She grabbed his hair in her fist and pulled his head back so that his trembling face was exposed.

“I wanted-d a glass of water-r-r-r,” he stuttered, his chest heaving between hiccups.

She slapped his face and shoved him toward the door. “Go to bed now! And quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Bill stumbled out of the room and into the hallway, where he fell into his brother’s arms. His brother lifted him and carried him into their bedroom. He remembered James stripping him of his wet pajama bottoms before tucking him into bed. Remembered the feel of cold sheets against his wet butt. He watched as his brother reached into their closet and pulled out his Marlin .30-30 rifle with a scope mounted on top. He reached into the closet again and pulled a box of bullets from the top shelf. Bill watched as James knocked the lever up and opened the chamber. He listened as his brother loaded the rifle with seven long-nosed bullets. He would never forget that peculiar clink as they fell into place in the gun’s chamber.

“Where are you going?”

“Shsh. Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

His brother carried the rifle with the barrel pointed to the floor, cautiously opened the door, and vanished from the room. Bill later learned that James, perched on the lid of the woodbox, sat up for the rest of the night near the back porch door.

After his brother left, Bill did his best to protect her. When his father’s wood-nicked hands began to strike his mother, Bill ran in between them, slapping and kicking his old man into chasing him around the house and away from her. With his father thundering up the stairs behind him, Bill would dash into his room, lock the door, and push a chair against it. Then he would wrap his brother’s bedspread around him, even covering his head with it to muffle his father’s yelling and pounding on the door. The bedspread would protect him even if his father managed to break down the door. Bill wrapped himself around and around into a cotton cocoon. Even if his father did break down the door, he would not be able to find a beginning or end to yank his son out of his protective shroud. Bill didn’t even think his father would try. The bedspread’s whiteness glowed. His drunken father would be frightened of such an ethereal illumination, the way people long ago had been frightened by the paleness of the moon.

IT WAS TEMPTING TO KEEP Bill home from school, to ease the intensity of those days and break the jags of crying. It was my motherly sense of doing what was right for Bill even though I could not participate in it myself. I forced my son back into the outside world. On weekends I looked out the living room window and watched Bill play by himself, building snow forts. Sometimes he just sat on the snowbanks and stared at some destination beyond the house.

Our neighbor Rosemary Morriseau called several times, inviting us both over for dinner. She repeatedly offered help, but I declined. Jimmy had spent so much time over at the Morriseaus’ that it hurt me. He admired Rosemary Morriseau in a way that I could not compete with. He did not see my short experience as a teacher as comparable to her experiences as a wartime nurse. Bill had begun to spend time over there as well, as though I didn’t exist and was not his mother. I insisted he stay at home. I would not lose another son in that way. But there was a deeper motive in my not keeping contact with Ernie and Rosemary Morriseau. I wanted to keep at bay the questions I could not answer, did not want to talk about the voices I thought I heard and talked back to. I did not want Rosemary, a sharp and intuitive woman, to read what I suspected was true.

I was not just going crazy.
I was crazy.

LIKE AN ANNUAL APRIL FOOL’S day joke, the first gnats of the season came out in black clouds. Bill could not play outside without being tormented by them. Black and small. Biting. Always biting. He spent a day or so swiping them with his hands, blowing them out of his nose before resigning himself to them as he did every year. He ignored them as they tried to crawl into his eyes and crowded together in the wells of his ears, biting and then dying in clumps. Bill was so overjoyed with the early miraculous warmth of spring that tolerating the bugs was made easier in the late orange light. He stole one of his mother’s gossamerlike hairnets that she used to hold her hair in place before going somewhere, covered his face with it, and pinned it to his short hair with a few of her black bobby pins. In this way he could walk through the woods and swamp with some protection as the fine netting shielded his mouth, nose, and eyes.

On April 4 he joyfully jumped from the school bus and ran toward the house to change into play clothes for another evening outside. He was out of breath by the time he reached the kitchen and so did not hear her at first. He was halfway up the stairs when he became aware of the radio’s drone and of her weeping somewhere downstairs. He found her in the living room, lying on the davenport. The radio on the end table produced mostly static. He could discern a faint voice, could tell it was the afternoon news, but the static was so bad that he turned the radio off.

“Mamma,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

She pushed herself up just enough to rest on one elbow. He saw the ribbing from the brown davenport cushions imprinted on her face.

“Dr. King has been shot.”

The pressure from her crying raised the blue veins in her forehead. Not knowing what else to do, Bill wedged his butt between his mother’s legs and the edge of the davenport and patted her shoulder. He sat with her for an hour, listening to her deep sobs, feeling them as they racked her chest and tunneled up through her shoulder into his hand. He stared out of the window at the bird feeder, at the warm and sun-filled yard beyond the bird feeder, the deep green pine boughs dusted with the incandescent light of a falling sun. He could dimly understand the significance of what had happened, but Dr. King was not related to them. He could not understand his mother’s intense reaction.

When she became too exhausted to cry any longer, he nudged and prodded her into sitting up and finally into standing. He wrapped one arm around her waist and helped her climb the stairs. He maneuvered her until she was in front of the bed, and then he gently pushed her until she sat down. He pulled off her house slippers and tucked her under the blankets. He ran back downstairs, made toast, and heated up a can of chicken soup with mushy noodles. He put the bowl of soup and toast on a tray that was meant for the luxury of eating in bed but had never been used for that. He gingerly carried the tray upstairs. She swallowed the spoonfuls he offered her. Chewed on the pieces of bread that Bill broke apart and fed to her in bits as though she were a pigeon. When she would eat no more, he took the tray back to the kitchen. Climbed the stairs again. This time he wet a clean washcloth with cold water and wiped his mother’s face, holding it against her swollen eyelids. Af ter she gradually fell asleep, Bill got up from the bed and stood in front of the bedroom window. He stared at the setting sun behind the barn.

Bill spent the next few weeks getting up an hour earlier than what was normal for him. He dressed and then slipped into her bedroom to shake her awake. Every morning he cajoled her out of bed, pushed her pink bedroom slippers onto her feet, and guided her downstairs ,to the kitchen. She sat while Bill made toast and oatmeal and coffee. That was when he learned to make coffee, to drink coffee, and to love coffee. His mother drank her coffee black but appeared not even to smell its presence until he pressed the edge of the cup against her lips to make her drink. He poured coffee into his cup halfway, filling the rest of the cup with evaporated milk. The milk became less and less of a component until he was drinking his coffee black as well. Bill made sandwiches at night, taping notes to the refrigerator so that she would eat them while he was at school.

By the middle of May she could get up by herself in the mornings although she still relied on Bill at night. He washed her hair as she bent over the bathroom sink, rinsing it and then toweling it dry. She sat on the toilet seat, holding a jar of Dippity-Do in her lap while Bill combed and parted her hair into thin sections. He held each section with one hand while dipping the tips of his fingers from his other hand into the jar of green gel. He smeared it onto the section of hair to be rolled around the pink sponge curlers his mother always used. When he was finished and her hair was wound into neat pink rows on her head, he tied on the blue hairnet that would hold them in place while she slept. Then Bill helped his mother into bed and talked to her until she fell asleep.