The Turtle Warrior (24 page)

“Did you call me?” I opened my mouth to ask, but I reacted instead by stepping forward. That was when I saw the fawn. It scrambled to its feet, and I could see the fading spots on its body. The doe whistled and flagged her tail, leaping across the field in bursts with her fawn following her. She chose a section of the fence that was down so that her baby could clear it and not become entangled in wire. They both disappeared into the white cedars that bordered the swamp. I walked to where they had bedded down in the grass and knelt. With the palms of my hands, I touched the flattened grass and felt the warmth from their bodies. Rocking forward, I pressed the side of my face into the grass. Then I remembered Bill. He was alone and sleeping in the house. This time I wouldn’t forget him.

Before entering his bedroom, I went down the hallway to the bathroom. I leaned over the sink and stared into the mirror. In the artificial light, my eyes were the flat black of an ancient flint arrowhead, the same color as Jimmy’s eyes in the Polaroid picture he had sent home the month before he died.

“Soldier eyes,” Bill had said with all his TV wisdom, fingering the photo. “Like in the movies, Mom.”

My face. Wrinkles wound like ivy around my eyes. Those pink curlers that held my hair like mousetraps.

I was sick of those curlers.

“For chrissakes,” my husband had sneered a few days before, “don’t you ever take those things out?”

Yes, I thought.
I’ll take them out.

I reached into the medicine chest for a pair of barber’s scissors. After grabbing one curler and pulling it up, I cut it free from my head. One by one, curlers of my hair fell into the wastebasket until I was left with a jagged crop of hair barely an inch long and a scalp that finally breathed.

I slipped into Bill’s room and stood over his small body. It amazed me that he could sleep in pajamas and with all those blankets when it was so hot, that he could still sleep so deeply after the loss of his brother whereas my insomnia had returned. I wouldn’t realize until years later that it didn’t matter where he slept or how many blankets he had wrapped around him or whether it was hot or cold. His was a dreamless sleep, the deepest sleep of all. But as I looked down at him, he appeared as though he had had a bellyful of my milk and was gone from the world until the next feeding.

I lifted and carried him as if he were a toddler again, on one hip with an arm wrapped underneath his rump, his feet touching the middle of my calves. I scooped up the cotton blanket at the foot of his bed with my other hand.

My arms were stiff with pain by the time we reached the doe’s bed in the field. I dropped the blanket and spread it flat with my foot before easing Bill onto the ground. Then I lay down next to him. Bill had not stirred or made a sound in our journey from the house to the field. I put one hand up near his mouth and felt the warm air from his nose. I studied the way his breathing caused a small tremor in his chest every time he inhaled and exhaled. I lifted his hands and looked at each of his fingers and at the dirt underneath his nails. His palms were as calloused as his feet from climbing trees. I could tell from his long legs that he would be taller than his brother. His toes flexed and curled in his sleep.

I was brushing the hair away from Bill’s forehead when I heard a car pull into the driveway and park. I crouched over Bill and lifted my head just enough so that I could see through the grass without being seen. My husband had come home.

He staggered into the house. I prayed that he was drunk enough to fall into bed and go to sleep. But every light went on, and ten minutes later John came out of the house. He shuffled until he stood underneath the yard lamp. I could tell by the way his shoulders were hunched forward that he was squinting his eyes as though trying to see in what little natural light was left.

“Ca-laire! Bill! Where the hell are you!”

I listened to his repeated call for us. The words were slurred, but with each effort his voice rose to the boiling point I knew so well. The doe had bedded down just close enough to have full view of the comings and goings from the house and barn while staying in the dark, beyond the rim of the barn and yard lights. I could see my husband, but he could not see me.

Only last week he had shoved me against the refrigerator, his hands around my neck, choking me. “Why did you do that? I told you that would make me mad!”

Why did I do what? What had made him mad? I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. And really I had done nothing wrong. He had just come home in a bad mood, ready to burn the house down if that was what it took to make him feel better.

Bill had run outside and gathered rocks from the driveway. As if to break up a dogfight from a safe distance, Bill pelted his father with rocks, striking him in the head twice so that he would release his hold on my neck. My son’s aim was perfect. I didn’t get hit once by one of those rocks. I instinctively reached up to my neck at the memory of it. The bruises were yellowing now.

I stared at my husband. He weaved and reached out to grab the lamppost to steady himself. I opened my eyes and tried to make them as big and as dark as the doe’s, tunneling my rage and hatred through the dark and into the light. And into him.

Then something warm covered my back and traveled down my arms to my hands. There was a voice again, not from my head but from behind my left ear.

“Laugh,” it whispered. I felt a warm breath on my neck.

I hesitated. I wasn’t sure of what I heard. Then it came out of the dark again.

So I did. I laughed. It came out of my mouth in a way that my crying never did. It pierced the darkness naturally, hauntingly high like the scream of a bobcat in heat. Suddenly everything seemed funny: my husband, our marriage, life in Olina, and the craziness of my drifting days. I laughed harder, my voice dropping in pitch so that it squalled.

My husband stumbled backward from the post. “Jesus!”

I laughed again. But this time like the raven. With a deep pitch and rattle in my throat. It worked. My husband ran, tripped, fell down, and stumbled back up in his desperation to reach the car. The rumble and then roar of the engine. The tires spitting rocks.

I waited until it was quiet. Stroked Bill’s face and smiled at the fact that he had slept through it. That I had protected him and he didn’t know it. Smiled for myself. I was not crazy There was a voice out there somewhere in the field. I listened, hoping to hear him again, and turned around to see if I could glimpse him. The sun had gone down, and it was completely dark. All I heard was the rustling of grass, but I wasn’t afraid. After fifteen minutes of hearing nothing, I decided to take the first step. I sat up and held out my hand, hoping to feel that warm breath again. Then I called out, “Sweetheart. Mamma’s here.”

HE HAD TAKEN THE STEERING wheel off of the green Oliver tractor but for no other reason than to do it and to give the impression that he was working even if he had been making the same tinkering noise for twenty years. The tractor had started once during their first year on the farm, and John had driven it for a mere ten feet before the engine killed and stayed dead.

“Cracked manifold” was the diagnosis from the local snuff-chewing farm mechanic, and then he named his price for fixing it. Of course John would not pay it then just as he would not pay for it now. His older son had put it in plainer terms not long before he left for Vietnam.

“The engine’s fucked!” his son had called out from a window in the upper level of the barn. “And has been for twenty years! Besides,” his son sneered, his cigarette ash drifting to the grass below, “you wouldn’t know how to drive it anyway. Who do you think you’re foolin’?”

John Lucas stared up with hatred at his son but made no move to go after him. Nothing John did made the kid obey him, and when Jimmy got older, it became dangerous even to try. But as a young boy Jimmy was immune to his father’s punishment. It didn’t matter how many times he told the boy he was stupid or hit him with a belt, the kid just laughed. If Jimmy hadn’t been conceived so early in their marriage, John Lucas would not have considered Jimmy his because there was nothing of the Lucases in his looks except his height. He was dark like his French-Irish mother. Jimmy had her black hair and deep brown eyes, and he could tan up in the summer as brown as an Indian. John grimaced, thinking of their neighbor Ernie Morriseau.

He could hear his wife singing as she hung clothes on the line. He threw the wrench against the wheel and then settled himself down next to the hub to rest. Earlier that day he had purchased a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. A treat, he told himself, for working so hard at the mill lately. He drank straight from the bottle. Claire’s voice drifted over the top of the barn, and he shifted uncomfortably against the wheel. He had awakened that morning in a strange mood, an almost oily feeling that made his limbs feel disconnected. He slithered out of bed, and he noticed that his brain felt the same way. It slid inside his skull like kneaded but well-greased bread dough. His head grew heavier as the day went on, as though his brain were expanding. Things he had not remembered for years bubbled up, warm and yeasty. Until his wife began singing something familiar that punctured the bubbles.

“Are you sure she’s not somethin’ else,” his father had whispered, pulling John aside at his wedding reception, “besides being a mick and a frog? And,” his father added, puffing on his cigar, “a little princess?”

John was in love then, proud of his lovely and well-educated wife.

“Shut up, Pa.”

Basil Lucas blinked several times in astonishment, his broad fatback face turning red as though slapped into a hot frying pan.

“Don’t think,” he slurred, repeating what he had grown fond of saying to his tall son, “that I can’t reach up and pull you down, big-shot soldier. Height’s nothin.’ ”

“Here,” John said, grabbing a stein from a passing waiter and pushing his corpulent father down into a nearby chair, “drink another beer and sit tight for a while.”

Basil Lucas downed half his stein and stared after his son dancing with his new wife. “Height’s nothin’!” he roared, and they danced farther away from him, ignoring him. “You gotta have muscle too,” Basil muttered to himself.