The Turtle Warrior (33 page)

The dog exhales a deep lungful of air, but his eyes stay open, luminescent in the white light. I stare at him until I realize that I have forgotten to let him out for his nightly wandering. Then it dawns on me that he has not made the slightest familiar sign of wanting to go outside.

My head suddenly clears from years of shameful and cloudy debris, and my skin prickles.

Oh, yes,
I want to say out loud.
Yes, yes, yes.

Grandma Morriseau was right about such things.

Up until now I would’ve traded Angel to have had at least one child come out of my rickety womb. I was at one of the lowest points in my life when we found Angel lying in that ditch. I believed, since the first time I saw him all shot up and spared him an early death, that I had saved him. That all my stored-up and unused maternal love and care could at least save him, a mere dog. I was determined to save him. But all the tears in the world can’t hide the truth.

If anyone was saved, it was me.

When I have given and given and danced with love until I am exhausted, when my husband has remained silent and, some days, as bitter and brittle as a winter’s day, this dog has given to me. When I have felt fragile and vulnerable, when I have wondered if Ernie would still fight for me and over me, over an aging fifty-seven-year-old farm wife instead of the slender and long-legged beauty that I once was, it is Angel who sits beside me in the cab of the truck while I sell eggs to homes on some of the worst back roads in this county; it is Angel who guards the farm and me from aggressive salesmen, from all the possible evil that people are capable of bestowing out of the blue. It is Angel who has kept me from talking to the air like Claire Lucas and whose very presence has kept to a distance the haunting ghosts of my never-born children. It is Angel who circles the perimeter of the farm at night, black and mysterious, who tastes the wind and listens for sounds that we cannot hear. And it is Angel who saw Jimmy Lucas first, and who I suspect, because I will never really know, is able to talk to Bill Lucas while Ernie and I cannot. It is this big, black, scarred-up dog lying in front of us that has for years carried a spirit that is not his own.

My husband has stopped crying but makes no move to uncoil himself from my arms. Someday I shall tell Ernie what I know. I shall tell him that it was a good thing, not a bad thing, that he saw Jimmy. That Jimmy chose him. That we cannot save anyone. That we choose to be saved ourselves.

“Love,” I shall tell my silent husband, “is never wasted.”

And I shall tell him, looking at Angel, now sleeping by the TV, that we have never been alone.

IF HE STAYED VERY STILL and gave no indication that he was awake, Bill could see through one cracked eyelid the black dog passing between the trees about ten yards away. He was not frightened, only cautious that any sudden movement would scare the dog away. He was familiar with his neighbors’ dog, had played with him when he was a boy, had seen him roaming the boundaries of his farm in the early morning, and indeed knew the dog shadowed him whenever Bill was in the woods. He was an old dog now. Even from the distance of ten yards, Bill could see the frost of age on his muzzle. The dog’s appearance gave Bill an inexplicably eerie yet familiar feeling. But he was never afraid.

Not like the night during the previous summer, when Bill had awakened halfway through his drunken slumber only to see a party of coyotes staring at him in the moonlight from the south end of the ridge, their eyes iridescent and haunting. His resting heart jerked like a cranked lawn mower, and he jumped up, shouting and waving his arms. The coyotes yipped and scattered down both sides of the ridge. Bill listened until he could no longer hear the papery sound of their paws on top of dried pine needles. When he calmed down, he realized it was only a group of yearling pups from that spring’s litter by a female that had denned successfully at the base of the ridge for several years now despite a trap-crushed leg that had healed crookedly. They were curious and not threatening.

What had frightened him so badly was the sense of
waiting
he felt when he first saw them, motionless between the trees. The same silent waiting of crows and ravens in the treetops as they watched a winter-beaten doe die after giving birth in the spring.

He had spent many nights on the ridge during the past six years. It was the only high, dry land on his family’s property that faced the deep kettle lake on the north side, rising out of the surrounding cedar swamp like the massive back of a brontosaurus long dead, and covered with red and white pines and birch.

“Search and destroy! Search and destroy!” James would cry as he chased Bill up the ridge in a mock game of war. Armed with his turtle-shell shield and wooden sword, Bill could never make it to the top with his brother chasing him. James would grab his ankles while Bill tried to keep from being pulled down the slope, releasing his sword and clawing the ground with his hands. Then his brother would run his fingers up Bill’s legs, up to his chest, and tickle Bill under his arms until the towering red and white pines echoed with the sputtering and hiccuping laughter of a little boy. That was if his brother was feeling good.

If his brother was feeling mean, he would drag Bill down the slope until Bill’s face was skinned and bleeding and his hands were raw. Breathing hard, James would crouch over him and yank the turtle shell from Bill’s right arm and steal the wooden sword out of Bill’s right hand. James would run up the slope until he reached the top. Turning around to stare down at his whimpering brother below, James would raise the turtle shell and sword and breathlessly chant a portion of the Eucharist prayer. Only James would change the possessive pronoun. “The kingdom and the power and the glory are
mine,
now and forever!”

The prayer, never meaning much to Bill in church, radiated with meaning as the God that was his brother, that looked like Elvis, shouted it from the top of the ridge. To Bill, trembling with fear and love below, the power of his brother’s deep voice caused the woods to become silent. Caused the ridge to become a mountain and the mountain to become sacred. The ridge was his brother’s, and it was where his brother would live forever.

Although Bill was a grown man now, he still clung to his childish belief. It was here on the plateau of the ridge that he slept most nights within a stand of four red pines that seeded themselves in almost perfect geometric harmony with one another, forming a natural square room. If he wasn’t sleeping, then he was drinking and finally sleeping some more. He had his brother’s shotgun, a Remington 870 Wingmaster pump, which he kept with him whenever he was in the woods, the barrel nuzzled against his cheek when he slept. It was the gun that Ernie Morriseau had given to his brother when he was twelve years old. He was not old enough to go along when his brother joyfully left their house, dressed in hunting clothes and carrying the shotgun. In his jealousy, Bill went over to the Morriseau place anyway and spent time making cookies or helping Rosemary in the kitchen.

He had a vague sense of why he always took the gun with him. Someday the pain might become so bad that he could not outdrink it. His life was going nowhere, and even the simple pleasures he had loved as a child held nothing for him. Even worse, the very thing that had kept him alive, kept his hopes up, seemed to have disappeared even at night. Bill had not dreamed since he was nine years old. When he looked in the mirror, he saw the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz.
His skin was gray, and when he pounded on his chest, it sounded hollow. All he had left was the numbness of beer and the remaining physical sensation of something
out there.

“What are you looking for?”

It was a foggy gray morning two days ago when his mother appeared, standing at the edge of the field nearest the barn and holding a kerosene lamp even though it was daylight. She startled Bill when he emerged from the cedars, wet, cold, and hung over. At first he could only stare at her, not entirely sure that she wasn’t an apparition. She worked as a receptionist for the Forest Service, but their paths coming and going on the farm rarely crossed. He knew she was there, though. His clothes were always washed and put in his drawers; there was always food cooked and ready to be eaten in the refrigerator. The house was clean.

It shocked and simultaneously amazed him that she knew exactly where he would exit from the swamp, that she had apparently waited and had not gone to work. It also made him angry.

“The sun,” he answered sarcastically, pointing up at the sky. “Haven’t seen the damn thing in days.”

Her dark eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head back slightly.

“Wally Wykowski,” she said as her son walked past her, “told me that you’re going to lose your job and that it is a shame because you do excellent work.”

Bill stopped and turned around. “Wally can fuck off.”

“Bill—” she sighed “—I wish you wouldn’t use that language. This is a small town. There aren’t many jobs. We might be forced,” she continued, waving her hand toward the house and barn, “to sell this place if you can’t earn a living and help me. You know I can’t pay the taxes on it alone.”

His head hurt so badly that he could barely hear her. He looked down at his feet but not before noticing that she was wet and shivering and had a streak of mud on her cheek.

“I never see you,” she said. “You’re never home. Do you need anything? Money?”

“I don’t need any money!”

“Look at me,” his mother commanded. She grabbed Bill’s arm. “I know,” she said tersely, “what you’re looking for. I live here, remember?” Her fingers pressed into his arm. “It’s not worth it to drink yourself to death.”

In an effort to divert her, he laughed. A fake and horsy laugh. “I told you,” he said, shaking his arm loose, “I’m looking for the sun.”

He felt a sudden urge to puke. In an attempt to quell his stomach, he stared back at his mother and realized that her hair was completely white and not its former black color and that she was stooped. He saw the misery in her face. The defeat in the way her arms hung limply. Then his stomach erupted, and he bent over, emptying into the wet grass what little liquid was left in him. Bill felt her hand cup the back of his head.

“Yes,” he heard his mother say through his spitting and coughing, “you are.”

ERNIE MORRISEAU WAS CAUTIOUSLY SCALING the barn’s gambrel roof that morning, hammering the tar-coated shingles so that they overlapped and were waterproof, when he heard the distant brassy honking of geese above him. In his haste to look up, he fumbled with his hammer and lost it. He watched it slide down across the shingles before falling to the barnyard below. He swore loudly before looking up in time to see a very small flock of Canada geese pass over him on their way south. He thought he’d counted twelve of them until Ernie noticed that something was amiss about their flight pattern, and he rapidly re-counted the flock. Eleven. There was an obvious gap in the right string of the V-shaped flock between the fourth and fifth birds. A lost bird.