The Turtle Warrior (34 page)

Ernie listened as each goose intermittently sounded off, the cracked bell of their voices calling out as if to leave a trail of sound like bread crumbs for their lost member to follow. He knew the geese would maintain this space for the missing goose for the rest of their migration. As Ernie watched them, he wanted to believe too that the lost goose would find the others. But it was November, and the entire flock was unusually late in migrating. The more probable truth was that the goose was dead. Ernie continued to stare at the geese even as tears blurred his vision and the flock resembled a strand of hair floating in the distance.

He raised his arm to wipe his face on the upper part of his sleeve but stopped when a movement in his neighbor’s field caught his attention. Ernie hoisted himself up for a better look and settled his body halfway over the pinnacle of his barn roof. He knew who it was before he saw him, and he watched intently as Bill Lucas’s tall and gangly figure emerged from the corner of Ernie’s field. He watched as Bill swung one long leg and then the other over the fence into his own forty-acre field. This was the first time Ernie had seen him emerge in the morning. Usually he saw Bill at dusk. It had become a twilight ritual begun last spring, Bill walking the field and Ernie watching him.

He was mildly relieved. It had always bothered Ernie that he never saw Bill come back out, although he knew the young man was fundamentally safe in the woods and swamp. In Ernie’s mind, Bill would always be the sensitive and inquisitive boy who used to visit his farm with his older brother, Jimmy. He could not quite reconcile this image with the Bill Lucas who was a Standard station car mechanic, who still lived with his mother and was rumored to have inherited his father’s absorbency of beer. Ernie had acted on his worry only once, waiting until Bill disappeared from sight before walking across his own field in an attempt to follow Bill. He stopped when he reached the middle of his field, his stomach cramped with memorable fear and apprehension. He turned around and walked back to his barn, telling himself that to follow Bill was a terrible invasion of his privacy.

Perched on top of his own barn like a swallow, Ernie timidly raised one hand as if to wave, fanning his fingers out to let the wind pass through them. But then his chest began its slow rumble of grief. As he began to shake, Ernie quickly dropped his hand to steady himself on the barn roof.

Moments later his wife stepped out of their farmhouse to find out what had caused her husband’s swearing, only to see the silhouette of his weeping body draped over the top of the barn roof.

“It
will
get better,” his wife said later that night, both of them squeezed together in the old brown recliner like two loaves of bread. “Think of crying,” she whispered into his ear, his face burrowed into the crook of her neck, “as medicine. It feels bad now, but it will make you feel better in the long run. There is nothing wrong with crying.” Ernie felt the vibration and muffled rise of sound in his wife’s throat before it enunciated itself in his ear. She was right, but he was still appalled that at the age of fifty-eight, he should cry with the same painful urgency as a newborn with colic. It was as if the grief had stored itself up, a small lake behind his eyes that had reservoired in his chest for years, its shoreline slowly rising until it overflowed the upward barrier of bones and tissue and gravity. He rested in his wife’s arms until she gently pushed him out of the chair and guided him upstairs to bed.

The exhaustion of crying coupled with his work on the barn roof caused him to sleep deeply for only a couple of hours. He woke up feeling the pleasant warmth of Rosemary’s thigh against his own. She shifted in her sleep to lie on her side, and he aligned his body with hers, slipping one hand underneath her exposed arm so that he could caress her breasts and belly. She woke up and turned over to face him. They made love leisurely. Then he had slipped into that watery, vague state of early-morning sleep most apt to produce dreams when he thought he heard a shotgun go off. Although she never woke up, his wife stirred in her sleep as though she had heard it too. He sleepily opened his eyes just enough to see that it was two-thirty and then drifted back to sleep. When he woke up again, it was to the hammering ring of his alarm clock at five-thirty.

He sat up and shivered. It was the opening day of deer season, and although he looked forward to it, getting up in the cold darkness still took some effort. He quietly got out of bed and groped his way down the unlit staircase to the kitchen. He had stuffed most of his hunting clothes into a large plastic bag filled with cedar boughs and left the bag in a corner of the kitchen the week before. He discovered, after opening the bag, that he had forgotten to include a pair of thick wool socks and quietly felt his way up the stairs to the bedroom. He was blindly feeling through the dresser drawer when he heard the sheets rustle and the click of the bedside lamp.

“What are you looking for?” his wife asked behind him.

“My wool socks,” Ernie answered at the same moment he spied them in the far corner of the drawer. “Found ’em.”

He turned around and held up the socks as if they were trophies. His wife smiled, her long salt-and-pepper hair fanned out like a spiderweb against the pillow.

“I better get rollin’,” Ernie said, bending down to give her a kiss. She reached up and held the bottom half of his face in her hand. He patiently waited, caught by the pressure of her fingers on his cheeks. “Do you want me to stay home?”

DID I WANT HIM TO stay home? Yes and no. I contemplated his question. Looked into his dark brown eyes and stared at his cheeks and chin with its mix of black and gray stubble. My face was chapped from the stubble on his face, from hours before, when I had awakened to his hands cupping my breasts. He asked me while I could still taste him in my mouth, always that taste and smell of sweat and cedar. The first taste of him when we made love the night we met. I wanted to say, “Yes. Stay home with me. In bed.” It had been so long since we’d made love, and I felt dreamy and luxurious from his touch. Girlish.

But it was a good sign that he wanted to go hunting. This past summer I lived in daily fear that I might walk into the barn and see him hanging from the rafters. I watched him struggle to get out of bed in the mornings, unable to raise his face to a beautiful sunny day. I fought to keep from being sucked down into the eddy he had become and, at the same time, wanted to reach down and pull him out, even when he lashed out unintentionally and hurt me.

Every marriage re-forms itself over and over again with each crisis. We’ve been lucky. Most of our years were spent under fairly happy circumstances except for the lack of children and the wound that festered from it. Thinking about it now, I think it was appropriate that our breaking point would come during the season of summer. Like heat rash, every painful truth and secret in our life together surfaced under the searing light of the summer sun. One of the biggest secrets of all. None of our friends had any inkling of what we’d been through. Not just this past summer but the whole fourteen years before. If they knew, they would say that I was crazy to let Ernie go alone in the woods with a gun. If they really knew, they would say that Ernie was crazy, period.

Once he started crying, I knew he would survive. I make sure that I am never very far away. Ernie cries when he needs to, sometimes once a day. And soon he will surface completely from his tears. From what causes those tears.

I would be more worried if he hunted with other men. Thank God, Ernie prefers to hunt alone except for years ago, when he hunted with his father and his uncles and then with Jimmy Lucas. In the Morriseau family, hunting meant something very different, and it bears little resemblance to the craziness of deer season in these times: Sundays spent hunting in the morning, stopping for the noontime NFL game and several six-packs of beer, and then going back out to hunt until dark. I can’t tell you how many hunting accidents happen on Sundays.

I’ve seen the aftermath of accidental shootings because I’m a volunteer nurse and paramedic, riding with the Olina ambulance whenever a call comes through. I’ve seen shotgun blasts at close range where a deer slug makes a quarter-size tunnel through a human body. That’s to be expected with a shotgun. But rifle bullets are different, and even then there is little similarity between a .22 rifle bullet and a .30-‘06 bullet. With a high-powered .30-30 rifle and a scope, a hunter can shoot an animal at a considerable distance, sitting comfortably on top of a truck or in a deer stand. At first all you see is a clean hole in the chest of the man or boy who has been shot, but a strong clue is the large puddle of blood he is lying in. It is when I turn the body over that the devastation can be seen and smelled. A .30-’06 long-nosed rifle bullet without a full metal jacket enters the body neatly and almost pierces it with the fineness of a sewing needle. But when it exits the body, it does so with such force that it blows open a crater, splintering the spine and exposing spilled and ruptured intestines. The fresh smell of blood and bowel can make whatever you’ve eaten crawl up into your throat instantly. It is even worse when the victim has caught the bullet in the face and head. Then he is almost unrecognizable. I lost three new volunteers the year before, after they saw the shattered head of the Penter boy.

The hunter who has ill-fatedly pulled the trigger usually does not vomit or cry but stands near the dead man or boy with a lost and uncomprehending look. There is emotion on occasion, especially when it is a father who has shot his son or a brother who has shot his brother or a son who has shot his father. He falls to the ground, incoherently praying and apologizing, and has to be picked up and carried to the ambulance as well. Sometimes he just faints.

I surprised myself when I volunteered five years ago to do ambulance duty. After taking care of men or what was left of them in an Army hospital in the Philippines during the war, I didn’t think I could handle it anymore. I didn’t think I’d have the edge. But the township was having a terrible time finding volunteers. Someone has to do it. It takes practiced detachment because if they are still alive, you have to work fast and think rationally to try to save them.

Don’t get me wrong. It is never easy. I wait until later, until I can get home, and then I rant and rave at the stupidity of it before collapsing into tears.

But it is about crying.

It is those men who do not cry that are in danger and dangerous to hunt with. Those men who often drink instead of cry. It is those same men that at the last minute suddenly realize that in the haze of their hangovers it is their buddies’ heads they are staring at through the rifle’s scope and not the eight-point bucks standing just beyond them in the snarl of brush. Those are the men who shoot and kill, sometimes anything in front of them. Sometimes, I think, they pull the trigger because their rifles are raised and they don’t know how to put them down without firing them. As though once they’ve set their eyes on those beads at the end of the barrels, it is shameful not to fire. It is strange. I eventually see those same men because they have either drunk themselves to death or have pointed the barrels at themselves. And they die never knowing why.

“No, go ahead,” I answered, releasing his face. “But come home before it gets dark.”