The Turtle Warrior (38 page)

“No!” Bill shouted, and Ernie immediately stopped moving toward him.

“I did it! I’m the one!” Bill shouted again. He obsessively began to rub his hands over the dirty jacket covering his chest.

“Billy,” Ernie asked, confused and frustrated, “what are you talking about? What did you do?”

Bill tilted his head back to look up at the canopy of the pines while his mouth desperately tried to work the words out. Then he looked down at his neighbor’s face, and the kindness he remembered from childhood released the years of stored grief. He stumbled down the slope a few feet before falling down hard on his rear.

“It was me,” he suddenly sobbed, making no attempt to get up. “I killed my brother.”

Ernie let go a deep breath as though he had just been slugged in the stomach. He bent over slightly, resting his hands on his thighs.

“Bill,” Ernie tried to say evenly, “that’s impossible. Jimmy’s been dead for fourteen, almost fifteen years. You were only nine years old. You didn’t kill him. He died in Vietnam, remember?”

“No,” Bill cried, gulping in between breaths, “I saw him. I didn’t mean ... to shoot him. I thought it ... was the dog. I was mad‘cause he wouldn’t ... c-c-come to me.” Bill hiccuped. “Then I saw James. And he ran away from me. I kept yelling at him . . . to wait . . . but he kept runnin’. I d-d-didn’t mean to shoot him. I tripped . . . and dropped the gun ... and it went off. He was burnin’ ... and runnin’ ... and then he fell. I looked all over . . . the field ... for him. I’ve been waitin’ ... and waitin’ ... for him. I was happy,” Bill sobbed, “to see him. If I’d a known . . . it was him . . . I wouldn’a fired at him. I tried to find him. I c-c-couldn’t find him . . . anywhere. He ran away from me ... and I shot him.”

Then Bill raised his knees up and rested his forehead against his kneecaps. Ernie stared at the sobbing young man. His hands trembled, and sweat trickled down his wrists to wet his
palms. Is killing a man like killing a deer?

He’d never forget that day. Never forget the smooth handle of the spade in his hand. The dog’s howl. The sight of Jimmy standing in the middle of his field. The pain so severe in his head and chest that Ernie thought he’d die there, kneeling in the snow.

How after that it insidiously began to invade him. That creeping of muck that covered his senses and that he couldn’t put a name to for fifteen years, that gradually robbed him of the simplest joys, the simplest details. The drift of clouds over a full moon, the click of the dog’s nails on the floor, the graying of his wife’s hair, and the growing loneliness reflected in her eyes. Just when he thought he had no other option but to end the pain by swinging from his own barn rafters, Ernie trudged down the stairs one night in July and walked toward his wife sitting in the living room, his mouth open, the words of 1968 finally reaching the air. He would never forget her outstretched arms, ready to catch him as he lurched toward her. And catch him she did. In the past five months, she didn’t let him go back down, pulling him to the surface again and again, holding him when he cried. He never once saw doubt in her face over his story or a furtive glance that might have indicated that she thought he was crazy. Ernie begged her not to say a word about what he’d seen, and Rosemary did as he asked her, folding the story into herself. But he hadn’t counted on Bill.

Ernie cautiously began trudging up the slope toward Bill. When he got to within three feet, Ernie dropped to his hands and knees and crawled up next to him. He lifted and pulled Bill toward him until the young man’s head was cradled in the crook of Ernie’s left arm and his body lay across Ernie’s lap. He pulled out the gun rag from the pocket of his hunting jacket and wiped Bill’s nose, wiping again when he saw he’d left a smear of gun oil on Bill’s cheek.

“Billy,” Ernie said quietly as the young man slumped against him, “Jimmy’s been dead a long time.”

“Not to me,” Bill cried, shaking hard in Ernie’s arms.

“No,” Ernie said, gently rocking Bill back and forth. “I know he’s not dead to you. He’s probably been with you,” Ernie said, looking down the slope at his rifle lying in the snow, “all this time. Here,” he added, sweeping his free arm at the surrounding pines, “all this time.” Then he quit talking and listened to Bill’s deep sobbing punctuate the silence of the woods.

Ernie raised his head and stared at the November sky. This was the year he had begun to love autumn again. He liked the canning of fruits and vegetables and the last-minute winterizing of the house and barn. He liked the dark furrows of dirt after he plowed the fields to ready their absorption of melting snow in the spring. He loved the smell of woodsmoke from his fireplace, an ancient smell that clung to his skin and made him grateful for a warm house. He loved the stark and skeletal outline of the hardwood trees against the mottled gray skies and the intense yellowing of the tamarack needles in the swamp. He loved the increasing silence and the space it encompassed above his head, space often filled with the passing flocks of migratory birds whose voices it seemed had been with him even before he was born. He strongly believed that it was the season in which life did not die but transformed itself, flew to another part of the world, went underground, went to sleep, and in some cases throve. It was the season of the spirits and the spiritual, the season most embedded with tradition and ritual for him, the season of his father. At the age of fifty-eight, Ernie still missed both his parents, but especially his father.

Feeling Bill’s head slip from the crook of his arm, Ernie hoisted him up so the nape of Bill’s neck was resting against Ernie’s chest. He brushed the wet hair from Bill’s forehead and gazed at the small blue veins in his eyelids. The color of his skin was startling. Ernie lightly pinched Bill’s cheek. It did not redden but stayed a waxy, nearly albino white. Ernie realized with horror that he could lift the skin from Bill’s cheekbones. He had lost so much weight that the skin on his face folded in places, giving the twenty-three-year-old man the appearance of being decades older. With one hand, he methodically rubbed Bill’s cheeks to warm them. Bill was fair-skinned and did not have his brother’s olive brown complexion. Ernie remembered teasing Jimmy when he started shaving, tapping him lightly on one cheek when he noticed a nick on the boy’s face. Rubbing Bill’s cheek harder, Ernie tried to remember at what age Jimmy had first made himself known to the Morriseaus. Was it five?

He had sought them out. Ernie and Rosemary did not question his wandering over to see them until the visits became frequent. They surmised from rumor and observation that all was not well at the Lucas home. Jimmy ate fried egg sandwiches with Rosemary in the mornings and tried to help Ernie in the barn in the afternoons. By then Rosemary was calling Claire to ask if Jimmy could stay to supper. Soon it was little Bill, tagging after his brother on their neighborly visits. Ernie remained slightly gruff with them, wanting to maintain a distance from the boys, while Rosemary lavished maternal care on them. They were not his sons, and he was acutely aware that their father did not like him. Ernie in turn did not like John Lucas.

Even with the boys over at their place so much, it still came as a surprise when Claire Lucas unexpectedly phoned Ernie one August day. “Jimmy wants to hunt, and I’m exhausted from saying no. I don’t want my husband to teach him how to hunt. He doesn’t have the time,” she breathlessly added. “Would you be willing to teach him how?”

He heard her nervousness, the way her voice dwindled down after speaking from one intake of air. It had taken all of Claire Lucas’s strength to ask him. “Claire,” he mouthed silently to Rosemary, who was kneading bread dough. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. It was as though a ghost had called them, so rarely did they see Claire Lucas. He hesitated before answering, wondering if John Lucas knew of his wife’s request.

“Does he have his own gun?”

When she paused long enough for it to be an answer, he interrupted. “Don’t worry. I have a safe gun he can use and some hunting clothes.”

He lied. He did not have a gun he would trust with a twelve-year-old, and they certainly did not have hunting clothes that would fit Jimmy.

“I don’t know about this,” he commented, shaking his head after he hung up the phone. “I don’t want that drunk bastard on my doorstep yelling at me. He should be doing this. It’s his son. What if something happens? Then we’re liable.”

Rosemary stopped kneading the dough, straightening up from the table to brush a stray hair away from one eye with the back of her hand. It left a floury sash above her eye.

“Honey, you can be so dense sometimes. Why do you think the boys are over here so much? Do you really think that John Lucas cares? And for Claire to ask you . . . well, that speaks for itself. She is the other parent there,” Rosemary reminded him, “and she has asked you.”

She dropped the mound of dough into the buttered bowl and covered it with a flour sackcloth.

“We can afford to buy another gun and some hunting clothes,” she said calmly, scraping the dried dough off her palms with a thumbnail. “This will be good,” she added with a smile, “for you too.”

Whatever hesitation Ernie had felt disappeared with his wife’s response. He rose to the challenge, fueled by memories of his own father and by the sobering fact that he had no children to pass on what his father had taught to him.

The distance between them dissolved on hunting trips. They suffered through cold, rainy weather, hunkered down in a duck blind, drinking coffee, eating brownies, and laughing while waiting for rafts of mallards, wood ducks, teals, and bluebills to drop out of the sky and land on an oxbow of the Chippewa River. They hiked through stands of poplar and aspen, their faces scratched by the slap of branches and their pants covered with burrs, trying to keep up with Butter, the yellow Labrador that Ernie had then. He was an old dog but full of mischief. They never knew when that sudden explosion of feathers that was a flushed ruffed grouse would occur because Butter was a dog bent on his own wishes.

Once, when Jimmy was fourteen, the dog enraged a sow bear, having tampered with one of her cubs by chasing it. Ernie and Jimmy scrambled for the nearest big trees. Ernie instinctively put himself between Jimmy and the black bear, raising his shotgun and aiming while Jimmy climbed to safety first. They stayed up in the branches of their trees until the bear had sufficiently rebuffed the dog and retrieved her cub before running off. The dog sat under Ernie’s tree, his mouth dripping foamy saliva in what appeared to be a fool’s grin as he peered up into the branches at Ernie.

Ernie took Jimmy fishing too. They fished the Namekagon, the Brule, the Flambeau Flowage, and even Lake Superior for whitefish and steelhead. Wherever they went, people mistakenly took them for father and son. Except that Jimmy was much taller than Ernie’s five feet, nine inches. Other hunters and fishermen slapped Ernie on the back kiddingly about his height compared with his “son.” Ernie corrected them while Jimmy smiled and said nothing.

By the time he became seventeen, Jimmy had grown into a more skilled and sensitive hunter than many men three times his age. Ernie was a good teacher, and Jimmy was a good student. That, as Ernie saw it now, was his biggest mistake. Jimmy became too good with a gun, too confident that he could protect himself.

Bombs. That was one of the many obvious differences between hunting and war. There wasn’t a bullet made that could disarm a technological rock of hell. Or something so lethal that it could be tossed at you as easily as a baseball. Jimmy fought in a different war. While the bombs and artillery had gotten sleeker, and the grenades more effective in their timing, it was the reason for Jimmy’s war that was never clear to Ernie.