The Turtle Warrior (40 page)

He watched Ernie Morriseau walk down the narrow hallway until he turned the corner and was gone.

In a week he would inform the bishop of his archdiocese and then file his discharge papers from the Navy Chaplain Corps. He didn’t know what he’d do after that. It was as though the visit to the Lucas home had opened a hole in his brain and Marcus had crawled through it. He was on Hildebrandt’s mind every day, and he felt the weight of Marcus as surely as if he were carrying the man on his back. He heard the words of St. James:
“and the
prayer
of faith shall save the sick man, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him. ”

He shut his office door and sat back down at his desk. Stared out the window. He remembered being given Marcus’s dog tags so that he could wash them before they were placed back with the body and zipped into a body bag. The chain necklace draped over his hand and fingers in a familiar pattern, and he stared at it as the water washed the blood and little bits of tissue away. He stared at the rectangular metal plate with Marcus’s ID number. The tag that represented Marcus. A man’s life on a metal tag.

The bizarreness of it. He had dog tags too. He was a priest and a soldier. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Thought about it before. The military unwittingly issued necklaces with tags that represented only five of the fifteen Mysteries. Not the five Joyous or the five Glorious. But the five Sorrowful, punched into the metal by a machine and given to each man. Or, in Marcus’s case, to each boy.

Just yesterday he was on the University of Wisconsin, Madison campus and had to dodge demonstrators. The protests were growing daily. There was one sign held up not by a young student but by a middle-aged woman. He assumed, even before reading the sign, that the official military picture pasted on the tag board was her son. The sign said:

That sound of humming in his ears. Hildebrandt listened as though Private Marcus were right next to him, buzzing that familiar tune in his ears. A nursery rhyme. “Down will come baby, cradle and all.”

Ernie left Madison, knowing what he already had known but having it more or less officially confirmed. Jimmy had died a horrible death, burning until he was nothing but ash scattered across that hill. He thought nothing could hurt him as much as what he’d seen in World War II. The friends like Frank LaRue who died there. But the knowledge that it had happened to Jimmy stabbed him with a pain like no other. He drove home, hunched over the steering wheel of his truck, trying hard to breathe evenly against the information he had been told that afternoon.

“Ernie,” Rosemary had repeated to him last week, “listen to me again. At that age children think they are immortal. They do the exact opposite of what you want them to do. My mother said I was unnatural and selfish. My father said he never thought he’d see a daughter of his go to war. Your parents were very unhappy when you enlisted. And so happy when you came home alive.”

He knew Rosemary was right. There was nothing he could have done or said that would have changed Jimmy’s mind. The simple fact that Ernie and Rosemary had survived the war was encouragement enough for Jimmy to think he could do the same.

“Bill,” she reminded him, “is still alive. We could try to see him.”

Looking down at Bill, Ernie knew they had almost waited too long.

He heard Bill moan and saw more tears trail down his face. Bill looked like his father, but Ernie would not believe, could not believe that he had his father’s traits. Not the small boy he remembered. That wooden sword. The huge turtle shell encapsulating his left arm so that it looked as though he had no arm at all. The shy Oliver Twist smile of yearning and the small face pressed into the screen of their porch door at lunchtime.

He stroked Bill’s forehead and remembered something else. He used to be able to locate Bill anywhere on his place just by listening. The aria of a child’s voice in song, fading in and out.

Ernie rocked him for the next three hours until his crying died down to an occasional whimper. When Bill fell completely asleep, Ernie moved from beneath him. He gently pushed Bill off his chest onto the ground. Ernie stood up and stretched the cramped muscles in his arms and legs. He looked down the slope and saw his rifle on the ground and the old Remington leaning against the tree. He’d have to leave the rifle and the shotgun and come back for them. Squatting down, Ernie hefted Bill into his arms, amazed by the initial lightness of his tall but impoverished frame, and began the long walk home.

THE DAY STARTED OUT SUNNY and then went gray at noon. At 4:00 P.M. the light began to fade as it does in November. I was dull and slow from lack of sleep. I was staring out the window, remembering Ernie’s hands on my breasts, when I pared the skin off my left thumb while peeling potatoes. I dropped the peeler and shook my hand like a child trying to throw the stinging pain away. While I was holding my thumb under cold water from the faucet, I heard the dog whining and scratching at the back door.

Angel had been gone all night. It was a good thing he came home when he did. The minute I opened the door the wind slapped me, and I slammed the door shut after the dog was inside. The temperature was dropping. I didn’t notice the blood until the dog walked across the kitchen floor to his watering dish. He left a trail of red beads on the linoleum. I bent down and examined him while he noisily lapped up water. He shifted his weight slightly when I touched his right side. He had been peppered with birdshot, the little BBs wedged into his skin. I watched in astonishment as our dog finished drinking and then, circling nose to tail three times, dropped into a relaxed heap on his blanket. I was shocked. Someone had shot our dog.

My nursing bag was in the truck. I knew I’d have to wait until Ernie was home, to hold the dog down while I squeezed the BBs out with my smallest forceps, but I pulled my barn jacket on anyway and went outside.

The first flakes of what turned out to be a snowstorm hit me in the face, and I turned sideways to avoid the needle-pricking feel of them. It was then that I saw the remote but recognizable figure of Ernie at the far end of our field. I remember smiling, thinking that Ernie must have had a successful day because of the way he was walking. So slow. I reached into the truck and grabbed my nursing bag and started back to the house. Something made me look again. I realized there was something odd about the way Ernie was walking. His pace was so labored. I stood and waited. He was carrying something large, and I thought that was too strange to ignore. He usually came home first and got the truck to haul his tagged deer home from the edge of the field. I wondered what possessed him to carry his deer. How could he do it? Two hundred pounds of deer?

I waited. My vision became clearer as Ernie made progress across the field. That was when I cried out. I clutched the nursing bag to my chest and began to run. I had on only my household slippers. When I reached the barn, I simultaneously heard Ernie shout and fell down. My nursing bag dropped into the muddy snow, and my arms flailed like the wings of a wounded duck before I hit the ground. I pushed myself up and heard Ernie shout again.

“Go back!” he yelled. “Get ready to open the door!‘

I slipped and slid my way back to the porch, shaking my slippers free of snow when I reached the steps. My feet burned. I trotted in place to keep them from going numb while I waited. Ernie stopped every so often to shift the weight of the man in his arms. The wind picked up speed, and the snow began to fall more heavily, coming down in white sheets. I could barely see Ernie even though he had reached the barn.

Just in time,
I thought.

THAT NIGHT AND THE WEEKS that followed gave rise to our private scars and unspoken grief, some of it floating in the air of the house, some visible enough like braille on our faces and bodies so that it could be read with fingertips. Some of it spoken aloud.

I shall always remember the way Ernie had to swing sideways because Bill was so tall and how even then one of Bill’s boots caught on the tension spring of the screen door and stretched it as if it were a rubber band. I squeezed between the two men and the screen door and, with a clenched fist, hit the heel of the boot, popping the foot loose above the spring.