The Turtle Warrior (43 page)

I stood up and put my knitting on the chair.

“We have
never
thought that.
Never.
In pain, yes. But bad, no,” I answered adamantly. I placed one hand on Bill’s forehead, to feel if it was hot. “Bill is going through a troubled time,” I said. “But not because of you.”

I reached across the bed. “Give me your cup. I’ll get us some more coffee.”

Claire spoke just as I was taking the cup from her. “I was relieved when he died. I haven’t missed him at all. I didn’t miss him when he was alive. I often thought ... but I had children,” she said defiantly as though daring me to ask what I had wondered earlier. “I’m sorry about a lot of things, but I’m not sorry about his death.”

I had always known it. But it strangely lifted my spirits to hear her say it, to know that there was some part of Claire that her husband could not beat down.

“Nor should you be,” I said.

As I walked down the stairs to get more coffee, it occurred to me that we had the easy part. We had the treasured role of an aunt and uncle or grandparents. We did not suffer the boys’ tantrums or fights, they did not mouth off to us, we were not responsible for making them do their homework, nor did we have to worry over bad report cards. We did not have the daily discipline of raising a child. We had the gift of their love and their good times. Claire had their love too, but she also had the work and the pain.

Did anyone,
I thought as I poured coffee into our cups,
love Claire without asking something from her?

We offered and Claire accepted our care of Bill.

ERNIE WOULD REMEMBER THE DAYS and nights spent sitting by Bill’s bed. The muscle spasms that rippled down Bill’s belly and legs. The intermittent gagging and crying from withdrawal although it was not nearly as bad as they had anticipated. Ernie’s hands shook as he tried to weave a plastic straw through Bill’s chapped lips and past his teeth to wet his dry mouth with a little water. When that didn’t work because Bill’s jaws were so locked together, Ernie used a mouth sponge. He parted Bill’s lips with two fingers and pressed the sponge against the clenched teeth so that some of the water trickled into the well of Bill’s gums.

Rosemary had inserted an IV line into a vein on Bill’s right arm that first night. But Bill ripped it out of his arm repeatedly during his hallucinated thrashings. They finally tied his arms to the bed, and Rosemary reinserted the line, taping it down in several places on his arm.

Ernie had to wait until the next day after the snowstorm passed to go back to the ridge and search for the guns. He had worn snow-shoes to give him better traction on the deep snow, but upon reaching the base of the ridge, he realized with horror that he had left a loaded rifle behind, and it was now buried under snow. He found the old Remington still propped against the tree, appearing as though it were a snow-covered stick. The ridge was not only snow-covered but had a glaze of ice covering it. He did not want to step on a loaded rifle. He squinted against the sun, trying to determine just where he might have put the rifle down. Then he noticed a three-foot-wide ribbon of impacted snow and about halfway down a patch that appeared to be thrashed. He walked up the ridge on the right side of the packed snow until he reached the mangled snow. He ran his hands gingerly over the spot, pressing down just enough to feel for steel. He found the butt end of the rifle first and dug around the entire rifle before lifting it up. The safety was frozen into place, and he warmed it with his bare hands until the ice melted. Then he moved the bolt back and unloaded the rifle.

He walked back down the slope with a gun in each hand, but when he reached the bottom, he turned to look back up. There wasn’t an animal that made such a distinctive mark, and he had found no footprints. It was exactly how it appeared to be. As though a child had taken out one of those newfangled sleds that looked like a large metal tray but were called saucers and enjoyed a fast and snowy ride down the slope in the night.

Four days after he’d found Bill, Ernie walked upstairs one afternoon to relieve Claire and Rosemary so that they could get a chance to eat and rest. Half an hour later, while he was wiping down Bill’s face, he heard a loud wail from outside. He dropped the washcloth and ran to the window. The two women were standing in the middle of Rosemary’s vegetable garden in snow up to their knees. His wife had her arms around Claire, holding her up. He stood for a few minutes and listened to the desolate crying. He watched as Claire began to slip, dragging Rosemary with her until both women were kneeling in the snow. He assumed it was delayed grief on Claire’s part, that she had just realized how close she had come to losing another son.

Claire saw him standing in the window. Shook her head. She did not want him to come down.

Bill wasn’t silent either. Ernie could not shut out Bill’s cries or the effect they had on him. Those memories from the war roiled up. He thought about all the men he carried on litters to the evacuation hospitals on Leyte. They cried out for their mothers or they cried to God. He remembered how difficult it was to keep the litters steady as they moved down slopes of mud in the rain. Canvas was thrown over the tops of the wounded men to protect them from the rain, but he could still hear them screaming in pain when they were jostled.

He would never forget the British officer. Red-haired and blue-eyed. Freckles the color of iron-stained soil on his face. The remainder of his body was little more than a head and torso, but he was not dead yet, and he was not unconscious.

“Look at me,” he commanded. Ernie told his buddy carrying the other end of the litter to stop. He balanced one pole on his knee and lifted back the flap on the canvas.

“Shoot me,” the officer said with such calmness. Then he added as though his mother had nudged him, “Please.”

When the tremors ceased, the three of them took turns feeding Bill spoonfuls of cream of rice cereal and Gerber’s baby food. Pureed apricots, peas and carrots, tapioca pudding.

Ernie would remember the weeks after Bill was up and moving around and eating solid food. His clothes did not fit him, and not even his jutting hipbones could hold up his jeans. Claire’s voice rose above Rosemary’s offer to buy him new clothes. It would be a waste, she said, because he would gain the weight back. And where would they find a belt but in a boy’s size, and what would they do with such a small belt afterward? So his jeans were held up with a piece of twine woven through the belt loops. Bill helped with small chores on the farm. In the afternoons they drove over to the Lucas place, to work on the chores needed to keep the place up there.

Nothing worthwhile moved in a straight line. After all, Ernie had crawled out of the muck of himself last summer, but it remained in his head as a small patch of quicksand, always threatening to take him down again. It was true of Bill’s recovery too. But that was a misnomer. Bill would never completely recover. He would learn instead to cope.

Early that spring Bill heisted Ernie’s truck and drove into town to drink at his father’s old haunt, Pete’s Bar. Ernie and Rosemary drove into town in their sedan. Rosemary waited in the car while Ernie, both angry and grateful that Bill was drunk enough that he couldn’t fight back, hauled Bill out of the bar. But it didn’t stop Bill’s mouth. Ernie clenched his teeth against invectives he hadn’t heard in a long time. Bill’s voice punched and echoed through the silence of a small-town night. Ernie considered himself fortunate that it was near midnight and only the few dedicated nightlifers were about. There was one expletive that Bill seemed particularly fond of calling him and that Ernie had to endure hearing the six miles home, with Rosemary following in the sedan.