The Turtle Warrior (48 page)

AFTER A LONG HOT DAY of putting new siding on the Lucas farmhouse, Bill took Ernie up to his bedroom and showed him the bed Jimmy had slept in and his own bed. He took out his shoebox of mementos, and they sat together on the bed and looked wordlessly at the Polaroid of Bill’s brother. At the leather pouch containing the fringe from the bedspread. A mud turtle’s shell. The worn leather collar from a dog Bill and Jimmy once had. The thick packet of letters sent from Vietnam.

“He never told me until the night before he left that he was leaving.”

“That’s the same night we found out,” Ernie said. “Remember you ate at our house and your dad came to pick you up?”

Bill flipped the picture over and stared at the writing on the back. “He told me that he had signed up that winter and that he never thought the day would come when he’d have to leave. That never made any sense to me. How could you sign up and not know you were going to leave?”

“I don’t know, Bill,” Ernie answered. “Your mom says she didn’t know until that night as well. I can’t figure that one out. It didn’t seem like something your brother would do. I don’t mean enlisting. I mean, not telling anyone.”

“I thought he 1-1-left,” Bill stammered, his voice cracking, “because he didn’t 1-1-like us anymore. Because we w-w-weren’t ever happy.”

Ernie pulled Bill’s head to his shoulder. “Nah, Bill. That wasn’t it.”

Ernie thought of all the trite sayings they listened to during their Monday night AA meetings. “Let go and let God” was the worst one. It made Bill squirm and Ernie bite his lips. The meetings were good in that Bill got to see other local people struggling to keep sober just as he was. But the heavy emphasis on God needled Ernie so badly one night that he thought he’d have to leave. Bill must have sensed Ernie’s irritation. He calmly asked, “What if you don’t believe in God?”

“Hey! That’s a good question. I was wonderin’ the same thing,” a brawny woman about Ernie’s age chimed in.

“Well,” one of the senior members said, not comfortably, “think of it as a higher power then.”

Bill decided to focus on “One day at a time.” Ernie thought that was a better idea too. After all, that was the unofficial creed of life in northern Wisconsin, where jobs were seasonal at best and the tourist trade fluctuated with people’s desires and pocketbooks. It could be said of farming as well with a slight modification: “One rock at a time.”

“That’s where,” Bill said, pointing to the small cemetery they always drove by on the outskirts of Cedar Bend on their way home, “the ‘Let go and let God’ people are.”

“Lucky bastards,” Ernie cracked, thinking of the dismal price of beef and whether or not he’d have enough hay for the coming winter.

Ernie gazed up at the bookshelf above Jimmy’s bed while Bill cried.
Walden Pond. The Ballad of the Sad Café. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Go Down Moses. Everything That Rises Must Converge. Catcher in the Rye.

“Hey,” he said nodding to the bookshelf, “where’s
Huckleberry Finn?
And there’s another book that’s missing. Oh, I know.
The Man Who Killed the Deer.”

“I don’t know. Those books didn’t come back with his other stuff.”

Bill got up and put the shoebox back into his dresser drawer. He sat down next to Ernie on the bed.

“I gave him those books. Have you ever read them?”

“No. James was more of a reader than I am.”

Bill was telling a white lie. Ernie remembered seeing him read books and carry books. Remembered how he had snuggled next to Rosemary as she read books aloud to him.

“That’s not true. I used to see you reading all the time.” He nudged Bill good-naturedly.

“I guess.”

“You guess? I know. You should start again. It would take your mind off things.”

Then Bill got up again and opened the closet. He took out the Marlin .30-30 rifle and handed it to Ernie.

“It used to be James’s. I don’t hunt. I think the rifle probably needs cleaning.”

HE HAD LIED TO ERNIE. Of course he used to read books. His mother had always read books and continued to read books. His brother had read voraciously. And Bill used to lose himself in books as well. He just stopped reading his senior year of high school. If Ernie had pressed him, he would have shaped and stretched the lie and told Ernie that he didn’t know why he stopped. But he did.

He couldn’t hold a book with shaking hands. He didn’t want to read when he felt numb and weightless. A book would have crashed through all that. He did try. The beer bobbing in his veins caused a throbbing in his eyes. The words appeared to skip across the page and not make any sense.

Late that August his mother and Rosemary went on a shopping trip to Madison. His mother was so excited. She waved her hand out of the open car window all the way down the Morriseau driveway. Ernie made Bill go to bed that night, saying that he would stay up for them. They came home late. Sometime in the night she must have entered his room. He woke up the next morning and saw a book on his bedside table.
Death Comes for the Archbishop.

He thanked her at breakfast and was startled when she beamed. It wasn’t until a week later, when a thunderstorm kept them all inside, that he picked up the book.

“One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine Hills, overlooking Rome....”

He read through the night.

Bill could feel the dust of the Acoma mesa. He wanted to crack piñon nuts between his teeth and stand on top of the mesa, all ten acres of it, and look at all that blue sky and the distance. The seemingly unending distance.

Huddled in his bed, Bill was only vaguely aware of the rain that slapped the window glass. The thrashing of the pine boughs in the wind. He was in Acoma. He could feel the night coming on there after a hot day and the slow gathering of the Acoma people. Their singing and chanting. How they gathered as a large family and approached the abusive priest reading his breviary. How they bound his hands and feet. He tried to imagine those small people carrying that obese man and throwing him off a cliff.

He reread that book several times. Then he moved on to the books on his brother’s shelf. Ernie gave him new copies of
Huckleberry Finn and The Man Who Killed the Deer.

He had forgotten the interior pleasure of sitting quietly and absorbing a story that lifted him effortlessly away from his own life and at the same time strangely affirmed that his own life was real to him. People shared his own feelings long ago. Books held those people whose lives were not so far from his own. Books said that life mattered in its beauty and its ugliness. His life.

“I want you,” his mother said one evening, “to go to college. I wanted Jimmy to go to college. He was smart, and so are you. College,” his mother said with a dreamy look, “is not at all like high school. It is like having the world brought to you, and you can study anything you like.”

She got up and opened one of the kitchen cupboards. Placed a jarful of money on the table. “I found this when I was cleaning out the barn. You can use this to buy your first semester of textbooks.”

He stared at the jar. So many nights when he was short of cash for beer or cheap whiskey, it never once tickled his memory. That money hidden in the corner of the barn.

“I think your dad probably hid this and forgot all about it. Funny, isn’t it?” His mother giggled. He looked up at her. She had a satisfied “I-got-him” look on her face. He had a flash of that look from long ago.
Things will get better.

Her giggle snagged him. It was a joke. A joke on him. And so funny.

“Not Dad,” he gasped, slapping the tabletop. “James. I got that money from James. I forgot all about it.”

“He sent you money?” His mother was stunned.

“Yeah. All of that,” he said, wiping his face on his shirtsleeve.

“When you were eight and nine?”

“Yeah.”

“And you kept it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good Lord!” His mother covered her mouth. She tried to hold it back with her hand, but her giggling bubbled through the crevices between her fingers.

Bill howled. “James told me not to let
Dad
use it on a beer dream!”

That did it. His mother dropped her hand from her mouth and let loose with raucous laughter. Bill slapped the table again and joined her.

A somber mood settled over them when they both were too tired to laugh anymore.

“I want you to understand something,” his mother said. It was her choice of words that once again conveyed her intent. It made him sit up and listen.

“Small towns are often like chicken coops. They don’t like or accept difference or change. If one hen is molting or is hurt and the rest of them aren’t, they will peck at that bird until she is bloody. I’ve seen hens that were molting,” his mother said, “get pecked to death.”

She ran her hands down the sides of the large jar. Rubbed it up and down as though it were a genie’s bottle.

“In a small town,” she said, “talk is like that. It can kill you if you let it. Sometimes you need to leave and finish your changing somewhere else before you can come back. Then they have nothing to say about it because they don’t know where you’ve been. That frightens them. Then they shut up.”

She pushed the jar into the center of the table and then leaned toward Bill. “Will you at least try a year of college? I think you’ll be surprised.”

He glanced at the jar of money.

“I’ll try.”