The Turtle Warrior (56 page)

This anger and bitterness never go away. Ernie does not feel that way about our war. He has let that one go. But this one he’ll take in his fists to his grave.

“Why did Jimmy show up that day? What did he want from me?” he asked.

I love my husband, but he is a man. Even among the best of them, he’s still dense sometimes. This world would have gone to hell in a handbasket if it hadn’t been for women. We’ve always had to interpret the signs for them.

I pulled my chair up next to his and cupped his face in my arthritic hands. “Why do you think Jimmy showed up that day? To punish you?”

His lips trembled. I knew that was it. What he carried for years.

“Did it ever occur to you that he was coming to tell you first? I think that’s why he never told you he enlisted. He knew you would try to stop him. Just like he knew his own father wanted to get rid of him bad enough to sign those papers.”

I stroked his white hair and marveled at how handsome he still was at seventy-six. But the pain. I can’t stand to see him in this pain.

“I think he wanted,” I said, “to spare you whatever outcome his decision would have. Then the worst happened. Like many sons in trouble, he needed to tell the father who would have protected him. Always remember,” I said, feeling his tears wet my hands, “that he came to
you
in your own field.”

OH, BILLY. BILLY BABOON.

Don’t fuck it up!
I wanted to scream at him that day, especially after he took a shot at the dog. It was so unlike Bill that I had trouble believing it. But I saw it, and I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. The way Bill walked, the way he held himself. As though his skin were in danger of sliding off.

I’d have given anything to be in his shoes. To be able to smell the sphagnum moss, the white pine, and the cedar in the swamp and to touch it. To chew on fresh wintergreen leaves and see wood anemone in the spring. To walk down to the Chippewa on a summer’s day and go fishing. I felt longing. Something I never thought I’d feel after I was dead. But watching my brother turn into my old man was too hard. I saw my mother’s helplessness. What could she do? Point a gun at his head and tell him to stop drinking?

I had to do something. I had to scare him. Just like the old days. I had to scare him so bad that he would turn around and run back toward his life. And not give up.

I am tired. All that is me has slowed down and is leaving. I did what I had to do. The Yards believe that their ancestors, their dead loved ones, live in the highlands, sometimes as good spirits and sometimes as bad spirits, but all of them belonging to the land. I too am that way. The Bru and the rest of the Yards will fight like hell to stay there, and they should. It is their land and their soul. Their burned and bombed soul. But someone had to stay there and make it green again.

I lost my copies of
Huckleberry Finn
and
The Man Who Killed the Deer
at Khe Sanh or they were pinched. But it was something else Twain said, that Sister Maria read to us in class. She was my favorite teacher in high school because she had such a wacky sense of humor. She read it to us, knowing that Twain poked at religion. I never forgot it.

Twain said, “I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and then not until we have been dead years and years. People,” he said, “ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

What had seemed like a bunch of fuckin’ nonsense to me at sixteen made perfect sense after I was dead.

If I have not been a good son or brother in life, then I hope that I have been a better son and brother in death. I have existed in this way for a reason that I still don’t fully understand, but the energy that is me is finally falling apart. As it should. I can drift away, unhinge myself just as we used to unhinge snapping turtles to get at the meat. This is what seems to be happening. The molecules of my being are drifting into the pines and cedars, sinking below the surface of the water. I can feel myself get carried down the Chippewa. Feel myself settle onto the skin of those people I loved and left.

In this way I will never leave them again.

In every corner of the world, on every subject under the sun, Penguin represents quality and variety—the very best in publishing today.

For complete information about books available from Penguin—including Penguin Classics, Penguin Compass, and Puffins—and how to order them, write to us at the appropriate address below. Please note that for copyright reasons the selection of books varies from country to country.

In the United States:
Please write to
Penguin Group
(USA),
P.O. Box
12289
Dept. B, Newark, New Jersey
07101-5289 or call 1-800-788-6262.

In the United Kingdom:
Please write to
Dept. EP, Penguin Books Ltd, Bath Road, Harmondsworth, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7
ODA.

In Canada:
Please write to
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3.

In Australia:
Please write to
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, P.O. Box 257, Ringwood
,
Victoria 3134.

In New Zealand:
Please write
to Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland 10.

In India:
Please write to
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Panchsheel Shopping Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017.

In the Netherlands:
Please write
to Penguin Books Netherlands bv, Postbus 3507, NL-1001 AH Amsterdam.

In Germany:
Please write
to Penguin Books Deutschland GmbH, Metzlerstrasse 26, 60594 Frankfurt am Main.

In Spain:
Please write
to Penguin Books S. A., Bravo Murillo 19, 1° B, 28015 Madrid.

In Italy:
Please write
to Penguin Italia s.r.l., Via Benedetto Croce 2, 20094 Corsico, Milano.

In France:
Please write
to Penguin France, Le Carré Wilson, 62 rue Benjamin Baillaud, 31500 Toulouse.

In Japan:
Please write
to Penguin Books Japan Ltd, Kaneko Building, 2-3-25 Koraku, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo 112.

In South Africa:
Please write
to Penguin Books South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Private Bag X14, Parkview, 2122 Johannesburg.