The Turtle Warrior (7 page)

Some of the pine stumps were six feet in diameter. They shocked me as much as if I had witnessed an execution, and my recollection of French history suddenly became vivid. The stumpy remains of the white pine resembled the eighteenth-century illustrations of men and women after their heads had been sliced off by the guillotine. The bloody, pulpy necks. The sap had oozed up just as blood would have and had covered the stumps’ surfaces. Much of it was no longer sticky but hard and brown and on its way to becoming amber.

The Hausherrs were in their seventies, and their sorrow at leaving was visible. Their children wanted them to come to Milwaukee because they were tired of making the long trip back and forth to make sure their parents were all right. I thought it was ironic that we were trading directions. They were going south for an easier life, and we supposedly were headed north for an easier life.

While Emil Hausherr talked to John, Anna Hausherr showed me the house and surrounding yard. “There is new plumbing!” she proudly announced.

“Oh. When did you have the plumbing replaced?”

“Replaced? We never had plumbing before that!”

She guided me to the porch, and we looked out of the window. That was when I noticed the tall and narrow shack not far from the chicken coop.

“Two years ago we were still using the outhouse. Or—” she joked, her hooded eyes crinkling—“the
Schmidt
house, as Emil calls it after we saw a cartoon in the
Milwaukee Journal.
It had Santa and all the reindeer perched on top of an outhouse and Santa was saying, ‘Rudolph! I said the Schmidt house. Not the shit house!’ We laughed pretty hard over that one. You see, our neighbors to the south are the Schmidts. We never did get along with them.” She gestured with her head toward the south.

“You should keep it,” she added, “in case of emergencies. I’m still not sure about that plumbing ... our kids chipped in and had it done for us, but I didn’t mind using the outhouse.”

She was proud of her house, but it was when she showed me her garden that her voice caught and she covered her mouth from time to time.

“There is rocks,” she said. “Always rocks. I think they grow here. Every year I had to rake out more rocks, and the children, when they were younger, hated picking rock. But I could grow good lettuce and tomatoes and good, good potatoes. Flowers too. Zinnias, marigold, some daisies. Imogene Morriseau showed me how to use a cold frame to get them started early. Her husband, Claude, showed Emil how to do maple syruping.”

When we went back inside the house, she took me downstairs into the basement to show me the housewarming gift she had left for us: rows and rows of canned vegetables, pickles, maple syrup, and berries. The jars glistened like jewels even under the dull light of a single bulb. Dark blueberries, ruby-colored beets, and the green of pickled cucumbers.

“Oh, my,” I said, overwhelmed and thinking of my mother’s advice never to take food from people I didn’t know, “don’t you want to take these with you? Your husband will want them and your children too.”

“Ach!”
she exclaimed. “My children only like store-bought food. It is good food,” she said as though reading my mind. She smiled proudly. “I have a cabinet shelf full of ribbons from the county fair for my canned goods.”

I knew she had many children—nine, I think—and so I wondered why none of them wanted the farm.

“Well, we did have a son,” she said haltingly, “who wanted the farm. Our youngest boy, Joseph. He was my late-in-life baby, and he loved this place. But he enlisted and went to France. He died there.”

“I’m sorry.”

We stood in the basement for a long time in silence. Then she grabbed my hand and led me back upstairs and out of the house. She must have sensed my nervousness and my fear of so much wildness.

“It will come to you. You’ll see.” She patted my cheek. “Your children will love it, and so will you.”

She turned away slightly and watched John as he talked to her husband in the driveway.

“Your husband,” she commented dryly, “does he know much about farming?”

I remembered her hands, so calloused and thick from hard work. Her legs were wrapped in Ace bandages to help ease the pressure from varicose veins. Her face was ruddy and full of little wrinkles that folded her skin inward. The blue plates of her eyes underneath the cowl of skin that draped over them. The look on her face when she spoke of her youngest son. She had probably said good-bye to her son on the very porch steps I was sitting on.

Does a house come with pain?
I wondered, thinking of the way Anna Hausherr patted my face and looked at me so kindly as if to give me bread for a long journey.

I drank the rest of my coffee. I knew I would have to take a nap. I had not slept the night before, and I felt as tight as a bowstring ever since seeing Jimmy board the bus. My head hurt, and I heard a buzzing noise.

I thought of John’s smile. That malevolent look on his face. I was so angry I thought I could almost smell the smoke from the invisible lightning that had struck me a half an hour before. I could not believe what my husband had said.

I felt something snap.

EVER SINCE HIS BROTHER LEFT for Vietnam, Bill had the same dream. Only it wasn’t as much a dream so much as it was a sensation. It beat across the insides of his eyelids, and he could see the slits of sunlight as the white feathers expanded to soar on a current of air. He was underneath, but he couldn’t see anything except the feathers. The wind whistled in his ears, and the feathers flapped against the bright yellow sunlight. He was being carried, but Bill could not see where, and he could not turn his head because it was held in a viselike, even painful grip. While he was listening intently to the melodious whistling, it became shrill, and he was suddenly dropped. His arms beat frantically against the wind, but they were useless. He heard the sound of his own voice, but it did not say what he had intended, what would have been natural. It did not say “Mamma!” or “Help!” It said:

“Billy!”

His mother’s voice cut through his fall.

“Here,” she said, shaking his shoulder. He strained to open his eyes, recognizing that it was still night. He could see the outline of his mother but not the details of her face. She was waving something white in front of him.

“From your brother,” she said before dropping it on the covers and disappearing from his room. He pulled an arm out from underneath the covers and groped for the white thing. A letter. Still shaking from his dream, Bill crawled out of bed and onto the floor to the night-light by the closet. He sleepily crossed his legs and ripped the top of the letter open with his thumb. Then he held the seemingly fragile paper under the dim yellow light to read.

Bill looked down at the two twenty-dollar bills that had slipped out and fallen to the floor while he read the letter. He picked them up and stared at them. He lifted his head, still in the trance of so much money for an eight-year-old boy, and gazed at the twin bed across from him. James. Bill’s mother always called his brother “Jimmy,” as did their neighbors and the rest of the community, but Bill, looking at his brother’s empty bed, had always called him “James.” Like James Dean, another one of his brother’s idols besides Elvis. Or Saint James, although his brother was anything but a saint before he left. There was the good and the bad James, but the letters Bill had gotten so far seemed full of the good James.

He crawled back to the bed, hefted the mattress up, and slipped the letter underneath with the other letters his brother had sent. This was the first time James had sent money, though. He folded the bills in half and tucked them under his pillow. Tomorrow before school he’d have to think about where in the barn to hide the money and the letters. He climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up next to his chin. Feeling the coldness of the sheets at the spooky end of the bed, he bent his legs and curled his toes. Since James had left, he worried even more about the safety of his feet so close to where
something
could reach up from underneath the bed and grab them. And no one, not his mother in her few hours of peace, or his father in his Pabst-saturated slumber, would hear him like James.

He turned on his side so he could look again at his brother’s bed, covered with a white crocheted spread and untouched now for five months. He thought about the letters lying underneath him and the ghostly way his mother always brought these letters to him in his sleep. As though they didn’t exist in the daytime. As though his brother didn’t exist except at night, a black inky voice on white paper.

The wind whispered through the pine boughs outside his window. He slowly dropped off to sleep again and waited for the feathers.

The next morning he crept out of the house early, clutching a large blue mason jar in his arms and the letters and money stuffed inside his shirt. It was late October, and he’d forgotten his jacket in his desperation to get to the barn and back before his parents woke up. By the time he reached the creaky old barn door, he was shaking violently from the freezing morning whip of fall temperatures. He put the money and the letters in the jar and buried it deep in a corner of the barn where he knew the loose hay would be untouched by his father. After peeking out of the barn door to check for signs of life and seeing none, he streaked across the barnyard and slipped back into the house.