The Turtle Warrior (46 page)

He would be the talk of the woods and a presence that would cause fear in most hunters.

ERNIE WAS GONE MOST OF that day and into the night. Not because he couldn’t face Bill but because his rage was so severe he could not risk its unwarranted explosion on those he loved.

He killed time before nightfall by driving up to Lake Superior. He had taken one of his rifles with him, but after reaching the hardware store in Washburn, he realized that using bullets would be dangerous. He was about to the leave the store when he caught sight of a shelf full of baseball bats. He bought six of the cheaper wooden ones but reconsidered and went back into the store to purchase two of the more expensive heavy alloy bats. Then he drove on to Bay-field, where he bought a whitefish sandwich and thick-cut potato fries from a lakefront restaurant. Sitting on one of the docks, he ate his food and watched the ferry cross back and forth from the main-land to Madeline Island.

It was midnight when he reached Olina again and parked by the cemetery on the edge of town, shaded by very old and lofty elms. He gathered the bats under one arm and, using a tiny flashlight from the truck’s glove compartment, walked through the newer section of the cemetery.

The headstone was as clean and polished as the day it had been set into the ground. An expensive gray granite. He had to give Claire credit, though. The only words chiseled on it were the name. No date of birth or date of death. No terms of endearment. Still, it galled him. The money spent for a meaningless piece of stone. Money that Bill and Claire needed. And the harshest joke of all, John Lucas was buried in an area of ground known as the Sacred Heart Cemetery.

He picked up one of the wooden bats and raised it above his head. He listened for a moment, to make sure that he was alone. Then he brought the bat down and struck the headstone. It splintered after the third strike, and he tossed the handle aside. He picked up another bat, and then another, beating the headstone until they broke.

It was the metal alloy bats that did the most damage, and he regretted not purchasing more of them. He stepped sideways and thought of what he’d seen the night before. The maimed genitals. The humiliation and agony on Bill’s face. He swung so that the tip of the bat smashed into the chiseled name. He shut his eyes against the chips and wedges of granite that flew with each strike. When the first alloy bat was so severely dented that it was useless, he picked up the second alloy and last bat. Exhaustion stopped him before he had destroyed the last bat. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and he felt something heavier trickle down his chin. He had bitten his lip.

He stood for a while until his breathing was steadier. Squatting down, he gathered up as much of the splintered wood as he could and the two alloy bats, and headed back to the truck. He took the long way home and stopped to dump the remains of the wooden bats into the Chippewa, where they would secretly float away.

He hid the alloy bats in the far corner of the hayloft in his barn before going into the house and taking a shower. Then he crawled into bed next to Rosemary and fell asleep.

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?”

We were in bed talking in the dark. It was two nights after Ernie found out. I had rubbed ointment into the bloody split on his lip.

“Because,” I answered, feeling fragile myself and near tears, “I was afraid of what it would do to you.”

I wasn’t happy either. I resented being the one who knew, who had to tell. It reminded me of writing letters for dying soldiers. Putting their last words to their families on paper in my penmanship. I was sick of being the body through which bad news had to pass. It wasn’t entirely true, though. Ernie had been the one who had had to tell Claire about Jimmy and then about John.

But there was another reason I hadn’t told Ernie. A very good one. Bill did not tell me or give me permission. I stumbled on it while he was unconscious. I had no right to speak of it until Bill did. That’s what Ernie had to know.

“Bill had to tell you,” I whispered into his neck. “Not me.”

But I did tell Claire. Or rather I showed her. That fourth day while Bill was still drifting in and out of consciousness. We were sitting across from each other, in our same chairs, listening to Bill’s breathing. I stopped knitting.

“Claire,” I said, standing up, “I have to show you something.”

I slowly rolled the blankets down. Unsnapped the top of Bill’s pajama bottoms and tugged them down his legs. She stared at his bared hips.

“What is that?” She reached forward and touched one of the red marks with a fingertip.

“Those are burn scars. I think, from a cigarette.”

She cupped his penis in her hand for a moment.

“I didn’t ... I didn’t ...
know,”
she said in a small voice. “Bill would never let me see him naked. I don’t remember when he got funny that way about it. He would never wear shorts,” she continued in a daze, “even on the hottest days.”

I heard Ernie rustling around in the kitchen downstairs. I pulled Bill’s pajama bottoms back up and covered him once again with the blankets.

“C’mon,” I said, “let’s go for a walk. We need some fresh air.”

Claire stumbled going down the stairs, and I caught her by the arm. I had to put her coat and boots on. Her mittens. Then I dragged her outside with me. When we waded through the snow to the garden, she fell against me, and I caught her again. Her lips opened, and her teeth bit down into the fabric of my coat. I felt the sound in my shoulder before I heard it. That intense wail of a mother in pain. She began to slip from my arms, and I didn’t have the strength to hold her up. So we went down on our knees.

It was almost as I feared. When I saw the small article in the
Olina
Herald
about the vandalism of John Lucas’s grave, I knew exactly who had done it. The headstone was severely chipped and cracked down the middle. The front was smashed so that John’s name was obliterated from the stone. Sheriff Meyer was quoted as saying that he thought it was someone that John had owed money to years ago but that he didn’t have any leads.

I went through the motions of the day Ernie smashed John’s headstone, smiling like an idiot as though nothing were happening and making lunch and dinner. Talking to Bill, who was severely hung over. Bill asked me where Ernie had gone, and I lied, saying he had gone to look at a used tractor for sale near Rice Lake. I had no idea what Ernie was up to that day or where he was, but I knew what had happened the night before. The dog’s barking woke me up. I watched from our bedroom window and bit my knuckles, wondering if Bill and Ernie would fight some more and whether I should go down there to break it up. I couldn’t have predicted what happened next. But it made sense. How do you explain something like that? Bill could not say what was done to him. He had to show Ernie.

I was grateful that John Lucas was already dead. I know Ernie would have killed him. I don’t know how—hanging him from a rope, beating him, and then maybe shooting him—but he would have killed him. And I would have lost Ernie for doing what was only right, what was just. Still, killing John Lucas wouldn’t have relieved Ernie or erased the physical remnants of what had been done to the most consecrated part of a little boy.

Claire said nothing to us about the wrecked headstone. But she told the priest that she would not pay for another one.

Ernie had trouble getting out of bed again, and he had that dead fish look about him for a while. But he did get up. He had to. Bill was with us, and that was a blessing. Sometimes you can do the impossible for another person when you cannot do it for yourself.

While Ernie spent time with Bill, I spent time with Claire. We walked our field and her field countless times, wading through snow and then through the mud of spring. I had lived in this area all my life and on the Morriseau farm for nearly forty years. But I never took the time just to amble through it. I let Claire lead us on the walk, and it was always the same. She could name all the birds, knew what plants grew on the edge of the fields and why some of the cedars grew in their twisted way. Claire wordlessly showed me how walking the same route over and over again had a meditative effect. How she had survived those years of loneliness and pain by putting her feet on the ground and moving forward. It hit me that walking in a circle means you never come to a dead end. You just keep walking the circle over and over until whatever it was or is that bothered you slows down or becomes unwound. And then, maybe, drifts away.

I finally understood why she had stayed after her husband’s death and had not returned to her hometown of Milwaukee. It was never his home. It was hers.

THEIR HOUSEHOLD THAT WINTER, SPRING, and summer of 1983 became one in which three people resided at the Morriseau place with a fourth, Claire, drifting between the two farmhouses, staying some nights with Rosemary, Ernie, and Bill. Rosemary had a short bout with her own polluted memories. They drifted up through her sleep and caused her to kick the covers off the bed. One night, before he realized what was happening, she had pushed Ernie off the bed with such force that he hit his head on the bedside table before landing on the floor. Then there was Bill’s constant flood of nightmares. One of them, both of them, and sometimes all three of them found themselves running into Bill’s bedroom when they heard him crying loudly in his sleep.

A week after he smashed the headstone, Ernie borrowed a six-bladed plow meant for cutting deep furrows and began the hard work of unearthing what amounted to liquid grenades left by John Lucas in the field. He wired a wooden box behind the seat of the tractor. Whenever he unearthed a bottle or the blades sliced into and smashed a bottle, Ernie stopped the tractor and let it idle while he picked up the bottle or the pieces of glass and put them into the wooden box. If there were any contents in a bottle, he used a glass cutter to slice off the rusted top and drained it into the soil. Only half of the field was pockmarked with booze, and for that he was grateful. Most of the bottles containing less than 80-proof alcohol had shattered. But that half was so loaded with buried forts of shattered bottles and then some bottles that were miraculously intact that Ernie filled six empty oil drums with bottles and glass.