The Turtle Warrior (42 page)

I had sisters and made yearly trips to visit them in Oregon, or they came to visit us. I wrote to girlfriends from the service, and we often called one another at holidays. But then I thought about my parents. My mother. The brothers that I never saw.

My mother had lived just twenty miles away in Cedar Bend, and I visited her only when I absolutely had to. It was a relief when she died. Her cruelty was in her passive acceptance of wrongs committed against us and in her failure to love her three daughters as she did her sons. She didn’t think we were as worthy as our three brothers. Her expectations of us were to stay put, get married, work like beaten horses, have a houseful of kids, and take care of her and Dad in their old age. The farm was never to be ours.

My older sister, Betty, was the first to leave. A week after she graduated from high school in 1935, she got up early one morning and dressed and left a note on the kitchen table. Her note said she’d contact us once she got settled wherever it was she was going, and she signed it “Betty.” That note was a code to Jeannie and me. Like a honky-tonk song, Betty was really saying, “I’m looking for love and someone who’ll want me.” But she did love her sisters. When we woke up that day, we saw two chocolate bars propped up against the mirror on the dresser. We cried and then ran out to the hayloft to eat our precious chocolate. I learned then that sometimes leaving is sweet.

A few years later Jeannie and I did the same thing. Left early one morning and didn’t look back.

That’s why I understood Jimmy’s decision even though it gave me grief.

I was as hell-bent to get out of Cedar Bend as he was to get out of Olina. I worked my way through nursing school and then did the unexpected. I joined the Army in ’43. I wanted to travel, and it made me feel proud to serve my country. I was going to show my mother and father that I was smarter and braver than my spoiled-rotten brothers, all of whom found a way to dodge joining up. I was initially trained for nursing in North Africa. But in the eleventh hour they sent us to the South Pacific. I worked from Guam to the Admiralty Islands and then to Leyte, becoming part of the Fifty-eighth Evacuation Hospital.

I hadn’t planned on returning to northern Wisconsin. I came back to Milwaukee, where I had gone to school, to look for a civilian nursing job. I was no longer so proud or so brave. I felt sad and hollowed out. I thought I had fallen in love with a doctor. But after the war he returned to his wife. The wife I didn’t know about. He had given me a pair of silk stockings as a good-bye gift. In my grief, I blew some money on a wickedly beautiful dress and shoes to match in San Diego. When I arrived in Milwaukee, I heard there was a VFW dance for returning veterans. So I put on my dress and shoes and went to the dance to sap over my wounds and memories. I didn’t want to meet anyone. I just wanted to get drunk. In style.

After the doctor I did not believe in fairy-tale love. I thought love was something that had to get built up over time like a house that needed constant remodeling. Lust was different. It helped ease the loneliness at night just like a good bottle of wine. A temporary bandage on the brain and a lot of fun between the legs. But when I looked at Ernie and heard his voice, a lot of what I thought I knew about myself disappeared. I just knew I had met the man I would marry. If he hadn’t asked me, I would have asked him. In those days they called it fate. Now they call it chemistry or pheromones. We fizzed and popped at first, but we’ve never gone flat. Maybe underground but not flat.

Ernie insisted that we stop in Cedar Bend first and see my parents. I didn’t want to, but Ernie felt it was only right. I think he knew what would happen.

“How could you?” my mother growled when we were alone.

I had predicted that she would shit peanuts, but it wasn’t over the dress. I had married an
Indian.
Even worse, a
local Indian.
It was bad enough growing up feeling worthless as a girl, but facing that German prejudice and arrogance after all that I’d seen and been through was the last straw. Her words bounced off me because I didn’t care what she thought. But it would be over my dead body before I’d let her hurt Ernie.

“Too late now,” I smarted off, holding up my left hand. “I thought you
might
be happy for me.”

“You girls never did have the sense God gave you!”

I marched through the kitchen to the door. “Don’t worry,” I said sarcastically, slamming the screen door on the house I’d grown up in and hated, “we won’t visit and
embarrass
you. My last name is now Morriseau, not Niedemeyer.”

Ernie drove to Olina with one hand on the wheel and the other hand wiping the tears from my face. I was afraid to meet his parents after that. After all, racism goes both ways. I was afraid they would not think me good enough for their son. How wrong I was.

You would have thought I was the one who had brought their son home alive. His mother had a face as round as the moon and copper penny eyes. When she smiled, it radiated through the darkness I felt, and she laughed right away as though Ernie had brought them a huge surprise. I towered over her, but she reached up anyway and hugged me around my waist. His father was more reserved, but when his big hands wrapped around mine, it was with such strength that I didn’t think he’d let me go.

The sweetness of having such parents. His mother gave me a lifetime of maternal love in the five years that I knew her. Even while she was dying from congestive heart failure and I was caring for her, she would rub my hands from time to time.

“The babies will come,” she whispered. “Maybe a little late like Ernie, but don’t worry. They’ll come.”

I glanced at Claire. I thought about her own mother. Did she talk to her? Did she talk to her sons?

Jimmy had pestered me to tell him stories about the war. Tagged after me with the tenacity of a badger. So I told him the funny stories and not the bad ones, although I did tell him that I’d been sick for a good six weeks when we were on Leyte. I told him how we used our helmets to wash our underwear in, to carry water in, and how the nurses even used their helmets like shovels, digging small tunnels underneath the zigzags of low-grounded barbed wire. How we would wake up with snakes on the dirt floors next to our cots and how I had to kill the first snake with one of my boots so that the other nurses would feel brave enough to do it. How once we ran out of containers to carry our rations of rice and I took off my bra, put my shirt back on, and had them fill the cups of my bra so that I could carry my rice back to the hospital. Jimmy went into giggling fits on our kitchen floor when I told him that. He was fascinated by the fact that I had gone through basic training too and could shoot a carbine rifle. That I outranked Ernie, being a lieutenant while Ernie was a corporal.

And he asked me to tell him the story of how I met Ernie over and over again. He thought it was magic that Ernie and I grew up twenty-five miles from each other, were in the Philippines at the same time, and didn’t meet until that dance in Milwaukee. He wanted to know what we wore and what we talked about. I had kept that dress and opened the closet to show him. He called it my movie star dress. When Jimmy was still small, I sometimes caught him looking into our closet and holding the hem of that dress. I even had to tell him the songs we danced to, which of course wasn’t easy. I couldn’t remember, and I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d been really drunk. So I told him some of the songs that everybody danced to then: “Jivin’ the Vibes,” “This Love of Mine,” “Take the A Train,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” I pulled out my albums and played them on the record player. Jimmy loved music.

I wondered why Jimmy craved our stories so much. Didn’t Claire tell him stories? Or was her life so painful that she could not repeat it or remember any of the good times? I knew there was a complexity to abusive marriages, that the women in them did not enjoy the suffering. Did not ask for it and often found themselves trapped before they knew it. But I often wondered: Did he ever push her too far? Far enough where Claire picked up a skillet or a hammer and tried to smash his skull in?

I took a sip from my own cup of coffee. We probably would have heard about it if she had. A man of his size would have killed her for making such an attempt. But on the off chance that she had succeeded, Ernie and I would have defended her all the way to the stake if it had come to that. Any belief I had in redemption was killed in the Philippines along with all the men whose heads I cradled as they died and the pain I saw in the people who lived there. All the Filipinos and the Chamorros, caught between two forces they wanted no part of, who came to us looking for food. They were often shot, and their women raped. Occasionally a Filipino or Chamorro woman, made a refugee because her village had been bombed, gave birth in the hospital. The baby was passed from nurse to nurse. We could not believe the smallness of its hands or the kernels of its toes. The beauty of its crying. The wounded men who were conscious called out to see the baby as well. The men stared at the baby’s face in disbelief. Birth was not in our line of work, so when it happened, it carried more than a sense of the miraculous. It was an act of opposition to what was going on around us. I’d watch the mother nurse, and it broke me to see that small face blissfully pressed into her breast.

Justice during war takes on a concrete meaning. There are no courts to make fair and judicial decisions, to prosecute the obviously guilty or safeguard the innocent. It is one thing to shoot and kill or be killed in combat. It is entirely something else if you kill and cripple innocent people caught in between. If you torture them, rape them, and keep them prisoner. If you kill children and their mothers. You do that during a time of war, and justice can be immediate. A bullet to the brain is in store for you.

I could never help thinking whenever I was called out with the ambulance during hunting season that it was a pity that John Lucas hadn’t been dispatched while hunting. It was too hard to sort out those deaths. They were almost always ruled accidents. I know almost for certain that if Jimmy had come home from Vietnam, that might well have happened.

I put my cup back on the bedside stand. “He’s going to have delirium tremors soon, and he may even have seizures,” I said. “I think he may need to be in the detox center in Cedar Bend. Do you want us to take him there in the morning?”

She put her own cup next to the heater. “I don’t think,” she said, caressing his face again, “that Bill has insurance any longer. I think he may have lost his job at the Standard station.”

She looked down at her hands, picked at the cuticles of her nails as though
she
had lost her job and were ashamed.

“The county would pay then,” I said.

“I’m not sure that would be good for Bill. For other people to know.”

I watched her turn slightly in her chair and stare out the bedroom window at the falling snow. The room was so quiet except for Ernie’s occasional snore and a moan from Bill.
For other people to know.
Always that fear of other people’s knowing her business that had prevented her from asking for help. I suffer from the sin of pride too, but I’d have taken John Lucas down with me in a fight if I’d had to and not given a crap what the community thought.

I could tell by the way she stared out the window, the way her lips pursed together, that she was working up something to say. Then she said it, and it struck me as if she had reached across the bed and slapped me.

“You always had what I wanted. A wonderful husband. A good life.”

She turned and gazed at Ernie, who was not looking his best at that moment. A bit of drool dribbled onto his shirt. I was used to other women eyeing my husband and in fleeting moments falling in love with him. Ernie was the kind of man you fell in love with within seconds. After all, I fell in love with him in the course of one night. And
what
a night that had been. He had been gorgeous and even now was still handsome. But more important, he was a good man. He is a good man. Someone who thinks deeply about his actions. At times too deeply. There is no pretense or hostility in his manners. But in being the closest one to him and his wife, I have been hurt by Ernie. Husbands and wives hurt each other in ways that others don’t see.

I was sure that Ernie saw as little of Claire as I had. It never occurred to me that Claire would desire my husband. Of course. Why wouldn’t she?

I put my hand on my chest and swallowed.

“Claire.
You
had
children. We
couldn’t
have children. Our life has not been golden. I love Ernie,” I said, nodding toward my sleeping husband, “but he’s not perfect either.”

Claire bit down on her lower lip, and I knew that it was a reflex to keep her lip from trembling. “You did have children,” she said. “You had my children. My boys loved you.”

She was right. But to hear it said stopped me in my tracks. I had never meant to hurt her. I had thought I was helping her, that the boys wandered over to our place because their mother was too busy or too much in pain. But truthfully, I did love her children. More than that, I coveted them.

“And I loved them,” I said, finding my voice. “But I was not their mother. Are you saying that I took your children away from you?”

Claire looked at me straight on then. For a few seconds the two of us just stared across the bed at each other. Despite years of abuse, she still appeared delicate and birdlike. With the contrast of her snowy hair, her brown eyes appeared darker than ever. If her hair had been a smoky gray instead of white, she would have resembled a junco.

“I would have said that years ago,” she said, trying to stay composed, “but it isn’t the truth. You didn’t even have to try. My boys wanted to come to you. I can’t blame them. I suppose,” she added, clasping her hands in her lap, “that you and Ernie think I’ve been a bad mother all these years. Even now.” She tilted her head toward Bill.