The Turtle Warrior by Mary Relindes Ellis

Author:Mary Relindes Ellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-29T18:29:41.906000+00:00

I stared out the window long after Bill was gone. I considered it a blessing that Bill was drunk in the hope that it might cause him to cry. He had never cried over his brother’s disappearance, so sure that he was alive. That was the worry that weighed me down over the past eight years.

If drinking caused him to cry, then it would also relieve me of that ugly and shameful part of my history that I thought was over but that loomed in front of me like a necessary ghost. Necessary because I would repeat that history if I had to, to make my son cry. I would hit him as I did years ago when he was a little boy and didn’t deserve to be shaken like a rag doll or have his hair pulled until his small head was wrenched back, all because Bill had, maybe, spilled a glass of milk.

What child, I thought bitterly, wouldn’t spill milk, wouldn’t shit in his pants or wet the bed, wouldn’t act out in a household where threats hung in the air like wet laundry until fists pulled them down?

I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheets up despite the heat. I always cried after I hit Bill, cried when I heard his terrified sobs, cried because my little boy had done nothing wrong except exist to be a receptor of a long line of pain. And I cried too because I felt almost powerless to stop it. When Jimmy left, the truth finally locked my fists to my sides and found its way out of my mouth. I walked away, talking aloud to myself and the invisible whoever and whatever inhabited the space around me.

Bill had always been an introspective child. A different child. Unlike his brother, who could be verbally picked at and teased into a rage, Bill remained quiet and nearly impenetrable to verbal taunts. After Jimmy left, my husband tried the same humiliating tactics on our younger son. He pulled out those medals and dangled them off his fingertips when he was drunk, most often during a meal, and proceeded to tell stories I knew were lies. Bill calmly ate his food heedless and undeterred by the nearly indecipherable words of his father. When he did look at his father, it was with a momentary lift of his eyebrows and brief detached interest. Sometimes Bill looked at John with puzzlement, but most often he noticed him with an “oh there you are” attitude. Eventually my husband would give up, his lips pursed with confusion, his eyebrows wrinkled with thwarted anger. John was unable to determine whether Bill was spurning him or mocking him or simply didn’t care or was too stupid to react. Knowing my husband, I watched him wordlessly reach the conclusion that Bill was too daft to understand the concept of the medals or what they stood for. What they meant to becoming a man, to being a man. What they meant to John.

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