Julius Winsome

by Gerard Donovan

  * * *

  I could see that he was a big man indeed, a slab of muscle two hundred and fifty pounds, with giant hands. It was a fair while before I had managed to drag him all the way to the hollow two hundred yards off in the deeper forest, where I tipped him in, rolled him with my boot ahead of me until he was at the bottom. I lay his rifle on him and went back to the truck, driving it through the trees; it sailed easily through saplings, and when the truck and I rode into the grove of trees I wanted I jumped out. The truck continued into the dense brush and branches and on down a slope, and I followed it at a trot till it hit a tree, and I turned off the ignition and proceeded to cover it with more branches and leaves as best I could. I was on the way back to him when I remembered a magazine on the seat of the truck and went back to look: a publication called Hunt, with a huge elk on the front cover.

  I went back to the man. I needed him farther down behind the boulder, so I jammed him tight into the small dry gully, just wide enough for him, well an inch too narrow, but my boot took care of that.

  But you’re heavy, I said and sighed, wiping the sweat off my head despite the cold. This was a tiring business, this dragging and driving. He could have knocked every sense out of my head if he’d made contact with that fist of his in close quarter fighting, made short work of me indeed. I was lucky as to the shot, that it brought him down and that it stopped him from getting up.

  I think he said something before he went.

  What? I think he said, and frowned, maybe from pain or at the words I spoke. There was no country, after all, of Elizabeth, and no country for Elizabethan words. I moved the page because his head moved to one side and stayed there. It was clear then that I would not be hearing from him on the matter.

  I’m sorry, I said into the gully.

  I walked to the cabin with Hunt in my inside coat pocket. The sun shone on the other side of me, and when I went to drink more tea from the flask I could shake but a few warm drops into my mouth.

  I stood at the place where Hobbes always slept and looked at me with the flames in his eyes. His hairs were still stuck to the cushion. I missed my friend.

  11

  WITH OLD RIFLES YOU HAVE TO CLEAN THEM OR LOSE them, and the best time to clean them is when the powder is fresh in the barrel and before the fragments of the bullet jacket turn to a crust in the firing chamber. Whatever crud is in your bore can send your bullet off by a few inches, or worse, eventually backfire into your face if you’re especially careless.

  You clean it straight after.

  I laid the rifle to rest on the bench in the barn and moved the rod with the brush through the bore to clear the powder from the grooves that made the bullet twist in flight, that gave it accuracy. Then I pinned a patch dipped in bore solvent to the rod polished off the residue in the barrel, then used a dry patch. That’s it, it’s that simple.

  All that was left was to pour copper solvent mixed with some water into the chamber and wipe out the bullet fragments with a cloth. I wiped until the action shone, and I proceeded to walk the gun inside the cabin and hold it upside down over the stove to heat off the moisture, then brought the bore level to the window light and sighted along it for obvious obstructions: none. Rifle clean.

  My father taught me to clean this rifle before I learned to shoot it. On any certain morning around the first of the month I could be sure I would hear him shout from his chair with his eyes lowered to his book, Julius, did you clean the Enfield?

  I returned the rifle to the barn, as only a careless man leaves something like that, even unloaded, in a living room. And since I had placed another five rounds in the magazine I had no business storing it anywhere except in its case in the barn, having inserted the cartridges so that I would be able to fire at short notice. You don’t want to be loading that thing under fire. People won’t wait.

  12

  I COULD NOT CHOOSE A BOOK WITH THE RESTLESSNESS and wandered the shelves, in and out of the heat from the woodstove, walking along warm and cold books alike, they stood to attention with the life teeming in them. Then I remembered the list of Shakespeare words I copied out: they were on some pages shoved tight in between Othello and Richard II. I walked toward the spreading heat of the fire and pulled them, brought them to the New England chair and reviewed the list. There on the first page, in a young boy’s careful writing, I saw my three words for one day: Amort meant dead, Cullion a base fellow, Convoy an escort.

  I repeated them now, speaking low, as if afraid the words would take shape and walk off the page. And so many of them, pages and pages, hundreds of words.

  I saw the shape in my coat draped on the wall hook and pulled out the hunting magazine and perused it after stoking the fire into an orange crackle. The pages felt glossy and expensive in my hands, large photographs and advertisements for weaponry, bows and guns, boots and fatigues, Rifle Association badges, patriotic emblems, statistics on bullets, trajectories, different load weights, error rates in flight. Enough statistics to make you dizzy. A gentleman with gray hair kneeled with his gun behind a bear splayed out on a mountain. The caption: “Jake Larson harvested this very nice black bear with a 12-gauge shotgun and the Federal saboted slug load.” Articles on the hunting life, another fellow dangling two fat dead rabbits, big as two hands, at the end of a string. Next page, a deer’s head and a polished black and gold shotgun leaning against a tree trunk, with three shells fanning out from the butt: “I took this big buck at seventy yards with the Winchester saboted slug and the Browning Gold shotgun. The deer dropped where it stood and did require a finishing shot.” The deer’s eyes were open, the belly’s fur matted around the gunshot. A long essay on rifle choices for the beginner: the centerfire rifle, the pump gun, the double barrel (side-by-side or over-and-under), and the autoloader, along with prices and makes, advantages and disadvantages, types of game for each. And everywhere, photos of men in baseball caps.

  I studied the magazine in some detail, delaying at the descriptions, losing myself in the riflery and the camaraderie. A one-page announcement of the new Remington slide action, 12-gauge model 870, Special Field Edition. I read the phone numbers for the advertisements, the area codes, the small print and the policies, as I had been taught to read everything closely, even the footnotes, for therein often lay the true tale. It was obvious: there was much that could be termed passion in these men’s pursuits, a few women too. They loved their cold winter days in the field, the outing, the man and his gun in the wild, the open weather, the venture into danger. Good luck to them, I thought, for they gain excitement in the hunt, this much is obvious. And they were decked out in clothes and assisted by equipment that my grandfather or father never had going into the great battles that decided the fate of nations. I closed the magazine and slotted it between Victor Hugo’s The Retreat from Moscow and Les Miserables, since my father had also instructed me never to throw away the written word.

  13

  AT TWO-THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON ON THAT SAME day I tired of sitting in the cabin, namely because the same restlessness came back to haunt my blood, my eyes, my hands, so much so that there was nowhere I could look where restlessness was not; and moreover the manner I had of breathing above ground when my friend and companion of late lay breathless under that same ground seemed unfair and brought his loss closer, made me seek another place to spend the hours. I therefore made my way to the barn, spread a handful of dripping seed for the birds that come night would be wanting for heat and food, and sure enough they came from all sides at once, seeing as I had the habit of doing this every day, and then I took the Enfield to the woods, walking the same trail that led me to the same place, singing a song from the great war I learned when a child: “It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way from home, it’s a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest girl I know.” I sat by the same two crossed trees, saw a buck through the trees in the field.

  14

  MY GRANDFATHER JOINED THE WAR IN PROGRESS, that is to say, he joined the war when the American ar
my did, in 1917, hopped on a transport ship and crossed the Atlantic. And they gave him a good rifle, a Springfield .30 caliber. At the end of the war he made a trade with a British soldier, a man who had roamed the trenches with a Lee-Enfield for a year, picking off Germans with the Pattern 14 sniper version, chambered for .303 ammunition with a telescopic sight.

  The last time my grandfather killed a man was in the Second Battle of the Marne when he fired at German troops crossing the river. They took heavy losses, and after that, as my father explained, my grandfather never seemed to be able to hit his targets, firing wide or too high, and he proceeded to miss his way through to the end of the war. On the last day of fighting, November 11, 1918, he sat with his friends counting down the minutes to the Armistice at eleven o’clock. A British soldier left his position and approached the German lines on a reconnaissance mission. His friends called him back. The Germans waved him back, told him to wait. He did not. The Germans shot him. The war ended sixty seconds later. Everyone got out and shook hands. My grandfather traded the rifle that had lately been off target so often for the British sniper’s Enfield, called it an exchange of blood, remarking that the sniper said he had twenty-eight kills with the Enfield in almost two years.

  So it came to pass that my grandfather arrived back in Maine early in 1919 carrying a rifle he never shot that had killed twenty-eight men, and though he kept it in good condition, he never shot it at any time after the war either, because he had seen enough of that, and smelled enough cordite, he said, and the war had bred all the gunnery out of him. And when he died and my own father officially owned the rifle, he in turn never fired it, only taking it from the wooden case for cleaning every few months.

  When I was twelve he brought me out to the barn and took the rifle from its wooden case and leather wrap, brought me with him into the woods and taught me how to use it. On that day I became the first to shoot that rifle since 1918, and I had a hard time even lifting it straight, it weighed almost a pound for every year of my life. My father told me that the rifle I was holding had certainly ended the life of a number of German soldiers in the trenches, most of those officers whose wives and children received letters in small German towns and villages in the weeks that followed, letters that expressed official regret. When he told me this, the rifle seemed to get even heavier. He said that I was qualified to use the rifle when I felt mostly comfortable with a little fear mixed in. And never forget, he said, to fire from the shoulder and breathe as you pull the trigger.

  Standing in the woods with him and the rifle, barely holding it up straight, I felt mostly fear. I looked down the sights and instead of the bright woods of Maine saw the shadows of gray battle dress six hundred yards away across a mud-drenched battlefield, ghosts of men long dead still hovering in the sights. At that point the rifle was at its heaviest. I smelled powder, I thought, but my father said that the powder was long gone, the bore and action well cleaned.

  He laughed as I faltered and told me that a gun held nothing more than bullets; it took a man to hold the gun, an eye to train it on a target, and a finger to pull the trigger and set the bullet in flight. He said a gun will shoot a tin can or a president and was no more good or bad than the people who used it.

  15

  I SAT WAITING IN THE WOODS AND IGNORED THE BUCK in the field. Some time passed, not much. The man who eventually came into view moved as though from out of the trees themselves, so quietly did he walk. I saw nothing, but I heard him. I lifted my eyes only and did not stir another muscle in any part of me, and even then the seconds went by and he was still invisible, and I thought he was a part of my mind coming toward me and not in the woods. In the end, the boots gave him away: he was wearing new or recently polished boots, I heard the tiny squeak, and then I saw him, dressed in fatigues, camouflaged well against the dark brown and green undergrowth, carrying his gun in both hands, angled upward and ready for a quick shot, his index finger laid across the trigger housing like a soldier trained in warfare. This was a man who liked to stalk his prey, to walk with it, shadow it, strike in a moment like a thunderbolt. I surmised his weapon to be therefore loaded, and it looked like a slug gun, lethal up to a hundred yards, a wound mortal for sure. He was moving at ninety yards from me I gauged, and he seemed taken with the big buck now feeding in the open field, and he stared at it, head down, and lifted and brought down each leg with silence and cunning, a feat for a big man wide at the shoulders and with a neck used to carrying for a living, a construction man from appearances. Red stubble uniform on his skull. He should have been wearing an orange vest: that was careless of him.

  He lifted his shotgun in the brush and aimed, and that is when I darted from the two trees and swung the rifle to my shoulder, and breathed halfway out and squeezed the trigger. He dropped where he stood, like the forest falling down in his clothes. The buck was already half way across the field, covering yards a step, head first to the horizon, as if shot from the same gun.

  He could not have known his luck as he ran, that deer.

  I approached the man who had pitched forward onto his face and was breathing heavily, snorting against leaves and such. The bullet had found him between the shoulder blades and a foot down from the neck, and he reached for it as did the other man that morning, and to no account. There was no pulling the lead out, no undoing the havoc it spread among any soft organs going in.

  What came next? I did not feel the rush of air. I only believe I did, and that is very much a different thing.

  It was a knife on my neck but no knife when I turned and swung the rifle to my left as I heard the thunk in a tree trunk behind me. Well, well. The second of an unusual pair of hunters, wherever he was. And this one carrying a crossbow and walking parallel to his friend somewhere on the other side of the woods: he had heard and seen the shot and knew what was what and let loose upon me. I was cut at skin level. This man, however, would not make the same mistake twice and was no doubt already inserting another bolt in his weapon, strong enough to go through me if he found the mark. I brought the rifle up to my shoulder and grasped the bolt handle, dragging it back and forward to eject one round and chamber the next, hoping that the sight of a rifle pointed in his direction would get the man to stir. Move! Move! Anything to make him move.

  What he did was not to move but breathe, and I saw the wisp of breath, targeted it, and fired.

  My hand was straight away on the bolt right above the trigger and moving another round into the chamber. First came the groan, and again I saw the forest move, as this one, also in fatigues, went soft in the knees and went down on them. I walked to him then, seeing as he did not appear to have suffered a fatal wound. When I reached him he was attempting to reload as blood pumped from his right shoulder, spreading red in the fibers of the cloth.

  He watched me approach, slack-jawed, eyes drooping in some degree of pain, I could tell. They swung lazy and insouciant to his friend.

  You were unlucky in the shot, I said. That was a good shot. You had me almost, but you aimed for the thinnest part of me.

  He fumbled with the bow and I kicked it away from the tangle of his hands. There was not much meat on this one, bony enough, though he had a wiry texture to his strength no doubt, and liable to chill easily around the joints. He developed a shake about the limbs, the shock that was, and shock is worse than any wound.

  Amort, bow hunter.

  You son of a bitch, he said.

  No need for that, I said, and shot him back into the ground, smelled the cordite out of the second hole in him like a black flower.

  * * *

  I walked to the first one who had gone down and not moved since but was praying heavily or saying some fashion of words directed not at me nor himself, but at another not present with us. I slid another round into the chamber and placed the Enfield on the ground and withdrew the drawing of Hobbes from my shirt pocket, turning the man around on his back, holding the drawing to his face, observing his features directly for a reaction.

  Are you t
he shooter of my dog, this dog?

  He was saying something, but the shock took the saliva from his mouth and with it the chance to manufacture a word to say to me. Still he tried. His mouth moved in the dirt as if he were talking to the earth and not to me at all. His right eye was wet, the snot grew under his nose, I saw some purple at his kidney where the jacket was pulled up. There went his jaw again, opening and closing into the dirt, saying his secret words. Keep them to yourself, that is fine, they won’t change anything.

  But he was gone already, gone from shock, he shook his head or his head shook him, and I asked him again, asked him in truth did he shoot my dog, was he a shooter of dogs, and he sank at the neck into the leaves, and when I bent to lift him up, he was a damp red rag of a man dressed in camouflage.

  I said, You fired from hiding, but I saw you. And your convoy is a cullion.

  I thought I observed a spark in him, a puzzlement.

  Prithee, I said then, was your hiding not hidden enough? I took you, harvested you.

  I waited by him while he left and said an Ave into his ear, though he was well past hearing. With everything that had happened, the man who shot my dog was most likely dead by now, I thought, and plenty who would say what I did was wrong. And they would be right, because two out of the three were not the shooter, and those two I had killed unjustly, no question of that, especially since I was of sound mind and an otherwise principled man.

  All that remained was to clean up the forest, which entailed bringing the pair to their resting place. After a bit of thought I dragged them to the earlier man’s truck and placed them inside, across the bench seat, one on the other, head to toe for balance. They were friends, after all. After the leaves and branches were piled above the windshield, I was on the trail back to the cabin in no time, where I cleaned the rifle and laid it in its case in the barn.