Julius Winsome

by Gerard Donovan

  16

  A WOMAN ONCE SAID I SHOULD GET A DOG FOR COMPANY if not for hunting. She said that a man should not live alone as I did, in the woods. And we passed over lists of all God’s creatures that might keep me company and we settled on a dog, a good choice given where and how I lived.

  That was four years ago.

  We drove to the dog pound in Fort Kent because I wasn’t going to buy a dog and not a fancy one either, they take up your time and are better off in large houses and the like. When we got to the pound we walked the line of cages, the rows of paws and heads aching for a run somewhere, a bit of fresh air, barking for masters who had let them go in all manner of ways, lost them, let them out of cars at supermarkets and driven off, beat them away with sticks or starved them. And they were waiting for those masters to come back and find them, you could see them searching every face for a face they knew.

  Here, she said, and we stopped at a cage where a dog the size of my hand was pacing in a circle.

  The boy who worked there nodded sadly as if he knew this fellow’s time was soon up; the breed and his size would win no one’s heart or a home to him. He would be put to sleep.

  The boy said, He was brought in by a couple who had baby twins and couldn’t have him around the house, they were afraid. We’ve had him a week already.

  Can you take him out a second, I said.

  The boy opened the cage and hauled the brindle-colored fellow out by the neck, mostly terrier but with some pit bull about the mouth and chest. I held and bent to him, and didn’t the little bastard nip me in the nose.

  I’ll take that one, I said, pointing to him, even though he was the only one out of his cage, the only one in my hand. That’s how definite I was. We took him back home that same day. He got out of the truck and ran around the clearing, stretching his legs, busy taking possession of the place, figuring what he owned, all the space he had suddenly and out of nowhere.

  * * *

  It is true that was a happy time for me, not then so much because of the dog as the woman who asked me to find one for myself. One day a few weeks before that, she had walked out of the woods and across the clearing around the cabin, and when I came out to greet her, she told me she got lost when out for a walk on a late spring day, that her car was parked a ways off somewhere, and she said it without a trace of fear. To walk in these woods meant she was local. She pointed to the flowers, now just appearing.

  You grow flowers.

  I nodded. That I do. They keep me company out here.

  She seemed to like that response and looked down at her hands, which she had taken from her gloves. They were white and perfumed with a cream I could smell from where I stood, a light ointment most likely. I asked her if she would like a cup of tea.

  When she saw the books she opened her mouth but said nothing.

  I fiddled with the kettle, letting the water run from the tap till it was good water, eyeing the chair for papers or a book I might have left on it. The fire was hot and splintering pleasantly but the woman ignored it and passed along the shelves in trails of sunlight curled by trees and the window frame. Her fine shoes clicked on the bare floorboards.

  But there must be thousands, she finally said. Those words took a while coming out of her. Her accent had a trace of the local about it.

  Three thousand, two hundred and eighty-two, I said.

  I’ve never seen anything like this, and she smiled and clapped her hands. And you have green plants everywhere too, and those paintings. This is wonderful.

  She ran her finger along the spines of the books, feeling the imprint of the title letters. She leaned close and smelled the leather, closing her eyes. I lost sight of her when she moved beyond the H books but heard her murmur as I carried the tea out of the kitchen and found her sitting on the chair, smoothing the spider plant, the only one that could go that close to the fire.

  You sit well in that chair, I said.

  That was the first day I met Claire. She came back the day after, and some weeks later she came again, and this time the night fell in the middle of a talk and she stayed until the morning, slept beside me in the bed, and soon enough my arm was around her and she did not move away, so we grew warm together and slept, and before we did she asked me to take off my coat, that I had company. I felt her giggle beside me.

  She said I was like a straw man, a blond scarecrow with blue eyes, my feet sticking over the end of the mattress. And so tall, she said, you are seen for miles with that pale face, the whitest face and blue eyes and blond hair.

  Yes, from head to toe she measured me at six foot three, which was news to me as I had never thought too much about it, and had long since bowed my head without thinking in most doorways, though I did not cross that many except for my own. She told me I was the handsomest man she ever saw, and that was a strange thing to hear from a woman who could have been with any man, but she chose me, this lady who came out of the woods in her coat. I was happy, felt an ease that had not been mine since the days of my father. I lay beside her and thought again of what lay around me in the darkness: a life simple, the mattress on boxes, the chair with a red velvet cushion that my father used to read Shakespeare from, yes, the best piece of furniture in the house, and fine Rosenthal china for the tea, two cups and two saucers. I had much to be grateful for.

  She asked me if I missed my father and mother.

  Dead a long time ago now, I said, and that’s the truth.

  She asked me what happened, and I told her that my mother died as I passed through her body into my own breathing. She was a person I killed by being born, I said.

  You didn’t kill her, Claire said. And she’s not dead, not in your mind she said, and touched my forehead. I flinched, not used to touching.

  I liked her more for saying that. But the truth was that I did kill my own mother, the first person I ever killed, and no words can counter that. I missed seeing her alive by a minute. I often spoke to my mother at night and whispered to her, hoping that somewhere a trace of her could hear me, a touch she left on a candlestick, a breath stuck to the window glass she looked out of one morning.

  If love leaves an echo, I said, she is with me still. If not, I have nothing of her.

  * * *

  The summer sun moved the days longer and longer apart, and soon the flowers filled the view in the window with yellow and deep reds and purples. Butterflies swam along the fat grass and up into the stems, drawing their own greens and browns through the mornings. Claire came and went from her home in St. Agatha, a small French town on Long Lake, almost twenty miles east of me, where she lived near her parents. I asked her why a woman like her, in her late thirties, had not married, and I added that late thirties was still very young in a woman, because I knew the delicacy of such matters from all the books. She said that she had once had a fiancé but that it had not lasted. She watched me closely as she said this. I didn’t know why I was being inspected so closely, and I nodded.

  These things happen, I said. People come together, people part.

  She seemed to relax then, took a deep breath and added, And I think I will have a child one day.

  I saw a daughter in her eyes, I don’t know why.

  She will be happy, I said.

  She held my hand then and nodded. You are a gentle man, Julius Winsome. Then she laughed and said, Some weeks ago I went for a walk in the woods and I found a very gaunt giant living in a tiny cabin.

  * * *

  We called the dog Hobbes, from a philosopher, the first name we found when we pulled a book at random from the shelf; so the luck of a draw got Hobbes his name. It might easily have been Charles or Hugo or Stevenson or Leviathan, thankfully not the latter, with all the syllables. One Wednesday evening she brought me a dog’s nest from a shop in the town and Hobbes took to it warmly, spent many happy days curled up in it, taking more space as the weeks passed and he grew to the edges. Terriers are smart. He quickly learned the words “Walk,” “Run,” and “Ride,” the three words he kn
ew, or at least the three he let me know he knew. The sound of the truck keys also brought him bounding from the woods or scratching to get out the door. With his head out the window and a breeze in his face as we drove along the countryside, he was a dog run through with happiness, for they lead short lives and have an extra sense for each passing moment. They eat with all their hearts, they play with all their hearts, they sleep with all their hearts.

  And whenever Claire visited, he heard the sound of her truck before I did and ran between her legs and jumped up to lick her face.

  That’s why he licks you, to put his scent on you, I said.

  She said, And I thought he liked me.

  That too, I said.

  17

  IN THE SECOND MONTH OF SUMMER CLAIRE WAS arriving twice a week, sometimes when I was working the gardens of the rich around Fort Kent or at the machine shop. I never locked the door because I had Hobbes, who had grown into a friendly but punchy little pit-bull terrier, so she let herself in and read the books or, she said, sat on the porch and watched the woods or tended to the flowers. I had no telephone or television, and I think she liked the silence that the woods sheltered, even if the guinea hens cackled, and she grew fond of the rhythm that soothed away the worry she seemed to carry with her, an anxiety that came from nowhere and had nowhere to go. In the evenings we drank some tea and wine she brought from the supermarket in paper cups and I sometimes fished out the Turkish cigarettes I kept for special occasions. What I loved was the anticipation on the drive home of being with her, seeing her in the evenings, her smell, her touch that made me shiver alive like a plant, the joy when I saw her truck parked in the clearing.

  One day toward the end of summer, she didn’t come any more. I was just getting used to her and didn’t understand why she stayed away. I heard nothing for months and wondered if something had happened, so I drove to Fort Kent and looked for her. This was difficult because she never once brought me to her parents, who she said lived in St. Agatha, nor to her home or her friends. I let it go because people have their reasons and if you have to ask you already have asked one question too many. I was sure her parents were fine people who didn’t know about me or did and didn’t want anything to do with me. Anyway I finally bumped into her outside a small cafe.

  She looked sad and said, He has a house and a business.

  Who, I said.

  You know.

  No, I don’t. I had no idea what she was referring to, though it sounded like another man.

  She read my mind or my features because she said that she had been with him for some time. He lived in the town too. Maybe I was supposed to know.

  I have to look after myself too, she said.

  I said, Yes, that’s the truth, and I lost her in that second. I did not know who the other fellow was, and it felt to me as if she had indeed been seeing him all the while. And she was gone from me.

  All of this was years ago, but even now I keep an eye on the woods, sometimes the white woods, sometimes the green woods, hoping some evening she will walk out of them and back to me, and then I see that I’m only dreaming and would in any case not be able to welcome her again. She chose her life and everything in it, every stitch. Perhaps things don’t happen for a reason, they happen because people do them.

  After she told me the news, going back to being on my own was hard, and winter soon came and hardened it more.

  18

  AFTER RETURNING TO THE CABIN FROM THE INCIDENTS which had occurred in the woods earlier in the day—I mean the meeting with the two men and how they came to be resting on one another—I ate some dinner and then read Shakespeare, his word-inventions.

  When I was young my father checked the list of Elizabethan words often, making sure that I learned at least three a day. Going down the column I could see that on a certain Tuesday—I could see from the entry—on a Tuesday when I was nineteen I learned five C words, so it must have been raining outside or I may have neglected to learn any the previous day. I checked the list: cinque-pace was a dance, colour meant pretense, churl was a rude person, coil turmoil, and cog cheat. I sipped the tea and leaned back on the red cushion, enjoying the moment enough to make up sentences: “He did a cinque-pace when I shot him, the churl. The second one meant to kill me, but I cogged him of that chance by killing him.”

  I said more sentences because the day felt long to me, and repeating them brought me back to when life was simpler, no unpleasantness or confrontations. I would have shown them to my father had he been standing at my shoulder or sitting by the fire himself, puffing tobacco in his pipe. But with life’s events one must win one’s own approval. There is no one to show anything to, no one who will say well done.

  * * *

  All the following day, a sunny, cold Thursday, the kind of day favored by hunters, I remained home and listened to the shooting from far off, starting early when I was not long out of bed and making the fire and the first pot of tea, and continuing well into the afternoon as I gathered more books to the chair to read, the shots thinner and weaker because the hunters were far off. I looked out and saw Hobbes’ grave, the last of the color on the dead stalks hanging on. There was little that was beautiful about the world, I thought, and little that the world of men brings to it at the best of times. What there was, he brought to me.

  The pink petals hung raw and shook with the cold and wind. How they hung on out of season, the struggle of it, the strength it took. Not long now, and they’d be brown stains on a stalk.

  Before I went to bed, I did some more writing. The fire was low and I had to squint, and on top of that I wasn’t much of a writer indeed, but this was a time for committing words.

  19

  IT CAME TO PASS THAT ON THE THIRD DAY AFTER HOBBES’S shooting I drove into Fort Kent with a new poster spread on the seat beside me, drove cautiously late that afternoon along the dirt road, swerving slowly around the same potholes that I bumped over in my desperate drive with Hobbes. There was no hurry now, and I didn’t pick up speed until the trees to each side petered out and the sky and its clouds opened up above the paved road to the town, but as I rounded the bend at the outskirts I came onto a checkpoint, slowed down, then stopped. A policeman asked me my name and had I seen any men up my way, that some were missing. He seemed to know where I was from, because he mentioned the general area where I lived in passing, and his eyes darted around the truck while I said no, that I hadn’t seen any such men. He thanked me and waved me on, and once in the town proper I parked in my usual place behind the supermarket. Taking the new poster, I carried it to the front of the store and hammered it into the timber notice board with a hammer and nail from the barn and standing back to read the words: DOG SHOT. October 30. Reward for information. J. Winsome, Post Office Box 271.

  It was the best thing to do, because someone saw the first poster, if only the person who wrote all over it; otherwise I might have to explain one day why the first poster went up and came down the same day around the time that various incidents were alleged to have occurred, and if taking down the poster meant I knew something no one else knew, or words to that effect, whatever way lawyers talk when there’s trouble. The pity was that I no longer needed information, and if anyone had some they could hold onto it for the rest of their lives for all I cared. The second poster could rot. But let’s see who turns up.

  After buying matches, milk, tea, bread and butter, and putting them in the truck, I walked across the street and down two blocks to the diner. Sure enough, I noticed the wind stiffening, the rain harder when it fell in fitful drops, as if they held snow inside them for ballast. I was glad then of the warm blast of air as I opened the door of the diner, and of the bright lights, and of the few people who sat huddled over soup and hot beverages. The waitress was different but brought the same make of coffee to the same table I liked and said the same word, Enjoy.

  At another table, two men in lumberjack gear bent to their drinks, discussing a missing man.

  He went hunting two days ago
, no sign of him.

  Where did he go?

  We’re not sure, I heard his wife said west in the valley, maybe as far as Allagash, to the mountain woods, but Jack could have veered north on a whim and even gone across the border.

  Or down to Moosehead Lake, the other said.

  The first said, It’s got the sheriff spooked, since there’s word of another couple of men from Frenchville way missing, though they were out for a week and are late only a day or two. Still, there’s a coincidence.

  I kept an ear to what they said, kept my eyes down, finished my coffee and left some change, tipped my cap to the waitress and left. So, three men missing, one of them called Jack. Sounded like a decent man. The word had spread fast for some men gone off to the woods with guns. They must have been more local than I thought, men from the area, with families, with times they were due back home. I was sorry to hear a wife being mentioned. But that was to have been expected at some stage. You can’t get away from that once the numbers go up.

  There were lights strung above the street at the other end of town, a festival organized by the town library where children dressed as scarecrows, and the banner announced a barn dance and book sale to be held this Sunday. On the small green, a tall spreading pine tree lit the falling night. Good to have something that brought a glow to the streets up here where the dusk was so early: window candles, silver stars and such on trees, children’s eyes filled with new hours of light, what this festival promised them even in winter’s longest dark.

  As I walked back to the supermarket I saw Claire across the road at the same time as she saw me. She raised her hand in half a wave and I stopped, then she looked each way and crossed the road, and I waited outside the window of an electronics shop in the gusty wind while my insides shook. I wrapped the long coat around me to stop it flapping.