Near Fort Kent she slowed past a parked police car and mentioned how isolated we all were up here, even in the town, how important her family was to her and the comfort it brought. I nodded and changed my position on the seat. At the supermarket I was ready to go in when she blurted out that she had been seeing someone recently, but not now, because she needed time to think.
I said nothing as I had not been asked anything, but I should have noted the way she tried to fit a long history into a short trip, how she shared details such as that so easily with a stranger. She brought me back with the groceries as the sun touched the ground and the woods closed in like a zip around us to where the lane narrowed.
You should come again if you’d like, I said, and I glanced a little toward her. It was the way I was then, saying the things a somewhat lonely man will say.
Maybe, she said. Maybe I will.
I walked off into the woods with the brown bag and felt my way by the odd star and a certain amount of memory, stars and memory then, until an hour or so later from the woods I saw the black shape of the barn blot out some of those stars and knew I was home.
* * *
I remember thinking as I walked back home that a loss brought her to me, this sudden woman out of the trees, someone she said goodbye to. It made sense, how a lack of something can shake you free of the present and wonder what else there is to be found in life. I admired how she was able to do it, but then the present has the persistence of weeds: it returns every day with the same smell and the same shape and yet you keep expecting something new. Was she expecting that new with me, I wondered.
Now of course I could see the evidence of the seed she had planted: after a brief reference to my school days, she mentioned a man she left behind, knowing that the mind forgets nothing, especially what is left unsaid, and that she could return to the subject of the school later when it would echo against the first reference and seem to make better sense.
I was closing in on her deceit. I placed the rifle inside my coat to keep it warm.
24
ANOTHER TIME SHE SAID THAT SHE KEPT THINKING OF me eating alone, the silence in the house, how the dark nights must affect me. Yes, they did line up in winter, but this was summer and I thought that come the darker months things might be different for me. Then she mentioned I should get myself a dog. I sat in the chair and looked out the window for a minute.
I said, It’s been twenty years and probably time for someone else to be living in the house.
You make me laugh when you talk like that, she said.
It was not something I would have done without her: we drove within the hour to the Fort Kent animal shelter in the truck, and I wondered if she minded anyone seeing her with me. She didn’t care. The shelter was on the outskirts of town and it was early in the morning. We walked the line of cages. The expressions on the dogs’ faces made each one hard to pass. We came to a cage where a small brown terrier was wrapped in sleep but whose eyes flickered open when my shadow crossed them. It straightened up.
That’s a dangerous breed, she said.
No, I said, mostly terrier, look at the body. And young.
He had so much spirit and so little time. I agreed to the terms of care and took a leash out of my pocket, from a dog my father once had, I said, and though he cowered at first we walked out with the small fellow pulling me along after I had pulled him, as if to say, I’ve been waiting, let’s go.
I’m sorry I suggested anything, she said. Now when I come I will be facing a pit bull.
We drove back with him between us on the bench seat. Dogs know their fates intimately, and sitting between us in the bench seat of the truck—with me smoking a cigarette out the open window given the occasion—and with the winding roads, this one knew his life had just changed and he was grabbing every moment of it with every glance. When I picked up my mail earlier at the post office I threw it on the seat. Now a bunch of it slid around like so much water and he hopped around the pile between us. I told him I would avoid the letters too. We called him Hobbes.
How quickly successful her plan was.
Dogs have one bond in them, and Hobbes let me know that he had chosen me in ways easily missed: how he came up a few minutes after eating and nuzzled his nose on my leg, as if to say he’d eaten the food. I was of no use to anyone as a father, perhaps that is why I saw the little fellow as the next blessing in line, his need to be cared for, with nothing to give in return but his company.
As for references to my days at school, there was nothing I ever did there apart from turning up and going home, though there was one thing: one day in my final year I did notice a group of boys huddled under a tree during the lunch break. They had a stick and were rattling it in around the leaves. I walked closer and saw a cat trapped on the branch. Now they pelted it with stones: one hit it in the head and drew a line of blood down the ear and mouth. The cat tried to play with the stick in case that would make them like it better, that’s what I thought it was trying to do, whatever way the fright was working on its mind. Then it squeezed itself into a ball out of terror and fell, and they were on it, stepping and kicking. I ran the field and then their heads with punches until they spread out. The matter was over as soon as it began, which was just as well as they could have made short work of me had they fought in a unit. One of them had blood on his mouth, another limped holding his knee and saying that I would be sorry, that he had a real father and mother.
The principal was upset that no one noticed anything in a school with so many windows. That is likely what her sister described. Perhaps the local boys turned into men and they were all confederates now so many years after the fact, the settling of an old score in a remote place that manages that kind of thing so well.
I have long believed that the grave is the end of us, and if I did not think so, I might have allowed the killing of Hobbes to pass and allow it some significance in a larger story. But he was a stone, he was stiller than a stone because even a stone moves eventually, kicked by a boot or moved by the weather or a tire, and he was lying packed in clay twenty feet from the cabin, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, tasting nothing, nothing stored in him. That twenty feet might as well have been the universe, it made no difference to him or to me. And he was dead evidently because of some pique, a stored offense over as many years.
I was not going to let that pass.
25
IF CLAIRE HAD A PLAN FOR MY UNDOING, SHE WAS slow and careful in its execution.
Once I was late at the repair shop and when I got home saw the steam and the flicker of candlelight in the bathroom beside the kitchen: she must have poured herself a bath in the antique tub. I had pots in there too with rubber plants and large daisies and beige tile underneath. Within the minute I heard a voice reading poetry and then calling my name, the water may have cooled and I carried some more that had boiled in a large pan on a towel to the door. She was reading a poet from France, I recognized the lines, the rhythms she captured without effort, because the French in her understood the cadences.
I heard her voice: Why don’t you pour the hot water into the tub.
It was a voice without a body that drifted through the steam. When I stepped forward, a book emerged from the mist in her hand.
Bring yourself in too, if you want, she said.
I stood inside the door and she asked me to turn the pages for her, an old hardcover, with poems on one side and drawings in thin orange pencil scattered through the pages. I knelt and read in the candles from different poems as she lay in the foam. This poet was killed in the Great War, I said, and there were many in the book who died in that conflict, some known, some not, the words collected from boxes and envelopes, from lonely wives and anguished brothers. She grew still in the hot water surrounded by plants and the perfume of the soap and listened to those voices out of time.
I rested my hand on the edge and wondered if she saw the old English in my face the way I saw the old French in hers, and if such differences mattered. I tho
ught that if she touched me I would disappear too like those vanished men who brought such differences with them into hell.
She said she was tired, asked if she could stay a while.
My bedroom was small and white and the bed-covers were orange and yellow. The mattress leaned over the edge of the wooden frame that lay close to the floor and had a dip in it where I lay every night. She said she could tell I had not had any visitors in a while, and perhaps she wondered if anyone had ever slept in that bed but me. The sheets were clean and whiffed of lavender soap. I had boxes stacked by the walls and a gramophone balanced on three of them over a length of cut carpet, plugged into an outlet shared by the small lamp on another box by the bed. It was my bedroom from the start. My father slept in the room opposite, what was now occupied by shelves and books. We lay together and she slipped the towel off and moved the shirt from my chest.
That night, as in a few other summer nights to come, we warmed each other under the covers, though in the very early hours she rose and went outside to the stove and the chair with the red cushion. I thought I heard her cry, but it may have been the night. I knew what drew her to that chair: you sat in it and wanted to think, you wanted to read something with the whiff of pipe smoke but not from any one thing: even when I held the cushion to my face, the phantom of the pipe produced my father generally about me.
* * *
If Claire had a plan for my undoing, she did not stick to it. The following evening she held my hands and placed a small book into them, one I had not seen before, poems by John Donne. On the preface page she had written some lines.
All that silence waves across you, Julius, like the long grass.
You make me feel like a poet.
I was surprised to find myself the subject of such fine words and did not know what to say. She stroked my hands and leaned closer, her whispers soft in the firelight:
You never say how you feel, but I feel affection everywhere in you. Maybe that’s what matters, do you think?
If solitude could be measured I suppose it might have been in the way I was happy to see her despite being happy anyway. Now I was more than happy, nothing that I had a word for, to have all this company in my life all of a sudden. She felt to me like those first drops of rain that make you wait in the doorstep with your coat above your head, wondering if this is a small cloud or something longer. In response to her question I simply nodded, because I didn’t know what to say. Being given something was new and I hadn’t the natural words for the thanks I meant. Her hands slipped away.
With Claire lying beside me that night I heard a fox and plenty of coyotes howling in groups across the fields, and closer to the house the guineas in the trees flapped up into little rows; the roosters babbled in sudden fright at a creature creeping through the undergrowth where they perched, sometimes a scream of pain and fright, something leaped on in the night. The walls sparked and creaked, most of which must have been the wood contracting in the cooler temperatures, but other noises too, things moving, or Hobbes, I wasn’t sure.
In the morning I woke with his face in mine: she must have left early for the town.
Love, or words of tenderness and affection, yes, she had spoken them to me, and I think now that I was meant to respond in kind: yet I was not used to it, how saying a word meant that the feeling was any less or more when it was given a name, but I should have said enough to let her know that I was thankful for her company, that I missed her when she was not about, and if that was love, then we would be fine. Claire never again said something in order to discover what I might say back, or what might be offered in return. I should have known that people can sometimes come close enough to discover that they are strangers.
After that night, she visited less and stayed shorter. The absence of someone comes like a new season, first only in pieces: you see the absence in them long before they leave. In Claire it started with long glances and silence and arrived fully only after she was gone.
26
THAT DAY WE WENT PICKING BLACKBERRIES ALONG the sloping meadows and wild flowers near Eagle Lake—we made a trip of it with Hobbes in the truck. If there is only one field in the world, it must surely be found in Maine, a hay-green slope to a blue lake that I knew since a boy: I ran down it and threw a hawthorn stick from England that my grandfather brought back, and Hobbes didn’t swim after it. We watched it float away.
Well that’s that, I said.
Claire lay on the grass and drew him in pencil and charcoal. I tipped a bottle of ale sideways for a drink, felt the sun easy on my face, felt that I was happy. That’s it, she soon said, and handed me the drawing: just one glance told me the same as a long stare, that she had captured the living dog and his character, matched him to the whisker. I put the page on the grass without a word, and afterwards stored it behind the seat for safety.
We drove in the afternoon to the west end of the valley until the road ran out at the Allagash wilderness. I parked at the side of a small store by the bridge in front of a large field with fifteen or twenty rusted cars and buses, some from the forties and fifties, clumps of grass showing from the partially open hoods. I left Hobbes in the truck and we walked until I turned and saw that he was a silent waterfall of barking glued to the glass. He noticed what we had not yet seen, what was even now watching us. When we were about to step onto the porch two white wolves jumped down from a bus window and trotted toward us, wolves, the farthest things from men, from any leash that stretches around a property or from a hand.
They moved easily into a run and the crystal blue eyes took up more of their bodies as they covered more ground, a younger one and an older one. I told Claire they were pets, not to worry, though I wasn’t sure yet. See, they were slowing down and their tales wagged. When they reached us Claire seemed afraid even though they ignored her and took no actions that indicated they knew she was even there. She shrank back to the truck. One carried a stick in its mouth, a husky and wolf mix, afraid of nothing. They lay on two front seats torn out of a van and placed side by side on the porch facing the road. I rubbed their ears and moved inside: a man came out of a side room on a walking stick wearing a war veteran shirt, and when he heard what I asked for, kindly made me a fresh cup of coffee, and then we talked in the shadows for a while.
Through the door, as I tried the new coffee, I watched her stare at the sleeping wolves, a stare with absence sown into it, and I decided to keep the card I bought from him, what I had meant to press into her hand to ease the worry I felt in her, a card of a Furbish’s Lousewort that grows on both banks of the Saint John River, nowhere else. Above it I had written three letters with the fountain pen:
You.
After that day she did not return.
* * *
In the months following I often drove through Fort Kent and saw the smoke winding up from chimneys like ropes attached to the sky, as if the houses hung from them, and I glanced at the windows with their amber lights and imagined what was happening inside, the evening sweaters taken from storage and shaken, the heated wine poured into glasses as the sun grew gold on the trees, the conversation—what it was like, going on late in the year, to be with another person. It took me a long time to understand that she could never have wanted the life I had.
27
THE PRESENTATION OF EVIDENCE WAS OVER, AND THE only one I could find guilty was me: guilty of having brought the accused to it. Now on this first November night of winter I found myself standing inside the circle of trees at such a late hour, holding my midnight court. More geese flew south, long lines in the dark flying low over the trees, scraping them with their peals, scorching the low cloud with their instinct, and still louder as they crossed directly above, fanning the arrow out wide from the tip, streaking through the night sky like broken glass. I should fly with them. This cold.
It was as clear to me as the direction of the geese that Claire could not be the one who did this murder. She may have been careless with men’s hearts, but surely she was not cruel. To
night I should have gone straight back to bed, should have switched off the lamp of memory and remembered nothing. Perhaps I wanted to bring her near to me once more, feel for another hour what I had then.
If the culprit came from that time, there had to be someone else, perhaps the one she left behind, a silent man upset at being abandoned. I searched through the weeks I spent with her, looked for a trace of him, something I may have not noticed.
Somewhere I had not looked.
28
I SAW HIM.
I closed my eyes in the clearing and remembered one evening during the time I was seeing Claire: I was driving home alone when the mist was draped around the church steeple on the other side of the river and was heaviest on the river itself. The lights of a car in New Brunswick driving the other way shone on the silver yarn of the street. The road was sparsely traveled in these conditions. A mile out of town my rear window lit up with the lights of another car. I veered off the road and waited in the shoulder with my engine running and an eye on the mirror trying to see through the mess of the swirling fog on a long road. The car did not pass. Another few miles down the road to the cabin I thought I saw weak headlights again sift in and out of the mist. I drove to the corner and then to the treeline and parked, turned off the lights and waited to see if anyone went by, rolling down the window and looking back in case I missed anything. After thirty seconds a car went by with its lights low, shrouded in fog that peeled off it. I continued up to the cabin until Hobbes bounded down the lane to meet me a hundred yards from the cabin, his eyes shining in the headlights, then the white crest and his tail. He knew the sound of the engine and was the cabin’s little alarm clock, had stirred himself into a bark when he heard the truck.
Julius Winsome Page 6
