Julius Winsome

by Gerard Donovan

  A very light snow from the cloudy part of the sky brushed the air and swept the parking area as a truck drove in with antlers attached. Two men got out and walked in, thick arms, caps down to cigarettes without smoke. They eased into their table and made their orders with a nod. Snatches of their talk drifted through the clang of cutlery and the orders, the coughing and sneezing, the drone of the television up on the wall unit:

  I bagged a big buck and had him strapped to the back in under fifteen minutes.

  Yeah? I took this one black bear that came at me and moved off again like it knew. I opened up with the Winchester, dropped it like a sack.

  Some of the locals, they’re harvesting a lot of bears up there on the border.

  Then their voices dropped and they leaned together. I had to turn my head to hear the whispering above the clank of dishes:

  No, don’t know what’s happened either. No sign of him these past three days. And then the other two. I tell you this, something’s wrong. Men don’t go off missing in groups without sight nor sound.

  One of them lit his cigarette and saw me staring at him and I looked up to the television where on the screen a rifle was superimposed over a red question mark.

  And now, reporting from Fort Kent: three missing hunters and two families in a desperate limbo. What has happened in the North Woods? Where have these men disappeared to?

  Three photographs popped up on the screen. Yes, there they were, and up last the bow hunter, the skinny one. The reporter said that two of them were family men from Frenchville, whom I knew to be the two recent friends now lying in the truck in the woods, and the first in the shooting order lived in Fort Kent. Two had children but not the skinny, who was not married. I felt my heart drop at the children item. The little fellows, no father now; there was no need for that, and why in heaven’s name would a man need to go hunting when he had a child at home? And why go hunting and near my cabin? Why shoot a dog or associate with a dog shooter? That’s what happens when you do that kind of thing, isn’t it just. Harvest, that hunting term, it sounded more like what you do with crops and didn’t seem all that bad a thing to do, which is what I was doing anyway. Get them where they don’t expect, isn’t that what hunting is all about, the art of the hunt? You hide and let them have it if they have it coming.

  You should all have been more careful. I said to the crossbow man, You came to shoot in the woods, but the woods shot back.

  I wanted to feel sympathy, but sympathy was driving ahead of me and I’d be behind it in a few minutes, as soon as I finished the sandwich cradled in my hands, which were shaking. My hands never shook, even when I was nervous. A state trooper car pulled up outside as I munched.

  Two troopers got out and came in and went up to the counter, their revolvers shooting a stripe down the side of the trousers, and they opened not a newspaper but a map, the county it looked like, with some circles drawn. They didn’t have to ask, the waitress put coffee in front of them, and they looked up as the television news item on the missing hunters continued.

  I went to the bathroom and saw as I passed them a circle on the map around McLean Mountain and the Back Settlement south of St. Francis, on the river, a few hundred yards from the border. A fifty-square mile circle at first glance, and three arrows coming at it from different directions. They were triangulating.

  Fair enough, that was to be expected. But as I washed my hands in the soap and cold water I realized I would have to be more careful if there were ever any confrontation again, mighty careful, otherwise those arrows might take a better aim and finally point to the cabin and in the window from every direction. But then my present journey might help aim them the wrong way. I paid my check and said good morning to the officers, who smiled a greeting back.

  I got in the truck and drove away with a fresh cup of coffee to go. Hot tea was good for a gentle, steady, reliable life, the broad arc of the afternoon, that sort of thing, and I brought some for later, but for ten minutes that followed, I needed the coffee to surge my blood awake and keep me alert for locations. A car with skis on the roof rack passed me, going in the opposite direction. People dressed in yellow coats and hats, even in the car. They were that eager to hit the slopes, and it was cold, getting colder. I wondered why I chose St. Agatha instead of the woods around my house, where Hobbes was shot and my reasons for taking action were more defensible: I knew it had nothing to do with Claire being from there, and anyway, she lived in Fort Kent now it seemed. I was not driving into St. Agatha with a rifle looking for Claire.

  34

  I ARRIVED IN ST. AGATHA AT ONE-THIRTY IN THE afternoon and made a left for the east side of the lake south of town, the wilder part, and parked off the road, and with the rifle slung and the book under my coat and the thermos in my right pocket I walked to the nearest tree with a tree stand on it, one that bordered a field and offered an excellent field of fire. The woods were sparse here, more potato fields than trees, but bird and deer hunters would no doubt be active here, and possibly that fellow who was commentating on the poster.

  Wouldn’t be long now, not on a day like this, with the blue breaking out all over the sky and deer tracks peppering the woods. I leaned the rifle on the railing and opened the book of sonnets and poured a mouthful of Earl Grey onto my tongue—nothing like that first bite of sun on your face in the cold weather. But I had other matters on my mind, drawings and lines of statistics, ordinance and such.

  A book I once read said that war snipers in northern climates wore white for camouflage. This was a detail I remembered before leaving the cabin this morning, when I wrapped the barrel of the Lee Enfield in a white blanket to keep it warm and the gun invisible against the snowy bark of the tree. That’s why when I was up in the tree I also covered myself partly with the same blanket, the eyes cut out so I could see. From a distance the stand would appear unoccupied.

  I took the Aldis telescopic sight from the leather carrying case and attached it to the mount. The curious thing about many of the telescopic sights used with the Enflields in World War One was that they were attached left of the bore, forcing the shooter to aim with his left eye or move his cheek off the stock to sight with the right, losing the tight wedge against the rifle necessary for a steady aim.

  I swept the field, moving the range drum on the sight, and saw how the sight seemed to gather the available light and create a luminous halo around objects. Now to make a range card, the way my father taught me, to help me judge distance before a shot and allow for elevation and bullet drop. I set an index card against my knee and drew expanding circles radiating from my position, four circles, each representing a distance of one hundred yards. Then I marked a tree that stood approximately half way between the first and second circle and added a simple drawing of the electricity pole that stood twenty yards on my side of the third circle.

  With that done, I threw a piece of the card in the air and watched it fall to get a sense for wind speed, the windage, though you can never tell with gusts, and today was a day for sudden blows, but on this day they would all blow from left to right.

  Some live their lives in preparation. A time comes when what’s left to do is wait.

  I sat still and rested my eyes as much as I could. If a time came when I had to aim, the eyes can quickly tire and must be rested. After a short while, an hour at most, I observed a shape walk with a rifle slung over the shoulder, skirting the line of the woods across the field, a distance of four hundred and fifty yards. I brought the rifle up and sighted him.

  In 1914 the Germans discovered that the best place to aim at a human body was the teeth, a miss six inches up or down still gives you a mortal shot; and if aiming for the area between the head and waist, you have two feet down by one foot across to hit and should try for the middle.

  The man moved out of the tree line and into the field. I took my gloves off and bunched them against the stock and leaned my cheek against them to wedge the gun into my shoulder. I closed my left eye and opened my right in the sight,
found him, zeroed up half an inch for distance and made a best guess for wind, aiming off a bit to the left, and took a deep breath, letting it out and pulling the trigger, and the man in the sights stopped and spun half way around and fell on his back.

  I kept an eye on the shape that was now lying in the field.

  The biggest mistake a sniper makes, and usually the last, is to check on his shot, to get up and stare, to come to the window, the ledge. The novice can’t resist looking out the window or peeking above the wall to confirm a kill. Which is what the other side wants, because they have a number of rifles pointed at that window or that wall and will wait for two or three hours for the split second when the face appears up for a view, and that half second is all they need to shoot a bullet into that face. So after the report died away into the white wasteland I froze and kept the rifle parallel for a full five minutes, using my knee as support and opening my right eye occasionally to check on the shape in the snow. Most of those five minutes I sat with my eyes closed, bunched up on the stand.

  The shape did not pick itself up and walk away, and from every side came nothing but silence and wind brushing snow along the tops of the trees. The least I could do was approach and ask about Hobbes, so I packed up and walked across the field, past the tree and the pole. It was a long way to the man declined in the snow. After a hundred yards I noted that he was lying by a pool, after two hundred a red pool, and after three hundred a red pool from his head. At four hundred yards from the tree where I sat and aimed the shot, I stood beside him, the drawing of Hobbes in my hand, but there would be no questions today. If this were the shooter of a dog, he brought that to his grave. He had spun out of his left boot when shot, but how I could not figure, unless he had not laced it up properly.

  I pulled his license out of his wallet: he was local, one of them alright, the Fort Kent crowd spreading out after me. That was good then, to bring them farther out here, the wrong way. And everywhere now I sensed them closing in. I dragged him inside the treeline and flopped him down scooped some dead leaves and branches over him. At the edge of the woods was best, with all the brush and tangled brush. He would be okay here. I noticed a car drive by, then another, and thought it best not to stay in the area. I could depend on most people not noticing what was immediately in front of them, but you never know. There’s always one.

  At the last moment I said anyway: Did you shoot my dog? Do you know I shot you? The shot caught you unawares, you declined like the others, and that’s your blood disponging.

  Then I said, Did you write on that poster? Was that your hand?

  He said nothing, at least the bits of him I could see through the dressing of undergrowth I put across his body, so I wasn’t entirely addressing him then. If he were the writer, he was not going to write anything again: if I put up a new poster and it wasn’t written on, I might have got my man. If he were in Fort Kent to write on a poster, then he might as easily have gone anywhere hunting, including around the cabin. It was advisable for that reason to have spread the net like this to catch him. And he came with a fancy rifle, a Browning Gold model, very expensive, very clean, polished like a boudoir mirror, one of those guns from the magazine. He must have read the advertisements too.

  Possibly it was the caliber that knocked his boot off, or him out of it.

  My father once sat me in front of him, a .303 cartridge held in his hand to the light, long as a finger it was, and it looked as if he had six fingers, I said.

  This is not a finger, Julius, he said. It spins through the rifle bore and travels at over 2,500 feet a second. It penetrates the bones and veins and muscle like wet cucumber. Some Germans we shot in Holland at a hundred yards, we found them later cracked and broken, as a good part of the body sometimes won’t stay intact against one of these.

  You mean this bullet blows people up, I said.

  That is essentially what it does, he said.

  * * *

  On the drive back from St. Agatha I saw more police cars at one end of Fort Kent’s main street stopping drivers, asking questions, searching trunks, but only those leaving town. I parked behind the supermarket, close to three o’clock, put the weapon and other items behind the seat, and tacked the new poster on the wall in the usual place using a blue nail someone left sticking in the noticeboard, this time a 4x5 inch index card, the same size as my range card: DOG SHOT, Information to J. Winsome, P.O. Box 271, Fort Kent.

  I walked to the diner, where the waitress touched my shoulder with her voice and then her smile:

  And what can I get you today?

  Coffee, I said as I went to the small table by the window behind the large floor plant, a palm, like the one I had in the cabin by the bookshelves, the warm books in the window sunlight.

  I must discase myself, I said to her as I took my coat off. She nodded and said,

  Yep, that’s the coffee right there.

  When she left me, and I was sure I wasn’t being observed, I opened the carrying case and lifted the telescopic sight to my right eye and brought it to the noticeboard two blocks down, ranged the focus, and put the sight on my lap. Every couple of minutes I trained it through the café window to catch any anonymous writers. The waitress saw me and wandered over with her coffee pot and asked me who I was spying on, then laughed.

  I nodded. I am testing a very old sight. The optics.

  Well as long as there’s no gun under it in here, I’m fine with that.

  I smiled. Always having to have their word in, some people, and I kept my smile until she went away, and then I brought the sight again to my face.

  There, a man with a scarf around his head leaning to the wall with a pen or some instrument. I tried for more detail with my finger, turning the dial. There had been shots with Enflields up to a thousand yards. It was not an impossible shot at all, especially if along a street, walls on each side, a corridor to help shepherd the bullet.

  Suddenly the sight went out of focus, a black cloud crossed it, pale on top, and then a tap sounded on the window, another when I pretended not to hear and didn’t move. After a few seconds I realized that freezing did not bring safety or invisibility, as the person evidently knew I was sitting at the window and was probably in fact on the other side of it. I removed the sight and blinked: Claire stood on the pavement outside, wrapped in gloves and a scarf except for her bare left hand touching the glass, the glove held in her right, as if she were leaning on the window with her fingertip. If she were an adversary and we in the open I might not have survived the next few seconds. She had stood so close I did not see her, and I determined not to forget that lesson.

  Her face was shaped a pear in the scarf but enough to recognize. I saw her say my name, heard the last syllable of it, us, the sound muffled as though she stood at some distance, like a shout across a wide stretch of woodland. I sat holding the sight and made no movement. She had spied me in the act, and now she passed along the window and walked into the diner, across the floor and into the reflection of the same window up to my table, ignoring the waitress who followed her with a coffee pot.

  Julius, she said.

  I turned until she was real in front of me. Yes?

  What’s that? She pointed to my lap.

  Optics, I’m having them looked at today. Down at the gun shop.

  Troy, she said, you know Troy?

  I saw him with you, I said. I was there, if you remember.

  She sat opposite me, unfurled the scarf off her head, and I saw the full face that lay beside me on many mornings when I woke, a very happy season.

  What are you doing, Julius? It’s just that Troy says, I mean he’s talking about where they think the killer is operating, or where they think he lives.

  Killer, I said.

  They found a body, she said.

  35

  IT WAS MY FATHER WHO TAUGHT ME BASIC RIFLE SKILLS. The war stories came mostly from my grandfather and contained other rifle skills buried in their telling, lessons he learned about shooting under pressure and bei
ng shot at. As my father relates it, my grandfather came home from World War One and was fine for twenty years; then one afternoon, for no evident reason, he broke down and said he had seen the faces of his victims in his dreams for some weeks past, and not only their faces but also the children they never had, crowding the edge of the dreams, legs and arms sneaking into the picture. After some time, when the trouble did not disperse in him, a doctor was mentioned. Perhaps, it was suggested to my grandfather, he was suffering from shell shock.

  No, my grandfather said. This is no shell shock. I was not generally under artillery fire.

  My father explained to him that he might not have seen the faces of many people he shot as a sharpshooter since they were often a hundred yards and more away, and at that distance the faces were a plate, no eyes or expression a human would have. But there was no reassuring him, my father said to me, and my grandfather grew quiet after that, grew haunted, hollow, his eyes blacker, as if looking through sights at things a long way off.

  I cannot believe how unlucky your grandfather was to have been caught up with like that, he said to me.

  Caught up with? I said.

  Yes, they caught up with him. You see it from battle.

  My father was so sparing in his words you had to add water to them before they swelled into a sentence you could understand.

  I said, From battle?

  He thought some more and put down his book to say what he had to say.

  That’s it, a gun leaves a battle loaded with dead men. Your grandfather must have seen so many times their faces through the telescopic sights, the surprise on the face of the man he shot that he was shot, that he was shot and not the man next to him or someone way down the line or on another battlefield altogether, so much surprise that those men crawled twenty years toward him with their fingertips, and when they got to him he was lying asleep in his bed, so they pressed those fingers into his dreams and punctured them like wet jelly, entered into those dreams and stood up and he saw them, all of them, in that jelly, in their uniforms, sick to their boots of the long journey into his dreams. And then they pointed those fingers at him and said, Remember me? You killed me.