* * *
After two pots of tea and with the fire already burning on its embers I glanced at the clock for the third time in two days, the most times that clock had been looked at in two months at least. Only noon. I had to get wood or the place would be frozen by three. It was the time of year I called the wood time, when I heated the place using just the logs I cut from the dead trees; but next week I’d have to get the oil tank filled to keep the temperatures up. Once the winter set in around here you could burn a whole forest and not catch up with the cold.
I walked outside across the clearing with the grave on my left and grabbed some logs. Each one fed the tang of the month it was stored into the luke-warm sun, and from the trees hundreds of rusty leaves fell scraping the bark on the way down, finding air again and floating, then landing with the sound of rain. Holding four logs in my arms I walked straight back to the door I’d left open, my eyes fixed to the ground. I didn’t look but the damage was done—the fresh soil with the rock I put on top to keep predators away crept into the corner of my eye somehow, and my heart sank. By the time I was back in the cabin and stirring the fire, I missed him for the first time, missed him with a hammer strike against the heart, the awful moment when you know what gone really means. It means no one sees how you live, what you do.
And along with the sadness, something else crept in the door, a trace of something else, I mean. It must have come from the woodpile or ran in from the woods, because I’d not felt anything like it before.
6
WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT a man called William Shakespeare invented words, thousands of them, and to prove it he took out the plays of that man, Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, and Richard II, and showed me the small print at the bottom of each page where the words were written and what they meant. As part of my education he had me write out lists with Shakespeare’s words in them, a few new words every day, using his fountain pen, and soon those words and the smell of ink entered my mind, and when I began to speak them in daily use my father was quietly pleased, smiling widely at me from behind his book, his socks drying by the fire. Thus every week I increased my vocabulary by twenty or so Elizabethan words, words come all the way from the 1500s to sit in my mouth and in my hand when I spelled them with their definitions. I remembered one day’s set: Blood-boltered meant covered with blood, besmoiled meant covered with dirt.
I am a reader mostly, not a writer, but when I have to I can put some words together. Why then, so many years later at the age of fifty-one, I took a large sheet of paper and taped another to it and spread it on the floor in the last piece of sunlight left in the cabin and kneeled before it with a black marker, why I did that I don’t know, and whatever I hoped to achieve was a distant and troublesome fleck on the horizon. But I found myself composing the first lines I’d written in a long time, apart from my signature or an address, writing in large capitals the words DOG SHOT and under it in smaller letters “On October 30 between the Wallagrass Lakes and McLean Mountain, Reward for Information,” and under that my address at the post office where I collected my mail once a week, in winter sometimes every two or three weeks.
It is true that I composed these words by the stove fire when Hobbes was in the ground and beyond saving by letters, and I cannot say why I did it at all, though I think what crept in the door after me that same morning is what set me to writing, or else it was Shakespeare who inspired the poster. One of the two.
I warmed up the truck and drove with the announcement, reaching the good road along the St John River and travelled from there on to Fort Kent, where I set it on the wall outside the supermarket, taped it well to hold up against the wind and fastened it with a nail I banged in using a flat stone I brought in my pocket from the woods. It was early in the afternoon and I went inside to buy some groceries, bread and milk, some matches and vegetables, and then I stopped by the diner with a mind for black coffee and to sit in the heat and light and let my eyes see different things, hear different voices, for the cabin lay too heavy on my senses with Hobbes and everything. The woods were dark and wet, a mind of their own sometimes.
I set my gloves on the table and bowed my head slightly as the waitress stood at my shoulder with her notepad. She had seen me do this before and smiled.
She said, What would you like?
I stayed there for twenty minutes and enjoyed the cup and the way the steam heated my forehead until dark filtered along the streets and it was time to drive back. I said goodbye to her and passed the supermarket and glanced at the poster to see if it was still flat against the wall. I stopped and moved closer.
A large circle now surrounded the words Dog Shot and inside it in small letters, “Bye-bye dog” with exclamation marks after it, a punctuation mark my father had often complained about, a crutch for a weak word. I read on. Under that the person had written, “So what, one less dog. Get over it,” and more exclamations. I stared at this for a minute in the street as people walked around me, giving me a lot of space, and then I took the poster down and rolled it up, placed it inside my coat.
I could not get back to the cabin fast enough, and then get inside the door fast enough, nor open the wood stove fast enough, nor stuff that poster inside it and burn it fast enough, watching the paper curl into an orange grip around the logs, thinking the cruelty of small towns was so sharp it might be a pencil and you could write with it, write on posters for lost and shot animals and mock them. My mind hopped around agitated on a high tree, would not come down, would not let me read, I tried—different books, different authors, warm and cold—no matter, an urgency wanted me out the door and walking, walking.
So I grabbed a coat and walked, out along the trail to the woods, to the place where I thought the shot came from when I heard it. Already a whole day gone by now but it felt like many weeks, and I replayed the sound to get my bearings. About five hundred yards along the edge of the trees, where it bordered a wide field, I saw a yellow shotgun shell in the grass and picked it up. It was a fresh cartridge, the metal untouched by rust, the yellow plastic still bright. And a few feet into the forest I found a pool of blood, and then drops of blood, frozen, heading toward the cabin.
This was the place. Hobbes had made it five hundred yards with a shotgun blast in him, shot from two feet away. I looked along the trail and saw the roof of the cabin where the trees dipped. Five hundred yards to get back to the cabin. I traced the ground, bending to and fro, looking for footprints but found none: the wind in the grass had erased them.
7
IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON. I HAD LET THE FIRE go out.
I sat in the New England chair as the woods grew quiet and hard and dark around the cabin and wondered what my father would have said to all of this, what he would have thought of a grown man, his son, all out of sorts over some lead and a dog, sitting by a cold fire, if such a thing existed, sitting there in the dark with something else that crept in the door and was standing nearby, a feeling or tainted air that would not be ignored but would not identify itself, moving from room to room rustling furniture and drapes before coming to the living room with its arms folded as if to say, what now, now what. I sat in the chair as the room light fell in sympathy with the woods, and I did nothing to win the room back, did not stir to read or make some tea or listen to the shortwave radio. My father would not have stood for it, he would have snapped his book shut and told me to snap out of it. He had seen too much fighting, and his father had seen too much fighting before him. My blood was weaned off guns by two world wars.
Yet the yellow cartridge and the blood haunted me, a small action at the edge of a trail in a forsaken part of the world.
* * *
My father said that his father carried so many wars on his chest it was a wonder he could stand straight: medals from the Boer War, the First World War, and other small wars no one hears of anymore, skirmishes in the bush and such, scores or hundreds briefly dead and then wiped from history. He never fired a rifle after he came back from t
hat war, and before he died, my grandfather gave his medals to my father and told him to keep them or to throw them away, he didn’t care which.
I wonder why he would say such a thing, I said to my father one day, to which he said, World War One, and the Battle of the Somme, the lonely farmland in France where a million men fell to the ground: half a million British, two hundred thousand French, and over five hundred thousand Germans, shot or blown up by ordinance, where the Allies fired a week-long artillery bombardment of fifteen hundred guns and 1.6 million rounds before the opening assault and still lost fifty-eight thousand troops on the first day alone. How many people, Julius, do you think remember any of that?
Few people, maybe nobody, I said.
And that was barely eighty summers ago, he said. That’s why your grandfather didn’t care.
He took a deep-blue velvet box from the shelf and opened it, and there were the medals, heavier than I thought they should be.
But you kept them all the same, I said.
He nodded, the fire staining his spectacles, swallowed, and shut the box and went back to reading, and I left him alone for a while because he was a man who did not say much of what he felt.
He himself had fought in Holland in 1944 during the last desperate months of the Second World War when men claimed each building by the brick and fell in wet streets. At the end of it he threw away his carbine and came home, done with any kind of killing, and he never shot anything after that either.
I kept my grandfather’s medals in the velvet box. You don’t throw a million men away like that.
8
I GOT THE FIRE TO BURN HIGH ON SOME FRESH LOGS and sat before it with a mug of tea, watching the orange flames roar through the tempered glass. At such times, in the moments before I took up anything to read that is, silence sometimes took hold of me. Now that the hard weather had come, snow would follow and stay the winter. For some days past I heard the last of the Canada Geese cross the sky above the woods and fall in a deluge of cackles over the fields to rest on their way south to breeding grounds, stay silent for the night, hundreds of them on the plain, then rise with a thousand wings in the morning and circle until they drew an arrow in the sky under the sun, their compass south. This time of year stirred the restlessness in me too, perhaps because I saw how most creatures, when faced with a change in weather, either settle down or get out of town.
I had now lived fifty-one years in this cabin. In the summer months I worked some landscaping for the rich, mostly out-of-towners with holiday homes, and that suited me fine, since my business stayed my business, as those kinds of people don’t generally want to be talking to anyone local. Along with that I did some machine work for an automobile shop fixing troublesome engines for the proprietor, a man who dangled at the end of an oily black rag and was glad to see me every spring, said I was a wonder with a machine, any machine on the face of the known world. I made enough from both jobs to sit out and survive the winter, and that was good, what you don’t need isn’t yours, my father said. But that was all I did, sit out the winter. I wondered if there was somewhere else in the world for me, and if I should have gone to the university, and what I would have done with my life if I did. I had never quite settled down or left and know I should have done more with my mind. If I were to write my life in one sentence up till now, I would say that at one point I lived in a cabin for fifty-one years.
9
ON WEDNESDAY I WOKE LATE WITH THE COVERS wrapped tightly around me all the way to my eyes, the way I slept. I had worn my long coat and socks to bed and fell asleep in them with the windows open for the fresh air. My breath rose in a fog of droplets as I gathered the courage to rise into the chill and boil some water for tea.
After some toast and butter I dressed in a sweater and my coat and a good pair of boots and walked to the barn. On the way I noticed that the orange and yellow nasturtiums had shriveled in their beds: the three nights in a row of even light frost had killed them. I could take away the plastic covering now, but all that for later. It was a very fine morning and some birds blew from one branch to another, swooping down for the seed I threw them and the hot water I put in the concrete fountain.
I shoved aside the door of the barn and made for the bench at the far end and unwrapped the rifle from the leather cover. I checked the bore, cleaned the chamber with solvent, and tested the trigger mechanism. From a closet I retrieved a bag of .303 cartridges in 5-round clips and slipped one into the rifle before closing the door behind me, walking over again to the flowers to see if any were for saving, but they all drooped from their stems, long past rescue. I thanked them for their scent and for what they brought me by way of lifting my spirits all these months. I looked up: a snow flake or two drifted down out of a mostly blue sky, and the air in the clearing swam with the bark of trees in sunshine. I stood a moment at Hobbes’s grave and did not know what to say or think. I would have given every book in the cabin, every penny I had to see him rise again from the hole. I would have forgotten the matter as best I could. But he did not rise, and so we now had come this far.
I set off for the woods with some bread in my pocket and hot tea in a small hip flask, and on a strap across my shoulder, the other thing my grandfather passed on to my father, a World War One Pattern 14 Lee-Enfield rifle.
10
I HIKED TO A SPOT A MILE AND A HALF INTO THE FOREST, walking in and out of the shade like a man in parts as the broken sun in the branches found me with little light and even less heat, and I walked slowly, for I was in no hurry, and even paused along the way to take a sip of the tea, wondering how anything in the world could feel warm in Maine, and how anyone could sneak up on any living thing in the late fall when the dry leaves cracked under boots so much. In summer these trees had formed a lush sanctuary from the heat; now most stood bare before the northern winds, sifting nothing.
I leaned between two trunks that formed a bench like a wishbone curling out over me, and rested the Enfield against my knee, ten pounds of wood and steel and resin pointing muzzle first into the sky, the only place you can safely point to no matter what’s on your mind or finger.
I thought about the hour. Early on a fine morning. Any moment now.
I think I waited a long while, I’d say the best part of two hours, until a truck drove up, a big one with large antlers spreading from the middle of the front grille, humming slowly and quietly along the side of the forest about fifty yards off until stopping at the tree line. The man who got out looked in his early thirties, a big enough fellow wearing camouflage, his head shaven down bald on top, with long hair at the sides. That much I could tell and little more. He left the door open and changed his boots and then took a rifle from the back seat, shed the case, pointed it at the sky and then took out a bottle of beer and closed the door. Slinging the rifle on his shoulder, he walked forty paces to a tree where he climbed a ladder nailed into the trunk to reach a tree stand fifteen feet up, and there he leaned back and sipped from the bottle, his rifle—looked like a Winchester from where I sat—crooked across his lap, a fine rifle, no doubt. Now that he was a fixed distance from me, a matter of eighty yards, I could study him better. He was well-built, the type who can bring a fight to you and win easily, and his clothes appeared expensive and well-maintained. This was a careful and a patient man, confident that if patience and care went out of use, he could prevail with a more primitive manner of settling disputes. That was my reading of him, and so I elected to keep my distance.
He had probably decided to spend the morning here, waiting for the silence that brings deer in, a buck wandering at the edge of the field or bigger game down from the mountain. I brought the rifle up to my shoulder and fired from those eighty yards, one bullet that slapped into the folds of his neck. He grabbed at it as if for an insect and made a half-turn with eyes bigger than the forest, wondering what had happened. It was not a fatal shot, not yet, there was no spray of blood. I snapped the bolt back and chambered another round as he fell to the forest floor, his rif
le tumbling after him to land flat on the leaves, bouncing once. That was good, the safety on his weapon was engaged. He groaned through the hole in his neck, it sounded. I moved from between the trunks and came up on him, the Enfield at a low angle and my finger off the trigger, because this man was done with shooting any thing for a long time.
He saw me coming and shook his head, kept shaking it as if saying no to a question I hadn’t asked. I looked around the woods as I pulled out a drawing I had of Hobbes and bent to him.
Did you shoot this dog, I said.
He kept shaking his head.
Did you shoot this dog.
And then I said words I hadn’t spoken for thirty years since learning them at my father’s side. You are blood-boltered, I said. You are besmoiled.
Julius Winsome Page 2