Looks like weather coming, she said, stepping to the curb.
Yes, I said. That it does.
The store window had about twenty televisions on all the shelves, it seemed to me, and each one had a different channel showing, flashing images of bodies behind me in the corner of my eye, people dancing, singing, talking, with holiday lights already draped on the televisions, flashing too, with signs saying that there were only seven short weeks to Christmas. Even though the sound was turned down they did all the talking for us, because we said nothing to each other for a while as people walked by. A flurry of white swept the street and was gone like a lighthouse beam.
I didn’t want to be staring at her, so I gave a quick glance. Her hair was different, more curly. It was better when it was straight, suited her bone structure that way. After some time passed with us standing there she said,
Julius, I’m so sorry.
For what then?
For everything. She kissed me all of a sudden and said, Be careful.
Of what then?
I don’t know. I often think of you alone up there. Just a feeling.
Another gust blew the lights sideways on the tree, a colder wind, bringing snow for sure. I wondered about that comment of hers. Then we both said nothing again for some seconds. I’m not good at saying goodbye, especially if it’s forever. I don’t know, I felt a frozen wind blow around her as if encasing her in stone, or maybe it was just going around her and heading straight for me.
How’s Hobbes? she said
He’s fine.
What was the point in making her sad? Sharing my own sadness would not make it less, only double it.
You know I love that dog.
I know. He’s fine.
A man joined us, he was dressed in a constable’s uniform, and he slotted himself at her side without looking at me.
Hi, Honey.
He kissed her and hugged her close to him. I watched something above her head that wasn’t there just to put my eyes somewhere. She smiled and nestled her head on his shoulder. He smooched her hair, stroked it. The television danced behind me, the boxes this time, not the people in them. They were yelling at me to go home and be away from this town.
Let’s go, he said to her. It’s getting late. Remember we’ve got friends coming over for drinks.
He still didn’t look at me.
Troy, this is Julius, she said.
He turned his head and stared, empty, mouth hard, gave a nod only a marksman could have observed. I held out my hand but he was already sheparding her away.
I heard him say after only a few steps, Don’t tell me that’s the guy.
Shhh, she said.
You went out with him? What were you thinking?
Shut up, will you, Troy? He’s got good hearing.
He said something else while they crossed the road, I could tell by his lips and the waving he was doing.
I continued on, a short walk the rest of the way to the supermarket. People tumbling out with shopping in the rush hour, cars dusted with flakes pulling up and flashing people who waited with groceries on the pavement outside. I glanced at the poster to make sure it was still there. Yes, and not only that, someone had written across it in a heavy pen, “People are more important than dogs!!! Feed the people this Christmas!!” I ripped it off the wall and a couple moved aside to give me room as I tore it into strips and stuffed the shreds into my coat pocket. Fine, I’m done with posters now. No more writing.
I drove home under the festival lights of Fort Kent and on into the night where there were no lights but the stars, and none were out that evening, or they were but strung out over low cloud, the type of cloud that races across the skyline at twilight, races with the smells of the earth and of the air, pushing the air in front of it, cold air.
Night fell as I cut through the countryside. When the headlights scoured out the dirt lane to the cabin I thought I saw Hobbes run up to them, as he was always doing, running out of the night and across the lights, sniffing the bags after I brought them into the kitchen and put them on the floor, looking for his treat.
Now, driving in the dark, I summoned my boyhood friend Shakespeare and tried another sentence: “My stomach was in a coil when that man hugged Claire. He had some color about his face, the way he ignored me.”
* * *
After she left me I had gotten to love that dog. He always greeted me when I returned home. For the rest of that summer he ran from his spot in the hot woodpile, from his walks in the woods, where he went for solitude or whatever drives them there, ran to see me after my landscaping work, ran to greet me when I was happy, ran to greet me when I was unhappy, ran to greet me when I was distracted, vague, thoughtful. When my hands gripped the steering wheel or lay loose as the truck rumbled up the dirt road, lurching with shovels and picks or unencumbered, he ran to greet me. Dogs know only loyalty and find their own lives inside it.
And they know when you’re not right, they’ll sniff the disease in you, the low light in your blood, and put their mouths there, be it your kidney or your arm—and they’ll stick by you until you’re okay. Find me a human who’ll do that. They bark a certain way and it means certain things: you have to hear the tones and the length and how he places his head and what his tail is doing. They don’t have words so they use their whole bodies to make words. Sound and head angle and tail and what not. They talk with their whole body. People use their bodies not to talk, hands in front of mouths, turning sideways, never listening. They put fear in their dogs. You want to know the man, look at his dog.
And when I thought he was running up to me, I thought a miracle was mine, some strangeness in the woods had produced him back, my Hobbes, the terrier, an early Christmas gift for Julius Winsome. I would have a fire on in no time, find a treat or drive him to Fort Kent with the heater on and the window open so he could stick his head out and still be warm. That would be just the start.
But when I parked the truck with the lights shining on the flowerbeds, the grave was undisturbed.
20
THURSDAY NIGHT THE SNOW FELL.
The wind stopped and the temperature went up slightly, I could tell from the drafts and the silent sweep of powder that shook itself across the fields, the woods, the cabin roof, and across and along the rest of Maine it seemed. But for the trees the wind would strike the cabin directly.
There is a day, an hour when winter comes, the second it slips in the door with its weather and says, I am here. If snow falls early enough, it drifts down into red forests and piles along lakes ringed with blue ice, but the visit is temporary: the white handprint of north vanishes with the next sunny day, polished off the hills and trees of Maine by the cloth of sunshine, the blow of warm fall breath on wood. If late, winter arrives on the back of a windstorm that blows every color before it but white, while under it, lakes turn to frozen spit and bare trees split, cracked open, and the forests stretch up to the shivering lit skin of the northern lights.
Maine, the white star that burns from November, it rules a cold corner of sky. Here, only short sentences and long thoughts can survive: unless you’re made of north and given to long spells alone, don’t trespass here from then. Distances collapse, time is thrown out. Children skate their names on ponds, sleds drag dogs in front of them. People defeat the winter by reading out the nights, spinning pages a hundred times faster than a day turns, small cogs revolving a larger one through all those months. The winter is fifty books long and fixes you to silence like a pinned insect; your sentences fold themselves into single words, the hand of twelve makes one hand of time. Every glance ends in snow. Every footstep sinks North. That’s time in Maine, the white of time.
It is also the time when an entire day squeezes in through the single bedroom window, and I stayed in bed most of the day, the blankets warmer than the air.
* * *
But I had things to do first. I ran to the woodpile and hauled in some logs before they got damp, and I covered the rest with green tarp
aulin, folded once. After a meal of potatoes and fried fish I went out again with the flashlight and walked the flowerbeds and said goodbye to the last shades of pink and red, since by morning they would be cast under white, and soon covered. I hoped that the long snow of winter, now just begun, would keep my friend warm. I leaned to the ground and sank my fingers into the snowfall above where he lay.
I stood in the clearing as it whitened and looked up into the broken pieces of the night around the flakes.
Winter.
PART TWO
Night of November 2nd
21
THAT NIGHT IT WAS AS IF THE WIND SIMPLY BLEW through the house and blankets, as if nothing blocked the weather from my body. I lay in bed, waiting for a strain of heat to measure me and fit me into sleep. I heard noises, surely the crackling chill in the timbers of the cabin. Unless: wait, was that Hobbes at the door scratching? Had he somehow woken up and clawed his way out of the flower beds? I had heard of such things in history books, people in coffins waking up, wood found in their fingernails. That, or there were men about in the dark. If so, no matter: before lying down I brought the Enfield into the bedroom and leaned it against the wall.
I rose, let the cover fall away to the coat, and made for the door with the rifle loose in one hand, but when I opened it, one knife flew at my face, my hands, my feet, three instant cold blades from the wind. I shielded my eyes to no avail: no dog anywhere in sight, no paws and a head waiting to come in. I lingered to be sure, stood there for a minute before going back inside and pulling on the wool socks and a sweater under the coat. The wind must have infected me now, I shook that hard. I dressed myself fully by the bed. To fall asleep and be defenseless, to lie still while the forest swarmed around, that could not be. Better covered now, I was off again, this time all the way outside, to the grave.
Bending close I saw nothing that showed Hobbes had freed himself. I traced no evidence of even weak marks, the softening tracks of a running dog. So the howl and scratch at the door was only the cold after all. I stood at the forest edge wrapped in the coat and looked back at the cabin: the weak light of the frigid bedroom I had just left glimmered in the cracks of the side window, otherwise all was black, open to the elements but for a few inches of timber and a lining of books.
I waited for nothing. And nothing arrived. A deep ice stole its way into my heart. I felt it settle in and numb the valves and quiet the wind that blew inside my frame, heard it set upon my bones and breathe silence into the brittle spaces, everything that was broken. At that moment my heart knew the peace of cold. I gave up on my friend, and the night watch was done, for only his spirit would ever come to me again.
22
IF THE NOISE WAS NOT FROM THE GRAVE, THE UNEASE was elsewhere, and I could not stay out here standing sentry for that long. The suspicion that drew me out was perhaps all that could be called grave tonight: what had stayed at the back of my mind, a worry like wings.
I did not want to suspect Claire of anything, and did not, until I remembered our recent conversation on the street when she seemed to sense that all was not well with me. How would she know? Was her hand in this? Perhaps she belonged so completely now to another man that she decided to remove anything from that summer that still attached itself to me, and all that was left was Hobbes.
Such a thought, that Claire brought a gun out along the trails to my cabin and ended the life of the dog she helped rescue. It was well beyond my means to harm her, or any woman—and in that event my father would never have tolerated such a thing—but the thoughts would not disperse from my mind. Had she killed him?
Though the cold was something fierce, I hugged the coat about me more and leaned into the sheltered side of a tree trunk.
23
TO LOOK FOR EVIDENCE MEANT SHARPENING THE details of what was already known, re-seeing what was already seen. And it slowly came to me, what was bothering me, some evidence of a trick she played with others to bring this dog into my life and then take him away. I resolved however to think things over before anything else was done.
* * *
The first evidence of guilt was the way she turned up at the cabin that day in early summer. She walked past the flowers that stained the grass blue and yellow under the Maine sky, wide and shallow and ice blue. I was in the kitchen reading, and the wind blew from the south through the open window and through all the rooms, seeking out the last smells and shadows of spring, and the new summer grazed my skin with a warm whisper, its first word. I rose from the armchair when I heard her: my face had been buried in a book and now it filled the glass as I watched.
Some hens ran after each other in the sunlight under the smell of burning pine and past the truck. I stepped out onto the porch under smoke that swept down from the chimney.
She said, I was in the area. I don’t know, I got lost I think.
It made perfect sense to me then, as if she had just raised her wrist with a watch on it and told me the time of day in the middle of the street back in the town.
If that’s so, I said, why don’t you come in then and have some of the tea.
To her the walls must have looked like they were made out of books, leather that stretched along the eye. I walked behind her to the sink and watched the house fit around her as she stood under the door frame that separated the large first room from the second. She glanced at the oak floor and the wood stove, watched the fountain outside the small side window: a bird wriggled through the water. She whispered how few of the paintings had people in them, the ones on the walls hung by my father and grandfather, one a brown landscape of bare trees, others of seashores, gardens, haystacks, climbing above the bookshelves.
I went off to play a record, some piano music. I should have pressed my question at once about this sudden visit. Outside it fell down some short rain, the flowers dripped, and the notes dripped from the bedroom, a tune by Satie from my father’s days. I poured the boiling water onto the tea bags and handed her a mug with a spoon.
You haven’t changed much, she said.
I said, I don’t think we’ve met.
No, it’s my sister. She was a few classes behind you in school when you went there. She described you.
Though it made little sense, it was what she said. When the shower ended the sun shone through the wet glass and warmed the red roofs in one of the paintings. I wondered why she got lost here and not somewhere else but did not want to ask, since people usually choose the place they get lost in and she must have had her reasons. Anyway I had much of the rest of the day free, and all that was left was to run into the town and pick up carrots and fish and some bread.
Was I rude to just turn up like this, she said.
I asked her what other way there was to turn up.
Her car was in the woods, she said, a half mile away where the road was still wide enough: she wanted to go for a long walk today and kept going. She had to go home now. That must have been her first mission, to see the cabin, to count how many lived here, a short count as it turned out.
I told her I would bring her back as this was no place for walking in once evening made its way through the trees, even in summer. The odd large creature made its way across the river from Canada and might not take well to the surprise. We made our way under the leaves, mostly in silence along a brown line that wound itself into the undergrowth. The way was narrow enough to tell me that the last part of the journey had been too close for her to drive: the branches touched each other across it. In the truck it was just a matter of keeping going for the half mile through everything. It was clever of her I suppose, to keep her car where it would not be seen.
She did not know where to turn, so I offered to drive it out of the lane for her. I was bent around the wheel as it was one of those small cars, and my head bounced off the roof. She laughed. I must say it was funny all right, you get in and turn the key and then your head hits the roof as if you were the one started and not the car.
To the Saint John’s Road, she said, and p
ointed me back, saying left and right, the particular way she came, though I knew a shorter way myself. Her map was not local. I estimated by the route she took that she had come twenty miles from Fort Kent, though we were twelve miles as the crow flies from that town. They flew above us black and cawing over the trees.
I switched on the headlights as we approached the edge of the deep woods, stopped and said goodbye and stood in the last sunlight along the wall of green, the brush of the leaves scattering in the high wind like surf.
She said, I can’t let you walk those miles. It’ll be pitch black.
I’ve done it many a time, I said, to make her feel at ease. On those nights, with a bottle of something to warm me and a few good cigarettes, I had indeed ventured out in the cool black summer woods.
In any case, I have to drive to the town for some things, I said.
I’ll take you.
I hesitated at the offer, going into town with a stranger whose sister said she remembered me. That wasn’t a lot to be going with and a long time to be in company.
My name, she said. It’s Claire.
The good thing about hearing a name is that it brings the familiar with it, a sound that means someone when you hear it, even if for the first time. And the good thing about wearing a coat for most of the day is that you have what you want in it. We switched places and she covered the gravel road out of the hills, arrived at the crossroads in Saint John, and took a right past the long fields, a few houses and a church.
She said, I knew you lived out here somewhere behind the hills.
So we were coming to it now, why she came, as we sped along the winding road to Fort Kent. Across the river a red tractor in New Brunswick spewed up dust in a potato field. The people of lower New Brunswick were French too, and across the river from Saint Francis was Saint Francois and its own white church spire sticking into the sky. To my right the wide brush of forest led back into the settlements where hunters rented log huts and some families lived. I never met them, but they knew I was where I was and the other way round. That was distance enough for everyone to keep.
Julius Winsome Page 5