Julius Winsome

by Gerard Donovan

  Hearing that, I realized that the medals and the rifle were not the only things my grandfather brought back from the war. The men he killed dragged themselves across seas and rivers, roads and hills, an inch a day, unerring as to the compass that pointed to my grandfather, and when they found him, they must have smelled his dreams, tasted them too, ate them until they were the only dream that was left in his head, the only one his sleep could produce, and so he soon stopped sleeping and spent the nights with his eyes open in the dark.

  To my knowledge my father never fired a single killing shot out of that gun. Perhaps he did not want to have any ghosts come after him if they heard a familiar sound, the last sound they may have heard in their lives, even if it wasn’t a gun he fired at them, or his father fired at them for that matter. The English sniper’s gun came with spirits attached, following it like a wake behind a ship, the water coiling in white streamers. My father had been a regular paratrooper in the last year of the second great war and did little that could be called sniping, mostly running and firing, more running and firing, a lot of ducking, more running and firing. Of the war he said little other than that the destruction was complete in most villages along the way to the Rhine, rubble where there used to be windows, rubble where there used to be people. And that destruction cured him of triggers completely.

  For my part, I had discharged the Enfield twice before the recent events. Once I shot a wounded fowl at my father’s direction, and later, the following winter, a fox that limped into the clearing, bleeding from what I believed was a bear wound. The fox did not run when I approached, and when I saw his condition, he still did not move, and when I brought out the gun, he looked at it and me. The shot filled the forest and drove the fox to the ground. There is little honor in pain or in enduring it, and less honor in ending it. In truth I thought of that fox for many a night after and hoped the best for him, if beyond the body there really is a place you can survive.

  What I mean by all of this is that shooting did not come easy to me. I dreaded the kick and smell, the dead thing at the other end, torn.

  36

  STANDING UNDER THE STRONG BULBS OF THE diner, Claire stared at me as if delivering that word, Body—what they found—with her eyes as well as mouth.

  Sometimes your eyes get full quickly like a pint of water poured into a thimble and you can’t see everything at once, you have to choose what to look at. A patrol car drew up outside as she mentioned the body, but I kept my eyes focused on Claire, which was hard to do, as I kept seeing the months I spent with her, thinking what her eyes must have seen in me, wondering how whatever she saw was ever enough at all, even for that amount of time, how her lips felt on mine, the touch of her hands on my shoulders.

  The door of the patrol car opened. I thought of Hobbes, that it had been worth it if the person who took his life was gone himself, worth it even if now my wrists were chained and I was led away while Claire watched, and if she had given me away. Only someone close can betray you in the end.

  She sighed and shook her head, looked down and away from me, to my relief.

  They’ve drawn a box from Fort Kent to Allagash, and inside it another box up around McLean Mountain. That’s where you live, Julius.

  I said, Indeed it is.

  I watched a pair of police boots walk up to the window and stop even at the glass, angled the way men stand who are authorities.

  She said, Please be careful, Julius. Are you sure that everything is okay up there?

  Why wouldn’t it be okay? I am not a hunter.

  I divided my sight between her and the boots.

  Troy says they’re looking up your way, I heard him mention it today. I haven’t said anything, I never would, not to him or anyone.

  I took my eyes off the boots. What would you say, Claire?

  Nothing. I mean, nothing.

  The police boots stood there in the bottom of my eyesight, tips pointed toward the diner in a gathering light afternoon fog. Claire looked up and nodded at the window, stood and put her hand on my shoulder: Take care, Julius.

  I did not look up when Claire left the table, and the boots shifted and went back to the police car. A very intense man, this Troy. I hoped his intensity would keep him looking too hard for me and miss what was in front of him, as had just happened to me not five minutes ago.

  Then I wondered if it was all over; with the body found, they must have discovered more than just the one, surely, in the woods and close to the cabin, and now Troy was waiting outside to make the arrest of Julius Winsome, late companion to a dog. No more looking, looking is done for today—we found you. I wondered if I shouldn’t go out and make conversation with him, close the distance to him, he wouldn’t expect that, and be cheerful on top of it, catch him doubly unawares with something like, How now, Troy, and what cheer?

  Someone in the diner said for everyone to be quiet as the waitress leaned up on her toes to turn the knob on the television, and out poured a reporter’s voice, a microphone and some woods, a moving camera at a treeline, some yellow tape and flashing lights. You can’t go anywhere without the televisions. The café filled with the loud wind in the reporter’s microphone, the volume way up, and no one said a word or made a sound among the tables, everyone froze. I saw snow on the ground, so it was today, it was live. I thought I remembered the run of the same trees across the skyline when I took the long shot, so that would have to mean this morning.

  Friends, the reporter said, had found the body, the long-distance body, the new one, but those last ones were my words, and thankfully I said them low and no one heard me. They had gone out hunting with him late this morning, the reporter said, and heard a shot and thought it his, but when they had not seen him for a while they back-tracked and eventually found him in the brush.

  That detail told me the news item must be dealing with this morning’s event, if only they would pull back on the camera shot so I could see the bigger picture, recognize the woods. That was a relief, my cabin was still safe at least.

  The mouth on the microphone continued, The friends stumbled on to a terrible sight, the body of their friend buried under leaves and branches, as if stored, shot only minutes before, according to police sources at the scene.

  Yes, but did they see anything, a person walking away with a rifle? And where was Troy now? I had to keep an eye everywhere it seemed to me.

  The camera pulled back. Then a banner appeared at the bottom of the screen, Long Lake, St. Agatha. The relief in me when I saw that it was this day’s man and not the previous men who were lying not one mile from where I lived and who would have pointed the way to my cabin even in death. The television showed my footprints in the snow but blurred from the wind and too deep for detail, and the reporter said that the victim, whom police described as a local hunter, was shot from a half mile away, shot through the teeth, killed instantly, an expert shot. That seemed insensitive, I thought, that kind of detail. What if the family were watching? What was she thinking? Then the reporter held her hand to her ear as if listening and went pale and flustered, and the camera moved to an officer of the law standing beside her.

  Particularly savage, said a police captain to the camera. Appalling, he said.

  A fast world I lived in. An hour at most, and the reports already widespread.

  Then more news flashed across the screen, breaking news, a gravelly voice, police now saying that a serial killer, a sniper, could be loose in and around Fort Kent and the western St. John Valley.

  I checked outside: that swirling vague fog, but no Troy, no police. They were waiting out of sight or they weren’t waiting at all. No point in thinking like a victim, and if they were there, fine. Time to go home.

  I slipped the sight into its case and went outside, went right for the supermarket and my truck; along the way I passed a boy and his mother, tipped my hat and smiled at the young fellow, and he smiled back. I sensed they were without, and if I had some money I would have bought the child a toy, or something at least. The fes
tival tree grew brighter as I approached, lit the pavement and my boots, but I sensed no heat in the light, they were just the decorations.

  Already the locals had gathered outside the supermarket, a constable there too in the middle, nodding and holding up his arms and then shaking his head and criss-crossing his arms in a big no.

  What about the law, why can’t you catch him, one man said. Two men walked out of a side street, large men, heavy with big coats and guns. One waved his in the air and said, We’re being shot at and no one is doing anything.

  The policeman said, We’re trying, it’s all woods up here and you know that very well, Pascal, and we don’t know for sure that anyone else has even been shot. This is early on.

  What do you think, the gun waver shouted back at the policeman.

  I think you need to calm down, the policeman said. I think you all need to move on and stop blocking the thoroughfare.

  I stood beside the crowd and tried to read the poster through all the shoving and the consternation in the cold mist. People get upset very quickly, the citizenry teems along, never more than an inch from their passions. One dead body half an hour away and everyone is up in arms.

  There you have it, I could not read the poster, but I could see some new writing on it, that man had penned something for sure: a black spider of words. Just too many bodies in the way. Didn’t want to be obvious, peering at it up close. I decided to go back to the diner and wait, let them disperse like snow in a bluster. First I put the sight back in the truck, no point in carrying that around and asking for trouble.

  Since I left, the diner had filled with pedestrians come in for the reports, two extra televisions had sprouted, one on a table they cleared for it, so different people stared at different televisions. I stood between the two television tables, looking for my waitress. She was standing with her tray extended in front of her, mouth open. The entire place was silent, and I could have been standing in the silent forest with all those straight, standing bodies and the sitting ones like trees around me.

  Can I have a cup of coffee, I said to no one in particular.

  Someone looked me up and down as if I had done something terrible. All I had done was ask for coffee. I looked for a table, but the only one available was the table with the television on it, so I sat behind it on a chair I dragged up. Now everyone was looking at me but not at me. That was strange, that I was in the best hiding place, the best camouflage in the countryside, better than any hole in the deep forest. I was sitting behind a television with everyone staring.

  I passed the next hour listening to words like news, fast and anxious, the mounting evidence, the fading light in St. Agatha, a high-caliber bullet, battle-munitions variety, victim killed instantly, and then, police have a lead, some footprints. I could not see the images that went with the reporter’s voice, but I had seen those footprints before anyway. I leaned with my chin in my hand, with an ear to the details. Police have a lead indeed. She was not telling the truth, I could tell because the tone of her voice changed, the timbre. They were telling her to say that, to rouse the prey.

  When I felt it was time, I rose and walked away, and to everyone in the café it must have seemed that I rose out of the television itself and walked toward them saying, I am the killer of all these men. Can’t you see me? Outside, I noted how empty the streets were all of a sudden. Maybe because it was dark and there was a shooter of men abroad. The supermarket had closed early and the lights were out around it, so I had to lean close to the noticeboard, and the writing was tiny: Guess who shot your dog.

  Of the writer I saw no sign, but the writing was his, the geography of the D was the same as the other notes on the posters. So I had the bastard. Shooting the other man today was not justified in that case. But he was ruled out now, as well as any others not directly in the woods around the cabin. So from now on, if there were any more incidents, they would only happen there, even if it invited attention in the long run. And I committed to memory the scarf’s appearance. I would know him again.

  Beside my index card hung a sheet on which someone had written in black marker: “Wanted, the shooter of Henri Dupre on Long Lake. Information to Fort Kent or St. Agatha Sheriff’s Office.” Not an official poster, that one. An angry citizen. I thought of drawing a bullseye around the word SHOOTER with an X through it, but there was no reason for doing it, no point in that kind of cruelty.

  I took my card off the board. The snow had come on again, blowing hard and thick. Soon it would be time for chains on the tires, a shovel in the back to dig my way out of embankments and when I skidded off the road, especially up in the woods. That time of year now, and so suddenly. Five, six months of it coming, lined up.

  * * *

  That morning before taking the road to St. Agatha I had put Hobbes’ things away. I could not place my eyes anywhere in the cabin and not see him, and what was there and what was gone kept colliding in me so much that I sat for a while and determined to move them, his nest and brush and everything, away into another room, the one opposite my bedroom, where my father used to sleep. What to do with them besides, the rope he pulled on, the knot I tied to hold it the better with. A small broad-chested terrier is not at his happiest until tugging at the other end of a rope, a growl clamped around his teeth with tail wagging that says, I’m playing. If I had the presence of mind I would have buried the rope with him, though I felt now there would be no waking for him in another life, no toy to pick up again, it was this world or none for him. What he loved in life now conjured him instantly to me, a dog made of thought, captured and held by thought, and once in the hands of memory, never let go.

  I found myself remembering parts of him through a space too narrow for all to appear at once and still be from him, or else there were only so much recollection and so few memories, and more would not be made: he slept on the couch with his head nearest the bedroom door, he woke me in the morning with bare teeth, for they smile too, many dogs do, and the same happened if I had been away the entire day and he felt the time alone. Whenever he showed his teeth with the gums back, and there was no sound, and the tail was moving, I was being smiled at. How many know? A dog smiles and they hit him for it.

  * * *

  I drove down Main Street and closer to the two shapes beside the police car in the middle of the road, a few cars ahead of me. When it was my turn, one of the policeman flagged me down and I saw it was the same as the man who stopped me on the country road earlier in the day, but the other held him back and waved me on and stared at me as I passed. I saw that it was Troy and I made no move to greet him, knew any gesture would not be returned, was thinking only of the rifle snug in cloth behind the seat. I heard Claire’s question again: What are you doing, Julius?

  Maybe she had indeed said something to him. But what? What did she know about anything, being gone out of my life a good three years and more? Nothing, that was the sum total of what Claire knew about me.

  Passing the last streets of Fort Kent for the open countryside I glanced at the lit front rooms and the people in them. Soon the weather was more on than off. In the late afternoon on the St. John Road a single car came at me in the snow, the headlights growing from a couple of glowing coins to a blinding light splashed over the windshield like water, then the hum of an engine going by, and then nothing, the blue wallpaper of the road and the sky hanging from east to west, the frump of the wipers like a clock. By the time I drove back, the cabin was covered in luminous powder from the clouds.

  37

  I DECIDED TO KEEP THE CABIN UNLIT AND NOT START a fire either in case they were on their way to surround the place or were already out in the woods with drawn guns. I stood in the dark and gathered my thoughts. After fifteen minutes though all I could feel was the cold, my fingers and knees hurt, and how tempting to throw on a few logs and chase some heat into my joints. I flapped my arms and hopped up and down a few times, twisted my hips. Then I walked to the window and touched the thick web of frost on the pane; my finger stuck
to the glass a moment until I pulled it off gently. The woodstove was ice cold, the black heart of the kitchen without its flames. True enough for my father: he once said that all the books together served to insulate the house, and I felt them now, stacked up between me and the rawness outside that pressed a giant white silence down from Canada into every crack of the place. The pulp of pages were trees too and protected me as much as the words in them once did.

  I stared outside at the flowerbeds and said, Now I’m as cold as you, Hobbes.

  In the pitch black I saw my father sit in front of the fire with his socks against the iron and a book in his hand. What else did he hold? His pipe. Where was his pipe? I thought about it and came to the conclusion that if the police were outside the house they’d have knocked on the door by now or made a different type of entrance, more direct, without the announcement. So I lit a match and waited for a shot to blast through the window, if a man was waiting outside for something to aim at. No shot punctured the glass and I felt no hole appear in me. I followed my other hand with the lit match along the closet until it found the wooden box and in it his English pipe. In the trenches of World War One, the man who lit the first cigarette was least in danger, that was the spark that drew attention; the man who took another light from a match was more in danger as the sniper drew the light into the crosshairs, and the third man to light up in a group was the dead man. Three strikes and you’re out.

  Kneeling on the floor I detached the head and shook out any flakes, then filled the pipe with the English tobacco stored in the same box, then sat back and puffed away in the dark. A bit stale, the smoke, but a strain of pleasure in the moment, that first taste, the smell that makes the thoughts wander, and those two senses brought my father back even stronger. Now I could hear him turn the pages and call me over and show me a good passage and ask me what I thought, and he would listen for a long time as I spoke, nodding his head and saying how wise I was for a young boy. He was kind that way.