Julius Winsome

by Gerard Donovan

  An hour passed and the cold flung stones in my fingers and knees and the muscles pulled at the low bones in my spine. Unable to bear the chill a minute longer, I lit the fire and crept out into the clearing for wood, lifting the tarpaulin for some logs. The rising moon switched its own lamp on in the woods.

  No-one shot at me while I carried the logs back into the cabin; no-one shot when I opened the woodstove and lit the paper under them; no-one shot when I boiled some water for tea and sat in the New England chair with the Shakespeare list from between the books; no-one shot when I held the first page to the fire and read the words in the light of the flames under the glowing pipe. The evening had come, and the dark crept along the walls holding its own weapons, chief among them loneliness and silence, and aimed them at me from every corner at once. I tried to get the fire higher with more wood and filled the cabin with smoke, carelessly enough that I had to open the front door and leave it open for the smoke to blow out, swirling into the night along with the warm air. Bad for the books and the lungs, the eyes and the breath. I stood at the door and watched it sweep off and up into the dark. If they were waiting, now was the moment.

  I went back inside when most of the smoke was gone, pulling off my boots to let my socks steam in the heat. I was my father all of a sudden, isn’t that the way it happens. I reviewed a list in the glow: There was a D word, decipher, meaning to detect, and a couple of E words: exhale, to draw a sword, and expedient, fast on one’s feet. I smelled the ink again that I wrote them in, now the best part of forty years old, felt the texture of the page and my father’s gaze as I curled the letters, felt the comfort of his companionship like gauze wrapped around me.

  38

  OF MY FATHER’S DEATH I REMEMBER THAT IT WAS measured like cups he took into himself of a substance designed to end him, accepted with grace and without complaint. His breath had come shallow for a good year, and the distances between objects in the house, the steps from the bathroom to the chair, from the chair to his bed, grew longer and longer for him. It was good that he was a reading man, since that activity required no extra breathing, and for large portions of the day no-one would have known that his lungs were eaten away from the tobacco, except mornings and evenings that passed in coughing, when he turned himself inside out with it, mostly in the final months.

  In Fort Kent, the doctor was careful in how he listened to the chest and the lungs, and always shook his head when I spoke to him as my father waited in the car outside. That was our way—the doctor told me his findings, and I informed my father, who was not a man given to doctor visits, and that was the only way I could get him to visit one: I received the message, I made the translation. Most of the time the doctor said that he should stop smoking the pipe, and I would translate it as, You have to cut down on the smoking.

  On the last visit, I got into the car where my father waited.

  Well? he said.

  The doctor says you will be dead in a month. There was no translating that.

  He nodded, Well that’s to be expected. Don’t worry, Julius. You have the house and all those books to take care of.

  I drove him home in silence. I wondered if my mother was waiting for him, and if so, where, and if the man I knew was the same one she knew, and how I had never asked him what parts of me were from my mother and what parts were his. Such is what went through my mind as I drove him home in silence.

  Three weeks later he took to staying in the chair, and I put blankets round it with a pillow near the head, kept the fire going even though it was April. He slept there too, and I placed some logs on the floor for a footstool. His breath grew louder by the hour and I felt a chill cover him for two days. He stopped speaking then. I saw the pupils in his eyes narrow and knew that he could see me, that I was in his eyes still. I walked my reflection across his eyes, back and forth with logs to the fire and such, to give him the comfort that I was there and not leaving. His voice came back on the third day, and he asked for a Shakespeare, like ordering from a menu at a restaurant, and I waited by the shelves while he chose one.

  I’ll take the poems, he said, as I watched the back of his head.

  I had the book to him in no time, Collected Sonnets, 1843 edition, London. Next thing he was reading out loud in a singing voice marking the stresses:

  That time of year thou mays’t in me behold,

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold

  .

  He had stopped after the word hang in his frail voice and waited a moment till he fell to reading the next line. I walked around in front of him. He looked up at me and smiled. I held his gaze and after a while saw that his pupils observed nothing, no more light affected them, I was nowhere in him, from now on, only in myself. Nothing to tell him anymore, to say how well I’d done with this or that.

  Men came from far away, by train and car, by foot the last part, the distance to the plot, and they stood to attention for this man who served with them. The small church in Fort Kent had rarely seen so many corporals and sergeants and privates ranked equally around a grave. I saw battles in their eyes long forgotten by many, and never known to some, and observed some of them fall with him into that hole in the ground, I mean the part of them that remembered the fear and the rubble of distant towns, or the part that had hoped for better things afterwards. The soldier who fights always hopes that way, my grandfather said, but it’s those who don’t fight who get to decide what things will come. From that day until Claire came out of the woods all those years later, I managed to live on my own, maybe from habit, maybe to honor him. I learned the shape of loss, it was not a stranger to me, since every corner and bench in Fort Kent reminded me of my father, all the places he went. How many times did I pass his grave on my way to buying milk and bread—especially in those weeks after he was first gone, this man of my first thirty years—and wonder how such learning and experience could be switched off like a light.

  * * *

  I sat in the dark and thought such things that would keep me still, perhaps for my safety, a small trick of nature to protect Julius Winsome.

  The fire was well lit and still no shot through the window, though Friday night did feel long because I was listening for phantoms in those woods and half dreaming of Claire, probably because I had seen her twice in a short time, but the dreams and the listening swapped places frequently as I sat in the chair between both, sometimes dreaming that Claire was listening, sometimes watching her with a gun in her hand in the woods, watching me, waiting for me to walk outside the cabin. She shoots, I hold a book to my chest, the bullet sinks into the words and stops before my heart.

  I was done with shooting.

  39

  ONLY WHEN I WOKE NEXT MORNING IN THE CHAIR DID I know that I had slept the night before. The last few hours before dawn in deep sleep and without a cover had left me sore. I walked stiffly along the shelves of books, the dark corridor. I clapped my hands to get warm. Water for tea, the fire, more logs from the woodpile, and no footprints in the clearing, that was good. A fine crisp Saturday morning, sky blue, some cloud galvanized along a light wind, a calm before the freeze and on the day before the festival. In Fort Kent the children of the town would be bouncing out of bed and rushing to the window, seeing the same sky, same cloud. Then they run to their parents and remind them that the scarecrow festival is the next day. In seven weeks they will wake and check the pine tree on the night before Christmas, that it was still there and lit and ready for the night, and that there was space enough underneath for the night visitor who was perhaps already a speck above the continents, the eternal father holding the reins, knowing each and every chimney, and each and every name of all children. I wished them all the joy they could hold, every last one, and that he’d leave something for them. If I had a child he would be a reader of course, with all the books; still a child needs friends, even on weekends, and that would mean we’d drive to town a lot, but there was the diner for me t
o wait in. Such thoughts kept me warm that morning until the fire took hold.

  I lit my father’s pipe and poured a glass of sherry from the closet into a crystal glass, the one we kept for special occasions. I walked then along the shelves, wondering which book to pick for reading today: the decision was easy in the end, why not? I pulled out Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Seven weeks too early but that’s why you read ahead, to get into the spirit. And perhaps there was to be a visitor for me soon, a man with a question, a man with a gun. Then I should be outside surely.

  From the bedroom I dragged a blanket after me, and walking outside with the sherry on the tray of the book, I threw the bed blanket across a rock out by Hobbes and drank the glass and read for a bit, an hour or so, to give him the feeling he once had with me. It was fairly cold all the same, and eventually I went inside, missing my friend with every step. But a lightness had entered my mind, perhaps leaked gently into it through the long night before, a suggestion that he was at peace now, and that I should be. I was ready for such peace and silence again.

  Not fifteen minutes later, deep in the New England chair on a Saturday mid-morning with my second sherry in hand and thirty-eight pages into Dickens, a bullet punctured the woods.

  40

  SOME PEOPLE WILL SHOOT ANYTHING, ANYTHING IN the world that moves, anything that flies, crawls or swims, anything of the living, furry, feathered, large, small, plump or scrawny, a grouse, woodcock, turkey, pheasant, white-tailed deer, black bear, moose, mice, rats, voles, rabbit, beaver, lynx, bobcat, raccoon, eastern coyote, muskrat, squirrel, otter, fox, mink, weasel, skunk, porcupine, they will do it on fine days, their favorite, on wet days, on days neither fine nor wet, though hunters love the chill in the air, the dank perfume of bark, the forest floor violets, the deer wandering the lakeshore in fog, it all triggers some deep delight in their blood, and if it makes them happy, then so be it, but my father often complained when the shots came five or six to a minute, saying it was hard to be reading in the middle of a broadside. We never heard the shriek of an animal, and that was at least something, but one day my father put down his book and paced the living room, hands behind him, his back slightly bent, his eyes a step ahead of his shoes on the floor.

  He said, A battle sniper waits motionless for three hours for a second’s aim at a target that will shoot back or call artillery down upon him if he misses. These people out there, and he pointed out the window without looking, they shoot at targets taking a predicable course and without a return shot: you don’t have to worry about giving away your position, the flash of the gun muzzle, the steam off the barrel. The worst thing that can happen is you miss or hit but not fatally and they’ll go bleeding to find their young.

  That was a lot for my father. Then he sat down and found his page again, but too late, I had heard what those shots had loosed in him. That night I dreamed of a feathery archer bending his bow to a nightingale in the branches of a cypress tree.

  As a young boy of twelve or thirteen I often took walks in the woods around, though my father explained the places I could not go. One day off a trail forbidden to me I found rusted iron jaws chained to a tree and snapped shut on a leg. To the right in sunlit brush a mountain cat lay on its side. I clung to a tree in fright before seeing flies circle in the sunlight over the stump, a missing front leg. I ran home in tears. My father explained the mystery: the animal had stepped on a hidden hunter’s trap, and it chewed first through its own flesh and tendons, then the bone, and tore free. Those who did not, he said, pulled for a few days until hunger outpaced the pain, the string of convulsions, strange sights from the starvation, until they arrived at death and were calmed. He said that the cat’s ordeal was over. To the question I did not ask he added that some men must create pain in others to feel less of it themselves.

  I soon came to a point in life when I watched for people who came too close to the cabin and the animals we kept. I was twenty or so when I saw a man with a 12-guage looped from his shoulder standing by the pond looking for something to shoot. We had a pet water fowl called Cinder who sometimes went down there, she’d lived on the farm for four years and her mate was somewhere about rummaging in the water basin to clean himself. I heard them calling to each other across the farm a few minutes before. So I stood at the treeline and watched this man. He looked forlorn, balding at the crown, with a tube in the middle, a flannel shirt rolled up and rough at the arms, staring still and silently at an empty pond ringed with plants. Maybe she was in there, he’d spy her and shoot, and she would not survive the blast of pellets. I made a movement and he looked up to me. I did not acknowledge him. He muttered and walked to his left along the pond and into the trees. I put water on for tea and waited for him to come back, since I suspected he was not to be happy that particular day unless he put an end to something. But I was wrong: that man did not return.

  It seemed to me that the world and the people abroad in it would not be told where not to go. In summer I had a ring of flowers to stop the forest, in winter a ring of books to stop the cold, to retreat inside for the months of silence. And around me another living ring, the animals that grouped around because of the food I threw down, the birds that hoped for seed in winter and sang their hearts out in spring in return. They lived in a circle of maybe a hundred yards, and in the end they gave their bodies up in peace. I’d find a bird lying in the woods, a mouse curled up by a rock. I hoped I could die so well. Perhaps it is all instinct, men say this. But try stopping a man from doing what he wants: people will not be controlled, they will not be dissuaded, they are also chained to what is in their minds to do, that too might be called instinct. It whips us all.

  I tried to read more, but another theme had inserted itself into my thinking. Mine was a minor life, no church steeple scratching at the clouds or joined to the streets of a town, no birthdays and weddings and weekends, a few flowers holding back the forest, a certain number of ducks and guinea hens crackling up in the branches at night. A life all of my own choosing. That thought brought me back to Hobbes, but I had never left him, nor he me. His loss scratched my stomach like burlap, my companion of those years, none to visit him where he lay with his small life, none to know what he was. And now these insistent shots, these reminders.

  In the hour that followed, the gunfire came thick and heavy across the yard, the book in my hands. From the sound and the spacing I figured there were two shooters nearby, well within a mile, and whenever I lost myself in the novel, a pair of shots startled the words away brought me back, until my mind left the book altogether and returned to rifles. It became obvious to me that I may not have dealt with the hunter who shot Hobbes after all, that he might still be at large in the area.

  Of the shots that banged relentless out of the trees, and closer now too in the last few minutes, one of the two had a familiar ring to it. Something stirred in me again, this deep measure that had the better of me. People were incapable of minding their own business, all this infernal noise they brought with them everywhere.

  I feared suddenly that I had reached a time where life had taught me all it was going to or wanted to. From this point on it would be a circle for me, always the same again, and harder to bear at each turn of the wheel when it came round. If I had a child, or someone, I could have led them to what I’d seen and heard over the years, but that was not to be. Around and around, the life of Julius Winsome, day in and out.

  I was being shot out of my father’s books.

  Every year, more and more hunters, better equipped, venturing farther into property, not content to go home without taking something. And if I could not read with all this firing going on, then why have books? The idea caught hold of me, and perhaps because I had not eaten yet or the sherry had gripped my blood or because of the feeling in the air of an approach of some kind, visitor either of weather or man I don’t know, but I imagined myself going inside the house, grabbing a foot-length of books, as many as I could carry in one go, and bringing them out to the clearing and se
tting them in a stack at the edge of the flowerbeds. And again for the second foot of books, a stack every yard till I had a line of them stretched along the boundary with the forest. What use were books now.

  If I did that, it would be best to burn them, not leave them for others, but no big blaze either with smoke everywhere, because in no time I’d have people running with buckets and good intentions, sirens tearing up the road. If I wanted attention, no better way to signal my name in the air than with a smoke blanket. More effective would be one small and secret burning, and then another and another, piles of incendiary words, until the entire library was gone without fuss or notice. Don Quixote? A man my father said had so much information in his head it conjured his mind outside of him. The Parliament of Fowles? Such grace was long gone, long of little use.

  But lighting a fire with them was also useless. The cold flakes would wrap themselves around any small flame and snuff it out, and I wondered if I was the complete fool now if I thought I could burn the hours of my childhood and most of my life on a whim or because men had taken to shooting on a morning in early winter.

  There would be no transportation of books. I should be dealing with those guns instead.

  41

  I WALKED INSIDE AGAIN, BRINGING OUT A THIRD GLASS of sherry and sitting by the flowerbed where a few feet down my companion lay wrapped and packed in clay.