Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

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.

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 being 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.

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.

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?