Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

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.

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.

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.