Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

IT WAS ALMOST DARK, AND TROY STOOD WHERE THE flowers had perfumed the entire clearing and my bedroom in the mornings, he stood where the light of the porch reached now to cover us.

He said, It was another time, over a year ago. I came up here to the woods, to see where you lived. I was tired of Claire talking about you; she had mentioned your name twice in four years, and so I had to see what was going on, to understand the competition I was dealing with. I walked along the woods out there meaning to check out the cabin, and your dog heard me, ran through the woods at me. I got into the truck and drove away.

You said he was barking.

He barked, that’s all he did. Why would a man shoot a barking dog?

I lowered the rifle. So Hobbes had stood his ground. Either that or this was an incident with the dog that this man had time to fancy up on the long silent walk back. No, maybe poor Hobbes was competition for Troy too, had she really talked about Hobbes to him? I thought I asked out loud, but Troy did not move to speak.

Then, as a white flurry blended through the trees and the last leaves tore from the branches, I remembered Claire wearing no clothes and standing in the warm kitchen a few weeks after her first visit, holding a copy of The Winter’s Tale to her breast.

You are my own William now, she said to me.

I found myself looking at the place where the flowers appeared, those which I had grown myself or that grew by themselves, pressing themselves above the hard ground for light.

Such soft skin, such a hard memory.

Troy stood at the flowerbed, sulking. Then a murder of crows, thousands of them, a rattle of black, flew mid way up through the trees, a trickling shrill band. They took five minutes to pass, and the noise ruled out any words between us in the meantime. Troy watched the rifle, and I watched the birds pass behind him.

The trees are crowed, I said.

He winced. They’re what? What are you saying?

That word was of my own making, I said. My Shakespeare has run out for the moment.

His sullen shrug, as if we had parted languages and he was staying behind. Defiancy, another new word, just for him. But I admired his focus, the strength and purpose of his will: he thought in a way that excluded everything from it that did not fit in, the way a moth stitches itself to the light bulb on the porch, a knitting circle, and sometimes its shadow bothered me and I switched off the light to free it into the night, since only silence sends people like Troy away, since if you say anything they must at once attach a reply.

Do you want to come in, I said. The evening was settling in.

He shook his head, eyes drifting to the cabin. I’m not going in there.

As you like, I said. But they’ll be going down badly soon, the numbers.

He must have thought I was talking about something else because he said, And you’ve shot a good number of people already, haven’t you?

I took a drink, the temperature was mixing the sherry differently on my tongue. I nodded to give him that victory, since he deserved it:

I said, There’s an idea abroad that men with guns can do as they wish, that it’s the natural order of things. I gave them a natural order.

So you admit it, here and now, he said.

He was warming up to his plan to survive, whatever that was. I was past the point where it mattered to me, about myself, about anything. All I felt was an absence that had never been there before, that blanketed everything in me. Before this I knew the normal happiness in being alone disturbed suddenly by one absence: the sheer hardness of it, you become a stone, a wood, a splinter in the ground, wind with splinters in it. And as poisonous remedy, the flowers in all the grey, the touch of a hand on your arm, the sweet word from a smile, what cures and then leaves you worse. Some people think it is the mind that does it. If that were the case, whether Hobbes had ever been in my life, or I in his, mattered little to the world or anyone in it, only to me now. You attach yourself and suffer when you don’t have it anymore. But he made my days shorter when I had no one else, his friendship present even when no gain occurred.

And you can admit something for me now, I said.

I spoke deliberately, sure that I was speaking out loud and not to myself since living as I did sometimes blurred the two.

Troy moved his legs to shoulder width. Admit what?

That you sent a man out yesterday to check on me, the man on the road in the morning. I saw two men in the car afterwards.

Troy began nodding before I was done. I sent a man out, dropped him off and picked him up after you drove through. You have some eyesight, I’ll give you that, he said.

But you didn’t follow me, I said.

You would have seen us. But I had a rifle on you the whole time he was questioning you.

And now, I said, you are here today, you came with these men to the woods, neither of them a constable, and both of them working for you it seems, to get me out looking for you.

Only one of them knew, not the first you killed. Anyway, I figured I could get you myself before any shooting started.

And be the hero.

Just doing my job.

I doubt that, I said. Doing your job would not have had you employing another man to die today. I incarnadined your intelligencer.

My Shakespeare had returned but skipped the H words. He seemed puzzled, so I translated the English into English: I bloodied your spy.

That set him off.

You’re mad because I took Claire away from you, he said. That’s it, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Not some damn dog.

I could see the fear and defiance again stir in him like milk into tea. And when I arrived at his curse as I reviewed the order of his words, the curse placed before Hobbes, my blood went low in my body, down in cold parts under the veins. Claire was, I had to believe, as distant from all of this as could be, and bringing her into it was ill-advised on his part. But I owed him the respect of following his own logic:

If that were so, if you are the instigator of everything that has happened, the man whose power I live under, then you would be the man equally to end it all by his death. If I am jealous, I said lifting the rifle, I can remedy that now.

I aimed at his forehead. He grew whiter and faster than snow blizzards a windshield. I could tell he was thinking of running, the way he met my gaze down the barrel without flinching. His training told him to do that, not to betray his thinking with an unconscious glance around him for an escape route. To stare at me instead as if he were intent upon me only. Good for him, to have that resource of mind. I had underestimated him.

I glanced to one side for him, to let him know.

Unless you can become a tree I wouldn’t try to run, I said, thinking that he should elect to see the bullet rather than have it travel after him.

He sensed the moment had come and stiffened against the shot he expected. I breathed out.

You wouldn’t treat an animal like this, he said. Some pleading now.

Does treat mean well or badly, I said.

You know, he said.

I must know what to do with you then, if that’s what you expect from that word. I would have thought treating like an animal meant well.

I brought the rifle back up as I had dropped it an inch to answer him and I wanted that breath to be the last thing he ever heard. A cold blast banged us both hard, a cloud moved off the yellow rising moon. It was all but dark, thirty minutes at most. The forest was showing its white hand, the sky closing its fist.