Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

I heard his next words at the second the trigger was at the pressure of firing.

Claire, he said.

I froze at the sights. What about Claire?

He spoke again, his hands up from his sides: She’ll miss me.

What has Claire to do with you and me, I said. Only in your head.

But he sensed the hesitation, and the proof was that he was still alive. He did not waste time, mostly because lately he had less than a second of it to his name.

He said, What about her, her feelings, what will she do?

She’ll live, I said.

How? I can give Claire a family, children, a family life. What could you have given her?

That stopped me. It was a good question. I wanted to smoke a Turkish cigarette, drink strong coffee against the falling twilight, what I loved most about the day, that chink in the door. But there was Troy and given a moment he’d snap himself out of my sight.

I said, I don’t know anymore. I’m not sure that people give anything to anyone as such.

Well I can give her a family, a sense of values.

I know what those words mean, I said, and let the rifle down. Enflields are heavy, even for a grown man, when you hold them up long enough.

He said, Then you can put those words into practice.

He was being earnest or else an actor in the first league. I had left the sherry on the porch railing, nothing to do but shoot the man or talk to him.

I have an example, I said.

Yes, he said. Go ahead. I’ll listen.

I said, The guinea hens go into the bushes and sit on eggs and leave them only when it becomes a matter of life or death. I see the female walk scraggily out of the bush in the evening, and three males walk about her in a triangle protecting her as she goes to the feeding place.

That’s a start, he said.

I said, A chicken hawk once darkened the yard and most of the animals ran for the trees except the chickens. And the hawk swooped on one and lifted it. Hobbes was already at full stretch even when the hawk was still on the way down, and he leaped for the chicken in the hawk’s talons, jumped well up, and the hawk let go, and Hobbes fell to the ground with the fowl.

Troy had no response for that, as if he had not heard or believed me. But I had seen it happen. The good policeman went to another page in his survivor’s manual.

Make it easy on yourself. Give yourself up, he said.

I was disappointed. There you go with your give again.

Make it easy on yourself, he said.

It’s already easy on me.

I decided to be silent for a while, to let him make the next move. It chafed at him. He said something but the wind caught it and anyway I wasn’t answering him for the moment. And if he moved he was a dead man in that second.

When I was young I heard a visitor to the farm point to the ducks we kept and say to my father that they were being unnaturally protected against predators, that in the real world they fend for themselves, that the laws of nature favor the strong. The sun was shining that day and the ducks were in the water of the upturned basin lid they had crowded into, corded their necks together and slept. My father listened, nodded, offered him more tea, and they talked some more. Then he said,

You don’t mind if after you’ve finished that tea—he pointed to it—that I go inside and get a shotgun and kill you with it?

I don’t understand, the man said, shifting in his seat.

Surely you must, my father said. Because I have a shotgun and you don’t, I’m stronger than you so I can shoot you, according to your philosophy. His voice had a lilt in it even though the matter was technically a threat, according to the visitor who left shortly after that. The story went around town but it was put down to the war. At the end of the day my father had a rare twinkle: A war can be handy like that, he said. And then, the twinkle gone, he added, You cannot believe in survival of the fittest but want to decide first who is the fittest to survive.

Survival of the fittest, I said.

What? Troy whitened again. I had spoken aloud, spoken myself out of the past, people dead and gone. And that brought me back to the books, the book in my pocket.

Troy followed where I was looking.

A cup of tea would have been a miracle for me, but I knew that a second of lost attention would bring me around to the wrong end of my own rifle and that Troy would shoot me at once, not trusting himself to bring me all the way to the station ahead of him through the woods. He’d be right.

I told him to take the book with the piece of paper I had slipped recently into it and stand at the flowerbeds. He grabbed the book and walked, step by slow step, his eyes flicking from the ground to the gun, judging the moment of a last desperate run he knew he could not finish. Yet that truth has never stopped anyone.

The night was upon us now, with its own strange light, the light of the other side, smaller and in pieces but enchanting and a salve for those whose lives blossom under it. That same light carries voices better. His had fallen thinner, less confident, or maybe the light made it seem so:

He said, What did she see in you anyway?

His voice shook with a trace of something that didn’t have metal in the sentences, the way people talk who believe everything they believe. But perhaps I was the same myself, had my own cogs driving what I thought and said, full of my own belief. I was part of it all, that was for sure.

You’d have to ask her that. She chose you.

He looked down to what he was holding: What is this?

Read the lines on the paper, I said.

He opened the book to where the paper stuck out and lifted it, and covered the writing up and down with a glance, puzzled and panicked to be reading his last testament, and that not even in his own words.

I said read it.

Okay, okay. He traced the words with a finger, the finger falling behind his eye, his voice trailing the finger:

Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,

To cure this deadly grief

.

What do you think, I said.

It’s a foreign language, I don’t understand this continual talk of yours.

It’s English, I said.

What—you mean like intelligencer, and that other word you said? That’s not English.

I knew what he was saying and felt for him.

You mean it’s English like a dog’s bark, I said.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean, what it’s like.

I said, They might be the same thing now.

What’s the same?

What dogs and Shakespeare have to say.

Who says? He snapped the book shut and pointed to his chest: What’s with this lecturing me? What are you going to do? I’m a police officer.

He shouted these words to give them force, but they were the right words and didn’t need shouting. It was true for him, I had far too much to say all of a sudden, a form of impertinence.

I kept the rifle high. My intendment? I don’t know, I said by way of a fast retreat. Read a little, make some tea, get a fire going with this chill coming, something along those lines is what I will do.

His voice softer again: I meant do with me.

I shook my head to let him know, and at that he melted for his final moments, they loosened him into talking more, complaints about his life and his business, how hard he had worked, how everyone respected him, and then his lists of responsibilities, and I waited till the complaints echoed themselves into the silence of the forest that eats up everything a man might ever say till he has talked himself out and the echoes peter because no generation follows them into the trees.

I knelt on one knee and wiped off the snow from Hobbes, from the clay above him. He was a couple of feet away from my hand, and I felt I could almost rub his back, pat his head.