Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

My father had indeed lined the house with 3,282 books, far too many for anyone to remember, and so he drew up an index card for each one, listing author, publisher, and year, as well as a summary of contents. I remembered the scratch of his fountain pen as he sat in his antique New England chair, still there by the fire, and scanned each cover up and down, over and under his spectacles, noting the details, moving his head from side to side, mumbling those details as he wrote. The fountain pen scratched through snow and spring, rain and fall. I stayed in the room, bent over the box, as the image of him flooded me like a running stream in woods after rainfall: how he sat straight in that green wool sweater he wore, his cashmere scarf, vaguely tinted with aftershave, covering his neck when it got cold even with a fire, and how I stayed close to him and read too, the silences stretching like vines through the cabin, broken only as each of us got up to make tea or cut some bread and butter. He was a gentle man and easy to live with because he took up very little room around him. Some people are like that, though very few, and it was from him I learned how to be still. We had lived alone together: he never remarried. He said there was only one woman for him, even if she had died, and from that I learned what loyalty is when you take the bare word that’s written and put flesh on it and let it live.

After two pots of tea and with the fire already burning on its embers I glanced at the clock for the third time in two days, the most times that clock had been looked at in two months at least. Only noon. I had to get wood or the place would be frozen by three. It was the time of year I called the wood time, when I heated the place using just the logs I cut from the dead trees; but next week I’d have to get the oil tank filled to keep the temperatures up. Once the winter set in around here you could burn a whole forest and not catch up with the cold.

I walked outside across the clearing with the grave on my left and grabbed some logs. Each one fed the tang of the month it was stored into the luke-warm sun, and from the trees hundreds of rusty leaves fell scraping the bark on the way down, finding air again and floating, then landing with the sound of rain. Holding four logs in my arms I walked straight back to the door I’d left open, my eyes fixed to the ground. I didn’t look but the damage was done—the fresh soil with the rock I put on top to keep predators away crept into the corner of my eye somehow, and my heart sank. By the time I was back in the cabin and stirring the fire, I missed him for the first time, missed him with a hammer strike against the heart, the awful moment when you know what gone really means. It means no one sees how you live, what you do.

And along with the sadness, something else crept in the door, a trace of something else, I mean. It must have come from the woodpile or ran in from the woods, because I’d not felt anything like it before.

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT a man called William Shakespeare invented words, thousands of them, and to prove it he took out the plays of that man, Julius Caesar, Cymbeline , and Richard II , and showed me the small print at the bottom of each page where the words were written and what they meant. As part of my education he had me write out lists with Shakespeare’s words in them, a few new words every day, using his fountain pen, and soon those words and the smell of ink entered my mind, and when I began to speak them in daily use my father was quietly pleased, smiling widely at me from behind his book, his socks drying by the fire. Thus every week I increased my vocabulary by twenty or so Elizabethan words, words come all the way from the 1500s to sit in my mouth and in my hand when I spelled them with their definitions. I remembered one day’s set: Blood-boltered meant covered with blood, besmoiled meant covered with dirt.

I am a reader mostly, not a writer, but when I have to I can put some words together. Why then, so many years later at the age of fifty-one, I took a large sheet of paper and taped another to it and spread it on the floor in the last piece of sunlight left in the cabin and kneeled before it with a black marker, why I did that I don’t know, and whatever I hoped to achieve was a distant and troublesome fleck on the horizon. But I found myself composing the first lines I’d written in a long time, apart from my signature or an address, writing in large capitals the words DOG SHOT and under it in smaller letters “On October 30 between the Wallagrass Lakes and McLean Mountain, Reward for Information,” and under that my address at the post office where I collected my mail once a week, in winter sometimes every two or three weeks.

It is true that I composed these words by the stove fire when Hobbes was in the ground and beyond saving by letters, and I cannot say why I did it at all, though I think what crept in the door after me that same morning is what set me to writing, or else it was Shakespeare who inspired the poster. One of the two.

I warmed up the truck and drove with the announcement, reaching the good road along the St John River and travelled from there on to Fort Kent, where I set it on the wall outside the supermarket, taped it well to hold up against the wind and fastened it with a nail I banged in using a flat stone I brought in my pocket from the woods. It was early in the afternoon and I went inside to buy some groceries, bread and milk, some matches and vegetables, and then I stopped by the diner with a mind for black coffee and to sit in the heat and light and let my eyes see different things, hear different voices, for the cabin lay too heavy on my senses with Hobbes and everything. The woods were dark and wet, a mind of their own sometimes.

I set my gloves on the table and bowed my head slightly as the waitress stood at my shoulder with her notepad. She had seen me do this before and smiled.

She said, What would you like?

I stayed there for twenty minutes and enjoyed the cup and the way the steam heated my forehead until dark filtered along the streets and it was time to drive back. I said goodbye to her and passed the supermarket and glanced at the poster to see if it was still flat against the wall. I stopped and moved closer.

A large circle now surrounded the words Dog Shot and inside it in small letters, “Bye-bye dog” with exclamation marks after it, a punctuation mark my father had often complained about, a crutch for a weak word. I read on. Under that the person had written, “So what, one less dog. Get over it,” and more exclamations. I stared at this for a minute in the street as people walked around me, giving me a lot of space, and then I took the poster down and rolled it up, placed it inside my coat.

I could not get back to the cabin fast enough, and then get inside the door fast enough, nor open the wood stove fast enough, nor stuff that poster inside it and burn it fast enough, watching the paper curl into an orange grip around the logs, thinking the cruelty of small towns was so sharp it might be a pencil and you could write with it, write on posters for lost and shot animals and mock them. My mind hopped around agitated on a high tree, would not come down, would not let me read, I tried—different books, different authors, warm and cold—no matter, an urgency wanted me out the door and walking, walking.

So I grabbed a coat and walked, out along the trail to the woods, to the place where I thought the shot came from when I heard it. Already a whole day gone by now but it felt like many weeks, and I replayed the sound to get my bearings. About five hundred yards along the edge of the trees, where it bordered a wide field, I saw a yellow shotgun shell in the grass and picked it up. It was a fresh cartridge, the metal untouched by rust, the yellow plastic still bright. And a few feet into the forest I found a pool of blood, and then drops of blood, frozen, heading toward the cabin.