Julius Winsome Read online

  Julius Winsome

  Gerard Donovan

  Living alone with his dog in the remote cabin in the woods, Julius Winsome is not unlike the barren winter lands that he inhabits: remote, vacant, inscrutable. But when his dog Hobbes is killed by hunters, their carelessness—or is it cruelty?—sets Julius’s precarious mindset on end.

  He is at once more alone than he has ever been; he was at first with his father, until he died; then with Claire, until she disappeared with another man into a more normal life in town; and then with Hobbes, who eased the sorrow of Claire’s departure. Now Hobbes is gone.

  Julius is left with what his father left behind: the cabin that he was raised in; a lifetime of books, lining every wall of his home, which have been Julius’s lifelong friends and confidantes; and his great-grandfather’s rifle from World War I, which Julius had been trained to shoot with uncanny skill and with the utmost reluctance. But with the death of his dog, Julius’s reluctance has reached its end. More and more, simply and furtively, it is revenge that is creeping into his mind.

  Fresh snow is on the ground as the hunters lumber into his sights. They’re well within the old gun’s range. They pause, and they’re locked into the crosshairs. Julius’s finger traces the trigger. Will he pull it? And what will that accomplish? What if he simply has nothing left to lose?

  Gerard Donovan

  JULIUS WINSOME

  A Novel

  for Doug Swanson and

  Christina Nalty

  Those who live the longest and those who die the soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have.

  —MARCUS AURELIUS

  PART ONE

  October 30th–November 2nd

  1

  I THINK I HEARD THE SHOT.

  It was a cold afternoon at the end of October, and I was in my chair reading by the wood stove in my cabin. In these woods many men roam with guns, mostly in the stretches away from where people live, and their shots spray like pepper across the sky, especially on the first day of the rifle hunting season when people from Fort Kent and smaller towns bring long guns in their trucks up this way to hunt deer and bear.

  But the metal punch that rang across the forest seemed a lot closer, less than a mile off if it’s the sound that killed him, but the truth is that I have imagined hearing it so many times since, rewound the tape of those moments so often, that I cannot tell anymore the true sound of the rifle from the phantom of my thoughts.

  That was close, I said, and opened the woodstove and shoved in another log, closing it before the smoke poured out and filled the room.

  Most of the hunters, even the beginners, kept to the open forest, farther west in the North Maine Woods and to the Canadian border, but a good rifle carries far, and the distance can be tricky to figure without walls and roads.

  It still sounded too close. The seasoned hunters knew where I lived and where all the cabins were in the woods, some in the open, some hidden. They knew not to discharge a weapon, that bullets will travel until they hit something.

  I had a good fire going and my legs were warm, and I finished the short story by Chekhov where a girl cannot sleep and the baby won’t stop crying, and was so caught up in it that I didn’t notice my dog was gone. I had let him out a few minutes before and it was nothing new for him to wander off, though mostly he stayed a hundred yards or so from the cabin in a big circle, his territory, the thing he owned.

  I went to the door and called for him, thinking again that the sound was a bit close to the house, and then I checked again ten minutes later and still couldn’t find my dog, he didn’t come in when I called, louder each time, and when I walked to the edge of the woods and whistled, cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, there was no sign, no brown shape breaking out of the undergrowth toward me as he always did when summoned.

  The wind was cold and I closed the door and slid the towel on the floor against it to block the draft. Then I did something I rarely do in the winter months: I checked the clock.

  It was four minutes past three.

  2

  NOVEMBER ARRIVES IN NORTHERN MAINE ON A COLD wind from Canada that knifes unfiltered through the thinned forest, drapes snow along the river banks and over the slope of hills. It’s lonely up here, not just in fall and winter but all the time; the weather is gray and hard and the spaces are long and hard, and that north wind blows through every space unmercifully, rattling the syllables out of your sentences sometimes.

  I grew up in these woods, the forest land at the western edges of the St. John Valley that borders the Canadian province of New Brunswick and runs along the banks and south of the St. John River with its rolling hills and small, back settlement towns. My grandfather was French Acadian, as was my mother, and for reasons unknown to me he built the cabin miles away from the French, on tree-covered land close to where the great woods began in the western part of the valley. At the time it was even more remote than now, and strange because those people stuck together: most who lived in those settlement towns were descended from the French Acadians expelled by the British from Nova Scotia in 1755. Some went south to Louisiana, the rest moved eventually to Northern Maine, these people of extremes, my father said, people of far south and north.

  It was strange also because of the winters. He built the cabin on two acres of cleared land, with the woods on all sides, and my father added a large barn, bigger than the cabin, where he kept all his tools and the truck and anything fragile or easily lost that would not survive the six winter months outside. The woods that ringed the house were formed of evergreens and leaf-shedders both—pines, oak, spruce, hemlock, maple—and so the trees circling the cabin seemed to step back, retreat in pieces as the leaves turned yellow and deep rust, shredding off like dead skin as September came, crinkling yellow along the floor of the woods as October arrived, and blowing away into November.

  The cabin came from my mother’s French side, my father being English, and I inherited it through her by way of him. He told me that I wouldn’t believe it if I saw it, that the valley was like the rolling midlands of England, but the tongue that echoed in these hills was French, not English. And that was another strange decision, an Acadian woman marrying English, but she was her own woman I am told, and anyway they are not people you tell what to do.

  The cabin blends into the woods, or the woods into the cabin. One moment you are in forest stepping over a branch, the next step puts you walking across a porch, and you want to be careful. Many men live in these woods who cannot live anywhere else; they live alone and are tuned close to any offense you might give them, best to keep your manners about you, and even better to have nothing to say at all. They come up north and wait out life, or they were here anyway and stayed for the same reason. Such men live at the end of all the long lanes in the world, and in reaching a place like this they have run out of country they can’t live in. They have no choice but to build, and so they go as far out of the way as they can even here, in the deep shade of the trees. I lived far from the nearest of them, the closest cabins three miles to the west and north of me.

  In summer I kept a bed of flowers along the edge of the clearing, about thirty feet by three, filled with nasturtiums, marigolds, lilies, and foxglove, and every year I added to the small lawn with sown grass that grew to a hot green carpet in the summer where I could lie down and smell the flowers and taste the blue sky. But this winter had come late; we had a strange, warmer south wind for most of October, and some of the flowers were still alive with their smell, way past season. I’d covered them with black plastic bags pulled out to little tents on poles to keep them alive through the odd night frost, hoping to keep their color another week and shorten the gray months ahead. They had made my lif
e bright in summer and I wanted to help them. But in the last couple of days the temperatures had fallen, and soon these survivors would retreat too, find the safety of the soil and sleep in their seed under the vice-grips of deep winter.

  * * *

  Except for my dog I lived on my own, for I had never married, though I think I came near once, and so even the silences here were mine. It was a place built around silences: my father was a reader of books, and spreading along the walls from the wood stove stretched the long bookcases from the living room and on to the kitchen at the back and right and left to both bedrooms, four shelves high, holding every book he ever owned or read, which was the same thing, for my father did indeed read everything. I was surrounded therefore by 3,282 books, leatherbound, first editions, paperbacks, all in good condition, arranged by alphabet and recorded on lists written in fountain pen. And because the bookcase ringed the entire cabin—and since some rooms were darker and colder than others, being distant from the woodstove—there were also warm novels and cold novels. Many of the cold novels had authors whose last names began with letters after “J” and before “M,” so writers like Johnson and Joyce, Malory and Owen lived back near the bedrooms. My father called it an outpost of Alexandria in Maine, after the Greek library, and he liked nothing better when he came in after work than to stretch his socks to the fire until they steamed, and in his thick sweater and smoking his pipe then turn to me and ask for a particular book, and I remembered the cold pages in my hands, carrying to my father the volume he wanted, watching it warm under his eyes by the fire, and when he was finished I carried the warm book back to its shelf and slid it in, a tighter fit because it had grown slightly in the heat.

  Although he was gone for twenty years I had the novels and travel books, plays and short stories, all as he had left them, everything he was and knew still around me.

  In the afternoon of that Monday I took one of those books to read, some Russian stories, and when I finished the story I strained a look out the window. Still no dog.

  The clock again: Twenty minutes past three.

  3

  I WALKED INTO THE CLEARING AND SHOUTED.

  Hobbes!

  I hoped to see him run up behind me or jump out of the truck where he often slept during the day on the seat, where the windshield gathered the sunlight into a greenhouse, but another three shouts didn’t bring him. To get my mind off him I took more logs from the woodpile and stacked them by the door. A small knot draped loosely in my stomach and lay there even though I ignored it and selected another book from the shelves and sat by the window. An essay by Alexander Pope in a first edition, published in 1757 in London, one of ten volumes bound in their original leather, the catalogue index card inside the cover. No good. I could not lose myself in the detail, and what would have once given me pleasure seemed so many loose and tedious words in my mind, the pain of stones: “The Works of Alexander Pope Esq. In 10 vols. London: printed for A. Millar, Jan R. Tonson, H. Lintot, and C. Bathurst, 1757. With frontispiece and twenty-three engraved plates, separate title-pages to each volume printed in red and black, in contemporary mottled calf, red morocco labels on spines lettered in gilt.”

  In the end I closed the book and sighed because the minutes joined at each side to pull the knot tighter.

  The shot was too close, sounded wider than a rifle too. I replayed it and figured less than five hundred yards.

  At forty minutes past three I walked to the edge of the woods again and cupped my hands and shouted his name. I heard the echo bounce off ahead like a skimming flat stone. Then I walked farther into the woods along a trail, a hundred yards, two hundred yards, and called again. It would soon be dark; this was the time when the deer came out. He may have seen one and ran after it, a pursuit that might take him two or three miles away. Often when I was out walking with him I’d see him dash off after a big buck without a hope of catching it, and I’m not sure what Hobbes would have done if he ever did catch up, and he was always back at the house before I was, waiting with his wagging tail and a parched mouth.

  Since the hunting season had begun I tied an orange scarf around his neck as a sign to hunters, but it got torn off and I had not replaced it, something I regretted now as I made my way back. No use walking any more and fumbling my way along in the night.

  At five minutes to four I arrived in the clearing and saw him lying in the flowers, bleeding, breathing, but barely. His eyes were open and he raised his head when he heard me. I ran to him and saw the wound, a shotgun.

  * * *

  He was still breathing when I got him to the veterinarian’s office in Fort Kent, a fifteen-mile drive, the first three miles along a dirt road and overhanging trees. I swung around potholes, holding him steady and keeping pressure on the wound, saying his name to let him hear a word he knew, felt the damp on my hand. I sped up as I reached the paved road to the town. The doctor was dressed in his white coat having dinner in his kitchen when I knocked on the door. His wife answered it, holding her hand to her eyebrows under the porch bulb while she looked me up and down.

  My dog’s been shot, I said.

  She looked to the truck with the door open idling in the driveway, saw Hobbes lying on the bench in the light. She clutched her collar and nodded, called to her husband.

  A dog’s been shot.

  I appreciated the brevity of what she said. This was a woman who knew the value of seconds. The doctor ran out and we carried the dog to his office, which was attached to the house, and laid him on the metal bench.

  He was shot up close, he said.

  I told him I could see that already.

  No, it was very close, the vet said, inches. The buckshot is well into his back.

  You mean the gun was touching him, I said.

  The person knew the dog, patted him first maybe, to get him that close, he said.

  Then the doctor said I should go with his wife because he worked better on his own. I asked about staying for the dog to see someone he knew, but he shook his head and said again for me to go.

  His wife brought me to the kitchen and gave me a cup of tea and told me not to worry. She was a good woman and I liked her; I remembered her kindness to my father when he made the long trip with another dog, twenty years and more before, shortly before his own death. She recognized me now, I could see.

  You’re Julius Winsome, she said.

  I nodded.

  He must have run after a deer to get so far from the house, I said.

  They’ll do that, she said. Poor thing.

  Or gone for a walk, his nose in the air, I said.

  She said, They like to go for walks, just like humans.

  A bell sounded and she said that we should go back next door. As we walked in, all I could see were bandages and blood. He had lost so much blood.

  You have to be mighty cruel and then some to pull the trigger on a dog like that, the doctor said, and he moved until his hand was on my shoulder, and I knew what he was saying. They left and I heard his wife ask him how things were and why couldn’t he save him. His answer was gone as they closed the door and I stood there with my dog under the single light.

  The little fellow looked at me and I held his head, and he lay his head on my arm and stopped breathing, as if he could let go like that, now that I was there.

  4

  IN TRUTH IT WAS A LONG WAY BACK TO THE CABIN. Hobbes lay beside me but I moved his head onto my lap for whatever comfort might be got for him even at this late stage. He had lost much of the heat from his body and the blood matted in his fur and the seat. That same night, shortly after getting back to the cabin, I ran the truck lights and buried him in the flower beds at the spot where I found him, a part I would see from the window when I looked out. It was hard to throw that first shovel of clay over his face, to see a hole gouged around the body that had so often ran after toys I’d thrown or shivered in dreams on the floor as he ran and barked. The shovel worked in and out of the light beams as the dirt hit him in the stomach, on h
is back, fell into his ears, his eyes, as I covered him along with the things that had made him: his walks, his rest, his eating when hungry, the stars he watched sometimes, the first day I brought him home, the first time he saw snow, and every second of his friendship, what he took with him into silence and stillness; I shoveled the whole world on top of my friend and felt the weight of it as though I lay with him in that dark.

  After he was gone, I put the shovel in the barn and walked to the warm cabin and left him to stiffen. It rained that night, and it was cold after the fire went down. I lay in bed on Monday night listening to the wind whip around the house like a rope.

  5

  I WOKE ON TUESDAY MORNING TO A SPLINTER OF LIGHT through the window, the first time the sun did not rise on a living Hobbes. His grave was twenty feet from the cabin, too close not to notice even if you tried to walk past, and I couldn’t bring myself to go outside and see it, so I fumbled around inside the dark walls, walking down the lines of books, plucking them out from their tight positions along the shelves and dusting them in the shaft of light through the front window until the air filled with dust swirling in the morning rays; then I went into the spare room and pulled two boxes from under the bed, both marked “Alexandria,” and found inside them stacks of cards carefully wrapped in brown elastic bands.

  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.