And when I thought he was running up to me, I thought a miracle was mine, some strangeness in the woods had produced him back, my Hobbes, the terrier, an early Christmas gift for Julius Winsome. I would have a fire on in no time, find a treat or drive him to Fort Kent with the heater on and the window open so he could stick his head out and still be warm. That would be just the start.
But when I parked the truck with the lights shining on the flowerbeds, the grave was undisturbed.
20
THURSDAY NIGHT THE SNOW FELL.
The wind stopped and the temperature went up slightly, I could tell from the drafts and the silent sweep of powder that shook itself across the fields, the woods, the cabin roof, and across and along the rest of Maine it seemed. But for the trees the wind would strike the cabin directly.
There is a day, an hour when winter comes, the second it slips in the door with its weather and says, I am here. If snow falls early enough, it drifts down into red forests and piles along lakes ringed with blue ice, but the visit is temporary: the white handprint of north vanishes with the next sunny day, polished off the hills and trees of Maine by the cloth of sunshine, the blow of warm fall breath on wood. If late, winter arrives on the back of a windstorm that blows every color before it but white, while under it, lakes turn to frozen spit and bare trees split, cracked open, and the forests stretch up to the shivering lit skin of the northern lights.
Maine, the white star that burns from November, it rules a cold corner of sky. Here, only short sentences and long thoughts can survive: unless you’re made of north and given to long spells alone, don’t trespass here from then. Distances collapse, time is thrown out. Children skate their names on ponds, sleds drag dogs in front of them. People defeat the winter by reading out the nights, spinning pages a hundred times faster than a day turns, small cogs revolving a larger one through all those months. The winter is fifty books long and fixes you to silence like a pinned insect; your sentences fold themselves into single words, the hand of twelve makes one hand of time. Every glance ends in snow. Every footstep sinks North. That’s time in Maine, the white of time.
It is also the time when an entire day squeezes in through the single bedroom window, and I stayed in bed most of the day, the blankets warmer than the air.
But I had things to do first. I ran to the woodpile and hauled in some logs before they got damp, and I covered the rest with green tarpaulin, folded once. After a meal of potatoes and fried fish I went out again with the flashlight and walked the flowerbeds and said goodbye to the last shades of pink and red, since by morning they would be cast under white, and soon covered. I hoped that the long snow of winter, now just begun, would keep my friend warm. I leaned to the ground and sank my fingers into the snowfall above where he lay.
I stood in the clearing as it whitened and looked up into the broken pieces of the night around the flakes.
Winter.
PART TWO
Night of November 2nd
21
THAT NIGHT IT WAS AS IF THE WIND SIMPLY BLEW through the house and blankets, as if nothing blocked the weather from my body. I lay in bed, waiting for a strain of heat to measure me and fit me into sleep. I heard noises, surely the crackling chill in the timbers of the cabin. Unless: wait, was that Hobbes at the door scratching? Had he somehow woken up and clawed his way out of the flower beds? I had heard of such things in history books, people in coffins waking up, wood found in their fingernails. That, or there were men about in the dark. If so, no matter: before lying down I brought the Enfield into the bedroom and leaned it against the wall.
I rose, let the cover fall away to the coat, and made for the door with the rifle loose in one hand, but when I opened it, one knife flew at my face, my hands, my feet, three instant cold blades from the wind. I shielded my eyes to no avaiclass="underline" no dog anywhere in sight, no paws and a head waiting to come in. I lingered to be sure, stood there for a minute before going back inside and pulling on the wool socks and a sweater under the coat. The wind must have infected me now, I shook that hard. I dressed myself fully by the bed. To fall asleep and be defenseless, to lie still while the forest swarmed around, that could not be. Better covered now, I was off again, this time all the way outside, to the grave.
Bending close I saw nothing that showed Hobbes had freed himself. I traced no evidence of even weak marks, the softening tracks of a running dog. So the howl and scratch at the door was only the cold after all. I stood at the forest edge wrapped in the coat and looked back at the cabin: the weak light of the frigid bedroom I had just left glimmered in the cracks of the side window, otherwise all was black, open to the elements but for a few inches of timber and a lining of books.
I waited for nothing. And nothing arrived. A deep ice stole its way into my heart. I felt it settle in and numb the valves and quiet the wind that blew inside my frame, heard it set upon my bones and breathe silence into the brittle spaces, everything that was broken. At that moment my heart knew the peace of cold. I gave up on my friend, and the night watch was done, for only his spirit would ever come to me again.
22
IF THE NOISE WAS NOT FROM THE GRAVE, THE UNEASE was elsewhere, and I could not stay out here standing sentry for that long. The suspicion that drew me out was perhaps all that could be called grave tonight: what had stayed at the back of my mind, a worry like wings.
I did not want to suspect Claire of anything, and did not, until I remembered our recent conversation on the street when she seemed to sense that all was not well with me. How would she know? Was her hand in this? Perhaps she belonged so completely now to another man that she decided to remove anything from that summer that still attached itself to me, and all that was left was Hobbes.
Such a thought, that Claire brought a gun out along the trails to my cabin and ended the life of the dog she helped rescue. It was well beyond my means to harm her, or any woman—and in that event my father would never have tolerated such a thing—but the thoughts would not disperse from my mind. Had she killed him?
Though the cold was something fierce, I hugged the coat about me more and leaned into the sheltered side of a tree trunk.
23
TO LOOK FOR EVIDENCE MEANT SHARPENING THE details of what was already known, re-seeing what was already seen. And it slowly came to me, what was bothering me, some evidence of a trick she played with others to bring this dog into my life and then take him away. I resolved however to think things over before anything else was done.
The first evidence of guilt was the way she turned up at the cabin that day in early summer. She walked past the flowers that stained the grass blue and yellow under the Maine sky, wide and shallow and ice blue. I was in the kitchen reading, and the wind blew from the south through the open window and through all the rooms, seeking out the last smells and shadows of spring, and the new summer grazed my skin with a warm whisper, its first word. I rose from the armchair when I heard her: my face had been buried in a book and now it filled the glass as I watched.
Some hens ran after each other in the sunlight under the smell of burning pine and past the truck. I stepped out onto the porch under smoke that swept down from the chimney.