I said, It’s been twenty years and probably time for someone else to be living in the house.
You make me laugh when you talk like that, she said.
It was not something I would have done without her: we drove within the hour to the Fort Kent animal shelter in the truck, and I wondered if she minded anyone seeing her with me. She didn’t care. The shelter was on the outskirts of town and it was early in the morning. We walked the line of cages. The expressions on the dogs’ faces made each one hard to pass. We came to a cage where a small brown terrier was wrapped in sleep but whose eyes flickered open when my shadow crossed them. It straightened up.
That’s a dangerous breed, she said.
No, I said, mostly terrier, look at the body. And young.
He had so much spirit and so little time. I agreed to the terms of care and took a leash out of my pocket, from a dog my father once had, I said, and though he cowered at first we walked out with the small fellow pulling me along after I had pulled him, as if to say, I’ve been waiting, let’s go.
I’m sorry I suggested anything, she said. Now when I come I will be facing a pit bull.
We drove back with him between us on the bench seat. Dogs know their fates intimately, and sitting between us in the bench seat of the truck—with me smoking a cigarette out the open window given the occasion—and with the winding roads, this one knew his life had just changed and he was grabbing every moment of it with every glance. When I picked up my mail earlier at the post office I threw it on the seat. Now a bunch of it slid around like so much water and he hopped around the pile between us. I told him I would avoid the letters too. We called him Hobbes.
How quickly successful her plan was.
Dogs have one bond in them, and Hobbes let me know that he had chosen me in ways easily missed: how he came up a few minutes after eating and nuzzled his nose on my leg, as if to say he’d eaten the food. I was of no use to anyone as a father, perhaps that is why I saw the little fellow as the next blessing in line, his need to be cared for, with nothing to give in return but his company.
As for references to my days at school, there was nothing I ever did there apart from turning up and going home, though there was one thing: one day in my final year I did notice a group of boys huddled under a tree during the lunch break. They had a stick and were rattling it in around the leaves. I walked closer and saw a cat trapped on the branch. Now they pelted it with stones: one hit it in the head and drew a line of blood down the ear and mouth. The cat tried to play with the stick in case that would make them like it better, that’s what I thought it was trying to do, whatever way the fright was working on its mind. Then it squeezed itself into a ball out of terror and fell, and they were on it, stepping and kicking. I ran the field and then their heads with punches until they spread out. The matter was over as soon as it began, which was just as well as they could have made short work of me had they fought in a unit. One of them had blood on his mouth, another limped holding his knee and saying that I would be sorry, that he had a real father and mother.
The principal was upset that no one noticed anything in a school with so many windows. That is likely what her sister described. Perhaps the local boys turned into men and they were all confederates now so many years after the fact, the settling of an old score in a remote place that manages that kind of thing so well.
I have long believed that the grave is the end of us, and if I did not think so, I might have allowed the killing of Hobbes to pass and allow it some significance in a larger story. But he was a stone, he was stiller than a stone because even a stone moves eventually, kicked by a boot or moved by the weather or a tire, and he was lying packed in clay twenty feet from the cabin, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, tasting nothing, nothing stored in him. That twenty feet might as well have been the universe, it made no difference to him or to me. And he was dead evidently because of some pique, a stored offense over as many years.
I was not going to let that pass.
25
IF CLAIRE HAD A PLAN FOR MY UNDOING, SHE WAS slow and careful in its execution.
Once I was late at the repair shop and when I got home saw the steam and the flicker of candlelight in the bathroom beside the kitchen: she must have poured herself a bath in the antique tub. I had pots in there too with rubber plants and large daisies and beige tile underneath. Within the minute I heard a voice reading poetry and then calling my name, the water may have cooled and I carried some more that had boiled in a large pan on a towel to the door. She was reading a poet from France, I recognized the lines, the rhythms she captured without effort, because the French in her understood the cadences.
I heard her voice: Why don’t you pour the hot water into the tub.
It was a voice without a body that drifted through the steam. When I stepped forward, a book emerged from the mist in her hand.
Bring yourself in too, if you want, she said.
I stood inside the door and she asked me to turn the pages for her, an old hardcover, with poems on one side and drawings in thin orange pencil scattered through the pages. I knelt and read in the candles from different poems as she lay in the foam. This poet was killed in the Great War, I said, and there were many in the book who died in that conflict, some known, some not, the words collected from boxes and envelopes, from lonely wives and anguished brothers. She grew still in the hot water surrounded by plants and the perfume of the soap and listened to those voices out of time.
I rested my hand on the edge and wondered if she saw the old English in my face the way I saw the old French in hers, and if such differences mattered. I thought that if she touched me I would disappear too like those vanished men who brought such differences with them into hell.
She said she was tired, asked if she could stay a while.
My bedroom was small and white and the bed-covers were orange and yellow. The mattress leaned over the edge of the wooden frame that lay close to the floor and had a dip in it where I lay every night. She said she could tell I had not had any visitors in a while, and perhaps she wondered if anyone had ever slept in that bed but me. The sheets were clean and whiffed of lavender soap. I had boxes stacked by the walls and a gramophone balanced on three of them over a length of cut carpet, plugged into an outlet shared by the small lamp on another box by the bed. It was my bedroom from the start. My father slept in the room opposite, what was now occupied by shelves and books. We lay together and she slipped the towel off and moved the shirt from my chest.
That night, as in a few other summer nights to come, we warmed each other under the covers, though in the very early hours she rose and went outside to the stove and the chair with the red cushion. I thought I heard her cry, but it may have been the night. I knew what drew her to that chair: you sat in it and wanted to think, you wanted to read something with the whiff of pipe smoke but not from any one thing: even when I held the cushion to my face, the phantom of the pipe produced my father generally about me.
If Claire had a plan for my undoing, she did not stick to it. The following evening she held my hands and placed a small book into them, one I had not seen before, poems by John Donne. On the preface page she had written some lines.
All that silence waves across you, Julius, like the long grass.
You make me feel like a poet.
I was surprised to find myself the subject of such fine words and did not know what to say. She stroked my hands and leaned closer, her whispers soft in the firelight: