Kneeling on the floor I detached the head and shook out any flakes, then filled the pipe with the English tobacco stored in the same box, then sat back and puffed away in the dark. A bit stale, the smoke, but a strain of pleasure in the moment, that first taste, the smell that makes the thoughts wander, and those two senses brought my father back even stronger. Now I could hear him turn the pages and call me over and show me a good passage and ask me what I thought, and he would listen for a long time as I spoke, nodding his head and saying how wise I was for a young boy. He was kind that way.
An hour passed and the cold flung stones in my fingers and knees and the muscles pulled at the low bones in my spine. Unable to bear the chill a minute longer, I lit the fire and crept out into the clearing for wood, lifting the tarpaulin for some logs. The rising moon switched its own lamp on in the woods.
No-one shot at me while I carried the logs back into the cabin; no-one shot when I opened the woodstove and lit the paper under them; no-one shot when I boiled some water for tea and sat in the New England chair with the Shakespeare list from between the books; no-one shot when I held the first page to the fire and read the words in the light of the flames under the glowing pipe. The evening had come, and the dark crept along the walls holding its own weapons, chief among them loneliness and silence, and aimed them at me from every corner at once. I tried to get the fire higher with more wood and filled the cabin with smoke, carelessly enough that I had to open the front door and leave it open for the smoke to blow out, swirling into the night along with the warm air. Bad for the books and the lungs, the eyes and the breath. I stood at the door and watched it sweep off and up into the dark. If they were waiting, now was the moment.
I went back inside when most of the smoke was gone, pulling off my boots to let my socks steam in the heat. I was my father all of a sudden, isn’t that the way it happens. I reviewed a list in the glow: There was a D word, decipher, meaning to detect, and a couple of E words: exhale, to draw a sword, and expedient, fast on one’s feet. I smelled the ink again that I wrote them in, now the best part of forty years old, felt the texture of the page and my father’s gaze as I curled the letters, felt the comfort of his companionship like gauze wrapped around me.
38
OF MY FATHER’S DEATH I REMEMBER THAT IT WAS measured like cups he took into himself of a substance designed to end him, accepted with grace and without complaint. His breath had come shallow for a good year, and the distances between objects in the house, the steps from the bathroom to the chair, from the chair to his bed, grew longer and longer for him. It was good that he was a reading man, since that activity required no extra breathing, and for large portions of the day no-one would have known that his lungs were eaten away from the tobacco, except mornings and evenings that passed in coughing, when he turned himself inside out with it, mostly in the final months.
In Fort Kent, the doctor was careful in how he listened to the chest and the lungs, and always shook his head when I spoke to him as my father waited in the car outside. That was our way—the doctor told me his findings, and I informed my father, who was not a man given to doctor visits, and that was the only way I could get him to visit one: I received the message, I made the translation. Most of the time the doctor said that he should stop smoking the pipe, and I would translate it as, You have to cut down on the smoking.
On the last visit, I got into the car where my father waited.
Well? he said.
The doctor says you will be dead in a month. There was no translating that.
He nodded, Well that’s to be expected. Don’t worry, Julius. You have the house and all those books to take care of.
I drove him home in silence. I wondered if my mother was waiting for him, and if so, where, and if the man I knew was the same one she knew, and how I had never asked him what parts of me were from my mother and what parts were his. Such is what went through my mind as I drove him home in silence.
Three weeks later he took to staying in the chair, and I put blankets round it with a pillow near the head, kept the fire going even though it was April. He slept there too, and I placed some logs on the floor for a footstool. His breath grew louder by the hour and I felt a chill cover him for two days. He stopped speaking then. I saw the pupils in his eyes narrow and knew that he could see me, that I was in his eyes still. I walked my reflection across his eyes, back and forth with logs to the fire and such, to give him the comfort that I was there and not leaving. His voice came back on the third day, and he asked for a Shakespeare, like ordering from a menu at a restaurant, and I waited by the shelves while he chose one.
I’ll take the poems, he said, as I watched the back of his head.
I had the book to him in no time, Collected Sonnets, 1843 edition, London. Next thing he was reading out loud in a singing voice marking the stresses:
That time of year thou mays’t in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
.
He had stopped after the word hang in his frail voice and waited a moment till he fell to reading the next line. I walked around in front of him. He looked up at me and smiled. I held his gaze and after a while saw that his pupils observed nothing, no more light affected them, I was nowhere in him, from now on, only in myself. Nothing to tell him anymore, to say how well I’d done with this or that.
Men came from far away, by train and car, by foot the last part, the distance to the plot, and they stood to attention for this man who served with them. The small church in Fort Kent had rarely seen so many corporals and sergeants and privates ranked equally around a grave. I saw battles in their eyes long forgotten by many, and never known to some, and observed some of them fall with him into that hole in the ground, I mean the part of them that remembered the fear and the rubble of distant towns, or the part that had hoped for better things afterwards. The soldier who fights always hopes that way, my grandfather said, but it’s those who don’t fight who get to decide what things will come. From that day until Claire came out of the woods all those years later, I managed to live on my own, maybe from habit, maybe to honor him. I learned the shape of loss, it was not a stranger to me, since every corner and bench in Fort Kent reminded me of my father, all the places he went. How many times did I pass his grave on my way to buying milk and bread—especially in those weeks after he was first gone, this man of my first thirty years—and wonder how such learning and experience could be switched off like a light.
I sat in the dark and thought such things that would keep me still, perhaps for my safety, a small trick of nature to protect Julius Winsome.
The fire was well lit and still no shot through the window, though Friday night did feel long because I was listening for phantoms in those woods and half dreaming of Claire, probably because I had seen her twice in a short time, but the dreams and the listening swapped places frequently as I sat in the chair between both, sometimes dreaming that Claire was listening, sometimes watching her with a gun in her hand in the woods, watching me, waiting for me to walk outside the cabin. She shoots, I hold a book to my chest, the bullet sinks into the words and stops before my heart.