Troy followed where I was looking.
A cup of tea would have been a miracle for me, but I knew that a second of lost attention would bring me around to the wrong end of my own rifle and that Troy would shoot me at once, not trusting himself to bring me all the way to the station ahead of him through the woods. He’d be right.
I told him to take the book with the piece of paper I had slipped recently into it and stand at the flowerbeds. He grabbed the book and walked, step by slow step, his eyes flicking from the ground to the gun, judging the moment of a last desperate run he knew he could not finish. Yet that truth has never stopped anyone.
The night was upon us now, with its own strange light, the light of the other side, smaller and in pieces but enchanting and a salve for those whose lives blossom under it. That same light carries voices better. His had fallen thinner, less confident, or maybe the light made it seem so:
He said, What did she see in you anyway?
His voice shook with a trace of something that didn’t have metal in the sentences, the way people talk who believe everything they believe. But perhaps I was the same myself, had my own cogs driving what I thought and said, full of my own belief. I was part of it all, that was for sure.
You’d have to ask her that. She chose you.
He looked down to what he was holding: What is this?
Read the lines on the paper, I said.
He opened the book to where the paper stuck out and lifted it, and covered the writing up and down with a glance, puzzled and panicked to be reading his last testament, and that not even in his own words.
I said read it.
Okay, okay. He traced the words with a finger, the finger falling behind his eye, his voice trailing the finger:
Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief
.
What do you think, I said.
It’s a foreign language, I don’t understand this continual talk of yours.
It’s English, I said.
What—you mean like intelligencer, and that other word you said? That’s not English.
I knew what he was saying and felt for him.
You mean it’s English like a dog’s bark, I said.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean, what it’s like.
I said, They might be the same thing now.
What’s the same?
What dogs and Shakespeare have to say.
Who says? He snapped the book shut and pointed to his chest: What’s with this lecturing me? What are you going to do? I’m a police officer.
He shouted these words to give them force, but they were the right words and didn’t need shouting. It was true for him, I had far too much to say all of a sudden, a form of impertinence.
I kept the rifle high. My intendment? I don’t know, I said by way of a fast retreat. Read a little, make some tea, get a fire going with this chill coming, something along those lines is what I will do.
His voice softer again: I meant do with me.
I shook my head to let him know, and at that he melted for his final moments, they loosened him into talking more, complaints about his life and his business, how hard he had worked, how everyone respected him, and then his lists of responsibilities, and I waited till the complaints echoed themselves into the silence of the forest that eats up everything a man might ever say till he has talked himself out and the echoes peter because no generation follows them into the trees.
I knelt on one knee and wiped off the snow from Hobbes, from the clay above him. He was a couple of feet away from my hand, and I felt I could almost rub his back, pat his head.
Had Troy shot Hobbes? I believe I was leaning that way. His manner when he denied it, the quickness of his explanation, what he knew. He admitted being around the cabin and had the streak required for such an act, to silent what was already voiceless.
I stood with the Enfield, pointed it at his stomach.
Tell me she’s happy, I said.
He looked surprised and said nothing for a change, maybe because the lights were out in the sky, only stars in the clear night ahead of tomorrow’s storm. He thought for a minute or looked at his boots without thinking, I couldn’t tell. And that chill at my arms, at my ears. The trees seemed to move differently behind him, surely the numbers on their way, that’s what it was, sucking any heat from the air.
Is she happy? I haven’t—I think so.
The first uncertainty out of him all day. I looked again at the beds, the width of snow I’d scraped away, a small scrap off the face of death, as useless as digging him up and holding him again. To have him so close and not have him at all.
So she was happy. I knew at those words that she was truly gone and likely never to pass before me again, no woman come out of the woods, no ointment in the air of the cabin, no voice reaching out a hand for mine in the kitchen after nightfall, by the fire. I still loved her, if that’s what this feeling was in me, this memory. But there was Hobbes, taken from me, taken from his own life, his joy.
I stood and said, That’s good then. You’ll need to be on your way.
I glanced to the trees that led to Fort Kent, as if some trees held a highway in them and those were the ones for him to follow.
You’re going to kill me, he said.
I said nothing to that, but it was true, I had gone back and forth. He was the one. I had him now.
49
HE LOOKED WHERE I POINTED, AT THOSE TREES, THEN at others around him as if to confuse me or himself as to where he intended to run. He breathed deeper, storing air for the dash.
You’re going to shoot me.
I told you to go. How many times do you have to be told something?
I owed Claire that much, to bring this man back to his house and to her. The impulse to let him go needed quick nurturing before a stronger one came back, before my eyes passed over the flowerbeds where Hobbes lay on his side, silent in his end, what waits for everyone.
He stepped to the rear, one foot searching, then the other, facing me, not taking the chance to turn his back and run.
You will do something for me, I said.
He stared.
Never, I said, never on your life say another word to me, and don’t look in my direction ever again, unless it’s to be your final glance.
He did not wait for further instructions, and I saw that he was walking away from town and my cabin, back into the woods where we met earlier. That meant he had a vehicle parked somewhere near where I found him.
Very presumptuous, I said.
What? He did not move to face me again.
You’ll be walking back to Fort Kent, I said, or some of the way. And Fort Kent is that way. I waved the rifle at the invisible town in the other direction. Go on. Forget your car. And cover your gulf.
He did not ask what a gulf was but curled the scarf around his throat anyway and walked across the yard in front of me, this policeman heading off to Fort Kent on foot. When he was twenty yards into the brush, fifty steps distant in the snow, I aimed the rifle at the back of his head, as he no doubt expected me to do, and pulled on the trigger until a finger’s tension and release balanced him on this and the far side of life.
Look around, Troy, I said.
He did not. That surprised me. He struck me as the type who has to do what you tell him not to. I thought he would shout something at me then as he flitted along the floor of the woods, walking faster. I would shoot him if he did, pursue him to the very end of him. He ran finally, sifting himself away into the trees, and I loosened the trigger and brought him back to this life, and he was gone, along with my chance of shooting him into the next, gone carrying my last embrace to Claire, this man who took her from me and whose life she had just saved.