And whenever Claire visited, he heard the sound of her truck before I did and ran between her legs and jumped up to lick her face.
That’s why he licks you, to put his scent on you, I said.
She said, And I thought he liked me.
That too, I said.
17
IN THE SECOND MONTH OF SUMMER CLAIRE WAS arriving twice a week, sometimes when I was working the gardens of the rich around Fort Kent or at the machine shop. I never locked the door because I had Hobbes, who had grown into a friendly but punchy little pit-bull terrier, so she let herself in and read the books or, she said, sat on the porch and watched the woods or tended to the flowers. I had no telephone or television, and I think she liked the silence that the woods sheltered, even if the guinea hens cackled, and she grew fond of the rhythm that soothed away the worry she seemed to carry with her, an anxiety that came from nowhere and had nowhere to go. In the evenings we drank some tea and wine she brought from the supermarket in paper cups and I sometimes fished out the Turkish cigarettes I kept for special occasions. What I loved was the anticipation on the drive home of being with her, seeing her in the evenings, her smell, her touch that made me shiver alive like a plant, the joy when I saw her truck parked in the clearing.
One day toward the end of summer, she didn’t come any more. I was just getting used to her and didn’t understand why she stayed away. I heard nothing for months and wondered if something had happened, so I drove to Fort Kent and looked for her. This was difficult because she never once brought me to her parents, who she said lived in St. Agatha, nor to her home or her friends. I let it go because people have their reasons and if you have to ask you already have asked one question too many. I was sure her parents were fine people who didn’t know about me or did and didn’t want anything to do with me. Anyway I finally bumped into her outside a small cafe.
She looked sad and said, He has a house and a business.
Who, I said.
You know.
No, I don’t. I had no idea what she was referring to, though it sounded like another man.
She read my mind or my features because she said that she had been with him for some time. He lived in the town too. Maybe I was supposed to know.
I have to look after myself too, she said.
I said, Yes, that’s the truth, and I lost her in that second. I did not know who the other fellow was, and it felt to me as if she had indeed been seeing him all the while. And she was gone from me.
All of this was years ago, but even now I keep an eye on the woods, sometimes the white woods, sometimes the green woods, hoping some evening she will walk out of them and back to me, and then I see that I’m only dreaming and would in any case not be able to welcome her again. She chose her life and everything in it, every stitch. Perhaps things don’t happen for a reason, they happen because people do them.
After she told me the news, going back to being on my own was hard, and winter soon came and hardened it more.
18
AFTER RETURNING TO THE CABIN FROM THE INCIDENTS which had occurred in the woods earlier in the day—I mean the meeting with the two men and how they came to be resting on one another—I ate some dinner and then read Shakespeare, his word-inventions.
When I was young my father checked the list of Elizabethan words often, making sure that I learned at least three a day. Going down the column I could see that on a certain Tuesday—I could see from the entry—on a Tuesday when I was nineteen I learned five C words, so it must have been raining outside or I may have neglected to learn any the previous day. I checked the list: cinque-pace was a dance, colour meant pretense, churl was a rude person, coil turmoil, and cog cheat. I sipped the tea and leaned back on the red cushion, enjoying the moment enough to make up sentences: “He did a cinque-pace when I shot him, the churl. The second one meant to kill me, but I cogged him of that chance by killing him.”
I said more sentences because the day felt long to me, and repeating them brought me back to when life was simpler, no unpleasantness or confrontations. I would have shown them to my father had he been standing at my shoulder or sitting by the fire himself, puffing tobacco in his pipe. But with life’s events one must win one’s own approval. There is no one to show anything to, no one who will say well done.
All the following day, a sunny, cold Thursday, the kind of day favored by hunters, I remained home and listened to the shooting from far off, starting early when I was not long out of bed and making the fire and the first pot of tea, and continuing well into the afternoon as I gathered more books to the chair to read, the shots thinner and weaker because the hunters were far off. I looked out and saw Hobbes’ grave, the last of the color on the dead stalks hanging on. There was little that was beautiful about the world, I thought, and little that the world of men brings to it at the best of times. What there was, he brought to me.
The pink petals hung raw and shook with the cold and wind. How they hung on out of season, the struggle of it, the strength it took. Not long now, and they’d be brown stains on a stalk.
Before I went to bed, I did some more writing. The fire was low and I had to squint, and on top of that I wasn’t much of a writer indeed, but this was a time for committing words.
19
IT CAME TO PASS THAT ON THE THIRD DAY AFTER HOBBES’S shooting I drove into Fort Kent with a new poster spread on the seat beside me, drove cautiously late that afternoon along the dirt road, swerving slowly around the same potholes that I bumped over in my desperate drive with Hobbes. There was no hurry now, and I didn’t pick up speed until the trees to each side petered out and the sky and its clouds opened up above the paved road to the town, but as I rounded the bend at the outskirts I came onto a checkpoint, slowed down, then stopped. A policeman asked me my name and had I seen any men up my way, that some were missing. He seemed to know where I was from, because he mentioned the general area where I lived in passing, and his eyes darted around the truck while I said no, that I hadn’t seen any such men. He thanked me and waved me on, and once in the town proper I parked in my usual place behind the supermarket. Taking the new poster, I carried it to the front of the store and hammered it into the timber notice board with a hammer and nail from the barn and standing back to read the words: DOG SHOT. October 30. Reward for information. J. Winsome, Post Office Box 271.
It was the best thing to do, because someone saw the first poster, if only the person who wrote all over it; otherwise I might have to explain one day why the first poster went up and came down the same day around the time that various incidents were alleged to have occurred, and if taking down the poster meant I knew something no one else knew, or words to that effect, whatever way lawyers talk when there’s trouble. The pity was that I no longer needed information, and if anyone had some they could hold onto it for the rest of their lives for all I cared. The second poster could rot. But let’s see who turns up.
After buying matches, milk, tea, bread and butter, and putting them in the truck, I walked across the street and down two blocks to the diner. Sure enough, I noticed the wind stiffening, the rain harder when it fell in fitful drops, as if they held snow inside them for ballast. I was glad then of the warm blast of air as I opened the door of the diner, and of the bright lights, and of the few people who sat huddled over soup and hot beverages. The waitress was different but brought the same make of coffee to the same table I liked and said the same word, Enjoy.