Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan

Author:Gerard Donovan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571267200
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

33

I DROVE THE LONG WAY AND THE ONLY WAY IN WINTER, through the towns of Fort Kent and Frenchville, then south to St. Agatha, passing the slow trucks that spread salt and ploughed the snow aside, their wipers and headlights on. The entire sky had fallen and collapsed into sludge. You could lose the place where the sun hung on a day like this except for the wind that herded the clouds from occasional patches

The weather forecasters down in Bangor always point to Caribou on the map and refer to it as “up there,” but that town is forty miles south of us, and we are also a good four hours north of Montreal. Fort Kent is the most north you can live in the continental United States and be in any town: people hanging their washing in long back yards can see the televisions flickering in the living rooms of people in Saint Clair, New Brunswick. If that isn’t enough you can also speak French all day long if you want, even the English in you has run out by the time you make it this far. A small few thousand year-rounders live here, and the main street twists along a few restaurants, banks, a supermarket, building supply store, auto shop, pharmacy, a motel, and then opens out on both sides west into the wider Saint John Valley, the fields and the forest, the road following the river turn for turn, like dancers. I stopped at a station off the highway. A logging truck maneuvered in the parking area, and two men in red gear and flannel shirts held steaming coffee by the wall outside the restaurant where it was warmer, especially now that some blue had broken out briefly in the sky.

I passed them with a nod.

It’ll melt now, one of them said to me, for the day and some of tomorrow.

Expect so, I said, and entered, felt the blast of hot air and the smell of more hot coffee and fried bacon. I did not want much, some tea and a cheese sandwich. The restaurant was busy, and this morning, hours after the first snowfall, the snowboarders no doubt soon arriving, though not as many as in parts south and west, and the place would fill with noisy families, not the hard men and women who sat here today, the ones with long journeys fixed permanently in their eyes, the long-distance men.

A very light snow from the cloudy part of the sky brushed the air and swept the parking area as a truck drove in with antlers attached. Two men got out and walked in, thick arms, caps down to cigarettes without smoke. They eased into their table and made their orders with a nod. Snatches of their talk drifted through the clang of cutlery and the orders, the coughing and sneezing, the drone of the television up on the wall unit:

I bagged a big buck and had him strapped to the back in under fifteen minutes.

Yeah? I took this one black bear that came at me and moved off again like it knew.

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