Free Devotion by Howard Norman

bird feeder on its post, and a few seconds later he felt an animal brush past his leg. He looked down to see it was a fox—gone into the fog. Just like that. The fox had actually touched his bare leg, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, he thought, astonished nearly to tears. The swan’s Great Enemy had graced David with its stealth and brazen playfulness, the very human being who might have just now killed her.
    He felt so grateful, he was tempted, perversely but honestly, to sacrifice a swan to this fox, maybe just loose it in the woods, report it gone missing the next day to William, lying with conviction. Though he’d come to dearly love the
swans, he now loved the fox as well. A thoughtless momentum took hold. Exhilarated, he went into the guesthouse, secured the rifle back in the pantry, grabbed a flashlight and hurried to the main house. He woke William up, saying “William, William, William” close to his ear, shaking him by the shoulder. “Wha-a-at?” William said, a bit like a star-tied goat. “Who the hell’s that?”
    â€œIt’s me, David.” David set the flashlight on the bed. The beam mooned out against the wall. (He remembered his own father, Peter Kozol, was good at doing shadow puppets.) “A fox brushed up against my leg, William. I fired three shots at it. Guess you didn’t hear.”
    William had scarcely come into full consciousness. David rattled on about the fox. Finally William said, “Know what I thought first thing when you woke me just now? You almost got me killed in London. You fucking idiot. Not to mention everything else.” William turned on his side and went back to sleep.
    â€œUnforgiving son-of-a-bitch,” David said. William didn’t budge; maybe he had heard, maybe not.
    Should not have woken him like that,
David thought, walking back to the guesthouse.
In the middle of the night like that.
Should not have expected William to celebrate a miraculous incident. Yet who else was there on the estate to tell? For the first time, at least with such inimitable clarity, it occurred to David that, over the past months, he’d tried to invest any
small faith in the possibility not only that Maggie might forgive him—for Katrine Novak, the accident, his dissembling, any or all of it—but that William might consider him part of the family again. Family: he’d addressed this in his notebook.
If only I was back to being part of the Field family
—how inane that read. Yet it was true.
If only William might put in a good word to Maggie for me.
Yet now he was convinced, should he broach the latter subject, William would say, or write: Not till hell freezes over. He would need a second notebook soon.
    Stopping a moment on the porch of the guesthouse, David thought,
You fucking idiot.
Or heard the echo of William saying it. It seemed a fitting epitaph: David envisioned it etched on his gravestone. And where would this gravestone be? Not in the Field family plot in Scotland or in the nearby Parrsboro cemetery. No, should he die late that night of an accumulation, slow as an intravenous drip, of poisonous self-pity, corrosive guilt, not to mention desire for his wife, most likely he would be buried in a plot adjacent to one of his parents in Vancouver. He didn’t have a Last Will and Testament designating another preference. This little impasse of morbid thought depressed him no end. He felt a crick, a queasy ache in his neck, as if he’d been whiplashed by self-imposed degradation; he felt dumb as a box of rocks, a phrase he’d overheard in the Minas Bakery. Despite being alone, leaning against the screen door’s frame, David nonetheless felt embarrassed, realizing that when he’d just now uttered
You fucking idiot,
he’d done so in an imitation of Peter Lorre.
    In the kitchen he drank a glass of water, tried to read more of
Manuscript of a Country Doctor,
but his mind kept detouring. He went to the