“Veil” by Kathryn Schwille (fiction, ’99)

My brother, on his deathbed, could not get out of his mind the big things he’d screwed up in his life. Each would nag at him for a day or so until he seemed to come to terms with it, then he’d move on to some other mismanaged affair. Carl believed he’d mistreated his first wife, which he had, and he fretted that he’d ignored our aging father, which was also true. There was one event Carl never mentioned, though, and I wonder if he thought of it at all. The incident with Plato Winchester has troubled me more and more over the years. Perhaps at the end of my life, I will have to answer for both of us.

People used to say about Plato Winchester that you could drop him in the woods buck naked and hungry, and if you went back in a week you’d find him fully clothed and well-fed. He was a throwback to another time, a woodsman who could sling a gut hook and skinner with the grace of a TV chef filleting a trout. We thought of him as a modern-day Davy Crockett, though his life—as we knew it, anyway—lacked mythic proportions. Plato was not a romantic figure. His social wits were on the dull side and near as we could tell, he’d never had a woman’s company for more than a night. Diabetic, Ghandi-thin and prone to mood swings, he lived deep in the woods in a broken-down camper with nothing for company but his private thoughts and a posse of hog dogs. He came to town once a month for his pills, and when he did, people who didn’t know him cut him a wide berth. His beard was longer than the one you imagine for Methuselah and his clothes were holey and rough. A couple of times a year, to raise what little cash he needed, he’d sell off some boar that the dogs had hunted. Though he fed those plotts and curs from the pet food aisle in the grocery store, Plato would leave Brookshire’s grocery with nothing for himself but a can or two of beans. He named the dogs according to the alphabet, like tropical storms. The yellow cur he carried in his arms that winter was number sixteen, a young one he called Pip.