Sam left, Dean went to sleep, and Henry picked up John's journal.
At first Henry only leafed through the pages or the journal. He couldn't believe how old it was. This was his son's? Even learning how to time travelhadn't prepared him for the thought of a time when John was grown, a father and husband himself, and already dead. It seemed so unreal. Yet the soft, worn leather and the cold, metal of paper clips pinning scraps of paper together told him that this was very real.
If this journal was real, if he was stuck here and John was dead, he had to know. He wanted to know his son and the life he had led. So, he started at the beginning.
It was not a diary. The journal was more of a record, a source of information, than anything person. Which in a way was very like a Man of Letters. But this was nothing like Henry's neat and precise style. Everything was thrown together with seemingly random names and numbers scribbled in margins. Occasionally there was a rough doodle of some horrible monster. Still Henry read every word, studied every drawing. Anyone else, perhaps, would have been caught up in the mystery and the horror of the contents, but Henry just wanted to know his son.
Although it was no diary Henry could still glean some of John's personality. From the first hand accounts of encounters henry could tell John was a little impersonal. He almost never called the victims by name…or the monster. Just 'the victim' or 'the spirit' or 'the werewolf.' He was also very blunt about exactly what happened, stating facts clearly and without any hint of euphemisms. John was obviously very intelligent and though his notes might not be neat or clearly marked, Henry found there was a method and an order in the seeming chaos. Nothing was unimportant or left out. The times when John was more personal was when he wrote about a demon with yellow instead of black eyes. It was clear that John was dangerously obsessed. The anger and sheer number of times over many years he wrote about the demon made that clear. The anger reminded him of Dean. They seemed to share the same righteous anger with the same deadly, destructive, definitely frightening force behind it. With them both, even when it was restrained, the anger was frightening. And with them both the destructive force also appeared very self-destructive.
At least from this obsession, he learned that his daughter-in-law's name was Mary. He could also catch some of the names of people Sam and Dean stayed with while John hunted. Men called Jim and another Bobby. Later there were also notes about Sam and Dean's involvement in hunts. There never enough information to really tell him anything, though, leaving Henry with more questions than answers. And nearing the end all mentions of Sam drop out and no explanation is given.