Anna From Away Read online

  Remember when Rory Angus stepped on the cat? Willard said, helping Donald John clear a path to his front door. He leaned on his snow shovel, resting.

  Kitten it was.

  His cat’s kitten.

  Small, yes, poor thing. His big boot came down.

  Drunken boot. His young fella was well put out. Yes.

  There was no saving it. Stomping through the dark, no wonder, half-snapped as he was.

  Bad place for kittens, in the kitchen like.

  It’s where they have them.

  Stove I guess, warm. Makes sense.

  They’re not dumb animals, cats.

  I had one, she’d sleep right up at my head, loved it there.

  That’s affection. She wouldn’t have to be smart.

  She was anyway. Only had to tell her once and she wouldn’t do it, stay off the table, like that.

  Same with a dog.

  Some dogs. I’ve seen a lot of them pretty dumb.

  They’re not much for tables. They can sniff out disease, I read. Had them sniff a person up and down and pick up cancer there where a doctor even wouldn’t see it.

  Cancer hound, eh?

  No particular breed. Maybe your dog even, if you could read her right.

  I can’t read her any way. She’s gone. Taken.

  Who’ d do that to you?

  Same as’ll do anything awful. Peg stones at her, they’ll damn sure do worse.

  Isn’t that so.

  Creatures at the wharf there, wouldn’t put anything past them.

  Gone indoors for the winter, down at Sandy Morrison’s.

  They’ll be out again, like the blackflies.

  They have a taste of the devil in them. I know that much.

  Am I too old for this, Willard, this shovelling of snow?

  III.

  “THANK GOD TO BE HERE,” Red Murdock said at the door.

  “Thank God for yourself,” Donald John said, “come in, come in.”

  Molly, his wife, looking up from her knitting, said weeks had gone by since they set eyes on him, anywhere. Murdock took in the lovely smell of baking and the warm kitchen, too often he warmed himself only with whisky and didn’t care to eat.

  Willard Munro, seated at the table with a cup poised at his lips, had stopped in, wearing his big plaid coat, his tool box at his feet. Murdock joined them all at the table. Tea was simmering on the stove, dark leaves dancing in a clear glass pot.

  “We didn’t see you at the meeting, Murdock,” Willard said, “last night in the church.”

  “For what? I don’t go to church.”

  “The Mounties, they need our help,” Donald John said. “The constable told us, You fishermen, beachcombers, anybody who’s on the water, keep your eyes out for suspicious boats and the like.”

  Willard reached for a scone. “A lot of drugs pouring into Nova Scotia, by water, he says. I believe it.”

  “Right here?” Red Murdock said, looking out at the grey sea, the wind plucking up bits of white. Apart from a buoy tender, he hadn’t seen a boat in a good while. “Not since rum-running.”

  “There’s a new running going on,” Donald John said, “and there’s not much fun to it from what the constable says. Guns and thugs. Dope is what they’re bringing in.”

  “Not for us they aren’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter about us, Murdock. They truck it away up the province. We got all these coves and bays for to bring it in, see. Down the States, they’ve tightened up the border in the south, so they’re coming up here to smuggle it in, the constable says.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen any,” Red Murdock said. “Have you, Molly?”

  Molly smiled, smoothing her apron over her plump lap. “No, dear. Wouldn’t know dope if I tripped on it.”

  “You’d know it if they dropped it in your teapot, girl,” Willard said. “Make you weird.”

  Molly laughed. “Okay,” she said. She held up toward the window a half-knit sweater of tweedy brown wool. “I might walk around in this.”

  Red Murdock took a long sip from his cup. “If it’s weirdness around this end of the road, it’d be the youngsters anyway, and summer folks. Who’s left of us in the winter now? Handful.”

  “You haven’t seen that little gang at Sandy Morrison’s place?” Willard said. “They hung around the wharf last summer and I had to fetch my dog home more than once, raising such a fuss he was. Up to no good there and he knew it, they cursed at him. I didn’t see a local face in the whole damn bunch.”

  “Oh, I think young fellas of our own were in there too,” Molly said. “Most likely. Poor Willard, he has lost his little dog.”

  “Someone made off with him, I’m sure of that.”

  “Who’d want that noisy little runt?”

  “Oh, Murdock, shame on you,” Molly said. “Willard loves that dog.”

  “I was kidding. Not everybody loves it.”

  “Them fellas on the wharf,” Willard said, “stoned him any chance they got.”

  “This took time coming on, you know, and worse it’s getting,” Donald John said.

  “See, there’s so much excitement going on in the world that it’s not fit. The young people got an awful hard job to grow up,” Molly said.

  “Well, we’ll keep the watch then, eh?” Murdock said. “I’ll send up a flare if I see a drug boat. Fire a shot across her bow. Nobody on the old wharf in this weather anyway.”

  “But Sandy Morrison’s old place, hellraising there some Saturday nights,” Willard said. “Play harder than they work.”

  “Young men anymore, they don’t know what hard means unless it’s in their trousers,” Donald John said. “That woman from away keeps to herself. Murdock Ruagh, do you know her now?”

  “Met her once. I can’t say I know her.” He wouldn’t tell them he had seen her seated in snow, calmly drawing, or that, for a few head-spinning moments, he thought she was Rosaire.

  “Nice-looking woman,” Molly said. “What would bring her here, though?”

  “God knows, I don’t,” Red Murdock said. “Not drugs anyway.”

  “The woman’s an artist,” Willard said. “I seen her pictures on the walls.”

  “Those walls could use some pictures.”

  Murdock’s cousin Jenny had written from Cleveland, the renter’s a woman by herself from California, so if you could kind of keep an eye out for her Murdo, seeing as you’re so close by. … He never had a word from Jenny unless she wanted something and none from her brothers, they owned Granny’s house and he was on cool terms with them—many years since they’d cut themselves away from this place. He’d never answered Jenny, had enough on his mind without acting the handyman for them who never set eyes on the house anymore. Let them pay Willard for that. Murdock had painted it red one summer years ago, and framed the windows with white shutters, but that was for Granny, before she died, Something bright, she said, I’m tired of the grey shingles. His cousins would sell anyway when the time was ripe, to Germans or Americans maybe, shorefront was getting high money now. In the meantime he wasn’t attending to Granny’s house or anyone in it. He was the last of his family here, still holding family ground, but for how long? More distant cousins still lived on the Island, but as dispersed as stars as far as he was concerned. True, he hadn’t done much to stay in touch these last years, but now just himself seemed more than he could deal with.

  “Your colour’s not so wonderful, Murdock,” Molly said. She was quick to detect illness or possible decline. “You feeling all right?”

  “I was under the weather awhile, I’m good enough.” He could see in the parlour the edge of a china cupboard he’d made for Molly, for the cups and saucers she collected, rock maple, dovetailed joints, glassed doors that shut solid as a safe. His closed-up workshop was strewn with unfinished furniture, some of it already cancelled, customers had given up on him. When would he get back to it? “How about I take a couple slices of that rum cake I’m smelling? That’ll colour me up.”

  “T
his’ll colour you faster,” Donald John said, taking a bottle of rum from the cupboard.

  “No thanks, too early.” He had already had whisky when the sun was barely up.

  “Is it the hour that matters, Murdock?” Willard said, pouring a good measure into his tea.

  “Not to you, it looks like. Are you out fixing things today?”

  Willard sipped the last of his tea. “That old house of yours …”

  “Not mine. Jenny’s and her brothers’.”

  “Family, even so. Something amiss in the wiring or plumbing or something.”

  “Best you figure out which is which, Willard.”

  “It’s the woman living there. Anna something or other …”

  “Going to fix her, are you?” Donald John said.

  “Nothing broke in that girl,” Willard said, “what I’ve seen of her. Like to see more.”

  Molly slapped his arm. “Willard! At your age!”

  “Age damps the fire, it don’t kill it. I saw a pretty woman go by on the road a while ago. Breagh, and her little girl on a lopsided sled.”

  Red Murdock remembered the sled. Didn’t Breagh ask him to straighten a runner on it? Lord, how many weeks ago was that? She had stopped coming by the time of that bad spell when he would pass out on the kitchen lounge and not hear the door, not care to hear it. He felt terrible about that now, he was fond of Breagh and her little Lorna, but he’d been so deep into himself, selfish with grieving. “How are they faring, Molly, those two?”

  “Oh, Lorna is so sweet. I had her here the other day while her mother went to Sydney with that young fella, the one she’s hot and cold over. Livingstone Campbell.”

  “She can do better than him,” Red Murdock said. He knew the man since he was a boy, over on the St. Aubin side, but he didn’t trust him, he had treated Breagh poorly at times, took her for granted, frosted her out. Not that she was a flower easily wilted, she could hold her own, when she wanted. But men she had a fancy for, she let them get away with too much sometimes. Breagh had that kind of straight beauty she didn’t have to do anything with, it was just there, it hit you the first time you saw her.

  “He’s from a good family, Livingstone is,” Donald John said.

  “That doesn’t make him good. He has to be more than his name. He was after renting my granny’s place. Write to Jenny, I told him, anyway the woman from California is in there for a while.”

  “That buddy of his, Billy Buchanan with the fancy pickup truck? He’s staying in Sandy Morrison’s house. I seen him and Livingstone jawing with two fellas out front one day. I didn’t like the looks of them,” Willard said.

  “Drug-runners were they?” Murdock said.

  “I don’t know just what they were. My dog knew. Now he’s gone. You don’t know what goes on at that house. Some awful rackets on weekends, cars coming and going? Way out here on this road?”

  “And what is going on? Plenty of kitchen rackets when Sandy was alive. You’re blowing it up, Willard. Nobody’s there now, and we did the same things on that wharf in the summertime, a lot more of us too, raising hell. Rum for us, moonshine, whatever you had on your hip.”

  “Well, now, Murdock, I don’t think we got crazy like that with drugs,” Molly said.

  Donald John laughed. “Thin ice you’re on there, girl.”

  “Yes,” Murdock said. “People jumped off the wharf with their clothes on. Danced like fools sometimes, didn’t we?”

  “Still, it wasn’t drugs,” Willard said.

  “Booze was all we had,“ Murdock said. Out the window there was fresh snow in that sky, colder, and the open sea beyond the black cliffs had turned the hue of storm, rollers white-eyed, wind-driven. Far colder than that water was the day he’d realized for the first time that Rosaire’s love was not there for him anymore, that it was no longer available, its comforts and pleasures and solace were slipping away for good, she was separating from the world. They could say all they liked about the lingering spirit of love, the grave cannot kill it and all that, but yet, but yet he had lost the woman who loved him, all her actions of love, and it had been no mean and easy thing to be loved like that, by her. No one exactly like her was left in the world, he was standing in their space alone. He had toppled backwards into a vast emptiness and she could never catch him up—there was no Rosaire love to be had, anywhere.

  “Speaking of booze,” Donald John said, “Connie Sinclair was on the road yesterday. Dressed for walking.”

  “He walks miles, that man,” Molly said. “One end of the road to the other.”

  “He’s looking for something, it seems like, and not just a drink,” Murdock said. Connie stopped by Murdock’s house now and then, they’d been boyhood friends and he knew he could cadge some liquor there, a few dollars, and a sympathetic ear. But Murdock had stopped answering the door, to anybody. “Hasn’t a cent to his name anymore since he’s come back home. We had some good times, Connie and me, when we were young fellas. He was smart enough, he just had that goddamn stammer.”

  “Used to be white shirt or nothing for Connie,” Molly said. “Shirts are grey now. Who’d hire him? Lost every job he had.”

  “I seen him shovelling the driveway at Sandy’s place,” Willard said. “Billy Buchanan gives him a few bucks, I guess.”

  “That’s not hiring,” Murdock said, rising, wanting suddenly to be by himself. He’d found it hard, going out and around after she died. A man who had come home years and years to an empty house and thought it fine, felt now, in a friend’s kitchen, as if he wasn’t quite there, that something of himself was so missing he couldn’t feel comfort in company, only an aching hollowness. “Weather’s turning. I should be getting on.”

  “Well, we won’t be out on that water, neither of us,” Donald John said. “Our fishing days are over, boy.”

  Murdock did not want to concede that, Donald John being older than himself. “I might have a boat again, even so,” he said.

  He looked into the parlour on his way out—there was a big rectangle cut in the seaward wall where two old windows had been. Clouded plastic was stapled to the fresh lumber that framed the opening. The plastic crackled and breathed with the wind. “Jesus, Donald John. Why in God’s name are you getting a big window put in this time of the year?”

  “We got the man cheaper. He’ll be back with a new one tomorrow. Picture window, Murdock. Big.”

  “Ah. Pictures. I’ll stick with my old ones.”

  “A good sou’easter,” Willard said behind him, “she’d blow out that plastic like a paper bag.”

  Outside, Red Murdock stood by his truck, the March wind teetering him, the little sack of rum cake warm in his hand. He could thread a needle, he could sew a patch. He had fished, here along the north side of the Great Bras D’Eau, out to Bird Island, years ago. He knew the raw rocks, where current and wave, combined against you, could tear out the bottom of your boat.

  Sometimes he just stopped where he was and thought, where to now? as if any next step were pointless. It scared him a bit, that nothing mattered enough to take it.

  IV.

  SO DRAFTY WAS THE HOUSE, cripplingly cold at windows and doors, Anna had early sequestered herself in the room off the warm kitchen, probably once a dining room, appropriating a worn but sturdy table of wide maple boards and an electric space heater, a boxy affair with glowering coils that looked to be out of the 1940s, always a few watts away from a blown fuse if she switched on the kettle or another lamp. But there was a wood stove too and here she did her drawing and her reading, the southerly light was good, and she wrote a few letters by hand at a small pine desk, its dark varnish dented and scarred. She read in the embrace of a stuffed armchair that gave out a mildewy sigh when she sat, so she’d draped it with a moth-holed blanket of some pale tartan.

  Every room she’d explored, dug into cupboards and chests, trying to learn from what remained, to get a feeling for it, anything redolent of its past. A large copper boiling pot and, dropped inside it, a washboard of corr
ugated glass, now cracked, on whose surface women had reddened their hands scrubbing clothes. The solid but well-made furniture, her spool bed, the pine commode, the old dresser in her bedroom, its maker’s initials incised in the scalloped frame, A one side, K the other, the top drawer’s hairpins and red ribbon and spent elastic smelling of stale face powder. There was a pitcher and washbowl decorated with violets. A bluebelled chamber pot. A roll of shelf paper with cherries on water-stained white. A set of china dinnerware in plain cream, one plate chipped, one with a hairline crack. A mirror that reflected a garbled, impressionistic image—more than adequate, she felt, a dreamy, timeless vision of herself.

  She found in a tiny bedroom closet a garment bag containing a dress, dark burgundy through the foggy plastic. Why this one left behind? A fragment of a woman’s life, in this house and its occasions.

  The first day of grinding cold and wind reminded Anna that winter here had force, it could kill you if you were careless. Cracking sounds from under the house turned out to be foundation stones contracting as the temperature fell. There was a high stack of firewood against the house where mice and woodlice had nested. Willard had the oil tank out back filled before she arrived, and he showed her how to operate the oil stove it fed in the kitchen, and bank the wood stove in her workroom so it would last the night. Its brand name amused her, the pure optimism—Warm Morning. Poorly insulated if at all, walls were cold to the touch when she got up. You’ll survive all right, Jenny in Cleveland had assured her, our dad’s family did, our grandmother to the end, no more than a kitchen stove for heat and a brook for water and the worst winters in Canada.

  Survival, in that sense, had not been Anna’s main concern, but still there was the scrim of ice in the bedroom pitcher she’d filled the night before, thinking to wash her face in the china basin—a quaint homage, she did not repeat, to those who’d awakened there. And the line of feathery snow whose gentle chill she brushed from the sill one morning. Yet, the first window frost lit with sun so delighted her she scratched into its patterns a rearing unicorn, the crystals pleasantly sharp under her fingernail. Other mornings, urging herself out of bed, she whimpered down the stairs, shivering in the bathroom while she waited for the water to run hot. It was not that she’d never known cold and demanding weather, she grew up in the fog belt of California’s north coast, where, in that deep dampness redwoods loved, frost was not unknown, this was not sun and surf but hard-nosed California, a cold ocean you didn’t wear a bikini in. But snow and ice, frosted windows? No.