Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  Murdock emptied the chamber pot in the toilet downstairs, then bent to the little window, his breath colouring a haze in the glass: the strait was thick and silent with fog. What the water was doing he couldn’t tell, dark grey, razored with currents.

  There’d been just the two of them, really, Rosaire and him, and then the rest of the world. That was so clear this morning, his chest hurt. They had done their daily living in different houses, apart, so they saved the best for each other. How many a man could say that, how many a woman?

  Most of the time he had never minded his own company. He’d been led to believe, from way back, that that was a failing, and maybe it was. But his mother’s betrayal put marriage out of his mind forever, he didn’t need it, she had walked away from him and his father, leaving behind a bitter taste he could not swallow. It hadn’t mattered, anyway, for a long time until he met Rosaire Robertson at a dance. Great company right off. Hard to explain that, what went into it.Hers was … well, he had liked to be with her, in all situations. He’d never known that feeling.

  He thought he knew sorrow before sorrow hit, but he hadn’t.

  He filled Cloud’s bowl with chopped up chicken he hadn’t finished and then lay down again in the mussed bedclothes. The Black Rock lighthouse bleated, familiar as a heartbeat. One good day, and then he’d start to unravel again, as if there were a loose thread in him somewhere that wanted tugging. He was tired of his own tics and quirks, the repetition of them, saying, this is you and you and you, and you’ll never change a hair of it.

  The woman down the shore, living there like she was, in Granny’s house, he’d spent many days there after his mother went away. Every detail of that bedroom, the old bed was still there, she’d have to be using it. Big, creaking, metal bed. God damn it. What if that woman had knocked on his door? The sight of him would have sent her running, unless, worse, he’d not answered at all, just hid deeper. Some awful hospitality, that. Why was he so plagued by that particular morning? She might have been drawing flowers, something in her head, for all he knew.

  A mad flower, a small monster. He’d read about it in Sydney, the doctor hadn’t the time or patience to go into it much, after all he was not her husband, not kin, but a nice woman in the library had told him where to look. Rosaire at first had wanted to know what scary thing was happening inside her head, but quickly turned away. What’s the point, she said, of knowing that? But Murdock was determined to understand this sinister activity unfolding inside her. Nightmare stuff, blossoming vivid in the brain, blood-nourished, aggressive, pitiless, you could stagger it for a while but you couldn’t knock it out, the radiation only winged it, slowed it down, gave her a few weeks more of living the way she had, flat out, good food and drink and to hell with you. And then the chemicals killed all that, her joy turned to a foul taste and nausea she couldn’t describe. I’m sick as a dog, worse than seasick, she said, this isn’t the boat, Murdock, I want to sail out on. She started to walk badly, with an exaggerated grace at first, like the early drifting stage of drunkenness, later self-consciously, an unsteady actress entering a room. Then one day she fell, just walking along a sidewalk she went face-first to the pavement before he could catch her, bloodied her nose, her cheek, her knees. She cried not then but later, seated on the edge of her bed. It was terrible, Murdock, the humiliation, she said. She was soon in a wheelchair, and he pushed her wherever she needed to go, wanted to go, he would come there to her house, be there, any time of day, he’d have pushed her up the mountain had she asked. He saw the chemo twist her face. She didn’t smile much anymore then, her eyes took on the faraway look of treated pain, she was slipping into a place he couldn’t come to. She did smile sometimes, quick and warm to remind him the way she used to kid about people, Jesus, Murdock, isn’t this too sad by half? Seizures came at random. Her speech went, in patches at first, then just slurring and then the word sounds stopped coming and that embarrassed her, murmuring like an infant, she went mute, only when her feelings welled out of her would she make a sound.…

  Murdock got out of bed again and pulled on his grubby jeans and a tattered black sweater. Lint. Cat hair. He had to pick himself up. Months of mourning had turned him limp and huddled, and the house he’d let slide, its slovenliness troubled him. Bones and joints still worked, when he got moving. Someday a stumble he would have once caught would carry him to the ground. Hills would steepen, he wouldn’t see the hanging branch, the flooded rut, the glib ice.

  You had to look into the mirror now and then, see what was rough there. If you had a woman who cared.He had been difficult at times, he knew that, but he had toned that down after he met her. You’re a born bachelor, Granny had told him before she died, you won’t want a woman around much. But Rosaire, married once for a short time when very young, liked her own life the way it was, her own place, and so she and Murdock loved somewhere in between. They’d had their quarrels. But he never liked to be angry with her, and they had their own houses to retreat to and cool off in, and they’d come to miss each other quick enough.

  Murdock shaved carefully. His ruddy face was florid from weather and wind and, lately, liquor. His hair was grey, but at the temples still a trace of his nickname, and in the grizzled hair of his chest.

  He would never let himself be an old man shuffling along the street or playing bingo in the mall, they seemed like aliens sometimes, those fellas. Their limbs were shot of course, God love them, he understood that, the toll of factory and pit, all those wracking years break you down, cripple you. But the first sign he couldn’t get through a day by himself, he would disappear like a sick animal, up into the mountain woods where even his bones would be lost.

  Wasn’t quick better, the sudden unexpected collapse? Too long in decline and people forgot you’d once been an able man, a man to lean on, to pull you up, to be awake for you when you couldn’t but sleep.

  AT THE FOOT of the ladder steps to his low cellar, cracks of light showed back under the sills and the smell of cold, dug-out earth was strong. He groped for a string cord. A bulb dangling over a crock lit up. The crock sat on a long flat stone like those of the foundation. Willard and all that talk about rum-running and drug-running, as if they had any damn thing in common. Murdock lifted the lid an inch: ouch, last year’s pungent mash. He hadn’t cooked any liquor since she died, his own good silver, there was no pleasure in it, he drank bought whisky instead. Since he didn’t care for hunting, for killing animals, he had bartered a few bottles here and there for a share of venison, a portion of moose, a few partridge or rabbits, a poached salmon.

  But here was a bottle he’d forgotten, he held it up to the light bulb: clear in the steam of his breath. I’m surprised, you know, Rosaire had said after the first taste, how smooth it is, and you made it. When she was ill and in bed, she’d asked for a shot in her water glass. It set her coughing, tearing up, but she said, Thank you, Murdock, a taste I’ll surely remember.

  Back upstairs, he set about restoring the neat, clean rooms that had been his way until she died—the home not of a hopeless bachelor but a man who looked after himself. I don’t need a woman for my house, he’d told Rosaire, holding her in his arms. I just need you for myself. Well, dear, she said, I don’t every morning need a man in my house either, so maybe we can have fun in the middle somewhere, eh? And there were her ashes in a small canister on his chest of drawers. He had yet to make a beautiful box for them. That had seemed too final, a formal storing away.

  Fog hung well up the back field, frozen, the air blank as paper. The walls of his house seemed so thin to him. You could crouch in corners, but it was no cover, something you didn’t want would always reach you.

  Could anyone describe the kind of absence he felt? It hollowed him out, a cavernous space, every day he teetered on its edge.

  The sun, oh, Murdock, it’s so low these afternoons, Rosaire said that December, her head turned on the pillow toward the window’s brassy light. I won’t see it high again, will I?

  Why couldn’t Rosa
ire have died on a summer day instead of a night of blowing snow? He had to leave her on a night like that, she loved warmth and light, he drove slowly toward home on the slick highway, flakes floating like crude ash in his headlights. Before he reached the bridge, he pulled into a restaurant where they’d often stopped together for its view of the fjord-like strait and the long mountain running in from the sea. It was deserted and he sat with coffee by a big window, looking out, the dark water obscured, snow whirling like his mind, memories rushing past him, he could not slow them down, they dizzied him until he left suddenly and sped out of the lot. He wondered now which weakening part of his brain made him drive down the wrong lane of the road that night. He sometimes ran it through his mind, what it was like to see headlights coming at him, cursing at first because he thought they were at fault, maybe drunk, then glancing to his right where the double line streaked past, disturbingly yellow in the dark, it was all wrong suddenly, there, on his right, and he had to force himself nonetheless to cross it, to sheer into that other lane just before the oncoming car blared past in terror and outrage. He’d picked up speed then, raced, shaking, across the bridge toward home not because he was afraid the fellow might come after him but because he’d call him an old fool whose licence should be yanked. He had been proud, until that night, that he could drive anything with wheels. Now, another reason for vigilance lest he die—and worse, take others with him—sooner than he needed to. Did he have a death wish that night?

  Did he turn to memories too quickly, did he suck the life out of them?

  He wept, it flooded into him, all his anger and sorrow and pity, he couldn’t hold it back, alone in his kitchen, his face clasped hard in his hands. When it was over, he sat numb, exhausted but calm, glad for it, that it happened here, in this peaceful room. No one to witness it but Cloud. The cat sat in the chair by the stove, observing him intently, pupils big and black in his owl-yellow eyes. “That’s done with, kitty,” Murdock said, “you won’t see me like that again.”

  Well, they put him, my little brother Andrew, in the parlour, see, Willard said, we was living with Uncle Alec then, way up Aspy Bay, poor times, we got farmed out. No stove in that room. Took the lounge in there and put him down on it, the windows flung wide open, for him to get his breath, you see. Pneumonia. Him just in his pajamas and bedclothes, imagine. But see, he had a fever, he wasn’t cold at all, he didn’t mind it. Frost in that breeze, but the boy was burning, you see, burning. And I sat in that room all night with a fur coat on me, my uncle’s fur coat. We couldn’t get my brother out till morning. Three sleighs it took to get him all the way to North Sydney. Seven and a half hours it took, all the way to the hospital. They had to put two dollars and fifty cents worth of brandy into him, in his system, soon as we got there. Injected it all through him. His heart stopped for a bit, Andrew’s. Nineteen thirties that’s what they did, that’s what they had. Brandy. He lived though, he lived it out.

  VII.

  LATE IN THE NIGHT Anna got up, squatted half asleep on the cold toilet, a pale nightlight at her feet, shivering, thinking only, God get me back beneath those quilts quick. But a single, isolated sound crept into her hearing. Howling? Distant, pitched not with menace or alarm but with pain, the slowly waking side of her said, and a coyote wouldn’t bark like that, would it, give away its peril? Holding her breath, she allowed the possibility—knowing at the same instant its absurdity—that it was the dog from the bridge, somehow it had survived.

  Chilled and frightened, she dressed quickly, pulled on her parka and heavy boots, stepped out the back door. The night was so still, the wind she’d fallen asleep listening to had spent itself, the cold sharp in her throat. She had not intended to investigate any further than the back steps, but the howling did not waver and it pained her to listen to it. The way it rose to a wail, stopped, then resumed drew her slowly down the steps. It seemed to be coming from the pond as Anna walked into the darkness, every crunching step telling her to go back for a flashlight, but the sound pulled her forward. She found her way along, picking out the familiar path of tramped snow. The dog, a dark form out on the pond ice, did not move but it must have seen her, heard her, because it began a slow, mournful yowl. Anna stopped at the edge, she could feel with her foot where the ice, having thawed a bit and refrozen, was lumpy and rough, beyond it a flat white surface. She started to talk, to herself at first, coaching her way along, then to the dog, urging it soothingly to come, Come here, don’t be afraid. She whistled, she made kissing sounds, but after lurching toward her in a rattle of chain, the animal took up again its pitiful call. Of course! Caught in a trap, poor thing, out there in the middle of the ice.

  She swore at the man who’d set it. For what, the fox, the coyote, the mink, animals she’d seen and drawn, here, on someone else’s land, her land for now? She had to stop its suffering, this stupid cruelty. Would the dog see her as the cause of its agony, go for her hand? Why in hell didn’t she bring a flashlight. She moved closer, sliding her feet while scarcely aware of them. Of course it wasn’t the dog from the bridge, it was bigger, darker, and she knew nothing about traps, could she open the jaws? Okay, it’s okay, we’ll get you loose, she cooed, barely feeling the ice shiver beneath her.

  A trapped smell of pond water hit her nostrils as the ice parted, a clean cracking, a zigzag sound like muted lightning, and the cold iron smell rose as her body dropped, her clothes screening for a moment the shock of water, a convulsion of cold quick to her body, into her fear of depth—Willard told her this pond was crazy deep—her scream brief, more surprise than pain, as her weight took her under, though not far, a deep childhood fear of drowning, from being swept off a winter beach by a rogue Pacific wave, stunned her. Her feet soon pushed into mud, her momentum sinking her into a crouch, silt clouding upward, toward faint light in the ice above, in the broken bobbing pieces, and she uncoiled herself upward, thrashing through the surface, her mouth wide and gasping, her wail in the brittle air weaving wildly into the dog’s yowl. Anna flailed, treading water, but her limbs were already stiffening, leaden, ice broke again and again under her clawing hands, she seemed to have no breath. Regrets charged absurdly through her, stunningly irrational, why did I come, why am I not home, there’s no ice there, reasons not to die after all, the simple gorgeousness of sun, warmth, of love, of safety. She would remember that it was not searing cold that killed her hope but the slow-motion weight of her body, dense, turning as slow as the primeval pond itself, and not far away the dog’s confused barking, the rattle of its trap. But then a beam of light swept the ice and someone clutched her under the arms and she was pulled backwards until her heels dragged bottom and she was set down on the snow. “You took a ducking, girl,” he said, his face craggy behind the flashlight. “Let’s get you walking quick. I’m your neighbour.” He helped her to her feet and held her steady as he led her back up the hill. Her voice came out wobbly and sobbing. “That dog,” she said, “he’s caught out there.”

  “I’ll free him later from the other side,” Red Murdock said. “Ice always bad there, where you went in.”

  She was shaking too much to talk when they reached her kitchen and she let him sit her on the daybed he called a lounge while he turned the fire up in the oil stove and stoked the Warm Morning.

  “Can you get out of those clothes?” he said, helping her off with her parka. Her red flannel pajamas were plastered to her skin, her jeans thick with water. “Dry off good and come back to the stove, you don’t want a chill now. Put a couple blankets around you.”

  She fumbled with the laces of her leather boot but her fingers moved like claws.

  “Here, let me.” He knelt and loosened her boots, tugged them off, shook water from them.

  In the cramped bathroom, a former pantry, shedding her sodden clothing was difficult, more like moulting she shook so, maybe she should have let him undress her as well. She buried her head in one towel and then another until her hair was merely damp. The old metal smell of pond water rose from the towels
she’d tossed into the tub. Her jaw ached from hard shivering but she rubbed and rubbed her body until her limbs, reddened from the towels, calmed. She looked dishevelled in the mirror, under the bare light bulb wild, like a madwoman in those nineteenth-century photos from insane asylums. Face flushed, lips pale, eyes glittering. Her cheek was scratched and she remembered Murdock touching it.

  On the back of the toilet sat a green kitbag with makeup she hadn’t touched for a long while. It could hardly matter now, and the man in the next room was what, maybe fifteen years or so older than she was? But she brushed her hair viciously anyway, put on her heavy robe that hung on the door and the fleece-lined slippers she’d kicked off earlier. She turbanned her hair in the last dry towel and when her shivering subsided to an occasional tremor, she opened the door, self-conscious but too eager for the heat of the kitchen to care that a man she hardly knew was looking at her.

  “Here,” Red Murdock said, holding up an open wool blanket and wrapping it around her shoulders. He followed it with a patterned quilt and urged her to sit in the rocker he’d pulled up near the stove.

  “A lovely old quilt,” Anna said, trembling in the cocoon.

  “Granny made it. Kept me warm lots of times, when I was a boy.” He took in the room as if he hadn’t seen it in a long while. “I lived with her for spells. Just me and my dad over there.” He nodded in the direction of his house. “Granny was more like a mother.”