Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  But he had to do it again, he didn’t know why. He would have to work at it to make it come back, and whatever he fashioned had to be good, nothing crude or ill-made.

  Murdock hefted a ball-peen hammer. Òrd. With the flashlight beam he picked out the anvil, innean gobha, blackened and scarred. Remember these at least, his dad had said, our old words for things. Only a few could Murdock call up. Balg-séididh, the bellows hanging near the teallach, the forge, an old backup for the blower. A dozen kinds of tongs, teanchair, nippers, nail moulds, the duck’s nest. Punches, there was a heart-shaped one somewhere, he’d have to find it for Rosaire’s box. Hammers of various heads, the flatter, the set hammers, the swage blocks and the drifts, the nail-maker’s stake anvil, reamers, clippers, shears. Buffers, rasps, hoof parers, fullers. Some were missing, people had tried to talk him out of the tools over the years, and they’d made off with a few before he padlocked it, they were worth money now, that’s how it worked. A man from the States had offered him a thousand dollars for the whole works, he wanted to move the shed, the forge, all of it to his summer property, It’ll be like a museum, Red Murdock, he’d said. But no, it would stay where it was, as it was, and he didn’t want anyone poking around anymore, pricing things in their heads. Leave it in the dark. His father had been here, bam-bim-bim, in the small focused roar of fire, bent to the work, fire to anvil to water, iron took shape out of the machinery of his own body, his muscle and brain.…

  How Rosaire slipped when her time came, oh, Jesus, it was not right. Her hair and her looks, and whenever he came to the hospital in those days he lugged the stone of his sadness with him. To see Rosaire looking beautiful, a joy, always. But the drugs had puffed the features from her face, the face she would die with, rounded and soft like a baby’s, a pale mask of illness, of death, not the face he had loved, its moods and glances, its fire. And it disgusted him that he could not feel quite the same way about her as she lay in her last days, her looks so different, he hated himself—she’s not beautiful like she was—it was selfish, terrible, by any lights it was awful of him to hold such a thought. And so he’d spent every minute possible with her, he had to assure her that she mattered to him desperately, and that was as true as the sun, his love for her, yes, yes. Still, there was that sharp sadness that he could not have her beauty anymore, could not daydream about it, wake to it, touch it, take it into his arms, take it, yes, for granted: that face of sickness he saw then would stay with him too, not just the face that had excited him for so long. He grieved over that loss, even as he grieved at her bedside, at her and her leaving, leaving it all.

  Back in the kitchen Murdock pokered the stove to life, then sat at the table and drank. He watched the light across the water slide from black to inky blue along the hills of St. Aubin. A lone window lit up near the shore: someone awake for work. Not a Bonner, they had the place at one time, he didn’t know who had it now. He needed to finish something, complete it. His woodshop sat dark and cold, every piece of work, on the bench or hanging, just as he’d left it the day she died.

  The liquor at least he had cooked himself, the last bottle of his last batch. Sweet as good water, hot in the gut. He’d get back to working with wood, soon. Wouldn’t he? Livingstone Campbell had pestered him again on the phone, only God knew what he needed with a big desk like that.

  This was what Anna Starling needed, a warm swig of this, she’d sleep. Maybe she was sleeping anyway, dreaming of dogs, the stun of water under ice.

  IX.

  “ANNA?” BREAGH WAS BENDING over her, smiling, eyebrows high. “Red Murdock asked me to look in on you. So here I am, looking.”

  Her bright green eyes tempered Anna’s irritation, she didn’t like this kind of surprise, still shaking off cobwebs, her own face battered by a feverish sleep she’d like to return to. The glaring kitchen windows said full morning, and an unpleasant guilt crept into her, as though she’d been caught out at something or had overslept for work. She pushed her head deeper into the pillow. “I’m not much to look at,” she mumbled into the down, funky with her own sweat.

  “Well, you’re awake anyway. That’s a step, Anna. I’ve got tea going.”

  “Where’s your little girl?”

  “With Molly MacKay. They love each other.”

  At least the child wouldn’t see her blowsy and half awake. “Did I leave the door unlocked?”

  “The back was open. I got worried when you didn’t answer the front.” Breagh clapped mugs on the table. “Nobody here used to lock up, but now you don’t know who might detour down this road. I’ll cook you some breakfast. You’re on the pale side.”

  “Tea’s fine. Black. Murdock sent you over?”

  “He told me what happened. What a night you had, girl. You feel all right?”

  “I’m just tired. I need to clean up.”

  “What a blow to the body, eh? Still, you’re lucky. If Murdock hadn’t heard the dog …”

  “If I hadn’t heard it, I’d be up long ago and working.”

  “You and dogs. Can’t ignore them though, can we? In distress.”

  She pulled a chair close to the daybed and Anna sat up on her elbows. “Breagh, there’s a brush in the bathroom there … please?”

  “Sure, dear.”

  Anna brushed out her tangled hair, then wrapped the quilts around her and sat up. She sipped the tea, wishing for the taste of rum in it. Crows were squabbling outside for the bread and stale cookies she had tossed out yesterday.

  “This won’t send you back home, will it?” Breagh said, seated with her tea.

  That had tracked last night through Anna’s wakings, a great excuse to pack up, give it up and go, she was half-sick, wasn’t she, who knew what she’d be like in the morning? Yet here she was, sitting on the edge of the daybed, groggy but talking with this young woman from up the road. Did Breagh guess? The woman had a driving energy, you could tell, she’d move ahead regardless, she didn’t spend time sifting her past, Anna was sure of that. “When I’m just getting used to things … like swimming in March?”

  Breagh laughed. “You know what you need in that tea, dear? Some rum.”

  “Oh, do I. But how?”

  “No spirits?”

  “Brandy. A little bottle.”

  “We’ll go for that then.”

  “I should get dressed. I feel worthless.”

  “Stay there, I’ll fetch it.”

  The Courvoisier Melissa had slipped into her suitcase (you’ll need it, honey, take it, it’s winter there) Breagh poured generously into their tea and Anna had to admit after two swallows it was worth the lift. Their conversation warmed along with the kitchen. Anna asked about her family.

  “I’m adopted,” Breagh said quickly, as if to get it out of the way. “I grew up in North Sydney. We used to come out here now and again, summers like. Winter sometimes, if the road was broken. Visit Uncle Murdock. He was good to us, my stepsister and me. I don’t know my dad, my mom gave me up and went west somewhere. Must be in the blood or something. Lorna’s dad? Don’t ask.”

  “I wouldn’t anyway,” Anna said.

  “More my foolishness than his, really. He looked good, God, I’ll say that for him. All flash handsome. Clothes on his back or clothes on the floor, he wouldn’t hurt your eyes any. I wasn’t after a baby, or a husband either. Blind passion, eh, Anna? It all goes cozy dark for a while and then you stumble out into the daylight and you think, wow, so that’s what it’s like. Happened to you, I suppose.”

  “Not exactly like that, but close. Hard to remember now.”

  “My little girl, she comes first. Any man who can’t see that, I don’t want him in the house.”

  “I wonder how much they do see sometimes.”

  “I didn’t yearn for a kid, you know? Not like some, you’d think mothering was the grandest thing in the universe. And maybe it is, if you’ve got nothing else going. But after all, just about any woman can have a baby if she wants, can’t she? It’s not like some special talent or some kind
of genius. Anyway, she’s my darling.”

  “It’s hard to want one and not be able,” Anna said.

  “That’s you, is it?”

  “I’m past all that.”

  “You’re not that old, girl.”

  “Oh, but I am. I couldn’t have a child in my life now. Not anymore.”

  “Because you’re here, you mean, because you’re not home?”

  “It’s complicated, Breagh.”

  “Your husband? Sure.”

  Anna did not want to get into Chet, it was enough to have him dropping in and out of her mind without the prospect of sharing their history with someone else, even Breagh, whom she liked and was inclined to trust. Any details of their troubles seemed only tiresome on this particular morning, and the less they knew around here about her private life, the better, it seemed an advantage she did not want to lose. But she could have told her that in a marriage watch out for things that stop: Chet stopped kissing her good morning, she couldn’t remember now precisely when, it just happened, a small thing, really, forgivable if she hadn’t known by then just why—there was another woman on his mind so early in the day. Then he stopped discussing with her books he was reading, as if he had talked them out somewhere else. He stopped showing her what he had written unless she asked, a manuscript would lie open on his desk as if for any passerby. He stopped wandering into her studio room to pause at her work and offer a critical frown or a smile or a comment. He stopped taking her to their favourite Indian restaurant once a week, once a month or two seemed enough, and when he did, he often gazed past her face, his conversation dutiful but straying. Then he stopped fitting her into anything that interested him, and his courtesy—he was always courteous—felt patronizing. Chet had always believed that confessing frankly to his sins, the very act of candidness, absolved him in some way, mitigated at least his deceit, but he stopped that too: Alicia was no ordinary lover, no rocket affair, and, after the spelunking chapter, what he did with her was not open for discussion. Anna of course had long ago ceased sharing with him anything intimate, any secrets of her own. She had always been discreet where he was careless, reticent where he was garrulous and self-dramatizing.

  So Anna skated over her marital circumstances with a bland summary, almost blushing at the clichés she resorted to in order to close down the subject—they’d each needed “their own space,” she and Chet, and felt that this time apart would be good for each other’s creativity, his writing, her art.

  “I could see that, I suppose,” Breagh said with a skeptical smile. “I split from Gordie because he wanted to run my life. No thanks, buddy.”

  She insisted that Anna needed to eat and she set about making her an omelette. “As a girl I wasn’t great for the kitchen,” she said over her shoulder, cracking eggs into a bowl. “I learned to cook on my own. I was grown up by then, of course.”

  “Funny what growing up will get us into,” Anna said. “You’re a seamstress.”

  “Clothes designer, I like to think.”

  “Of course. You’re an artist too.”

  Old Mrs. MacNeil up the hill, she was dead now, had bequeathed Breagh a portable Singer, a machine from the 1930s in perfect condition, all metal and smooth gears smelling lightly of oil, they didn’t make them like that now, she said. With little more than the instruction book, she taught herself sewing, baby clothes for Lorna at first, then skirts and blouses for herself and just kept going until she could sew a man’s shirt—I like to see a man looking good in something I made for him, why not?—and any dress she had a pattern for. Mistakes? Crooked seams and lopsided collars, cockeyed buttonholes and busted thread? Sure, you learn that way, she said. It all led to the little shop they were opening in May, recycling vintage clothing into original garments, one-of-a-kind, you wouldn’t expect a bespoke dress way up in northern Cape Breton.

  “Tourist season mainly,” she said. “Sew all winter, like women used to here, right in this house they weaved and sewed all the cold months, I bet, on top of everything else. Won’t be a grand living. Mostly women’s and a few men’s things. I’m working on a Byron type shirt, you know, the English poet? Full sleeves and that wide, open collar? It looks sort of Highlander too, you see. Tourists go for that Scotch stuff, hokum and all.”

  “If you put that on a man, he’d better be handsome,” Anna said, “and a good lover, with at least a touch of poetry in him.” She didn’t want to admit that Chet had sported just such a piece of apparel at one time, or that she’d told him all he needed now was a club foot. That remark seemed bitter to her now, unnecessary, after the chilling hazards of the night before, in this morning light so full of the sea. Yet that’s what their exchanges sometimes came to.

  “We’ll leave the poetry out, I think, Anna. I haven’t seen much of that lately.”

  “It’s usually the first to go out.”

  Breagh stayed until Anna had finished eating. “You’ll survive the day, I think,” she said, and gave her a quick hug. “I should pick up Lorna, get back, I have a new sewing machine and it goes like the devil. You’ll be all right?”

  “I’ll show Lorna my drawings of animals next time she comes. Would she like that?”

  “She loves to draw something fierce. She gets those crayons going, that girl.”

  “I can’t thank you enough for coming. And Murdock for sending you. By the way, who is that man in the long black coat I see walking the road?”

  “Connie? Walks all day, goes home and drinks. Next day, walks again. He was away in Boston for years. He’s harmless, like.”

  “I wasn’t afraid of him.”

  Anna missed her as soon as she was out the door. She washed and dressed, she’d save the hot bath, too early. She gathered up her damp clothing and hung it on a line she’d strung above the stove: flags of distress. She felt sore and listless, her body strained in odd ways, as if she’d run or swum too far. But she hadn’t been idle. Constrained perhaps. Would she see summer and swim in the sheltered lee of the point, from that sandy beach? It asked too much of the imagination right now, sun in her limbs, warm sand, that saltwater smell.

  She stood at the kitchen window, pulling herself slowly into the day, staring at the St. Aubin hills across the water, the snow-dusted woods that covered them, the blank fields near the shore. Tide and wind were at odds, the water a dark, dangerous grey where the channel narrowed past the point into a swift, translucent curve, spinning away into currents a fishing boat was rolling through. Fishing for what, now? She’d seen it once before, at dusk, but outbound. Too fancy a cabin maybe for a fisherman? She wasn’t sure. Lobster season would open soon, the radio said. She could make out down on the pond the dark, jagged patch where she’d gone through the ice, a wound skinning over, clear of snow. No dog, no trap. Thank you, Murdock. One day, all this would melt. It would seem ages ago, it had that weight already, happening in the night, she might even have dreamed it but for the water’s vivid burning, the ice hot now on her skin.

  THE NEXT DAY, Anna was beset by a strange hollow ache she knew was not physical. Its cause she could not pinpoint, and she hoped not homesickness for the weakness that implied—the balm of the familiar. Late afternoon she got into her car and headed for town, she needed motion, outward, the day was overcast, the cold air teased with sparse flurries. When she reached the Trans-Canada, she accelerated as if set free, the highway was salted and clear and she drove fast down the winding grade and across the bridge, glancing east toward the sea and the low point behind which her house, from this perspective, was hidden. Although the traffic was thin, she liked the speed of it, the dirty salt-stained cars she passed, the buzz of studded tires, the feel of going somewhere.

  She spotted the antique shop near the roadside, she’d noticed it before and assumed it was shut for the winter, but there was an old woman padlocking the door to the little white outbuilding, a big old verandaed house up the hill behind it. When Anna braked and pulled into the driveway, the woman stopped and regarded her and Anna asked if she w
ere open. She said, well, she could be, clasping a thick woollen shawl to her throat, her white bun unravelling in wisps. Mrs. Urquhart her name was and she let Anna into the cold interior lit only by window light. Anna sidled carefully through its packed, dim interior that smelled, as her house often did, of damp wood and metal. Some of its objects she’d come across in her house—testaments to a country life once lived—and maybe gathered here from relatives or friends not sentimental about relics of daily toil. Mrs. Urquhart stood by the door and chatted about the weather and had nothing to say about her wares, maybe she thought they were merely obvious—a churn, a yarn winder, a wooden bread bowl, a pine table holding small items of crockery and utensils, a butter press, patent medicine bottles, two white tureens, old handsaws and hammers and porcelain doorknobs and a thick leather album of studio portraits, a family from the nineteenth century in their best black clothing, all of them, it seemed, a mix of handsome and homely, infants to the toothless old, a bit sad to leaf through, no one had cared about them since how long?

  A large photograph was propped on an end table, its thick frame crackly with dark shellac. Behind the dusty glass was a studio portrait of a bewhiskered man in black frock coat and striped cravat, circa 1890s, solemn and without a doubt of his importance. A small brass plate said Herr Doktor Professor R. Schroeder, his spectacles, small discs of reflected light, had surely drilled through many a student.

  “That’s from the mainland,” Mrs. Urquhart murmured, “down Lunenburg, and that,” pointing underneath the table where an unlidded chamber pot sat, its bottom displaying a fading image of President Wm. McKinley.

  “I can think of a president or two who’d fit that even better,” Anna said.

  She asked about items she didn’t recognize—an egg poacher, a blacksmith’s tool—but back in the crowded dusk a table lamp caught her eye, its art-glass shade a mosaic of bright colours set here and there with translucent marbles that would surely glow when it was lit, like eyes of animals. She could see its colours beside her reading chair, lifting the winter gloom. Mrs. Urquhart, pondering the lamp as if it had just arrived mysteriously, said, “I think it’s from down Boston.” A cousin, long dead, had brought it home. “We had it in the parlour for a spell, but it’s a little noisy for me.”