Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  Anna said, “Well, it’s a cheerful noise.” She carried it away for forty dollars, but wouldn’t let Mrs. Urquhart, pleased with the sale and eager now for background information, learn much about her, she was tempted, just to put the transaction on another plane, to say, I fell in a pond the other night, through the ice. But she did not, she had left that down the winding road to Cape Seal, for now, and saying goodbye to Mrs. Urquhart in the shop that smelled like Anna’s attic, clutching the lamp swathed in newspaper, it didn’t seem to be true anyway.

  She drove all the way to Sydney where she hadn’t been since she leased the car after her arrival, a small city on a big harbour, the only sizable metropolis in Cape Breton, old, but which owed its former prosperity to a steel mill now struggling to survive. In a supermarket’s bland fluorescence she was for a while just another person fingering apples and packaged meat. Those around her had homes and families and were not troubled by visions of winter dogs or long spells of stone cold solitude, the only dangerous ice lay probably on their pavement. She did buy a box of chocolates for Breagh and for Lorna a furry white kitten from China. She ate in a licensed restaurant on Charlotte Street, once the main commercial part of town but now a bit threadbare, stores abandoned or on the edge, business having shifted largely to the malls, even the old theatre she’d hoped was open was shut down, for lease. The waitress told her that there was a Cineplex out by a mall, and, after two glasses of red wine, Anna went off to get lost in a movie, a pastime shared with Chet since they first met in college. For years they’d enjoyed nights out at an old art theatre back home, it showed classics and the earliest uncensored sex films, most of them mercifully forgettable, and certain rituals could be indulged there like fresh real popcorn, English chocolate, deep seats you could sink into—they revisited old favourites (they both admired British social realism like Room at the Top or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and Kubrick’s anti-war Paths of Glory, the dark French thriller Diabolique, the black-and-white seemed truer, more honest than colour), they were together in pleasure and memory, in cinematic contexts that called up their own early affection, passions, concerns.

  But Anna ended up in a wide, shallow cinema with no more than a dozen others hunkered among the seats, blasted senseless by the sound system and hyperkinetic action on an enormous, in-your-face screen. She hadn’t cared at first how bad the film was, its awfulness was a distraction from herself, an action thriller about a drug gang and their sociopathic boss, full of explosive violence and graphic wounds, she watched it in a daze, how distant and unreal it was from Cape Breton Island, light years from Cape Seal where some nights the quiet was so intense it woke her.

  She emerged into an evening of wet snowfall, and driving home in the dark, the snow thickened in the further reaches of the Trans-Canada and she had to slow down more, sometimes the car skittered sideways a little, snow tires or not. She encountered few vehicles, and none as she crept tensely toward the bridge, following someone’s treadmarks, the water below invisible in the snowy air. The dog had been conveyed here, from here it was flung into nothingness. A tractor-trailer loomed and juddered past on the narrow roadway, forcing her to clutch the wheel. The nearer her turnoff, as she strained to make out the road sign, the heavier the dead-end journey grew—I’m going home and no one is there, or will be.

  The house seemed desolate as the headlights glared in its dark windows. She stumbled inside, tired, shivering, and set to rousing the slumbering stove. The heat revived her, the crackling, snapping wood, and she remembered the lamp in the trunk. She carried it through falling snow and set it next to the squat armchair she read in. Her mother had never liked old things, Antiques, she said, are for museums, not my house. Anna’s taste for them had come from her father, Give me something from way back, he would say, give me a little history at least. She remembered him fondly in his little studio redolent of pot smoke, his chair swivelled toward the big window looking out at misted redwoods, the tall, glistening ferns, his eyes shut as he leaned back into the sounds of an LP from his early days as a man, maybe some Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Artie Shaw. What’s that burny smell, Dad? Anna had said the first time she walked in on him. He’d answered, That’s exhaust from my time machine, sweetheart.

  Once lit, the lamp was as she’d hoped, almost ridiculously cheerful, the room blessed with soothing colours, an artful mosaic, from another place.

  She would take a long walk tomorrow morning, early, a long way down the shore, beyond Red Murdock’s, and then, carrying whatever she found, she would get back to work.

  What do you think, Willard? Could we cross that ice?

  Give me a good bushline and I’d cross over anywhere, Donald John.

  Below them, out the magnificent new window, the strait was not frozen but scattered with pan ice barely moving.

  Who’d you trust anyway to put down a bushline now? Kids don’t know any of that. Can’t wipe their arse without instructions.

  And who would walk it if it was froze like the old days? All driving now, and the bridge.

  Remember when that young MacKillop fella drove into a hole? Forty-eight Chevrolet, I think.

  Forty-nine. Didn’t my dad tell him, Son, he said, don’t take that car across tonight, there’s bad patches on that ice, I can’t tell you just where either. Well, now, he wasn’t going to listen. Off he went, him and his buddies, drunk and saucy, the lot of them. My dad watched, right here at the old window, saw the headlight beams bouncing along, then just tail lights. Jesus, he whispered, they’re turning east, there’s open water there, and into it they went, disappeared in the dark, he could just make out the lights sinking, blurry, then nothing. Like seeing a boat sink fast, those tail lights red under water, but not for long. Not a soul could help them.

  Never found the car. Like new, that car. Kind of a maroon. White sidewalls. You’ d have to be mad now to drive across.

  Mad, yes, we’re too damned old.

  Oh, if you had the right car. Some fancy wheels yesterday down at Sandy’s old place.

  The party house?

  German car. Dirty from the road but big and black, powerful. Who’s got the money for that?

  Mercedes-Benz. Outside money.

  Somebody’s been out west maybe.

  Fellas from here, they don’t buy that kind of car out west. They want a big fat truck all dressed out.

  Ones coming out of the house were pretty well-dressed themselves. Hats with brims.

  Car like that one calls for a brim. Breagh would make you one.

  If I was a harlequin, I’d ask her to. Sew me up a hat, Breagh, dear, all colours and feathers and such.

  She’d do it, that pretty girl.

  Yes, Willard said, nodding, his eyes on the snow bluing into dusk. A ‘49 Chev is what she was. Wine colour. Shine up? Oh, my dear.

  X.

  WHEN ANNA FELT STRONG and steady again, she called Red Murdock to thank him, tell him she was okay, warm and normal, as she put it. But he sounded stiff on the phone, distant, as if he hadn’t expected a call or didn’t welcome one, not at all as he’d been in her kitchen that night. Puzzled, a bit hurt, she skipped the ritual about weather, thanked him for sending Breagh, and wished him a good day, thinking in the same breath, how California. She wanted to invite him for a meal, but maybe even rescuing a woman from a frozen pond had not closed the space between them, now the crisis had cooled.

  Anna was released into her work nevertheless, eager for it, she sorted and refined her sketches, leafed through the animal drawings she might send to Melissa, a series she could extend if other creatures came her way. There were tracks of animals she never glimpsed, they came at night circling the food, trailing away toward the pond or the woods. She remembered the fox inspecting a plate of stew she’d tossed out because she had no appetite that day, depressed as she was, sitting in the kitchen where a single white plate on the table seemed to shout her loneliness (why was supper, of all meals, so hard on some days t
o get through?). Fox and Meal she titled it, this animal that had swept away her self-pity, caught in swift strokes of charcoal, then tones of its deep red coat so brilliant against the white field, the strewn scraps of carrot and turnip and beef, dark gravy staining the snow. The fox sniffed cautiously each piece before it took it in its mouth, chewing with its head turned slightly sidewise, pausing to eye the crows pacing, waiting, planning a grab not far away, and later she’d included them, on wing or scrabbling on the ground, fun to watch anyway, their social antics and play. She’d seen a rabbit nibbling grain she’d sown there for birds until a big grey cat sprang out of a bare thicket and sent it exploding through the soft snow. She did the rabbit in fine pen lines, she had Dürer’s hare in mind, that exquisite detail and compression. And the frozen carcass of the beaver, its big teeth, the texture of its fur, the famous flat tail. The coyote had shocked her, she thought it a dog first, how it had regarded her, poised above a tomato-red lump of pasta, its long skinny legs set, its ears back, eyes eerie with intelligence, it knew exactly what little it had to fear from her. Would it have run from a man, from Red Murdock? Surely the coyotes were behind the wild yipping she’d heard late one afternoon, discovering the next morning at the edge of the pond the hind leg of a deer, intact but where it had been ripped from the body, bled out, pink stains in the light snow, bones bit through, crushed, tendons torn, and further out on the snow-covered ice where they had chased the deer, where its hooves would have slipped from under it in its struggle, a large dark patch of something she could not make out, bloodied remains maybe. By lunchtime the leg was gone.

  She had material to explore and she bore into it with scarcely a break but for domestic chores and walks to the shore and up into the woods as far as she could venture. Tears came to her eyes at odd times, she couldn’t say just why. Some vague sadness kept welling up. Not for losing Chet, that was the end of a long trajectory from what they had years ago—a loss she could feel sometimes in a silent winter forest. No other man had she been close to like that, and she might never again. That only happened when you were young. Didn’t it? Chet believed it could come again, and it had, for him. How that gnawed at her, that now she might be kept from that kind of love with another man, that her capacity for passion might be fading.

  And yes, she missed friends, certainly, women, men, their company and their mutual points of reference, shared allusions, assumptions, a warm embrace, nearness, the feel of someone she enjoyed, a sometime lover. She hoped this sadness was not rooted in fear, fear that she couldn’t hold out, that the choices she’d made were more eccentric than she could accommodate. Still, she had survived her baptismal, she was stronger. After all, back home she’d lived in a terrarium really, a pampered, sheltered city that could smother ambitions that elsewhere might have caught fire. You couldn’t always tell ahead of time, could you? Everything here had been a test, and sometimes, yes, it made her feel both solitary and exposed, her aloneness like a feeble beacon above the house—stay away. Those first weeks, doubt, like ice, had threatened her footing.

  And yet she had achieved a kind of comfort. Comfort in simply not having to engage with another person, not having to explain herself, her actions, her silence, defend anything she said or did, not having to resist, give in, be judged, gazed at critically, compared, contrasted, receive advice, sought or unsought. No one in this house, on this land, along this foothill road, had anything invested in her or what she did in her private life. An animal’s glance or stare was immediate and over with when it turned away, when it fled, there was no history in its brief appraisal—she was what she was. Her work was entirely her own. No one made anything of it, it had no consequences here, she was free. Sometime later, she would be ready then to send it back to that other world, a long way from Cape Seal Road.

  THE PATTERN she was used to—a few inches of snow, sometimes pelted into melt by rain, then a veneer of ice, a new layer of snow—was altered by a long, quiet snowfall that began late one morning and continued through the day. She watched thick flakes float dreamily past her bedroom window, a silent spectacle that ushered her into sleep. By morning, features of landscape were lost in one sinuous surface, a fresh sun glittered painfully off deep expanses of white, the pond no more than a sparse stubble of dead cattails. The dramatic shapes of driftwood were gone except for a few gnarled spikes or anonymous humps, and the snow was laced with the sharp, thin shadows of bare bush. Anna was delighted, amazed that March could revert so fast to deep winter, and, after a hurried breakfast and hot coffee at the back window, she dressed for outdoors and shouldered a backpack with sketchpad and pencils, her camera and a Thermos of tea.

  She waded into powder over her knees, squinting cheerfully into the bright, silent field spreading over the pond all the way to the shore. But not far into it where the path should be, she began to tire: with each step the snow sank deeply and she had to lift her legs high and push down hard to find its depth which, sometimes uneven, unpredictable, made her stagger. What she’d anticipated as a casual walk turned into a workout, she was struggling clumsily through a drift next to the spruce grove, breathing heavily, sweating, anxious to reach the shore, but she fell headfirst before she got there, snow jamming cold up under her sleeves. The snowfield stopped abruptly in a wave-bitten bank tinged brown with sand. At least no one had witnessed her clumsy, exhausting trek. The beach was narrow now with the tide high, but the bare stones were clear walking at least. She had planned to inspect the fields, the point, see what she could find, but that would be a slog, and she’d have to stay at the shore edge. Looking back up at the house, thick snow layered on the steep roof, she realized that her car was trapped in the driveway and she was almost out of anything sensible to eat.

  Over the sensuous contours of the field an animal’s tracks snaked toward the pond, the prints clean, it hadn’t been running, and she took a photo, then turned and snapped the Black Rock cliffs across the strait, Squatter’s Bluff now dusted with snow, and toward the open sea a shoal where waves broke starkly white. There was a fresh wind on her face, colder now that a grey sky had absorbed the sun. Sketching would be difficult, and the places she was after would be a tough haul, there and back, so she wandered the beach, picked up a rusty iron hinge with curlicued design, it might be off a boat. She plunged into a slow retracing of her own steps, uphill, disappointed at how the snow, so beautiful and inviting when she woke, had thwarted her. The crowns of trees were tilting—like me, she thought—meltwater dripping in their branches. How would she drive out of here if she needed? How quickly weather turned simple things difficult.

  Tired, her legs stiff, she could not imagine shovelling herself out, so she called Willard. During the night the provincial plow had finished the road, he said, but he’d come round himself and clear her driveway, which he did, a blade affixed to the bumper of his truck, an old four-wheel drive. The new snow had seemed to perk him up, and he accepted Anna’s offer of tea when he was done, and talked about the old days here when they had to break their own roads after snow, and, oh, it once come heavy and often, up to the eaves, and a big double sled and chains and a strong horse would break a road, you see, smooth it like the floor here, and he tapped it with his boot. She listened but didn’t press him about delayed repairs, he’d freed her car, after all, and shovelled, with remarkable speed, a path to the front door.

  “Them days,” he said, “we had the ferry handy. Not a dead end at all, a lifeblood flowed right through here. People coming and going all winter long. Now you don’t know who the hell’s around.”

  “Like me?” she said.

  “Och, you’re welcome enough, Anna Starling.” He reached for a raisin biscuit and chewed on it thoughtfully. “We’re all so damned old now, walking wounded. Except Breagh and her little girl, of course.”

  “Red Murdock?” His name jumped out of her, she was curious about him, though not his age.

  “Murdock’s got some good years left in him. When my house burned, he took me in till I was on
my feet. That’s the way his family was, do anything for you.” He noticed on the table a clump of dry, grey beard moss Anna had plucked from a tree branch to draw. He clapped it to his chin, grinning. “Halloween,” he said. “We pasted it on like whiskers.”

  “How did your house catch fire, Willard?”

  “Old, old house, great-grandfather built it. Stovepipe heated up, too much wood in her. See, they’d used newspapers to stuff the walls with, for insulation. Same here maybe.” He rapped the wall with a knuckle.

  “If there’s old papers in there, I’d like to read them,” she said.

  “Better news than what you get now.” He leaned toward her. “See, it wasn’t me that stoked the stove so hot like that. Somebody broke in and did it, make it look accidental.”

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “Hooligans. Druggies. Them I see at Sandy Morrison’s old house.” “Here?”

  “Wait till summer.”

  “Boy, am I waiting, Willard. For summer, I mean.”

  “Summer will spoil you. You’ll see.”

  IN BREAGH’S front field there was a small, listing snowman topped with a woman’s crazy hat. Anna parked at the road, the driveway looked chancy. Breagh seemed pleased to see her at her door. A bit unkempt in a baggy denim shirt and black jeans, but radiant nevertheless, her hair up, a suffusion of red, wisps at her slender neck. Though domestically capable, she never seemed to look domestic. Chet’s affair had made Anna doubt her own appeal for a while, she’d lost interest in her looks, hiding in loose and sloppy clothing. Whereas she had once loved to dress up, the pleasure of a flattering outfit, she lapsed into drabness, which only made her feel worse. Stupid of course to make yourself dowdy, but she’d wanted to be free of seeing herself through the eyes of men, to figure out who she was beyond the boundaries of a marriage. Wasn’t that one reason she was here? What did a woman need from a man, a man from his wife? She had no duty to look sexy or alluring or desirable. So she had told herself.