Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  Anna said, “I like your hair that way,” but Breagh scoffed.

  “I look like a schoolmarm, it’s just for when I sew.” Her work lay scattered about the room, swatches of cut cloth in bold textures and patterns and colours spilled over a big table and onto the floor where Lorna sat and assessed, in her busy little hands, the white kitten.

  Breagh made them tea and broke open the candy. Lorna got fussy and Anna appeased her with a chocolate. At the sound of an engine Breagh looked out the front window. “Well, if it isn’t himself. Snow and all.”

  Livingstone entered by the kitchen door in a noisy display of stomping boots and clapping hands. “Give us a kiss!”

  She offered her cheek perfunctorily. “Lorna heard you, Liv,” she said. “She wants to know what you brought her.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Bree, I forgot. I got things on my mind.” He noticed Anna, and stepped back, adjusting his mood. “Who have we here?”

  “My neighbour down the road, Anna Starling.”

  He appealed to Anna with mock helplessness. “I always bring my little girl something. We’re trapped in a habit.”

  “You’ve been trapped in worse ones,” said Breagh.

  “Bree, here. Give Lorna these, three shiny loonies. She’ll have to learn money sooner or later.”

  “Later the better, I think.”

  “Next time, Bree, I’ll bring her something grand. I’ve been busy, a little project on the side.”

  “I hope it’s the right side.”

  “There’s money in it. Is there any other side?”

  “What kind of scheme is this?”

  “Not for discussion. Don’t want to jinx it.”

  “Fine. Excuse me, Anna, I have to put Lorna down for a nap.”

  “Is there any tea for this man?” he called after her but she didn’t answer. He looked at Anna and shrugged. “Poor hospitality. I hope she’s treating you better.”

  “She’s treated me fine. There’s tea in the pot there.”

  “She can be unpredictable, that girl. So you’re living down at the old MacLennan place?”

  “I am. How did you know?”

  “Things get around. You like our winter?”

  “I like this beautiful snow.”

  “I’m surprised.” She dreaded the predictable questions, the nosy skepticism about her circumstances, the undertone of bafflement she’d encountered before, much of which had to do with her being a woman on her own here, and married yet. But all he said was, “How could you give up California for this?” gesturing at the lines of fog now flowing above the cliff-edge behind the house. He was more interested in the pond incident Breagh had mentioned to him. “Red Murdock heard you and hauled you out?”

  “Not me. A dog caught in a trap got his attention.”

  “Ah, dogs. Dogs in traps.” He shrugged. “Women in traps.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Livingstone raised his hand. “I’m just kidding. I’d like to know the whole story, the details.”

  “I’d like to put it behind me.”

  “That? No, Anna. Can’t be done.” There was something presumptuous about him she didn’t like. He had a handsome head, one that, in an actor, might make up for deficiencies of stature—you’d always be looking at his face, his profile would hold you, a strong chin and nose. His black hair fell over his brow, and his eyes were a deep, irisless brown, seemingly intense. He was tall but slight, with long restless hands, his fingers riffing silently on the tabletop as if it were a piano.

  “Are you a musician?” Anna said.

  He nodded, rooting inside his leather jacket until he fished out a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match, squinting. “Guitar, keyboards. It’s not a living.” He smiled, blowing smoke. “I drove a truck too, down the province.” He did a steering motion with his hands. “But I’ve quit that. Better money to be made. You, Anna, what do you do besides fall through the ice on cold nights?”

  “That keeps me pretty busy.”

  “Ah.” His smile was charming, seemingly disingenuous, but without it his face took on a flat, appraising look that yielded little.Breagh returned, she’d taken her hair down, it fell golden red to her shoulders. Anna could see her easily in a Rossetti painting.

  “Liv,” she said, “you know I don’t want cigarette smoke in the house. Okay?”

  “She prefers weed,” he said to Anna.

  “My preferences go through changes, so watch out.”

  “Where does she get her ideas for all these funny clothes? You seen the hats in there, Anna? Wild.”

  “Is this what we have to listen to?” Breagh said. “I haven’t seen you for two weeks.”

  “Been looking into a couple things. And I had gigs. Eddie’s Pub, and a wedding.”

  “Must’ve been a long wedding.”

  “Days. You know Cape Bretoners.”

  “I know you.”

  “You know, Anna, when she’s pissed at me, she always puts her hair up.”

  “Nothing at all to do with you. Don’t flatter yourself. We don’t always do what’s expected of us,” she said to Anna. “Do we?”

  “Never.”

  Livingstone nodded toward Breagh. “Unless we expect the same thing. Eh?”

  “That’s all that’s on your mind.”

  “Not really. Only when I’m around you.…”

  “You wouldn’t have a little money to spare, I suppose? I’m behind on the electric.”

  As he was reaching for his wallet, he said to her almost in a whisper, “I’ll have a hell of a lot more before too long.”

  “I believe it. Hundreds wouldn’t.”

  “Don’t sell me short, Bree.” He glanced at Anna as he handed Breagh a few bills. “Stick with old Liv.”

  “Haven’t I? Anna, please, more tea? That cake’s from the store but it’s tasty.”

  Livingstone steered away into a story about two bachelor brothers who’d lived back up the mountain, long dead, and when they finally got a television set, they would dress up in coat and tie to watch it because they thought the people on the screen could see them. Anna could tell he was deft at diverting Breagh when she pushed at him. He was a good mimic and had Breagh laughing despite herself. Anna was glad not to be Exhibit A, to be included like a local on the road who’d stopped by, not a woman from California whose presence altered the tenor of conversation, turned people guarded and wary. For the first time she felt like a person with some small stake in the place, she was wintering like everyone else, not a tourist, an object of curiosity, possibly derision, for all she knew, the woman who almost died in the pond (what was she doing out there, wee hours of the morning?). When Livingstone looped back to her night on the ice, she had to fall in, she simply started at the beginning, pleased enough it wasn’t a resumé or a defence of her current life but a discrete incident. She gave them details, but not of Red Murdock, of how he cradled her foot and the feel of his hands, or her almost shattering loneliness when he left, or even of missing her husband who, regardless, would have tended to her as he once had, or the whirling delirium that visited her in that rocking chair. She did try to call up, as strongly as language would permit, the sensations of being plunged suddenly into that killing water. Speaking of it, she imagined it again, one depthless second of bone-cold nowhere. She told them how glad she was that Murdock had freed the dog, how difficult that must have been, he already chilled and wet, the dog frightened and suffering. When she finished, she smiled and took a sip of warm tea.“Jesus,” Livingstone said. “You might’ve stepped in that trap yourself, girl.”

  “You’d have heard me howling.”

  He smiled. “I’d like that.”

  “Livingstone,” Breagh said, “give it a rest.”

  He took binoculars off the windowsill and aimed them toward the sea. “Billy been by?”

  “Looking for you. He said they got the boat, whoever ‘they’ are.”

  “Guys I know. They fish.”

  “What kind of fishing can y
ou do? Never heard of Billy fishing except for beer.”

  “All kinds,” Livingstone said. “Any kind going. Then we’ll have some fun.”

  “You won’t get me on it.”

  He smiled at Anna. “We don’t want you on it. There’s others around.”

  “Not here, there isn’t,” Breagh said.

  “Summer, girl. Summer is different.”

  Anna, uncomfortable in the middle of their conversation, looked to the window. Not far behind the house a patch of snow was enclosed by a high fence of thin, bleached spruce poles, varying heights driven into the ground like rough spears. Old Dougal’s deer fence, Breagh had told her, a whimsical form against the grey sea, artfully assembled in a ragged but tight line, high enough to hinder deer from leaping into an old man’s garden. Seven feet high now, he’d made it only five the first time, he’d said, then he looked out the window and saw a big buck soaring over it like a show-jumping horse. Anna tried to imagine vegetables leafing in that blank white spot but couldn’t. Summer seemed impossible, almost a fantasy.“I think you’re crazy, getting involved in a fishing boat,” Breagh said.

  Livingstone panned the glasses slowly back and forth, fixing them for a few seconds toward the sea before he set them back on the sill.

  “There’s fish, and there’s fish,“ he said.

  XI.

  RED MURDOCK HAD FELT GLUM since the morning she’d called, he couldn’t forget it. So unexpected to hear Anna Starling’s voice on the phone, he got few calls anyway now, and the morning liquor had knocked him into a nap that left him muddled and grumpy when the phone rings rattled him. After he’d hung up, he stood there dumb: God, he must have sounded the wooden man he was.

  He wandered down to the forge, avoiding the woodshop, he was not ready to face it, Livingstone’s desk sitting there half-done, a big slab of oak. What the hell did he want with secret drawers? What secrets for a drawer could you have at his age? I’ll need good money for that, Murdock told him, and Livingstone answered, I’ll have good money for you when you’re done, don’t you worry.

  But Murdock was mulling not wood but a pair of skates, the old-style stock skate his dad had fashioned. He’d once promised a set to Rosaire, way back, she was keen to skate the pond on them, What fun, she’d said, I’d love it, but then … You love me, don’t you, Murdock? she asked him often in those last days. Yes, yes, he said, in every tone of voice, desperate that his love was not enough to save her, dismayed that his love had changed, just a little, love for the dying was different, for a woman he’d loved as hard as he could imagine, it was not quite the same.Losing his mother as a boy was some like this ache, sure. She went off and left us, his dad said, without rancour by then, years later, like old news he’d just remembered. That was painful to me, Murdock, I hurt for, oh, a long time, don’t ever get like that, so tight to a woman. But Murdock got over his mother, there was so much time out ahead of him then, endless, he grew, he healed up, he moved on, he learned what a woman felt like with his arms around her, and he could always release her and let her go.

  Now he felt on certain mornings paralyzed, like his heart had ripped.

  But, yes, for being cold and stupid on the phone, he was going to make skates and give them to Anna Starling. You see, it’s like getting back on a horse, he would tell her, strap these on and take to that ice, just once, and the fear will leave you.

  Could he make them, could he remember enough? He wanted something that had weight, had consequences. All the ordinary things wanted power, it could still amaze him: the hammer striking red iron, clangs sparking from the anvil—what took shape there wasn’t just anything, you made it. He would dig out some of that Swedish steel, must be a piece or two left, get him started. They had to be well-made, the skates, handsome enough she’d like even the looks. His dad had said, If your work is flawed, do it over, you’re wasting good steel, do it right this time or that’s the end of it, I’ll give you something easy instead. But Murdock, if far more slowly than his dad, had made his first blades out of an old rasp, and that winter his little cousin Kay skated on them over the pond, wobbly but happy.

  The air dropped suddenly in the afternoon, into that cold zone he’d hoped was past but knew better, and what might have been rain came snow, fluff dancing to the thick crust remaining from the last heavy fall. Flurries tickled his face as he stood at the shed door, looking out, remembering horses. Shaking them loose in a barn late at night, a bit drunk, hot from the kitchen and rum. His father could never get up the enthusiasm for cars that he had for horses, Where’s the life in them? he said. The used Meteor he finally bought, he drove, battered and muddied, with a look of monotony, Give me a horse, he said, farts and all, she’ll love you and she’ll take you home, drunk or sober. His father’s final driver horse, Sìoda, Silken, a beautiful black, sleek mare, like a racehorse, she did it all, plow, dump cart, buggy, sleigh. When Murdock came into her stall, he felt her heft and presence, the low rumble in her throat, she was like a great animal engine idling there. The leather stink of harness, and droppings, the nervous clapper of hooves on planks. That night coming home through black woods, half-cut happy in a borrowed horse and sleigh, he and Rosaire, what a ride up through a logging road in moon-bright snow where he stopped so they could work their hands inside each other’s clothing, her lovely warm skin, her delicious mouth, she there in the seat with him under that buffalo robe that belonged to his grandfather, how warmer did a man need to be anyhow, on a night like that? To snap the reins now, glide away over snow, Rosaire beside him, how that would settle his heart, like rising into the air.…

  Noticing footprints disappearing into his back field, he cut across it in the stinging cold, his boots crunching softly, through a few wind-beaten spruce and the wiry tuckamore all the way to the far east bank where he could see MacDermid’s Cove below. Soft, hazy snow hung like gauze over the afternoon, everything cast in grey shades, darker, lighter. The sea was no more violent than the silent fields, and just as still, a driftwood grey, ice white and startling along the shore, fixed in a slack tide. Whoever had tracked to the cliff edge had retraced their way out.Squinting in the wind, Red Murdock picked out tire tracks, growing faint. They came out of the woods below almost to the shore, intersected in two dark loops and wove back into the little road there. He didn’t know who that would be this time of year, not an easy spot to get to unless you had a four-wheel drive, the narrow road was runnelled and rock cut, tear the bottom out of a car anyway. He kept an eye on that property, for trespassers, vandals, a favour to Donny MacDermid, a saltwater captain who lived in Boston but intended to fix up his mother and dad’s old house for retirement summers. It had a good roof and Donny didn’t want people from town roaming around there like they owned it, as they would, had. His father, Robbie, had looked the other way when rum-runners ran booze into that cove, he got his cut of it. Nowadays, a few drinks and mischief, then broken windows and anything else they could smash, and, sooner or later, a fire.

  Up at the road Murdock had built a stout gate out of heavy poplar poles and padlocked it, of course you could walk around it, but you sure as hell couldn’t drive around it. So he had believed. Whoever it was, they hadn’t stayed. He would go have a look down there.

  But when he reached the house, someone was waiting, hunched out of the wind at the back door. Connie, had to be, hatless, in his long coat, his hair shiny with melted snow. There was a clotted cut along his eyebrow and a nasty bruise on his cheekbone. Had he fallen? Murdock had never known him to, not since they were kids and ran together, but he fought plenty. They’d drunk their first, stolen, liquor up in Murdock’s clearing, a bottle of rum he’d found stashed in the forge shed, not full but plenty enough to get them silly and stumbling, they’d danced around the trees and bayed at the sky until they reeled with sickness. When they could vomit no more, they headed home, pale and shaking. Only much later did Murdock know that was a day of divergence, that his pal’s thirst would become far greater than his own, take him into corn
ers Murdock did not want to go.

  “Connie, you okay?”

  “You spare a d-drink, Murdo?” he said, his voice raspy.

  “Come inside.”

  At Murdock’s table he drank quickly two fingers of rum. Murdock poured him another, watched the tremor of his hands subside.

  “You been tangling with somebody?” he said.

  Connie waved his hand dismissively. “Little shits.” The collar of his white shirt, though pressed, was soiled. He preferred to slip back to the old days when they’d coasted on homemade sleds and explored this end of the mountain, when Murdock stood with him and they fought bigger boys who’d teased him.

  “You rem-m-member that old b-bootleg mine?”

  “The one you and your dad worked? Way up the hill behind Jimmy Robert’s?”

  “I’d like to f-find it.”

  “Has to be caved in now, Connie.” Murdock smiled. “You low on coal or something? That had a lot of sulphur in it.”

  “Good p-place to hide out.”

  “Lots drier spots than that, Connie. Who you hiding out from?”

  “You n-n-never know.”

  “You’re tough, Con, but you’ve got to stop mixing it up with people. We’re slower now, you know, that split second makes a big difference.”

  “I got m-mine in.” He displayed his raw knuckles.

  “So did they, by the looks of it.”

  All his life Connie had wrung words out of himself, you could see the strain in his looks, the taut cords of his throat, his lean cheekbones, the tight line of his lips, as if to say, don’t make me speak unless you have to, and the dark, warning eyes, primed for slights, for mimicry, his hand already in a fist. He fought often, from boyhood to manhood, sometimes winning apology or regret, sometimes not. Asked his name, he’d say only Sinclair because he could hiss it smoothly through his teeth, whereas Connie, trapped deep in the cave of his mouth, choked him, flared up in his face. He discovered that alcohol could, though not always, sweeten the bitterness that troubled his life. But once out of school, he veered off deeper into drinking, became too much of what Murdock did not want to be—a man without mornings, a man sick in the middle of his work, everything a back seat to drink, drink his sole ambition. Murdock met up with him less and less, then he moved to Boston where he ruined lives with two different women, and little of what he’d been before he went there was left when he came back home to the old family house, rundown but habitable, alone under its leaky roof, visited for a while by a few of his drinking pals who gave out along with the last of his money.