Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  XVII.

  WHEN RED MURDOCK APPEARED around the spit that hid his shore from hers, Anna rose from the tangle of flotsam she’d been poking through and hailed him with a hearty wave. He picked his way toward her over the stones. The long rains surely had not depressed him as they had her, used as he was to this weather, but her work was going well, she’d mailed Melissa a series of pen and ink drawings of what now seemed a distant winter.

  “What are you finding then?” he called as he drew near.

  She held up a long tin box, the lid flapping, its label dented and scratched. “Malt whisky,” she said, tapping wet sand from it. “High-end.”

  “Where would this be arriving from?” Murdock said, peering into the brassed insides. “Can’t think of anyone here who’d stow that on his boat.”

  “I’ll keep it for pencils,” Anna said. “The bottle is long gone, unfortunately.”

  They discussed the unusual rains, she told him about her leaky window waiting for Willard.

  “He’s that way,” Murdock said, “since he lost his dog. I’ll have a look at the window, if you like.”

  Anna was pleased to lead them up the path along the eastern leg of the pond, the water turbid from the rains, toward the house he hadn’t been inside since the night he half-carried her home. She felt strong, proprietary now from just the turn in weather, a warm breeze in her curtains, sun hot in her hair, it gave you confidence somehow, illuminated possibilities. They passed her seedling pots of fresh green sprouts, “Things grow fast here once they’re under way,” Murdock said, “if we don’t see a killing frost.” He suggested Anna trim back the bushes near the back door, they were shading iris bulbs, all blades and no blooms now, he said. When his granny lived here, out the kitchen window in the morning sun they flowered yellow and red. He touched his nose to the first blossoms on the high lilac bush and smiled. Anna mentioned the high-pitched birdsong she heard even after dark, “They sing like lights blinking randomly.”

  “Peepers,” Murdock said, “little frogs calling for mates, you won’t hear them in July.”

  They paused at her new sculpture on the back porch and Murdock knelt to look at it. She’d rooted around under the collapsed carriage shed and in the barn ruins and pulled out bits and pieces of hardware. Even the old ash pile she’d discovered down the brook bank offered doorknobs and stove parts and holed pots, a lid from a kitchen stove and an old crank handle and a small blade from a plow, piled there in the yard awaiting artistic attention.

  “Funny, we’d never give a look to it, chucked-away junk like that. But you bound it together, all of a piece like.”

  Anna wanted to serve him tea, as the custom was, and the oatcakes she had baked from a found recipe in faded pencil, so she put the kettle on the stove while he examined the window in her workroom. Now she could use the pale green teapot trimmed in gold and the matching cups and saucers from the downstairs bureau.

  When she joined him there, his attention had stopped on the nude study of herself, forgotten on a clipboard. Back home, she wouldn’t care, she was an artist, everyone knew that, but when he turned away, his face reddening, she didn’t know what to say, so she made light of it. “I was the only model on call that day,” she said. “And was it chilly.”

  “I bet it was,” Murdock said, moving back to the window. “This needs new flashing. Wind drives the rain under the shingles there.”

  Anna had also forgotten the shaggy black bundle on a chair, Livingstone’s sweater he was so proud of, knit in the Hebrides, he’d told her. She had tossed it in a closet corner the day after, but later, on a damp, cold night, she’d yanked it out and pulled it and its woolly smells over her. A faint odour of pot, of harsh tobacco, the funky alcohol smoke of a bar. Almost undetectable, but there too, a tint of that sweat they’d shared? Anna wore it sometimes while working, over a baggy denim shirt, but one evening she slipped it on after a bath, like a floppy wool dress barely touching her thighs. She’d walked through the house that way, through the rooms, the air cool on her legs, before she put on underpants and jeans, and dressed herself for weather unkind to fantasies. Murdock would make nothing of a sweater limp in a chair, never link it to Livingstone, but she wished it hadn’t been there.

  “Should I tell Willard then?” she said.

  “It seems somebody might’ve done his dog in, back in the winter there. Connie Sinclair hinted as much, but he was steering a little wide when he told me. He seemed awful bothered about it, not even his animal.”

  “Who would do that? Why?”

  “Connie had naught to say on that. He picks up things he hears, some true, some not. I’ll fix your window, before the next storm, if we’re lucky.”

  “I’m sorry about Willard. His poor dog.” Should she tell him what she’d seen? She didn’t want to revisit that cold recollection, not on a day like this.“Bad year for dogs, Anna,” Red Murdock said, smiling.

  She was glad he glanced at her drawings and sketches but didn’t ask about them. They soon relaxed at the kitchen table with strong black tea and the oatcakes. She recalled the night on the ice and how ungodly cold the water had been, and the luck of his coming.

  “Did you ever see that dog again?” she said.

  “Hightailed it, if the coyotes didn’t get him.” They sipped quietly. Voices from the point drifted in on the wind, summer people, she had seen a few on weekends, rarely during the week.

  “What brought you here, Anna?”

  “Cape Seal? Well … do you have an hour or two? Oh, I needed to get away on my own for a while. I won’t bore you with reasons. Let’s say I had to put myself in a new place, and draw what I saw and felt there.”

  The battered whisky box sat on the table, open.

  “You’re finding what you wanted then?” Murdock said.

  “I’m working on it.” Anna smiled. “I was hoping to swim at that nice beach around the point. Before too long?”

  “You know what cold water’s like, Anna, you could swim there now,” Murdock said.

  “Thanks a lot, Murdock, I’ll wait a while. One rescue is enough. You can’t rush things here. But I like that. Excuse me a minute.”

  Anna slipped into her workroom and quietly moved the nude behind a chair. She rummaged through rolled-up drawings, among them the one of Breagh, she’d almost forgotten it. She turned it toward the light: she had tried not to dwell on the contrasts with herself when she’d put the last touches to it, the downcast eyes, the light on her breasts. The fussing had more to do with Breagh than with the drawing, as if the more perfect the portrait, the better Anna herself might appear. She set it aside underneath the table and then found what she was after.“This is for you, Murdock,” she said, unscrolling it on the table in front of him.

  “Well, then,” he said, “what’s this?”

  There was his forge in oil pastels, as she’d approached it from the snowfield, but the shed dominant, the mountain dark and high as a rogue wave behind it, chimney smoke torn in the wind, somewhere deep inside the glow of fire, and against a wall the shadow of an arm, a hammer raised powerfully. She knew its distortions were dramatic, exaggerated, but suddenly she so wanted him to like it, knowing at the same moment that sometimes art was not enough, no matter how serious its beauty, its vision, or what it told us about ourselves, about our worlds. Murdock held it at arm’s length.

  “Yes,” he said. “The forge, right enough. That’s what goes on in there, something like this. I see it myself … a little different, but that’s good, isn’t it? We don’t have the same eyes for everything.”

  He wondered why she hadn’t put him in it.

  “But you are. Very much so.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s finished and it’s fine, I’m pulling your leg.” He nodded at the drawing. “I’ll make it a nice frame. Thank you very much, Anna.”

  Outside they strolled the soggy fields while he told her where pasture had been, now wooded with scrub spruce and poplar, open spaces of rose brambles, early goldenrod and
bull thistle, and some of the things he’d done here as a boy, happy to be with his granny, helping her tend two cows that sometimes fought, one butted the other over the bank and she broke her neck on the rocks. His granddad had died early on, he barely remembered him. He regretted the old saltbox barn had been so neglected, they let the roof go, his cousins, he had no say in its fate, and the carriage shed collapsed after they were good and away and not likely to come back. But if it was iron and broken things she wanted, there’d be plenty under those heaps of grey boards.

  “Just be careful there, a snake might surprise you. They’re harmless.”

  “Oh, they’re small,” she said, “I picked one up. I’d like to plant a little garden, herbs and green onions, ordinary things.”

  Murdock showed her a fertile spot where they’d piled manure, he’d break the sod there for her, wouldn’t take long, if Willard didn’t show, he would fix the leaky window too, she couldn’t have rain in the room where she worked. Nights were still cold, eight Celsius yesterday, did she have enough wood? The apple trees, scarred and bent, shook down flurries of white petals in the wind.

  “They’ve done that over a hundred years,” he said, “the apples will come and the deer will come for them, green or ripe, hunters will be around, you’ll hear their guns.”

  The same question seemed to hang between them: would she?

  They stood looking out on the strait, the pond below a blue not like the sea but tinged dark with iron. From behind bulrushes, a heron rose in great lazy wingbeats and headed downwind toward another marsh. Two lobster boats, done for the day, were passing inward not yards apart, their hulls a vivid red, a vivid blue, the throaty rumble of their engines muted seemingly by the misty air. With Murdock beside her, talking in that slow brogue, saying he would be back, and her saying, I hope you will be, and not just to fix something, Anna felt for the first time like a genuine neighbour, sharing a place, she had woven a few threads of herself into the pattern of its life, and that itself was a kind of shield, she would not be easily shaken. The worst of winter seemed to fall away that afternoon, its cold, lingering threat, and the gloom of rains.

  Willard on his third glass of rum said, You know that rocky bank north of here? Juts out a ways? On a calm night like this, but winter, my dad’s young brother Duncan starts across the water, rowing. Dead low tide, the moon in full. Out of nowhere come swells, three of them, one after the other, silent as ghosts, no breeze of wind at all. Turns his boat over, swift and clean, whoosh. My dad couldn’t find him, too dark, he had to give up. Next morning, first light, there Dad was, standing on that bank of rock, me next to him, looking down, the two of us—the water is clear in winter—and there’s Duncan on the bottom, face down, arms spread out like wings. He’s kind of rocking in that easy motion of the sea, shirt ballooning, jacket gone. He could’ve been just playing, resting, floating. That’s what I wanted to think at the time, me only ten, Look, Daddy, he’s holding his breath there, underwater. Dad got him out with a grappling hook. Hooked his clothing, hauled him up. God, he’s some heavy, Daddy said, I never pulled a weight like this. He was crying. Not a sound out of him, just the tears.

  XVIII.

  GUSTY DAYS TOOK ANNA into July, a heady mix of sun and sudden rain, mist that moved in stately lines through the strait, lit silver by the hidden sun. They’d been well into June before summer took hold of the land and she basked in the salty air. On bright afternoons the white, bulging clouds swept enormous shadows over the landscape as if it were the floor of an utterly transparent sea. The shore was reconfigured often in tides and winds, shifting sand and rock. She had a fondness for her garden scarecrow—a favourite, baggy, paint-speckled shirt she’d used at home, a pair of torn jeans, and a pummelled, limp-brimmed fedora she’d found on a nail hook inside the door—whose windy antics she could watch from her room. Its crazy flailing seemed to unnerve none of the birds, but she liked it anyway.

  Above the point, looking down at the cove through a fence of spruce, was a small cemetery, and Anna wandered through it for old gravestones on whose faces she might do a rubbing. A few had lines in Gaelic and she wished to know what they said, but she settled on one for its texture and inscription: instead of doggerel sentiments, it said simply, Some day we shall understand. That seemed like the best that faith could offer, it covered everything. She had not grown up with religion, but her father had urged her to respect the spiritual, You’re in a kind of cathedral right here, he’d said, gesturing to the shafts of light falling through redwoods above their house, and his yoga meditation, still and serene in his room, seemed a kind of praying.

  Anna taped a long sheet of paper to the stone and set to rubbing it firmly with a hard wax crayon, blackening the surface until the incised letters showed clear, Lionel MacLennan drowned Cape Seal 18 July 1881 aged 47 years. She worked patiently in the warm breeze, hoping that Lionel did sooner or later understand. Out past the point, terns and gulls were feeding at a white, jagged shoal, circling and crying before they dove. How had Lionel, the same age as she, drowned? Somewhere out there, fishing? Swimming? In a storm?

  On her way back, she sketched a boneyard of driftwood snarled into a wide heap, and, where the last finger of the pond went dry in sand, an ossuary of sticks thin as bird bones. The wind had risen, buffeting across the point, cool out of the east, and it had weather with it, a darkening sky, she could read it now.

  She didn’t remember leaving the back door open but it was wide to the wind and a note on a torn sheet of paper fluttered on the floor. Anna, stopped in to see how you’re doing, try you later. Like your new drawings. Liv.

  Her face heated with anger and disappointment. He had walked in, maybe poked around in her room? What new drawings? She couldn’t care less if he liked them or not. Weeks since she’d seen him. Damn him.

  She sorted impatiently through old sketches on the kitchen table, whispering curses, trying to concentrate on what to send back home, what to revisit. Why did he have to show up today? She was doing just fine, thank you very much.

  She had rolled up several drawings into a mailing tube when she sensed someone outside: a man, his back to the house, was standing at the head of the shore path scanning the strait through large binoculars. She held her breath until she recognized the long dark hair, the hat, the leather jacket, the lanky slouch. Her bras and faded jeans and cotton shirts streamed out on the clothesline, like flags of distress. She waited before opening the door.

  “You just walk into people’s houses?” she called to him. “Go over their things?”

  “Only people I know,” Livingstone said, without turning to her.

  After he came in, she closed the door to her workroom. No more of that. This was a kitchen visit, as far as she was concerned. His face looked gaunt behind a new beard, giving it a thin, dark seriousness Anna was unsure of. Whiskers could turn a face, and falsely. Had Breagh bestowed upon him the Byronic shirt, or was it hanging in her shop? He spread the kitchen curtain and put the binoculars to his eyes.

  “You planning a naval manoeuvre?” Anna said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I hope you had a good look around in here. We don’t do that where I come from.”

  “We’re not scared of each other here.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You have a little garden out there, I see,” he said.

  “Carrots, lettuce. Good old zucchini.”

  “No weed?”

  “Oh, there’s lots of weeds, I can’t keep up with them.”

  “Must grow like mad where you come from. Weed.”

  “People don’t generally put it in their gardens. Is something on your mind, Livingstone?”

  “Just you, Anna.”

  “I don’t think so. I really don’t.”

  Livingstone peered east, then west along the strait. “They used to bring schooners up here, into the 1930s,” he said, his voice low. “Bootlegging too, boy. Speedboats.”

  “Before your time. Mine even.” />
  “My time is now. I think you know that.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  He glanced back at her. “Done any beachcombing lately?”

  “Odds and ends.”

  “Like what?”

  “They wouldn’t interest you.”

  “You’d be surprised.” He dropped the glasses to his chest.

  “A rusty padlock? An old tobacco can?”

  “No, nothing I’d drag home. But you’re an artist and all.” He rubbed his breath off the glass. “You’ve got a lot of shore there all to yourself, eh?”

  “Not so much anymore. That beach around the point, I hear swimmers there some days. Or someone fishing or …”

  “Or what?”

  “Red Murdock walks the beach now and then.”

  “How often?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. I don’t stare out the window all day.” That Murdock had been here was no affair of his. She was not offering details of her life to Livingstone, any corner of it.

  “How about at night?”

  “Night? I doubt it. Who’d be out there at night? I’m at the front door so often checking to see who might show up, I don’t have much time for the back. Sorry.”

  Anna sat down at the table and he let go the curtain and pulled out a chair across from her. He aimed the wrong end of the binoculars at her face for a few moments, then grinned and set them down. “Anna at a distance. I’ve been one side the Island to the next. Late-nighters. No zees.”

  “You look it.”

  “I didn’t mean women.” He touched his cheeks, his eyes.“You need some sleep. Are you coming from Breagh’s, or going?”

  “Neither. My buddies are waiting out front. Got to get back to our boat. Anyway, she’s been on my back some, Breagh.”

  “With good reason probably. Do you want tea?”

  “That’s the liquid of the day, is it, Anna?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She filled the teakettle with a slow, thin stream from the tap. Flower shoots on the outside sill trembled in their pot. The pane creaked. “Windy,” she said. “Your friends want tea?”