“Suppose we dumped the bale and it washed back in here, on your shore?” Anna said. “Now that would be funny.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Okay, sort of funny. Where is your boat anyway, the one you salvaged?”
“She’s ready. I’d row her anywhere,” Red Murdock said. Many times these last months he had felt like pulling toward the ocean alone, rowing out there until he couldn’t lift an oar, taking whatever came until it was all nothing but expanse, then he would drift.He wouldn’t lie in the bottom this time, not like he did that day, his poor uncle anxious for the sight of him, not because he had loved Murdock so much but because he wanted to feel normal again, unafraid.
“Where do you suppose it came from?” Anna said.
“I couldn’t say. She’s not from here.”
“You’d think someone would be looking for it.”
“You know what I miss?” he said suddenly. “Swordfish hearts. Been a damned long time since I’ve had me some hearts. Almost as big as a deer heart. He hunted swordfish, my dad, and Uncle Hugh. He could fling a harpoon, I’ll tell you. Sometimes they got tuna too they couldn’t give away, giants, in those days.”
“Where did you get your tattoo?” Anna said. She had hold of his forearm, touching the faded blue maple leaf.
He rolled his sleeve up further. The tattoo looked somehow fresh to him, new. The air seemed warm, even the breeze from the window.
“Halifax. I decked on a cargo boat for a while, way back.”
“My husband got one a year ago. A phoenix with an arrow through its heart.” She pulled out another of Murdock’s cigarettes and lit it. “He and his girlfriend, high on pot and dinner wine. Romantic, I suppose, and maybe it was. You know, a little thrill. Sly glances from students and secretaries. He liked that. Then a colleague said, You never did time, did you? And the feminist theorist in the office next door told him it was aggressive, like drumming your chest, she said. I told him it was sexy in a ratty sort of way. The girlfriend’s was an elaborate butterfly.”
Red Murdock nearly said, as a helpful link of information, that a bosun he’d sailed with, an ex–petty officer, had a green horsefly tattooed on the head of his prick. Instead he thought, it must have hurt like blazes, the man was not that big.“Chet, my husband, sold his solid, safe Volvo sedan and bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.” She could see it, smell its exhaust. A simple-minded Freudian machine, gleaming between his thighs. From those high handlebars he’d slung his thin physique. On a downtown street one morning she had suddenly seen him blare by, hearing the Harley first, the chesty accelerating stroke of its engine, then looking up to spot his ponytail flying, his chin high, and she had actually admired him for those two or three seconds, that rushed grainy image of him, a person he might have been, braver, bolder in some way that mattered, but could never be except for mere moments in his wife’s eyes, she who had been his lover once, at maybe the best time of her life, of his life. Did Alicia Snow know that, would she reckon with it? Anna knew things about Chet that Alicia would never know or notice because she wasn’t looking for them. But now Anna wondered how fair this memory of him was, how she might easily exaggerate its vividness, mock it. Surely he could call up selective memories of her, embarrassing, unflattering. Had he? “His girlfriend liked to ride on the seat behind him. I never would’ve.”
Murdock, barely listening, poured himself half a glass. It sat warm inside him awhile and then spread quietly into his head, seeped into his tongue. Tha’m pathadh orm, his dad used to say, I’m thirsty. Nobody here now but old Malcolm down the Cape had the Gaelic. Red Murdock used to go down there and listen to him, just tossing out a line, a phrase, words clustering around a name, an incident, comforting sounds that Malcolm took and wove into a conversation.
So much had slipped through his fingers. And Rosaire.
“Chet’s seeing a therapist,” Anna said, as if she were talking to someone who was following his life.
“Why, did he hurt himself?”
“Well … yes. As far as I’m concerned, he did.”
Red Murdock smiled politely. He didn’t care about this Chet or who he was seeing. The sea was rushing the stones of the shore, a loud stirring. Ah, the trunk in the closet: it fixed and sobered his attention. The time to discuss it seemed to have passed somehow, and Anna, still garrulous, was telling him about the strange and appealing dresses Breagh had sewn, what they might do for the right women.
“How about yourself?” he said.
“I don’t draw that kind of attention.”
“You don’t want to, or you can’t?”
“Oh, any woman wants to, I suppose.”
Murdock pushed toward her the untouched glass of his liquor. “Your turn.”
“Fair enough.” She downed it in one swallow, surprised that its heat was smooth, not searing as she’d expected. She leaned back, her eyes glistening.
“That’s booze all right,” she said. “I’m spinning.”
“Don’t shut your eyes then.”
“Oh, I’ve done that already, Murdock, many times. Did you ever by any chance read The Death of Ivan Ilych? Tolstoy?”
“I haven’t. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t. Books were never much to hand.”
“I was thinking of the story, you said one day your friend’s death left you not caring about things, objects, we really only want them when we’re not sick, when no one’s dying.…”
“We’re always dying, it seems to me now.”
“Ivan Ilych is the man’s name, he’s dying slowly. A Russian man. Cancer.”
“Yes.”
“Material things, they no longer matter to him, getting them, having them. What comes to matter is his servant who gives him relief from his pain. This peasant just sits at the foot of the bed and lets Ivan rest his legs on his shoulders while he listens to Ivan talk. That simple act relieved the man’s pain.”
“I don’t know what that’s like.”
“Tolstoy could help, you know, spiritual pain, that’s what he does.…”
“From the outside I know, but not further in, not where the real pain is. They’re alone with that. She was.”
“What was she like, your …?”
“That’s hard to talk about.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I mean it’s hard to call a woman up … for someone else. The way I knew her.”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Needn’t be sorry.” He closed his eyes and touched his fingers to them. “She’s in my head. I don’t know where she comes from, or where she is now, but that’s where I have her.”
They both went quiet, their eyes toward the sea window.
“Oh, she’d wear Breagh’s dresses right enough,” Murdock said, his voice low, “she loved clothes, you know? That hurts, she told me, I have nothing to wear but this silly gown with the arse out of it, day after day. Some getup for the dying, eh? You wouldn’t catch anyone capering around in this. Get Breagh over here, she said, sew me something bright.”
The long ray of the Black Rock lighthouse was swirling slowly over the sea, and the dark land behind it. The whirligig on the back porch chattered to life in a sudden breeze.
“Have you seen anything of Livingstone Campbell?” Anna said.
“No more than I’d care to. His buddy went flying by this morning, in that gypsy pickup of his,” Murdock said.
“Billy?”
“That’s him. Livingstone’s making more than music, I’m thinking.”
“Like what?”
“A lot of activity the other night down at Sandy’s, cars, late. They woke Willard up. He saw Livingstone driving off, then they all left but Billy. Breagh, she might’ve had enough of his tunes anyway.”
“Oh?” Anna felt elated for a few moments—a feeling that could go nowhere, she knew, except to lighten her guilt.
“She’s seeing a teacher, now and then, she told me over the phone. I like him a lot, she says, I like talking with him. T
eaches English, I think she said. Over at that university college, in Sydney.”
“Good luck to her. She’ll need it.”
Murdock lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling.
“Livingstone must never, Anna, get wind of what you’ve got.”
Anna smiled slightly. “Too late for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t mean I told him. Did you know he and Billy have a boat? It’s pretty big, a dingy white.”
“That’s theirs, is it? Saw it, a while ago. I don’t think they’ve got a clue about boats.”
“Maybe other things?”
“Maybe.”
Anna stood up from the table. She tapped out one cigarette from Murdock’s pack, showed it to him before slipping it in her pocket. “For later,” she said. “I’d like to draw your portrait, Murdock. Could I? I don’t mean right now, but sometime soon.”
“What would you do with a thing like that?”
“I have a collection of faces from here. Yours is special.”
“That’s kind. Well, after we’ve settled with your house guest. Let’s hope his pals aren’t looking for him.”
“Can I call you if they are?”
“Right away. I’ll be there fast. You walked? I’ll drive you home.”
“I don’t mind the dark, Murdock. I know the way.”
“Do you? I’m not so sure.”
He could tell by the way she took hold of the door that he would have to let her. He lifted a flashlight off a wall hook. “Take it. Even you can fall.”
Murdock waited until she should have reached her house, then he got into his van and started down the road. At the first curve his headlights picked up someone approaching on the shoulder, and the instant he knew it was Connie, the man leapt away and stumbled into the trees. Murdock braked and rolled down the window, calling his name out. Never known him to run from anybody, Connie, but God knew what alcohol was doing to him by now, what ravages it was exacting. He waited, idling, but heard nothing from the woods but two barred owls tossing hoos back and forth, staking their territory.
At Anna’s, he crept down the driveway, his headlights killed, keeping back in the trees. The moon was high and white over the water, a wide shadow as defined as daytime beneath the high crown of the silver poplar, it had popped up wild when his grandmother was already old and she let the seedling flourish because, she said, It’s a fast tree and that’s all I have time for. There was a light in Anna’s workroom and when he saw another come on in the bathroom, he relaxed at the wheel. A few minutes later it went off. Behind the house, moonlight washed cleanly through goldenrod and daisies. His attention fixed hard on that field, as if he were seeing it for the first time.
RED MURDOCK walked the beach late the next morning, looking for whatever he could find that might have something to say.He hadn’t slept well, so much had reeled through his head, Connie ducking away like a convict, he needed the sharp, cool air. Anna was nowhere in sight, and that was okay, he didn’t want to meet her, not this morning: he had to persuade her somehow to give up that bale and he didn’t know what tack to take now without offending her, without pushing too hard. At his feet lay a lobster trap the storm had crushed, clogged with stony seaweed: could be the man lost a lot of gear in that blow last week, but this wasn’t what Murdock was looking for.
The Dutchman’s tour boat was heading out from the St. Aubin shore to Bird Island, a sign the seas were down. Be seasick passengers anyway before they got to the birds. Binoculars flashed at the rocks where Red Murdock was standing. All he could see was a string of sunglasses and caps along the bulwarks, sometimes the mirror flare of a panning lens. Lookers, not watchers. They didn’t see much really, nothing they could keep, just snapshots. And ordinarily he wouldn’t give them a thought, but now any eyes felt suspect, any person aiming themselves at this shore.
Lord Jesus, he’d been here so long, and the MacLennan houses far longer. His dad had seen sail here, schooners, and local rigs of their own. A boat could come in right off the point there, riding the tide, and you wouldn’t hear a thing but maybe a voice, the soft shaking of canvas.
When he’d last come upon Anna, suddenly around the turn of shore, he felt strongly the simple pleasure of her looks, complicated by an old desire, the thought of touching her. It had sneaked into him. Here, on this familiar beach, where everything had said Rosaire. He had let the feeling pass—it was not one he could keep, should keep. She was from away and would always be from away. She had an armload of dope in her house and would not let go of it. Yet. Yet.Was it his duty to keep the family flame clean, clear of smoke, of soot? He had borne it without question, he’d become after all the last man home, and if you didn’t get away somewhere, you found yourself standing alone some Sunday afternoon in the middle of an empty kitchen, everyone gone for good, dead or living, and memories of them at every turn. How would his own MacLennans be remembered, how would he cap that off? He couldn’t take it lightly, the respect his father had, his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, their names had nothing awful attached to them. Red Murdock MacLennan was known as a certain kind of man, and how he saw himself had a lot to do with how others saw him. He couldn’t change that, it was banked, he could only trade on it, and keep the risks small. Having Rosaire stay over for nights had been gossiped but easily forgiven, lapses of the flesh fit into everyone’s kind of forgiveness, and weren’t they delicious to discuss? But dope was outside of things, not a community sin known and understood but one of garish headlines, handcuffs, sinister figures in poor lighting. People saw you, and they saw you. No need to rattle that. If he could help it. Some lines he would have liked to cross, but had not, wasn’t sure he ever could.…
AFTER HE GRABBED his mail that afternoon, and jammed the bills into his hip pocket and shut the mailbox, Murdock gazed down the road in both directions out of long habit, not that you’d hail a person or a vehicle much anymore. Things being what they were, better to see it empty. That a dead crow near the shoulder? He would toss it into the brush, he didn’t like to see them flattened, but he drew nearer and it wasn’t a bird but a man’s black shoe, its laces busted, the tongue gagging out. He picked it up: pretty worn, heel rubber nearly gone, the leather cracked from soakings. Whose trash did this fall out of?
He heard the flies then, twirling up out of the ditch, and he stepped nearer, looked over the evening primroses shut to the sun. Jesus. A man face down at the bottom, why the hell the highway department had ditched so deeply he did not know, had to be four feet or more. Was that Connie, for God’s sake? He didn’t want to believe it. But there was the black coat. Stained khaki trousers hiked up his calves. A torn white sock half-peeled off a foot shockingly pale, the limbs twisted, the disturbing angle of the neck that said it was broken.
He slid carefully into the ditch, into its wet clay smell, and stooped in the shallow water, rain runoff, and lifted a shoulder: a muddied, muddled face, the back of his head a sticky mat of blood. Connie, what have you come to, boy?
Murdock stood up, a bit dizzy, and gazed around him: nothing but summer sounds, what you’d expect on a dead-end road: nosy crows overhead hopping and gabbing in the high branches, insect buzz from the roadside brush, wind tugging a thin eddy of road dust. Connie couldn’t just have fallen, you didn’t damage yourself like this tumbling into a deep ditch, a car must have hit him. And then just left him? Nobody on this stretch would do that, not even to a deer. If the Mounties weren’t here before, they’d have to be now. He reached down and laid his hand on Connie’s matted hair: a poor end, boy. Lord. Who would run you down and leave you? Why did you flee last night? Didn’t know it was my truck, me? I never knew you afraid.
Murdock didn’t want to leave him there, his face in ditch water, but the police might prefer it that way. He climbed out and hurried toward the phone.
XXIII.
IT WAS THE WAY THE MAN was stepping, as if he had never walked on a stony beach, that caught Anna’s eye while her mind was some
where else. He’d appeared around the lower point, his arms winged out like a kid’s on skates. A fine rain glistened over everything and that made it strange to see him here, mid-week, an afternoon of grey damp. He crept near the water to yank at a piece of dark plastic in the sand. She wanted to run, to be out of sight, but held herself erect, an air of proprietorship about her. She regretted she could not drive him off with a shout, a threat. She endured his approach when he spotted her, his hands coming down to his sides. By the time he reached her, she saw who he was and he had a cigarette lit in his mouth.
“This your place, Anna Starling?” he said, through smoke. She glanced behind her where he was looking: just her house up high, the wide path, the vegetables blooming in her garden.
“You know it is, Billy.” She might have said no, just to confuse him.
“Never seen it from this way.” He poked his aviator sunglasses higher on his nose.
“Not from your boat?”
He stared at her, shook his head slowly. “Uh-uh.”
She measured him, rain inching down her face. His head was thick with curls from the drizzle, and his sunglasses did not convey the menace he might have intended. He seemed to be inflating his pot-belly for her benefit. She could never understand the pride men took in that, lugging it around like a prized rock, oof, check this out. He rearranged his foothold so he could stand relaxed. Binoculars hung like a pendant against his chest.
Anna From Away Page 21
