“He thinks I belong to the place, that we’re married, and maybe that suits us, you know. It won’t hurt.”
“He was blowing smoke. If he’s in with Livingstone, he knows who I am.”
“I wouldn’t make much of a husband anyway.”
“Oh, I think you’d more than do, Murdock. I’m sure your late friend thought so.”
“She didn’t,” he said, smiling. “She knew better. But I did for her.” He slowly drove a screw into the latch plate. “That dope, Anna, we have to get rid of it. Today.”
“In daylight? With those people around?”
“After dark.”
Get rid of it. That sounded so easy, but the bale’s power was undeniable. Even between her and Murdock it was a force, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to give it up entirely, just toss it away, now that Livingstone was after it. With her foot she drew a slow circle over the rug like the beginning of a dance. “We could hide it better,” she said.
“Look, Anna, they know that stuff washed ashore, our shore. They might just be guessing about you, but that doesn’t make things any better.”
After her talk with Breagh, Anna felt pushed, cornered, the outsider. “The guy with the shaved head, he did have a girl with him. Why would he be dangerous? He wasn’t sneaking around at night.”
“Night isn’t here yet.”
Anna took off her rain jacket and flung it on a chair. She ran water into a pot and set it on the stove. Murdock watched her, a crank drill poised in his hand.
“Anna …?”
“Husbands usually stay for supper,” she said.
“There’s nothing usual about any of this. That’s not a bale of hay upstairs.”
“Just not tonight?” she said. “Please? I’m tired out. I feel like I’ve been pulled around by my hair.”
“I’ll finish your door then,” he said, his face hardening. “You need a stronger lock. I don’t think they even make them that strong.”
THE PASTA Anna boiled, now a cold nest in a colander, had not raised her appetite. Murdock had left without a word after he finished the door. He was angry and that made her feel worse, she’d driven him away. She opened the expensive bottle of California wine she’d been saving, for something, someone. From the kitchen table she could keep an eye on the back field, the shore, the path. The rain grew fainter and fainter until it was just still, moist air, and then a wind came up out of the east, cool, full of sound, waggling the sticks of her sluggish scarecrow, its denim shirt soaked. She’d put out in the grass a bowl of leftover dessert and the ravens were at it immediately, their beaks tipped with whipped cream like kids at a party. Who would come here now, in this weather, seeing her at home? That stranger and his girlfriend? Did they even know she had a root cellar? Did Billy? Why should she give in to someone after her weed? She wasn’t going to cower, to hell with them. Let Livingstone stew for a while. Murdock, of course, would not understand.
She was back and forth at the rear windows, staring out. She had let the house slide a bit, and her work. All she had left were two blank sketchpads and the dog drawing, but she could not pick up a pencil or a charcoal stick without Livingstone rising in her throat, his cruel, unnecessary betrayal. Well, she had something he desperately wanted, though no part of herself.
Curled up in a chair, she tried to concentrate on a novel, but the words streamed by like water. She couldn’t even escape into someone else’s language, but she picked up a letter from Melissa, the handwriting, bold and elegant, soothed her. I love the pen drawings on the grey paper, with just touches of white shading. The crows at the dead rabbit, the blood and the white fur, terrific. You’ve done good animals here but nothing like these. The lines are strong, powerful. I know you have Dürer in mind, they have that kind of sharp stillness, empathy, awe, such careful observation. I sold the red fox, beautiful. I imagine him lying there in the sunlit snow like a dog, full of your leftovers. You must’ve had time to sketch him well, you finished it so fine, the detail. Your best work ever, I hope you feel that way about it. The woman wants it framed so I’ll do that for her. I’m keeping your money like you asked, any time you want a check for it just say so and it’s in the mail.
Anna wanted to reply, but the bale seemed to dull her wit, her invention—she hardly spoke about it except for Murdock, yet it altered everything she did, like sudden, spectacular wealth. It had seemed at first such a luxury to have that sweet smoke at her disposal, all hers, so valuable, a universal currency, and now there were people, not very far away, determined to get it back. But who had guessed it was here in her house? Then again, she was the woman from away, from California, a likely suspect. And she had toked up with Livingstone Campbell.…
At least the lock was new.
She smoked half a joint in plain view at her table, killing it in a yellow rose teacup she’d filled with sand. Then she pored through a jumble of old photographs she had found mouldering in a shoebox, all from times when cameras were not common possessions. She’d worked her way through them slowly as if she were squinting through a microscope, imagining histories, however vague or inauthentic, for the faces there. A few were tiny prints probably from the nineteen teens, in sharp sepias: a woman, maybe Anna’s age, in a long wool coat and tight-fitting hat, the ubiquitous spruce behind her draped with snow, she bent awkwardly forward in a white clearing, maybe pond ice, where a man held her arms to steady her, maybe her first time on skates. In another, a dark collie leaned with affection into a woman’s skirt, a mown field behind them (dogs seemed beloved wherever they appeared). She wore a nautical dress—a white jumper with a dark neckerchief and a long dark skirt, likely navy, and on the back of the photograph she’d written: Myself taken away from the house last fall. I am fatter in the other pictures I think. Who was she addressing? What hopes did she have in their reaction? What did she mean, “away from the house"? Two middle-aged smiling women at either handle of a long crosscut saw resting on a sawhorsed log, a loose pile of cut wood beside them: they weren’t posing so much as pausing at a task they were well familiar with. No men to do it? Or did they take it on themselves, just another domestic necessity? A boy, maybe seven or eight, putting up his dukes for the camera but looking aside (Connie? He had the thick dark hair). Anna dwelled on three dark, surreal figures in heavy snow, too indistinct to single out the faces, they were framed by a black sky and a black foreground—a murky dream from a Bergman film: on the back, Snowshovelling 1930. A ship, its three sails filled but ghostly faint, was passing down what might be the strait behind the house, August 1917 in pencil, a world war not yet over. She examined closely a photo of a soldier who’d served in it, in his kilted uniform, at relaxed attention for this posed postcard, his bonnet jaunty, his large farmer’s hands at his sides, a slight self-conscious smile on his lips as if he were both proud and a little doubtful. On the back he’d written: Mama I never thought I’d miss the haymaking. Knit me socks please. Love Rod. Under it, in another hand, Cpl. R. MacAskill, killed at Ypres.
Anna’s mother had taken but a handful of snapshots that she could remember, and preserved even fewer. Anna had one of herself, still in pigtails, with her dad on a Pacific beach, huge rocks behind them, mist from a hard surf swirling in the air, and another in their surrounding woods, resting her head against the soft, warm bark of an enormous redwood.
She looked hard for Red Murdock and thought he was there in a few dim black-and-whites, a young man on a boat, maybe the old ferry, shirtless, arms crossed firmly over his bare chest, not out of arrogance (his smile cancelled that) but because he was entirely at ease with himself: there was nothing about him that said I need your help to know who I am. Anna turned the photos slowly, absorbed: was that his philandering mother, pulling her hem up to reveal her shapely legs? Who was the handsome guy, dark as an Italian, holding a baby girl? The four elderly men in black suits, soberly greying, seated on a row of chairs placed in a field, deciduous trees in full leaf behind them and, further on, the sea? Everything about them said a P
resbyterian Sunday afternoon, said Gaelic was in their mouths.
She had persuaded herself she wanted to get by on this shore, in this place, alone, and she had. Not because of its simplicity or purity, since it was not simple or pure, but rather its old complexities which she sometimes sensed acutely, in this house and elsewhere, she had preferred them to her own, they had informed everything she drew.
Did she hear a car? She willed the sound away, if there was one. Dusk: entre chien et loup. Between the dog and the wolf.
She got up and went from window to window. The bale in the cellar was like a radioactive core: anywhere in the house she could sense its soft vibration. Why had she let Murdock leave that way, in that mood? She wouldn’t run to him, she couldn’t. The rattling call of a kingfisher came up from the pond. She felt watched. The field would be dark before long. Trees were swaying shapes in the wind, she felt terribly alone.
XXV.
THE MORNING OF Connie Sinclair’s memorial, Murdock carried a piece of water-carved limestone up to his clearing in the mountain woods, a handsome stone he’d dug out of a brook where water, over many years, had worked it into graceful curves and hollows. He knew Rosaire would like it. This was what the settlers had done in their early graveyards, sited near water where they could be reached in all seasons: marked graves with undressed stones picked from the shore or wherever a pleasing rock revealed itself. Murdock set the brass canister holding half her ashes into the small hole and filled it in, tamping the earth down gently with his foot. The rest would stay with him at home, in the beautiful box. Two places at once, my dear woman, how about that? Can’t do that while we’re living. Be damned handy if we could.
This was the day of ashes.
Tired from his climb, he sat on the bench, pleased with the look of the stone. Like a sculpture. Did Anna ever carve in stone?
Last night he had lain awake for a long time. He had the feeling she would leave before long, somehow, in some fashion. If she did, she wouldn’t know October when night frost stiffened the grasses, and the sun, as it rose into the morning, melted away the winter there, you could forget a while longer that it was coming. She wouldn’t see a blizzard rage for three days and drift high as the telephone wires where birds had roosted, dishevelled by the wind. She wouldn’t be dancing by her stove, or his either. But she still had moves to make whether she reached for his hand or not.
He shouldered the shovel and took his time down through the woods. Sun filtered through the crowns of trees, the maples and birches, the barest hint of autumn there, a subtle cast to the light, a tinge of melancholy, he always felt it late in summer, before the first red in leaves, and geese took to the air in long fluttering vees, arrowing southward.
THERE WAS TIME before the cemetery to drag the skiff, the hull fresh white with a stripe of royal blue along the gunnels, to his shore. He’d found in a forge tin his dad’s old punch that incised a small heart shape into wood, and before he painted her he’d whacked that mark into the hull just aft of the stem, one port, one starboard. He circled the boat, looking it over, running his fingers along Rosaire on the stern, the nameless boat was his to name. The afternoon had turned hot along the dry stones above the high-water mark. The wind had dropped. Seaweed, burned black, brittle and sharp to the touch, crunched underfoot. A grasshopper hidden in a clump of beach grass made a thin chirping sound. More like a desert today than a northern shore. The skiff was too out in the open here, he didn’t know who might be watching.
Under a bare sun, through a sea of undulating glare, he rowed to MacDermid’s Cove where, sweating and winded, he hauled her up, sheltered her where she wouldn’t be easily seen. She’d handled nicely, responded well, cutting cleanly through the light chop, and the long oars Donald John had given him—I won’t be putting my back to these anymore, Murdock Ruagh—felt good in his hands. Full moon and calm tonight was the prediction, wind down, hardly a breeze, but shut your eyes to sun one minute here and you might open them to rain the next. Be better without moonlight, but he was determined to slit that bale wide open and dump its guts into the sea. He had stowed a grey wool blanket and two life vests. He would take Anna with him, out of her house.
He and Connie and the MacDermid boys, they had played on this beach, took out their dad Robbie’s boat on the sly, learned to row that way, just small they were, then. Older, half-cut, they staggered in swimming some summer nights, slept out into morning, sometimes with a girl, when they were lucky. He and Rosaire had swum here too one night under a high moon, shed their clothing and waded slowly in, she fearful of crabs or fish or eels, but they had felt on their feet only the soft stroke of eelgrass, tasted later the salt on each other’s skin.
Now the sea was lazy, teasing the shore, barely breathing. In the shallows seaweed swayed dreamily. Somebody had capsized in this skiff, not a good oarsman, dangerous waters for an open boat, you’d have to know them. And no one here had been watching, had they? Donald John and Molly’s big window would be dark that time of night, Willard gone home to sleep in his church. Hell, they had all slept through it, himself, all of them. If he’d only moved sooner the day Anna drove north to see Breagh, he could have spirited that dope away.
Murdock fussed about the skiff, checking the oars, the oarlocks, the killicks he’d secured her with, stone anchors Robbie’s father had made, calaich, they’d hold her, the tide wouldn’t reach here anyway. He shook out the blanket and tucked it under the stern seat. This was where Anna would sit, facing him. After supper, he would wait for nightfall to come back here, hoping no other hulls were cutting water, then pull for Anna’s beach, for Anna Starling.
Feeling someone’s presence, Murdock squinted up at the shorebank path: Livingstone was looking down at him, his face shaded by a black cowboy hat cocked over sunglasses.
“Nice boat, Murdock.”
“What’re you doing here?”
“Could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?” He pointed up at the cliff edge of Murdock’s eastern field. “I stopped by your place to see you.”
He worked his way down carefully in the high-heeled boots, a cigarette in his mouth. He wore a jacket of rich brown leather, fringe dangling from the sleeves, but up close he looked scruffy, dusty, the boots dirty with mud and damp sand, he must have walked down from the gate. His beard needed trimming, as did his long hair, and the lenses of his glasses were oily with finger-smudge.
“A buddy of mine had a boat very like this one,” he said, stepping close to it, rapping the hull with a knuckle. “He lost her out there that storm we had.”
“Is that so? Funny I never heard of it. If he had any sense, he wouldn’t have been out there. How did he get ashore, swim?”
“Fisherman. Towing it at the time. Had some gear in it though. You seen anything washed up along here?”
“He wasn’t fishing and you know it. How’d you find out I had this boat here?”
He tossed away his cigarette, whipped the sunglasses off and massaged them between finger and thumb. His eyes were bloodshot and danced. “I know people here, Murdock, just like you do. Anyway, you know how it is. Everybody’s got binoculars, cheap or pricey. People over there”—he nodded toward St. Aubin—“see people over here.”
“Maybe. But some of them belong here and some of them don’t.”
“Like Anna Starling, you mean?”
“Leave her out of this.”
“This? Is that possible? She lives on the shore. Not too far from here.”
“You know what I mean. Friends of yours sniffing around. And then there’s Connie.”
“Connie was a juicer.”
“That’s not all he was, not the whole of him. Somebody met up with him up on the road. You know who it was, don’t you.”
“Not any more than you do. You get a drunk stumbling along in the dark …”
Murdock grabbed his lapels and yanked him close, his jacket releasing a sweaty smell of leather.
“Listen, you bastard. Connie would make two of you. You used h
im for this caper here, on this beach. Were you done with him? Is that it?”
“Who the hell told you that? Connie? He ran his mouth when he was loaded, he made up stories …”
“About Willard’s dog? Making him kill it so you’d give him booze?”
“Let go of me, Murdock.”
He shoved him away. “Glad to! You stink of your deeds!”
Livingstone straightened his clothes, his hat. He grabbed a stone in his fist and threw it hard into the water. “Shit! I’ll tell you one thing, Murdock.” He pointed to the boat. “The fella that owned that, he wants what he lost from it, he’s pissed. Him and some others. My ass is on the line here. I have to drive to Sydney today, now. If I don’t have what they want, I don’t get my money, just grief for a bonus.”
“I can’t help you. I don’t want to help you.”
“Somebody better.”
“Like who?”
Livingstone looked away across the water. “If I was sure, I’d go there now.”
“You’d better be more than sure.”
“I’m not the only one in this, Murdock.”
“You’re the only one I know. You and Billy Buchanan. Tell them to stay away from her. She’s got nothing of yours.”
“Well.…” Livingstone grinned. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “That’s not exactly true, Murdock. I left a little something with her, back in the cold weather.”
“You get by on lies. Why would I believe you?”
“Ask her. She tells the truth. I like that about her.”
“Good. Then believe her now.”
“Wish I could.”
Murdock pulled a rope from the boat, uncoiled it. “Look what you brought into this place. You proud of that?”
“Hey! Folks smuggled liquor right into this cove, I know that much. Old Robbie here had a hand in it, and your own dad, your own people. They better than me? Fuck that.”
“Yes. They were. They all drank the liquor. They knew what it was. Nobody got killed over it.”
Anna From Away Page 24
